Introduction

Brexit has prompted renewed calls for EU studies to take seriously the problem of European disintegration. In fact, ‘disintegration’ has been on the field’s agenda for some time. With the EU suffering a ‘perfect storm’ of crises, some of which are thought to be existential, it is perhaps unsurprising that there have been calls to theorise disintegration (Zielonka, 2014) as well as a few attempts to map out what a theory of disintegration might look like (Jones, 2018; Vollaard, 2014, 2018; Webber, 2014). Part of the turn to disintegration has involved thinking through how and whether standard theories of integration would cope with the unravelling of the EU (Schmitter and Lefkofridi, 2016) or at least to posit ‘disintegration’ as an outcome that could follow from the interactive effects of several independent ‘crisis’ variables (Schimmelfennig, 2017). Meanwhile journalistic treatments, confronted by the eurozone and refugee crises along with the prospective exit of a key member state, often question the sustainability of the EU project. There is a clear logic at work here. Most simply, the idea that the real world of the EU is changing provokes calls for an appropriate response from those charged with generating systematic knowledge about the EU. The disintegration turn presumes, first and foremost, that there is empirical evidence of the EU suffering from severe tensions that, in turn, are likely to reverse some, if not all, of the key integration gains of the past seven decades. It follows that the field’s theoretical coordinates need to be reset in ways that presume the possibility of integrative collapse or decline. Analytically, and independently of any trends or events in the real world of the field’s object (the EU), there are strong grounds to suppose that any theory of integration must, as a matter of methodological principle, be able to explain dis integration as well as integration. These two stimuli are not necessarily incompatible, but they do emerge from quite distinctive concerns about why extant theory is lacking or flawed. In the first, theory needs to get its act together because the world it seeks to account for is changing in important ways. In the second, it has always been incumbent upon theorists to specify the conditions under which disintegration would occur; the absence of a theory of disintegration thus reflects poorly on established theories of integration.