How can Europe be studied?

Viewed from a theoretical and empirical perspective, the ongoing process of Europeanization poses new challenges to sociology. As a science, sociology reveals the inadequacy of the conceptual and methodological instruments currently available for our understanding of European social phenomena. Sociologists even find it difficult to define the very object under scrutiny: does a European society exist? How should we define a society whose boundary lines are variable? Does a study of Europe from a sociological perspective entail a study of the European Union, or of a broader social formation? The difficulty encountered in “studying Europe” in the sociological area is linked to a broader theoretical debate which, in the light of the ongoing processes of change, queries the entire cognitive apparatus, and the theoretical paradigms developed by sociological disciplines and related to the modernity of the western world. The “national constellation” of norms, institutions and regulative techniques which have allowed political and social integration within the national state, are now challenged by phenomena which undermine their very epistemological foundations.The concepts applied to the study of social and political integration, - society, state, legitimacy, social inequality, mobility, justice, solidarity, etc.- are, in a classic definition of the term, no longer efficient in discerning the phenomena which impact contemporary societies.The variety of themes discussed by several italian and foreign authors opens windows onto many aspects of the workings of Europe. They open ways on the new theoretical and methodological perspectives with which we set out to study the political, social, cultural and economic phenomena which today characterize Europe.