Reconciling EU studies with regionalism studies-the research agenda The constitution of European Union (EU) studies has long been an exclusionary process, both dealing extensively with internal debates and arguing for an own discipline within or even next to political sciences and international relations (Warleigh-Lack and Rosamond 2010). Due to the self-centredness on the vivid development of the EU, other regions were largely disregarded when it came to theory building or only taken into account later as comparators. Though not all approaches have depended on the EU as an object of study, many implicitly carried assumptions based on the European experience. Concepts such as supranationalism cannot be easily de-and re-contextualised if other categories, such as the state, mean different things in a different context (Söderbaum 2012). Regionalisms outside of Europe are therefore easily characterised as deficient if an archetypical status is attributed to the EU. These shortcomings have fuelled an ongoing debate concerning the role of studying the EU in the context of the broader research on regionalism. The more the dichotomy between the EU and the "rest" was strengthened, the more it turned into parochialism. The tendency to understand the EU as a unique entity and phenomenon has been expressed in the "small n" problem in academics (Genna and de Lombaerde 2010) and in the frequent sui generis statements by policy makers. In order to avoid such Eurocentrism, many other scholars of regionalism have tried to avoid the EU in theorising efforts (Bøas, Marchand and Shaw 2005). This polarising fragmentation over the role of the EU created a gap between EU studies and regionalism studies (Postel-Vinay 2007). As a reaction, extensive critiques have been formulated in this journal (cf. Journal of European Integration Special Issue: Rethinking EU Studies: the Contribution of Comparative Regionalism, 2010) with attempts to recombine the two approaches. For instance, the constructivist move away from institutions towards norms, values and identities made Europe more comparable. Throughout these (sub)-disciplinary debates, an increasing number of scholars made considerable efforts to overcome the conundrum of an evident theoretical and empirical