Narrating the Process: Questioning the Progressive Story of European Integration*

Abstract Underlying scholarship on the EU is the conviction that the institutions of the EU are the outcome of a historical process whereby national institutions are being superseded and replaced by supranational ones. The article criticizes this tendency, for two reasons. First, it argues that the progressive conception has led to the story of the EU being told in over‐simplified and unhistorical ways. Second, it suggests that the progressive conception has blinded authors to the possibility that alternative narratives of European integration are possible and that these may come to predominate if the European project loses its aura of success.