Interdisciplinarity and EU Studies


Interdisciplinarity
Mention interdisciplinarity in some academic circles in the social sciences and you would think that you had waved a red-rag at a bull. “So“, some people react, “it's a practical rather than an academic degree, is it?” Or, alternatively, and in a deprecating tone, “I suppose someone has to produce generalists.” Personally, I find the worst is to be addressed, with knowing condescension, with the question “And what meta-theory do you use?”
This is puzzling because in the pure and applied sciences it is routine to explore questions from outside strict disciplinary boundaries. Indeed it seems impossible to imagine much of modern science and technology, and the spin-offs we consume, without traditional disciplines coming together – nuclear energy and molecular biology are but two examples. Equally, many modern challenges confronting decision-makers are often solved by interdisciplinary teams – urban planning, aging, global warming. The nature of the problem does not render a solution within the confines of a single discipline.
Problem-oriented (or mission-oriented) research and the search for policy-options is one route into interdisciplinary research. Often, in real life, that research is undertaken by teams of specialists but the direction of those teams requires someone with an overarching vision of the entire project. That person needs to understand, and to be able to articulate, the work being done even if he/she only undertakes part of it. That person is acting inherently in an interdisciplinary fashion.
Interdisciplinarity takes a number of forms. It can start simply by borrowing concepts form one discipline and applying them to the subject matter traditionally regarded as the preserve of another. My own discipline of economic history is a case in point., though there are plenty of other examples. Often these survive as sub-disciplines, rather than forming new nuclei in their own right. On the other hand, after a while there is usually a “synoptic quest” for a new and separate unity and emancipation from the mother discipline.
Often the drive can come from another direction, an attempt to derive theory that can do justice to the complexity of the reality being studied. This is particularly prevalent in the social sciences where long and bitter turf-wars are often fought among its practitioners. This obsession with theory contributes to a denigration of more empirical approaches, which a labeled as descriptive or, at best, analytical. Ad hoc explanation and one-off reasoning are regarded with suspicion, if not distain.
Area Studies
The European Studies movement finds its origins in the “area studies movement” that started in the United States (US) in the 1930s, initially as a reaction against the grip of esoteric “orientalist” research within the study and teaching on Asia. World War II demonstrated the limitation of America’s capacity to operate militarily and diplomatically in countries outside the West. After the War, and culminating in the National Defense Education Act of 1958, the US Government responded to the scarcity and diffusion of scientific expertise on the countries of the Soviet Union and Asia, by funding centres in the humanities and the social sciences in major universities. About the same time, in addition to worries about the relevance of university teaching geared towards the production of colonial officers in a post-colonial world, the government of the United Kingdom (UK) was voicing similar concerns. In 1962 the government accepted the findings of the Hayter Report to concentrate and fund a limited number of interdisciplinary, area studies centres devoted to Asia, Africa and the Soviet Union.
     
