Keywords

Introduction

With the expansion of European nation-states scholarly practices were gradually incorporated in national institutions, academies and other learned societies, and from the late eighteenth century onwards in reformed or newly founded research universities. This historic transition from a European wide network of ecclesiastical to national institutions of higher learning was apparent, among others, in the shift from Latin to national languages. From around 1800 teaching and publishing were done in the vernacular, while Latin mainly survived for ceremonial purposes.

Rather than producing a confinement of scholarship within the borders of nation-states, the establishment of national systems of higher education provided the basis for new arrangements of transnational collaboration and exchange. Certain national languages replaced Latin in acquiring the status of a lingua franca ( French, later German, and later still English), and the development of international scholarly organizations offered an institutional framework for transnational exchange. Two phases can be distinguished in the historical development of international scholarly organizations (Jeanpierre and Boncourt 2015). During the first phase, from the mid-nineteenth century until the inter-war period, such organizations emerged in all major fields. The process was related to the more general flourishing of international organizations, which were seen as a new phase in the relations among the more advanced nation states (Crawford et al. 1993; Drori et al. 2003; Feuerhahn and Rabault-Feuerhahn 2010; Rasmussen 1990; Schofer 1999). Actual exchange across national borders, however, was restricted to small numbers of scholars and remained relatively infrequent. International organizations were more important for purposes of information sharing, diffusion and intellectual diplomacy than for effective transnational collaboration (Heilbron et al. 2008).

During the second phase, from the end of the Second World War to the present, new international scholarly organizations were initiated, in particular by UNESCO (see Boncourt in this book). Profiting from the growth of national academic systems as well as from increasing international mobility, these new international associations enabled more regular transnational flows of people and ideas, while at the same time including a widening range of countries and regions. The globalizing scope of international organizations was stimulated by decolonization, the rise of newly industrializing countries, and, after 1989, by the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe.

The long tradition of internationalism that was carried by international organizations and the recent forms of more global patterns of circulation have obscured the fact that since the 1990s transnational regionalization has perhaps become the more important mode of cross-border exchange (Heilbron 2014b; UNESCO 2010). Transnational regional structures have emerged in Africa, Asia , Europe , and Latin America; North America is the main exception. Located between national systems of higher learning and global arrangements, these transnational regional structures include research councils like the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLASCO, founded in 1967), the Association of Asian Social Science Research Councils (AASSREC, 1973), the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA, 1973), and the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS, founded in 2008). While transnational regional initiatives have developed in most parts of the world, Europe currently probably represents the most advanced case of this process.

In this chapter we will analyze the emerging European research area in the social sciences and humanities (SSH). We will do so mostly on the basis of new evidence that has been collected and analyzed in the framework of the European project INTERCO-SSH. First, we will provide a historical outline of the formation of a European research area in the SSH, and identify the conditions that made this process possible. Second, we will analyze the current structure of SSH in the European research area, and indicate the main obstacles for European research initiatives.

How and Why European SSH Emerged

The Structuring of European SSH

From the mid-1960s, and especially between 1970 and 2000, European integration in the social sciences and humanities has been developing at a fast pace. This is visible at three interconnected levels: the level of institutions, transnational collaboration, and scientific orientation.

European SSH have become denser at the institutional level. Several European research oriented institutions, such as associations, journals, databases, research institutes, et cetera, emerged from the 1960s onwards. While systematic data is not available for all types of institutions, two indicators may be singled out to illustrate this process. The growth is, first, tangible in the development of European professional associations in virtually all of the social sciences (Boncourt 2016, 2017). While these disciplines had been, thus far, mainly structured by national and global associations, continental organizations gradually appeared. This occurred at different dates in different sciences, with the late 1980s and early 1990s witnessing most of the creations of new associations (Tables 6.1 and 6.2). These changes were not necessarily limited to the birth of one European association per discipline, as up to two such groupings could coexist in a given social science at a given time.Footnote 1 To these general disciplinary associations should be added sub-disciplinary organizations, such as the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology (EAESP, created in 1966), the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (EAERE, 1990) or the European International Studies Association (EISA, 2013), to give a few examples among many.

