Learning from Europe? EU Studies and the Re-thinking of ‘International Relations’

Abstract

This article argues that European Union Studies (EUS) provides a useful resource for scholars engaged in the rethinking of international relations in the era of an emerging global polity which has been neglected for reasons of what might be called discipline blindness. More precisely, my claim is that EUS can help IR scholars ask new and useful questions about the nature, development and functioning of the emerging global polity. This is because EUS has already drawn on, and adapted, comparative politics to produce a significant body of work which can act as a transmission belt for ideas, concepts and approaches between the study of ‘domestic politics’ and the study of ‘international relations’, and thus begin to show IR scholars how these tools can be adapted and used to study politics in post- and transnational contexts.