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Tracing the main enterprise of the Ford Foundation aiming at instituting European Studies, from the 1950s to the 1970s, this article shows how transnational strategies linked with the institutionalization of the European field of power come up against the resistances of national fields. “European Studies” indeed appear to be the residual lot of much more ambitious strategies to create a truly “European University”. In this special issue about the sociohistory of political science, this article thus illustrates the fact that a “discipline” cannot be apprehended in isolation from other social spaces seemingly extraneous.