Table 6.1 Creation of main European Social Science Disciplinary Associations
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Table 6.2 Names and acronyms of European Social Science Associations
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The creation of European associations is not limited to the most established academic disciplines and sub-disciplines. Rather, some organizations focus on more recently formed domains, which have gradually become equally established as university departments. Most of these newer fields, often called ‘studies’ (e.g. gender studies, communication studies, cultural studies, European studies, etc.), emerged after 1968, in opposition to the traditional academic division of labor and in alliances with groups outside of the academy. In these domains, the object of research took priority over academic and disciplinary approaches. Thus, the second half of the twentieth century witnessed the creation of the Women’s International Studies Europe (WISE, 1990), the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST, 1994), the European Association for the Study of Religions (EASR, 2000), and the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA, 2005), among others.

A third category of associations is more specialized and focuses on academically less well established topics than classical disciplines and ‘studies’. They concern particular ‘areas’ (American studies, Eastern and Central European studies, Turkish Studies, etc.) or particular themes (security and crime, public health, etc.). Their ranks include, for example, the European Association for American Studies (EAAS, founded in 1954), the European Association for Chinese Studies (EACS, 1975), and the European Society of Criminology (ESC, 2000).

The second indicator of institutionalization at the European level is the development of “European” journals, which has unfolded in a pattern quite similar to that of European associations (Heilbron et al. 2017b). The second half of the twentieth century has witnessed a general growth in the number of SSH journals published in the old continent, to the point that such periodicals now probably outnumber those produced in North America (Mosbah-Natanson and Gingras 2014). More specifically, journals that use the adjective ‘European’ in their title or subtitle have been growing in number since the 1960s, and at a particularly spectacular rate after the mid-1980s (Fig. 6.1). Between 1960 and 1985, on average five to six European SSH journals were created during every five-year period (i.e. about one per year), albeit with no clear trend. Journal creation accelerated during the second half of the 1980s, when 17 journals were created (1985–89), reaching a peak in the 1990s with 34 (1990–94) and 26 new journals (1995–99). Although the creation rate of European SSH journals slowed down after 2000, it remained well above the level of the first phase (1960–1985), oscillating between 16 (2000–2004 and 2010–2014) and 26 new journals (2005–2009) (Fig. 6.2).

Fig. 6.1
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Number of newly created ‘European’ journals in the SSH (1920–2010) (Source: Heilbron et al. 2017b)

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Fig. 6.2
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Number of newly created ‘European’ journals in the SSH (1960–2010) (Source: Heilbron et al. 2017b)

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Just like associations, these new European journals may be classified into different categories (Table 6.3). Most of them (n = 93) pertain to the most established SSH disciplines (philosophy, history, literature, economics, political science, anthropology, sociology , psychology, geography, demography), and to their most important research specializations and sub-disciplines (e.g., within economics: finance and banking, comparative economics, agricultural economics, etc.). The most prominent of these disciplinary journals are published by European associations. Another category of European periodicals (n = 31) focuses on ‘studies’, while thematic journals are also substantially represented (n = 34), with education, management, Europe , and planning and urban studies as the most important contingents.

Table 6.3 Newly created European SSH journals, by category
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A last category, distinct from those observed in the case of associations, is that of multi-disciplinary journals. These explicitly combine different academic perspectives, not for extra-academic purposes, whether political or professional (as in most transdisciplinary ‘studies’), but to go beyond the academic division of labor and foster scientifically innovative perspectives. Pierre Bourdieu’s Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (1975) is a good example, just as the older interdisciplinary historical journal Annales (1929) or the more recent Politix (1988) and Genèses (1990) to name only some French examples. But despite the prominence of ‘interdisciplinarity’ in science policy and scholarly discourse remarkably few European journals belong to this multidisciplinary category (n = 7).Footnote 2

The development of this transnational infrastructure of associations and journals was accompanied by increasing transnational collaboration. The proportion of transnationally coauthored articles by European scholars has been growing at a fast pace since the 1980s, in a pattern relatively parallel to those of European associations and journals. The growth of transnational collaboration has been significantly stronger in Europe than in the United States (US). According to data from the Web of Science (WoS) scholars in France , Germany and Britain published around 40% of their 2014 articles in transnational co-authorship, against only 22% of scholars based in the US (Heilbron and Gingras in this volume).

