Researching the EU (Studies) into demise?

The European Union (EU) may not have met the expectations of many EU scholars muddling through crises rather than propelling forward. Reports about its demise, however, appear greatly exaggerated. Rather than taking it as a forgone conclusion that the EU is doomed, this contribution outlines a research strategy to assess the state of European integration and the EU. Acknowledging the pro-integration bias' in EU studies, I argue that we need a more differentiated conceptualization of integration that takes disintegration rather than stagnation as the opposite value of integration. Even then, though, there is no real evidence that the EU is to collapse and terminate. This is not to say that there are no signs of disintegration. Nationalist, exclusionary discourses and practices of non-compliance reinforce each other in creating potential for disintegration. But even if they resulted in disintegration, this would not necessarily mean the end of the EU nor of EU studies. If theories can explain why European integration has moved forward, reversing their causal logic should be able to explain why it is not or relapses.