Le gouvernement de l’Union européenne revisité : éclipses et renouvellements du « dirigisme communautaire »

Since the mid-1990s, and largely thanks to a large increase in usage of the sociological method within the social sciences in general and its application to the European Union (EU) in particular, knowledge about how the latter is governed has grown considerably. Specifically, research conducted from this perspective has generated detailed data and analyses which have enabled deep explanation of the differentiated institutionalization of the EU, of its numerous legitimation challenges, as well as of its wide range of socio-economic and political effects. This paper's first objective is to synthesize the contribution of what are now the acquis of this research and, in so doing, to highlight the added value of its theories and methods. Its second objective is programmatic: to encourage ongoing and future research to tackle more directly change in the ways in which the EU has been governed since the mid-1990s. In a nutshell, the hypothesis that will be developed is that the combined effects of economic policy orientations adopted just after the Maastricht treaty on the one hand, and others made around the first Eastern enlargement on the other, largely destroyed the EU's dirigiste political equipment. Ever since, liberals within the EU's elites have made the most of the space left open to them, whilst their principal adversaries, largely because they have never managed to reinvent dirigisme at the EU scale, have consistently participated in EU affairs without any ideological compass. This hypothesis will be empirically nourished by successively revisiting the way in which the EU has been governed over the past 25 years as regards the single market, policies it shares with the Member States (defence and internal security), and two policy areas without any formal EU policy: sport and culture.