pressure on scholars to look for cross-cutting views.
Let me repeat: the point is not that we should always expect ideas and action to vary
independently from various kinds of material or organizational positioning. It is simply
that ideational logic tells us—and the EU case demonstrates with unusual clarity—that
we should imagine this as a possibility. If we allow that groups and organizations might
be unsure and conflicted over their positional interests, we will be driven to do broad
research on patterns of mobilization and rhetoric to check. Of course if we found that
certain patterns of action and rhetoric debates did follow fairly clear material or
organizational lines, this alone would not confirm positional theories and rule out
interpretive variation. We would then need to do close process-tracing and consideration
of counterfactual historical alternatives to interpret how tightly a course of action
followed from salient and fairly unambiguous goals, costs and incentives. But our first
steps must include a questioning of traditional assumptions and careful research on how
action and rhetoric map on to positioning. Not only can this unearth the clearest evidence
for ideational claims, as the previous section argued, but it is also the route to the clearest
foundations for non-ideational claims.
General theories, post hoc functionalism, and the status of ideas
There is another level to any attempt to deconstruct some of the empirical oversights in
the EU literature and to offer an alternative ideational argument. Structural and
institutionalist theorists did not overlook cross-cutting patterns simply because they did
not think to look for ideas with some autonomy from positioning. Much more
profoundly, they also tended to subscribe to philosophies of science that ruled out
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