The European Union as a Chaotic System

Abstract

From an analytical perspective, moreover, the study of the European Union, both as an actor and as an arena, has also precipitated many theoretical attempts to explain the genesis and the evolution of this object that has been even provocatively considered an Unidentified Political Object. This contribution will defend that Chaology's conceptual core may be of great help to overpass those quarrels, and that, surprisingly or not, these concepts do also fit in the theoretical assumptions driven by Historical Institutionalism, the analytical school that, since the 1990s has been proposing a suggestive approach to the European Integration process that to some extend challenge those that used to be the mainstream positions. All in all, this contribution has a two-folded objective. Firstly, it seeks to review the aforementioned debates through the lens of Chaos Theory to prove that in most cases, the reciprocal critics among the mainstream approaches to the European Union do actually lack of precise understanding of the basic features of any chaotic system. Secondly, it proposes few examples to illustrate this chaotic nature of the European integration process.