By Lenz, Tobias and Fredrik Söderbaum
For more than 60 years, scholars of Comparative Regionalism have struggled over how to deal with European integration and, more recently, the European Union (EU). Two polarised perspectives have dominated the debate (Acharya, 2016; Söderbaum, 2016). On one side, European integration is taken as the foundation and model, even the gold standard for conceptual development and theory-building, giving rise to numerous hub-and-spoke comparisons centred around the EU. On the other side, scholars reject the EU as the key referent due to its alleged uniqueness and the problem of EU-centrism, turning instead to exclusively non-European cases. This essay rethinks the divide between the EU and the rest and how it has evolved over time.3 We argue that the common rendering of the division conflates two distinct axes of contestation: (1) whether the EU is, in principle, comparable to other cases of regionalism and (2) whether the EU is accorded a special status in the analysis (EU-centrism versus non-EU-centrism). These two axes of contestation constitute a 2×2 typology, which allows us to trace the historical evolution of the field. Speaking directly to the sociology of knowledge in Comparative Regionalism, the proposed typology provides a way of considering both the research field’s organisation throughout the last 60 years and how it is currently transforming.
Published:
Cham: Springer, 2026
Online available:
link.springer.com