Europe between Nationalism and Neoliberalism

Transnational, international, multinational, supranational. The lexicon of European integration wrestles with the same Westphalian “nation-state paradigm” that has fragmented so much modern European historiography. For three generations, European integration scholars have debated the complex relationship of the state to the union and offered divergent narratives of the process by which member states pursued cooperation as well as its implications. Early scholarship echoed the ambitions of the federalist architects with a teleology of nations beyond nationalism; later works argued that cooperation actually strengthened and reified the nation-state. Amid the academy’s global turn, a new cohort has moved beyond the state to consider the European Union (EU) and its predecessors in the context of the globalization of both markets and market-oriented policies designed to buttress boundaryless trade. The events of the twenty-first century—from protracted crises to Britain’s exit from the EU—have only intensified debates about the intransience of the nation and the future of interdependence in the region, demanding: How can we understand the history and historiography of contemporary Europe between nationalism and neoliberalism?