There are, lastly, elements that suggest that some measure of European SSH integration has also occurred at the level of scientific orientations and practices. Although these processes are more difficult to objectify, studies of the origins of European associations and journals have shown that many of them were founded by transnational groups of scholars united by common intellectual ambitions. The founders of the European Consortium for Political Research advocated the diffusion of behavioralism and statistical methods in Europe , opposing older juridical, philosophical and normative perspectives, and explicitly promoting the example of American political science. The creators of the European Association of Social Anthropology and its journal Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, on the other hand, shared a commitment to a “European tradition of anthropology” based, among others, on the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and opposing culturalist and postmodernist perspectives, which were seen as more specifically North American (Boncourt 2016).

While these trans-European convergences were fueled by transatlantic exchanges (see section “How SSH Europeanization Came About”) and the broader transnational circulation of references, among others through translations (see Sapiro, in this volume), they suggest a relative blurring of national intellectual boundaries and the shaping of a transnational European field. They also recall one of the central issues at stake, namely whether the SSH in Europe differ, or should differ, from the predominant style and approaches of their American counterparts. The question of the specificity of European thought with regard to American ideas has been a subject of debates in many disciplines. Philosophy and political theory have seen the rise of a controversy about the analytical, Anglo-American tradition, which in the course of the twentieth century would have arisen in opposition to a “continental” European style of philosophy (Glendinning 2006; Prado 2003; Cassin 2014). Economics has been the subject of a debate since the financial crisis about whether the discipline should not, especially in Europe , break away from the neo-classical mainstream and embrace an alternative “complexity approach” (Rosser et al. 2010). In sociology the Handbook of European Sociology (2014) has tried to “tease out the distinctively European features of the themes it explores and examines” (Koniordos and Kyrtsis 2014: 1, see also Fleck and Hoenig 2014). While such debates point to the existence of divisions within the European SSH, they show that a European field of the SSH is not restricted to institutional issues, but that the content and style of the European tradition(s) is a critical dimension of the debate.

How SSH Europeanization Came About

While explanations for the development of the sciences have traditionally distinguished between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ factors, the ‘new sociology of ideas’ (Bourdieu 2004; Camic and Gross 2001; Camic et al. 2011) has rejected this dichotomy. In this section we will follow this approach by portraying the emergence of a European research area in the SSH as an inseparably political and academic process. This process can be accounted for sociologically by analyzing how academic entrepreneurs have mobilized their network to profit from growing funding opportunities coming first mainly from American philanthropic foundations in the context of the Cold War , then increasingly from extending European research policies in the context of deepening European integration.

The influence of the Cold War on the worldwide development of SSH has been well documented (Solovey and Cravens 2012). This specific context fueled the institutionalization of the social sciences, triggered the development of new fields (e.g. “future studies” – see Tolon 2012), the rise of particular paradigms (chiefly behavioralism – see Amadae 2003; Boncourt 2015; Hauptmann 2012, 2016), and the diffusion of a conception of agency based on the rational actor and formal modelling, as in game theory (Erickson et al. 2013). This influence was channeled by American funding agencies, and particularly philanthropic foundations (chiefly the Ford Foundation , and to a lesser extent the Rockefeller Foundation and Carnegie Corporation), who provided funds to develop “what they saw as a newly powerful, practically useful social science” (Hauptmann 2012: 185). While these efforts were initially directed at American academia, agencies and foundations shifted their attention to Europe in the late 1950s and 1960s, as the building of transatlantic connections in the SSH was perceived as one of the ways through which the battle of ideas with the USSR could be fought (Gemelli 1998). Agencies and foundations thus funded schemes that allowed European scholars to hold short-term fellowships in American universities and fueled the transatlantic diffusion of ideas (Boncourt 2015).

