This presentation will attempt to trace the role of ideas about economic policies and European institutional authority through the EU's past decade, highlighting the methods that best display them and their implications for the study of European politics today.
The crisis-ridden European Union has made it clear that its construction and major policies are built on contestable ideas. In the sovereign debt crisis, contending groups have seen their interlocutors as misguided, self-destructive, and morally corrupt – not just as representing contending bargaining positions. More general challenges to the EU's institutional authority have reached new heights in Britain, Eastern Europe, and among non-mainstream parties everywhere. For scholars of the EU, such clashes seem to pose rather direct challenges to materialist or institutionalist theories that analyze the EU as an aggregation of rational bargains or as a product of gradual institutional path-dependence.
