PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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makes it much more difficult to draw up consistent and clearly delimited research
projects, especially when they are to contain the term “sustainability”. We also have to
keep in mind the important distinction between natural science and social science
research and the methodological challenges each faces.
Although the scale of this study is Pan-European and moves far beyond the local
and the urban to include regional, national, and international perspectives on decisionmaking,
the analytic tools employed and the intellectual roots that inspire the writing
come from an urban theory tradition. That is: The questions that motivated me to study
the European Union are largely the same that motivate urban theorists to study urban
governments. The central issue is how to analyze and interpret the ever-present contrast
between decision-makers rhetoric of the benign and universally beneficial impact of their
policies and plans and the reality of winners and losers that those decisions always entail.
To take but one example: in his chapter “How to study urban political power,” New York
political scientist John Mollenkopf (1996:264) asks the question “How can we develop a
vocabulary for analyzing politics and state action that reconciles the political system’s
independent impact on social outcomes with its observed systemic bias in favor of
capital?” In the answer he gives, he stresses “three interrelated levels”: a) how economic
and social conditions shape the state’s capacity to act, b) how the ‘rules of the game’ of
politics shape competition among interests and actors to construct a dominant political
coalition and c) how economic and social change and political competition shape interest
mobilization. These levels are just as relevant for studying EU power and decisionmaking
as they are for studying US urban politics. In particular, the approach taken in
Saskia Sassen. Most commonly, those authors are simply identified as “social theorists” (see e.g. Murphy
2000:1).