European Integration: From Nation-States to Member States [1 ed.] 9780199606252, 0199606250

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European Integration From Nation-States to Member States

CHRISTOPHER

J. BICKERTON

OXFORD UNIVERSITY

PRESS

OXFORD UNIVERSITY

PRESS

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Christopher J. Bickerton 2012 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2012 Impression: 1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN

978-0-19-960625-2

Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King's Lynn

Para la Ema

Preface and Acknowledgements This book has been completed at a time of crisis for the European Union and for the European integration process. Observers regularly lament the absence of solidarity and goodwill within Europe and warn darkly about the ‘renationalization’ of European political life. Whether or not such concern is warranted, we can at least hope that the current crisis—if it is as serious as it appears to be—will shed light on the inner workings of the EU and on the nature of the regional integration process. The aim of this book is to contribute in some way to this endeavour and my motivation for writing it has a lot to do with the paucity of the contemporary debate in EU studies on the nature of the EU ‘beast’. For too long, the EU has been accepted by scholars as an obtuse, sui generis development, whose essence is obscure even to the most informed observers and participants. That Jacques Delors, former President of the European Commission, should be credited with describing the EU as a ‘nonidentified political object’ is a measure of how serious the problem is. Brave attempts at piercing this murky façade have been made and this book has been inspired in large part by such work. From Andrew Moravcsik’s intergovernmental regime through to Giandomenico Majone’s regulatory state and Jan Zielonka’s neo-medieval empire, these broad-brushed characterizations of the EU have been central to the development of the ideas in this book. My own view is that we have in Europe a union of member states. What this means and how it enables us to better grasp the mysteries of European integration is the subject of this book. Conceived and started in Oxford, written in Amsterdam, and finished and revised in Paris, this book has gone through different stages in its evolution and I have incurred many debts in writing it. The idea of member statehood I owe to Bruno Waterfield, a long-time observer of the EU as the Brusselsbased Daily Telegraph correspondent. With Bruno, I co-authored a set of essays on the eve of the European Council summit in early December 2008, a key summit which coincided with the debate about the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Bruno observed that European integration was marked by a particular kind of statecraft practised between member states. It struck me that in order to understand European integration we needed to move away from both nation-state-based accounts and those that see in the EU the formation of a new

supranational

European

state.

Integration

remains

the preserve

of

national governments and their many officials and seconded experts but is not the work of traditional nation states. The concept of member state expresses a fundamental change in the political structure of the state, with

Preface and Acknowledgements

vii

horizontal ties between national executives taking precedence over vertical ties between governments and their own societies. This development had already struck me at the time of the Irish referendum on the Constitutional Treaty. When the No result was announced, members of the Irish government expressed a mixture of surprise and embarrassment: surprise as they were unfamiliar with the sentiments prevailing within their own population; and embarrassment as this compromised many of the promises they had made to their peers at previous meetings in Brussels. A similar reaction had occurred amongst the French and Dutch political elites when their populations rejected the Constitutional Treaty back in 2005. With this concept of member statehood in mind, I set out to investigate its origins, its predecessors in terms of forms of statehood, and its role in the formation and evolution of the European Union. This investigation has taken me into different academic subfields: comparative politics, international relations, political theory, and European studies. A book that straddles so many subfields of political science no doubt runs the risk of pleasing no one and displeasing everyone. That said, my feeling is that work on the European Union has tended to be too circumscribed by disciplinary boundaries. Attempts at connecting the dots have given way to a detailed study of the dots themselves. My hope is that this book, in providing its own attempt at connecting these dots via the idea of member statehood, will inspire others to do the same. The book was started when I was a lecturer at the University of Oxford. I would like to thank the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford for its support. Some of the field research for this book was conducted whilst I was a visiting professor at Sciences Po, Paris in July 2009. I would like to thank the OxPo programme for their very generous financial support that made my stay in Paris possible and to those at the Centre for International Studies and Research (CERI)—in particular, Bastien Irondelle and Christian Lequesne—who made me feel very welcome. Two colleagues from Oxford, Jan Zielonka and Kalypso Nicolaïdis, have played a key role in my own intellectual development. Very different in their approaches to the EU, I have benefited hugely from their thoughts and comments over the years. I am also grateful to Kai Hebel for his help and advice on the topic of détente and European foreign policy cooperation during the Cold War. From Oxford, I moved to the University of Amsterdam and the bulk of the manuscript was written in my first year there, tucked away between the canals of the old city. Months of research and writing are not easy at the best of times but they were made much easier by the regular lunch breaks I enjoyed with those on my corridor. I am grateful in particular to Daniel and Liza Mügge, Marlies Glasius, Brian Burgoon, Willem Schudel, and Andrea Ruggieri. The book was finally completed once 1 had moved to Sciences Po in Paris. [ am

viii

Preface and Acknowledgements

grateful to my new colleagues at Sciences Po for their warm welcome. This book also formed part of my Habilitation a Diriger des Recherches (HDR)

which I successfully defended in July 2012. I would like to thank the jury, namely Christian Lequesne, Barbara Delcourt, Zaki Laidi, Uwe Puetter and Sabine Saurugger, for the detailed and constructive comments. Part of the empirical research for this book took the form of semi-structured elite-level interviews. Two rounds of interviews were conducted, first in the summer of 2009 whilst I was a visiting professor at Sciences Po in Paris, and secondly in the early autumn of 2011. I would like to thank those European Commission and Council officials who very kindly answered my wide-ranging questions and those national officials working within the structures of the Permanent Representations in Brussels who were also very generous with their time. As noted above, this book was written as the European Union was going through an economic and financial crisis of unprecedented proportions. Prompted by the desire to engage with these events in Europe and in the United States at a higher level of intellectual intensity and political commitment, Alex Gourevitch and I set up a political economy blog, The Current Moment. Far from being a distraction or an added burden, the work of the blog has helped shape this book’s evolution. My thanks go to Alex for all his support and feedback and to the many readers and guest contributors of the blog. Many other people have helped me along the way. I am particularly grateful to Jean Leca for his sustained interest in my work and for his erudition and good humour. His own iconoclastic writings on the EU have been a regular source of intellectual stimulation. I would also like to thank my editors at OUP, Dominic Byatt and Lizzy Suffling, for their support and patience. And I am very grateful to Chris Killip for allowing me to use his photograph for the book cover. Finally, I would like to thank those closest to me. My family has been supportive as ever and I am immensely grateful to them. My greatest debt of gratitude, though, is to my beautiful wife, Ema. When we first met, this book was in its very early stages. Since then, my own restless ambition has forced her to move countries twice in the space of two years. For her, this has meant leaving a good job and wonderful colleagues in the Netherlands for the challenges of a new city, a new country, and a new language. I realize how much I have asked of her and I am so grateful for all the support and love she has given me. I hope that one day I am able to repay her for all that she has done. This book is dedicated to her, with all my love and affection. Paris, April 2012

Contents List of Figures and Tables List of Acronyms

X1

Introduction

Part I 1. Europe’s Compromising Union

21

2. The Member State Paradigm

51

3. From Nation States to Member States: A Brief History

74

Part Il 4. European Economic Integration and State Transformation

113

5. From Nation States to Member States in European Union Foreign Policy

151

Conclusion

References Index

182 196 215

List of Figures and Tables FIGURES 1.1

European integration: from the national to the supranational

25

1.2 European integration as inter’.—state cooperation

25

1.3 The governance model of European integration

27

2.1

European integration as a union of member states

4.1

Eurozone crisis in dates

144

5.1

European foreign policy cooperation in the 1980s

167

71

TABLES 4.1

Growth rates in six Eurozone countries (2000s)

117

4.2

Unemployment rates in six Eurozone countries (2000s)

118

List of Acronyms AFSJ

Area of Freedom, Security, and Justice

CATS

Committee for Police and Judicial Cooperation

CER

Centre for European Reform

CFSP

Common Foreign and Security Policy

Civcom

Committee for Civilian Aspects of Crisis Management

Coreper

Committee of Permanent Representatives

COSI

Committee on Internal Security

CSCE

Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe

CSDP

Common Security and Defence Policy

EC

European Community

ECB

European Central Bank

ECJ

European Court of Justice

ECOFIN

Economic and Financial Affairs Council

ECSC

European Coal and Steel Community

EFRA

European Exchange Rate Agreement

EFC

Economic and Financial Committee

EFSF

European Financial Stability Fund

EMS

European Monetary System

EMU

European Monetary Union

EPC

European Political Cooperation

ERM

Exchange Rate Mechanism

ESDI

European Security and Defence Identity

ESDP

European Security and Defence Policy

ESM

European Stability Mechanism

EU

European Union

EUMC

European Union Military Committee

FRG

Federal Republic of Germany

GATT

General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade

GDR

German Democratic Republic

IGC

Intergovernmental Conference

IMF

International Monetary Fund

JHA

Justice and Home

Affairs

List of Acronyms

Xii

LTRO

Long-term Refinancing Operation

NATO

North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NFBE

Non-Financial Business Economy

OECD

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

OMC

Open Method of Coordination

OPEC

Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries

PASOK

Panhellenic Socialist Movement

PCF

French Communist Party

PSC

Political and Security Committee

PVV

Freedom Party (Netherlands) Red Army Faction

SAF

Swedish Employers Confederation

SCIFA

Strategic Committee on Immigration, Frontiers, and Asylum

SEA

Single European Act

SPD

German Social Democrat Party

WEU

Western European Union

Introduction

The relationship between science and politics is a complex one. Keynes once wrote that ‘madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back’.! In fact, Keynes rather exaggerated the relationship between the academy and political life. Keynes himself was a brilliant economist, but one whose life was more bound up with the British civil service than with his alma mater, Cambridge University. The task of developing ideas and theories has often fallen to journalists, party politicians, artists, or priests. As Perry Anderson has argued, a distinctive feature of the ‘classical tradition’ of Marxist thought (from Marx and Engels through to Lenin and Luxembourg) was its development well outside the academy: its intellectual energy came from within nascent social movements and its main theoreticians were publicists and full-time revolutionaries. In contrast, ‘Western Marxism’, a later development, spoke ‘its own enciphered language’ and belonged more to the rarefied atmosphere of independent research institutes than to the political struggles of the street.? Nevertheless, a distinguishing feature of political science has been its role as a bridge between the production of knowledge and the practice and art of government. As Sheldon Wolin has argued, the ambition of what Hobbes called ‘civil science’ has been to make the social world intelligible to those who inhabit it. In Wolin’s words, the aim of political philosophers has been ‘to fashion a political cosmos out of political chaos’.> This reflects the public * The phrase is found in Keynes’s 1936 General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. It is cited by P. Hall, The Dilemmas of Contemporary Social Science’, Boundary 2, 34/3 (2007),

121-41 (121). ? P. Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: New Left Review Books, 1976),

chapter 2. For a comprehensive history of one of the most ‘scholarly’ of the currents of Western

Marxism, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, see M. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (London: University of California Press, 1996). More generally, Nadia Urbinati writes of ‘the retirement of political knowledge to university campuses or competent experts’, resulting in the ‘academization’ of intellectuals ‘and the moral impoverishment of political practice’. In Nadia Urbinati, ‘Democracy and Populism’, Constellations, 5/1 (1998),

110-24 (115).

* $, Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Expanded Edition (Oxtord: Princeton University Press, 2004), 9.

Political Thought,

2

Introduction

dimension of political life: the need for the laws governing social life to be ‘a public form of knowledge accessible to all’ rather than ‘a priestly mystery cognizable only by the few’.” Contemporary political science, however, has often fallen short of this goal of public intelligibility. Peter Hall argues that the social sciences in general have over the last twenty-five years become fragmented and compartmentalized. They have lost their ambition of mediating historically specific moments with generalizations about the nature of social life. These generalizations, Hall believes, are necessary if social science is not to reduce itself to ‘a series of postcards, providing glimpses into other worlds without much purchase on the one in which we have to live’ The European Union provides us with a leading example of the gap between intellectual reflection and social and political change. On the one hand, dayto-day events involving the European Union cluster around fundamental questions about the nature of the EU as an institution, its vocation, legitimacy, and its identity. Immediate concerns about its effectiveness consistently open up deeper questions about its identity and purpose.° An inquiry into whether the EU can meet the challenge posed to it by developments in the Arab world, for instance, is quickly transformed into a debate about whether the EU exists independently of national foreign policies or is simply a sum of its national parts. Similarly, an esoteric discussion about whether the European Central Bank's intervention into government bond markets will be sterilized or not is inseparable from a fundamental debate about the role of the ECB as a putative lender of last resort. On the other hand, the academic study of European integration has increasingly eschewed these kinds of questions. Instead of inquiring into the nature of the EU, contemporary scholars focus instead on individual policy areas, on Hall’s ‘postcards’. They look in detail at the policy processes belonging to single policy domains. They focus on common fisheries policy, on agriculture, on security policy, and on social policy. This empirical focus has produced much salutary specialized knowledge about individual EU policy domains. However, it has left work on the European Union as a whole fragmented and disconnected. As Perry Anderson caustically observed, in spite of the three hundred or so Jean Monnet chairs of European studies that ‘now adorn universities and institutes across the Union .… [,] little of the

huge output of this world penetrates any wider public consciousness, the bulk “ Wolin (2004: 4).

° Hall (2007: 126).

$ For an extended account of how concerns about the EU's effectiveness in foreign policy belie a much deeper set of questions regarding the EU’s identity, legitimacy, and institutional coherence, see C. J. Bickerton, EU Foreign

Policy: From

Effectiveness to Functionality (Basingstoke:

Palgrave, 2011). This phenomenon is what Giandomenico Majone referred to as the ‘epiphenomenal’ aspect of EU policies developed under the ‘Community Method’. See G. Majone, Dilemmas of Furopean Integration: The Ambiguities and Pitfalls of Integration by Stealth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), chapter 6.

Introduction

3

of it remaining as technical as the regulations themselves, sometimes more so’.” This has not work on European integration was focused on the process: on the way integration was transforming location within European history, and the nature

and directives of Brussels always been the case. Past ‘political metaphysics’ of the political space in Europe, its of its power and authority.”

This concern with ontology has increasingly given way to a more pragmatic

interest in decision-making processes and their consequences. What is considered politically relevant today is the way EU-level policies affect the lives of individual European citizens.’ As a result, precisely at the time when the political world of European integration is interested in agency—who rules Europe?—the academic world sidesteps this question by focusing instead on the complex and multi-level nature of the EU. We thus observe the curious practice whereby political scientists studying the EU address one another using concepts and ideas evident only to themselves, whilst European publics increasingly rally against the shadowy and mysterious ways of the ‘Brussels bubble’. As Jean Leca writes, ‘the new political science of Europe makes some sense to the aficionados and no sense to the common man’.'

7 P. Anderson (2009), The New Old World (London: Verso, 2009), 79-80.

$ On the phrase ‘political metaphysics’, Wolin writes: ‘Every political theory that has aimed at a measure of comprehensiveness has adopted some implicit or explicit proposition about “time”, “space”, “reality” or “energy” .. . Admittedly, few if any writers have employed this form of terminology. Rather, the political theorist has used synonyms: instead of political space, he may have written about the city, the state or the nation; instead of time, he may have referred to history or tradition; instead of energy, he may have spoken about power. The complex of these categories we can call a political metaphysic’ (Wolin 2004: 16). * There are of course many exceptions to this focus on EU policymaking. Attempts to characterize the EU as a whole include Jan Zielonka’s work on the EU as a neo-medieval empire. See J. Zielonka, Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). One of the best critical overviews of the EU, advocating a return to ‘first principles’ and a study of the EU’s ‘operational code’ is G. Majone, Europe as the Would-Be World Power: The EU at Fifty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks have also in their work focused on European integration as process of political contestation. See for instance L. Hooghe and G. Marks, “‘The Making of a Polity: The Struggle Over

European

Integration’,

in H.

Kitschelt,

P. Lange,

G. Marks,

and

J. D. Stephens

(eds),

Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 70-97. ‘9 J. Leca, ‘“The Empire Strikes Back!” An Uncanny View of the European Union. Part I—Do We Need a Theory of the European Union?’, Government and Opposition, 44/3 (2009): 285-340 (292). The identification of a gap between political science and ordinary people, in their assessments of the EU, is one of the main themes of Jean Leca’s magisterial overview of European Union studies. He writes that ‘the “old” terminology [of European integration studies] made sense to both the scientists and the agents, the “new” one is just part and parcel of a language game reserved to a specific closed community of “Europeanists” (of all nationalities) whose contribution to general comparative political science may even be disputed’ (p. 302). It is because of this gap that Leca argues strongly for the development of an institutional theory of the EU: ‘The scientist has the duty to understand the agents and by the same token she has the corresponding duty to make herself understood by them, to supply some meaningful translation

4

Introduction

This book aims at bringing these two worlds back in relation with each other. European studies today tends to reproduce the ‘priestly mysteries’ through which the EU governs itself, instead of translating them through analysis and exposition into ‘public knowledge accessible to all’. This book attempts this exercise in translation by characterizing European integration as a state-driven and state-based process. However, what accounts for its peculiarities and mysteries is the fact that states in Europe have been transformed. European integration is driven by states that are fundamentally different from the traditional, egotistical, bourgeois nineteenth-century nation states that still inhabit the imagination of political scientists and citizens alike. The book develops the concept of member state: a distinctive kind of state where national power is exercised in concert with others. National executives seek to bind themselves and their own domestic publics through a growing body of rules and norms created by national governments in their ongoing and increasingly complex policymaking activities at the EU level. The paradox of member statehood is thus the way in which political power is exercised by national governments but in ways that appear external to and far removed from the national societies over whom these governments rule. This paradox is responsible for the crisis of democratic representation in Europe. Many attribute this crisis to the expansion of the EU but it is in fact a product of the transformation of the state in Europe. The remainder of this introduction will outline the kinds of questions being asked of the EU by domestic publics today in Europe and will compare this with the pragmatic turn taken in EU studies. The introduction will end by outlining the concept of member statehood developed in the book and by briefly summarizing the main points of the following chapters.

WHO

RULES? THE POLITICS OF EUROPEAN (DIS)INTEGRATION

In its early years, European integration was essentially an elite project, pursued at a distance from the daily concerns of national populations in Western Europe. In the language of scholarly work on integration, a ‘permissive consensus’ prevailed that gave national governments considerable leeway in their interactions at the European level.'' More prosaically, Roy Jenkins put it of her findings and conjectures since she is also an ordinary citizen. If this statement conveys some truth, we cannot do without an institutional theory’ (p. 302).

L The term ‘permissive consensus’ was originally coined by Vladimer Key in his 1961 book, Public Opinion and American Democracy. It was taken up by L. N. Lindberg and S. A. Scheingold in thelr seminal 1970 book, Europe’'s Would-Be Polity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall).

Introduction

5

thus: asked on television in 1975 why he thought the British people had voted for Common Market membership in the referendum, he replied that ‘they

took the advice of people they were used to following’.'* This consensus did not mean that European integration left untouched important questions about the changing structure of political authority in Europe but these questions remained firmly ensconced within academic writings. In the course of the last twenty years or so, this trust in national political elites has been steadily eroded, with a more politicized and contested process

of European integration one of the results.‘” This growing public contestation has meant developments in the EU are subject to far greater inquiry and debate with changes in policies giving rise to sustained discussions about the nature of the EU polity."* We can illustrate this with a couple of examples. A move to create an External Action Service for the EU, one of the main innovations of the Lisbon Treaty, has prompted a debate about whether this constitutes a de facto European Union foreign ministry and whether or not such a move makes sense for an EU that struggles to identify its own interests

or to elaborate its own strategies.'” The mobilization of national treasuries in the Eurozone’s sovereign debt crisis has prompted an extensive and vociferous debate about the nature of the relations that exist between different national populations in Europe. Foundational ethical questions, about solidarity, obligation, and transnational identities have become a regular feature of discussions about the Eurozone crisis. Strong national prejudices about the profligacy of peripheral Eurozone populations coexist alongside powerful expressions of pan-European solidarity.'° !? Jenkins, who was president of the European Commission from 1977 to 1981, was quoted in the diaries of Kenneth Tynan, a well-known British writer and theatre critic. The quote appears in P. Mair, ‘Political Opposition and the European Union’, Government and Opposition, 42/1 (2007): 1-17 (2). !3 The literature on contestation around the EU is extensive. For an extensive assessment of the evidence and of the evolutions in academic debates, see G. Marks and M. R. Steenbergen (eds), European Integration and Political Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). ‘* For a sustained discussion of the relationship between opposition to individual policies and mobilization against the EU as a whole, i.e. qua polity, see Mair (2007). !> L Traynor, ‘On the Lady’s Service’, E! Sharp (January-February 2011), available at: . G. Avery, ‘The EU’s External Action Service: New Actor on the Scene’ (Brussels: European Policy Centre), available at: , accessed on 14 June 2011. More generally, on the policy/polity discussions relating to EU foreign policy, see A. Bressand, ‘Between Kant and Machiavelli: EU Foreign Policy Priorities in the 2010s’, International Affairs, 87/1 (2011): 59-85.

‘ For a sample of those contributing to the discussion, see the following: Otmar Issing, ‘Why a common Eurozone bond isn’t such a good idea’, Europe’s World, summer 2009, available at: ,

accessed on

14 June 2011; W. Carlin, ‘10 Questions about the

Eurozone Crisis and whether it can be solved’, Commentary, 9 (September 2011), London: UCL European Institute, available at: ,

6

Introduction

As well as being prompted by specific crises within Europe, political contestation over the EU came about as a result of the national votes held as part of the ratification procedures of the different treaties agreed upon by member states over the last two decades. In the early 1990s, votes on ratification in Denmark and France gave rise to unexpectedly violent debates surrounding issues of national sovereignty and national identity. The Danish government lost the vote on the Maastricht Treaty whilst the French government only won

by an incredibly thin margin.'” Since then, concerns about the distributional implications of European integration have been added to public concerns about sovereignty, with many groups worried about the consequences of EU-level agreements on social policy for national welfare regimes.'® À specific debate about the democratic failings of the EU, known in the literature as the ‘democratic deficit’, has become a constant theme in discussions about the EU and has fuelled growing Eurosceptic sentiment across Europe. Indeed, whilst Euroscepticism was for a long time the preserve of the marginal and highly quixotic fringe of the right-wing political parties in Europe, it has increasingly entered into the political mainstream.'” Germany, long considered one of the most strongly pro-European countries, is today increasingly Eurosceptic in its outlook. Polls suggest an openly Eurosceptic party in Germany could be electorally successful whilst the rhetoric of main-

stream politicians has become hardline and critical of the present-day EU.”°

accessed on 21 September 201 1; M. Rutte and J. K. de Jager, ‘Expulsion from the Eurozone has to be the final penalty’, Financial Times, 7 September 201 1; Joseph Stiglitz, ‘A principled Europe would not leave Greece to bleed’, The Guardian, 25 January 2010, available at: , accessed on 14 June 201 1. For an analysis of this debate through the lens of political philosophy, see G. Morgan, ‘Justice, Solidarity and the Eurozone crisis’, paper presented at the RECON workshop on ‘Transnational Social Justice in the European Union and its Implications for Global Justice’, Amsterdam, 10-11 June 201 1.

!” A special issue of West European Politics in 1995 covers many of the early instances of contestation and political mobilization around European integration after the difficult ratification votes on the Maastricht Treaty. This special issue was published as J. Hayward (ed.), The Crisis of Representation in Europe (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1995). '8 These kinds of concerns have been important factors behind the rise of left-wing Euroscepticism. On this phenomenon, see S. Heine, Les résistances à l'intégration européenne en France et en Allemagne: Une analyse des idéologies sous-tendant les critiques de gauche contre le Traité constitutionnel européen, doctoral thesis, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 2008 (under the supervision of Prof. Paul Magnette). 19 For a general introduction to the phenomenon of Euroscepticism, see C. Leconte, Understanding Euroscepticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010). 29 On the support for a Eurosceptic party, see EU Business, ‘Euroscepticism rises in crisisweary Germany’, 18 September 2011, available at: , accessed on 9 November 2011. Though there is evidence of Eurosceptic sentiment in Germany, it is less clear whether such sentiment would translate into anti-EU electoral outcomes. For a sceptical view, see Q. Peel, 'Euroscepticism wins no votes in Germany’, Financial Times, 16 December 2010,

Introduction

7

In characterizing these policy/polity debates and the political mobilization around the EU’s democratic deficit, we can say that they all point towards a desire to identify where and how political decisions in Europe are being made. Their concern, in other words, is with both the matter of political agency and of political ontology. This question of ‘who rules®’ underpins the democratic deficit discussion and fuels Eurosceptic sentiment. It has pushed some national politicians, such as the former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, to break new ground in attempting to characterize the EU. Blair famously distinguished between a superstate and a superpower, claiming the EU was the latter but not the former. President of the Furopean Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, went as far as conceding in 2007 that the EU could be considered as a ‘non-imperial empire’.?! Political parties themselves mobilize on this issue, though often with a focus as much on the ‘who’ as on the issue of rulership as such. As Hooghe and Marks have found, where political parties stand on European integration is often determined by their attitude towards

national identity.”* Another determining factor is the attitude of parties to globalization. A sentiment of being buffeted by events beyond one’s control dominates in the discourse of those critical of European integration, suggesting that at issue is the desire to re-establish more firmly control over one’s daily life. Those more sanguine about the erosion of national sentiments, and

less exposed to or benefiting from a more internationalized economy, tend to be far more supportive of European integration. As argued by Kriesi et al., in a seminal study of the political consequences of globalization, this process of ‘denationalization’ does not empty the national context of political significance. On the contrary, it has unleashed a renewed inquiry and struggle over the meaning and scope of national power and its relationship to international

and supranational bodies.* Overall, therefore, there is little doubt that public debates about the EU today touch upon all those aspects of what Wolin called ‘political metaphysics'— political space, the relationship between past, present, and future, and the question of power, authority, and political rule. Indeed, as Jan Zielonka has put it, these questions have become so pressing that we may need to develop theories of European disintegration in order to accommodate some of the

present tensions and conflicts.?*

2l H. Mahony, ‘Barroso says EU is an “empire”’, EUobserver.com, 11 August 2007, available at: , accessed on 9 November 2011.

?2 L. Hooghe and G. Marks, ‘A Postfunctionalist Theory of European Integration: From Permissive

Consensus

to Constraining

Dissensus’,

British Journal

of Political Science,

39

(2008): 1-23 (17). 23 H. Kriesi, E. Grande, R. Lachat, M. Dolezal, S. Bornshier, and T. Frey (eds), West European

Politics in the Age of Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

# J. Zielonka, ‘Europe: a plan for disintegration’, Le Monde Diplomatique, 23 September 2011, available at: , accessed on

8

Introduction

THE

PRAGMATIC TURN IN EUROPEAN INTEGRATION THEORY

The proof of the elephant is that we want it with us, whatever we think

it is.* In contrast to this growing interest in political agency and ontology within the political and public space of the European Union, academic studies of European integration have shifted towards a more pragmatic assessment of the EU. Instead of inquiring into the ‘nature of the beast’, as Donald Puchala so memorably put it in his eponymous 1971 article, the focus of EU studies today is on policymaking dynamics within a multi-level field of transnational gov-

ernance.”® This contrasts with early theories of European

integration—

functionalism, intergovernmentalism, federalism—that sought to pin down the exact political identity of the emerging European order. Theory and practice, in the unfashionable Marxist terminology, was more closely aligned. Federalists, for instance, were unabashedly committed to a federal Europe. The passion of their writings contrasts dramatically with the dry, technical language of contemporary EU integration theories. In the federalist manifesto, drawn up in 1941 by Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi when they were both prisoners on the island of Ventotene (put there by Mussolini), progressive politics is associated with internationalism:

9 November 2011. On the theme of EU disintegration, see also M. Kettle, ‘Greece, Schengen, Nato—it’s time to admit the European dream is over’, The Guardian, 23 June 2011, available at: , accessed on 21 September 2011. For an even more apocalyptical view, see Bret Stephens’s column in the Wall Street Journal. For instance, B. Stephens, “What comes after “Europe”? Wall Street Journal, 19 September 2011, available at: , accessed on 22 September 2011. For a rare scholarly account of disintegration, see P. Taylor, The End of European Integration: Anti-Europeanism Examined (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008).

? Leca (2009: 312). 26 D. J. Puchala, ‘Of Blind Men, Elephants and International Integration’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 10/3 (1971): 267-84. Joseph Weiler has made this point at length in his writings on constitutionalism. In his words, ‘there is increasingly a welcome, substantial and growing literature on the various policies of the Community, be it environmental policy, consumer protection, transport or social policy, which focuses on objectives, content, impact, but, as with the comparable literature in the national context, takes the constitutional operating system for granted. Even studies specifically dealing with the European system of governance will frequently not bother, or not bother any longer, with the constitutional premise. For example, constitutionalism is often not part of that rusty but trusty old discussion of the Community democratic deficit . . . but is inevitably premised on its presence .. . Likewise, New Institutionalism does not, rightly, expend too much energy on the constitutional setting of the Community. But try to consider its illuminating insights outside that setting. They just do not make sense’. In Joseph H. H. Weiler, “The Reformation of European Constitutionalism’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 35/1 (1997): 97-131 (99).

Introduction

9

The division [between progressive and reactionary politics] falls along a very new and substantial line: those who conceive the essential purpose and goal of struggle as being the ancient one, the conquest of national power, and who, although involuntarily, play into the hands of reactionary forces, letting the incandescent lava of popular passions set in the old moulds, and thus allowing old absurdities to rise once again, and those who see the main purpose as the creation of a solid international State, who will direct popular forces towards this goal, and who, even if they were to win national power, would use it first and foremost as an

instrument for achieving international unity.” What also marked out the earlier theories were their contrasting assessments about the international system itself. A normative disagreement about the nation state was at the heart of the debates between neofunctionalists and intergovernmentalists. For Hoffmann and other realists, supranational institutions and identities were minimal compared to the strength of national attachments, affinities, and interests. Supranational organizations, in Hoffmann’s view, were unable to serve as substitutes for nation states because of their limited subjective dimension: Any new ‘formula’ would have to provide world order, of course, but also the kind of social organization in which leaders, elites, and citizens feel at home. There is currently no agreement on what such a formula is; as a result, nationstates—often inchoate, economically absurd, administratively ramshackle, and impotent yet dangerous in international politics—remain the basic units despite

the remonstrations and exhortations.?® What defines these early theories of European integration was thus an attachment to the idea of political communities as a combination of both institutions and the subjective identification of individuals with a collective sense of self. Federalists aspired to building a European community of fate, realists argued that national attachments were too strong. Neofunctionalists thought that repeated interaction between national representatives and pan-European officials through the medium of supranational institutions would slowly create a

political identity for Europe powerful enough to propel integration forward.? Alan Milward’s claim was that growing public expectations, not just the state as a dry analytical category, lay behind the movement towards European integration. The political ontology underlying these assessments was a classical #” In M. Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, Debates on European Integration: A Reader (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 40.

?3

S. Hoffmann, The European Sisyphus: Essays on Europe,

1964-1994 (Oxford: Westview

Press, 1995), 72.

79 Ernst Haas’s conception of about institutional development. from structure—depends on the of Europe: Political, Social and Notre Dame Press, 2004), 59.

supranationalism As Haas put it, behaviour of men Economic Forces,

was thus as much about subjectivity as it was ‘[S]upranationality in operation—as distinct and groups of men’. In E. Haas, The Uniting 1950-1957 (Notre Dame, IN: University of

10

Introduction

one based on the unification of identity, legitimacy, and authority in the body of an identifiable and stand-alone political power. In later developments, European integration theory has turned its attention to the workings of the EU’s institutions and its individual policy areas. From considerations of j)olity-building, we have turned to considerations of policymaking. In terms of academic nomenclature, this occurred as a fusion of two subdisciplines of political science: International Relations and Comparative Politics. What made this rapprochement possible was the abandonment of the state as unit of analysis, in preference for more neutral terms such as governance and ‘political system’. In International Relations, this movement against sovereignty as the theoretical starting point for the discipline began in earnest in the 1970s, when the collapse of the Bretton Woods system seemed to reveal

the deep interdependence between nation states.”° In particular, the various forms of cooperation in the West that persisted in spite of the decline in the power of the United States turned the attention of many theorists to the phenomenon of international regimes.”' This, rather than inter-state conflict, seemed empirically more significant for the study of world politics. From here, theorists began in different ways to unpack the concept of the state, focusing on the motivations of individual state actors in ways that accommodated international cooperation and moves to share sovereignty in specific policy areas. Mirroring this development in International Relations was the departure in Comparative Politics from its attachment to the state as its theoretical keystone. Instead, Comparative Politics oriented itself around the study of policy instruments and more limited political dynamics such as the formation of coalitions, fighting over rules, and aspects of distributional conflict—all the classical Lasswellian parameters of political life. For scholarly work on the EU, this development was initiated by a British empiricist school, led by Helen and William Wallace. Their seminal 1977 edited work sought to draw attention to the political aspects of the EU’s policymaking processes. As William Wallace put it, ‘policymaking on the Community level is . . . a deeply political activity. There are advantages to be lost and won, rules to be drawn up, resources to be tapped, in a political arena which is highly visible to interested groups in each

constituency’.> Relativizing the nation state proved difficult when primacy was still placed on inter-state relations in Europe. The late 1970s and 1980s was the era of the Second Cold War, the politicization of relations within European states and

79 R. O. Keohane and J. S. Nye, Power and Interdependence, 2nd edition (London: Longman, 1997).

*! S, Krasner (ed.), International Regimes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983).

* W. Wallace, ‘Walking Backwards Towards Unity", in H. Wallace, W. Wallace, and C. Webb (eds), Policy-Making in the European Communities (London: John Wiley & Sons, 1977), 302.

Introduction

11

the ongoing destabilizing effect of proxy wars (particularly in Afghanistan and Central

America).>>

Under

such

conditions,

it was

difficult for the inter-

national relations dimension of the EU to retreat entirely. However, in the early 1990s, with Germany peacefully reunified, a pacified post-Cold-War Western Europe was more appropriate for the study of the EU as a policymaking field liberated from the straightjacket of the nation state. What was prefigured by Wallace and Wallace in the 1970s, but had remained relatively marginal to the study of European integration as a whole because of the prevailing political conditions, slowly emerged as a dominant new way of approaching European integration. Not as a polity-in-the-making but as a set of policymaking dynamics, to be studied in their multi-level singularity and as comparable instances of political struggles over who gets what, how much, and why.’* Describing this intellectual move away from the nation state paradigm, Thomas Risse wrote in 1996 that Comparative policy analysis increasingly conceptualizes the state as a network of inter-locking institutions where political and societal groups interact with subsets of national governments...and where political decisions result from complex bargaining and discursive processes . . . These analyses no longer assume the state as a hierarchical organization but conceptualise state-society relations in terms of

policy networks where national governments are only one actor among others.> This relativizing of the state in both IR and Comparative Politics facilitated the shift towards policymaking in European Studies. The legacy of this approach is that some of the key mysteries of the EU have remained unsolved, replaced instead with a focus on the dynamics and consequences of policymaking in

individual policy fields.”° This was recognized as a danger at the time. Caroline

3 F. Halliday, The Making of the Second Cold War (London: Verso, 1986). See also the discussion on this in Chapter 5. ** At this point, the debate between scholars narrowed. Some argued that the EU should be

seen as a sui generis form of multi-level governance, others felt that whilst far from being a state, the EU could nevertheless functions of government. inquiring holistically into ics. For a summary of the

be studied from a comparative perspective as it fulfilled enough of the What both perspectives have in common is their move away from the nature of the EU and focusing instead on its institutional dynamdebate, see S. Hix, The Study of the European Union II: The “New

Governance” Agenda and its Rival’, Journal of European Public Policy, 5/1 (1998), 38-65.

5 Thomas Risse-Kappen, ‘Exploring the Nature of the Beast: International Relations Theory and Comparative Policy Analysis Meet the European Union’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 34/1 (1996): 53-80 (57).

°® In a chapter on France and its role within European integration, Andy Smith begins by asserting strongly that IR-inspired approaches, focusing on how much or how little of the nation state is involved in EU policymaking, is unsatisfactory, generating statements that are overly general. He then goes on, however, to argue that in place of studying the role of the state in European integration, we can safely assume that the EU represents a single government in Europe and can be studied as such. It would appear that in the semantic shift from state to government, all analytical problems to do with studying the nature of the EU are resolved. A. Smith, ‘Le gouvernement de l'Union Européenne et une France qui change, in

12

Introduction

Webb candidly wrote in the original 1977 edited book that ‘a policy-making

focus is a coward’s way out of a theoretical dilemma”’.” The consequences have been to narrow the scope of the inquiry into European integration. As Piers Ludlow writes with respect to historical work on the EU, much of the work done today on the EU is highly fragmented: ‘those analysing the Community/ Union’s past have often preferred to write densely footnoted and impeccably researched microstudies of small and isolated episodes in integration history rather than seeking to explain the broad pattern of development’.”® A similar point can be made about contemporary European Studies as a whole.

