Blind Men and a Bigger Elephant? The Present and Future of EU Theories – Inaugural POL Annual Conference

On Thursday, 8 October 2026, the European Political and Governance Studies Department (POL) gathered students of the new Johannes Gutenberg Promotion and faculty for two hours devoted to the theories of European integration. The occasion was the inaugural POL Annual Conference on “the present and future of EU theories,” opened by Rector João Cravinho, who congratulated the organisers on a conference that “begins its tradition today”: “Traditions are very good, especially when you start new ones.” Invoking Keynes's warning that “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist,” he asked the audience to treat theoretical approaches as “attempts to interpret and anticipate emergent realities” and described the College as a convening space that is not only “celebrating the Europe that we have,” but examining it in a critical manner. 

The event was convened by Professor Michele Chang, Resident Professor at the POL Department and Director of the Transatlantic Affairs Programme. Professor Didier Georgakakis, Professor of Political Science at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and coordinator of the IDEAs programme, set the theoretical stage, after which Professor Chang moderated a panel of four leading scholars of European integration: Professor Vivien Schmidt, Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration at Boston University; Professor Mark Pollack of Temple University; Professor Frank Schimmelfennig, Professor of European Politics at ETH Zurich; and Professor Veronica Anghel, Assistant Professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies of the European University Institute. The line-up, Professor Chang pointed out, deliberately combined internal and external perspectives: Professor Schimmelfennig and Professor Anghel teach in the department as visiting professors this year, while Professor Schmidt and Professor Pollack joined from the American academy. Three questions were posed to the panel: how they see their own contributions evolving, what cautions they would flag for students of European integration, and which questions they would put to one another, before an extensive Q&A that included the Rector himself. 

Setting the scene, Professor Georgakakis offered a compact defence of theory. Citing Gaston Bachelard, he reminded the audience that scientific facts are “conquered, constructed and observed,” constructed by concepts and observed through methods. European studies makes this unusually demanding, because “our object moves faster than our textbooks”: when reality changes that quickly, the temptation is to follow the news, and “our only protection is really to build and rebuild solid theory.” For students heading for the EU institutions, this is no scholastic exercise: “there is no method without hypothesis,” and understanding theory “will help you build good compromise.” He set the panel three challenges: to break with Bourdieu's “scholastic point of view”; to bury the legend of a founding duel between neofunctionalism and intergovernmentalism, given that Ernst Haas declared his own theory obsolete, and Stanley Hoffmann discussed Haas “very positively” as early as 1959, so that “the founding duel was never one, but a retrospective illusion”; and to end the “silence between the tables” in a discipline he compared to a restaurant with different tables, each with its own journals and references. The panellists, he suggested, embody that overdue conversation: Professor Anghel imports the economics of collective goods “from Buchanan to Ostrom,” Professor Schimmelfennig brought rhetorical entrapment from sociology, and Professor Schmidt a theory of discourse. 

Professor Schmidt opened with one of the field's oldest images: the blind men and the elephant, coined by Donald Puchala, to warn that “the beast has only become more complex.” She mapped three theoretical silos that long developed in isolation: intergovernmentalism, from Hoffmann's geopolitics to Moravcsik's liberal intergovernmentalism, developed further by Professor Pollack and continued by Professor Schimmelfennig, and on to new intergovernmentalism and core state powers; supranationalism, from Haas's neofunctionalism through Sandholtz's and Stone Sweet's supranationalism to Bauer's and Becker's work on the ideational role of policy design; and politicisation, from Weiler's “demos” and Nicolaïdis demoicracy to the empowerment of the European Parliament and Hooghe's and Marks's postfunctionalism. Since the 2020s, she argued, the silos have begun to talk to one another: “failing forward” and incomplete bargains bridge rationalism and historical institutionalism, while her own discursive institutionalism insists that politicisation can be “positive as well as negative”: governments that “can communicate persuasively” can “overcome the rationalist constraints.” Her answer to the question of Europe's future was original: “not a hard core Europe but a soft core Europe,” made of overlapping clusters of Member States with no in-or-out membership. In the discussion, she predicted that security and defence will inherit an architecture as complex as the euro's or migration's, and warned that candidates left “in the antechamber,” Ukraine and Serbia among them, will drift away unless the EU gives them “voice if not vote.” 

Professor Pollack spoke with the authority of twenty-one years co-editing the field's standard textbook, Wallace et al.'s Policy-Making in the European Union, which sorts EU theorising into four families: integration theories proper, the EU as a political system, the EU as a system of governance, and critical approaches. Preparing the latest edition and reviewing previous ones, he drew four lessons. First, the theoretical landscape keeps growing with ever fewer “isms.” Second, the 2010s belief that the EU had reached a stable settlement, shared by Hix and Moravcsik, has been overtaken by events: integration and disintegration are back on the agenda, and so is the question whether the EU advances through crisis. Third, although he had been “very grudging” in making room for postfunctionalism, “their theory has proven right”: politicisation feeds back into the integration process. Fourth, the field now argues across multiple dimensions (integration, left-right, and GAL-TAN), which is why scholars often talk past each other while believing they disagree. The question that remains, he concluded, echoing Jacques Delors, is one of capacity: “the EU yes, but to do what?” 

