Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis essay investigates the intellectual history of one of the purportedly most "revolutionary" concepts of post-1945 international thought—the concept of supranationality. While the literature has generally analyzed the concept as a direct continuation of progressive cosmopolitan ideas, or, to the contrary, as a political watchword formulated after 1945 to promote the European project, this essay highlights other, more ambiguous origins for the concept. It retraces the early uses of the concept in French debates. It argues that the irruption of supranationality in the political and legal vocabulary was far from revolutionary, as is typically claimed—without referring directly to the writings of the great classical philosophers. Rather, the concept drew on earlier discourses whose emergence can be identified in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates, ranging from Catholic thought to international law. To retrace the genealogy of supranationality in the decades preceding the supranational vogue of the 1950s contributes to illuminating the complex intellectual origins of the European Union and of international thought more generally.

Résumé La contribution des savants à la construction européenne a fait l'objet d'un intérêt nouveau ces dernières années. Mais, si le rôle des juristes dans la production de formes de connaissance de l'Europe a été mis en évidence, la contribution des économistes semble étrangement limitée durant les premières années d'existence du Marché commun. C'est ce paradoxe d'un savoir économique qui ne « vient pas » au Marché commun qu'interroge cet article. Nous étudions pour cela les mobilisations, au début des années 1960, d'un collectif évoluant entre science économique et politique pour faire exister une « programmation économique communautaire ». Nous avançons que la difficulté à produire un savoir reconnu comme « scientifique » est une raison importante de la faiblesse de leur entreprise. Il s'agit alors de souligner la tension à laquelle est confrontée toute entreprise de mobilisation de la science (économique) dans le jeu politique : le succès des revendications d'un gouvernement « scientifique » dépend de la capacité de ses partisans non seulement à enrôler la science, mais aussi à stabiliser une distinction entre le savant et le politique.

The European Union (EU) is still in the making, and so are the concepts used to think and talk about it. They sometimes appear as randomly mixing various political and intellectual traditions, forming an incoherent discourse. The purpose of this article is to analyze the processes by which certain concepts succeed or fail to become part of this discourse. It focuses on the career of the concept of constitutional patriotism, made famous by the German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas. It will first insist on the difference in French and German contexts of national politicizations of the concept. Then, its introduction in the European arena will be examined. The article will challenge the view of a linear Europeanization of political concepts. Rather, the career of constitutional patriotism will appear as a complex process of co-production in which a transnational thought collective, mixing up scholars and politicians, has played the main part.

AbstractThis paper explores how 'social market economy' became a quasi‐constitutional principle of the EU, highlighting the crucial role played in this process by the European Parliament. Based on multiple archival sources, we show that social market economy came to function as a limited repertoire: While it was advocated for various reasons by different actors, increasingly including social‐democrats, it nevertheless also solidified certain ways of conceiving the EU and its economic model. So doing, this article not only illuminates the role of the EP in the definition of a constitutionalized economic model for the EU; it also challenges the view of Europeanization as the progressive convergence around national preexisting models. Finally, two paradoxes emerge from the analysis: while supporters of the discourse of social market economy aimed at promoting the European social dimension and at addressing the EU democratic deficit, the adoption of this principle may have actually contributed to the subordination of both the 'social' and the 'political' to the 'economic'.