The most active foundation, the Ford Foundation , also sponsored the creation of European-wide SSH ventures – chiefly research centers, professional associations and, correlatively, scientific journals – with a view of stimulating the structuring of European SSH in close connection to transatlantic networks. In practical terms, the Foundation sent envoys on tours to Europe , with the objective of identifying scholars and initiatives coherent with this agenda. This came at a key time for a field of European SSH whose structure was then rapidly evolving. In connection to the development of mass higher education, many new academic institutions were then being set up, leading to the rise of a new generation of academic entrepreneurs. For these entrepreneurs, meeting the Ford Foundation’s agenda was a way to gather financial support and international capital, and thereby to strengthen their institutions at the material and symbolic levels, notably in relation to older and more established universities. For many of them, who had spent time in American universities through the fellowship schemes mentioned above, this was also a way to promote in Europe paradigms and methods that they had been directly in contact with while in the US. These entrepreneurs therefore mobilized themselves and their networks to seize these new opportunities, in negotiations that involved academic, scientific, and political considerations.

Several European initiatives benefited from this “Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus” (Solovey 2013). One of the earlier ones was the Centre de Sociologie Européenne (1960) and the journal Archives Européennes de Sociologie (1960), both created by Raymond Aron. A cosmopolitan French liberal, professor of sociology at the Sorbonne and a prominent member of Cold War organizations like the Congress for Cultural Freedom (1950–1970), Aron advocated a historical and comparative sociology in the tradition of Max Weber. The Centre and the journal he created reinforced his position in the field of French social science with regard to his two rivals: the social theorist Georges Gurvitch and the protagonist of empirical and quantitative sociology Jean Stoetzel (Joly 2012; Heilbron 2015). In line with its domestic action, Ford also sponsored the creation of European professional associations (and, correlatively, journals) specifically concerned with promoting on the old continent a behavioralism inspired by American developments. The European Association of Experimental Social Psychology (EAESP, created in 1966, initiator of the European Journal of Social Psychology) was thus created in order to contribute to the diffusion of a blend of psychology that insisted on the importance of group dynamics over internal individual properties. It also helped its founding director Serge Moscovici in legitimizing his own institution, the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE) in a field dominated by the Sorbonne (Moscovici and Markova 2006). The European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR, created in 1970, initiator of the European Journal of Political Research) was founded with a view of stimulating the circulation of behavioralism and statistical methods in European political science. Simultaneously, it helped the newly founded University of Essex – the seat of the Consortium – to gain weight in a British national field where Oxford, Cambridge, and the London School of Economics and Political Science had long been dominant (Boncourt 2015). Scientific, academic, and political agenda converged to stimulate the development of a European SSH infrastructure.

This configuration, however, did not last. The early 1970s saw US philanthropic foundations shift their attention to other areas of the world. This withdrawal of American funding opportunities did not put a stop to SSH Europeanization, as properly European institutions took over. An early manifestation of this shift is the creation, in 1976, of the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy. Driven by the belief that the SSH had a role to play in legitimizing European integration, European institutions took the initiative of setting up a transnational European research institute focused solely on these disciplines – economics, history, law , and the political and social sciences. The first of its kind, the EUI gathered professors and doctoral students from all member countries of the European Communities (Boncourt and Calligaro 2017).

In the early years of European collaboration the founding members of the European Union (Belgium, France , Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands) had supported joint research initiatives such as the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN, 1954) and the European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM, 1957), but not until the 1980s was a systematic European science policy implemented (Bach-Hoenig 2017; Guzzetti 1995; Heilbron et al. 2017a; Hoenig 2017; Kastrinos 2010; Schögler and König 2017). Against the background of the deepest economic recession since the Second World War and in the face of mounting international competition, European research and development funding became concentrated in multi-annual ‘Framework Programmes’. The first was launched in 1984, the seventh and last Framework Programme ran during the years 2007–2013; they were replaced by the Horizon 2020 programme (see Fig. 6.3). Research funds increased from 640 million Euros in 1984 to 10 billion Euros per year in the seventh framework programme (2007–2013). This growth is larger than the general increase in financial means available to the European Union. In 1970, the research budget accounted for 1.8% of total EU expenditures, whereas the latest figures (2011, 2012) and the first years of Horizon 2020 represent between 6% and 7% of the European budget (Schögler and König 2017).