For Professor Schimmelfennig, the crisis period has been a revival for integration theory, because “crises are bad for politics but good for political science.” He offered five points. The classical debate between neofunctionalism and intergovernmentalism has dissolved into a “narcissism of small differences”: what analysts now appreciate is the commonality, and the two theories operate on “different time horizons rather than starting points,” a convergence the “failing forward” framework captures nicely. Postfunctionalism is “the new kid on the block,” yet incomplete: it deals “almost exclusively with internal politics” and is “a theory of constraints” with little to say about EU-level decision-making, even though major advances have happened “in spite of politicisation.” With treaty change off the table, the dependent variable has shifted from institutional change to integration as “capacity building.” External drivers have become impossible to ignore: “do we have to become realists again?” And the most challenging development is the move from theories of integration to theories of polity formation and state-building, even though the EU remains “a negotiated order” defined by membership. 

Professor Anghel began from the 2025 conference of the European Union Studies Association, where Marks and Hooghe, the founders of postfunctionalism, were asked what the next frontier of EU studies should be: “we have yet to theorise how EU geopolitics works.” Everything we know about geopolitics, she noted, rests on state-centric theories, hence the Kissinger quip about who to call to speak to the EU. Her own research follows three strands: crises have forced the EU to think about integration, with uneven external dependencies shaping preferences, raising the question whether Europe really is forged through crisis; war has reopened the debate on European state formation, even though “it is not that clear that war alone creates state-like powers for the EU”; and geopolitical competition is becoming “a cross-theoretical problem to solve,” best captured not by picking between theories but by relational approaches that explain, for instance, why wartime enlargement makes sense. Drawing on From Club to Commons, her book with Erik Jones (who happened to be in the audience), she described an EU “perfectly capable of being a geopolitical power” that “will not do it in a way that looks familiar.” Her challenge to her fellow panellists pushed back against calls for novelty: do we really need something new, or is the ongoing “tweaking and refinement” of existing theories already anticipating much of what is happening? 

The first question of the afternoon came from the Rector himself, who observed that while the Strategic Compass of the Covid years was a Council-led exercise, the Commission has since made “leaps and bounds” in defence policy with remarkably little pushback. Professor Schimmelfennig saw no power grab: defence initiatives “do not take away any formal powers of the Member States” but add support, extending the EU's regulatory logic into a new field. And should NATO ever fail, “the Europeans would take over NATO rather than bring it into the EU.” Professor Pollack contrasted the 1990s, when he used to tell students that EU defence was improbable — for France it competed with national competence, and for the Dutch and Germans it potentially conflicted with NATO. Europe was “living in a post-modern paradise” today, when NATO is “not reassuring” and the EU has become a source of common borrowing. Professor Schmidt pressed the money question: caught “between a rock and a hard place” by American and Chinese weaponised interdependence, the EU needs common assets and borrowing that German opposition has put out of reach; after the 2027 election year, she warned, the Union risks becoming “the amusement park for the rest of the world.” Professor Anghel urged the room to think bigger about security: “we need a theory of security that explains what the EU is doing.” She saw a European version of Nordic total defence emerging, in which a resilient society comes to the aid of Member States' military capabilities, in the service of higher-order purposes such as integration, unity, prosperity and happiness. 

On the EU's global role more broadly, the panel blended caution with defiance. Asked whether the push for enlargement after 2022 demonstrates identity-building, Professor Schimmelfennig answered with a resounding yes. “Before the war, Ukraine was not on the map,” and the wave of support after the full-scale invasion reflected genuine identification with a country seen as fighting for Europe, but he warned that “this will not be sufficient to carry enlargement through,” given issues such as agriculture and corruption; expect differentiated integration instead. Professor Pollack repeated his long-standing critique of “Normative Power Europe” as “a self-congratulatory story” that can shade into “soft colonialism” through economic leverage, and he was blunt about regulating artificial intelligence in a global race: “the EU will not save us.” What troubles him most, as an integration theorist, is that the field still lacks a strong hypothesis about the conditions under which a crisis produces a common European response. 

The debate returned repeatedly to legitimacy and to the EU's self-image. Professor Schimmelfennig noted that talk of a democratic deficit has faded while output legitimacy has become a dominant concern: Eurobarometer support is rising because citizens see the EU as guaranteeing democracy, and even polarisation normalises the EU as a polity: “in democratic terms, it is progress.” Professor Schmidt demurred: national politics still holds input legitimacy, citizens increasingly go to Brussels to lobby, yet the trust the EU enjoys does not translate into national politics that moves the Union forward: “there is still a democratic deficit.” Professor Anghel, for her part, answered the pessimism with an accounting exercise: NGEU, loans to Ukraine and the SAFE instrument, a combined trillion euros by 2027, which amount to “a lot of integration which is stealthy,” pulling candidates such as Ukraine and Moldova into the institutional fold before membership. “The EU never talks about itself as awesome,” she concluded, and when one questioner objected that common debt and back-to-back loans are two different animals, she insisted that attributing them to the states is itself a theoretical choice: debt can also be seen as the citizens’; it is a question of perspective. 

After two hours of debate, two conclusions can be drawn. First, the founding duel of the field is well and truly over, and not because one theory won, but because the panellists practised what Professor Georgakakis had preached: they combined rationalism, institutionalism, discourse and geopolitics to make sense of an EU that acts in ways no single lens anticipates. Second, as Professor Kaeding, the Director of Studies of the POL Department remarked in the closing statement, the POL department has started a tradition worth keeping. Held at the moment when students are matched with professors for their master's theses, the conference put the authors of the books on the library shelves in direct conversation with their readers and sent everyone off to continue that conversation over drinks in the Verversdijk foyer. The Rector's hope that students “will see the College not only as a place where they make a brief stop, but as a place for regular interaction” could hardly have found a better inaugural proof.

Photos of the Event