EUROPEAN INTEGRATION AS STATE TRANSFORMATION The focus of this book is on European integration as a process of state transformation. The book argues that European integration corresponds to the shift from one form of state—the nation state— to another, the member state. Central to this process of transformation is the way the state-society relationship has been relativized, becoming only one relationship amongst others constitutive of statehood. In contrast to traditional nation states, national governments of member states understand their power and identity as dependent upon their belonging to a wider group or community. This determines their decision-making procedures, shapes their institutional apparatus, and provides for them a distinctive social purpose. It is certainly true that traditional nation states were also members of wider communities, from the Concert of Europe in the early nineteenth century to

the ‘security communities’ of the post-1945 North Atlantic block.”” Moreover, historians of modern Europe have often stressed the internationalized dimensions of early statehood in Europe: the role of war and strategy in the formation of modern states. For historians and for philosophers, the relationship between individual states and the wider international community of which they are a part is above all a dialectical one. As Hegel put it, ‘without P. D. Culpepper, P. A. Hall, and B. Palier (eds), La France en Mutation, 1980-2005 (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2006), 343-4. 37 Helen Wallace, William Wallace, and Carole Webb Communities (London: John Wiley & Sons, 1977), 28.

(eds), Policy-Making in the European

°8 N. P. Ludlow, ‘History Aplenty: But Still Too Isolated’, in M. Egan, N. Nugent, and W. E. Paterson (eds), Agendas in EU Studies: Stalking the Elephant (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 24.

3 On security communities, see K. W. Deutsch, Political Communities and the North Atlantic Area: International Organization in the Light of Historical Experience (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1957).

Introduction

13

relations with other states, the state can no more be an actual individual than an individual can be an actual person without a relationship with other persons’.*® However, a defining feature of the kinds of states that emerged in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was that they were nation states. The relationship between a state apparatus and its domestic population constituted a privileged bond that defined the vocation of national governments. This bond gave a necessity and urgency to the concept of national interest and served as a check upon the kinds of cooperation that could take place between individual states. The primacy of this bond was bound up with ideas of self-determination, national independence, and national sovereignty. The international society of the modern nation state was premised upon the independence of its members and those societies whose independence was gained in the course of decolonization thus unhesitatingly claimed for themselves the trappings of national statehood.* The Second World War constituted perhaps the most serious challenge to the nation state unit in Europe and in the eyes of many is identified as the starting point of the European integration process. This book takes a different approach. It argues that after 1945 the nation state in Europe was preserved through a post-war class compromise between business and labour. This gave rise to the national corporatist state. This form of state retained the primacy of the national framework because of the many rights and obligations that underpinned it. Governments had their freedom at the international level constrained by the national framework of post-war social democracy. This form of state had its own international order—what Ruggie has called ‘embedded liberalism'—that was set up as a means of realizing the domestic social

and political objectives of the post-war social contract.*? This book argues that member statehood developed out of the dismantling of the post-war national corporatist state. In the rewriting of the social contract of the post-war Golden Age that took place in the 1970s and 1980s, the primacy of the state-society relationship faded as governments undid the various relationships and rights that made up the national corporatist state. In their place, we have seen a strengthening of the relations between national executives at the pan-European level. This was pursued initially as a strategy for weakening the hold of domestic actors on the policymaking process but it has become over time a source of authority for national governments lacking points of connection with their own domestic societies. Importantly, this authority is not exercised ideologically as the harbinger of a new federal % G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 367.

*! This is evident for instance in the account of international society given by Hedley Bull. See Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (Basingstoke: Macmillan,

1977).

12 John G. Ruggie, ‘International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order’, International Organization, 36/2 (1982), 379-415.

14

Introduction

Europe or a source of aggrandizement for individual states. The community itself is not invested with any symbolic or ethical significance but is understood instead as a technical necessity: it is a way of binding the hands of national governments in order to insulate policymaking from partisanship and short-term electioneering. The institutions of the EU are thus characterized by a search for consensus and a willingness to compromise. What matters, as many observers of the EU have pointed out, is keeping the show on the road. The EU is also characterized by an entrenched bias towards technocratic justifications for policy decisions. This emphasis on technocracy stems from the particular manner in which the post-war social contract in Europe was dismantled. It was done by criticizing not only particular kinds of policies but also political action in general. Critics of post-war social democracy argued for the need to bind national executives with independent rules in order to prevent societal actors from capturing the policymaking process. The dismantling of the national corporatist state thus took place via the technocratization of political life. This chimed with the scepticism about the possibilities of national governments playing a progressive role in economic and social life. European integration emerged from the mid-1980s onwards as one key element of this wider movement against political discretion and thus its institutions became imbued with the same technocratic understanding of politics. Contrary to Alan Milward, who argued that the nation states in Europe emerged strengthened from their experience with regional integration, this book does not assume that the shift from nation state to member state has strengthened the state.*> On the contrary, member statehood is a fragile and contradictory social form. It is both powerful and weak at the same time. The horizontal ties of loyalty and identity that bind core national executives together across Europe mean that national political actors are more insulated from domestic social pressures. In this way, national governments have been strengthened vis-a-vis their domestic societies. However, the horizontal relations between national governments are thin and fragile in comparison to the vertical bonds of nationhood that characterized nineteenth-century nation states. For this reason, we find that though nationalism as a political force is relatively weak in Europe today, its atavistic populist successor very quickly challenges the authority of member states. However limited this populist mobilization might be, it exposes the fragility of the ties that bind national executives to each other at the European level. A community of member states like the EU can thus only successfully excise political conflict when the scope of disagreements between members is small enough for compromises to be found. The community rests upon the

AL S Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation State (London: Routledge, 1992).

Introduction

15

attenuation of political ideologies and the favouring of technocratic justifications of policy decisions. To the extent that disagreements in Europe today are increasingly touching upon the fundamentals of social and political life, the future of member statehood is in doubt. It would be wrong, however, to underestimate the power of this particular state form. Member states represent a fundamental transformation in European politics and society that will not be reversed so easily, however serious and divisive the crisis in Europe may be.

THE

STRUCTURE

OF THE

BOOK

Part 1 of the book focuses on the idea of member states and presents the argument in a general way. Part II focuses on individual EU policies and on how the member state perspective helps us understand EU-level policymaking. The book begins with an empirical chapter looking at the working of the contemporary EU. In Chapter1 it analyses four key aspects of the EU—its foreign policy, its economic policy, internal security policy, and its ‘constitutional experiment’ of the early twenty-first century. In each of these areas, we find that the relevant institutions and decision-making procedures correspond neither to the presumption that the EU is merely the sedimentation of inter-state bargains nor to the notion of an emerging pan-European superstate

or integrated political system at the EU level. What is striking is the manner in which national representatives and national officials remain at the heart of European governance but act in ways very different from traditional diplomats engaged in state-to-state negotiations. Their orientation towards consensus and compromise, and the dominance of expertise over ideology, contrast with older forms of inter-state cooperation. These features of European integration cannot be captured by purely intergovernmental or supranational perspectives and call instead for attention to the way in which the nation state in Europe has been transformed into what the book calls member states. The second chapter investigates this process of transformation from a theoretical perspective. It argues that the concept of member state, largely defined in the contemporary mind as a legal title obtained automatically upon entry into the EU, can also be thought of as a distinctive form of statehood. As a basis for differentiating between different state forms, the chapter stresses the associative dimensions of statehood, arguing that the recent neo-Weberian work on the state has tended to focus too much on the coercive dimension. The originality of member statehood lies in the idea that binds it together as a community of individual wills. This is the idea of limiting power through external frameworks of rule. Whilst the limiting of power is central to the political theory of the modern state, these limitations were thought of—from Machiavelli through to Madison—as internal expressions of sovereignty. For

16

Introduction

member states, the limits are understood as external constraints upon popular will. The chapter identifies Joseph Weiler’s work on ‘constitutional tolerance’ as the best exposition of how this idea of limited power forms the basis for thinking about European integration. What Weiler's argument reveals is that the external appearance of the EU is in fact a product of an internal reconfiguration of statehood. In the imaginary of member states, state and society relate to each other antagonistically rather than as an integrated totality as was the case with the modern nation state. The EU thus serves as a tool via which this conflictual state-society relationship can be managed. The chapter argues that constituted upon this basis, member statehood is a fundamentally unstable form of state. The third chapter shifts registers and considers the concept of the member state from a historical perspective. It asks when, how, and why did this form of state develop. In contrast to traditional narratives that portray European integration as a response to the violent first half of the twentieth century in Europe, the chapter argues that we should look to developments since 1945 for the best understanding of European integration. Specifically, member states evolved out of the contradictions of the post-1945 national Keynesian state. The chapter looks at the origins of the post-war Keynesian consensus and studies in detail its conflicts and contradictions. It argues that the early period of European integration in the 1950s needs to be clearly differentiated from later developments. In this early period, the impulse towards European integration existed but was constrained by the strength of state-society relations. Political strategies beyond national frameworks were thus stillborn as the institutionalized role of organized labour in the Golden Age era gave cohesiveness to the nation state framework. The crisis of this framework in the 1970s and 1980s and the dismantling of the Keynesian and corporatist state that occurred laid the basis for the shift towards member statehood. This shift lies behind the relaunch of European integration in the 1980s and the development of the EU which is familiar to us today. Chapters 4 and 5 explore in more detail two facets of European integration: macro-economic policymaking and foreign policy. Chapter4 looks at the development of economic policymaking in Europe. It begins by looking at the European economy and asking whether a single European economy exists. The chapter finds that in fact the evidence is mixed: the European economy is certainly integrated in terms of trade and to a lesser degree in terms of crossborder foreign direct investment. Yet it remains far from the kind of European division of labour one would expect from a single European economy. If relations of production and processes of exchange cannot alone account for the degree of policy coordination in Europe in the economic field, explanations need to be sought elsewhere. The chapter looks at how both internationalization and regionalization of economic policymaking are products of concrete internal struggles, fought at the domestic level within European

Introduction

17

states, over the implementation of anti-inflationary monetary policies and the dismantling of the main institutional expressions of the post-war Keynesian consensus (such as national wage bargaining or, in France’s case, the credit allocations by central government to private businesses). Looking at the development of European integration in the economic field from the 1950s and until the present day, the chapter differentiates between those forms of cooperation that are expressions of the consensus (the ECSC, the Treaty of Rome) and those driven by its collapse (European Monetary System, Single European Act, monetary union).** European-level macro-economic policy coordination today, in the form of the Lisbon Strategy and the practices of the Eurozone, demonstrate powerfully the disappearance of the national limits to integration posed by the Keynesian consensus of the earlier post-war decades. The chapter ends with a detailed account of the ongoing Eurozone crisis and how this crisis has both challenged and reinforced the member statehood paradigm. Chapter 5 looks at foreign policy. It argues that whilst intra-state relations in Western Europe very soon moved beyond the antagonism characteristic of previous eras, closer cooperation on foreign policy issues was inhibited by the Cold War. This bipolar conflict introduced into Western Europe tensions that would otherwise not have existed. Only in the period of détente was European foreign policy cooperation possible and the chapter looks at the EC's role in the CSCE negotiations as a useful measure of foreign policy cooperation pursued at the time. Its technocratic and bureaucratic aspects, far removed from the ideologies of Cold War confrontations, anticipate the form taken by EU foreign policy in the post-Cold-War period. The chapter goes on to explore these post-Cold-War developments, looking at how the EU’s foreign policy was neither driven by an aspiration towards superpower status nor by lowest common denominator agreements between European states. Its dominant features are its pragmatism, its eschewal of power politics, and its orientation towards the development of functional roles for the EU within specific areas of international relations, free from any realpolitik or grand strategy. The conclusion assesses the contemporary dynamics of European integration in the light of its twin crises of democratic legitimacy and of economic growth. The conclusion argues that the transition to member statehood

%% Alan Cafruny and J. Magnus Ryner make this point well when they emphasize the importance of differentiating between ‘two very different projects of integration’: ‘the modest or “shallow” European initiatives of the post-war Fordist era, characterized by an “embedded liberalism” social content and the “deeper” neoliberal integration of the post-Fordist era’, in A. W. Cafruny and J. M. Ryner, ‘Critical Political Economy’,

in A. Weiner and T. Dietz (eds),

European Integration Theory, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 237. See also A. W. Cafruny and |. M. Ryner, Europe at Bay: In the Shadow of US Hegemony (London: Lynne Rienner, 2007), 3-4.

18

Introduction

corresponds to a shift in Europe away from traditional Left-Right cleavages towards a new political spectrum organized around the twin poles of populism and technocracy, what it calls populist technocracy. The conclusion argues that through a proper assessment of the origins and dynamics of European integration, we can begin to challenge the way populism and technocracy appear as the only two choices available to us under conditions of economic crisis, globalization, and societal fragmentation in Europe today. The conclusion explores the possibility that member statehood can serve as a basis for studying the highly institutionalized nature of contemporary international affairs and it lays out a research agenda based on the member state paradigm.

Part I

Europe’s Compromising Union The history of Europe is a history of necessary compromises and of a necessary

consensus.l

Several things can be said about the way the EU works. Perhaps most importantly, it is the epitome of a consensus-based system.*

INTRODUCTION The history of European integration is very often told as a struggle over sovereignty. Theorists of integration are divided between those who see sovereignty retained at the national level, only delegated in specific areas to the EU, and those who see in the EU the emergence of a new, pan-European sovereign power. Faced with the peculiarities and messiness of the actual European Union, there is something distinctly unsatisfying with these arguments. As we shall see, as integration develops, states are becoming more, not less, important in the EU. And yet, at the same time, those who stress the primacy of national sovereignty in Europe struggle to make sense of the multiple ways in which national capitals are bound up with institutions, rules, and expectations that together subvert traditional understandings of national sovereignty and nation statehood. Dissatisfaction with this focus on state sovereignty convinced many scholars of the need for greater empiricism. In this empiricist spirit, they relativized the role of the sovereign state, focusing instead on the multiplicity of different actors and levels of authoritative decision-making present in what

! B. Kouchner, ‘Intervention du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères et Européennes, devant la conférence

annuelle

des

ambassadeurs

Polonais’,

Warsaw,

Poland,

20

July

2009.

Author’s

translation. Available at: , accessed on 14 June 201 1. * Anand Menon, Europe: The State of the Union (London: Atlantic, 2008), 109.

22

European Integration

they describe as Europe’s ‘multi-level governance’.” This opened up space for a focus on EU policymaking, with emphasis placed above all on the variety of institutional patterns within the EU: from the Community Method of old, to the new modes of governance that have proliferated in recent years. This diversity was summed up in Deirdre Curtin’s famous lament about a Europe ‘of bits and pieces’.* This chapter concurs with the view that grand theories of integration lack specificity. The battle between intergovernmental and supranational accounts of the EU excludes key aspects of contemporary European integration. However, the chapter also argues that we can achieve greater specificity without giving up on a holistic account of the integration process. Navigating between the Scylla of excessive parsimony and the Charybdis of descriptive empiricism is one of the main challenges of contemporary European studies. This book deploys the idea of state transformation and the concept of member statehood as a way of meeting that challenge. This chapter begins by outlining the basic contours of the mainstream theories of European integration. It argues that most theories, even the more marginal neo-Marxist theories, are stuck on the question of whether sovereignty in Europe is still national or is being transferred to the European level. The chapter outlines two basic models of European integration which reflect this long-standing debate. The chapter then turns to the governance theories of integration, where theological debates over sovereignty have been replaced by a more descriptive approach. In order to assess the usefulness of these approaches, the chapter analyses four facets of the contemporary EU: foreign policy, macro-economic governance, justice and home affairs, and the EU’s early twenty-first-century ‘constitutional moment’. Summing up these four facets, the chapter argues that we can view European integration as the sum of two key paradoxes: (1) a state-based process that appears as external to the state; (2) a fundamental process of social and political change that appears as an apolitical, essentially technical, matter of institutional reform. Turning back to the main theoretical approaches, the chapter argues that each of them ignores in different ways one or both of these paradoxes. The chapter argues that instead we can approach European integration from the perspective of state transformation. Though states remain central to European integration, these states are not the bourgeois, egotistical nineteenth-century nation states of old. They are member states, a fundamentally different kind of state. The concept of the member state is the subject of the next two chapters.

3 On multi-level governance in general, see I. Bache and M. Flinders (eds), Multi-Level Governance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). For more references, see below.

* D. Curtin, ‘The Constitutional Common

Structure of the Union:

Market Law Review, 30/1 (1993),

17-69.

A Europe of Bits and

Pieces’,

Europe’s Compromising Union OBSTINATE

23

OR OBSOLETE?

The main theories of European integration are predominantly state-centric: they focus either on the primacy of the nation state or on the state-like features of a supranational EU.” Intergovernmentalism thus presents integration as an ongoing series of bargains between states. Tensions between members on issues of Eurozone governance, or on defence matters, are taken as proof that the EU remains a fissile coalition of self-interested governments. Neofunctionalist approaches highlight instead the many avenues of ‘spillover’ whereby the cumulative weight of individual decisions biases outcomes in favour of greater supranationalism. On the same issue of the Eurozone crisis, neofunctionalists would highlight the seemingly inexorable move towards fiscal federalism, citing as evidence the growing discussion around Eurobonds. More recent integration theories, such as those inspired by constructivist theories of International Relations, tend to distance themselves from specific discussions about national versus supranational states. However, they retain the same dichotomous framework in the suggestion that we are slowly seeing the emergence of a pan-European identity that is exerting increasing influence over decisions made within the EU. Constructivist theorists reproduce the framework of the state but recast it at the European level and theorize in terms of identities rather than interests. Thus, Thomas Risse writes that ‘the EU not only increasingly regulates the daily lives of individuals in various respects; it also constitutes “Europe” as a political and social space in people’s beliefs and collective understandings’.° In a well-known article on the EU’s enlargement to Eastern Europe, Helen Sjursen argued that the process was driven by a common European identity. In her view, ‘enlargement is based not only on the norms of a liberal democratic international community but on a communitybased identity’.” It was thus the result of ‘an understanding of who the Europeans are and what it means to be European’.® A similarly dichotomous account of European integration can be found in less mainstream theories. Neo-Marxist approaches, for instance, tend to be divided on this very question. This was the substance of the disagreement between Ernst Mandel and Nico Poulantzas in their respective assessments of

° This point is well made in Jan Zielonka, Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 2. ° Thomas Risse, ‘Social Constructivism and European Integration’, in A. Wiener and T. Diez (eds), European Integration Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 171. Risse Is at paifis tovexplain, however, that these national and European identities are not mutually exclusive

but can coexist alongside one another and influence each other in various ways. 7 H. Sjursen, ‘Why Expand? The Question of Legitimacy and Justification in the EU's Enlargement Policy’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 40/3 (2002): 491-513 (508). # Risse makes à similar point: ‘the collective identity of the EU as a liberal community explains the enlargement puzzle to a large degree’. In Risse (2004: 172).

24

European Integration

integration in the 1970s.” In Poulantzas’s view, one which has influenced many of those writing today in the neo-Marxist/Gramscian tradition, Certain distensions are currently manifested between the State and the nation [in Europe], but not in the sense generally meant by the ‘supranationalization’ of the State. It is not the emergence of a new State over the nations that we are witnessing but rather ruptures in the national unity underlying the existing

national States."° European integration, according to Poulantzas, was transforming the relations between different factions of the capitalist class within individual states, rather than leading to the formation of a pan-European capitalist class able to compete with the United States." On this assessment, we can classify mainstream theories as falling into two camps. On the one side, we have those theories focusing on the supranational elements of the EU, pointing to a shift in power, authority, and identity formation away from the nation state and towards a supranational EU. Here, the main dividing line is a horizontal one, with nation states on the one side and a proto-pan-European power on the other. This is represented in Figure 1.1, below. In the second camp, the dividing line is a vertical one found between individual nation states. The EU is never more than a vehicle for the respective interests of its members, and these interests are reconciled via extensive

” Ernst Mandel believed that the crisis of the 1970s was leading to a convergence of interests amongst national capitalist classes in Europe, generating as a result an immanent intra-imperialist clash between Europe and the United States. In his words, the choice was between ‘national economic programming’ and the ‘international amalgamation of capital (with the parallel rise of supra-national powers)'. In Ernst Mandel, ‘International capitalism and “supra-nationality”’, Socialist Register, 4 (1967): 37-8. Cafruny and Ryner write that Mandel ‘anticipated growing inter-imperialist rivalry between amalgamated European capital and American capital in competition for spaces of profitable deployment’. In A. W. Cafruny and J. M. Ryner, ‘Critical Political iconomy’, in A. Weiner and T. Diez (eds), European Integration Theory, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 228.

‘ Nico Poulantzas, ‘Internationalization of Capitalist Relations and the Nation-State’, Economy and Society, 3/2 (1974): 145-79 (172).

"' In place of cohered and self-identifying national bourgeoisies, of the kind that mobilized on a nationalist basis and fought against each other in the two World Wars, European states were increasingly structured around what Poulantzas called ‘interior bourgeoisies’: social class formations ‘imbricated, by multiple links of dependence, with the processes of international division of labour and international concentration of capital under the domination of American capital’. In Poulantzas (1974: 166). Attempts at regional cooperation of the kind like the EEC were therefore, In Poulantzas’s eyes, as much expressions of continued US hegemony as they were challenges to it. Cafruny and Ryner build on Poulantzas’s argument in their book, Europe at Bay. Their main thesis is that European monetary union is not a challenge to US hegemony so much as a confirmation of it. Europe’s attempts at challenging US power with, for instance, the introduction of the Euro, are in practice ‘self-limited strategies’, meaning in this case that they deepen the very transatlantic bonds they were set out to break. See A, W. Cafruny and J. M. Ryner, Europe at Bay: In The Shadow of US Hegemony (Boulder, CA: Lynne Rienner, 2007).

Europe’s Compromising Union

|

Supranational EU

l

25

l

National sovereignty of European states

Figure 1.1. European integration: from the national to the supranational

European Union

Delegation ce Î

: 1

l

t

E

Nation

State

!

State

2 -

-

Nation State

l

1

|

:

) T

n >

v

Nation

State

N PO

Nation

® By virtue of their close interactions, Civcom members have developed an important and discernible collective culture or esprit de corps. Their degree of technical expertise, and the sheer scope of the EU’s obligations in terms of civilian missions, means that individual members are often given considerable leeway by their national capitals and they have some autonomy in interpreting their own mandates, interests, and goals. Both the PSC and Civcom thus maintain intergovernmentalism in foreign and security policy but it is intergovernmentalism of a special kind. Similarly, both demonstrate elements of supranationalism but not the kind of supranationalism envisioned by neofunctionalists. Neither a forum for inter-state bargaining nor an incubator of a pan-European sense of collective identity, both the PSC and Civcom are best viewed as consensus-generating machines. They are held together by a common willingness to compromise and a professional identification with the technical—as opposed to political—side of their discussions. The starting point and overarching goal of ambassadors within the PSC is towards identifying a common position, acceptable to all around the table and to their national capitals.”” This is also the case for Civcom where participants judge their own professional conduct in terms of their ability to achieve an agreement amongst themselves. In the words of one Civcom official, there obtains a strong sense of ‘group solidarity’ where achieving agreement without having to return to one’s own ambassador is a

sign of success.”® According to Cross, the commitment towards finding a

" Interview with author in Brussels, July 2009.

* Cross (2010: 12). " Cross (2010: 27-33).

V C. Meyer, The Quest for a Furopean Strategic Culture: Changing Norms on Security and Defence in the European Union (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 124. " Interview with author, 16 July 2000,

32

European Integration

consensus unites an otherwise rather disparate group of individuals.”” In his detailed study of the PSC, Howorth found that the ‘quest for consensus’ was

the ‘basic stock in trade of the PSC members’.“’ He also found that the ‘dominant mode of interaction is consensus-seeking rather than bargaining

around fixed national positions’.*! This kind of consensus-seeking behaviour is far removed from what we would expect to find in a traditionally intergovernmental forum. Commenting on the workings of Coreper, one ambassador noted that the approach is not one of defending pre-existing interests. Instead, each ambassador is a participant in the elaboration of a common interest. And yet, this common interest is not one undergirded by an ideological commitment to a particular ideal of

European integration.*? Rather, in the words of one Coreper participant, ‘we don’t defend interests, we solve problems’. Mérand also remarks on this technocratic approach: ‘the success of ESDP can be attributed to its bottom-

up approach’.‘° ‘Avoiding the pitfalls of a discussion on the finalité of European defence’, he notes, ‘officials focused their minds on modest forms of cooperation, small organizational structures and relatively safe military operations”.** What is valued most is the willingness to compromise combined with a technical mastery of the issues at hand. Expertise is equally valued within Civcom. Cross notes that whereas some members lack the knowledge of civilian crisis management ideally required for the job, they are well versed

in the pursuit of compromises.‘” In the case of Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008, members found an agreement by pushing to one side the politics of Kosovo’s status. They adopted planning documents for an EU mission in Kosovo early on so that the documents referred to the province’s status pre-independence. This diffused the political disagreement between national capitals over the legality of Kosovo’s declaration of independence. . We can apply this analysis to the Council pyramid as a whole. The purpose of these bodies, from working groups up to political committees, and all the way to meetings of ministers, is to excise political disagreement. The outcome all actors seek to avoid is a public dispute between ministers. As Perry Anderson puts it, ‘any public disagreement ... [is] treated as if it were an

unthinkable breach of etiquette’.*® Differences are ironed out through iterative

B

œ

? Cross (2010: 30). ° Howorth (2010: 16). *! Howorth (2010: 16).

42 Cf. the work by Rebecca Adler-Nissen on what she has called the ‘integration doxa’. Rebecca Adler-Nissen, ‘Opting Out of an Ever Closer Union: The Integration Doxa and the Management of Sovereignty’, West European Politics, 34/5 (2011): 1092-113; R. Adler-Nissen, ‘Late Sovereign Diplomacy’, Hague Journal of Diplomacy, 4/2 (2009): 121-41.

> Mérand (2008: 28). “* Mérand (2008: 28). %3 Cross (2010: 26-7). 16 Anderson

(2009: 62).

Europe’s Compromising Union

33

processes of private deliberation. By way of contrast, if we consider national political institutions we see that they tend to be based on the opposite presumption: namely the inevitability of conflict and the need to manage it and institutionalize it. This rationale behind majoritarianism is true of both unitary and compound polities. Even in countries such as the Netherlands, founded on a need to secure compromises between discrete social groups, the corporatist model is based on a presumption of conflict and thus a need to institutionally diffuse it through a set of representative procedures. This is the account given of so-called ‘consensus democracies’ by Arend Lijphart. Lijphart notes that consensus democracies exist in divided societies. In his words, ‘in plural societies [i.e. those deeply divided by religious or ideological conflict] majority rule spells majority dictatorship and civil strife rather than democracy’. As a result, ‘what these societies need is a democratic regime that emphasizes consensus instead of opposition, that includes rather than excludes, and that tries to maximize the size of the ruling majority instead of

being satisfied with a bare majority”.*” The EU, in contrast, functions very differently. Its distinctiveness, well captured in the actions of the PSC and Civcom, is the presumption of consensus and this lies behind its peculiar organizational structure. By implication, of course, the EU must be shielded as much as possible from the main source of conflict, namely the unpredictability of public debate and of public expectations. This explains why EU policymaking is so secretive and lacks what is so elementary to political life at the national level: publicity. This is as true of foreign and security policy as it is of other domains of European integration.

GOVERNING

THE

EUROZONE

Debates around the governance of the Eurozone crystallize along the spectrum of supranationalism versus intergovernmentalism. The late Italian economist, Tomaso Padoa-Schioppa, wrote that ‘the decision to move ahead with the euro in advance of political union contains an implicit commitment to the completion of the polity’.*® Contained within the DNA of monetary union, he suggested, is a supranational polity. In contrast, describing the situation as laid out in the Treaties, Uwe Puetter writes that ‘economic policy is based on a decentralized system of governance. The

17 A. Lijphart, Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in TwentyOne Countries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 23. ™ Cited in Paul De Grauwe, ‘Flaws in the Design of the Eurosystem’, International Finance, 9/1

(2006):

137-44

(139).

34

European Integration

member states remain fully responsible for policy implementation. .. The course of economic policy is defined at the national level’.*’ We see this confusion in the ECB itself. The ECB appears as a classic example of the supranational Community Method. As Hodson recounts, its extensive powers have been delegated to it by member states and the ECB has legal personality. It can therefore formulate opinions and make regulations. ‘[E]ven more so than the Commission’,

Hodson writes, ‘the ECB’s political

authority is closely linked to its credibility and technocratic expertise’.”° However, Belgian economist Paul de Grauwe caustically comments that even the pristinely European nature of the ECB leaves much to be desired. Reflecting on Padoa-Schioppa’s observation that the ECB’s governing council is ‘a “wisdom-based” collegiate system’ interested only in the wider European interest, de Grauwe reminds us that replacements on the governing council are determined by nationality. An Italian must replace an Italian, a Frenchman a Frenchman, etc.”' Most recently, a change in the leadership at the ECB raised the prospect of the Bank’s executive board being entirely free of Frenchmen and filled with two Italians. This prompted French president at the time, Nicolas Sarkozy, to force the Italian incumbent, Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, out of the ECB executive board. For many, this made a mockery of the ECB’s supposed political independence and Smaghi himself fiercely resisted efforts to displace him.°* It is also worth noting that whilst a simple majority rule is implemented within the ECB governing council, votes on interest rates tend in practice to proceed along consensual lines.”” Indeed, so much so that when, in early 2011, the German head of the Bundesbank and governing council member, Axel Weber, disagreed vehemently with the ECB’s decision to start buying up the government bonds of troubled economies on the Eurozone’s periphery, Weber chose to resign instead of remaining as a dissenting member of the council.”* ¥ U. Puetter, ‘Governing Informally: The Role of the Eurogroup in EMU and the Stability and Growth Pact’, Journal of European Public Policy, 11/5 (2004): 854-70 (855).

°° D. Hodson, ‘Economic and Monetary Union: An Experiment in New Modes of PolicyMaking’ in H. Wallace, M. A. Pollack, and A. R. Young (eds), Policy-Making in the European Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 168. Hodson notes that alongside defining and implementing the Eurozone’s monetary policy, the Eurosystem (which encompasses the European Central Bank and National Central Banks) ‘also holds and manages the official foreign reserves of the member states, promotes the smooth operation of the European payments and settlements system and plays a central role in the Euro-area exchange rate policy’ (Hodson 2010: 165).

>! De Grauwe (2006).

°? For an account of this, see The Economist’s ‘Charlemagne’ column, 24 June 2011. Available at: , accessed on 27 June 201 1. See also C. Prudhomme, ‘Silvio pousse, Lorenzo résiste, Nicolas s’agace, et Mario s’installe’, Le Monde, 29 October 2011. After leaving the ECB in November 2011 Bini Smaghi joined Harvard University as a visiting scholar. >3 Hodson

(2010: 166).

°* For details, see C. Pauly, ‘Jean-Claude Trichet’s Lonely Fight to Save the Euro’, Spiegel Online, 14 March 2011.

Europe’s Compromising Union

35

Beyond the ECB, the intergovernmental basis of the Eurozone’s economic policymaking is far from classical understandings of intergovernmental bargaining and negotiation. There are striking parallels between the way the EU's foreign and security policy governance has evolved and that of the Eurozone. Both have moved towards a focus on informal committee-based governance, with an accent on expertise and consensus. In both foreign and economic policy, institutional mechanisms have been developed that eliminate as much as possible political conflict between member states. This is achieved by bringing together national officials and experts in order to reach agreements that are subsequently ratified at the level of the Council of Ministers. We see this in the development of the Eurogroup since 1999 and in the Economic and Financial Committee, the EFC, two consensus-generating mechanisms. For Hodson, the Eurogroup has become ‘a key piece of EMU’s governance

jigsaw’.>> At first glance, the Eurogroup would seem to entrench firmly the powers of member states over economic policymaking. Meeting in Brussels, it is composed of all finance ministers of the Eurozone, plus the president of the ECB and the European Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs. Finance ministers are allowed to bring to meetings only one advisor, so overall numbers are much smaller than the Ecofin meetings where as many as 100 people can be together at one time. Much as with the PSC, finance ministers have created a forum that functions as a barrier to supranationalism. This reading would seem consistent with long-standing French ambitions to create a ‘gouvernement économique —a state-based political counterweight to the supranational ECB. The long-standing German belief was that such a grouping would only mine the independence of the ECB and any such move was strongly resisted. However, in the late 1990s, as EMU moved towards its final stage three, a deal was struck between Berlin and Paris over the need for a forum within which finance ministers of the Eurozone could meet informally and discuss economic policy issues amongst themselves. Uwe Puetter recounts that it was former French finance minister, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who in October 1997 persuaded the German finance minister, Theo Waigel, to set up a group made up of finance ministers from the Eurozone countries. In Puetter’s words, ‘the Eurogroup’s emergence seems to confirm the view that member state governments are determined to keep control over the agenda

and hesitate to create new supranational structures’.” This reading, however, is misleading. As Puetter explains, there developed over the course of the 1990s a growing interest in collective macro-economic policymaking. This reflected the common experience of national executives in struggling to push through difficult reforms in order to meet the demands of °* Hodson (2010: 174). °° U, Puetter, “The Informal Eurogroup: A New Working Method and Constitutional Compromise’, Constitutional Web Papers, ConWEB No.2 (2001), p. 3.

36

European Integration

Eurozone membership. At the time, common agreement was found on the need to establish a forum where discussions on issues such labour market reforms, wage policies, economic growth-related matters, could all be discussed. In particular, the nature of the ideological convergence between these centre-left ‘third way’ governments was based on a common acceptance of the need for widespread labour market and public-sector reform. The Eurogroup was thus created as an informal forum geared towards building consensus between national finance ministers on these policy decisions. One reason the German finance minister of the late 1990s, Oskar Lafontaine, proved unpopular within the Eurogroup was that he promoted an explicitly Keynesian economic agenda, a real ‘breach of etiquette’ as Anderson would put it. Whilst composed of national representatives, the Eurogroup is not really a national barrier to further supranationalism. Its working methods resemble more those of an epistemic community than they do of an intergovernmental forum. The raison d'être of the group is the creation of consensus amongst its members. It is also used as a place where a shared sense of purpose can be forged in order to tackle recalcitrant domestic populations. As Puetter puts it, ‘participants of the Eurogroup value the unconstrained atmosphere and take

the opportunity to discuss their domestic approaches’.”” They do this ‘in order to get a better understanding of the positions of their respective counterparts’ but also ‘to assure each other mutual support with regard to domestically

sensible subjects such as spending cuts’.”° As Puetter argues elsewhere, ‘the main aim of the discussion [within the Eurogroup] is to strengthen the role of individual ministers as advocates for reform in their respective home countries’. The aim of this ‘collective review of different national policy approaches’ and the ‘common identification of best practices’ is also to create ‘incentives for further reform’.>> We might add that in Greece, the failed attempt by George Papandreou to organize a referendum on Greece’s Eurozone and EU membership as a way of committing his population to the public-sector reforms demanded by the EU/IMF bail-out package, was an extreme version of this same practice: using European cooperation as a basis for pushing through in extremis controversial domestic policies.°° As with foreign policy, discussion within the Eurogroup is remarkably open. French finance minister in the early 2000s, Laurent Fabius observed that ‘there is no topic beyond debate’.°! The Eurogroup adopts a problemsolving orientation. Its technocratic bent, however, is not synonymous with 7 Puetter (2001: 16).

°3 Puetter (2001: 16). °? Puetter (2004: 863). C. J. Bickerton, ‘Greece’s referendum is à good thing’, Le Monde diplomatique, 2 November 2011. Available at: , accessed on 4 November 2011,

61 Puetter (2001: 16).

Europe’s Compromising Union

37

encroaching supranationalism. Puetter argues that ‘it would be misleading to judge the work of the Eurogroup against the template of an imaginative European economic government with supranational decision-making

powers’.°” The Eurogroup is composed of national representatives, all of whom are committed to national discretion in this policy area. However, the manner in which they act is far removed from traditional assumptions about intergovernmental negotiation and bargaining. The working method is informal, interests are defined through interaction, discussions are focused on technical issues and ministers use the Eurogroup as a mechanism with which they can strengthen their reform efforts at the domestic level. Working closely alongside the Eurogroup is another committee, the Economic and Financial Committee (EFC). The EFC was set up in January 1999

as the ‘senior expert committee in charge of EMU affairs’ in the final stage of

monetary union.°” It is made up of two members nominated by member states, two members nominated by the European Commission, and two members nominated by the ECB.°* Its formal roles given in Article 114 of the Treaty are: the delivery of opinions to the Council and the Commission; supervision of the budgetary positions of member states and of the EU's financial situation vis-à-vis third states and international institutions; assistance to the Council (in the manner with which the Council Secretariat prior to the Lisbon Treaty would assist the GAERC) and acting as a preparatory body for Ecofin meetings. The EFC is also expected to study capital movements and freedom of payments at the level of the EU as a whole. As with PSC’s relationship to Coreper II, the EFC clearly functions as a consensus-generating mechanism. Including non-Eurozone member states, the EFC helps these countries follow the discussions of the Eurogroup and it ensures that issues agreed upon within the Eurogroup enjoy support from nonEurozone members. When these same issues are voted upon in Ecofin, consensus can be expected as extensive discussions have already been undertaken lower

down in the chain of EMU economic governance.°” The EFC also manages the relationship between the ECB and the Council of Ministers. As stated in its statutes, the EFC ‘may provide the framework within which the dialogue between the Council and the ECB can be prepared and continued at the level of senior officials from ministries, national central banks, the Commission and the ECB’.°® Taken together, both the Eurogroup and the EFC exist as epistemic %2 Puetter (2004: 859).

