Seeing Europe like a state

In writing ‘State-building and the European Union’ we hoped to open up a conversation. We are gratified at how the thoughtful contributions of the Debate Section participants usefully push the debate forward. We stress that our story of state-building and the EU is about contingent causal processes within specific cases, not universal laws. This allows for a series of rich research questions, posed by the participants, around how different types of security threats may play out in the EU, interacting with other political logics. It thus fully demonstrates how scholarly understanding of the EU is enhanced by historical comparison with state-building, illuminating similarities and differences to earlier episodes of political consolidation. Approaching the EU through the lens of state-building not only holds benefits for EU studies, but also for the study of state-building itself in incorporating novel processes of the construction of political authority in the twenty-first century.