Although the creation of Hayter Centres did not embrace Western Europe, both their interdisciplinary nature and their area approach challenged the traditional thinking on the organisation of knowledge. Their creation, in the UK, coincided with a major phase of university expansion, including the establishment of new universities which were not bound by path dependency, as were many of the more established institutions. In favour of a more interdisciplinary approach, they argued that it was paradoxical that research advances seemed to be accompanied by increasing specialization while the increasing complexity of society requires knowledge and systematic experience outside the confines of a single discipline.
The challenge to traditional approaches to post-secondary education was being felt by students, too, as demand for social science courses as sociology, anthropology, psychology soared. It was not surprising, against this background, that students who wanted to pursue the study of modern languages began to demand that they could do so through the medium of contemporary politics and culture rather than through the medium of high culture and literature. The imminence of the UK’s entry into the European Economic Community (EEC) added to the urgency and excitement, and by the early 1970s, several undergraduate European studies degrees had been established in British universities. A decade later, reflecting the expansion of taught postgraduate degrees in the UK, and European studies Masters degrees. began to emerge. 
European Studies in the UK (Masters degrees)
The UK was a pioneer in postgraduate European Studies since unlike most of Continental Europe, it has specialised BA/MA tracks. It has, therefore had the longest experience in this area and the most comprehensive surveys, conducted in 1997 and 2001. Taught postgraduate degree programs only really took-off in the UK in the 1980s and by 2001 fourty university institutions offered MA degrees in European studies. Over the intervening twenty years the disciplinary balance within these degrees had narrowed so that by 2001, the overwhelming disciplinary bias was towards social science, which is basically, political science and public administration. A full 71 per cent of degrees are based on social science alone. The remainder combine social science with a with Business, Economics, History or Law. Moreover, even when other topics are included, this does not necessarily mean that the degrees are interdisciplinary – many degrees allow students to specialise in different tracks. There are still some good interdisciplinary programs around, but for many the degree label does not accurately refect the contents.
Ironically, the UK has had the longest experience in designing and teaching Masters courses in European Studies. On the European Continent it was the 'Bologna process', initiated in 1999 that often paved the way for the creation of a separate, visible Masters track and this led to the development of MAs in European Studies. This is probably the most advanced in Belgium, where half of universities offer an European studies masters of some kind. In the Netherlands, too, the visibility of existing opportunities to specialise in Europe increased and new courses emerged. As in the UK, these labels concealed as much as they revealed - many were straight political science or public administration degrees in disguise and others were so general that you wondered wherein the specialisation expected at masters level actually lay. 
The Design of Leiden's MA in EU Studies
Leiden University has aimed consistently for an interdisciplinary approach. To start with, it has made the focus of the degree not the EU itself, but the issue areas with which it is confronted, regardless of whether it confronts them or not. Most of the issues are economic or political, and therefore concepts and theories from these disciplines are incorporated into the core first semester syllabus. Moreover, the EU has an impact on domestic and international law and, obviously, all the problems and the roads to their solution (or not) have their own history (or path dependency). Thus law and history complete the range of core courses. In the second semester, students chose options from a wide range of specialised courses focusing on the issue areas, viewed from various disciplinary perspectives. Whilst the students may choose a single disciplinary approach in their essays, in their final theses, they have to place their findings within the relevant disciplinary frameworks of their selected topics.
The problem-oriented approach, the investigation of policy options and an analysis of the feasibility of their implementation characterise the construction of the Leiden degree. It is unapologetically 'bottom-up' in its construction and it justifies this by pointing to the demands of complexity of the issues addressed. For an economist, the policy implementation is often a "black box", whilst for political scientist the problem usually only appears when it hits the process of policy-formation or implementation. lawyers often get tied up in definitional and procedural issues, whilst historians are often reluctant to raise their ambitions above the parapit of the archives.   
We describe the end-goals of our students "to be able to design and run a research project on any issue area of interest (or not) to the EU, including areas that are totally new or unfamiliar, and to undertake part of it.... starting with one's own thesis". This has an academic value, it has a market value and it has a societal value, and we feel little need to apologise for that.
The interdisciplinary concept of the Leiden degree is shared by most of our students - most mention it as an important characteristic in determining their choice (I know, you would not expect them to say much else!). If we contrast the degree with those offered in the UK, the disciplinary bias is not the only difference. From the 2001 survey, we can determine that we are already relatively large - 92 per cent of UK degrees have less than 20 full-time students and 54 per cent have less than ten. By contrast, Leiden already has more than 40 students and this is likely to increase even further. One of the implications is that small degrees in the UK can only remain viable by sharing courses with other degrees, which rather spoils the intellectual and academic progression that should be part of an MA program. It also means that the number of specialist options is likely to be curtailed. Another difference is that 75 per cent of Leiden students are graduates from non-Dutch universities, a proportion of foreign students only found in 36 per cent of UK degrees and it is the international profle of the student body that makes it such an attraction for staff and fellow students alike. 
Some Literature Suggestions
M. Cini, “The ‘State of the  Art’ in EU Studies: From Politics to Interdisciplinarity (And Back Again?)” Politics, 26, 1, 2006.

R.T. Griffiths, "The Landscape of European Studies in European Universities", in M. Holland, S. Jora and P. Ryan (eds) The Future of European Studies in Asia, 2008.

B. Rosamond, “European Integration and the Social Science of EU Studies: the disciplinary politics of a subfield” in: International Affairs, 83, 1, 2007.

C. Rumford and P. Murray, “Globalization and the Limitations of European Integration Studies: Interdisciplinary Considerations” Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 11, 1, 2003.

M.L. Smith, The State of European Studies. Report commissioned by the Standing Conference of Heads of European Studies, London, 2003.

B. Tonra,“Interdisciplinarity in European Studies. Core Value or Side Payment?” Paper presented ECPR General Conference, 18-21 September 2003, Marburg.