Fig. 6.3
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Main phases of the history of European Research Policy (Source: Bach-Hoenig 2017)

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The objective of the Framework Programmes was to strengthen the scientific and technological bases of the European economy and to improve its competitiveness. In their thematic structure, the Framework Programmes reflected the policy objectives of the European Union as a whole. The Maastricht Treaty of 1992 slightly broadened the programme, but it was only with the Lisbon Agenda of 2000 that research officially became a European priority. Europe , as was famously declared by the government leaders assembled in Lisbon, was to be transformed into the “most competitive knowledge economy” in the world. The route mapped out for science was parallel to that laid down for education. Just as the Bologna Process of 1999 aimed at creating a single European Higher Education Area (EHEA), research policy now set out to establish a European Research Area (ERA). One of the most tangible consequences of the new policy was the establishment of the European Research Council (2007). As the equivalent of the American National Science Foundation, it funds research in all disciplines, independent of policy objectives, with “scientific excellence” as the only criterion (Bach-Hoenig 2017; Wedlin and Nedeva 2015). As such, it represents a significant complement to the policy-oriented research of the Framework Programmes.

In the initial Framework Programmes there were hardly any provisions for the social sciences and humanities. The first fully-fledged research programme in this domain was introduced in the Fourth Framework Programme (1994–1998) and this was continued in subsequent framework programmes (Heilbron 2014a; Kastrinos 2010; Kuhn and Remøe 2005; Schögler and König 2017). Because every Framework Programme project had to include researchers from a minimum number of European countries, they functioned not only as tools for allocating funds, but also as a stimulus for furthering transnational collaboration. Although only between 1% and 2% of the Framework Programmes’ funds went to the social and human sciences, the size and significance of these programmes were considerable. The three Framework Programmes between 1994 and 2006 funded some 580 SSH projects. They ran for about three years, had an average of ten partners, and could include well over a hundred individual participants. The output of these projects has been estimated at between five to ten thousand books and 20,000 to 32,000 journal articles. These figures do not include the largest output category, the grey literature of preprints, research reports, working papers and the like (Heilbron 2014a).

The key-roles played by philanthropic foundations and the EU do not, however, tell the whole story. Though this situation is exceptional, some national governments also intervened in sponsoring European SSH initiatives. The Austrian government was thus instrumental in providing funds for organizing in 1989 the founding meeting of the European Sociology Association (ESA, creator of the journal European Societies). While the rationales behind this involvement could not be traced, it is safe to assume that, like universities, national governments draw a form of prestige from sponsoring such international ventures (Boncourt 2016).

The same argument can be applied to the particular case of European central banks in sponsoring European initiatives in economics. Starting in the 1960s, the growing independence of central banks from national governments allowed them to set up funds financed by non-remitted profits. A considerable part of these funds have been used to finance research institutes and associations, establish prizes and organize academic conferences, seminar series and workshops. The prime example in this respect is probably the Swedish Riksbank, which founded a scientific research foundation and established an off-balance sheet fund earmarked to provide the yearly ‘Nobel prize’ for economics (Offer and Söderberg 2016: 97; 102). European central banks were also important financial contributors to the founding of the European Economic Association (EEA) in 1984 (Boncourt 2017). Fifteen European central banks, as well as the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), were ‘institutional members’ of the European Economic Association (EEA) in 2016.

Central banks also financially support, and participate in, international economic research networks. An example of a European research network co-funded by central banks is the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). The CEPR was founded in 1983 to reduce the comparative disadvantage Europe was seen to have in applied economic research compared to the US. According to Richard Portes, the Centre’s founder and first director, it was inspired by the model of the American National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and “was established (…) to apply this model, with an international orientation and emphasis on the dissemination of research results to a non-specialist, policy-oriented audience” (Portes 1987: 1334). Among its current members are 23 European central banks, as well as the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the European Central Bank (ECB) and four more non-European central banks.

