If the European Union should disintegrate, it would not be the first vast, expansive, complex, multi-layered and composite system to do so. Many empires faced the fate of decline and fall before, from the Roman Empire, the Habsburg Empire to the Soviet Empire. Even if empires and the EU are only remotely similar, comparative examination of empires may help to trace the underlying causes and dynamics of disintegration. Moreover, the concept of empire has the advantage of not suffering from a state bias, according to which the territorial state is and remains the predominant political format by assumption. Exactly this state bias has been a stumbling block in using classic theories of European integration for conceptualizing and explaining European disintegration by turning them simply upside down.
The proposed paper will discuss in more detail (1) how 'comparative imperialism' could be a more fruitful starting point for analyzing European disintegration, (2) the explanation of decline and fall of empires, (3) the imperial features of the EU, and (4) the causes and mechanisms explaining the dialectical process of integrative and disintegrative forces in the EU.
