What Is the EU?

This interpretive article relies on insights from three critical literatures -world-systems analysis, postcolonial studies and, to the extent of an extended simile, the economic sociology of flexible global production -to propose a geo-political understanding of what the European Union (EU) is. The authors begin by interrogating the tendency within much of the current research and commentary on the EU to treat it as a state of sorts. They then outline some mechanisms -pertaining to its internal and external linkage structures -that have enabled the EU to perform successfully in a geo-political context where most of the main actors are states. Finally, drawing on critical insights from the sociology of subcontracted production and distributed organization, the authors suggest ways in which the EU, in its current form, might be thought of beyond the constraints of the current theoretical language of statehood.