6* Puetter (2004: 858).

64* The EFC belongs to stage three of EMU. Stage 2 involved the creation of a ‘monetary committee with advisory status’ that had similar tasks as the EFC but did not include members of the 5yet-to-be-formed ECB. $ Interview with EFC Secretariat members, 29 September 2011, Brussels. 66 Article 2 of the Statutes of the Economic and Financial Committee, provided as annex to the Council Decision of 18 June 2003 on a revision of the Statutes of the Economic and Financial Committee (2003/476/EC).

38

European Integration

communities united around a sense of shared expertise. Agnostic as to deeper questions of the EU’s political future, their focus is more technical than political. Strikingly, one national representative with regular dealings with the EFC explained that whilst the committee might have similar functions to the PSC, it would not be ‘Brusselized’ in the same way. This is because the PSC deals only with the low politics’ of security and defence policy. The EFC, in contrast, is caught in the maelstrom of a Eurozone sovereign debt crisis. This makes its role more delicate, consensus more difficult to achieve, and the connection with

national capitals all the more essential.°” Broadly, however, these institutions point to the same puzzle in European integration. Made up of national representatives and officials, they function as deliberative forums for building policy consensus and not as vehicles for interstate negotiations and bargaining. At the same time, this consensus is technical, and focused on individual policy issues. It neither betrays hidden aspirations towards supranational community-building nor involves the imposition of a single national Weltanschauung upon all other members.

FREEDOM, JUSTICE, AND SECURITY: A ‘'TRANSGOVERNMENTAL’ AFFAIR Justice and home affairs is perhaps one of the most dynamic policy areas within the contemporary EU. Officially referred to today as ‘Freedom, Justice, and Security’, this policy area has seen a dramatic intensification in cooperation between national representatives, officials, and agencies. Issues and policies that fall within the remit of justice and home affairs include common policies on immigration and asylum seekers, the management of the EU's external borders, the elaboration of common standards, and best practices in areas such as national policing. This policy area has also seen a blossoming of pan-European agencies such as Europol and Eurojust (both based in the Hague in the Netherlands), Frontex (based in Warsaw, Poland), the EU Centre for Fundamental Rights (based in Vienna, Austria) and the European Moni-

toring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (in Lisbon, Portugal). Frontex, the EU agency dedicated to the management of borders, has seen a radical growth in its budget and activities. Established in 2005, Frontex saw a 360 per cent increase in its budget between 2006 and 2009. In 2010, its budget had risen to 98.8 million Euros, having been only 19 million Euros in 2006.°° Jorg Monar, a specialist on justice and home affairs, writes that since the 1990s 7 Interview with a national treasury official. Brussels, 30 September 201 1. 68 Frontex General Report of 2010. Available at: , accessed on 2 November 201 1.

Europe’s Compromising Union

39

The JHA domain has been marked by a massive process of institutionalization: not only has it led to the establishment of more than 30 specialized Council committees and working parties within the decision-making hierarchy of the JHA Council, and the establishment of two fully-fledged directorate-generals in the

Council and Commission, but it has also been populated by an increasing number of institutional structures specific to this area of EU policy-making.‘° Monar adds that ‘the budget available for JHA measures has increased more than tenfold and no other policy domain has seen such proliferation of multi-

annual plans’.”° With regard to the institutional development. of JHA as a policy field, scholars tend to present it as a messy but discernible shift away from pure intergovernmentalism towards some kind of supranationalism. Sandra Lavenex describes the development of JHA as a ‘delicate compromise’ between intensive ‘transgovernmental cooperation’ and the ‘incremental consolidation of supranational structures’.”! Her account of the history of cooperation in this area begins with ‘intergovernmental formalization’ under the terms of the Maastricht Treaty, followed by ‘uneasy communitarization’ in the Amsterdam and Nice treaties. The subtitle of her 2010 book chapter, ‘Communitarization With Hesitation’, summarizes her vision of how JHA has developed.”” Whilst scholars tend to agree on this slow movement towards a more supranational JHA policy field, they also note how concerns about national sovereignty have fundamentally shaped the development of JHA. Indeed, at present, JHA is one of the best examples of the legal complexity of European integration: moves towards supranationalism coexist alongside long-standing concerns about national sovereignty. JHA is thus caught in the gap between obstinate nation states and a putative pan-European ‘Area of Freedom, Security, and Justice’ (AFSJ). Writing on the Community Method and its relevance to JHA, Monar

argues that concerns of national governments about their sovereignty over

internal security issues lie behind the complexity of the JHA domain.”* Lavenex also presents the development of JHA as fundamentally about a struggle over national sovereignty. In her words, the growing institutionalization of JHA at

9 J. Monar, ‘Deviations from and Alternatives to the Community Method in Justice and Home Affairs’, in R. Dehousse (ed.), The ‘Community Method’: Obstinate or Obsolete? (Basing-

stoke: Palgrave, 2011), 128.

"% Monar (2011: 118). "! $. Lavenex, ‘Justice and Home Affairs: Communitarization With Hesitation’, in H. Wallace, M. A. Pollack, and A. R. Young (eds), Policy-Making in the European Union, sixth edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 460. 72 Monar concurs with this account. According to him, JHA is at a ‘transitional stage’ (p. 124). In his words, ‘Whereas the pre-Amsterdam “third pillar” could still be regarded as a fully-fledged intergovernmental alternative to the Community Method for this domain, the Amsterdam reforms

not

only

“communitarized”

a substantial

part

of what

became

the

AFS]

but

also

introduced elements from it to the remaining, thinned-out “third pillar™' (Monar 2011: 124).

/* Monar (2011:119),

40

European Integration

the EU level reflects ‘the increasing involvement of EU institutions in core functions of statehood, and concomitantly, the transformation of traditional

notions of sovereignty and democracy in the member states’.”* As with foreign policy and macro-economic governance, the categories of intergovernmentalism and supranationalism struggle in capturing the specific features of JHA. The proliferation of qualifying adjectives (e.g. ‘hesitant communitarization’) is evidence of this. Nevertheless, the scholarly literature tends to present the development of JHA as a struggle over sovereignty and as a transition from a domain rigidly kept within the remit of the nation state to one increasingly subjected to supranational pressures. This is, as Rebecca Adler-Nissen has shown, particularly the case with the opt-outs, a notable institutional feature of the JHA domain. Originally negotiated by Margaret Thatcher at the time of the Schengen Agreement of 1985, the UK has opted out of the Schengen Area. Thus, citizens of EU countries, upon entering the UK, must present their passports. As well as being outside the Schengen area, the UK has also a special ‘opt-in’ status vis-à-vis the AFSJ (Title V of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union), meaning that it can choose, on a case-by-case basis, to be involved in AFS] policies. In the Danish case, the opt-outs in JHA provide less flexibility: there are no opt-in provisions and the opt-outs are considered key in preserving Denmark’s more nuanced and distant relationship to the rest of the EU in immigration, asylum, and

justice-related policies.”” As Adler-Nissen writes, these opt-outs are generally understood as expressions of national sovereignty. They are designed to halt the forward march of supranationalism in policy areas considered too sensitive and too close to domestic interests to be subject to majoritarian decision-making within the Council or to legislative initiative by the Commission under the terms of the Community Method. Looked at more closely, though, they appear as something other than expressions of national sovereignty. Based on detailed field research, Adler-Nissen concludes that ‘the management of opt-outs reflects a 74 Lavenex (2010: 458). Adler-Nissen

recounts the conventional view of the JHA

domain’s

evolution: “While national sovereignty may still be an important concern, cooperation in justice and home affairs has shifted from taboo to totem’. In R. Adler-Nissen, ‘Opting Out of an Ever Closer Union: The Integration Doxa and the Management of Sovereignty’, West European Politics, 34/5 (2011): 1092-113 (1104).

75 Alder-Nissen (2011: 1104-7). See also R. Adler-Nissen, ‘Behind the scenes of differentiated integration: circumventing national opt-outs in Justice and Home Affairs’, Journal of European Public Policy, 16/1 (2009): 62-80; R. Adler-Nissen and T. Gammeltoft-Hansen,

‘Straitjacket or

Sovereignty Shield? The Danish Opt-Out on Justice and Home Affairs and Prospects after the Lisbon Treaty’, Danish Foreign Policy Yearbook 2010 (2010). Available at: , accessed on 4 November 201 1; R. Adler-Nissen, ‘Organized Duplicity? When States Opt Out

of the European

Union’,

in R. Adler-Nissen

and T. Gammeltoft-Hansen

(eds), Sover-

eignty Games: Instrumentalizing State Soverelgnty in Europe and Beyond (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 81-103.

Europe’s Compromising Union

41

retreat from national sovereignty rather than an expression of it.”° Her investigations into the day-to-day practices built up around the British and Danish opt-outs suggest that there are two very different visions of the optouts: those presented to domestic audiences and those presented by British and Danish representatives and officials to their European peers. In the former case, the emphasis is put on national sovereignty. In the latter, the emphasis is on cooperation and compromise. Indeed, both the British and Danish governments are active players in JHA, opt-outs notwithstanding. For AdlerNissen, the opt-outs function as a façade behind which European cooperation in JHA proceeds apace. British and Danish governments are as keen as their peers to remain full players in the policymaking process and find multiple ways to circumvent the legal obstacles of the opt-out agreements. Looking at the development of JHA as whole, we find that the categories of intergovernmentalism and supranationalism are as unsatisfactory as in the other

areas

examined

above.

What

stands

out are those

features

of JHA

common also to foreign policy and macro-economic governance. The first is the centrality of national representatives and officials to the EU policymaking process. As with foreign and macro-economic policy, the geographical location happens to be Brussels but the individuals involved are overwhelmingly national. ‘Governance by governments’ thus accurately describes JHA as much as it does CFSP and CSDP.”” Secondly, there is in the JHA domain the same proliferation of consensus-generating institutions as elsewhere. Looking at the institutional structure of JHA policymaking, we find on the side of the Council of Ministers a proliferation of intermediary coordinating committees whose function is to elaborate common policy positions and to forge consensus prior to the meetings of national ministers within the JHA council itself. These coordinating committees, which bring together in Brussels senior civil servants from national ministries, are accompanied by working groups that bring together national experts. The coordination committees include a committee for police and judicial cooperation (CATS), a committee on immigration, a strategic committee on immigration, frontiers, and asylum (SCIFA), a committee on civil law matters and a committee on internal security (COSI).”®

Alongside these institutions designed as consensus-generating bodies, the multiple semi-independent agencies of JHA listed above bring experts

79 Adler-Nissen (2011: 1093). 7 This phrase is used by Mérand, Hofmann, and Irondelle in their study of CSDP. Contrary to predictions of multi-level network analysis, they find that CSDP is a heterarchical policy area: ‘the core of the CSDP network is made up of national actors with high positions in the formal state hierarchy’. The most significant of the national actors are the Brussels-based PSC ambassadors. In Frédéric Mérand, Stephanie C. Hofmann, and Bastien Irondelle, ‘Governance and State Power: A Network Analysis of European Security’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 49/1 (2011):

121-47 (132).

78 Lavenex (2010: 462 B).

42

European Integration

together as part of an extensive collaborative effort between national services. National police services and national border agencies cooperate under the aegis of these pan-European agencies. What characterizes this policy domain is less the precise balance between intergovernmental and supranational modes of decision-making (messy and complex in the case of JHA, as noted) and more the orientation towards consensus, the progressive elimination of political conflict via the multitude of deliberative points within the Council pyramid and the overwhelming orientation towards problem-solving within these different institutional environments. Whilst issues such as immigration and asylum are highly politicized at the national level, within the EU’s institutions they are understood not as fundamental conflicts of interest or of ethics but as technical problems to be solved amongst national experts. This helps explain the pragmatic actions of British and Danish officials in this area: in spite of the opt-outs, their orientation towards the EU is driven by a problem-solving attitude, where what matters is achieving a workable solution acceptable to all those present. The opt-outs thus appear to them as atavistic residues of national debates to which they are associated only remotely and tenuously.

‘LEGALLY

A TREATY,

POLITICALLY

A CONSTITUTION’

When former French President, Jacques Chirac, visited the University of Oxford in November 2004 for a ceremony celebrating the Franco-British entente cordiale he was asked by this author whether the proposed ‘Constitutional Treaty’ was really a constitution or just a treaty. The campaign for the French referendum had begun in earnest, with overwhelming support for the Yes campaign by both political parties and mainstream media. Chirac’s answer, cannily non-committal in the manner of an accomplished professional politician, was to say that what was on offer was ‘legally a treaty, but politically a constitution’. Clever as a rebuttal in a public debate, the phrase fares less well when analysed more closely. In fact, it expresses one of the main mysteries surrounding what was eventually ratified by all EU member states in the form of the Lisbon Treaty. Does the Lisbon Treaty move in the direction of closer political integration in Europe or does it empower states against supranational

elements within the EU? As Christine Reh puts it, is the Lisbon Treaty a

European constitution or is it ‘the epitome of its failure’?”® This same question hangs over the constitutional process as a whole, which began in the aftermath 79 C. Reh, ‘The Lisbon Treaty: De-Constitutionalizing the European Union’, Journal of Common

Market Studies, 47/3 (2009):; 625-50 (627).

Europe’s Compromising Union

43

of the Nice Treaty of 2000 and was a response to a significant decline in public support for European integration. Some see in this process the beginnings of a genuine move towards political union, prevented only by the regrettable recalcitrance of French, Dutch, and Irish voters. Others identify it with an end to any real federal aspirations. The Treaty, in this latter view, was supported by national governments because it entrenched their own authority and control over the integration process. This ambiguity was encapsulated in the very different assessments made of the Lisbon Treaty and the need for national referendums. Some groups, particularly within the UK and Ireland, argued that the Lisbon Treaty was no more than a slightly modified version of the failed Constitutional Treaty, justifying the need for a popular vote. Others, in France and elsewhere, argued very strongly the opposite: no new referendum was needed because all the constitutional elements of the original 2004

document had been purged in the revised version.”’ Reh sums up very well the confusion that has reigned over this issue: How can a very vocal coalition in the UK call for ratification by referendum, arguing that the latest reform is a qualitative leap in constitutional terms while opponents can claim with equal confidence that the Treaty is decidedly ‘non-

constitutional’?5! Both sides of the argument can find evidence for their views within the Treaty itself. Considered in terms of whether it represents a strengthening of panEuropean or of nationally-based authorities within Europe, the Lisbon Treaty is remarkably difficult to assess. It provides grist to the mill of Eurosceptics whilst not depriving Euro-enthusiasts of hope either. For constitutional lawyers, it signals both the beginning and the end of a European constitution depending on whether one is an optimist or a pessimist. As with the other policy areas described above, the mysteries of the Lisbon Treaty are testimony to the inadequacy of the debate around European integration as the expression or surrender of national sovereignty. The aspects of the Lisbon Treaty pointing to putatively more supranationalism are well known. The creation of a new post of High Representative for Foreign and Security affairs was seen by many as evidence of creeping ‘Brusselization’ of EU foreign policy. The same sentiment has been expressed regarding the External Action Service. Another highly publicized change proposed in the treaty was the creation of a permanent President of the * Reh’s own view is that the Lisbon Treaty did not merit a referendum. She argues that ‘rather than transferring new competences to Brussels or making a constitutional saut qualitatif, the latest reform moderately bolsters the Treaties’ formal functions; yet, in contrast to the Constitutional Treaty, Lisbon adds little In material terms and is a decisive setback symbolically. Calls for ratification by referendum Juatified by the reform’s extent are therefore ill-founded’, Reh (2009: 627).

"' Reh (2009: 620).

44

European Integration

European Council. Intended as a partial replacement of the rotating presidency of the EU, this new executive position enjoys considerable agendasetting powers. Assuming the post-holder is able to convince member states of his proposals, the post contains within it scope to shape the direction of European integration. Other aspects of the Lisbon Treaty point in the same direction and confirm Eurosceptics in their belief that the treaty has constitutional implications. National vetoes in the Justice and Home

Affairs (JHA) issues (i.e. matters of

internal security such as cross-border policing, migration, and terrorism) will be replaced with qualified majority voting. This strengthened the resolve of some member states, at the rhetorical level at least, to retain their opt-outs to further integration in this field.°? Another significant change, with powerful constitutional symbolism, was the incorporation of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, a so-called European bill of rights, into the Lisbon Treaty. Worried about the implications of this, the UK government pushed for a legally binding protocol stating clearly that the Charter is not to be the source of any new

labour law or social rights and that it cannot be considered above British law.*’ One other controversial measure has been what its critics call the ‘selfamending’, ‘ratchet’, or ‘passarelle’ clause, namely the idea that the EU can modify the decision-making rules on its own policies without having to resort to an intergovernmental conference and the negotiation of a new treaty. The controversial article is Article 48, which covers the revision procedures for the EU. The section entitled ‘simplified revision procedures’ states that governments can, without having to convene an intergovernmental treaty-writing conference, revise provisions contained within Part Three of the Treaty. This refers to existing Community policies, some of which are currently decided by unanimity. In the eyes of critics, this clause means that the EU is no longer fully under the control of its member states. The constraint of having to agree fundamental decision-making changes through treaty revisions has been replaced with a more permissive and far less transparent process of rule change. In spite of these provisions, some maintain that the main feature—and underlying purpose—of both the Constitutional Treaty and the Lisbon Treaty was the formalization and expansion of the powers of national governments over the integration process. For Christine Reh, the Lisbon Treaty represented a de-constitutionalized version of the early Treaty that had contained many legal, practical and symbolic elements pushing the EU towards what she calls

82 H. Brady and K. Barysch, The CER Guide to the Reform Treaty, Centre for European Reform Briefing Note, 2007. Available at: , accessed on 27 March 2012, 8* Brady and Barysch (2007: 3).

Europe’s Compromising Union ‘thick’ constitutionalism.”* However, the original Constitutional Treaty was member of the European Commission Constitutional Treaty ‘recognized that

45

some would contest the idea that even properly constitutional. Chris Patten, a during this period, has argued that the we had gone about as far as we could or

should in developing supranational policies and institutions’.®” For Patten, the irony of the national referendum decisions in France and the Netherlands was that the views of those voting against the Treaty were the same as the views of the authors of the Treaty. In his words, ‘the treaty sought rightly to draw a line in the sand so far as further integration is concerned’. And yet, ‘much of the satisfaction at rejection is on the part of those who have sought precisely the

same outcome as that contained in the treaty”.°° There is much in the Lisbon Treaty to confirm Patten’s argument. For instance, it formalizes for the first time a member state’s right to leave the EU. In Reh’s words, ‘an institutionalized right to secession introduces territorial flexibility unimaginable in any “thick” constitution and strongly smacks of

international law’.®’ Fitting with Patten’s assessment, Reh notes that those aspects of the Lisbon Treaty that attempted to improve the democratic accountability of the EU did so by more firmly situating democratic participation at the national level. This is the case both for the Citizen’s Initiative, which involves the collection of one million signatures of EU citizens but in a manner that is widely spread across national boundaries, and for the empowerment of national parliaments. As Reh puts it, ‘the latest reform round establishes new norms of democratic participation but anchors them explicitly in the domestic democratic arena’.*® What stands out in this debate about the Lisbon Treaty’s supranational and intergovernmental aspects is the limited purchase of these categories. That such different assessments of the treaty can be upheld at the same time suggests the Treaty itself is fundamentally ambiguous. Supporters of the Lisbon Treaty tend to suggest that the changes introduced are minimal, do not have constitutional implications in so far as they do not revise fundamentally the balance of power between member states and EU institutions, and that the overriding goal of the Treaty is simply to make an expanded EU of twenty-seven members fit for purpose. This explains some changes, such as the reduction of the number of Commissioners and a revision of the voting rules within the Council of Ministers from a triple to a double-majority

8* Reh (2009: 628). The distinction was made by the legal theorist, Joseph Raz.

85 C. Patten, Not Quite the Diplomat: Home Truths About World Affairs (London: Penguin/ Allen Lane, 2005), 129.

% Patten (2005: 129-30). 7 Reh (2009: 637). ** Reh (2009: 641),

-

46

European Integration

system.”’ This pragmatic view, however, fails to account for any of the basic antimonies which bedevil the document. In describing the primary law of the EU, Reh writes that it is written but not codified in one single document, superior and justiciable but subject to potential constitutional conflict, constitutive of a system of government but only in a functionally restricted domain, stable as concluded for unlimited duration but inherently flexible and evolutionary, displaying a common ideology of policy objectives and governing principles but deficient when it comes to public recognition and explicit societal consent.”°

The EU’s experience of constitutionalism is thus similar to other fields of integration: scholars and participants struggle to find the right qualifying adjectives to do justice to the peculiar and confusing institutional features of the EU. In all cases, the categories of supranationalism and intergovernment-

alism fall short both descriptively and analytically.”"

CONCLUSION Summarizing the above discussion, two paradoxes characterize contemporary European integration. The first is the appearance of the EU as external to its member states. This is what prevails in the popular imagination across Europe: a European bureaucracy, standing over national governments, pushing upon them a dizzying array of rules and directives. With the myriad of Brussels-based institutions, and the peremptory manner in which the European Court of Justice hands down its decisions, it is little wonder that the EU appears in this way. Such sentiment prevails across the continent, surfacing

for instance in France’s rejection in the 2005 referendum of a neoliberal EU that threatened the existence of France’s social model.”> However, what is curious about the operations of this apparent superstate is that at its heart we find not European officialdom but national representatives and national

% This is the argument made by the Centre for European Reform. See Brady and Barysch (2007). The new double majority system, states that a measure will pass only if it condition that together this 55 per cent population. The intention of this change but without removing the need to build member states.

to be introduced gradually over the course of 2014-17, is supported by 55 per cent of member states and on also amounts to at least 65 per cent of the total EU is to give countries with larger populations more power coalitions and seek support for initiatives from other

79 Reh (2009: 646), italics in original. ?! On the ‘battle of the qualifying adjectives’ in the study of EU foreign policy, see Bickerton (2011d: introduction).

°2 C. Lequesne, La France Dans La Nouvelle Europe: Assumer le Changement d’Echelle (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2008), chapter 4, 99-122.

Europe’s Compromising Union

47

officials. The Community Method, identified as the most supranational of methods, contains within it the discretion of national authorities exercised by the Council of Ministers. Majoritarian decision-making within the Council, even in those areas formally under the rule of qualified majority voting, is rare as ministers prefer to reach an agreement amongst themselves.”* Today, the Community Method sits alongside many other ‘methods’, most of which involve greater cooperation between national governments but in the absence of supranationalism. The most recent addition to the list is Angela Merkel’s ‘Union Method’, a development resisted by smaller member states for whom any public renunciation of the Community Method is too close to an admission of their own weakness.* The first paradox is therefore the continued centrality of national executives in an integration process that appears as external to and separate from national governments. The second paradox, in a further twist of the dialectic, is that whilst national governments are central to European integration, they do not act as traditional nation states. Instead, we find a concentration of national executives and national bureaucracies, cooperating together under the shared horizon of problem-solving, with little if any role at all for national publics. There is very little ‘nation’ in the twenty-seven nation states that currently make up the EU. In the dynamics of integration, there is little evidence of the kind of negotiating and bargaining one would expect from a robust clash of national interests within state-based forums such as the Council of Ministers. The vast bulk of EU business is conducted in a consensual manner, dominated by the pursuit of compromise. National representatives and officials are committed to finding solutions to problems which they consider as technical challenges

rather than as political disagreements.”” In place of a robust defence of the national interest, we see a common pursuit of collective agreements aimed at

binding and constraining national governments. In their negotiations in Brussels, national representatives seek to limit their own wills, not to impose them upon others. Moreover, the form taken by these limits and constraints is

3 As Renaud Dehousse puts it, in a passage highlighting some of the key paradoxes of European integration, ‘why is majority voting considered central, if the number of votes actually taken

remains

low®

in R. Dehousse

(ed.)

‘Preface’,

The

‘Community

Method’:

Obstinate

or

Obsolete? (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), p. x.

?* According to Uwe Puetter, ‘policy-coordination as a method of collective decision-making in a system of decentralized political responsibilities has become enshrined as a core European “method”. It now firmly exists alongside the classical Community method and the latter’s focus on integration by law’. In U. Puetter, ‘Europe’s Deliberative Intergovernmentalism: The Role of the Council and European Council in EU Economic Governance’, Journal of European Public Policy, 19/2 (2012):

161-78 (162).

33 Puetter develops the term “deliberative intergovernmentalism’ to capture this particular feature in negotiations within fora such as the European Council or meetings of the Council of Ministers. Puetter (2012: 1603 6),

48

European Integration

that of abstract rules and norms, of a technical rather than a political nature. Participants themselves, when asked, tend to view themselves as problemsolvers rather than as political agents as such. Existing theoretical approaches each seek, in their own way, to efface one of these two paradoxes. Those theories that push the EU into either an intergovernmental or a supranational mould have the effect of reducing the first paradox to either its appearance of supranationality (neofunctionalism) or to the reality of a state-centred EU

(intergovernmentalism).

Neither is

able to properly mediate the relationship between appearance and reality, between form and content. As was shown, both readings are plausible, making the choice between either reading almost a matter of personal taste and disposition. What often seems decisive is whether one is optimistic or pessimistic with regard to Europe’s political and social development. Cafruny and Ryner rightly observe that the concept of European integration is not an ‘innocent’ one but rather is tied to a certain set of assumptions about the rationality of modern politics. For those who associate further integration with overall societal modernization and progress, pauses in integration appear as unwelcome

and atavistic expressions of special inter-

ests and of old-style European realpolitik. For those more pessimistic about the capacities for fundamental improvement in the governing of human societies, any lack of progress in European integration is taken as further evidence of the unwaveringly Hobbesian nature of political life. Much as E. H. Carr did with international relations, we can divide European integration theorists into utopians and realists. Hoffman’s work on Europe fits most closely into the pessimistic vein. Contemporary constructivists, in their work on the formation of European identities, appear as far more optimistic and hopeful. With regard to the second paradox, we see state-based negotiations conducted between national officials and national representatives appearing as a technical rather than a political process. European integration theories once again tend to efface this paradox by highlighting either the technocratic form or the socio-political content of European integration. Theories of multi-level governance and policy networks uncouple European integration from problems of power and interest, preferring to deploy ideologically neutral terms like governance, networks, and subsystems. Other cognate approaches, such as principal-agent analysis, study European integration through the lens of delegation theory. They consider reasons why national governments delegate power to supranational agencies. They explain this with reference to the desire of national governments to reduce the transaction costs associated with interstate cooperation. They focus on the dynamics of delegation rather than the wider forces that shape state preferences in the first place. In their attention to the institutional rules and practices of the EU, these approaches reproduce at

Europe’s Compromising Union

49

face value the depoliticized and technocratic manner in which fundamental changes in European societies appear to us at the EU level. In contrast to those governance approaches, neo-Marxist theorists bend the stick entirely in the other direction. They stress the correspondence between the expansion in EU-level competences and the European economy’s move towards a neoliberal order. Bastian van Appeldorn, for instance, has argued that the EU is best viewed as the institutional expression of an emerging transnational capitalist class. This has taken the form of an alliance between big business and Europe’s political elites, facilitated by the tireless endeavours of the shadowy European Roundtable of Industrialists. Van Appeldorn writes that ‘conventional integration theories tend to focus largely on the institutional form of the integration process, thus ignoring the question of its socioeconomic content, or the “social purpose” underlying European order’.’° Peter Cocks argues along similar lines. He situates European integration within a longer-term historical process of capitalist development. In a manner analogous to modern nation states, the EU’s functions are ‘to provide the political infrastructure for the expansion of the productive forces...in capitalist societies’ and to act as ‘an appropriate means for legitimating the

power necessary to maintain the social relations integral to these societies’.”” In these approaches, we find that either the form of integration is being collapsed into its content (neo-Marxism) or the content is being assimilated into the form (governance approaches). Once again, we lack a way of relating form to content so as to explain why such process of social and political change should appear as a technical and apolitical development. Drawing on the above account of the EU and the identification of these paradoxes, this book argues that we can aspire to a holistic account of integration whilst still grasping its peculiarities by theorizing European integration as a process of state transformation. European integration is best understood as a process of cooperation undertaken not by nation states jealous of their sovereignty and their national prerogatives but by member states, entities whose self-understanding is inseparable from pan-European-level cooperation and policymaking. These member states are characterized by national executives and administrations whose main orientation is towards the cooperative decision-making process itself. As Thomas Risse has put it, ‘Germany, France, Italy, or the Netherlands are no longer simply European states. They are EU states in the sense that their statehood is increasingly defined by their EU membership’.”® It is through this revised account of the

e

B, van Appeldorn, ‘“l'ransnational Class Agency and European Governance: The Case of

the European

Roundtable of Industrialists’, New Political Economy, 5/2 (2000):

157-81

(158).

"7 P, Cocks, “Towards a Marxist Theory of European Integration’, International Organization,

34/1(1980): 1-40 (4).

"M Risse (2004: 163),

|

50

European Integration

state that we are able to explain the peculiar combination of supranational appearance and state-based reality that characterizes the EU and has been recounted at length in this chapter. The following chapters will expand upon the idea of member statehood in more detail, first in theory (Chapter 2) and

then as a specific historical development of the state in Europe (Chapter 3).

2 The Member State Paradigm It is a remarkable instance of civic tolerance to accept being bound by precepts articulated not by ‘my people’ but by a community composed of distinct political communities: a people, if you wish, of others.'

INTRODUCTION Chapter 1 argued that existing approaches to European integration struggle to grasp the different paradoxes which together make up the integration process. Supranational in its appearance, the EU in fact rests upon the intensive and expansive cooperation of national officials and national representatives. And though dominated by states, it lacks the attributes of a conflictual and politicized community of independent nations: its operations proceed largely by consensus. Conflicts—when they occur—are treated as problems to be solved rather than as competing interests to be balanced. We also saw in Chapter1 that existing theories of European integration efface these paradoxes by reducing the EU either to its technocratic form or to its state-based content. This book argues that in order to properly grasp both the form and content of the EU we need to look more closely at transformations that have taken place at the national level. It is in the complexity and contradictions of the contemporary state in Europe that we can begin to unravel some of the mysteries of European integration.

This book understands European integration as a process of state transformation, from a Europe of traditional nation states to one of member states. This chapter focuses on the concept of member state, outlining its main features and the various ways in which it contrasts with other forms of state, namely the modern nation state. The chapter considers the different ways of conceptualizing the state and argues that we should think of the state as not * J. H, H. Weiler, “In Defence of- the Status Quo: Europe’s Constitutional Sonderweg’, in J. H. H. Weiler and M. Wind (edn), Exropean Constitutionalism Beyond the State (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 200), 20,

52

European Integration

just a coercive actor founded on legitimized violence but also as a distinctive community of association. In this way, states are based both on material power and on ideas that are able to bind a community of human wills together. Looking specifically at member statehood, we see that what gives this form of state its distinctiveness is the practice of limiting national power through commitments and obligations beyond the state. The EU is best understood not as an idealistic project aiming to replace existing states in Europe but as a

creation of member states that places limits upon the exercise of national power. One of the most articulate attempts at understanding the EU in this way can be found in Joseph Weiler’s work. He calls these national acts of selflimitation the EU's principle of ‘constitutional tolerance’. To clearly establish the novelty of this form of member states, the chapter looks at the different ideas about limiting power that have been a feature of writings on the modern state, from Montesquieu through to Madison and Tocqueville. The chapter argues that there is a crucial difference between their conception of limits and those of member states in the EU. For modern nation states, limits were understood as internal expressions of sovereignty. For today’s member states, they are thought of as external constraints upon sovereignty. The appearance of the EU as external to states is thus a product of this internal shift in the nature of statehood: national power is no longer limited by popular will but seeks instead to limit that will via external constraints and rules. This denotes above all a change in the relations between state and society in Europe which is explored in this chapter conceptually and will be investigated from the historical perspective in the following chapter.

MEMBER

STATEHOOD

AS LEGAL

TITLE

The concept of the member state is commonly used in reference to European integration. It is taken to mean simply those nation states that are members of the European Union. As with the more general discussion regarding membership of international organizations, the term member state is thus mainly a juridical one. For this reason, we find the term used in legal documents, notably the treaties signed by national governments that regulate their relations with each other in the framework of regional integration. In the entry for ‘member state’ in the Dictionnaire Critique de l’Union Européenne, the term is defined as a legal title conferred upon an applicant state after that state has demonstrated beyond doubt that it has met the publicly-given criteria for membership of the EU.“ These criteria were ? Yves Bertoncini, Thierry Chopin,

Anne

Dulphy, Sylvia Kahn, and Christine Manigand

(eds), Dictionnaire Critique de PUnion Européenne (Paris: Armand

Colin, 2008),

153-6.

The Member State Paradigm

53

formalized at the European Council summit in Copenhagen in 1993 and have become known as the ‘Copenhagen criteria’. ‘Obtaining the status of member state enables all such states’, writes Yves Bertoncini in the Dictionnaire, ‘to benefit from the same rights and be subject to the same obligations

as stated in the European treaties’.’ Member statehood is thus a legal title to be added onto that of nation state and it is associated with an EU-specific set of rights and duties. Prior to membership, a state remains purely a nation state. Subsequently, and rather abruptly at a given date it becomes a member state. This notion of member statehood as an EU-specific legal title was given extra emphasis in the Lisbon Treaty where for the first time an article referred specifically to a member state’s right to leave the Union and thus to give up this title and revert to its original status as merely an ‘ordinary’ nation state. Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty states that ‘any Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements’. Bertoncini highlights that in light of this, and considering the procedures for membership, ‘the fact of obtaining the title of member state of the EU is a full expression of sovereignty on the part of applicant states’.* A less juristic conception of the member state is deployed by Simon Bulmer and Christian Lequesne in their opening chapter of their seminal book, The Member States of the European Union. Their main argument is that member states need to be defined not just as national governments, serving as gatekeepers of the European integration

process, but also as the sum of all political actors and institutions within a state.” However, what the authors are really suggesting is that what matters is having a broad understanding of the nation state. Their use of the term member state is determined mainly by the fact that the nation states they analyse are all members of the EU, not by an explicit treatment of the term itself.® The starting point of this chapter is that as well as being a legal title, member statehood is also a historically specific and distinctive form of state. It can be differentiated conceptually and in practice from earlier forms of state, most notably the modern nation state. * Bertoncini et al. (2008: 154).

* Bertoncini et al. (2008: 154). * They write that ‘here we use the term “member state” as shorthand to comprise all political actors and institutions within a member state’, in S. Bulmer and C. Lequesne (eds), The Member

States of the European Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2. Another short but very suggestive attempt at conceptualizing the term member state can be found in Sbragia, Alberta (1994), ‘From “Nation-State” to “Member State”: The Evolution of the European Community’, In P. Lützeler (ed.), Europe after Maastricht: American and European Perspectives (Oxford: Berghahn Books). C Their focus on member states docx of course have à larger rationale tied to the nature of EU studies. They focus on member stuatew In order to rectify an otherwise lopsided focus on EU Institutions and EU policymaking. See Balmer and Lequesne (2005: 23),

54

European Integration FORMS

OF STATE

AND

STATE

TRANSFORMATION

In order to develop this idea of member statehood as a form of state, it is necessary to situate this argument within existing scholarship on the state. The chapter makes two main arguments concerning its treatment of the concept of the state. Firstly, without jettisoning entirely a realist conception of the state, the chapter does reject a view of the state as an unchanging entity whose essence can be distilled in its control over the legitimate exercise of violence within a given territory. Highlighting the important contribution made by neo- Weberian scholars such as Charles Tilly and Theda Skocpol, the chapter takes issue with their focus on violence as the key feature of the state. Conceptually, this book is interested in forms of state and processes of state transformation rather than the state as such. There is a parallel here with the way Rogers Brubaker lifts the terms nationhood and nationalism from a reified and essentialist reading of the nation.” Inspired by Andreas Osiander’s work on systemic political change, the chapter approaches state transformation in terms of an evolution in the particular combination of material and normative power that makes up the state.® As a combination of coercion and consent, the state is a highly protean form. In its investigation of state transformation, the book focuses on changes in ideas that underpin the state as a particular kind of community. This does not ignore the institutional or class dimension of change but embeds particular institutional designs within a wider normative universe.” The chapter argues that the modern nation state contained two key ideas that served as the basis for an internal normative unity: popular sovereignty and nationhood. Member statehood is a very different form of state where the relationship between state and society is 7 Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). In contrast to Brubaker, the approach adopted here does not collapse the state purely into a set of institutional determinations, actors, and ‘fields’, a move that repeats some of the problems of the neo-Weberian approach. Brubaker's own view of the nation and nationalism is ‘as a practical category, institutionalized form and contingent event’ (Brubaker 1996: 7). The author thanks one of the anonymous reviewers of an earlier draft of the manuscript for drawing his attention to Brubaker’s work. ® Osiander defines the state in the following way, making clear that as a concept it belongs to a specific and relatively brief period of modern human history: ‘the term “state” implies the idea of a central supreme decision-making agency that both possesses means of coercion and claims recognition on the part of those subjected to it. The latter form a group that is unambiguously and exclusively associated with the central agency as well as being explicitly considered a community’, Andreas Osiander, Before the State: Systemic Political Change in the West from the Greeks to the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5. This association of coercive power and collective identification is a specific feature of the state and something we do not find expressed in the same way in political systems before the state, notably ancient Greece and Rome, the Europe of Christendom, and of absolutist monarchs. ? This point is made at length in Christopher Bickerton, ‘Europe’s Neo-Madisonians: Re-

thinking the Legitimacy of Limited Power in a Multi-Level Polity’, Political Studies, 59/3 (2011):

659-73 (esp. 663-4).