The fulcrum of the interest central banks have taken in these initiatives are their research departments. Almost all central banks in Europe currently have a research department (Eijffinger et al. 2002) which, among other things, is a means to increase the credibility and reputation of the bank (Eijffinger et al. 2002: 366). A strong research department also serves to legitimize a bank’s policy proposals and to increase its status in the international network of central banks. This can be particularly important for Eurozone central banks in the current structure of the European Central Bank. An important part of the consecration of the output of the research departments of central banks takes place in the field of academic economics. Publishing in top academic journals and entertaining close ties with economists working in academia are viewed as important indicators of research quality and, thus, important for the scientific legitimacy of the bank and its policies. A 2004 report, which assessed the quality of research at the ECB by looking at the impact factor of journals in which ECB staff published from 2000 to 2003, states that “for such economists [economists working at a central bank], competing in the world of academic research provides a natural market test of the quality of their models and methods.” (Goodfriend et al. 2004: 4). While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to delve deeper into this matter, it is safe to assume that seeking legitimation and prestige through close connections with the field of academic economics is an important motivation behind the sponsoring activities of central banks. Apart from this legitimizing function, these research initiatives may also have a political component. European central banks (as well as the BIS) have generally been sceptical of the Keynesian approach to economics that reserves an important role for fiscal policy to manage the business cycle. Central banks were early defenders of a monetarist stance, in favour of bank independence and a technocratic presentation of monetary policy, with a focus on interest rates as policy instruments and price stability as a goal (see, e.g., Toniolo 2005: 288 for the case of the BIS). In that sense they competed with other policy institutes such as Ministries or economic planning agencies that were set up after the Second World War.

The Current Structure of SSH in the European Research Area

The Balance of Power in European SSH

While the SSH have become increasingly institutionalized at the European level, this form of integration has not erased inequalities between disciplinary and national fields. Rather, the European field of SSH is structured by hierarchies between disciplines, countries, and languages.

Like at the national level, the SSH do not enjoy the same level of representation, prestige, and power at the European level. This is, first, tangible in the fact that these disciplines are not equally Europeanized. While the social sciences have become increasingly structured by European associations and journals, the humanities are not similarly integrated. The Society of European Philosophy (1996) is largely a British association aiming to promote continental approaches within the Anglo-American philosophical world. Similarly, literary studies do not have a European wide disciplinary association. They are, rather, structured by a myriad of more specialized groupings, such as the European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (EACLALS), the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and the Environment (EASLCE), the European Network for Comparative Literary Studies (ENCLS), et cetera.

The study of European research collaboration yields similar results. Transnational co-authorship is far less frequent in the humanities than it is in the social sciences and has progressed at a much slower pace. Scholarship in the humanities leads to more individual publications and is closer bound to national languages and national publication systems (Gingras and Heilbron 2009).

Differences between SSH disciplines also show at the level of funding, as they are not equally successful in obtaining research grants from the EU. While the SSH only receive small amounts of funding compared to the natural sciences, some of them still enjoy more success than others. Since the Framework Programmes were policy-oriented and thematically structured, there are no reliable data available by discipline. The thematic structure of the SSH programmes, however, clearly shows that the economic dimension has been dominant all along. This reflects the general aim of the European Commission to use the Framework Programmes to analyse and enhance the competitiveness of the European economy. It is only from the Fifth Framework Programme (1998–2002) that the SSH research themes come to include citizenship, a “European” society and a European public sphere. This enlarged the range of potential disciplines involved, as is indicated by the broader label “Social sciences and Humanities” (SSH), which has been used since 2004–2006, aside from older labels such as “socio-economic” or “social sciences” (Schögler and König 2017).

Funding by the European Research Council, which is based on “excellence” and independent from policy objectives, shows a certain predominance of economics as well, but the disciplinary distribution seems more even. Looking at subsidies attributed to individual researchers by the European Research Council, Barbara Bach-Hoenig shows that among the SSH, most grants are acquired by economics (3.6% of the total number of grants in all disciplines), history (3.1), psychology (2.4), and sociology (2.3). Consistent with the ERC’s insistence on excellence, applied or more professionally oriented domains such as education and media studies seldom receive funding (Bach-Hoenig 2017).

The European field of SSH is also strongly structured by geographical and linguistic hierarchies. Multiple evidence shows that the United Kingdom holds a dominant position. The degree to which countries participate in European research projects depends roughly on the size of their research system. Countries like the UK, Germany and France , which house the largest number of researchers and research institutes, profit most from European programmes. But among them the UK occupies a privileged position. Scholars who work in Britain – they need not have British nationality – have consistently coordinated the largest number of projects funded by the European Framework programmes, and have been more often involved in such undertakings than scholars from any other country. Germany and France come in second and third place, before Italy and the Netherlands: of the 529 research projects funded by the three Frameworks Programmes (1994–2006), 110 were coordinated in the UK, 88 in Germany, 76 in France, 44 in Italy and 40 in the Netherlands (Kovács and Kutsar 2010: 107). Most of the project coordinators funded by the Seventh Framework Programme (2007–2013) were also based in UK institutions (50), followed by German (38), Italian and Dutch ones (both 29) (Schögler and König 2017).

