objective “interests”—by which non-ideational scholars really mean their position in
some sort of unambiguous obstacle course (Parsons 2007)—were unable to decide for
them.
The unusual clarity of the role of ideas in EU history points to opportunities for
ideational scholarship more broadly. It highlights how attention to fairly concrete
positional patterns of political action (or the lack thereof) can complement more common
ideational methods of process tracing and interpretation, even in situations without such
dramatically cross-cutting constellations. It also showcases rather starkly some problems
with non-ideational scholarship that extend well beyond EU studies. In a case where
divided elites perennially shouted at each other about explicitly new ideas, non-ideational
social scientists did their best to boil the politics down to straightforward reactions to
positions in an evolving obstacle course. They managed to hold to such accounts by
relying mainly on fairly narrow and selective process tracing of events rather than
systematic research on the positional patterns implied by their theories, and by filling in
the resultant gaps in their accounts with post hoc functionalism. I suggest that these errors
were made possible by a pursuit of non-ideational hypotheses without serious
consideration of ideational alternatives. In EU history, like in many other settings, non-
ideational theorists have held a debate only between positional arguments. They asked
only what kind of positional pattern lay behind political outcomes, seeing little reason to
look for debates or mobilization that cross-cut material and organizational positioning.
Ideational explanation, by contrast, is built on the notion that action can vary
independently from objective positioning. Its logic instructs us to investigate closely the
relationship between positioning, ideas, and action, since there may well be multiple
viable ways to interpret any position. This is certainly not to say that ideas always
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