European integration and the problem of the state: universality, particularity, and exemplarity in the crafting of the European Union Stefan Borg Swedish Institute of International Affairs, Box 27035, 102 51 Stockholm, Sweden. E-mail: stefan.borg@ui.se The European Union is often presented as an entity that has ‘moved beyond’ the model of organising political life along the way of the modern sovereign state. This paper questions this understanding by engaging a set of texts that could be understood as exemplary of the EU’s official discourse of Europe: EU’s failed Constitutional Treaty and Javier Solana’s collected speeches. A paradox is herein identified: the values that are said to sustain Europe’s identity and upon which Europe is founded are simultaneously presented as distinctly European and universal. It is suggested that Europe is being crafted in a pendular oscillation between particularising and universalising the values upon which Europe allegedly rests. By drawing on critical International Relations theory, the paper suggests that this very contradictory oscillation between particularising and universalising Europe’s values to an important extent mirrors modern statecraft. One should therefore think twice before announcing the construction of the European Union as something qualitatively different from, or ‘gentler’ than, modern statecraft. Journal of International Relations and Development (2014) 17, 339–366. doi:10.1057/jird.2013.8; published online 19 April 2013 Keywords: deconstruction; EU foreign policy; European Constitutional Treaty; European integration; the state Whatever other disagreements there are in the proliferating literatures on European integration, there is wide-ranging consensus on one question: the European Union is not a state. Jan Zielonka expresses this received wisdom, writing that ‘the use of statist terms and analogies [in the study of the EU] is quite misleading because the Union is anything but a state y [a]nd the Union is a very different kind of international actor than any of the states we know from history’ (Zielonka 2006: 2–3). Instead, it is commonplace to present the European Union as the most important contemporary instance of an entity that has ‘moved beyond’ the model of organising political life along the lines of the modern sovereign state. What is more, this allegedly novel entity has been Journal of International Relations and Development, 2014, 17, (339–366) r 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1408-6980/14 www.palgrave-journals.com/jird/