Constructing the European Political Space

The concept of political space is one of the central categories of modern political thought and of modern political science. Originally, it refers to a spatial modelling of political decision situations that is traditionally connected to the revolutionary French politics of the late 18th century and over time it became a predominant cognitive framework of classifying political groups and characterizing policies. In modern political science it became an object of highly sophisticated technical disputes about the mathematical foundations of identifying the ’dimensions’ of the political spaces. Scholars also became involved in debates about the universality or contex-dependence of the spatial models. What makes the concept of the European political space of some interest to a conceptual historical approach is the puzzling and ever changing nature of the European Union: neither a federal state nor a mere intergovernmental cooperation, the EU was often described in metaphorical terms as a so far unknown beast waiting for its discoverers. The main topic of the paper is how scholars tried to tackle with the challenges of applying a conventional concept to an unconventional phenomenon (to coin a well-known idiom: to pour new wine into an old bottle) which is a direct way toward conceptual changes.