Why non-ideational claims haven’t paid much attention to positioning
Now I turn to a more negative, deconstructionist exercise. My research suggests that the
traditional non-ideational approaches to EU history have leapt over some major and fairly
clear empirical gaps in their arguments. Of course they will contest just how clear my
empirical claims are, and I welcome that empirically-focused debate. Again, however, I
cannot detail my side of it in a short chapter. But if we take as granted for the moment
that my claims hold up respectably in longer exposition, we can pose some other
questions. What might have led non-ideational theorists to allow major empirical gaps
into their research? What theoretical leaps allowed them to defend explanations despite
the gaps?
First let me expand briefly on some major features of what we can call traditional
non-ideational scholarship. Most social-science work since the 19
th
century explains what
people do as fairly rational responses to some sort of unambiguous obstacle course
around them. Political action varies not with different interpretations of the world but
with the resources people hold and the relative position they inhabit in arenas like
markets, security competitions, or contests for domestic political power. The most classic
versions of such thinking are materialist—Marxism, economic liberalism, realism—
where the obstacle course is presented as a set of structural givens. More recent, but now
very well established, is institutionalist work that emphasizes man-made organizational
aspects of the obstacle course. Its focus on a man-made environment leads to a stress on
feedback and “path dependence,” but otherwise its core logic shares some features of
structural materialism. Both rest on the expectation that the main patterns of politics will
follow from groups of people who share positioning (and so clear “interests”) in an
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Convention