From above and from below: A political sociology of European actors

The aim of the article is to develop a perspective on EU studies centred on social agents and to assess its contribution to the understanding of both the making of an EU political field at the top and the emergence of European social fields at the bottom. This perspective, intellectually informed by authors such as Pierre Bourdieu or Norbert Elias, provides a way to deepen existing approaches and to expand the scope of EU studies in two ways. First, it aims to evaluate the social foundations of the European integration process through a very precise analysis of what social actors involved in EU processes think and do considering their position in wider structures of interaction and domination. Second, it calls for wider collaboration with sociology, history and anthropology and bringing back traditional notions and toolkits from other social sciences in order to better understand an emerging European institution-society nexus. Comparative European Politics (2010) 8, 93-109. doi:10.1057/cep.2010.6