"The Limits of Comparative Politics: International Relations in the European Union"

Menon, Anand. (2005) "The Limits of Comparative Politics: International Relations in the European Union". In: UNSPECIFIED, Austin, Texas. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

[From the Introduction]. The current paper does not dispute that approaches from Comparative Government can bring added value to the study of the EU. Nor is its intention to suggest that comparisons between the EU and nation states perform no useful function – quite the contrary. Rather, it argues that, in order to gain a full understanding of the European Union, observers must be conscious of the specific – international – nature of the politics that occurs within it. The EU contains elements that are irreducibly international, which makes the character of interactions within it fundamentally different from those within national political systems, even federal ones. Largely, though not exclusively, because of the unique nature of states as political actors, politics between them differs in numerous fundamental ways from the politics found within them. Comparative Government approaches are often based on insights about the nature of politics that are not easily transposable from the domestic to the international realm. Their analyses rooted in assumptions about the texture and nature of national politics, they are simply unable to explain the development and functioning of the Union.

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