The British advantage is even stronger for the grants from the European Research Council: between 2007 and 2011, the UK received 35.8% of ERC grants allocated to SSH, with the Netherlands (14.4%), France (12.9), Germany (10.8), and Italy (10.6) the only other countries above the 10% bar (Bach-Hoenig 2017).

This hierarchy is also visible in European associations’ membership (Boncourt 2017), with the UK and Germany, typically counting among the best represented countries (Table 6.4).

Table 6.4 Four most represented countries in the membership of European Associations (2013)
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In term of publishing, where its linguistic advantage is even more decisive, British dominance is striking. In networks of transnational co-authorship researchers from Britain are well ahead of their German and French colleagues (Heilbron and Gingras in this volume). Directly related to collaborative publishing ventures in English is the fact that the United Kingdom houses many more “international” publishers and scholarly journals than any other European country. Out of the 161 SSH journals with the adjective ‘European’ in the title in 2015, 77 were published in the UK, followed at a distance by the US (20) and the Netherlands (16) (Heilbron et al. 2017b). Moreover, 25% of the chief editors of these journals were based in the UK, more than double the amount of the next largest country of origin, which is paradoxically the US (with 11% of all chief editors). The domination of the UK increases when the 22 European SSH journals with the highest impact factors in 8 disciplines are considered separately (Jantzen 2016). UK based chief editors make up 34% of all chief editors in this more selective group.

The competition for resources between disciplines and countries materializes at the level of research groups and networks. These are part of institutions for which – as seen above (section “How SSH Europeanization Came About”) – Europeanization is a resource of significant symbolic importance. With the development of EU project-based funding, it has also become key from a financial point of view, so that academic institutions have been active in encouraging their researchers to apply for such grants. Data show, however, that only a limited number of institutions participate in a great number of projects (Table 6.5). European resources tend to go to institutions already well established at the national level – thereby reinforcing existing hierarchies (Schögler and König 2017). This is especially tangible in the case of small national academic fields: the European policy of having a diversity of countries represented in EU-funded collective projects works in favor of the limited number of universities that have few competitors at the national level and are well connected internationally – such as Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), Central European University ( Hungary), etc.

Table 6.5 Participating institutions in SSH projects funded by FP7
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The Significance and Limitations of European SSH

So far we have outlined the formation of a transnational field of the SSH in Europe , identifying the main factors that have made it possible, and indicating some of its structural features. In order to explore its functioning in a more precise manner two questions need to be addressed. The first pertains to the relationship between the European research area and the various national research systems on which it is built. The second concerns the position of the European field in the global constellation of the SSH.

The relationship between national research practices and the European field varies, as was briefly indicated, across disciplines and countries as well. The humanities are more strongly bound to national languages and contexts than the social sciences. European research institutions are undoubtedly quite significant for some (sub-)disciplines like linguistics and comparative literature, but far less for others (history of literature). Within the social sciences a similar differentiation holds between more formal and standardized disciplines like economics and psychology, which have a higher level of transnational collaboration and exchange, and a discipline like sociology (see Heilbron and Gingras in this book). But in virtually all of the social sciences successful participation in European ventures (obtaining grants, developing collaborative projects) has become an essential advantage in the national competition for positions and career advancement. This effect is stronger in smaller and more internationally oriented countries like the Netherlands, Belgium and the Scandinavian countries. In larger countries like Germany, France and the UK, national criteria for excellence prevail more easily over European recognition. Comparative case-studies would be needed to analyze the interplay between the European and the national level in more detail.

But the relationship between the national and the European field cannot be properly understood without taking the more global context into account. Here as in other domains, the most important factor is the pre-eminent position of the US. Typically more than two-thirds of the extra-European co-authorships in Europe are with North American scholars. While intra-European co-authorships have increased significantly, the growth was only at the same rate as co-authorships with scholars from the US. In other words, while European collaboration has become more frequent and more extensive, this growth is only similar to the growth of collaboration between European and US scholars (Heilbron and Gingras in this volume).

