This book is about why we would think that ideas matter in politics and how we would
show how much they do. This chapter argues that the history of the European Union (EU)
provides an unusually clear display of the impact of ideas in major political outcomes,
and that this unusually clear case also provides some unusually clear lessons for broader
methodological and theoretical issues in political science.
The impact of ideas in EU history, as causes irreducible to other factors, can be
demonstrated with unusual clarity for four reasons. First, the EU’s “supranational”
institutions flowed from an explicit departure from previous organizing principles in
modern politics. The EU project is very openly about action based on what people
generally perceived as new and radical ideas. Second, the EU project came very far in a
relatively short period of time. Over less than fifty years we can trace how the new ideas
emerged as active options and were built into major new patterns of authority and
resource allocation. Third, EU institution-building has been a very elite-focused exercise
—a process of “enlightened despotism,” according to one French Foreign Minister
(Védrine 1996)—so its core dynamics involve a fairly manageable number of people.
Fourth and most importantly, a close look at elite patterns of support for the EU project
turns up fortuitously clear foundations for an argument about the autonomy of ideas.
Political debates over supranationality have cross-cut the main organizing lines of
European politics to a striking degree. This pattern undercuts attempts to explain the EU
project as any sort of straightforward, rational responses to salient patterns of an objective
environment. Whether we consider how Europeans were collectively positioned in states,
classes, parties, bureaucracies, sectors, or regions, we find that people in the same
positions tended to disagree as much as they agreed about how supranational institution-
building would harm or benefit them. They have fought a battle of ideas that their
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Convention