Servants of Power or Providers of Indispensable Ideas? The Role of Scientists and the Use of Social Science in the Making of the European Union*

The European Union represents a world-historic unique effort at peaceful integration of sovereign states. This is so not only because it has happened rather seldom in history that independent political units are willing to transfer considerable parts of their political sovereignty to supernational bodies. It is even more so because such a transfer earlier in history has never involved so many and so large and well-established independent nation states. In 1999, the European Union comprised fifteen member states with an overall population of over 360 millions of inhabitants. Earlier successful efforts at integration of more or less independent political units included only a few millions of people.1