The growth of European SSH associations also has to be assessed in relation to the US. Some of these associations, indeed, have American membership. Figure 6.4 illustrates this by classifying associations according to the share of Western members (that is, Western European and North American members together). The case of the European Political Science Association, the most Western and American association in the sample (with 96.5% of Western members, against only 1.3% of Eastern European members), thus contrasts sharply with that of European Sociological Association (67.7% of Western members against 27.7% of Eastern Europeans) (Boncourt 2017). This is, in part, due to the different intellectual agendas of these associations. The European Political Science Association was founded with the objective of importing a blend of American political science based on rational choice theorizing and sophisticated statistical methods into Europe , and therefore opened its doors to North American members; whereas preparations for founding the European Sociological Association were undertaken after the Fall of the Berlin Wall with the explicit aim to re-establish collaboration with colleagues from Eastern Europe. Europeanization was in some cases a strategy to import and emulate mainstream American approaches, in others to extend professional networks towards Eastern Europe. Organizational factors and constraints also played a key role in shaping Europeanization and, to a certain extent, detaching it from the European continent itself. The ECPR, which was originally focused on Europe , created a new category of “associate members”, open to non-European institutions, with a view of increasing its resources and becoming more significant on the global scientific stage. The label “European” thus regroups different forms of transnationalization, more or less centered on the European continent, in intellectual and geographical terms.

Fig. 6.4
figure 4

Geographical breakdown of the membership of European Social Science Organizations (percentages) (Source: Boncourt 2017)

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The continuing importance of the national framework and the preeminence of the US have made it difficult for the European level to become distinctively significant. Although transnational co-authorships have multiplied within Europe , citation data indicates that European collaboration is still relatively weak, both as compared to the supremacy of the US and with regard to the national level. In France , the most cited journals in virtually all disciplines are either American or French, with few exceptions to this bi-national reference pattern. Journals that call themselves “international” or “European” are still few in number and are not prominent in the citation hierarchies. In disciplines like philosophy, history and law, there is in France not a single ‘European’ title among the 50 most cited journals. In sociology and anthropology there is one explicitly called European journal among the 50 most cited; in political science and economics there are two (Heilbron and Gingras in this book). Although the number of European journals has increased substantially, they still appear peripheral as compared to both the hegemony of the US and persisting national structures in the larger European countries.

Conclusion

This chapter has described the formation and growth of a European field in the SSH. This rise, driven by growing funding opportunities and the mobilization of academic entrepreneurs, is tangible at the level of institutions, transnational collaboration, and scientific practices and ideas. As all fields, however, European SSH is structured by power hierarchies, rivalries, and struggles that notably take place between disciplines, countries and academic groups and institutions as they vie for financial and symbolic resources.

The history of funding of European SSH has been marked by a shift from sponsoring the creation of new professional structures (such as European associations and journals) to the funding of temporary, project-based research networks. The largest part of European funding, the Framework Programmes, have been oriented towards policy objectives that were formulated in predominantly economic and technological terms. The most important recent change in funding structures has been the founding of the European Research Council (2007), which operates independently of policy aims and is defined in terms of scientific excellence only. Although both components have not been fundamentally affected by the financial crisis and its immediate aftermath; the effects of the current political crisis in Europe are far more difficult to assess.

Aside from funding bodies, European organizations have emerged at the level of research infrastructure, such as data bases (Kropp 2017), journals and associations. In order to properly assess their significance more systematic and precise comparisons need to be made at least with the national level and the position of the US. In both senses the European field still seems to be relatively weak. European associations do not often have the same level of participation as their American counterparts. European journals, which have come into existence in all major fields, are still relatively few in number and rarely among the most cited journals. The most innovative journals, furthermore, are located on the national, not on the European level. In terms of transnational collaboration a strong intra-European growth was observed, but this has not been stronger than between Europe and the US.

No doubt the weakest part of the European field is the almost complete absence of teaching and research institutions at the European level. The European University Institute (EUI) in Florence has remained a rare exception. As compared to the US and emerging powers such as China , it is hard to imagine that the SSH in Europe can be competitive without permanent high-quality institutions on the European level.