The Member State Paradigm

55

constituted through the construction of external norms and rules that limit and constrain the discretionary exercise of national power. Taking up Joseph Weiler’s work on the EU, we see how this idea can give to European integration a certain internal moral coherence. Returning to scholarship on the state, one of the problems of European studies, and of international relations generally, has been the frequent use of a reified conception of the state. That is to say, in arguing that world politics is moving beyond nation state towards a more complex order of global governance, or in suggesting that European integration signals the death knell for the nation state in Europe, there has been a tendency to use as one’s point of comparison a simplified conception of the state. The so-called “Westphalian state’ is taken as the general representative of a world of states, and anything that seems not to fit with this Westphalian model is seen as suggestive of a

move beyond nation states.'® This is particularly prominent in work on the EU where the discussion is framed in terms of the retreat, return, or rescue of the nation state. The emphasis in these accounts is less on the state itself and more on identifying its place and its power vis-a-vis EU institutions. Work in international politics is often similar, placing nation states at the ‘government’ end of the spectrum and everything else at the ‘global governance’ end."' Rather than providing an accurate account of regional or global dynamics, these views reinforce an idealistic account of European and global politics as a slow but progressive move beyond the atavism of traditional nation states. They reinforce in this regard an idea that European integration has given to itself via the speeches and writings of its supporters. This is the idea that the EU represents a historical break with the violent nationalism of the first half of the twentieth century and manifests a willingness to go beyond the nation state model in matters of policymaking and of political morality.'* This

"9 As Osiander argues, this also works backwards. IR tends often to project a fixed conception of the state back onto earlier historical epochs. For his account of this problem, see Osiander (2007: 1-31).

' For a well-known account claiming a shift from ‘government to governance’ in world politics, see J. N. Rosenau and E.-O. Czempiel (eds), Governance Without Government: Order and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). See both the introduction and Mark W. Zacher’s chapter entitled “The Decaying Pillars of the Westphalian Temple: Implications for International Order and Governance’. Key texts in international relations that seek explicitly to historicize the concept of the state and draw out the implications of a historicized account of statehood for our understanding of world politics include the work of Robert Cox, Christian Reus-Smit, and John Ruggie. In particular, see Robert Cox, Approaches to World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chapters 6 and 7; Christian ReusSmit, The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity and Institutional Rationality in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); John G. Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity: Essays on International Institutionalization (London: Routledge, 1998), chapters 2 and 7.

|

!* See for instance Catherine Gulsun, Un Sens À l'Europe: Gagner la paix (1950-2003) (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2003).

56

European Integration

association of European integration with a movement beyond the state belies the way in which the regional integration process corresponds to a process of state transformation, a point made most forcefully by Alan Milward in his 1992 book. Milward’s own way of framing the discussion, however, was in terms of the ‘rescue’ of the nation state by the European Coal and Steel Community and the Treaty of Rome and his conceptual treatment of the state is rather simplistic. Instead of thinking of the state as an unchanging entity caught between collapse and resurrection, we can approach it in the manner that Brubaker does the concept of the nation. Brubaker observes that the nation ‘is so central and protean a category of modern political and cultural thought, discourse and practice that it is hard indeed to imagine a world without nationalism’."* He continues by saying that ‘precisely because nationalism is so protean and polymorphous, it makes little sense to ask how strong nationalism is, or whether it is receding or advancing. What he is interested in instead is how nationalism is being ‘reframed’. It is a similar interest which motivates this inquiry: it investigates not whether the state is receding or advancing but rather how it is being transformed. This interest in transformation faces some difficulties when it confronts the detailed historical sociological work done on the state by the likes of Charles Tilly, Michael Mann, and Gianfranco Poggi.'* The ambition behind much of this work, and particularly the collaborative work by Theda Skocpol and her colleagues, was to provide a non-reductive account of the state. Believing that research on the state had for too long been dominated by neo-Marxist and pluralist approaches that reduced the state to being merely an instrument of social classes or of interest groups, Skocpol et al. argued that in fact the state was as much an actor as an arena and often had interests at odds from those of

society at large.'” Stripping the state from both an idealized social contractarian account and one that saw it as little more than the tool of capitalist rule, these neo-Weberians sought to erect it as a stand-alone object of study.'® In doing so, however, they drew heavily on the work of Otto Hintze and Max

‘? Brubaker (1996: 10). 14 Charles Tilly, ‘Reflections on the History of European State-Making’ in C. Tilly (ed.), The Formation of Nation States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975);

Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume One: A History of Power From the Beginning to AD 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Gianfranco Poggi, The State: Its Nature, Development and Prospects (Cambridge: Polity, 1990).

!> Theda Skocpol, ‘Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research’ in P. Evans,

D.

Rueschemeyer,

and

T. Skocpol

(eds), Bringing

the State Back

In (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1985), 3-43. '* In Tilly’s words, ‘a portrait of war makers and state makers as coercive and self-seeking entrepreneurs bears a far greater resemblance to the facts than do its chief alternatives: the idea of a social contract, the idea of an open market in which operators of armies and states offer services to willing consumers, the idea ofa society whose shared norms and expectations call forth certain kinds of government’. In Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol (1985: 169),

The Member State Paradigm

57

Weber and as a result tended to assume that the specificity of the state rested

upon its monopoly on the legitimate exercise of violence.'” This view is articulated most famously in Weber’s lecture on ‘the profession and vocation of politics’ but it is also elaborated on at length in the historical essays of Otto Hintze.'® Gianfranco Poggi, in a similar vein, argues that ‘we can redefine the prototypical political figure as not so much a bandit as a warrior, availing himself of the military superiority he and his retinue enjoy over an unarmed, military [sic] ineffective population, not just to terrorize the latter but to rule

over it.'” Charles Tilly argues that ‘war makes states’ and that the four main activities of states are all related to violence in some way: war-making, statemaking (defined as the elimination of rivals), protection, and extraction.”° Whilst able to conceptualize the relative power and autonomy of state institutions as a dependent variable, these neo-Weberian approaches are not so useful in theorizing state transformation as such. In order to grasp the dynamics of transformation we need to identify the tensions and contradictions within the concept of the state as change springs from the attempted resolutions of these contradictions. In addition to its coercive aspects, the state is also a repository of ideas and norms. Ît is, as Martin Loughlin argues, a particular community of association. In his words, ‘the state...is an expression of the realm of the political’.”' In this respect, the specificity of the state is not so much the way in which it has managed to legitimize violence but in its representation of the idea of the autonomy of the political realm: a realm constituted only by a community of human wills, reducible neither to private economic power nor to force. Specific institutional features of the state, such as the separation of powers, law, or the constitution, are thus material expressions of what is in essence an associative phenomenon. This is well demonstrated in the cover of Hobbes's famous work, Leviathan: the figure of the king

” As well as focusing on violence as such, there was also a general interest in the state’s extractive and controlling relationship to society at large. Rather than the state being no more than an assemblage of governing institutions, it was the ‘continuous administrative, legal, bureaucratic and coercive systems that attempt not only to structure relationships between civil society and public authority in a polity but also to structure many crucial relationships within civil society as well’. Skocpol (1985: 7), quoting Alfred Stepan’s The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). '8 Max Weber, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 309-69. Otto Hintze, The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). For a more contemporary view that highlights the dependence of European state formation on military, strategic, and spatial constraints, see Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (London: Penguin, 2002). Bobbitt's focus is on the ‘strategic imperatives’ that animate constitutional innovations (p. 83).

' Poggi (1990: 5). 20 Tilly, in Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol (1985: 170, 181). In Bobbitt’s book he paraphrases Tilly's argument thus: 'state structure appeared chiefly as a by-product of rulers’ efforts to acquire the means of war” (Bobbitt 2002: 96).

! Loughlin (2010: 194),

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European Integration

has tiny images of individual citizens tattooed upon his body, emphasizing the connection between state power and those individuals that together make up the political community. This view of state power as both a political phenomenon (command of wills) and a material one (monopoly over force) is given in

Machiavelli’s famous account of rulers as centaurs: half-man, half-beast, with the human element corresponding to the need for consent and the bestial

element to the exercise of violence.“* This same tension was taken up by some Marxist theorists who tried to move away from a purely instrumental view of the state. In 1978, Nicos Poulantzas asked why a capitalist state should take the

form of a liberal democratic and representative state.”> What escapes those accounts highlighting violence as the distinctive characteristic of the state is this difficult reconciliation of coercion with community. By focusing on the different ideas that serve to bind the state together as a community of wills, we can understand processes of state transformation and distinguish between different forms of state. In the case of the modern nation state, the dominant norms are those of nationhood and popular sovereignty. Emerging in the late eighteenth century and developing over the course of the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth century, both these ideas served as a basis for integrating the associative community of the state and thus uniting the material and ideological components of statehood. The result is that these modern nation states were characterized by a high degree of internal integration and cohesiveness and were marked by a sense of self-sufficiency in their relations with other states. 2 Machiavelli puts it thus in chapter XVIII of The Prince: ‘You should know, then, that there are two ways of contending: one by using laws, the other, force. The first is appropriate for men, the second for animals; but because the former is often ineffective, one must have recourse to the latter. Therefore, a ruler must know well how to imitate beasts as well as employing properly human means. This policy was taught allegorically by ancient writers: they tell how Achilles and many other ancient rulers were entrusted to Chiron, the centaur, to be raised carefully by him. Having a mentor who was half-beast and half-man signifies that a ruler needs to use both natures, and that one without the other is not effective’. In N. Machiavelli,

The Prince (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 61.

?* Poulantzas puts it in this way: ‘As regards the capitalist State, the question may be formulated as follows: why, in general, does the bourgeoisie seek to maintain its domination by having recourse precisely to the national-popular-State—to the modern representative state with all its characteristic institutions? For it is far from self-evident that the bourgeoisie would have chosen this particular form if it had been able to tailor a State to its requirements’. In Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: Verso, 2000 [orig. 1978; 1980 English edition]), 12 n. For another extended reflection on state transformation from a neo-Marxist perspective, see Bob Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State (Cambridge: Polity, 2002). Jessop’s own account is

focused on three aspects of state transformation: restructuring, recalling, and retemporalizing. Though valuable, his work is often heavily jargon-laden. For instance, he writes about structures and institutions that they are ‘always constituted in and through action’ and thus are always ‘tendential’. These tendencies, he insists, are themselves tendential, concluding that ‘this doubly tendential nature of tendencies means that the very presence of the tendencies . . . depends upon the extent to which the social forms that generate them are themselves reproduced’ Jessop (2002: 34).

The Member State Paradigm

59

In this way, they contrasted with earlier political systems where the relationship between coercion and community was very tenuous. In his work on political systems before the state, Andreas Osiander remarks that a feature of the Middle Ages in Europe was the gap between the geographically vast normative universe of Christendom and the highly localized feudal relations of coercion and domination. Political rule was characterized by the absence of any unity between the ideas that gave the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor their legitimacy and the material relations of force that were present in the Lord-vassal relation. As Osiander puts it, this situation ‘favoured supra-local powerholders’ such as the Pope or the Emperor: ‘Since no one expected them to be in effective control except when they were physically present, their

nominal dominations could be very large indeed’.** A consequence of the gap between norms and material power was that ‘in even if called sovereign, were not seen as creating existed independently of rulers, it existed even if worse; indeed medieval people must often have felt

the ancien régime rulers, society’. Instead, ‘society they were ineffective, or that society survived not

because of its lords but despite them’.? In the imaginary of the modern nation state, in contrast, the relationship between the state apparatus and its domestic population constituted the privileged bond that defined the vocation and social purpose of national rulers. As Christian Reus-Smit observes, the ‘moral purpose of the state’ was transformed between the American Revolution on 1776 and the socio-political upheavals of 1848. ‘Legitimate states came to be seen as those that expressed and furthered the interests of their citizens, understood not as subjects but as

sovereign agents’. Their understanding of the social bond was firmly vertical, tying governments to their people, rather than horizontal in the manner of the

divinely ordained social order of the Middle Ages.*® This bond gave a necessity and urgency to the concept of the national interest and served as a check upon the relations between states. As noted in the introduction, the relationship between the individual state and the wider society of states was a dialectical

one.”” As Gianfranco Poggi put it, ‘the political environment in which each state exists is by necessity one which it shares with a plurality of states similar in nature to itself. Each state is one unit lying next to others within a wider ?* Andreas Osiander, ‘Before Sovereignty: Society and Politics in Ancien Régime Europe’, Review of International Studies, 27 (2001): 119-45 (122).

3 Osiander (2001: 144). For a more extended account of political systems the modern state, see Andreas Osiander, Before the State: Systemic Political from the Greeks to the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 26 Reus-Smit (1999: 127-8). On the ideus that underpinned the age of states, see Reus-Smit (1999: 87-121).

before the arrival of Change in the West 2007). absolutist European

? On this dialectic between the emergence of modern notions of society and its accompanying individualist ontology, see Reus Smit (1999:122-7). The seminal work on modern individuality is probably by Charles ‘Taylor. See Charles Tuylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: THarvard University Press, 1989).

60

European Integration

entity, the state system’.”* However, the international society of the modern nation state expressed the independence of its members; it was not a check upon that independence. In Poggi's words, individual states may form part of a wider state system but ‘it is not the state system that brings them into being, but on the contrary their independent existences which generate the system’.*’ Napoleon expressed a similar sentiment in more prosaic terms when he declared at the peace of Campo Formio in 1797 that ‘France is no more in need of recognition than the sun’, meaning that France’s existence was selfevident and as little determined by the judgement of outside powers than was the existence of the sun.”

THE

IDEA

OF MEMBER

STATEHOOD

Focusing on states as a unity of coercion and community draws attention to

those norms that bind the state together and it serves as a basis for differentiating one form of state from another. As a form of state, what are the ideas or the single overarching idea that bind the member state together? The critical idea is that membership is constitutive of statehood and is not just a post hoc recognition of the status quo as it was for Napoleonic France. The more traditional elements of statehood remain—central government, identifiable territory, and a population—and member states retain a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of violence. But the integrated state-society relationship of the modern nation state is increasingly relativized and seen as only part of what makes up the state. The other part is membership of international organizations, regional organizations, and generally the participation in a multitude of activities that appear as external to the state itself and function as material constraints upon its liberty. Some of this is captured in popular writings on the changing nature of state sovereignty in Europe. Robert Cooper has redefined sovereignty as a term no longer denoting independence or separation but expressing instead the act of participation. Sovereignty is, he has written, not a right but a privilege that belongs to those ‘with a seat at the table’.”! The state thus identifies itself through participation rather than as something existing prior to the participative moment itself. A similar idea is 8 Poggi (1990: 23). ?3 Poggi (1990: 23-4). % Georg W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 367. Cited in Chris J. Bickerton, Philip Cunliffe, and Alex Gourevitch (eds), Politics

Without Sovereignty: A Critique of Contemporary International Relations (London: UCL Press, 2007), 26.

*! Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century (London: Atlantic, 2004), 44.

The Member State Paradigm

61

present in Robert Keohane’s description of state sovereignty as a ‘bargaining resource: it is something the meaning of which is revealed only at the point of

interaction between states.** Compared with previous eras and epochs of state formation, member statehood resembles a little the early modern period and in particular the role played by the royal court in absolutist Europe. As Norbert Elias observed in his book on state formation, the term ‘society’ in the early modern period referred to the multiple royal courts of Europe’s ancien régimes, each of which were modelled on the French court. ‘Social communication between court and court, that is within courtly-aristocratic society’, he writes, ‘remained for a long time closer than between courtly society and other strata in the same

country’ in spite of the advent at the time of absolutist rule.”” This only disappeared from the mid-eighteenth century onwards when the emergence of national bourgeoisie severed the cultural and aesthetic ties that existed between aristocratic elites. In Elias’s words, ‘the national form of integration displaced that based on social estate’.>* The ideas and beliefs governing the orientation towards membership in a Europe of member states are, however, very different from those which animated the elites of absolutist Europe.’” For member states, participation is driven less by a concern for social status than by the goal of constraining the exercise of national power. Limiting power through the imposition of external constraints upon national governments is the guiding idea of member statehood. This does not mean erecting global or European supranational authorities that have the power to coerce and direct national wills. The idea is not to replace in toto existing states. Rather, the act of limitation is one of self-limitation. The member state realizes itself qua member state in the creation of multiple limits to and constraints upon the exercise of national power. The most sophisticated application of this idea to a study of European integration is Joseph Weilers work on European law and his notion of ? Robert O. Keohane, ‘Hobbes’ Dilemma and Institutional Change in World Politics: Sovereignty in International Society’, in H. H. Holm

and G. Sorensen

(eds), Whose

World

Order? Uneven Globalization and the End of the Cold War (New York: Westview Press, 1995), 177.

*3 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000 [orig. 1939]), 190.

"* Elias (2000: 190).

5 Elias writes that the driving motivation behind the creation of courtly society was that of rank, status, and culture: ‘the absolutist-courtly aristocracy of other lands adopted from the richest, most powerful and centralized country of the time the things which fitted their own social needs: refined manners and a language which distinguished them from those of inferior rank. In France, they saw, most fruitfully developed, something born of a similar social situation and which matched thelr own ideals: people who could parade their status, while also observing the subtleties of soclal Intercourse, marking their exact relation to everyone above and below them by thelr manner of greeting and their choice of word—people of “distinction™ and “civility™" (Llian 2000:

189),

62

European Integration

‘constitutional tolerance’.”® What motivated Weiler’s work in this area were the debates and discussions surrounding the idea of a European Constitution, particularly prominent in the early 2000s. Though this had long been a goal of European federalists, Weiler noted that it was entering into mainstream discussions with figures such as Jacques Chirac and Joscka Fischer making

public pronouncements on the merits of a European constitution. Weiler argued that this was both empirically misleading and normatively dangerous. Empirically, he noted that in the history of European integration there was never a strong thrust towards the creation of a single, federal European state. Going back to some of the founding documents, he noted that even the Treaty of Rome stated explicitly in its preamble that the signatories were ‘determined to lay the foundations of an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’.>’ The use of the plural, Weiler argues, is crucial: ‘Not one people, then, nor one state, federal or otherwise’.’® As well as signalling an empirical break with the founding ideas and processes of European integration, the normative dangers of such constitutional talk in Europe are clear to Weiler. He notes that inevitably they signal an ushering back in—via the backdoor—of the nationalistic currents of earlier European history. He remarks that already in the constitutional debates a militarist tone has arisen, particularly in the talk of

constitutional ‘patriotism’.> %® Weiler has articulated this idea in a variety of different places. A succinct account of it, from which most of the following quotes are taken, is to be found in J. H. H. Weiler, ‘In Defence of the Status Quo: Europe’s Constitutional Sonderweg’, in J. H. H. Weiler and M. Wind (eds),

European Constitutionalism Beyond the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). A more extended discussion of his ideas can be found, in the form of collected essays, in Joseph H. H. Weiler, The Constitution of Europe: ‘Do the New Clothes Have an Emperor?” and Other Essays on European Integration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Weiler’s work on ‘multiple demoi’ has inspired a number of scholars on European integration. For an extended discussion of these ideas, see Kalypso Nicolaïdis and Robert Howse (eds) (2001), The Federal Vision: Legitimacy and Levels of Governance in the US and EU. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

7 Weiler (2003: 9).

°8 Weiler (2003: 10). Weiler also noted that empirically, the evolution of the EU since Maastricht has been away from a simple model of pan-European constitutionalism. The challenges to this idea have been numerous: challenges from states altogether in the form of the Maastricht Treaty, challenges by individual states on the acquis communautaire, challenges from national constitutional courts, challenges from within the European Court of Justice itself and finally challenges from domestic publics whose dissatisfaction with the EU has been manifested in many ways. ‘Euroscepticism’, writes Weiler, ‘is not just a European vice’. In Joseph H. H. Weiler, “The Reformation of European Constitutionalism’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 35/1 (1997): 96-131. A similar argument about the retreat of constitutional ideals is made in Kalypso Nicolaïdis and Andrew Moravcsik, ‘Keynote Article: Federal Ideals and Constitutional Realities in the Treaty of Amsterdam’, Journal of Common Market Studies, Annual Review, 36 (1998): 13-38.

79 Weiler (2003: 17). He writes that ‘there is.. . an exquisite irony in a constitutional ethos which, while appropriately suspicious of older notions of organic and ethnic identity, at the same time implicitly celebrates a supposed unique moral identity, wisdom and yes, superiority, of the authors of the constitution, the people, the constitutional demos, when it wears the hat of constituent power’ (p. 18).

The Member State Paradigm

63

Responding to these discussions, Weiler argues that a close observance of the EU will reveal an already-existing constitutional architecture that has a number of unique features. These features are, in Weiler’s view, a remarkable and important step forward in terms of both politics and morality and need to be both recognized and preserved. Crucially, he notes that the distinguishing feature of the EU’s existing constitutional settlement is that it appears as something outside of states but in fact is an expression of an internal transformation in national moral sentiment. Contrary to federal and non-federal constitutions, the EU’s version does not integrate norms and power to ensure compliance with those norms. Instead, the normative order is elevated to the European level whilst power remains national. As Weiler puts it, ‘European federalism is constructed with a top-to-bottom hierarchy of norms, but with a bottom-to-top hierarchy of authority and real power’.*® The force of these European constitutional norms is thus turned against national political spheres and aims to transform the way European societies understand themselves, their relationship to each other and to outsiders. For Weiler, European integration has little to do with the creation of pan-European institutions or with the regulation of relations between national governments in the manner of an international organization. It is rather a project of moral renewal of national societies, pursued by national governments. The question of democracy is for Weiler only a second-order one that depends upon the moral stature of domestic societies. A Europe of intolerant and bigoted people will, via the representative procedures of democratic politics, remain intolerant and bigoted. Citing the case of Jorg Haider in Austria, Weiler observes that ‘a

democracy of vile persons will be vile’.*" Weiler thus presents European integration as a process of societal transformation, a civilizing process whereby traditional hostility to other peoples is replaced by a more tolerant and accepting attitude. Critical here is the mindset and identity of the individual, for whom the temptation of intolerant and exclusive nationalism is a constant danger rather like the call of the Sirens which so tempted Ulysses. Weiler argues that this temptation corresponds to a deep-seated human need for collective identification and his view of the EU is not that it eliminates this desire by supplanting nation states but merely that it tames and controls it. As he puts it, ‘the Tower of Babel dispersal was not a punishment but a blessing’ but at the same time ‘there should be, especially in the European tradition, an acknowledgement of the huge and destructive potential, moral and physical, of nationhood unchecked’.** The hope of European integration is that it is ‘the civilizing force which is to help keep this Eros at bay’. The EU’s constitutional architecture is, for Weiler, a valuable and positive expression of that transformation and functions as a way of

10 Weiler (2003: 9),

"

Weller (2003: 18).

12 Weller (1997: 120).

64

European Integration

disciplining European peoples, ensuring that they grant each other the necessary respect and do not fall back into their old intolerant ways. Crucially, we see that there is no movement away from European states in Weiler’s account. Rather he points us to the process of internal transformation underway domestically in Europe and how this is represented in the actions of national governments at the EU level. As Weiler explains, Constitutional actors in the Member States [national executives, officials, administrators] accept the European constitutional discipline not because, as a matter of legal doctrine, as is the case in the federal state, they are subordinate to a higher sovereignty and authority attaching to norms validated by the federal people, the constitutional demos. They accept it as an autonomous voluntary act, an act endlessly renewed on each occasion, of subordination, in the discrete areas governed by Europe, to a norm which is the aggregate expression of other wills, other political identities, other political communities.*’

With his notion of constitutional tolerance, Weiler provides us with an ethical account of member statehood. We see how the EU’s appearance as something external to states is a manifestation of their desire to limit and constrain their own powers. This desire is pursued as an act by national governments in order to improve the moral conduct and the basic human decency of their own populations. Their subordination is not to a supranational power of some kind but to each other; not to a new supranational will but to ‘an aggregate expression of other wills’. For Weiler, European integration is a process of societal change internal to European states, expressed in the form of panEuropean institutions that serve as the repositories for the shared ambitions of these self-aware and self-critical national governments.

TENSIONS

WITHIN

MEMBER

STATEHOOD

Identifying member states as specific forms of state defined by the pursuit of limits to the exercise of national power, it is worth asking to what extent this is a new development. Weiler's work on constitutional tolerance points to the attempt by national governments to institutionalize their mutual commitment to respect one another’s differences. But are not modern nation states defined by their pursuit of limitations and constraints in ways that also guard against the rise of tyrannical majorities likely to target the ‘otherness’ of national minorities? There is certainly a strong focus on limited power in much of the work done on the modern state. A theme of liberal political thought has been

* Weiler (2003: 21).

The Member State Paradigm

65

the way various social groups within society function as a constraint upon the exercise of executive power.‘* For Montesquieu both the doctrine of the separation of powers and the existence of an aristocracy as ‘intermediate power between the sovereignty of the king and the liberty of civil society

served as limitations.*> Tocqueville’s hopes were placed in the role of local associations and groups, prevalent within North American society, as checks to the expansion of governmental power.*® Republican thinkers have developed their own account of limited power, focusing on the civic virtues of citizens and

their active political participation as the best check against tyranny.*’ There is one key difference, however, between this extended interest in limited power and the way member statehood understands the act of limitation. This is that traditionally, in the minds of Montesquieu, Madison, Tocqueville, and others, these limits are ultimately understood as internal expressions of popular sovereignty. For member states, they are viewed as external constraints upon the exercise of sovereignty. In this respect, they are externalized and projected beyond the boundaries of the state rather than viewed as an internal expression of self-government and popular rule. We can see this in the case of The Federalist Papers, one of the most sophisticated attempts at creating an institutional architecture up to the task of limiting the discretionary power of a putative modern state. The goal of Madison and the other framers of the new federal constitution was to take power away from state legislatures. They had become, in Madison’s words, ‘an impetuous vortex: captured by local interests, particularly farmers, and succumbing to

their demands that the states print money in order to help debtors.*® In his Vices of the Political System of the United States, written in 1787, Madison argued that the state legislatures were turning themselves into ‘democratic

** For Locke, such a constraint ultimately took the form of a people’s right to rebel against a tyrannical government. See J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 406-28. * Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 [orig.

1748]). % A. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. A. Goldhammer (New York: Library of America, 2004), 595-9.

7" On public or civic virtue in American republican thought, see Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 65-70. More generally, on different republican conceptions of virtue, see Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (London: University of Chicago Press, 1956) and Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Volume One: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). For an extended discussion of limitations upon power as presented in The Federalist Papers, see Bickerton (2011b: 664-70). 1# For background details, see Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988), 239-87; Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present, third edition (London: Pearson, 2003), 76; Ellen Meiskine Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 204- 37,

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European Integration

despotisms’.*” Though arguing for a transfer of power to the federal level, The Federalist Papers was also concerned with ensuring that this new centre of power would itself not become despotic in its turn—hence the detailed attention given to the institutional framework of the new federal state and Madison’s famous argument about checks and balances. One reading of Madison is that—much in the same way as the EU today helps national governments insulate themselves from domestic political pressures—so the checks and balances were intended as a check upon the power of majorities within a new federal state. In the eyes of those opposing the new constitution, it merely enshrined the power of the aristocracy over the common man. The argument of The Federalist Papers in fact makes clear that the ‘institutional contrivances’ which it proposes are to be understood not as limitations of popular sovereignty but as expressions of it.>° As it was argued in The Federalist, 46, The

[anti-federalists]

must

be told that the ultimate

authority,

wherever

the

derivative may be found, resides in the people alone; and that it will not depend merely on the comparative ambition or address of the different governments, whether either, or which of them, will be able to enlarge its sphere of jurisdiction at the expense of the other. Truth no less than decency requires, that the event in every case, should be supposed to depend on the sentiments and sanction of their

common constituents.”! This conception of checks and balances, with a strong emphasis on nonmajoritarian institutions, thus serves as a guarantee against the formation of an overly strong executive, a prominent concern at the time of the consti-

tutional convention. But such limits were not presented by Madison as lying outside the polity: they were expressions of the people themselves.

¥ James Madison, ‘Vices of the Political System of the United States’, in G. Hunt (ed.), The Writings of James Madison. Comprising his Public Papers and his Private Correspondence including Numerous Letters and Documents Now for the First Time Printed, Volume 2: 1783-87 (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1901

[orig.1787]), 428.

° The term ‘institutional contrivances’ is due to Gordon Woods. He writes that in American republican thought in the course of the 1780s a split emerged between those believing in the sufficiency of individual virtue to check governmental power and those looking for extra institutional safeguards. In his words, in this time ‘a long-existing split in the American mind between what has been called the evangelical scheme and the legal scheme was now conspicuously revealed. Although many Americans in 1776 had blended and continued to blend both schemes in an uneasy combination, the events of the 1780s were forcing a separation between those who clung to moral reform and the regeneration of men’s hearts as the remedy for viciousness and those who looked to mechanical devices and institutional contrivances as the only lasting solution for America’s ills. It was a basic division that separated “unenlightened” from “enlightened”, Calvinist from Liberal, and ultimately Antifederalist from Federalist’, Wood (1998: 428). ! A. Hamilton, J. Madison, and J. Jay, The Federalist with Letters of “Brutus” (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2003), 228-9,

The Member State Paradigm

67

What emerges from this is an idea of modern constitutionalism as a process of self-binding and self-limitation but one where the active subject is in full evidence: the people limiting themselves. This comes through in one of the debates between federalists and anti-federalists recounted by Stephen Holmes. An anti-federalist asks: ‘if we believe in the sovereignty of the people, why do we accept all these restrictions®’ The answer of the Framers, Holmes recounts,

was that ‘these are not restrictions: they are the people’.°“ The difference with member statehood is thus clear. Whilst the limiting of national power is also an internal process, as Weiler remarks and as is evident from a look at the functioning of the EU itself which rests upon the ongoing actions of national representatives and officials, it is different from the acts of self-binding by the modern state. The active subject, namely the people, is not doing the binding. Rather, national governments commit to limit their own powers in order to contain the political power of domestic populations. Instead of the people expressing themselves qua constituent power through this constitutional architecture, national governments seek to limit popular power by binding themselves through an external set of rules, procedures, and norms. An internal working out of the principle of popular sovereignty that serves to unite state and society is replaced with an externalization of constraints to national power intended as a way of separating popular will from the policymaking process. Along with this fundamental difference, we can also see that the nature of the limitations themselves is different. In the case of member states, the practical expression of this idea of a self-limiting national government is through a reform of basic bureaucratic procedures. The examples Weiler focuses on when he explains what constitutional tolerance looks like in practice are illustrative in this regard. He notes that constitutional tolerance ‘is most present in the sphere of public administration, in the habits and practice it instils in the purveyors of public power in European politics, from the most mundane to the most august’.°’ Giving concrete examples, he lists different kinds of state officials—customs, housing, education, border control—all of whom could in their daily activities base themselves on the principle of constitutional tolerance. Weiler argues that in fact, whilst grand gestures at the level of heads of state may well gain the most attention, constitutional tolerance is really a matter of attitude and outlook best seen instantiated via the operating procedures of large and small bureaucracies. In his words,

"% Stephen

Holmes, ‘Precommitment

and the Paradox of Democracy’, in J. Elster and

R. Slagstad (eds), Constitutionalism and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 230.

" Weiler (2003; 21).

68

European Integration What defines the European constitutional architecture is not the exception, the extreme case which definitely will situate the Grundnorm here or there. It is the quotidian, the daily practices, even if done unthinkingly, even if executed because the new staff regulations require that it be done in such a way. This praxis habituates its myriad practitioners at all levels of public administration to their

concealed virtues.”* It is a striking fact that the practical expressions of constitutional tolerance lie in the actions and behaviour of bureaucracies. Rather than conceiving of limitations to the exercise of power as expressions of a political principle and embodied in a set of values defined by a founding constitutional document of some kind, the limits relevant to member statehood find their expression in more mundane ways. Weiler’s principle of constitutional tolerance is indeed best conceived of as an ethos for the reform of public administration more than as an idea able to bind the wills of individuals within a political community. It denotes in this way a particular conception of the state that is institutional and bureaucratic more than it is political. Rather than addressing the political bond that binds individuals to the state, constitutional tolerance addresses itself to public servants in the form of an ethic of individual behaviour. The contrast with the kinds of limitations constructed within the framework of the modern state is striking. There, the focus was on a constitutional document, a set of governing institutions that can be derived from the will of the people, and a notion of political obligation that transforms private individuals into active public citizens committed to a secular political project. Based on this analysis, we can point to two critical features of member statehood that stand out in terms of how they contrast with dominant assumptions and practices of modern nation states. The first is that central to member statehood is a presumed opposition between state and society. The purpose of limiting national power in ways that appear external to the national polity is in order that domestic populations are distanced from policymaking and decision-making. National elites seek to insulate themselves from the force and compulsion of public opinion because of the risk that ‘vile people’, as Weiler puts it, will generate vile policies. The idea of membership thus belongs to this sought-for separation between state and society. The contrast with modern nation states is striking: here the goal was to achieve a unity in what was a fractious and divided social space. Problems of economic and ideological conflict have generally been sublimated through unifying categories such as the people and the nation, even if those categories themselves have been subject to long-standing disagreements about their precise meaning.” °* Weiler (2003: 22). °> For an extensive discussion of the concept of popular sovereignty and competing interpretations of it in different strands of political and social thought, see Istvan Hont, “The Permanent Crisis of à Divided Mankind: “Contemporary Crisis of the Nation-State” in Historical Perspective’, Political Studies, 42 (1999): 166 231.

The Member State Paradigm

69

Whilst modern nation states have sought unity, member states assume division. The state-society relationship is thus reconfigured in a way very alien from traditional thinking about the state: a presumed relationship of representation is replaced by one of insulation and separation. The second feature is the way constraints upon the exercise of national power are based not upon a political ideal or principle but rather on an institutional and bureaucratic understanding of such limits. The picture we thus have of the member state, where its central principle of legitimization resides in the actions of public officials, is one of an administrative machine rather than a political community. We are in the realm of what Engels called the administration of things.® National governments tying themselves to institutional rules in order to limit their power are not replicating earlier attempts at containing majoritarian rule. Instead, refracted through the EU these attempts appear in a distorted form: as Madisonian checks and balances that lack the legitimating principle of popular sovereignty or as the multi-level and fragmented world of the Middle Ages without the unifying idea of Christendom to give that fragmentation its inner unity. Weiler’s own principle of constitutional tolerance as the supreme ethical principle of European integration is betrayed by his practical examples. They transform it into a working ethos of public administration that struggles to raise itself to an integrative principle capable of winning the allegiance of individual wills across the complex sociological terrain of European member states. As a form of state, we can therefore observe that member statehood is inherently unstable. To use the terms developed by Vincent Della Salla, it is

a hard but hollow state form.”” The hardness refers to the ability of national executives to insulate themselves from public pressures. Concentration of decision-making within executives as a consequence of European integration

and the relative weakening of national legislatures as lawmakers all give the

impression of strengthening the executive.”® As Della Salla notes, ‘hardness’ refers not just to those changes that empower the executive vis-a-vis more °® Cited in Mair (2009: 16). ” Vincent Della Salla, ‘Hollowing Out and Hardening the State: European Integration and the Italian Economy’, West European Politics, 20/1 (1997): 14-33. °* As Hussein Kassim observes, ‘With respect to the interaction between member states and the EU, there is general agreement that national governments are the most powerful member state institutions in Brussels and that they dominate, even if they do not absolutely control, the relationship between Union and the national polity, and domestic EU policy making’ (p. 287). He notes also that within national governments, the main interlocutor between the EU and domestic politics is central government i.e. the national executive. In his words, ‘central government is the dominant actor in representing national interests in Brussels and in defining and delivering policy responses to EU initiatives’ (p. 292). Hussein Kassim, “The Europeanization of Member

State Institutions’, in S. Bulmer and C. Lequesne

(eds), The Member

States of the

European Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 285-316 (287). Kassim makes clear,

however, that whilst general trends may be observable national differences are also very important.

70

European Integration

societally inclusive institutions. It also ‘refers to arguments which suggest that certain realms of decision making are technical exercises with no feasible

alternatives’.”® The hardness of the member state follows from this presumption of opposition between state and society: as national governments begin to understand their relationship to domestic societies as less one of direct representation and more that of a responsible and better informed guardian, so they will seek to make themselves impermeable to domestic interest

groups.°° This same relationship of opposition between state and society is the source of the member state’s hollowness and gives to the state form a chronic instability. Hollowness, in the political economy literature, tends to follow Susan Strange’s observation that political authority has drained away from the state: upwards towards international organizations and emergent forms of global governance; and downwards and outwards towards multinational companies and those new beneficiaries of governmental outsourcing.®’ Here hollowness refers more to the changing nature of political representation in Europe manifest in the shift from nation states to member states. Rather than integrating societal interests via the principle of representation, national governments relate to societies in a more distanced and sceptical way. They assume that representation needs to be qualified by a consideration—at the executive level—of how public expectations and desires fit with a considered, long-term, and expert-based assessment of public policies. Efficiency, as Fritz

Scharpf has framed it, tends often to trump democracy.* This dilution of representation makes for weak governments. As the mediating links between domestic societies and national governments have narrowed, it is more difficult for politicians to identify with national publics. And as political parties orient themselves towards their governing role, traditional channels of societal representation are drying up. This relative isolation of national governments generates considerable uncertainty over the nature of public needs and wishes and a general alienation of the political class from core social constituencies. This alienation works both ways as the public experiences this hollowness as a general disenfranchisement from political decision-making.

