uantitatively speaking, the shift in the centre of gravity of work on the EU from America to Europe itself has been a product of a now vast academic industry: some five hundred Jean Monnet chairs are currently planted across the Union. In the midst of a sea of conformity, a cluster of thinkers has emerged whose writing represents a qualitative advance in critical understanding of the Union. In independence of spirit closer in type to Gramsci’s ‘traditional’ intellectuals, as distinct from the ‘organic’ variant represented by Luuk van Middelaar, these are not to be found nestling in official positions; form no collective school of thought; and are of diverse national and generational backgrounds. A short list would include Giandomenico Majone (Italy), theorist of regulation; the jurists Dieter Grimm (Germany) and Thomas Horsley (Britain); the sociologists Claus Offe and Wolfgang Streeck (Germany); the political scientists Christopher Bickerton (Britain), Morten Rasmussen (Denmark) and Antoine Vauchez (France); the historians Kiran Klaus Patel (Germany) and Vera Fritz (Luxembourg). In the work of these and other scholars, the dynamics of European integration emerge in a cooler, more searching light than in van Middelaar’s panegyrics, revealing what these omit and scrutinising what they don’t with a finer lens.
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