현대성의 발현으로서의 유럽통합: 사회이론적 해석을 중심으로

Abstract

‘European integration’ has an important implication for social theory as well as international relations, which does research the integration process of political institutions. Especially, in the theories of modernity, which is classical and one of the key themes in the social sciences, European integration can be suggested as a crucial topic for the critique of the conventional discourses of modernity. For instance, modernity as the political project leading the change of polity is able to be reinterpreted with the help of investigating the nation-state in a historical point of view; the formation of the nation-state and its institutional embodiments, on the one hand, and its transformative process in the development of regional political community, on the other. In this paper I argue that The institutional integration of Europe as regional community is a major modern political project in the twenty-first century as much as the nation-building project in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century in Europe. Thus, modernity can be theoretically understood as the representations of historical projects which are reconstructed by specific epochal problematique rather than political institutions and actors' mode of practices which are pre-fixed as ‘stereo-type’ in the modern age.