°? Della Salla (1997: 18). $9 On the conflict between representation and responsibility as two different logics of governance, see Peter Mair, ‘Representative versus Responsible Government’, MPIfG Working Paper 09/8 (Cologne: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, 2009), 1-21. 61

Susan Strange, ‘The Defective State’, Daedalus,

124/2

(1995): 55-75

(56). Strange’s own

account raises questions familiar to scholars of European integration. She notes that, regarding state power, ‘In some matters, it seems even to have gone nowhere, just evaporated' (p. 56), a familiar conundrum for EU scholars. See Chapter | for more details on this conundrum. %2 Fritz Scharpf, Governing in Europe: Effective and Democratic? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

The Member State Paradigm

71

T 11 EU institutions

National executives& officials

National population National population

——

National atlon._a

population es

Figure 2.1. European integration as a union of member states

Member statehood is thus a fundamentally unstable form of state. It rests upon presumed division between governing authorities and their constituents. The idea of limiting discretionary political power through the creation of rules and constraints beyond the state assumes a divergence of interests between

national governments and national societies. As argued above, the conflict between public passions and reason is a familiar story in political theory but one resolved within the unity of a single polity. In the case of member states, that unity is replaced with a very different idea of how states and societies relate to each other. We see a reconfiguration of political life in Europe. The main dividing line and point of tension is no longer a vertical one that separates nation states from each other nor a horizontal one that separates nation states from the supranational EU. Rather, European integration as pursued by member states rests upon the horizontal separation of national executives—in close cooperation with EU institutional settings—from domestic populations. This is presented diagrammatically in Figure 2.1 above.

CONCLUSION This chapter has argued that the process of European integration can be thought of as a form of state transformation, from traditional modern nation states to what this book calls member states. It has explored the concept of member state by looking in particular at the ideas that bind it together as a form of statehood. Arguing that we can differentiate forms of state based on an analysis of these basic ideas, the chapter defined member statehood as a form of state resting up the goal and practice of limiting national power through the

72

European Integration

creation of rules and constraints beyond the borders of the national polity. Rather than signalling a transfer of power from the national to the supranational, these rules and constraints are instantiated through repeated acts of voluntary self-limitation practiced by state representatives and officials. The chapter took up in detail Joseph Weiler's idea of constitutional tolerance, arguing that it represented the clearest articulation of this idea that binds member statehood together as a specific form of state. By looking at how this idea of constitutional tolerance rests upon a presumed conflict between state and society, where the former must tame the excesses of the latter by limiting its power over policymaking, the chapter argued that as a form of state, member statehood is fundamentally unstable. It introduces into the very heart of the concept of the state a conflict between the constituted power— the government—and the constituent power—the people—which modern democratic theory and modern constitutionalism has for so long sought to resolve. This form of state is generally seen, by Weiler and by many others, as a product of Europe’s violent history. In particular, the desire to circumscribe the power of peoples or of nations via a framework of pan-European rules is seen a necessary move given the legacy of the First and Second World Wars. On Weiler’s reading, European integration is presented as a process of moral renewal. A heightened individual self-consciousness regarding how one should treat others translates into a more sophisticated and multi-level understanding of rights and citizenship in Europe. Other scholars writing in the same vein have put more emphasis on institutional changes. Jan-Werner Miiller, for instance, has highlighted the role played by constitutional courts in the building of ‘constrained democracies’ in Europe after 1945. This development he sees as the real root of the European integration process, not the later dismantling of post-war social democracy.°* By presenting this transformation as the development of a new form of state, this chapter has suggested that the process is not one operating at the level of individual cognition but rather at the level of national societies as a whole. The following chapter will explore this idea historically by looking at the emergence of member states across time. In particular, we see that member

63 Müller writes that after the Second World War, there emerged a new ‘constitutional settlement’ that was ‘informed by the perceived lessons of the interwar period: whereas fascists (and Stalin) had tried to create peoples from above. .. the point was now to constrain existing ones. Concretely, this meant weakening parliaments and, in particular, restricting the ability of legislatures to delegate power...European integration...was part and parcel of the new

“constitutional ethos” with its inbuilt distrust of popular sovereignty and the delegation of tasks to agencies that remained under the close supervision of national governments’. In JanWerner Miiller, ‘Beyond Militant Democracy?", New Left Review, 73 (January-February 2012): 39-47 (43-4).

The Member State Paradigm

73

statehood—and the contemporary EU—has less to do with the legacy of pre1945 Europe than it does events and developments after 1945. What serves as a transition from the nation state to the member state is the post-1945 corporatist-Keynesian state, the dismantling of which in the 1970s and 1980s has over time given rise to its successor in Europe, the member state.

From Nation States to Member States:

À Brief History INTRODUCTION This chapter provides an historical account of the transformation undergone by Western European states since 1945. Given the breadth of the topic, the chapter is not intended to be an exhaustive account of the changes undergone by individual states in this period. Rather, it provides a synthesized account of a key shift: from nation states to member states. For all the variety in national experiences, this shift was common to all.' The analytical focus of the chapter is on the difference between the post1945 era of national corporatist states and that of member states as they developed from the 1970s and 1980s onwards. The chapter looks closely at the transition from one period to another and the political struggles associated with it. In essence, the chapter argues that the post-war national corporatist state was characterized by two contrary tendencies: on the one hand, the framework of corporatist decision-making that isolated key policymaking procedures from democratic scrutiny and represented a narrowing of democratic politics after the radical disruptions prior to 1945% on the other hand, the strong national context within which corporatist actors and institutions were embedded. Thus, whilst national executives and key social actors during the corporatist era enjoyed considerable autonomy with which to set and

! As Andrew Schonfield put it in reference to the development of modern capitalism in Western Europe after 1945, ‘when the total picture is examined, there is a certain uniformity in the texture of these societies’ (italics added). It is this uniformity which this chapter aims to bring out in what was otherwise a highly variegated set of social and political changes. See A. Schonfield, Modern Capitalism: The Changing Balance of Public and Private (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 65. ? As Mark Blyth put it, ‘social democracy is paradoxically rather undemocratic in that decision making gets concentrated in very few hands’. In M. Blyth, The Transformation of the Swedish Model: Economic Ideas, Distributional Conflict and Institutional Change”, World Politics, 54/1 (2001):

1-26 (24).

A Brief History

75

implement their goals, something which lent to this era the mark of technocracy and depoliticization, their action was nevertheless contained within an overarching social contract that firmly tied the state to domestic society. This served as a constraint upon the actions of executives and in particular it limited their ability to internationalize their outlooks and their actions.” The shift to member statehood signalled an end to the primacy of the national context that had characterized corporatist decision-making. In its place, member states were constituted upon a new base: a far narrower social contract between the state and citizens, a much weaker set of mediating social and political institutions, and a national executive and administration much more closely tied into pan-European policymaking processes. This new form of state emerged out of the crisis of national Keynesianism of the 1970s and 1980s, a crisis that struck a blow to the belief in state-managed social transformation and saw a growing scepticism about the efficacy of political action more generally. Liberated from these complex state-society relations characteristic of national corporatism, national governments over time became less bound by domestic constituents and more dependent upon international rules and norms for their own identity and sense of purpose. As noted in the previous chapter, founded upon ideas of political ineffectiveness and the dangerous place of public expectations in national policymaking, member statehood has emerged as a weak form of state. Dependent upon the authority of internationally agreed rules and norms as a basis for ruling over domestic society, member states have become very vulnerable to challenges emanating from domestic society. The chapter begins by detailing the contours of the post-war Keynesian compromise in Western Europe. It identifies the main features and tensions of the national corporatist state. It then goes on to look at the crisis in this state form in the 1970s and 1980s and national government responses to the crisis. It highlights the transformation from a corporatist social contract based on a post-1945 class compromise to a new contract based on a revised relationship

* This is what differentiates this book from Jan-Werner Miiller’s valuable reading of European integration as an extension of post-Second World War ‘constrained democracy’. There is a strong member state dynamic after 1945, evident in the technocracy of nationally managed corporatism, but this is contained by the power of the post-war social democratic consensus. In short, states were too embedded in society in this period for the member statehood dynamic to assert itself fully. As this chapter shows, it only does so when those restraints are cast away in the revising of the social contract in the 1970s and 1980s. Miiller is not wrong but the differentiation of European integration in the 1950s from what develops from the mid-1980s is important: at issue are two different processes rather than one single overarching process of European integration. The former was an expression of post-war welfarism, the latter a departure from it. For Müller's argument, see his article in the symposium published in the New Left Review around Perry Anderson's book, The New-Old

World (Müller 2012: 39-47). See also Jan-Werner

Müller, Contesting Democracy: Polltical Ideas in Twentieth Century Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). My thanks to Carlo Invernizzi Accetti for helping me clarify this point,

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European Integration

between capital and labour. Far more advantageous to the former than the latter, this new contract was forged through various attempts by national governments to liberate themselves from the constraints and obligations of the corporatist era. The chapter documents the ways in which these national governments struggled free from these constraints by dismantling corporatist bodies, reorienting them towards a new set of social functions hostile to labour, and by undoing more generally the various connections between state and society that had come to characterize life in a national corporatist state. This involved both transformations in domestic social movements and new, more limited, roles for national political parties. These changes have given rise to a new kind of state form, the member state, whose existence is more firmly tied to international rules and norms and is more tenuously connected to domestic societal interests.

THE

POST-WAR KEYNESIAN CONSENSUS IN WESTERN EUROPE

One of the most marked features of post-war European society immediately after the Second World War was its poverty. Accounts of the years after 1945 focus on the pressing needs of people for the basic essentials of life: food, housing, and healthcare. In the opening of Elio Vittorino's powerful 1949 novel, The Women of Messina, post-war Italy is described as a country of wanderers: people travelling the length and breadth of the country looking for loved ones or looking for a new life.* In his account of Europe after the Second World War, historian Tony Judt writes that Western European society in the late 1940s resembled in many ways pre-World War One Europe. In his words, ‘post-war Europe was still warmed by the fading colours of the 19th century economic revolution that had almost run its course’.” Europe at this time was closer to the cloth-cap industrialism of the previous century than the polished consumerism of the Golden Age that was to come.® The material transformation of Europe—from the early 1950s through until the 1970s—is thus staggering. À continent dominated by food shortages in the * E. Vittorino, The Women of Messina (London: London Magazine Editions, 1975 [orig. 1949]). Interestingly, Vittorino’s story is also about the chequered attempt by Italian officials to reassert state control over self-organizing groups, in this case workers’ cooperatives, in the war’s aftermath. ° T. Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: William Heinemann, 2005), 227. $ Barry Eichengreen writes that ‘in 1950, many of the continent’s residents heated their homes with coal, cooled their food with ice, and lacked even the rudimentary forms of indoor plumbing’. In B. Eichengreen, The European Economy Since 1945: Coordinated Capitalism and Beyond (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), 1.

A Brief History

77

late 1940s was, a decade later, struggling to manage the growing food surpluses that over time gave rise to the much-maligned Common Agricultural Policy of the European Community. Alan Milward remarks that ‘taking Western Europe as a unit...the period [of 1945-68] is statistically distinct as an episode in income growth’.” Richard Kuisel writes of the French case that ‘the trentes glorieuses were unprecedented...[T]he post-war boom was a rupture with the past’.® GDP growth for most Western European countries in the period 1948-68 was twice that of the interwar period of 1922-37° According to economic historian Angus Maddison, the 1950-73 period stands out in comparison to growth rates as far back as 1820 and as far ahead as 2000. At no point before or after did Western Europe grow as fast. The same holds, though even more dramatically, for what Maddison calls ‘peripheral

Europe’.'° For individuals as well as governments, the period was ‘uniquely prosper-

ous’.!' GDP growth per capita in the United Kingdom rose at an annual average of 2.5 per cent during the period 1950-73, falling only in 1951, and the UK was one of the countries whose growth in this period was the least exceptional relative to earlier periods.'? Other countries posted more striking results. GDP per capita growth in West Germany and in Italy for the same period was 5 per cent; in France it was 4 per cent and in Austria 4.9 per cent. Western Europe’s regional average was 4 per cent; the following period average, for 1973-2000, was only 1.8 per cent. As is well known, this leap in income was the basis for a rapid rise in the consumption of consumer durables such as washing machines and televisions. And it saw a marked rise in government expenditure on social welfare programmes. Generalizing on the gains experienced across the second half of the twentieth century as a whole, the economist Barry Eichengreen writes that ‘gross domestic product per capita, what the income of a typical resident of Europe will buy, tripled...Hours worked declined by one-third...Life expectancy lengthened as a result of improved nutrition and advances in medical science’.!” The bulk

7 Alan S. Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State (London: Routledge, 1992), 21. $ R. F. Kuisel, ‘French Post-War Economic Growth: À Historical Perspective on the Trends Glorieuses’,

in G.

Ross,

S. Hoffmann,

and

S. Malzacher

(eds),

The

Mitterrand

Experiment:

Continuity and Change in Modern France (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), 18.

° Milward (1992: 21).

19 Cited in Eichengreen (2007: 16). Europe’s periphery was Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey. !! Milward (1992: 21). Cited also in Fichengreen (2007: 17). For the figures in general, see Angus Maddison’s seminal work on quantitative macroeconomic history. Much of his work is available online. See for instance chapter 3 of Monitoring the World Economy available at . ‘2 Milward (1992: 21).

'Y Eichengreen (2007 1),

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European Integration

of these advances were concentrated in the period running from the early 1950s through to the early 1970s. Whilst these figures are significant, this chapter focuses on the form of state-society relationships that developed in the post-1945 Keynesian era. Whilst economists have long debated whether or not this period constituted

à fundamentally new kind of capitalist system,'“ it certainly corresponded with a new kind of state, the national corporatist state. That the post-war period should give rise to a new political form that remained national was by no means evident. The Second World War was, as Milward noted, a catalyst for ideas on how to reorganize European society along non-national lines. “The scattered proposals during the war for the merging of European states into a federation’, writes Milward, ‘were but one small part of a tumult of wartime proposals for the post-war reconstruction of state and society”."* Judt remarks that ‘the re-emergence in post-war Europe of self-governing democratic states .. . came as something of a surprise’'® and Walter Lacquer notes that ‘visitors to Europe soon after the end of the war were . . . struck by the fact that, almost immediately after the fighting was over, the various nation-states,

big and small, retreated into their own shells’.!” National in form, the post-war state was also organized upon a presumption of strong governmental involvement in economic life. A defining feature of the national corporatist state was the assumption that governments, not markets, were responsible for the management of both production and consumption. Whether or not governments followed policies that were strictly Keynesian is unclear. Schonfield notes that whilst Keynes’s ideas were certainly relevant in the post-war period, Keynes himself had been uninterested in growth as such. His concern, reflecting the situation of the 1930s, had been about ‘how to bring a given production apparatus into full use’.'® This was rather different from the challenge of the post-1945 era which was about adding repeatedly to the productive apparatus itself. Nevertheless, a pillar of the post-war era was government intervention aimed at stabilizing the business cycle. Economic historians have debated whether or not national governments used demand or supply-side tools in their interventions but have not contested the fact of intervention itself. Key supply-side policies included investment in human

14 See the reference to this debate in Schonfield (1969: 61-7). ‘* Milward (1992: 27). Milward also remarks that the form the post-war nation state in Western Europe took—liberal parliamentary democracies in the main—was equally surprising: ‘In the 1930s, the many alternatives to liberal parliamentary democracy were close at hand, and democracy itself not a notably successful form of governance. Defeat and occupation were not merely a collapse in the face of overwhelming military superiority; in most cases they were also a collapse of internal morale’ (Milward

'* Judt (2005: 256).

1992: 26).

7 W. Lacquer, Europe in Our Time: A History 1945-1992 (London: Penguin, 1992), 54-5,

# Schonfield (1965: 64).

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79

and physical capital and the use of interest rate policies in order to encourage private investment in physical capital. Milward notes that explicit demand management was less important than the extensive and multiple transfer payments made by national governments through the framework of the welfare state. This itself, as in the case of Italy’s Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, was not about demand management as such but had significant stimulative effects on local and regional economies."” Crucial to understanding the post-war nation state in Europe was that it rested upon a revised set of assumptions about the relations between state and society and about the role of specific groups within society. The social contract upon which the Keynesian consensus was built was a corporatist one: it involved a specific compromise between business and labour and a prescribed role for the state in mediating this compromise. Corporatism itself can be understood as a system of interest representation based upon a set of compromises between competing social groups aimed at the stabilization of the capitalist system.”° As Charles Maier has shown, attempts at introducing a corporatist compromise emerged as early as the 1920s. The shift from what Maier calls ‘bourgeois Europe’ to a corporatist Europe was the focus on his study of political and social change in France, Germany, and Italy after 1918. Maier recognized, however, that these developments were embryonic and a full political embrace of corporatism from both sides (business and labour) did

not occur until after 1945.% The political quid pro quo of corporatism, which formed the basis of the post-war social contract, is given by Geoffrey Garrett and Peter Lange:

' Herbert Kitschelt, Peter Lange, Gary Marks, and John D. Stephens, the Duke-based ‘gang of four’, argue in their introduction to the 1999 edited volume Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism that the fiscal policies of social democratic governments during the Golden Age were ‘actually relatively austere’ (p. 7). See the introduction by H. Kitschelt, P. Lange, G. Marks, and J. D. Stephens (eds), Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). See also Milward (1992: 35).

9 One of the best known definitions of corporatism is given by Phillippe C. Schmitter. In his words, corporatism is ‘a system of interest representation in which the constituent units are organized into a limited number of singular, compulsory, noncompetitive, hierarchically ordered and functionally differentiated categories, recognized or licensed (if not created) by the state and granted a deliberate representational monopoly within their respective categories in exchange for

observing certain controls on their selection of leaders and articulation of demands and supports’. In Philippe C. Schmitter, ‘Still the Century of Corporatism?’ in Frederick B. Pike and Thomas Stritch (eds), The New Corporatism: Social-Political Structures in the Iberian World (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974), 93-4. For an extended discussion of

corporatist forms of state in the context of international organization, see Robert W. Cox, ‘Labour and Hegemony’, International Organization, 31/3 (1977), 385-424. 2! “The corporatist structure that was emerging in the 1920s as the instrument of social reconsolidation became a goal In lts own right by the end of World War II'. In Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeols Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Haly in the Decade After World War 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 14,

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European Integration

organized labour regulated its behaviour, eschewed militant strategies, and promoted labour market efficiencies; in return, business committed itself to reinvesting profits into the national economy in order to maximize growth in

national wealth.** In this way, recounts John Goldthorpe, labour was guaranteed ‘protection against the material and psychological ravages of large-scale and long-term unemployment and was offered the prospect of sharing in the benefits of sustained economic growth’.”* Business owners in turn were given the reassurance that the economy would remain ‘essentially capitalist, and no grave threats were posed to the key institutions of capitalist society nor thus to the associated structures of power and advantage’.** The corporatist model in West Germany was enshrined in the Co-Determination Law of 1951: labour representatives were legally entitled to sit on the management boards of large industrial firms, giving them a formal say in the running of the company, what in German is known as Mitbestimmung (co-decision making). At the national level, corporatism was associated with negotiated pay settlements between trade union leaders, core national government executives, and managers. In the UK, representatives of workers and managers would pass through the doors of the Prime Minister's office, 10 Downing Street, for wage-related negotiations and for talks on other issues. Beer and sandwiches, it was reported, would be served up in the heyday of British corporatism.”° The national corporatist state was thus premised upon a particular social contract that saw unprecedented degrees of wealth redistribution. The primary vehicle for such redistribution was of course the national welfare system. We see this reflected in national government accounts. Looking at figures for government spending as a proportion of GDP, we see a significant increase between 1950 and 1973. According to figures cited by Milward, government spending in France was at 23.2 per cent in 1938, rose to 27.6 per cent in 1950,

and then had risen far more significantly to 38.8 per cent by 1973. In the Netherlands, the figures for the same years were 21.7 per cent, 26.8 per cent, and 45.5 per cent respectively. For the UK, they were 28.8 per cent, 34.2 per

cent, and 41.5 per cent.”° What drove this increase in spending were government transfers. These took a variety of different forms, reflecting the specific

? G. Garrett and P. Lange, ‘Political Responses to Interdependence: What’s “Left” for the Left?’, International Organization, 45/4 (1991): 539-64 (545).

# John. H. Goldthorpe, ‘Problems of Political Economy After the Postwar Period’, in C. S. Maier (ed.), Changing Boundaries of the Political: Essays on the Evolving Balance Between State and Society, Public and Private in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 365.

24 Goldthorpe (1987: 365). 2> For the argument that even in the heydays of the Keynesian consensus in the UK corporatism never really managed to take root in Britain, see W. Hutton, The State We're In (London: Vintage, 1996), 46-52.

76 Milward (1992: 35).

A Brief History

81

national histories of welfare spending prior to 1945.%” In the UK, the key moment was the five years after the end of the Second World War, though social insurance coverage was already high in the UK prior to 1945 after the publication of the Beveridge Report in 1942. In the Netherlands, the welfare system was developed in the main in the years from 1951 to 1957; in Italy, it was a little later, 1955-60.°* Whilst social insurance schemes were the main tool for providing welfare provision, government spending was also channelled through other means, through the provision of public housing for example. Far from being simply a product of technological progress, or a mere ‘catching up’ by European economies after the ravages of the Second World War, the post-war national state that emerged was based upon a new kind of contract binding citizens to their states. It was as much a political development as it was a transformation in national economic policy. As Sheri Berman notes, Ruggie’s phrase of ‘embedded liberalism’ to characterize this new post-war model misses the extent to which it is based upon a set of social

democratic premises.?” Central to the post-war nation state was a specific class compromise that balanced expectations and interests on both sides of society. As John Goldthorpe has written, post-war national Keynesianism was not just about a shift in economic analysis and doctrine. It was above all a ‘historical

compromise between contending ideologies and opposing class interests’.”° What made that compromise possible was a shared reliance and belief in the state.

CONSENSUS

AND

CONTRADICTIONS

The development of the post-war nation state in Western Europe was thus driven by a transformation in the relationship between state and society and a redrawing of the social contract in response to the historic failures of market capitalism during the 1930s and 1940s. However, it would be a mistake to assume—as Alan Milward seems to do—that these developments coincided with a revival of participatory democratic politics in Europe. “The cumulative political will of the national entity’, writes Milward, ‘determines state actions to facilitate involvement, to implant more advanced technologies, or to %7 A seminal study of the differences between national welfare state regimes can be found in G. Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), chapter 1. 28 Milward (1992: 32).

79 S. Berman, The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe's Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 188.

* Goldthorpe (1987: 364).

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European Integration

transfer labour from less productive sectors of the economy’.”' As Perry Anderson observes in his review of Milward’s argument, this assumes a ‘democracy of policy formation’ which sits uneasily with many of the political

developments of the post-1945 period.* In many ways, national governments were forced to respond directly to the demands made upon them by their domestic populations. That the British leader, Winston Churchill, was deaf to those demands explains his surprising electoral defeat in 1945. And yet, at the same time, the development of the post-war national state signalled a marked depoliticization of European societies and the consolidation of the power of national officials and national administrators over political life. The national corporatist state was thus a contradictory phenomenon: it institutionalized the role of organized labour in the national decision-making process but it also circumvented national democratic procedures by empowering corporate representatives at the expense of both individuals and those social groups that lay outside of the corporatist decision-making process. In this period, we see the development of national governments that are on the one hand tightly bound by this corporatist social contract but also a growing depoliticization of societies where direct mobilization is given up to a highly routinized and regulated form of corporatist representative politics. A more egalitarian and redistributive social contract thus coincided with a narrowing of the political spectrum. Underpinning this depoliticization were the class compromises made after 1945. Key to those compromises was the deradicalization of organized labour across Europe. In his comparative analysis of the political stabilization efforts made after the First and the Second World War, Charles Maier remarks that a key feature of the latter period was the manner in which labour had subordinated its claims about ownership of production and wages to the wider cause of national productivity. The European Left as a whole was converted to this cause. Maier remarks that the Second World War was seen by working classes in Europe as ‘less an alien upper-class cause than an arduous wait for liber-

ation’.”> He adds that ‘Communist leaders stressed anti-Nazi unity...and "! Milward (1992: 23). ? Anderson (2009: 8). Anderson notes that in later writings, Milward revised considerably his assumptions about the direct correspondence between public expectations and European integration. In a 1993 edited work, The Frontiers of National Sovereignty, he noted that ‘votes and voters are less important than our original hypothesis suggested’. What mattered in fact was less domestic political consensus and more a widespread allegiance felt by individuals towards the actions of their national governments. Defining allegiance as ‘all those elements which induce citizens to give loyalty to institutions of governance’, Milward presents us with—as Anderson puts it—a more feudal account of how European integration develops. What mattered was the support given to national governments as such, rather than the manner in which these governments represented the different interests of their societies. See Anderson (2009: 20-1).

3 C. Maier, The Two Postwar Eras and the Conditions for Stability in Twentieth-Century Western Europe’, in C. Maier, In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 159,

A Brief History

83

continuing production, even at the cost of harsh industrial discipline’.** À famous example of this was the speech given by the French Communist leader, Maurice Thorez, at Waziers in July 1945. He urged his audience of coal miners to work harder, linking greater productivity to the wider liberation effort against fascism. Producing more, he argued, ‘is today the most elevated form of class duty’.” In the preface to his last book, Capitalism Unleashed, the economist Andrew Glyn remarked that the ‘Golden Age’ boom of the 1950s and 1960s is often associated with the massive Marshall Plan transfers made by the US government to Western Europe. Glyn disagreed, noting that the late 1940s was the moment when capital reasserted its authority over labour in a way that laid the basis for the subsequent boom. In his words, ‘the boom only emerged after the restoration of employer authority in the factories and macroeconomic discipline’.*° What made this reassertion of authority possible was that the basic question of ownership over the means of production had given way to a debate over output and results. Productivity, not the social relations of production as such, was at the centre of debate. As a result, discussions were depoliticized, focused on maximizing efficiency through policy experimentation. Gone were the irresolvable conflicts around basic principles of social organization that had continued in the aftermath of the

First World War.”” The de-radicalization of the European Left was the harbinger of broader depoliticization of European society in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Occurring so soon after the propaganda wars of 1939-45, Judt writes of this change as a sudden freezing of post-war European societies. The onset of political

stability occurred ‘as suddenly as water becomes ice’.”® Across the board, postwar Western European states were marked by the distinctive lack of political experimentation. Political power concentrated itself around a set of centrist parties, Christian Democrat in the main, whose concern was above all with political and social compromise. The politics of mass mobilization that had ** Maier (1987: 159). >> M. Thorez, ‘Produire, faire du charbon’, Discours de Waziers, 21 July 1945. Accessed on 19 July 2011. Available at: .

36 A. Glyn, Capitalism Unleashed: Finance, Globalization and Welfare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. viii. Heartfield notes that in the UK the labour movement continued to support the rationing of consumption goods until 1949 and in Italy wages did not rise until the 1960s, kept down by the migration of labour from the south to the north of the country. In James Heartfield, ‘Limits of European Economic Unification’, Critique, 35/1 (2007), 37-65 (44). 7 Maier writes that ‘the second postwar era did not resume the fundamental ideological challenge to managerial control of 25 years earlier. The first postwar restoration had largely confirmed the premise that the modern industrial order must operate under hierarchical chains of command, like an army or bureaucracy. The presumption of technical rationality legitimized the economic power that ownership alone could not’ (Maier 1987: 168). 38 Judt was quoting the English historian, John H. Plumb, describing the process of political stabilization in England after the civil war. In Judt (2005: 241 n. 1).

84

European Integration

defined the interwar period gave way to an individuated politics of interest representation with little purchase on the hearts of many Europeans. Judt notes anecdotally that in Sweden the annual sale of May Day badges fell steadily from 1939 through to 1962.°” In West Germany, it was the Social Democrat Party’s attachment to both socialist ideals and to the notion of national sovereignty that made it appear so out of step with the times. The SPD leader, Kurt Schumacher, had misjudged the post-war era in retaining his sense of German national identity and interest. Adenauer’s vaguer internationalism and Europeanism corresponded better with the German population’s post-1945 retreat into privatism. The system of interest representation provided by the national corporatist state was thus very functional. Interests were defined in terms of their place in the division of labour rather than in terms of a political critique or a defence of that division of labour. Union representatives or business owners represented themselves in the bargaining process rather than any alternative vision of society. This same functionalism was characteristic of political parties. As Otto Kirchheimer wrote, political parties were considered ‘as a functionally rational instrument for the realization of current group interests’ rather than as articulations of a distinctive Weltanschauung.*® This was not true of some of the large national Communist Parties, such as the Parti Communiste Frangais (PCF), whose militants retained a strong sense of ideological cohesion. However, the actions of the Communist Parties belied their orientation towards the status quo. The French PCF pursued this goal whilst remaining on the margins

of political life, as did the Italian Communist Party under Togliatti.*! This transformation of political life was, for evident reasons, particularly marked in the Federal Republic of Germany. Otto Kirchheimer notes that depoliticization did not mean apathy. Rather it pointed to a change in the quality and meaning of political engagement. He writes that collective organizations were not disappearing throughout the 1950s, nor were participation rates in elections falling. However, ‘the intensity of such organizational and political participation is not what it was’. “The approach’, he argues, ‘has become rational and pragmatic, and there is little of the direct sense of

personal involvement or mission’.** In the case of West Germany, this decline 9 Judt (2005: 263). Mazower writes that the sales figures for May Day badges in Sweden rose from the 1960s through to the 1980s and then declined dramatically. ‘Elsewhere’, he writes, ‘the decline set in even earlier (Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Vintage, 1998), 340).

% Otto Kirchheimer, ‘Party Structure and Mass Democracy’, in F. S. Burin and K. L. Shell (eds), Politics, Law and Social Change: Selected Essays of Otto Kirchheimer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 251.

1 Judt (2005: 262).

# Otto Kirchheimer ‘Notes on the Political Scene in Western Germany’, in F. S. Burin and K. L. Shell (eds), Politics, Law and Social Change: Selected Essays of Otto Kirchheimer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 205.

A Brief History

85

in ideological mobilization was reflected in a widespread judicialization of political life. West German political life increasingly resembled a ‘universe of [legal] claims’, administered by a series of local courts created as a way of dealing with the multitude of grievances held by German citizens. Political conflict was therefore both individualized and judicialized. Kirchheimer remarks that some of the biggest issues were dealt with by the constitutional court in Karlsruhe. However, from the viewpoint of the individual citizen, its deliberations were ‘infinitely less interesting than is his individual case, pending as may be, before any of the multiplicity of social, economic, finance, labour or administrative courts which have come into existence since 1950’.*’ This same process of individualization was evident across Europe. In Italy, whilst the legal framework was missing, the same focus on individual grievance breathed new life in state agencies originally set up by Mussolini. The Institute for National Reconstruction, for instance, employed 216,000 people in the early 1950s.** As Judt argues, ‘politics in post-war Italy...whatever their patina of religious or ideological fervour, were primarily a struggle to

occupy the state, to gain access to its levers of privilege and patronage’.‘° In Italy, this change led to an ingrained system of government-sanctioned corruption. In Austria, in contrast, the system was openly regimented. Political power, and the patronage which accompanied it, was systematically divided up in Austria between the two main parties, the Socialists and the People’s Party (a new name for what had been called the Christian Socials). From 1947

through to 1966 the country was run by this coalition. As a result, this patronage system over time ‘reached deep into Austrian life, forming a chain of interlocking patrons and clients who settled virtually every agreement either by negotiation or through the exchanges of favours and appointments’.* A similar set of arrangements prevailed in the Benelux states. Here the emphasis on institutionalized cooperation and compromise had long predated this particular trend of depoliticization. However, even there, the pillarization system was recast through the actions of reformist political parties in

order to create a distinctive kind of post-war political stability.*’ Part cause and consequence of this depoliticization was a shift in the balance of power between elected representatives and state administrations. A narrowing of political life, combined with a vast expansion in the role of

Kirchheimer (1969b: 203 n.). Judt (2005: 258). Judt (2005: 258). Judt (2005: 262).

7

Judt

_—

_

—

* * ° "°

(2005:

263).

As

a general

characterization

of this period,

Judt

writes: ‘A reform-

minded Christian Democrat Party, à parllamentary left, a broad consensus not to press inherited ideological or cultural divisions to the point of political polarization and destabilization, and depoliticized citizenry; these were the distinctive traits of the post-World War T'wo settlement in Western

Europe” (Judt 2005: 263),

86

European Integration

the state, unsurprisingly led to a strengthening of state bureaucracies. As political parties established themselves as key cogs within the wider governing framework of national polities, the distinction between parties and the state became blurred. As Kirchheimer notes, ‘by enriching and consolidating the state through the realization of new social and political horizons the democratic mass party must take part in a decisive way in the continuous process in which the state renews and refashions itself’.*® Certainly, for the duration of the Golden Age period, parties such as the German or Italian Christian Democrat Parties, or the Socialist and People’s Party in Austria, became virtually synonymous with the nation state itself. As the fagade of parliamentary politics was maintained, political power was increasingly concentrated in lower-level officials. Responsibility for managing the social consequences of this cartelization of political life was invested in these officials, a particular form of political patronage known in Italy as sottogoverno, meaning ‘governing below the surface’. Judt notes that Italy in this respect resembled Fourth Republic France: both countries were ‘in practice run by un-elected administrators working in central government or one of the many para-state agencies’.*’ The steady bureaucratization of political life was matched outside of the political sphere by the prominent role played by large corporations and trade unions. In his account of corporatism in the United States, Robert Cox emphasizes that both for business and labour the reality was of increasing bureaucratization. In Cox’s words, ‘the mythology of American business is the small entrepreneur of free frontier enterprise’ but the reality ‘is the corporate bureaucrat with his executive attaché case riding the metropolitan commuter train”. Similarly, ‘the mythology of labour is heroic struggle for recognition and dignity against the bosses’ whereas ‘the reality is legislative log-rolling, bargaining trade-offs with corporate management, and administrative pro-

cesses of individual employee grievances’.”° France is an interesting case as the concentration of power within administration structures existed both as a pathological aspect of the Fourth Republic and continued as a key feature of the Fifth. Though hidden behind the play of parliamentary politics, the Fourth Republic saw an entrenchment of administrative power in France. The national assembly even gave up its political control over budgetary affairs, signing off on a loi-programme that gave state

planners direct access to state funds.”' Kirchheimer remarks that politically, the Fourth Republic looked a lot like the Third Republic but with the crucial

* Kirchheimer (1969a: 267). ¥ Judt (2005: 259-60). *% Cox (1977: 388). >! See V. Schmidt, From State to Market? The Transformation of French Business and Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 78.

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87

difference that Third Republic politics had been organically suited to the

dynamics of an incipient industrial society.>“ They were, in contrast, quite out of sync with the more modern and industrialized society that had taken

form from the 1870s onwards.”* Behind the movement of political parties and the rise and fall of ministerial cabinets, the major interest groups within France exercised power in cooperation with the state administration. Social power, recounts Kirchheimer, had migrated away from political life and into a ‘more opaque system of societal reproduction’ corresponding to national

corporatism.”* As a result, explains Vivien Schmidt, ‘the economic miracle of the Fourth Republic was created more from above than from below. And it was largely the work of the state bureaucracy’.” Knowledge of this development fed post-war public cynicism in France: ‘Increasing feelings of anomie in the face of towering private and public bureaucratic structures led to a new height of cynicism in regard to the possibilities of meaningful participation by the citizen at large’.>® Looking forwards to the Fifth Republic, we see that whilst it appeared to reinject political life with the vitality of an empowered executive, it in fact did away with the pretence of parliamentary legislative sovereignty altogether. The new constitution, writes Kirchheimer, ‘marks the high water mark for the ascend-

ancy of the administrative personnel over the political professional’.”” Summing up, he describes the French political system post-1958 as ‘a ravaged parliament with an executive power in the hands of technocratic leadership’.”® Even Charles de Gaulle’s dramatic return to public life confirmed rather than contradicted France’s drift towards public apathy and the bureaucratization of its political elite. Whilst certainly a crucial turning point, the events of 1958

*2 Otto Kirchheimer, ‘France from the Fourth to the Fifth Republic’, in F. S. Burin and K. L. Shell (eds), Politics, Law and Social Change: Selected Essays of Otto Kirchheimer (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1969), 214-15. °* For the classic account of how this modernization process transformed rural life in France, sce E. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen:

The Modernization of Rural France,

1870-1914 (Stan-

ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976). * Kirchheimer (1969c: 215). The detainers of social power were what Kirchheimer calls ‘officialdom’. It is this officialdom which ‘elaborates and increasingly also promulgates new rules and administers the realm’. As a group, it ‘consists of a congeries of professional elite groups; they are recruited by an unmerciful process of competitive selection, but as a result of the working of France’s educational system they heavily reflect a background in the upper and upper-middle classes’ (Kirchheimer 1969c¢: 277). It is this officialdom which—almost forty years later—Pierre Bourdieu was to recount in detail in his book, La Noblesse d’Etat. See P. Bourdieu, La Noblesse d’Etat: Grandes écoles et ésprit de corps (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1989).

