The cognitive turn(s) in EU studies

Abstract

The claim that ideas play a central role in the European integration process has been recently gaining a large resonance among EU scholars. The reason for such cognitive turn(s) can be partly explained by the important transformations of EU politics and EU theories since the beginning of the 1990s. This paper identifies a strong/weak cognitivist divide in EU scholarship, and within the second, at least three different lines of academic inquiry about the role of ideas in the EU politics. The current paper points to three inter-related dimensions of the notion of ideas: instrumental, cognitive and normative, arguing that the diversity of the reviewed scholarly interpretations is due to their respective emphasis on one or another of these three dimensions. Furthermore, this three-dimensional conceptualisation of ideas facilitates a partial re-consideration of the relationship between ideas-institutions and ideas-interests in the European polity.