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Integration and disintegration Tamás Dezső Ziegler! European integration has been a well-researched process in European studies, with several competing theoretical schools reflecting on the intense cooperation and interdependence among countries in the European continent. On the other hand, researching European disintegration is a relatively underdeveloped new area, with only a handful of scholars dealing with this topic altogether. This chapter aims to give an overview of these two fields, and also to raise awareness about some of the most important challenges to integration in Europe. Furthermore, it offers a more complex interpretation of European integration and disintegration, highlighting that these two can both happen at the same time in parallel within the same political system, such as the European Union. Keywords: integration, disintegration, divergence, convergence, regional cooperation INTRODUCTION: INTEGRATING WHAT, HOW, AND WHAT FOR? The integration of European countries has been one of the most researched, documented, and debated subjects in European studies. This topic is also related to the question of whether a European demos (a European people) exists, or could exist in the future (Weiler 1995). Regarding integration, several schools compete with each other and give different explanations for this phenomenon. However, unlike concerning the methods and techniques of integration, much less is written about what we understand by integration. Most of the articles and books published do not invest in explaining what they mean by integration, and which aspects of integration they wish to analyse. To give an example, legal integration is not the same as political or economic integration. Consequently, in order to give the reader a relatively solid background about this process, we need to start with explaining three things: a) what the different forms of integration(s) are; b) what the theoretical 1 The author thanks Thomas Buijnink and Julian Romero for their help in creating the final format of this chapter.