"* Schmidt (1996: 76). Stanley Hoffmann colourfully described this transformation of the French state from protector to promoter of French capitalism as an instance of the watchdog becoming a greyhound. Cited In Schmidt (1996: 77 n. 9).

"¢ Kirchheimer (1969¢: 216). 7 Kirchheimer (1969c: 227). "* Kirchheimer (1969c: 241).

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European Integration

were far from revolutionary.”” There was no ‘organized onslaught of vital population groups on the constituted order’, Kirchheimer tells us, only an impasse brought about by the declining fortunes of French colonialism, the rise of Algerian nationalism, and an irresolute metropolitan leadership in Paris unable to sever the knot with the past. The impasse was resolved through a new constitutional settlement ratified by a majority of French men and women but written by a French high official and Gaullist, Michel Debré.°° Looking at national corporatism as a form of state, two features stand out. One is the emphasis on consensus and compromise. Central to the political systems of corporatist Western European states was the avoidance of conflict. Any disagreements were the subject of negotiation at the elite level rather than a basis for public mobilization in the streets. What made this consensus and compromise possible was the absence of ideological conflict. The main political parties were either similarly centrist in their orientations or excluded from the political game altogether (and quiescent in that exclusion). It was at this time that the US sociologist Daniel Bell wrote about ‘the end of ideology’.®! Crucially, instead of fighting over either the basic principles of social life or over the ownership of the means of production, parties and social movements differed only in the emphasis they gave to the mixed economy model that prevailed at the time. In France, there was a strong preference for indirect management of the economy through what was known as ‘indicative planning’, yet even here national ownership of industry and public-sector services was extensive. Dominating the discussion was a concern about the ends of the production process, not the nature of the production process itself. Another key feature is the power of administrative actors relative to that of national political representatives. With the attenuation of political conflict, choices appeared as technical rather than as political, making them seem resolvable by bureaucratic actors. Commenting on Sweden in the 1950s, one observer at the time noted that ‘as the general standard of values is so commonly accepted, the function of the state becomes so technical as to

make politics appear as a kind of applied statistics’.°’ The result was that administrative power found itself relatively freer from political control than in ” The economic historian of France, Richard Kuisel, reminds us that ‘the great divide in modern French economic history falls between the Third and Fourth Republics; the watershed period is 1930-1945. The Fourth and Fifth Republics distinguished themselves by their continuity’. In Kuisel (1987: 18).

69 Kirchheimer (1969c: 218). Debré was the first prime minister under the new Fifth Republic constitution.

He

was

also founder

of the École

Nationale

d’Administration

(ENA),

virulent

polemicist, and ardent defender of French Algeria. $! D. Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Harvard, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000 [orig. 1960]).

6? Cited in Otto Kirchheimer, ‘The Waning of Opposition in Parliamentary Regimes’, in F. S. Burin and K. L. Shell (ed.), Politics, Law and Social Change: Selected Essays of Otto Kirchheimer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 292-318 (312).

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89

past eras. As the legislative power of parliament was weakened, the ability to check the power of national bureaucracies fell mainly on executives. Yet as their political identities had lost their ideological distinctiveness, it became increasingly difficult for these executives to control the state administration. The traditional technique of sending a party cadre into the administrative apparatus in order to ensure its political control fails when party members themselves resemble career-driven civil servants more than they do party

militants.®’ As argued in Chapter 2, these two features reappear later as key components of member statehood. However, there are key differences between these two forms of state. Most importantly, political life in this period remained firmly attached to the nation state qua a national community of fate. In the various internal arrangements of cartelized political systems, from Austria to Italy, we see how the relations between national governments, state administrations, and national societies are firmly established via a multitude of ties. The patronage system in Italy functioned in such a way that the governing party was connected intimately with its own supporters and dependents. A vivid illustration of this is Il Divo, a film directed by Paolo Sorrentino. Based around the figure of Guilio Andreotti, Italian prime minister in the 1970s and leading figure within the Italian Christian Democratic party throughout the whole post-war period, the film highlights the personified nature of political relations in this period. On numerous occasions, Andreotti personally hands out gifts to a long line of grateful individuals and families. Evidence of corruption at the highest level, this is also the expression of a social contract of sorts, albeit one that is precarious in its reliance upon the discretion of individuals. The proliferation and depth of national ties in this period was also evident in national economic policy and in the workings of the welfare state system. In both cases, social groups were directly connected to government policies. Whilst there was little evidence of those collective national attachments that existed earlier in the century, the individualism of the post-war period coexisted with a shared national consensus around the importance of social protection. To describe this as the emergence of a new kind of citizenship, as T. H. Marshall did in the case of the United Kingdom, may miss some of the depoliticized features of the period described above.°* Yet it points to the manner in which the national framework remained as a basis for the political consensus of the boom years and was formalized at the national level as a set of social rights.

“* Otto K. L. Shell

Kirchheimer (ed.), Politics,

‘Expertise and Law

Politics in The Administration’,

and Soclal Change:

in F. S. Burin and

Selected Essays of Otto Kirchheimer

York: Columbia University Prenx, 1909), 572 B2 (377). TH Marshall, Ciéfzcrsbilpr and Soctal Class (London: Pluto Press, 1992),

(New

90

European Integration

The national corporatist state thus rested upon an uncoupling of political and societal representation from national democratic procedures. In the corporatist age, a shadowy world of top-level decision-making emerged that was inclusive of the main corporate groupings of society but was unencumbered by the public justifications and public discourses expected of nationally elected representatives and representative political parties. Based on a functional notion of societal representation, this uncoupling nevertheless had its limits. For all the depoliticization of the post-war era, its main features rested upon a specific reworking of the social contract within European states. This contract was national in form and content as it expressed a set of public expectations and a corresponding set of government obligations that together gave a vitality and clear definition to the nation state in post-war Europe. In so far as the post-war national corporatist state was based upon a bundle of rights and obligations, all administered through a multiple set of national bodies and more localized ties between individuals, it remained resolutely national in its outlook and practices.

THE

CRISIS

The economic crisis of the 1970s, which extended through into the 1980s and beyond, was almost as dramatic as the period of growth and prosperity which preceded it. After years of rapid growth, low unemployment, and modest inflation, Western European economies were faced with a reversal on all three counts: growth fell away, unemployment rose, and so did inflation. The combined rise in both joblessness and prices contradicted the prevailing assumption that a negative trade-off existed between unemployment and inflation. This view, formalized in the famous Philips curve, was contradicted by the ‘stagflation’ (high unemployment plus high inflation) that developed in the early 1970s. Looking at the figures for unemployment and inflation for Western European economies, the break-up of the Philips curve relationship in the 1970s is striking. Michael Burda and Charles Wyplosz look at patterns for Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the UK.®° In each case, the years 1965 to 1970 fit with the Philips curve prediction. The pattern then breaks down, most markedly in the years 1973-5 and 1979-81, without reasserting itself in the 1990s. Striking also is the fact that in all four cases inflation rose dramatically first, with unemployment only following in the later 1970s, 1980s, and through into the 19905s.°° %> M. Burda and C. Wyplosz, Macroeconomics: A European Text, second edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 305.

66 As the Philips curve orthodoxy fell out of favour, some economists returned to older theories of economic cycles such as the famous Kondratiev waves. These were fifty-year cycles of

A Brief History

91

This reflects the initial concern to preserve full employment levels at the expense of price stability, which gave way over time to a prioritizing of antiinflationary policies. Attempting to map these changes, the OECD developed a ‘discomfort index’: the addition of inflation and unemployment rates as a way of measuring the growing crisis. For the seven major OECD countries, the rate rose from 5.5 per cent as an average for the 1959-69 period, to 17 per cent for

the year 1974-5.°” The year 1976, Judt recounts, was something of a nadir: in the UK unemployment rose beyond 1 million for the first time since the Second World War and inflation reached almost 25 per cent; in Italy, the

economy shrank for the first time since 1945.%° Two key international events are associated with this economic crisis. The first was President Nixon’s decision, on 15 August 1971, to float the United States dollar, a move that meant holders of dollars could no longer demand that their holdings be converted back into gold. This move had been precipitated by a significant increase in US government spending as a result of the Vietnam War, which had the effect of increasing the circulation of dollars in the international economy. Faced with pressures to maintain its gold reserves in the face of growing claims by dollar holders abroad to exchange their dollars for gold, the Nixon government decided to uncouple the dollar from gold. This move effectively ended the fixed exchange rate system initiated at Bretton Woods in 1944, with a strong depreciationary effect on national currencies previously tied to the dollar. This saw a significant rise in the price of imports, generating inflationary pressure across Western economies. Inflation in non-

Communist Europe averaged at 3 per cent in 1961-9, rose to 6.4 per cent over

the period 1969-73, and hit 11.9 per cent from 1973 to 1979.°° The other key event was the dramatic rise in oil prices. The first oil price rise occurred in October 1973: oil-exporting countries of the Middle East reacted to US support for Israel in the Yom Kippur war by cutting oil production. Another price hike occurred later in 1979 in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, putting more pressure on Western oil-importing economies.”° As a result, for many people the 1970s was remembered for the pump closures and high gasoline prices. These events also pushed up general price levels as the high oil

rising prosperity and decline, with the 1970s identified—like the early 1920s—as marking the beginning of a serious economic downturn. Cited in Michel J. Crozier, Samuel P. Huntingdon, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 3.

$ Goldthorpe (1987: 363).

(* Judt (2005: 457). ““ Judt (2005: 455).

“ Hobsbawm notes that the OPEC price hikes had an opposite effect in the Soviet bloc, endowing the Soviet Union In particular (us à major oil-exporter) with an unexpected inflow of cash. See E. Hobsbawm, Abacus, 1994), 472- 3,

Age of Extremes:

The Short

Twentieth

Century,

1914-1991

(London:

92

European Integration

prices worked their way into the production process, resulting in higher goods

prices.”! Whilst the external shocks were important, the core of the crisis lay within Western European societies themselves. Writing about the French economy, Kuisel notes that by the late 1960s ‘trouble was growing from within a prosperous economy”.”” In France, unemployment began to rise after 1964 and the country’s development had been marked by the erosion of its commercial balance. According to Kuisel, ‘one counterfactual model of the crisis of the 1970s suggests that without external pressures, such as the increase in oil prices, France in the 1970s would have suffered from growing inflation and unemployment as well as slackening output’’> French economist, Robert Boyer, describes the instability in the world economy as a ‘multiplier’, rather than as a cause, of France’s internal problems. In the UK, the high growth of the 1950s and 1960s had been marred by what became known as ‘Stop-Go’ economics: the tendency for high growth to lead to balance of payments problems, resolved through devaluations of Sterling. Central to the crisis was the internal unravelling of the post-war class compromise. In this respect, the growth of the post-war decades actually came to serve as an obstacle to continued prosperity. In John Goldthorpe's words, ‘although “external shocks”—such as the Vietnam War and its financing, harvest failures, oil price rises, and so on—have certainly played a part, they are largely regarded as having exacerbated more basic difficulties which

stem from the long-term development of Western capitalist societies’.”* Reflecting the post-war compromise between capital and labour, income distribution over this period was relatively favourable to labour (reflected in rising real wages) and the entrenched position of organized labour by the late 1960s

set the scene for the unrest and struggles of the 1970s.”> At the same time, the business side of the corporatist bargain was reflected in the rapid accumulation of capital: Glyn observes that the stock of capital equipment increased by

about 5 per cent a year in the 1960s and the early 1970s.”® Over time, wage "! Though OPEC’s moves were critical, Glyn notes that the underlying issue was really the steady increase in the demand for oil in OECD economies (Glyn 2006: 10). Judt provides some details of Western Europe’s dependence on oil. In 1950, solid fuel (coal and coke) represented 83 per cent of Western Europe’s energy consumption. Oil at the time accounted for only a fraction of overall energy needs, 8.5 per cent. By 1970, the pattern of energy consumption had been reversed: 29 per cent for solid fuel, 60 per cent for oil. Judt also notes that the boom in automobiles in Europe in the post-war period had increased the reliance on oil (Judt 2005: 455).

72 Kuisel (1987: 28). 73 Kuisel (1987: 28).

74 Goldthorpe (1987: 348). 75 Glyn notes for instance that the rise of commodity prices in the 1970s impacted on workers’ real wages, limiting the increases which had been the norm in the previous decades. However, owing to their powerful bargaining position, workers were ‘able to pass part of the burden of reduced incomes onto the employers via the lower profit share’ (Glyn 2006: 10). 76 Glyn (2006: 4).

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93

pressures and growing capital outlays combined to squeeze profit margins. The subsequent attempt to revitalize profit margins pitted managers against workers and led to a prolonged period of social and economic turmoil. It was this conflict which fuelled the inflationary problems of Western economies in the 1970s and early 1980s. As John Goldthorpe argued, inflation itself is not exogenous to market economies. Rather, it is ‘the monetary expression of distributional dissent’.”” It was the return of class conflict to Western European economies in the 1970s that fuelled its inflationary problems rather than vice versa. Only a solution to that conflict would appease the inflationary

pressures.’® Whilst the debate over the exogenous and endogenous causes of the 1970s crisis is an extensive and well-documented one, it is clear that what was occurring was far more than an economic crisis. The crisis questioned all of the main features of the national corporatist consensus that prevailed across the 1950s and 1960s. The decades of prosperity were tied to a particular model of both state and society and a specific understanding of the relationship between politics and economics. They led to the formation of a specific set of assumptions, held by national populations and national governments alike, about the nature of governmental activity in the economy and about what could be expected of national governments and of national economies. They also created a distinctive set of relationships that bound individuals to collective institutions: those of their profession, their industry, their class, and their political orientation. The crisis that began in the 1970s was therefore a crisis of that model in its entirety. As Mark Mazower put it, it was a crisis of the Keynesian social contract and it was therefore as much a political crisis as it was economic, as much a crisis of governmental authority as it was one of

declining material standards.” For these reasons, it is unsurprising that the resolution of the crisis was to pass through a fundamental transformation in the national corporatist state. Solutions to the crisis thus involved a redefinition of the role of the state in social and economic life and a profound change in public expectations. Leading accounts of the crisis at the time focused on the political questions that it raised. A seminal document that focused on the problem of ‘ungovernability’ in Western societies was the Trilateral Commission’s report of 1975. Entitled The Crisis of Democracy, the report was authored by three leading political scientists from the United States, France, and Japan (Samuel P. Huntingdon, Michel Crozier, and Joji Watanuki respectively). The report 7 Goldthorpe’s claim is that ‘distributional dissent is the chief source of inflationary pressure in modern societies’ (Goldthorpe 1987: 373). 78 For a detailed account of the crisis as an internal one of accumulation rather than one prompted by exogenous shocks, see I Mattick, “T'he Crisis of the Mixed Economy’, in P. Mattick, Lconomics, Politics and the Age of Inflation (London: Merlin,

79 Mazower (1998: chapter t0),

1978).

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European Integration

identifies the crisis as one of Western society as a whole, rather than simply one associated with an economic downturn. It downplays the role of international factors, stressing instead the intrinsic contradictions within the postwar Keynesian consensus. Pointing directly to the consequences of the postwar compromise between labour, capital, and government, the authors identified ‘an overload of demands upon government’ that exceeded its capacity to respond. Post-war growth, and the opening up of the political system to working-class representation, had generated a set of expectations and claims

upon the state which it could no longer meet.”° In the words of the authors, ‘the demands of democratic government grow, while the capacity of democratic government stagnates’. That was, they claimed, ‘the central dilemma of the governability of democracy which has manifested itself in Europe, North

America and Japan’.®! Identified as a problem of an overloaded political system resulting from social compromises forged in the post-war period, the solution proposed by Crozier et al. was to replace that compromise with a new kind of contract between individuals and their governments. In Crozier’s words, the task for Western European state was to replace its national corporatist model with ‘more flexible models that could produce more social control with less coercive pressure’.®* This was to be done by having national governments relocate responsibilities away from themselves and towards individuals and the market. In particular, states had to find ways of isolating ‘longer-term and more broadly formulated purposes and priorities’ from the immediacy of the

crisis.®? In the 1970s, interest grew in alternatives to post-war national Keynesianism. One such alternative outlined by John Goldthorpe was a ‘new laissez faire’ approach. The main rationale behind this approach was a shift in responsibility away from the state as recommended by the Trilateral Commission. In Goldthorpe’s words, the laissez faire approach assumed that A modern democracy can function effectively only if the domain of politics, and hence the degree of conflictual political activity, is subject to some delimitation, and reliance wherever possible on ‘the judgement of the market’ in place of governmental decision offers an important means for achieving this.®*

Goldthorpe noted that this strategy would only work if public expectations could be transformed accordingly. The strategy demanded a reneging on the basic premise of the post-war nation state: that governments could act as forces for social improvement and could guarantee individual access to goods

% ‘Change

produces

rising expectations which

cannot

be met by its necessarily limited

outcomes’ (Crozier et al. 1975: 22).

81 Crozier et al. (1975: 9), #* Crozier etal. (1975: 9),

82 Crozier etal. (1975: 55). * Goldthorpe (1987: 367).

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such as employment, healthcare, education, and housing. Instead, individuals would have to accept that socio-economic outcomes such as employment or patterns of income distribution were beyond the reach of governmental policy. For national governments at the time, these were very unpopular claims to make. Even the most ardent defenders of free markets struggled to agree with Hayek that no moral qualities could be attributed to market outcomes. Most preferred instead to subscribe to some kind of version of the ‘American Dream’ where markets act as fair arbiters of individual effort and skill. In the words of US neo-conservative, Irving Kristol, ‘men cannot accept the historical accidents of the market place...as a basis for an enduring and legitimate entitlement to power, privilege and property’ and men cannot ‘for long accept a society in which power, privilege and property are not distributed according to some morally meaningful criteria’.®”> For policymakers at the time, the Barre plan of the late 1970s in France was a case in point: if publics could not be made to accept mass unemployment as medium-term outcome to national policies, then ‘liberal experiments’ such as Barre’s would continue to fall foul of electoral cycles. In Goldthorpe’s analysis, laissez faire attempts at redefining the post-war social contract had two options they could pursue. One was to induce fatalism into public expectations, making it seem highly unlikely that any viable alternative to status quo policies existed. Another was to invoke the necessity of outside rules and obligations. On the former, Goldthorpe noted that ‘the best strategy available to government would appear to be that of presenting its policies in such a way as to encourage an essentially fatalistic acceptance of them: that is, as policies in fact dictated by the exigencies of the new and much harsher economic world’.*® One such effort was made by Thatcher, whose categorical justification of her economic policy and its harsh consequences was given in her famous phrase: ‘there is no alternative to the market’. On the latter, Goldthorpe described the issue as being ‘whether parliamentary democracy may not ultimately need to be qualified—by constitutional restraints on the powers of “temporary” majorities—to allow continuity for those policies which. .. are essential to a free-market system and hence to upholding the “higher” value of personal liberty’.*” Goldthorpe observed that Thatcher was able to win re-election in the UK in 1983 on the back of her neo-liberal economic policy only for two contingent reasons: the national sentiment stocked up over the Falklands war with Argentina and the ill-fated Alternative Economic Strategy proposed by Michael Foot’s Labour Party—dubbed the longest suicide note in history. She had not, in his view, made successful use of either fatalism or of external constraints to policymaking.

° Cited In Goldthorpe (1987: 371), 7 Goldthorpe (1987: 470),

e Goldthorpe (1987: 375).

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European Integration

Whilst Goldthorpe seemed to believe that neither of these solutions was likely, they both in fact became central to the overcoming of the crisis of government. Fatalism and the authority of external constraints, as we shall see, have become central pillars of the new kind of state which emerged out of the crisis of post-war national Keynesianism, the member state.

THE

CONTINUED PURSUIT STRATEGIES

OF NATIONAL

This transformation occurred in various different ways across Western Europe and at different points in time. The initial response was not to dismantle the national Keynesian state but to reinforce it by expanding its activities and policies. This pursuit of national solutions to the crisis dominated the 1970s and the early part of the 1980s. Indeed, in the academic literature on political economy, the conventional wisdom of the early 1980s was that the attack on Keynesianism as a response to the crisis was confined to the United States and the UK. In continental Europe, it was argued, the predominant—and generally successful—response was social democratic neocorporatism. The failure of these national solutions, combined with the example set by the UK, was the basis for the movement beyond the post-war national corporatist state and the emergence of member states across Western Europe. The common factor in all of these national strategies was the desire to preserve the fundamentals of the post-war consensus. The priority remained that of full employment. Any movement away from that was to be compensated by the full use of welfare and insurance schemes. Only later did governments identify this consensus as the problem rather than the solution to the crisis. As Kitschelt, Lange, Marks, and Stephens note, ‘parties, unions and businesses initially reacted to the economic shocks of the 1970s as if they were cyclical economic downturns’. For that reason, ‘they applied the policy instruments that they had used in the previous era—demand stimulation, interest rate manipulation, wage restraint—but with greater intensity’.?® In the Netherlands, this approach was exemplified in the famous Wassenaar Accord of 1982—a deal that saw the Dutch unions accept the necessity of

wage moderation as a condition for renewed growth.®” In France, Valéry 88 Kitschelt et al. (1999: 4-5). % Kriese and Frey, in Hanspeter Kriese, Edgar Grande, Romain Lachat, Martin Dolezal, Simon Bornschier, and Thomas Frey (eds), West European Politics in the Age of Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 159. See also for more details, Hester Houwing and Kurt Vandaele, ‘Liberal Convergence, Growing Outcome Divergence? Institutional Continuity and Changing Trajectories in the “Low Countries”’, in Uwe Becker (ed.), The Changing Political Economy of Small West European Countries (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011).

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Giscard d’Estaing had tried early on during his presidency to force French business to adapt and improve its international competiveness by taking the French Franc back into the European ‘Snake’. His Gaullist Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac, undermined those efforts by pursuing his own Keynesian plan of boosting aggregate demand. More extensive even than what came later under the Socialist Party’s banner, Chirac’s use of traditional post-war macroeconomic strategies forced France out of the Snake in 1976. In 1975, Italy introduced the scala mobile, a flat-rate indexing system that linked wages to prices as a way of avoiding falls in real wages. In the UK, the Conservative government under Edward Heath had sought to preserve, not jettison, the mixed economy model. This was also the goal of the Labour government that followed. Only the failure of the attempts of both the main parties to keep the Keynesian model alive ushered in the Thatcherite revolution. As Judt puts it, ‘if the British political consensus collapsed in the [1980s] it was not because of ideological confrontation but as a consequence of the continuing failure of governments of all colours to identify and impose a

successful economic strategy’.”® As well as bringing the UK into the Common Market, Heath developed a British variant of neo-corporatism with the rationale that—as Mazower puts it—'if inflation was generated by unregulated corporatism, perhaps it might be contained by getting involved in encouraging or even enforcing restraint on employers and unions’.” The Labour Party in opposition at the time proposed its version of radicalized Keynesianism. At its 1973 conference, it approved a policy of compulsory nationalization for up to twenty-five of the largest manufacturing companies, with a view to improving the competitiveness of these companies via strategic government invest-

ments.”> When in power later in the decade, the Labour Party tried to stem the tide of decline of key industries (such as steel) through cartelization. A similar policy was adopted in West Germany with the cartelization of the mining industry and the extension of the co-determination laws. In 1976, the proportion of workers’ representatives in larger companies was increased from a third to half, though the casting vote remained in the hands of a chairman issued from the shareholders. Opponents to this development at the time labelled it a kind of ‘wealth compensation scheme’.”®> More radical proposals for the partial collectivization of major firms were floated in the ranks of the

* Judt (2005: 538). *! Mazower (1998: 330). Heath was unable to assert control over the unions, specifically the British miners’ union, with the outcome that ‘the very authority of the government was thrown into question and raised the basic issue of the country’s political governability’ (Mazower 1998: 330).

2 Glyn (2006: 20). ?* Glyn (2006: 18-19),

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European Integration

End of Liberalism, and more famously Hayek's 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, voiced such criticisms. More generally, public choice literature that emerged in the 1960s with works such as Buchanan and Tullock’s The Calculus of Consent pathologized notions such as the ‘public good’, arguing that these terms only served as masks for the reign of special interests. However, in this period these critiques of social democracy, what James Buchanan referred to as ‘politics without romance’, swam against the tide. They remained within the academy, unable to decisively influence national societies whose world view remained wedded to notions of material progress and modernization obtained via the activism of governments. This began to change in the 1970s as critiques of government policy, particularly within the

macro-economic field, gained political traction.'%? One seminal example is the concept of time inconsistency developed by two

Noble prize-winning economists, Finn Kydland and Edward Prescott.!°* Their argument, made in the late 1970s, was that governments—irrespective of their intentions—face an underlying problem of policy commitment due to the sequential nature of policymaking and its uneven relationship to the formation of public expectations.'° Assuming a government promises a particular

policy to its electorate, if the latter forms its expectations around that promise, the government will have an incentive—in the interests of maximizing social welfare—to renege on that promise at a later date. Used as a way of explaining the stagflationary problems of Western economies in the 1970s, the concept of time inconsistency suggested that Western democracies suffered from an inbuilt inflationary bias: with price levels resting upon public expectations, if governments could manage to fix expectations in one period then they would do so in order to gain temporary reprieve from high unemployment in the next period. The only way out of this problem seemed to be for governments to tie themselves to policies i.e. to opt for policy rules rather than political discretion. Such a reading of the crisis served as a basis for strategic responses by governments, such as the creation of new independent bodies charged with carrying out politically sensitive policies. Initially developed as short-term strategic responses to the problems of the Jate 1970s and 1980s, over time these strategies became steadily institutionalized 192 For a useful account of the intellectual convergence between conservative political scientists such as Samuel Huntingdon and the public choice school, see chapter 1 of Alasdair Roberts, The Logic of Discipline: Global Capitalism and the Architecture of Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 6-13. Roberts notes that the public choice school had the honour of being parodied in the BBC comedy sitcom, Yes, Minister. 103 Kydland and Prescott were awarded the Noble Prize in economics in 2004, for ‘their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles’, .

194 For their seminal article, see F. E. Kydland and E. Prescott, ‘Rules Rather than Discretion: The Inconsistency of Optimal Plans’, Journal of Political Economy, 85 (1977): 473-90.

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101

and coalesced into a new form of state, the member state. As scholars have shown, ideas in one period can harden into institutions in another period and short-term solutions can become sedimented over time and end up as enduring institutional structures that are difficult to replace or reform. When we compare the post-war national corporatist state with the member state, we see some important parallels. The most obvious is the degree of depoliticization present within the decision-making process: in both instances, policies are elaborated outside of the main institutions for democratic will formation, most notably the elected parliament. However, this gap between political representation through the ballot box and the actual representation of interests, common to both forms of state, exists alongside a number of crucial differences. The most important one, as noted above, is that in the period of post-war Keynesianism, the relative autonomy of national executives and officials in decision-making was contained within national social contracts whose normative commitments and policy goals were clear and vigorously defended by all involved. These contracts were not identical but had a shared social democratic character to them. In Sweden, the private ownership of business was sacrosanct, which explains why there was so much opposition to the socialization idea proposed by the country’s largest union federation in 1976. In France, private ownership was less of an issue as the state’s role in the economy was far more direct. Nevertheless, we can say that this national corporatist form of state rested upon a specific notion of state-society relations, what Claus Offe called the ‘associative relations’ of modern societies, and was characterized by a set of collective institutions whose role was to

mediate these relations.'°° As such, this was a national form of state with the social contract underpinning it made up of an extensive set of national rights and obligations. In the case of member statehood, there is no such national social contract that can contain the depoliticization of decision-making. In fact, whilst the national corporatist state was in the final analysis the expression of a particular social contract, the member state emerged out of a critique of the very idea of a social contract as the regulative norm for the exercise of public power. The importance of membership lies in the fact that national executives need to have their actions and choices bound by a non-political, non-partisan set of rules and norms. These rules need to be emptied of the kind of ideological commitments associated with the institutional apparatus of national Keynesianism. The defining feature—and virtue—of these rules is therefore that they exist outside of the politicized environment of national democratic politics, in a non-political, administrative realm.

195 In Claus Offe, ‘Bindings, Shackles, Brakes', in C. Offe, Modernity and the State: East, West (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 45.

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European Integration

The main features of member statehood which emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, each of which contrasts in its own way with the national corporatist state, are traced out below in detail. Whilst the social identity of the national corporatist state was vested in the state-society contract and the values that the contract was meant to defend, the social identity of the member state is tied up with the apolitical rules created in order that political actors be bound in ways that ensure a more effective, and less partisan, policymaking process.

THE

TURN

TO MEMBER

STATEHOOD

Having initially attempted to reform the existing national corporatist state in order to safeguard it, these attempts failed across the board in the 1970s and 1980s. From France through to the UK and Italy, national strategies ran aground, sometimes dramatically. The humbling of the British government as it went cap in hand to the IMF in 1976 was only one of many such experiences that marked national leaders across Europe during these years. In Greece, the PASOK government of Andreas Papandreou was forced to make a U-turn in the early 1980s, very similar to the one undertaken by

Mitterrand around the same time.'% Increasingly convinced of the impossibility of national solutions, governments embarked on various strategies to change public expectations and to demobilize those societal actors for whom national Keynesianism had become the natural policy choice. As Kitschelt et al. remark, ‘relative economic decline and the perceived failure of national

Keynesianism set the stage for innovation’.'°” The national institutional apparatus of organized capitalism thus became the target of governments and of private actors. Rather than part of the solution, these institutional frameworks were identified as the problem. The focus turned to untying the state from the bargain struck between labour and business in the post-1945 period. This meant reducing public expectations about the state’s commitment to full employment and reorienting public policy towards a much more limited set of monetary objectives. For all the variety in national experiences across Western Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, the war against public expectations and the struggle to transform corporatist arrangements into vehicles of public- and private-sector reform was a remarkably consistent and common theme. When the French Socialist government ran into difficulties in 1982-3, it realized it would finally have to tackle French public expectations. As Pierre Mauroy, Mitterrand’s Prime Minister at the time, put it, I want to change the habits of this nation. If 106 Mazower (1998: 358),

W7

Kitschelt et al. (1999: 6), Introduction.

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103

the French resign themselves to living with an inflation of 12 per cent, then they should know that because of our economic interdependence with Germany, we will be led into a situation of imbalance’. France, insisted

Mauroy, ‘must rid herself of this inflationary disease’."°* In fact, the national Keynesian outlook had already become outdated in French policy circles. Those advising Mitterrand to exit the EMS, devalue the Franc, and impose capital controls, were dubbed ‘the Albanians’—a label that assimilated any

kind of national strategy to a quixotic Maoist autarky.'°” Nevertheless, anachronistic as the alternative may have seemed, Mitterrand’s decision to implement the essentials of the earlier Barre plan demanded an extensive effort in societal demobilization. After decades out of power, the arrival of a Socialist Party president had raised the expectations of many across France that a

radical economic programme would be implemented.''® It was in part for this reason that France’s accommodation with the market, as marked as in other European countries in this period, was undertaken via the institutional backdoor, without much public debate and in the absence of any real public

justification.''! It was, note Culpepper, Hall, and Palier, generally presented as an outside—often European—imposition rather than a product of either governmental policy or of domestic social interests. Elsewhere in Europe, the same erosion in the idea of the state as agent of economic policy was taking place as attempts were made to dismantle the various institutions and practices that tied the state to organized interests within society. At the end of the 1970s, the Danish social democratic government collapsed as it tried to maintain an external peg for the Danish Krona in the face of continued wage inflation. The incoming government of Paul Schulter identified inflation reduction rather than employment as its number one priority, leading to a direct confrontation with Danish labour interests. The latter eventually agreed to have their wages pegged to German levels.

A similar story took place in Belgium.''? Committed to a strong national currency since the late 1940s, the Belgian Franc came under attack from

198 Cited in Hall (1987: 57). 109 Moravcsik refers to the group advising Mitterrand led by Jean-Pierre Chevenement and Pierre Bérégovoy as the Albanians (Moravcsik 1998: 270). Mazower also refers to the ‘Albanian option’ disregarded by Mitterrand in 1983 in favour of an anti-inflationary policy of austerity (Mazower

1998: 358).

!!9 Judt notes that ‘the association of control of the state with implementation of revolutionary change was so deeply embedded in radical political culture in France that the mere fact of

winning the election was itself taken as signifying a coming social confrontation’ (Judt 2005: 552).

!! See the various chapters of P, D, Culpepper, P. A. Hall, and B. Palier (eds), La France en Mutation,

1980-2005 (Parls: Presses de Sclences Po, 2006).

12 For more details, see the account provided by Paulette Kurzer, ‘Placed in Europe: The Low Countries and Germany In the luropeun Union’, in P. Katzenstein Germany in Europe (London: Cornell University Press, 1997), 116- 23,

(ed.),

Tumed

Power:

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European Integration

international markets in the 1970s as the state budget expanded in its attempt to manage internal social conflict. In 1981, Kurzer recounts, Belgium had ‘the dubious distinction of being the first and only member state to receive an official recommendation of the European Commission to address its growing

public finance deficits and rapidly rising wages’.""* In the course of the 1980s, in order to retain its currency to an external peg, the Belgian government asserted its control over wage bargaining and over organized labour in general. Wages were frozen for much of the remainder of the decade. Only in 1993, in response to a plan for a three-year wage freeze plus extensive cuts in social security payments, health care, and child benefits, alongside new taxes on property and investment income, did Belgian unions announce a general strike. This achieved a temporary pause in a long-term shift of power away from organized labour in Belgium but the secular decline in labour militancy continued. Figures on the numbers of days lost due to strikes showed a steady decline: from 132 per 1000 employees for the period 1991-5 to 63 per 1000 in

the period 2002-7."!* In Sweden a similar struggle took place after the radicalization of Swedish labour in the 1970s. Conservative governments in the late 1970s and early 1980s had been unable to challenge the prevailing social democratic consensus

but change began to take place in the course of the 1980s.'"> Leading the changes was Swedish business, organized via a powerful national association, the SAF. Mark Blyth recounts how Swedish business withdrew itself from corporatist decision-making and actively tried to split the labour movement by undermining collective bargaining procedures. Some features of the ‘Nordic model’ were revived after the deep recession of the early 1990s but by this time, the prevailing ideas within society and in government had changed. The Swedish model was thus put back together but on a different social basis. Certain features of the 1980s transition entrenched themselves, such as reductions in welfare payments, and the inter-elite trust and consensus of the postwar period had given way to a more fragmented and conflictual relationship

between government and society."!°

13

In Kurzer

(1997:

117-18).

Such

interventions

have

today

become

the norm,

as later

chapters in the book recount in more detail.

114 Houwing and Vandaele (2011: 129). '1> John Gillingham, European Integration, 1950-2003: Superstate or New Market Economy? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 190.

116 Karl-Oskar Lindgren, ‘The Variety of Capitalism in Sweden and Finland: Continuity Through Change’, in U. Becker, The Changing Political Economies of Small West European Countries (Amsterdam:

Amsterdam

University Press, 2011), 57-8. Lindgren concludes that ‘it

was therefore not so much the content of politics as its form that was re-oriented once the Social Democrats returned to power in Finland and Sweden in the mid-1990s’ (p. 58). Following Blyth, we argue here that it was the reverse: the content changed, whilst the form did not change radically.

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105

In Italy, the struggle to liberate national macro-economic policy from the multiple claims made upon it by societal actors was waged by its Central Bank’s elite team of technocrats. The break between the Central Bank and the national Treasury occurred in 1981 as the former wrestled itself free of some its wider obligations. In the course of the decade, the Central Bank continued to promote its own agenda, taking power away from political parties and

national legislatures.!!” In the Netherlands, the achievement of the ‘Dutch miracle’ through revived corporatist bargains in the 1980s occurred at the same time as macro-economic policy was reoriented towards monetary stability, a strong national currency, and controlling inflation.''® The exact nature of the corporatist arrangements thus shifted in their emphasis. From being a way of guaranteeing rising incomes for the working class, as had been the case for much of the Keynesian heyday, these arrangements became the means by which businesses were able to keep down labour costs as unions committed

themselves to wage moderation.''” Indeed, in some cases—like Finland— business actually preferred collective wage bargaining as it made it easier for

employers to secure wage moderation.'*° The liberation of national governments from their corporatist commitments thus coincided with a weakening in many of the institutions that had mediated state-society relations in the post-war period. Part of this !! For more details, see chapter 10 in K. Dyson and K. Featherstone, The Road to Maastricht: Negotiating Economic and Monetary

Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

!3 Paulette Kurzer notes that employment levels in the Netherlands are low: the rate of nonemployment is around 50 per cent. This is the result of a strong currency and high labour costs, which has had the effect of pricing certain kinds of workers out of the labour market. At the same time, Dutch firms have responded to high labour costs by investing in labour-saving technology. The Dutch state responded by covering the welfare costs of this particular model, which explains the high levels of government spending and of public debt. The economic downturn of the early 2000s put a severe strain on this Dutch model. P. Kurzer, ‘Placed in Europe: The Low Countries and Germany in the European Union’, in P. Katzenstein (ed.), Tamed Power: Germany in Europe (London: Cornell University Press, 1997), 112-15. The UK figures are interesting here. Mazower notes that in the UK, income from work as a proportion of gross household income fell from over 80 per cent of the total in the mid-1970s to 73 per cent by 1982, implying that work and income were less connected as social security payments rose to compensate for those out of work (Mazower

1998: 340).

