Perhaps the greatest academic growth area over the past twenty years or so has been “European integration studies”, a field that has both analysed and boosted support for the European “project”. Almost all of its practitioners have proceeded from the assumption that the process of integration is – must be – “irreversible”. It is the intellectual equivalent of the principle of the European acquis communautaire by which powers, once surrendered or pooled, cannot be retrieved. Or, more unkindly, one might see it as a “European Brezhnev doctrine”, by which socialism, being inevitable, could not be allowed to fail in any country in which it was already established.
But what if this is not so? What if, as the Croatian political scientist Josip Glaurdic, an expert on the collapse of Yugoslavia, once quipped, what we really need is a school of “European disintegration studies”?
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