Europe's Spaces and Boundaries
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Review Article
Europe’s Spaces and Boundaries Lauri Karvonen Department of Political Science, Abo Akademi, Abo Fin-20500, Finland. E-mail: lauri.karvonen@abo.fi
Restructuring Europe: Centre Formation, System Building and Political Structuring Between the Nation-State and the European Union Stefano Bartolini Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005, 415 pages ISBN: 0-19-928643-4 The Nationalization of Politics: The Formation of National Electorates and Party Systems in Western Europe Daniele Caramani Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, 347 pages ISBN: 0-521-53520-4 The Boundaries of Welfare: European Integration and the New Spatial Politics of Social Protection Maurizio Ferrera Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005, 299 pages ISBN: 0-19-928466-0 Comparative European Politics (2007) 5, 441–460. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cep.6110115
Introduction: The Non-Territorial Study of European Integration The territorial expansion of what is today the European Union (EU) is one of the most conspicuous features in the historical development of European integration. The original six member states account for slightly less than 30% of the geographical space comprised by the Union today. The enlargements of the 1970s and the 1980s raised that figure to around 55, and when the EU in the mid-1990s reached a membership of 15 states its territory was already threefourths of its present size. In terms of geographical scope, European integration has indeed advanced with giant steps. Against this background it may seem strange that territory has never figured prominently in the theoretical study of European integration. Even this formulation is in fact overly cautious; spatial factors are conspicuous by their absence in theories of European integration. A look at a few recent readers in
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the field readily confirms this seemingly bold statement. A cogent volume on European integration theory edited by Wiener and Diez (2004) presents no fewer than 10 different theoretical approaches. Not a single one of these pays systematic attention to spatial or geographical aspects, although such phenomena as multilevel governance and globalization are mentioned by several of the contributors. Most significantly, seven of the chapters have separate sections on the enlargement issue. Only one of them, however, mentions anything remotely akin to spatial factors and the message in this regard basically boils down to the following sentence: ‘International interdependence increases with geographical proximity’ (Schimmelfennig, 2004, 88). In a similar vein, a second prime reader on European integration (Cini, 2003) offers separate chapters on the most established theoretical approaches to the study of the EU as well as an overview of more recent theorizing about European integration (Rosamond, 2003). None of these, including the chapter on new theories, offer any account for the role of territoriality in EU politics. Research hitherto has dealt extensively with the significance of functional cooperation (Haas, 1958
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