\19 A striking example of this can be found in Italy. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, attempts at establishing neo-corporatist arrangements limiting wage inflation were made, though these pacts broke down from 1984 onwards due to disagreements between unions. In 1992, Prime Minister Guiliano Amato revived the tradition of neo-corporatist social pacts. Under the shadow of the Maastricht Treaty, which committed its signatories to monetary union, Amato was able agree with the main unions and the employers’ confederation of industry a powerful antiinflationary deal, namely the abolition of ‘the very icon of Italian industrial relations™: wage indexation. For more details, see Claudio Radaelli, The Italian State and the Euro: Institutions, Discourse, and Policy Regimes’, in K. Dyson (ed.), European States and the Euro: Europeanization, Variation and Convergence (Oxford: Oxtord University Press, 2002), 216-17.

70 Karl-Oskar Lindgren, “I'he Varlety of Capitalism in Sweden and Finland: Continuity Through Change’, in U, Becker (ed.), The Changing Political Economies of Small West European Countries (Amsterdam: Amaterdum University Press, 2011), 54.

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European Integration

development stemmed from a conscious attempt by national governments to create more atomized and compliant societies and achieving what Michel Crozier had called ‘government by distance’. As Judt remarks of the British case, ‘the Thatcherite revolution strengthened the state, cultivated the market—and set about dismantling the bonds that had once bound them together’.'*! In most cases, this liberation of national governments did not mean a wholesale dismantling of corporatist frameworks. Instead, the same institutional actors were used in order to facilitate the transformation of the state’s underlying social purpose. These changes—a weaker position for labour, greater power and freedom for business, and a relationship towards the market that was more focused on enhancing competitiveness than on taming market forces—were all achieved via rather than outside of the national corporatist framework. In many cases, the institutions of the past were preserved but ended up serving a very different purpose. Though the political role of the state was much reduced, and the hold of social actors over government policy was radically weakened, this did not mean that the administrative power of the state itself was circumscribed. In fact, the role of the state throughout this period steadily increased. In a furious book entitled Accountable to None, Simon Jenkins decried the “Tory national-

ization of Britain’.!** By this, he meant that behind the backs of the national legislature, Conservative ministers had steadily increased their administrative hold on society by stripping local governments of their powers (in particular their tax-raising capabilities) and hemming in the autonomy of the police, schools, and universities. This power was in turn vested in the Whitehall bureaucracy. Mazower notes wryly that ‘the UK’s economic “privatization”...turned out to be perfectly compatible with its administrative

“nationalization”’.!”*’ The phenomenon of the ‘quango’ (a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization) and the growing importance of independent auditing and monitoring bodies all signalled a significant shift of authority to non-majoritarian bodies. This was not a peculiar British development but was matched by similar trends across Europe. Writing in 1994, Giandomenico Majone observed the rise of what he called ‘the regulatory state’ in Europe. By this, he meant that states in Europe were transforming themselves from actors into regulators of market activities. Whether it be in the area of utilities such as water or gas, or in other kinds of goods and services, the role of the state was no longer in production directly or in public provision. Rather, its role was that of supervising and regulating the actions of private firms—hence the term regulatory state. 121 Judt (2005: 542). 122 S. Jenkins, Accountable to None: The Tory Nationalization of Britain (London: Penguin, 1995).

123 Mazower (1998: 333).

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107

What Majone’s work draws out is how this kind of administrative power is different from the power exercised by nation states in the corporatist era. From a purely functional perspective, it may seem that regulation can take place in many different ways and that the direct ownership of resources (as was the case in the post-1945 era) is simply one way—similar to others—of exercising this regulatory duty. Majone notes, for instance, that during the post-1945 decades, when European states were regulating industries by owning them directly, in the United States the regulatory practices were undertaken at a distance. In the 1980s and 1990s, Majone argues, European states began to resemble more and more the United States. There is more than a functional difference in these different regulatory traditions, however. “The purpose of public ownership’, he reminds us, ‘was not simply to regulate prices, conditions of entry and quality of service’.!** It also involved the pursuit of ‘many other goals, including economic development, technical innovation, employment, regional income redistribution, and national security’. It was part, in other words, of a broader political project for society at large. It is the retreat of the state from these other goals and from that project, consistent with its attempt to liberate itself from the obligations of the national corporatist consensus of the post-war era, that is the basis for Europe’s regulatory shift. The rise of member statehood has thus involved both a dismantling of the main institutional arrangements of post-war Keynesianism and a shift in the nature of the administrative power of the state. From a promoter of the wider goals of social democracy, the state has taken on a narrower role as regulator of market activities in a way that amounts to no more than the upholding of a set of rules and procedures designed to eliminate as much as possible the occurrence of market externalities. The importance of regulatory policymaking points to the role accorded to independent rules, norms, and institutional frameworks designed to control the actions of national executives. It is here that we can really see the difference between the national corporatist state and the member state. The institutional apparatus of the former was intended as a way of realizing the key goals of post-war social democracy: the defence of private ownership as a condition for continued investment by business in production and the focus on full employment as the key commitment of governments of all political stripes. Along with full employment came a broader set of social commitments, including the provision of unemployment benefits, health care, and housing. It was this social contract, forged between business and labour in the middle of the twentieth century and premised upon an inclusion of all key social actors, that was the basis of the post-war national corporatist state. This gave rise to a complex institutional environment at the 4

Giandomenico

Majone, "I'he Rine of the Regulatory State in Europe’,

Politics, 17/3 (1994); 77

101 (79).

West European

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European Integration

national level but one that could nevertheless be related back to the overarching set of ideas contained in the post-war Keynesian compromise. In the case of member statehood, there is no such social contract to which the state and its mediating institutions can be related. The idea upon which member states are based is that political power needs to be circumscribed in order that special interests do not dominate its decision-making. The aim is to liberate national governments from the stranglehold of organized labour. This form of state is understood in relationship to apolitical institutional frameworks within which its power is contained rather than to a model of society that the state is seeking to realize. As noted in the previous chapter, for national executives and for national officials this is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it gives them far greater autonomy than enjoyed in those national corporatist systems where discretion was still bound by the social compact of the national society in question. On the other hand, it means that they lack the overarching set of political values within which they can situate their own action. Unable to legitimize themselves via a commonly known and publicly articulated social contract, they identify themselves with the rules and norms set up in order to bind their hands. Member states are thus defined as much by these rules as by the state-society relationship itself.

CONCLUSION This chapter has charted the historical development of two state forms in Europe since 1945. It looked first at the development of the national corporatist state established on the basis of a post-1945 class compromise between business and organized labour. Whilst this state form saw key decisions being made outside of the framework of national democratic procedures, national executives, and the main societal actors remained constrained by the national context because of the nature of the post-war social contract. This contract was firmly one between a state and its citizens, enshrining an expanded set of political and social rights in a broad and inclusive concept of citizenship. The national character of post-war corporatism limited the freedom of national executives. The chapter then went on to look at how the crisis in the post-war Golden Age in the 1970s and 1980s fundamentally undid this particular social contract. Seeking to distance themselves from rising public expectations and to isolate the state from the economy, national governments set about undermining the main institutions of post-war corporatism. Intended as a shortterm strategy, these efforts over time have given rise to a new kind of state, the member state. In contrast to those who focus on 1914-45 as the critical period determining the development of the state and democracy in Europe, this chapter has

A Brief History

109

focused on the national Keynesian state post-1945 as a transitional state form. There is some continuity between the national corporatist state of the post-war decades and the member state that developed out of it, but the differences are as important as the similarities. The chapter describes how member statehood rests upon a more attenuated state-society relationship, where corporatist actors either serve to entrench market power or are marginalized altogether from the decision-making process. The political goals of the member state are far more limited and as such the administrative arm of the state has been freer to determine its own deployment. In order to secure its distance from domestic demands and public expectations, national governments have increasingly deployed their administrative powers in pan-European frameworks of policymaking. This has given rise to a situation where member states are as bound by their involvement in these collaborate initiatives as they are by the specific interests and demands of their own domestic populations. Having looked in this chapter at the domestic-level political and social changes that have given rise to the member state form, it is to this European dimension of member state policymaking that the next two chapters will turn.

Part Il

4 European Economic Integration

and State Transformation It is simply inconceivable to imagine a future Treasury minister, from either of the two coalitions competing for power in Italy, managing the public purse without the culture of stability of the Euro-Zone.' The biggest threat to the security of Poland would be the collapse of the Eurozone.”

INTRODUCTION Having considered the shift from nation states to member states theoretically and historically in Chapters 2 and 3, and having given a very general account of the paradoxes of European integration in Chapter 1, this second part of the book focuses on two policy areas central to contemporary European integration: macro-economic policy coordination and foreign and security policy. By way of a counter-argument, the chapter begins by looking at whether the degree and scope of cooperation in macro-economic policy can be explained by the pressures of regional economic integration. Given the frequency with which EU-level policymaking in this area is explained away with reference to the inescapable pressures of economic integration, it is important to consider the power of this argument. The chapter finds that whilst we have a common currency in Europe, there is no single European economy. National differences persist today in ways that are importing serious instability into the

! Claudio Radaelli, “The Italian State and the Euro: Institutions, Discourse, and Policy Regimes’, in K. Dyson, European States and the Euro: Europeanization, Variation, and Conver-

gence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 237. ? Radoslaw Sikorski, ‘I fear Germany's power less than her inactivity’, Financial Times, 28 November 2011. Accessed on 28 November 2011, Available at: .

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European Integration

Eurozone. This finding justifies our focus on transformations in state-society relations as key to understanding the evolution of macro-economic policymaking in Europe. A key message of this chapter is that we must clearly differentiate between two periods of European integration in the economic field, each of which corresponds to a specific form of state. The first period is the limited integration that took place in the heyday of national Keynesianism in the 1950s and 1960s. Some limited aspects of economic policy, most notably trade, were organized in common but the degree of integration was minimal. The second period is the much more intense form of cooperation that began in the mid1980s with the signing of the Single European Act. From the mid-1980s to this day, the remit of EU policymaking in economic policy has steadily expanded. Turning to the ongoing Eurozone crisis, the chapter argues that we seeing a confirmation—not implosion of—member statehood in Europe. As national governments struggle to manage the Eurozone crisis, their preference for external frameworks of rule grows stronger. An enduring feature of the crisis has been the way in which national governments see their fate and existence as irretrievably bound up with the EU as a whole even when the social and political cost of meeting EU commitments is staggeringly high. Life outside the Eurozone and the EU, even for the most embattled economies of the Eurozone’s periphery, seems inconceivable.

A SINGLE

EUROPEAN

ECONOMY?

The scope of economic policymaking taking place at the EU level in Brussels is unprecedented. The most recent statement of the EU’s economic strategy is the document entitled Europe 2020. Launched by the Commission and endorsed by member states in 2010, Europe 2020 covers almost all aspects of national economic life. Its ambitions are no less than the economic relaunching of Europe as a whole. In the words of the strategy, it aims at ‘more jobs and better lives’, ‘smart, sustainable and inclusive growth’, and hopes to ‘offer a new sense of direction to our societies’.” The strategy sets out five targets, each touching upon a cornerstone of economic policy: employment, research and development, environmental targets to be realized via major infrastructure projects (transport, clean energy, etc.), education, and poverty reduction. In order to achieve these targets, the Commission proposes a number of ‘flagship projects’. These include initiatives aimed at boosting innovation in Europe (‘Innovative Union’), enhancing labour market mobility across Europe and > Europe 2020: A Strategy for Smart, Sustainable and Inclusive Growth (2010) Communication from the Commission, COM(2010) 2020 final, p. 2.

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particularly amongst young people (‘Youth on the Move’), and the pursuit of a European industrial strategy that will make key European industries competitive at the global level (‘An Industrialization Strategy for the Globalization Era’). As the strategy puts it, it ‘sets out a vision of Europe’s social market

economy for the 21st century’.? The Europe 2020 strategy builds upon a pre-existing swathe of EU-level policymaking. The most important strategy to precede it was the Lisbon Strategy, launched in 2000 and described by Susana Borras and B. Guy Peters as ‘perhaps the most high-profile initiative of the European Union in the first decade of the 2000s’.° Significantly, the Lisbon Strategy brought within the remit of the EU various economic policy areas that had hitherto remained a purely national concern. Regulatory reform and corporate taxation, for instance, were ‘Lisbonized’.° The Lisbon Strategy also contained a new Growth and Jobs agenda. As Alan Milward documented, economic growth and employment had been a concern of the EU ever since its origins in the European Coal and Steel Community.” However, the Lisbon Strategy brought national governments together in an explicit effort at identifying a more unified approach to these broad macro-economic themes. This does not mean that these policy areas were removed from the remit of national governments and placed under the supranational control of the Commission. Rather, the Lisbon Strategy pioneered what is known as new modes of governance. This refers to a preference for more decentralized approaches to policy coordination. At the EU level, targets and guidelines are set whilst implementation is undertaken by national governments through individually tailored national programmes. The role of monitoring and supervision falls to the European Commission, whilst any real sanctions are left to the Council of Ministers to decide upon. In spite of this new approach to EU policymaking, it remains that the vast bulk of economic policymaking undertaken by national governments is closely coordinated at the European level. Discussing the transformations in economic policymaking in the 1980s and 1990s, Nicolas Jabko writes that ‘in less than twenty years, Brussels has become the epicentre of successive waves of reforms that have profoundly modified the economic governance structures of all the countries in Europe’.®

* Europe 2020: A Strategy for Smart, Sustainable and Inclusive Growth (2010) Communication from the Commission, COM(2010)

2020 final, p. 5.

> S. Borras and B. G. Peters, ‘The Politics of Governance Architectures: Creation, Change and Effects of the Lisbon Strategy’, Journal of European Public Policy, 18/4 (2011): 463-84 (465).

® Borras and Peters (2011: 465). 7 Alan S. Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State (London: Routledge, 1992), chapters 2 and 3. | * N. Jabko, L'Europe par le marché: Histoire d'une stratégie improbable (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2009), 27 (my translation).

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European Integration

The popular explanation for why so much economic policymaking occurs today at the European level is that this is the natural institutional complement to a highly integrated and interdependent European economy. As national economies within Europe become increasingly integrated, there is an inevitable move towards coordinating more macro- and micro-economic policy at the European level. The late Padio-Schioppa’s account of European monetary union makes this kind of functionalist argument. He argued that with a commitment to fixed exchange rates under the European Monetary System and with the elimination of capital controls under the terms of the Single European Market programme, national control of monetary policy was no longer tenable. Faced with a choice between flexible exchange rates or full monetary union, member states opted for the latter.” Refuting functionalist explanations, intergovernmentalist theories have themselves stressed the correspondence between economic integration and the development of economic policymaking at the EU level. In The Choice for Europe, Andrew Moravcsik wrote that the convergence of economic interests across European states reflected ‘fundamental trends in postwar international political economy—in particular, a fifty-year boom in trade and investment among industrialized countries’.'® ‘At its core’, argued Moravcsik, ‘European integration has been dictated by the need to adapt through policy coordination to these trends in

technology and economic policy”."' The problem with explaining the development of EU-level economic policymaking in terms of regional economic integration is that it presumes something that does not exist, namely an integrated European economy. If the transformations in economic policymaking were being driven by regional economic integration, we would expect the evidence for such integration to be particularly strong. In fact, much of the evidence points the other way, suggesting that Europe is still a collection of predominantly national economies. In his review of European economic integration, James Heartfield observes that ‘European economies are more internationally oriented than they were before the 1970s, and regional cooperation in Europe has accelerated as a consequence’. However, ‘as important as the changes in the economy have been, they do not represent an overcoming of the national development of the West European economies’.'* Heartfield blames the lack of European economic integration on the ‘retreat of capitalists behind national defences’. We can observe this in the difference in

? Cited in D. Hodson, ‘Economic and Monetary Union: An Experiment in New Modes of EU Policy-Making’, in H. Wallace, M. A. Pollack, and A. R. Young (eds), Policy-Making in the European Union, 6th edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 161.

© A. Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 3. !! Moravcsik (1998: 3).

'2 J. Heartfield, ‘Limits of European Economic Unification’, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, 35/1 (2007): 37-65 (65).

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117

European versus national budgets. In 2009 figures, the European budget amounted to 1.2 per cent of EU GDP; national budgets absorbed on average between 40 per cent and 50 per cent of GDP.'” An integrated European economy is difficult to envisage when national governments account for up to half of all economic activity within their borders. Other factors point in the same direction. In terms of labour mobility, the EU as a whole falls some way behind comparable economic units. In the EU fifteen (prior to EU enlargement in 2004 and again in 2007) only about 0.1 per cent of the working-age population changed its country of residence in a given

year. In the US, the figure was 3 per cent.'* Macro-economic indicators also suggest significant differences between national economies within the Eurozone. Average yearly growth rates for the period of 1981-2007 across Eurozone economies differed considerably. Relatively high rates, such as Ireland’s 5.4 per cent and Spain’s 3 per cent contrast with much lower rates, such as Italy’s 1.8 per cent and Germany’s at just under 2 per cent. Responses to the economic crisis that began in 2007-8 have also varied dramatically across the Eurozone as a whole. Though growth rates declined precipitously in 2009 in all Eurozone countries, the impact on jobs has been far from uniform. The tables below (Tables 4.1 and 4.2) illustrate these diverging responses to the Crisis.

Across all countries, 2009 was a year of considerable cuts in GDP growth levels. From Greece through to Germany, growth levels tumbled. Table 4.2, showing unemployment rates in these same countries, illustrates the differences between countries in terms of their response to the onset of recession. Movements in unemployment rates are products of various factors such as Table 4.1.

Growth rates in six Eurozone countries (2000s)

France Germany Greece Ireland Netherlands Spain Source: BBC/Eurostat;*

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006-2000*

1.6 3.6 -4.5 -0.1 2.0 -0.1

-2.6 -4.7 -2.0 -7.6 -39 -3.7

0.2 1.0 1.0 -3.5 1.9 0.9

2.4 2.7 4.3 5.6 3.9 3.6

2.1 1.4 4.3 6.0 2.0 3.6

average of six-year period

!* P. De Grauwe, Economics of Monetary Integration, 8th edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 10.

* P. Ester and H. Krieger, ‘Labour Mobility in a Transatlantic Perspective: Conference report’, European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, 15 April 2008. Avallable at: - http://www.curofound.curopa.cu/publications/htmlfiles/ef0826. htm>, accessed on 9 July 2011,

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European Integration

Table 4.2. Unemployment rates in six Eurozone countries (2000s) 2010

2009

2008

2007

2006-2000

France

98

95

79

84

Germany

71

78

76

88

=9

Greece Ireland

12.6 13.7

9.5 119

7.7 63

83 46

12% in 1999 down to ~9-10% Atorbelow 5%

Netherlands Spain

4.5 20.1

37 18

31 114

3.6 83

Peaked at 5.4% in 2005 ~=10-11%

Above 10% in 2004-6 in 2000-6

Source: BBC/Eurostat; figures are averages of four quarterly estimates

wage flexibility within an economy. Such differences in unemployment rates indicate fundamental differences in labour market conditions, institutions, and cultures. Perhaps the most striking difference has been the ability of both Germany and the Netherlands to protect jobs in the midst of a recession. Contrary to all other countries in the table below, Germany’s unemployment rate in 2010 was lower than in 2009. Unemployment in the Netherlands has been the lowest in the Eurozone over the course of the crisis. These two countries managed to keep job losses to a minimum in spite of the downturn by introducing a ‘Kurzarbeit’ scheme that sees workers exchange shorter

working hours for the prospect of continued employment.'° In trade, the Eurozone economy is marked by systematic differences between surplus and deficit countries.'® Looking at the figures for trade within the Eurozone, we see that four economies—Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, and Ireland—ran a surplus every year from 1999 to 2008. In contrast, we see that Portugal, Greece, France, and Spain all ran deficits over the same period. Turning to current account figures, there is a similar pattern: systematic surpluses over the period 2002-8 are enjoyed by Germany, Netherlands, Finland, and Austria whilst current account deficits over the same period existed in Italy, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and Greece. Still in terms of intraEuropean trade, it is also worth noting the limited degree to which the law of comparative advantage has asserted itself across the European economy. Presuming a high degree of economic integration, we would expect production of goods to concentrate in particular places; national borders would give way to a more functional organization in the European division of labour. Looking at what European economies produce and their trading relationships, we find that production remains strongly organized around national lines.

!> Reuters (2011) ‘Special Report: In Europe’s Squeezed Middle, Life Gets Tougher’, 21 November 2011. Available at: , accessed on 24 November 2011. ' For other trade figures, and a more general account of differences between national economies within the Eurozone, see Jean Arthuis, Avenir de la Zone Euro: L'Integration Politique ou le Chaos, Report commissioned by the Prime Minister, March 2012, Parts.

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119

Competition and trade occur between similar goods rather than as an ex-

change of different goods.'” In particular, the elimination of tariffs and nontariff barriers on the exchange of goods within Europe has had the effect of boosting intra-industry trade, meaning the exchange of goods belonging to the same industry. France and Germany, for instance, have a long-standing trade relationship in automobiles, with specialization occurring within the national car industries. In general, trading patterns within Europe resemble far more that of trade between rich countries than that of trade patterns within a single national economy. This trend also holds true if we look at the non-financial business economy as a whole. Some specialization does of course occur within Europe. Looking at the trade figures for EU member states, we see that German exports of machinery and transport equipment amounts to 27.1 per cent of the total intra-EU trade in this sector.'® In services, the UK is the largest contributor in terms of employment, with over thirteen million service sector jobs in the UK, which comes to 17.4 per cent of the EU-27 total. However, the EU’s other largest economies are not so far behind: Germany employed 13.3 per cent of the EU-27 total, France 11.7 per cent, Italy 11.0 per cent, and Spain 10.5 per cent.'” More generally, specialization within national economies includes construction for Spain and Italy, transportation and storage for the Baltic states, information and communications

services in Ireland and in Luxem-

bourg, and administrative support services in Belgium. Overall, in terms of the cumulative share of value-added in the non-financial business sector, it is the biggest economies that dominate, but without specializing amongst themselves in any clear way. When looking at specialization by member states, there is no sense in which this correlates with an EU-wide specialization. As noted in a Eurostat report, ‘some activities are relatively small across the whole of the EU, which means that even in a Member State with a high specialisation relative to the EU-27 average this activity may in fact only contribute to a small proportion of non-financial business economy value added’.*° Thus, for ” As William Molle puts it, ‘Contrary to what some had expected, the further opening up of the national markets for manufactured goods by the integration schemes of the EU and EFTA and the liberalization of GATT has not produced specialization among countries along the lines of traditional trade theory . . . On the contrary, at the beginning of the 1960s it became clear that the specialization occurred within sectors, with, for example, both countries producing cars but of different types’. W. Molle, The Economics of European Integration: Theory, Practice, Policy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 115.

‘* ‘Breakdown by Member State and by Product of Intra-EU25 and Extra-EU25 Trade Balances’, in External and Intra-European Trade, Statistical Yearbook—Data 1958-2006.

!9 “Main features of the EU-27 services sector’, Eurostat: Statistics in Focus, 78/2008, pp. 2-3. Available at: , accessed on 11 July 2010. 20 “Structural overview of the business cconomy’, Eurostat, Structural Business Statistics (SBS),

Section 2: Structural overview of the business economy. Available at: ” Austrian-born economist Gottfried Haberler, who worked alongside Joseph Schumpeter in the United States, argued that the worldwide liberalization of trade in this period (incarnated in the successive GATT tariff reduction negotiations) was far more significant in terms of contributing to growth than the regional efforts made in Europe. Timor Scitovsky described the benefits of the European Common Market as ‘ridiculously small’ whilst Hungarian-born economist Bela Balassa (of the famous Belassa-Samuelson effect discussed above) found that by 1965 the cumulative effect of the creation of the Common Market on the gross national product of its member states would have reached only about half of 1 per cent of GNP.

23 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: William Heinemann, 2005),

303. ?* Heartfield notes that Unilever (an Anglo-Dutch company) and Shell (also Anglo-Dutch) were examples but there were few others at this time (Heartfield 2007: 47).

?* For references, see G. Majone, ‘Is the Community Method Still Viable?’, in R. Dehousse (ed.),

The

‘Community

Method':

Obstinate

or Obsolete? (Basingstoke:

Majone concludes that given how widespread the EEC member states, ‘the early stages of the of the European Economic Community could impressive development of Europe during the

Palgrave,

2011),

20-1.

the economic Golden Age was, going far beyond economic integration of the six original members not have played a significant causal role in the first post-war decades’ (p. 21).

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123

Looking in more detail at the ECSC, we can see how it was a product of the concerns and tensions within the national Keynesian consensus of the day. Far from being a European alternative to the national goals being pursued in the early 1950s, the ECSC was an attempt at realizing more completely the mixedeconomy

model

of post-war

corporatism.

It was

an exercise in economic

planning—at the European level—that sought to reconcile the social commitments of post-war governments with the problem of declining competitiveness.”° That this represented a working out of the tensions within the post-war nation state comes through clearly in Alan Milward’s account of the Belgian coal industry and its role in the advent of the ECSC. Milward notes that in the Belgian political debate one of the major complaints targeted at the High Authority was that it raised the spectre of a backdoor nationalization of Belgian coal production. In Milward’s words, ‘the High Authority represented the post-war view which had come to prevail outside Belgium that government should have a constitutional role in the overall direction of an industry of such basic importance in the economy’.?” For various reasons, the Belgian government at the time of the ECSC negotiations was further behind in adoption of Keynesian macro-economic management policies and the hope prevailed in its coal and steel industry that government intervention could be limited to the continued provision of subsidies. The government, however, foresaw the need for a more profound overhaul of the coal industry, implying a confrontation with mine owners and mine workers, particularly those of the less competitive southern mine fields. This presented the Belgian government with a dilemma common to all national Keynesian states of the post-war period: how to combine the demands of capitalist modernization with those of universal social protection? From a French perspective, the ECSC was motivated by the desire to rationalize European coal and steel production but to do so in a way which created better conditions for French coal and steel producers. Crucially, this meant the breaking up of large German conglomerates that brought together

German steel producers with coal producers in the Ruhr.?® The French drive for the ECSC was thus a product on the one hand of its commitment to the need for large-scale restructuring of its own coal and steel industries. On the other hand, it expressed a realpolitik calculation about the distribution of the social costs of that restructuring. The French intention was that West Germany's coal exports would find an outlet not in France but in Belgium. It would therefore be wrong to see in the ECSC’s High Authority—as some of its * Milward notes that this attempt was, by and large, à failure. In the end, he writes, ‘the adjustment of Belgian coal mining to the realities of an interdependent world was not brought about through the supranational machinery but more brutally through the old familiar mechanisms of bankruptcy’ (Milward 1992: 108),

*7 Milward (1992: 79). “

Milward

(1992:

81).

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European Integration

critics did—a nascent form of socialism. The commitment was firmly towards the capitalist market. However, what the critics understood was that the High Authority served to manage the social cost of industrial restructuring and was for that reason an integral part of post-war social democracy. Understood in this way, we can see why the High Authority was bound—by the terms of the Treaty of Paris—to preserve ‘the continuity of employment’ and was not allowed to ‘harmonize’ living and working conditions of workers by pushing

down wages.”’ The ECSC was thus a product of the times. The supranational element of the Treaty of Paris reflected both the preference for economic planning on the part of its architects and the ideas of national governments to push the political costs of industrial restructuring onto the supranational body. The failure of the ECSC to properly function as a supranational route for industrial restructuring pointed to the constraints faced by national governments during this period. These governments remained too closely attached to their own national industrial concerns to fully transfer their allegiances to a supranational entity. The desire by national executives to avoid domestic political conflict was offset by the strength of the corporatist bargain operating at the national level. This early phase in European integration was thus driven by the competing commitments of the post-war Keynesian state: both to the market and to the welfare state. These commitments drove both the ECSC and the Treaty of Rome: two forms of pan-European cooperation shaped by the attempts of national governments to square the goals of modernization and increasing competitiveness with those of social protection and continued material prosperity. In the event, the pressure for closer regional integration was lessened by the buoyancy of the Western European economy at the time. Any restructuring that took place occurred incrementally and its social costs were managed both by an extension in welfare commitments and by the ability of the national

economies to absorb and redeploy labour shed by uncompetitive firms.”° The scope of European integration was limited by the national corporatist framework for macro-economic policy and the tensions inherent within the Keynesian consensus (capitalist rationalization versus welfare) were contained by the dynamism of the national economies in this period.

2> Milward (1992: 47). 9 Buoyant growth in this period was enough to ensure that when industries declined—such as the Southern Belgian coal industry—the fall-out in employment terms was compensated by strong job growth in other areas. Those many thousands of Italians who had been employed in the coal mines of Southern Belgium, for instance, were made redundant in the course of the late 1950s and early 1960s but were able to return to Italy and find work as this was a period of significant economic upswing in Italy (Milward 1992: 114).

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‘MODERNIZE OR DECLINE’: NATIONAL RESTRUCTURING AND THE COLLAPSE OF POST-WAR KEYNESIANISM Having been the expression of the reigning Keynesian consensus, European integration in its later incarnation dating from 1985 onwards became a key agent in the attempt by national governments over the course of the 1970s and 1980s to dismantle this consensus and replace it with a set of monetary and fiscal policies freed from the corporatist and interventionist shackles of the post-war period. The development of the European Monetary System and later the single currency, along with the relaunching of the Single Market with the Single European Act of 1985, were part of efforts at reducing public expectations regarding the role of governments in the economy. This was achieved by binding national executives to a set of policy rules that limited the influence of domestic economic actors on governmental decisions. As argued in earlier chapters, the crisis of the post-war Keynesian consensus in the 1970s was resolved via a denationalization of macro-economic policy in Western Europe. European integration was a central part of this process of denationalization as it provided national governments with an effective way of overcoming national opposition to the new policy framework. The idea of a single European monetary regime within which national currencies would be tied together originated in the early 1970s but it fell foul of the continued imbalances—political and economic—between EC states. In particular, membership of a fixed currency system was difficult to maintain when the political commitment to Keynesian demand strategies remained so strong. This explains France’s ongoing saga of entries and exits of the European currency ‘Snake’ in the 1970s.*' Created in 1973, the currency ‘Snake’ was replaced by the European Monetary System in 1979. Within the EMS was the Exchange Rate Mechanism, a tighter set of exchange rate commitments. Out of the ERM emerged the idea of a single currency, formalized within the Maastricht Treaty of 1992.

The role of a fixed exchange rate system was central to the shift away from the post-war Keynesian consensus. À commitment

to monetary stability in

lieu of fiscally managed demand-side commitments, with the expectation that competitiveness would be achieved via private-sector adaptations, had currency stability at its core. Repeated currency devaluations, undertaken at the discretion of national governments, had been a feature of the Keynesian period and had been used repeatedly during the crisis as a way of mitigating problems of competitiveness. France, for example, devalued three times in the post-war * The proper term for the snake was the European Exchange Rate Agreement, the EERA. Moravesik notes thut ‘greuter policy convergence, more than rising interdependence, explains the greater succenolthe EMS than the Snake” (Moravesik 1998: 239),

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period, in 1948, 1958, and 1969, in each case using devaluation as a national strategy to achieve competitiveness in place of the more difficult route of internal adjustment. De Gaulle’s own efforts at internal adaptation had ended in the general strike of 1968, a crisis his successor Georges Pompidou was determined to avoid.”” Being able to sustain a commitment to a particular exchange rate was thus understood as a badge of governmental commitment to the wider macro-economic agenda of price stability, budgetary austerity, reform of public-sector institutions, and an overhaul of Keynesian welfare states. The introduction of the EMS came at an inauspicious time. The Western European economy was dominated by a successful West German economy and a Deutschmark made ever stronger by a depreciating dollar. For other EC states, particularly France, a strong DM put considerable downward pressure on their own national currencies. This stoked inflationary pressures in the national economy. With West Germany unwilling to accept that it should bear some of the costs for this asymmetry, the issue for France was whether or not it could adapt via internal reform. This would mean pushing the costs of adaptation onto French industry and French labour instead of using currency

devaluation and lax fiscal policies.”” EMS, and ERM within it, was intended as a rule-bound framework with which the French government could pursue this strategy. The strategic benefit of using this set of rules was that it could be agreed and implemented outside of the national corporatist channels. Moravcsik notes that Giscard d’Estaing’s support for Helmut Schmidt’s EMS proposition was made without any consultation at the national level. It was agreed as a resolution of the European Council, itself a body created by Giscard d’Estaing for the very purpose of externalizing difficult decisions. A formal treaty change would have required domestic-level ratification and hence a public debate on the subject. Helmut Schmidt took Germany into the EMS

for similar reasons. In his case, the concern

was to escape from

the

criticisms and probable veto of the German Bundesbank. Whilst the EMS was part of a commitment by national governments to reduce inflation via domestic-level adaptation of firms and of workers, the Single European Act was intimately tied to the dismantling of the state-society relations that together made up the post-war national Keynesian consensus. We can see this in the changing place of the public sector in European society and the role of the EC and then the EU in these changes. The early 1980s was a time of fundamental reform for many public sectors across Western Europe. This was most dramatically the case in the UK under Thatcher but was also true in other countries. Vincent Wright notes that there was an interest in administrative reform across all of Western Europe in this period, with >2 Loriaux (1991: 189). 3 This analysis is consistent

with

Moravcsik’s

different. See Moravcsik (1998: chapter 4).

account,

though

the emphasis

is rather

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trajectories of reform taking broadly similar lines. In Ireland, an accord was signed signalling fundamental change in the relations between government and social partners. In the Netherlands, programmes aiming at decentralization and higher efficiency were launched. In Austria, some of the roles undertaken by the public sector were passed onto private actors and in Italy and Greece large public administration modernization plans were launched. Wright concludes that “Western Europe has truly entered “the age of administrative reform” after years of sporadic, pragmatic and limited change’.’* Driving the resolve behind this reform programmes, notes Wright, was a broad-based shift of sentiment against the role played by the public sector, articulated intellectually by the emergence of public-

choice theories.” The Single European Act, proposed in 1984 and signed by all EC members in 1985, did not emerge from a vacuum but should be situated within these broader transformations of the state. As Moravcsik notes, ‘unilateral, bilateral, and non-EC multilateral initiatives were well underway by the time the EC

first considered the SEA’.>® The main thrust of the SEA was a relaunching of the Single European Market, with the aim of eliminating all non-tariff barriers by 1992. The Treaty of Rome of 1957 had committed signatories to a single European market of goods, services, capital, and labour but to little effect. Beyond instituting a single external tariff, the limits imposed by the national Keynesian consensus of the 1950s and 1960s had checked further liberalization. The SEA, in contrast, came at a time when efforts were underway across Western Europe to dismantle this consensus. The SEA was thus an ambitious document, drafted by the British Commissioner at the time, Lord Cockburn, aiming at liberalizing exchange across the EC and introducing competition into areas previously dominated by national monopolies. The SEA restated the main ambitions of the earlier EC Treaty but was successful because of these changes at the domestic level. Member states had, at the time, begun already to attempt public administration and public-sector reforms of their own but with moderate success. The momentum for the SEA came out of these domesticlevel experiences of stalled reform. In Germany, the incoming Kohl government had been elected on a modernizing platform. On its arrival in power, it set about cutting the size of the public sector and reforming basic public services. Moravcsik writes that Kohl introduced supply-side tax cuts that reduced the public sector from 50 per cent of GNP to 46.5 per cent. He also appointed a commission to study the possibilities for the deregulation of key public service activities such as

* Vincent Wright, ‘Reshaping the State: The Implications for Public Administration’, West European Politics, 17/3 (1994): 102 37 (104),

Y Wright (1994: 100).

* Moravesik (1998: 417),

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transport, telecommunications, and insurance.’” Kohl’s reforms, however, were rapidly met with domestic opposition, from within the public sector, from labour unions, and from small businesses. With the domestic reform programme flagging, Kohl attempted to achieve the same result more indirectly, via the SEA programme. In France, a similar interest in liberalization and public-sector reform was met with resistance. Public service, as Andy Smith has argued, was a key part of the French dirigiste tradition and critical to

the legitimacy of the state itself.”® Introducing any far-reaching changes was therefore hugely controversial. Situated in this context of public-sector reform processes propelled forward by the wider goal of undoing the key state-society relationships that had made up the post-war national consensus, we are better able to understand the timing and success of the Single European Act. In his account of the liberalizing and deregulatory content of the SEA, Fritz Scharpf notes that the direction taken by European integration in the mid-1980s did not follow directly from the terms of the earlier treaties. In his words, It does not follow from the text of the Treaties of Rome or from their genesis that the European Community was meant to abolish [the] constitutional parity between the protection of economic freedom and market-correcting intervention . . Nevertheless, as a consequence of the supremacy of European law, the four economic freedoms, and the injunctions against distortions of competition,

have in fact gained constitutional force vis-à-vis the member states.’” Scharpf is referring here to the legal parity that existed between laws defending national economies against cartels and those identifying exceptions to these laws. These exceptions were mainly public services and other activities considered to be in the public interest and thus provided for via state monopolies. Article 36 of the Treaty of the European Community identified as acceptable derogations from non-tariff rules those regulations introduced on the grounds of public morality, public policy, or public security.‘° This reflected a key tenet of post-war social democracy: that the political judgement of individual national legislatures should be the determining factor in deciding whether or not certain regulations were to be judged as unfair breaches of a single market or as legitimate acts of intervention in markets by national governments. In the TEC, there was no a priori assumption about the superiority of anti-cartel law over public service laws. The two were part and parcel of the same

” Moravcsik (1998: 330-2). °8 Andy Smith, ‘Le gouvernement de l’Union Européenne et une France qui change’ in P. D. Culpepper, P. A. Hall, and B. Palier (eds), La France en Mutation, 1980-2005 (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2006), 357.

7 Fritz W. Scharpf, Governing in Europe: Effective and Democratic? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 58.

“ Scharpf (1999: 55).

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Keynesian consensus: a commitment to the market but also to the regulation and direct management of the market in the wider public interest. In his account of the development of European law, Scharpf notes the correspondence between legal developments and the erosion of the consensus on the relationship between politics and economics. In the place of politically controlled markets, competition law was increasingly given legal precedence over laws relating to public services. In particular, the European Court of Justice in its judgements declared itself the authority on deciding whether or not national government policies in the area of public-sector provision constitute a de facto form of protection. In the case of ‘direct effect’, the notion that European law should be directly taken as domestic law without having to pass through the gates of legislative deliberation at the national level, Scharpf notes that this notion was already implicit in the EC Treaty. The doctrine of supremacy, in contrast, was a more explicit move by the ECJ, aimed at ensuring that European law would be implemented equally in all member states and would not be undermined by subsequent legislative decisions by individual member states transforming EU law into an uneven ‘patchwork’.*' Scharpf writes that politically, ‘the most important effect of the combined doctrines of direct effect and supremacy has been the constitutionalization of competition law’, i.e. the placing of EU competition law beyond the control of the legislatures of individual member states. However, these claims by the ECJ did not lead immediately to an attack on public-sector provision in Europe. Whilst the Court made its own moves in the 1960s, the full political implications of its judgeménts were not felt until the mid-1980s onwards. For all its ‘neoliberal’ proclivities, the ECJ existed for decades within an EC dominated by mixed economies. The full implications of its decisions in the 1960s were checked by the control of national governments over their own economic policies and their own respective commitments to public services and to the development of the public sector. The shift identified by Scharpf, which enshrined the European bias towards negative integration, occurred in 1979 when the ECJ asserted its right to judge the validity of public-interest justifications for regulation given by national governments. The context for the famous 1979 Cassis de Dijon case was the exclusion by the West German government of the French Cassis de Dijon liquor. The justification given was that its relatively lower alcohol content compared to German liqueurs posed a public health risk for German consumers.*? In its decision on the Cassis case, the EC]J declared that it alone was

competent to determine public-interest justifications (in terms of health, safety, environmental impact, etc.) and it also argued that the rule to be 1 Scharpf (1999: 54).

|

42 Scharpf (1999: 56 n. 12). The risk was that the Cassis de Dijon could become an ‘entry drug’ for German consumers,

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applied in cases of spurious public-interest arguments was that of mutual recognition. In place of harmonization, implying an agreement between national governments on a give regulatory standard, member states should follow the rule that a product sold in one member state can ipso facto be sold in all other member states. In its decision, the ECJ was

attacking the delicate equivalence post-war

national governments had tried to establish between private competition and the public good. The ECJ's judgement replaced this precarious equivalence with a clear hierarchy, putting competition policy at the top. The effect, however, was not immediate. Only in the mid-1980s did the European Commission begin proceedings against national telecoms monopolies, targeting their exclusion of third-party suppliers.*’ Since then, the Commission’s attack on the exclusivity of public-service provision has been extensive: from air transport to postal services, ‘no area of service public is now beyond the challenge of European competition law’.** Yet the pace at which the Commission has taken on public-sector provision and its supposed discriminatory consequences has been determined by developments at the national level. Scharpf notes that Article 90 of the TEC had existed for almost thirty years before either the ECJ or the European Commission decided to confront the national public services. The Commission’s role in deregulating telecommunications developed as national attempts in this area failed. Moravcsik observes that the German telecommunications reform commission worked closely with officials from the European Commission in order to circumvent the opposition it faced from the Bundespost.‘° In his essay on the Common Market, Ernst Mandel lists various efforts by the European Commission in the 1960s to promote economies of scale in European industry. Not until the late 1980s were these initiatives taken up by national policymakers and even then only

% Scharpf (1999: 60). 4 Scharpf (1999: 61). “ Moravcsik

(1998: 330). Though

Moravcsik also notes that in this particular case, the

Commission did act as an initiator, a step ahead of many national governments. Another interesting case regarding the timing of relaunching the Single Market is in the liberalization of capital markets. Discussed below, it is worth noting here that the Commission had been pushing capital market liberalization in the 1960s—in line with Article 67 of the EC treaty—but to little avail. In the early 1980s, the Dutch and German governments, keen to see capital market liberalization in order to ease the burden they shared of financing currency adjustments of weaker ERM member states, took the initiative within the EC Monetary Committee to take up Article 67 once again. Capital market liberalization won full political support amongst EC member states at the informal ECOFIN meeting in Dromoland Castle, Ireland, in October 1984. Only then, following the initiative taken by member states, was this principle taken up and included in Jacques Delors’s White Book on the Internal Market of 1985. See Martin Marcussen, ‘EMU: A Danish Delight and Dilemma’, in K. Dyson (ed.), European States and the Euro: Europeanization, Variation and Convergence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 133.

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haltingly.*® The correspondence between an activist and neo-liberally minded ECJ and transformations in European societies is thus mediated by the social contract which existed between states and citizens in individual societies. As the national corporatist framework was dismantled and its class basis modified, so did pan-European law and policymaking develop.

FROM

THE

SEA TO EMU: CONSOLIDATING MEMBER STATEHOOD

Moving on to the 1990s, we see this process of state transformation powerfully

expressed in the move towards monetary union.?” The Maastricht Treaty of 1992 committed its signatories to monetary union. A set of criteria—the famous ‘Maastricht criteria’—laid out the conditions for membership. With a deadline of 1997, these conditions were aimed at ensuring adequate convergence between all prospective Eurozone members.

In order to join, govern-

ments had to have inflation rates no higher than 1.5 per cent of the average of the three best performing EU member states and long-term interest rates were to be no more than 2 per cent higher than in the three lowest inflation countries. They were to have a budget deficit of no more than 3 per cent of GDP and government debt of no more than 60 per cent of GDP. Finally, they were expected to have joined the Exchange Rate Mechanism two years prior to

monetary union and to not have devalued in that time.* Support for the Maastricht convergence criteria and the degree of effort made by governments to meet these criteria reflected the extent to which a search for external rules and constraints had become the accepted norm for macro-economic policymaking across Western Europe. Membership of the monetary union was understood as a stamp of European statehood. As Dyson and Featherstone put it, what was perhaps most remarkable about the Maastricht negotiations on EMU was the extent to which national representatives of all political stripes attached such importance to this ‘common endeavour’.*’ The convergence criteria in this respect were extensions of the already % Mandel also notes that efforts were underway, pushed by the Banker’s Federation of the Common Market countries, to create a European financial market. It was a ‘typical tendency’, according to Mandel, of ‘the legal superstructure adapting itself to changed property relationships i.e. the appearance of a type of capitalist property having outgrown the limits of the old national state on the European continent’. In E. Mandel, ‘International Capitalism and “SupraNationality”’, The Socialist Register (L.ondon: Merlin, 1967), 35. % The seminal text on this is K. Dyson and K. Featherstone, The Road to Maastricht: Negotiating Economic and Monetary Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). ** For details on the criterin, see the following website: , accessed on 9 August 2011.

¥ Dyson and Featherstone (1999: p. xi).

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European Integration

prevalent tendency of binding the hands of national representatives in macroeconomic matters.

In the Italian case, the EMU convergence criteria were in line with a traditional pursuit of domestic political and economic changes via the help of external frameworks of rule. Dyson and Featherstone note the reliance on a ‘vehiculo externo’ (external vehicle)

for domestic performance

as a regular

feature of modern Italian politics. It was a prominent tactic used by post-1945 governments in their efforts at containing the influence of the organized Left in Italian politics. The external constraint in that time was Marshall Plan aid and US patronage more generally. However, what was significant about the EMU criteria in the 1990s was how they served both to formalize and to galvanize a domestic reform effort already well underway in Italy. The reform efforts were focused on loosening the power of both organized labour and traditional business interests on Italian macro-economic policymaking. As noted in an earlier chapter, policymaking in Italy had tended to involve very close ties between political parties, national governments, and different interests from across the spectrum of Italian society. Institutionally, this was reflected in the lack of autonomy exercised by governments and by individual ministries and the countervailing strength of the national legislature over the state administration. In macro-economic terms, this led to a constant favouring of fiscal expansion over monetary discipline as a way of diffusing the social tensions present within post-war social democracy. In 1974, when the Italian central bank attempted to wrestle free from domestic political control via the external conditionality of an IMF loan, the Italian treasury fought back. It forced the bank to finance a new round of government spending the following year with the result that in 1975 the central bank was responsible for directly financing half of the government’s deficit, which in total amounted to 12 per cent of GDP. A decade later, much in line with the dismantling of the national Keynesian consensus elsewhere in Western Europe, this struggle between different forces within Italian society was waged with a very different result. What Radaelli and Martini call the resarnamento (fiscal adjustment) coalition had managed to wrestle the policymaking initiative away from the hold of political parties, employer associations, and labour unions. Composed of a mixture of technocrats and leading political figures, this coalition focused on isolating decision-making in macro-economic policy from political and societal interests. A crucial actor in this struggle was the Banca d’Italia, whose subordination to the Treasury was overturned in the course of the 1980s. Dyson and Featherstone recount how this ‘divorce’ between the bank and the Treasury was managed informally via an agreement between its two directors, Ciampi at the Banca d’Italia and Andreatta at the Tesoro. Andreatta believed that only by binding the Treasury from the outside could he break the hold of the parties over national budget lines. Avoiding a public and politically contentious break

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between the two institutions, and as a way of circumventing the national parliament as much as possible, Ciampi and Andreatta simply exchanged letters, subsequently published by the Tesoro, in which the new relationship was given in writing.

This ‘divorce’ symbolized a change in the balance of power and internal composition of the Italian state: from the political to the technocratic realm. However, it remained at the time dependent upon the will of individuals. The importance of EMU was that, in the words of Dyson and Featherstone, it provided ‘a golden opportunity to complete the process on a formal basis’.”° That formalization occurred in 1992 when a new law was passed that gave the central bank governor exclusive control over the setting of discount rates and in 1993 when the Treasury’s current account with the central bank was reformed. This latter move was in line with the Maastricht Treaty’s requirements that automatic financing of the public sector be abolished. This requirement makes sense given the role of the EU in the disinvestment from the public sector by national authorities. In 1996, under the government of Romano Prodi, the role of the central bank as primus inter pares was finally consecrated by placing the institution at the heart of a new economics ‘superministry’ that united the central bank, the Treasury, the Ministry of Finance, and the Budget and Economic Planning ministry.”" Over time, this reliance on the European vehiculo externo became an increasingly existential issue for Italian governments. Throughout the 1990s, leading up to the introduction of the single currency, governments garnered support for the necessary sacrifices on the basis of shame at being excluded from EMU and on the existential crisis that exclusion would provoke. Radaelli notes that membership of EMU did not command universal support across the Italian elite. Some business elements dissented: they favoured the internal protection afforded by state subsidies instead of the stick of external compulsion. The government itself, however, was wedded to the policymaking model of which EMU was an important part. In turn, it argued that there was no alternative to life within the Eurozone. It was on this basis that the Prodi government mobilized support for the temporary income tax, the ‘Euro-tax’, introduced to ensure Italy would meet the budgetary requirements for membership. In Radaelli’s words, ‘the apocalyptic message “either Europe or death” contributed to a successful dramatization of the Italian effort. The distortion of the language—EU instead of EMU—charged the discourse with passion and

° Dyson and Featherstone (1999: 480). On the fiscal side, the changes introduced by the Amato government of 1992-3, for instance, included a significant increase in the retirement age for men and women, a real reduction of public employment expenditure (i.e. the rate of growth in expenditure fell short of Inflation rates), and moves towards privatization. Amato’s finance bill generated an overall fiscal correction of 6.2 per cent of GDP (Radaelli 2002: 217-18). °* Dyson and Featherstone (1999: 45K, 480),

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emotion’.”* This dramatic language had been deployed a few years earlier by one of Prodi’s predecessors, Giuliano Amato. In a 1992 speech to the Italian Senate, Amato declared that there was no alternative to the Italy’s Europeanlevel obligations. Italy was faced not simply with a choice about EU member-

ship; at stake was Italy’s place in Europe’s ‘first division’.>> We observe a similar trend elsewhere: the EMU convergence criteria process was driven forward on the back of a deeper process of state transformation across Western Europe. Those countries still struggling with the old Keynesian consensus deployed the EMU criteria strategically as a way of isolating social partners and weakening opposition to the reform process. In other countries where changes had already been made, such as in the Netherlands, the EMU convergence criteria were hardly subject to any debate. They were considered as a logical extension of domestic macro-economic policy. In the Dutch case, the famous ‘Polder Model’ had been reformed in the course of the 1980s as Dutch labour accommodated itself to the new demands placed upon it by government and business. The recalcitrance and militancy of the late 1970s disappeared and by the time the convergence criteria were adopted, the Dutch macro-economic model was institutionally wired around an acceptance of the need for tight budgets, sound money, and ongoing public-sector

reform.>* We see here that European integration in this period was made possible by a move domestically against key aspects of the post-war Keynesian consensus. The SEA and monetary union are thus bound up with a process of internal political and social change. As Moravcsik puts it, ‘a shift in domestic preferences to lessen state intervention—the failure of the Socialist experiment in France, modest deregulation under Kohl in Germany, the Thatcher revolu-

tions in Britain—immediately preceded EC discussions’.”> Describing the impact of EMU on Italian politics, Radaelli observes that EMU should not be thought of as an external force foisting change onto Italy from the outside. Rather,

°* Radaelli (2002: 226). °* Vincent Della Salla, ‘Hollowing Out and Hardening the State: European Integration and the Italian Economy’,

West European Politics, 20/1(1997): 14-33 (26).

°* A. Verdun, ‘The Netherlands and EMU: A Small Open Economy in Search of Prosperity’, in K. Dyson (ed.) European States and the Euro: Europeanization, Variation, and Convergence (Oxford:

Oxford

University

Press, 2002).

Verdun

writes that in the Netherlands

simply considered to be -a logical extension of existing policies: maintaining fixed exchange rates with Germany and other ERM trading economy; and needing to restructure public expenditure, the market’. Nevertheless, ‘the convergence criteria were . .. gratefully

EMU

‘was

Dutch monetary policies; currencies; being an open welfare state, and the labour accepted as providing an

additional external constraint to legitimize the need to reduce the Dutch budgetary deficit and public debt’ (Verdun 2002: 248, 245). ** Moravesik (1998: 346).

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135

It is more useful to set EMU alongside other contextual changes, such as the crisis of the political system and the room of manoeuvre for technocratic politics offered by the Italian transition in the 1990s. The rush to the Euro-zone provided a catalyst of energies and political capabilities which grew out of instruments, discourse and practices of the 1980s.>°

Amy Verdun makes a cognate point in her account of the Dutch participation in EMU. ‘The EMU’, she writes, ‘was introduced in a period of ongoing restructuring of which EMU formed an integral part’. However, ‘EMU did not cause restructuring. Rather, the restructuring was perceived as necessary.

The commitment to EMU meant the need to restructure was more urgent’.>’ Alongside the reform of public services and monetary integration, the post1985 relaunch of European integration was also focused on market deregulation. An interesting case is the liberalization of financial markets. Prominent within the SEA, financial market reform was in fact undertaken a little earlier by national governments. Instead of initiating it as such, the SEA served to cement this national trend. Capital controls were eliminated in the UK in 1979, in Germany in 1981, and in France in 1984. In Denmark, liberalization

took place progressively, from 1983 through to 1988.°° Financial market liberalization is often seen as the beginning of the end for national sovereignty: a key moment when states accommodated themselves to the pressures of globalization and the erosion of their capacity as economic actors. In fact, it was part of a concerted attempt by national executives to regain control over the national monetary supply. For this reason, liberalization was promoted by central banks in Europe, for whom capital liberalization represented an opportunity to discipline national governments and to entrench the new anti-inflationary agenda. The influence of central banks was felt through German and Dutch representatives, who pushed capital liberalization onto weaker currency countries via the aegis of the EMS framework. It was also promoted by individual central banks at the national level.”

°° Radaelli (2002: 236). 7 Verdun (2002: 240).

°3 Marcussen gives the details: in May 1983 Denmark eased the restrictions on purchases of foreign securities and on direct investments; at the beginning of 1984 remaining restrictions on the purchase of foreign equity by Danish residents was eliminated; in June 1985 further liberalization measures were introduced and in October 1988 all remaining exchange controls were abolished. Marcussen (2002: 133, n. 6).

” Marcussen (2002: 134). See also K. Dyson, K. Featherstone, and G. Michalopoulos, ‘Strapped to the Mast: EC Central Bankers between Global Financial Markets and Regional Integration’, Journal of European Public Policy, 2/3 (1995): 465-87. Marcussen writes that the Danish case, where the Central Bank director at the time of Denmark's conversion to ‘sound policy’, Erik Hoffmeyer, was a prominent and much-trusted figure for thirty years, was no exception to ‘the general trend In Europe, which has seen central bankers achieve à pivotal, independent, and uncontested role In Macrocconomic policy-making and seen capital markets liberalized” (Marcussen 2002: 145),

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European Integration

An illustrative case is France. Control over the money supply had for a long time been bound up with a struggle by the government to regain control over labour, business, and banking interests, all of whom had carved out a place for themselves in the political economy of post-war France. In his book on the liberalization of French finance, Michael Loriaux notes that the government’s embrace of liberalization was part of a political strategy. It was not a sign of acquiescence to pressure emanating from private investors but was intended as a way of pursuing more effectively the anti-inflationary policy adopted after Mitterrand’s U-turn of 1983. As Loriaux writes, ‘the French state [was]

seeking through reform to regain control over its monetary and exchange rate policy rather than to deliver the economy entirely to the discretion of market forces’.°° In the post-war period, France had developed what Loriaux calls an ‘overdraft economy’: the practice of promoting private investment through control of the supply of credit. The original goal of this approach had been to ensure that firms had adequate access to funds. Its result, however, was to make it very difficult for the French government to control the money supply.®! The liberalization of the financial system was designed to reduce firms’ dependence on banks for credit and therefore to uncouple national monetary policy from its role in funding private investment, leaving it free to focus on its anti-inflationary targets which demanded a strict control of the money supply. The SEA’s goal of market liberalization, which included financial markets, was thus an aspect of the broader attempt by Western European governments to concentrate their power and authority around a key set of policies designed to eliminate the inflationary pressures of the Keynesian era. The relaunch of European integration from 1985 onwards was therefore an outcome of a process of national political and social transformation. Its scope, goals, and the form it took reflected key features of this process of domestic political change: the focus on monetary stability and a reduction in inflationary expectations, the importance of external rules as sources of credibility for national governments, and the severing of the ties between national governments and organized social interests, in particular organized labour. These were all key aspects of a fundamental process of societal change: a move away from the national corporatist state of the post-war era towards the new member state of the 1990s and 2000s. In this latter form of state, national macro-economic policies have become inseparable from European-level processes of deliberation and policymaking. More often than not, wider European responsibilities are identified as justifications for policy decisions in lieu of national interests and national obligations. % Michael

Loriaux, France After Hegemony:

International Change and Financial Reform

(London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 9. ! Loriaux (1991: 55). For more details, see chapter 2 of Loriaux.

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137

‘NEW MAASTRICHTS: EUROPEAN ECONOMIC GOVERNANCE AFTER MONETARY UNION Whilst the use made of the SEA and of the EMU criteria was often strategic, this has over time given rise to a new form of state, the member state. Shortterm political strategies have become embedded and institutionalized over time. We can see this in what Italians refer to as the ‘new Maastrichts’ of the post-1999 period. The third stage of EMU was completed in 1999 with the introduction of euro coins into circulation across the Eurozone. By this time, however, EMU had become one aspect of a wider set of macro-economic governance processes existing at the pan-European level. As Marcussen put it, EMU was ‘the institutionalization of ideas, institutions and policies over a

period of three decades’.°* The roots of EMU lie in the ‘informal and formal monetary regimes, patterns of cooperation, and macroeconomic causal ideas which date back at least to the beginning of the 1970s'. As such, it is unsurprising that EMU itself has evolved into something much broader, encompassing new aspects of macro-economic policymaking. EMU has been followed by a number of ‘add-ons’, including the Stability and Growth Pact, the Eurogroup, and a multitude of geographically denoted ‘processes’, such as the Luxembourg, Cardiff, Cologne, and Lisbon processes. Looking at the evolution of EMU after 1999 and the wider development of economic governance within the EU since the late 1990s, we see the consolidation of a long-standing process of state transformation. Macro-economic policymaking today has become inseparable from the highly integrated forms of cooperation between national governments at the European level and little is left by way of national macro-economic strategies. Virtually all aspects of economic policymaking, from labour markets through to monetary and fiscal policy, are conducted in concert at the European level. As Radaelli writes in the Italian case, life within the Eurozone after 1999 has been dominated by a continued demand for ‘new Maastrichts’, that is, by a new set of external goals that governments can commit themselves to.%> Since 1998, he writes, ‘increasing attention is given to commitments and indicators that can induce a process of conversion on competition policy, liberalization and regulatory reforms’. Western Europe’s member states are continuously reproduced via these panEuropean frameworks, their social existence maintained through collective policymaking activities.

? Marcussen (2002: 120). Regarding Denmark, a country which did not adopt the Euro after a rejection of it in a referendum in September 2000, Marcussen writes that ‘to study the consequences of EMU for the Danish polity means to study the development of the Danish polity throughout the perlod In which EMU has slowly materialized’, p. 120.

°* Radaelli (2002: 233 4),

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European Integration

A useful illustration of this is the Open Method of Coordination, announced with much fanfare alongside the launch of the Lisbon Strategy in 2000. The key feature of the OMC is its flexibility: instead of involving a legal role for the Commission under the traditional Community Method, the OMC involves member states together establishing guidelines, benchmarks, and other points of comparison which are then used at the national level as a way of moving reform processes forward. OMC also involves regular instances of checking up on the progress made by national governments, assessing their relative successes and failures, and adapting their goals in line with what has or has not been achieved. Sabel and Zeitlin have characterized subsequent iterations of this approach as ‘experimental governance’.°* The goal of OMC and the associated Lisbon Strategy is not harmonization of policy so much as a mutual sharing of information aimed at assisting national reform processes and the elaboration of common goals. As already noted, the Lisbon Strategy is noteworthy for the sheer range of policy areas included within its remit. The ‘add-ons’ to EMU are extensive and include information technology, research, business policy, social policy, education, the fight against exclusion, social protection, and environmental policy.° Essentially, whilst EMU was characterized by the coordination of macro-economic policies, the Lisbon Strategy includes the ‘social dimension’—a concern with growth, jobs, and redistributive issues. For some, the development of the OMC approach reflects the absence of any agreement between national capitals on these macro-economic issues. For Renaud Dehousse, the breadth of the OMC—what he calls its existence as a ‘meta-instrument’ able to sublimate national differences into an overarching but desultory policy framework—is due to the absence of any consensus on how to tackle issues such as social exclusion, pension reform, and labour market reform. In his words, ‘the emphasis [in the OMC approach] on methodological issues hides the marked divergences regarding the main objectives of European action. It is this which explains the choice of an approach that lacks any real constraints for states’.°° The constraints imposed upon member states by OMC are certainly far weaker than those of the Maastricht convergence criteria and there is no obvious overarching vision regarding European social policy. However, the presumption of fundamental disagreements between member states is difficult to substantiate. In fact, we can see in the development of OMC the confirmation of two features of

64 Charles, F. Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin (eds), Experimentalist Governance in the European Union: Towards a New Architecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

65 Renaud Dehousse, ‘La méthode ouverte de coordination: Quand l’instrument tient lieu de politique’, in P. Lascoumes and P. Le Galès (eds), Gouverner par les instruments. (Paris : Les Presses de Sciences Po, 2004), 334-5,

66 Dehousse (2004: 352).

European Economic Integration

139

member statehood already noted in Chapter 1 with reference to the role played by the Eurogroup and by the EFC. Firstly, the OMC powerfully expresses the contemporary EU’s combination of state-based cooperation with an absence of traditional inter-state bargaining and conflict. As in other policy areas, the OMC combines a technocratic and expertise-based treatment of economic governance policies with the empowerment of national executives and national officials. Whilst there are certainly disagreements within the expert groups set up under the OMC approach, these pertain most often to the details of individual policies rather than the overarching ideological questions traditionally associated with political disagreement and conflict. At the core of the Lisbon Strategy is an acceptance of the need to adapt social democratic values and the interests of labour to the exigencies and demands of regionalized and internationalized markets. National representatives and national officials agree that the purpose of social policies is to help individuals in managing the diverse and changing demands of the market. Lying behind this consensus is an acceptance by much of the organized Left in Europe of the need for an accommodation to the market. This follows the struggles of the 1970s and 1980s and led to a strategic reorientation away from national politics and towards the pan-European level. This Faustian pact with the ‘technocratic devil’ made by social democratic parties in Europe is well-illustrated in the career of Jacques Delors: a minister in a socialist government in France, Delors moved on to become president of the European Commission, convinced that social democratic goals could be better pursued at the European rather than at the national level. Whilst disagreement remains within the EU committees dedicated to macro-economic benchmarking, they are not struggles between competing political philosophies but are rather disagreements amongst experts who otherwise share similar world views and value sets. Secondly, the OMC is also consistent with the desire by national governments to pursue domestic-level reforms in ways that shield them as much as possible from public contestation. The experience of national governments in the 1990s that tried to push through contentious reforms on their own (e.g. the Alain Juppé government in France in 1996) was important here as it pushed ministers and officials to look for support and authority at the European level as a way of realizing domestic reform objectives. Dehousse observes that role played by the OMC in the pursuit of national reform programmes is perhaps its greatest contribution and the best explanation of why member states are attached to this method. The OMC continues the tradition of committing national executives to a set of external constraints. In some instances, the degree of formal constraint presented by the OMC is rather weak. Nevertheless, even general conclusions arrived at within European Council meetings can strengthen a difficult domestic reform process. As Dehousse notes, the potential of OMC is greatest “In those domains where Europe is called to act as

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European Integration

catalyser for reform processes, the ultimate responsibility for which lies at the national level’.®” From the perspective of domestic populations, the end effect is to make it difficult to see where the responsibility for policymaking lies. At the national level, OMC benchmarks are given as sources of collective obligation yet at the European level the OMC is defined by its lack of hierarchy. As Dehousse puts it, the prevalence of sector-based horizontal networks of experts means that in the OMC there is no ‘hegemonic actor, imbued with a

formal authority”.°® Reform processes are thus galvanized via the OMC but responsibility for their consequences is diffused across the EU as a whole. This shields national governments from domestic opposition whilst rendering the process of policymaking opaque from a national public’s point of view.

CRISIS

IN THE

EUROZONE®

In November 2009, the newly elected PASOK (socialist) government in Greece announced that its budget deficit for the year would be equal to 12.7 per cent of the country’s GDP. Revealing the precarious state of the Greek public purse, this announcement sparked what has become an unprecedented crisis for the Eurozone (see Figure 4.1 at the end of this section for a chronology of key events). Not since the euro’s launch in 1999 has its future been so uncertain

and the implications of the ongoing crisis for the Eurozone continue to be debated amongst politicians, journalists, and academics. For some, such as Spain’s former Prime Minister, Felipe Gonzalez, the crisis highlighted the need for more federalism in Europe, including harmonized tax rates and common balance of payments requirements.”° ‘Europe’s citizens want and deserve’, wrote Gonzalez in January 2011, ‘a long-term solution to their real challenges,

not a price dictated by markets that seem to rule over their governments’.”’ A similar federalizing argument was made by Belgian economist, Paul de Grauwe. If only the European Central Bank were allowed to act as lender of last resort, argued de Grauwe, the inherent fragility of the national bond

67 Dehousse (2004: 352). $* Dehousse (2004: 352). % Some of this section is based on a short guest editorial, published in Political Geography in 2011.

For

more

details

of this, see C. J. Bickerton,

‘Crisis

in the Eurozone:

Transnational

Governance and National Power in European Integration’, Political Geography, 30 (2011): 415-16. Available at: , accessed on 11 August 2011. 79 F. Gonzalez, ‘How to Calm the E.U.’s Turmoil’, New York Times, 7 January 2011. Available at: , accessed on 11 August 2011. "! Gonzalez (2011).

European Economic Integration

141

markets in Eurozone countries would disappear.”* Pessimistic observers have argued that responses since 2009 have signalled the return of national conflicts and national rivalries within Europe. Katrinka Barysch of the London-based Centre for European Reform (CER) summed up the consequences of the crisis for the EU: ‘governments rule, two-speed Europe, size matters’.”” Philippe Ricard, writer at Le Monde, described Europe as hostage to vicious battles between national capitals. ‘Under the pressure of populist movements’, he writes, ‘governments defend both tooth and nail their national interests, thus

giving free reign to national sovereignty’.”* Former President of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, warned darkly of the ‘dismantling’ of the EU whilst others highlighted the indecision and uncertainty demonstrated both by national leaders and by European institutions. ‘Both the Council of Economic and Financial Affairs (Ecofin)

and the European

Council’, observed Kevin

Featherstone in June 2010, ‘were stages on which

indecision was amply

dramatized’.”>

Loukas

In his JCMS

annual

lecture of 2011,

Tsoukalis

was

bleaker in his assessment, entitling his lecture ‘the shattering of illusions—

and what next?”° Observers are undecided about whether the crisis in the Eurozone signals a new round of integration or the return of national economic policies and—in the more extreme versions—a return to national currencies. Developments in

the Eurozone since the crisis began in 2009 indeed seem to point in two directions at the same time: towards further supranational integration and towards a retrenchment of national governmental power over economic policymaking. We can best make sense of these developments by thinking in terms of member statehood. National executives have asserted their power in the crisis but in ways that have expanded the regulatory and supervisory roles of non-elected bodies. There is no return of national sovereignty per se or of traditional inter-governmentalism in macro-economic policymaking. Instead, we see more intensive forms of cooperation between member states, aimed at

empowering national governments vis-à-vis their own domestic populations.

72 P. De Grauwe, ‘Only the ECB can Halt Eurozone Contagion’, Financial Times, 4 August 2011. On the subject of Eurobonds, the European Commission launched a consultation exercise with EU member states in November 2011 on the possibilities for what it has called ‘stability bonds’. See ‘EU chief Barroso unveils controversial eurobonds plan’, BBC News, 23 November 2011. Available at: , accessed on 25 November 2011.

73 K. Barysch, A New Reality for the European Relations, September 2010.

Union, Working Paper, Council on Foreign

74 P. Ricard, ‘Quand la crise de l’euro redessine l’Europe’, Le Monde, 26 January 2011. 75 K. Featherstone, “The JCMS Annual Lecture: The Greek Sovereign Debt Crisis and EMU’,

Journal of Common Market Studies, 49 (2011): 193-217 (194). This lecture was originally given as a keynote speech at a conference In June 2010,

76 Loukas Tsoukalls, “I'he JCMS Annual Review Lecture: The Shattering of Husions— And What

Next?", Journal of Common

Market Studies, 49 Annual

Review (2011):

19-44,

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European Integration

Moreover, most striking about the Eurozone crisis has been the tenacity with which national governments, from both core and peripheral parts of the Eurozone, have fought to keep the Eurozone together. Economists have repeatedly pointed to the problem of maintaining a currency union at a time when the asymmetries and unevenness of the European economy is so manifest. And yet, for all the member state governments, life outside the Eurozone is inconceivable. More than ever, statehood in Europe today is member statehood, not national statehood. In April 2010, the Greek government accepted the help offered to it by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. This was followed by the first set of loans totalling 110 billion euros and spread out over three years. Later in the same month, Eurozone governments sought to reassure the markets by announcing a 750 billion euro emergency rescue package: 500 billion euros provided by EU member states and 250 billion euros coming from the IMF. This package was formalized with the creation of the European Financial Stability Facility—a Luxembourg-based company with 440 billion euros in guaranteed loans for future bail-outs. These moves failed to quell the concerns of international markets about the viability of several Eurozone economies, notably Ireland, Portugal, and Spain. These countries, grouped together under the derogatory acronym of ‘PIGS’, were identified as candidates for both future defaults on their loan portfolios and for future EU emergency loans. These fears continued to push up the borrowing costs for these countries, making it increasingly difficult for them to service their debts. In November 2010, after having incurred huge debts by guaranteeing the loans of endangered banks, the Irish government accepted a joint EU-IMF loan

package totalling 85 billion euros.”” Signalling an end to the Celtic Tiger’s economic miracle, Ireland’s problems also made the geographical profile of the Eurozone

crisis more

complex:

it was

no

longer

a story

of a profligate

Mediterranean South versus a spendthrift and competitive North. Ireland had been féted as an example of a dynamic, liberal, and successful economy, an inspiration to many of the new Eastern European and Baltic member states who joined the EU in 2004. After Ireland, Portugal was the next member state to turn to the EU for a bail-out. In April 2011, Portugal opened negotiations on an emergency loan, with an agreement reached in May on a 78 billion euro package. Soon after this third plan had been arranged, concerns emerged around Greece’s ability to survive on the plan it had agreed with the EU and the IMF a year earlier. The target set for Greece’s budget deficit by the end of 2010 had been 8 per cent of GDP. It emerged in late April 2011 that the actual deficit at

77 On the historical background to Ireland’s current predicament, sec D. Finn, ‘Treland on the Turn? Political and Economic Consequences of the Crash’, New Left Review, 67 (2011): 5-39,

European Economic Integration

143

the end of 2010 was around 10.5 per cent of GDP. This was largely due to a lack of growth in Greece, a problem which many believed would mean Greece’s only option in order to return to growth would be to default on its debt. At this point, the Eurozone’s crisis entered into a new phase, where the main concern was about the possibilities and consequences of a Greek default. In response to the likelihood of a Greek default, the EU agreed a second bailout plan for Greece. This plan involved an extra 109 billion euros of lending to Greece from both the EU and the IMF, along with an extension in the maturities of Greek bonds (giving the country longer to repay its creditors) and a reduction in the interest rates charged by the EU for its loans to Greece. These were reduced from 5.5 per cent down to around 3.5 per cent, bringing

them closer to German borrowing rates.”® The second Greek plan also included private-sector involvement, meaning that the cost of managing the softening of Greece’s debt burden was incurred not by governments (and hence taxpayers) of the Eurozone but also by those private lenders who had been providing Greece with credit prior to 2010. The agreed deal with private investors, the so-called ‘private-sector involvement operation’, finalized in early 2012, saw them lose around 75 per cent of the present value of their

holdings of Greek debt.” Overall, European governments had committed by the spring of 2012 almost one trillion euros to the so-called ‘bail-out bazooka’. This includes the two bail-out packages for Greece, the write-down of Greek debt, the Irish and Portuguese bail-outs, the European Central Bank's secondary market purchases, 250 billion euros of uncommitted EFSF resources, and the promise of 150 billion euros from the IMF. Another trillion euros, however, has been provided to Europe’s financial institutions by the European Central Bank. This has been done in the form of longer-term refinancing operations (LTROs) by the ECB: in essence, the provision of cheap three-year loans to European banks. The intention has been to inject liquidity into the European banking system in the hope that over time this liquidity can work its way into the real economy in the form of bank loans to businesses. The ECB provided these loans in two stages: first in December 2011 then again in February 2012. The total amount of the loans provided by the ECB was 1.019 trillion

euros.”°

78 ‘Bazooka or peashooter?” The Economist, 30 July 2011. Available at: , accessed on 11 August 2011. 79 The fact that this write-down of debt occurred late on in the crisis and was only of Greece’s private debt means that Greek debt levels remain very high. What keeps them high is the money the Greek government owes to the EU and to the IMF. By the end of 2012 Greece will owe more than 80 per cent of its GDP to the EU and the IMF. % Richard Milne and Mary Watkins, “I'he leaning tower of perils’, Financial Times, 28 March 2012,

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European Integration

November 2009-The PASOK government in Greece announces the budget deficit for the year is much higher than previously thought, standing at 12.7% of GDP. April 2010—Greece turns to the EU and the IMF for a 110 billion euro bail-out. May 2010- Eurozone governments announce a 750 billion euro rescue package (500 billion euros from the EU and 250 billion euros from the IMF). The ECB begins to buy up Greek government bonds. October 2010— At an EU summit, Eurozone member states decide on a permanent fund to be used to support troubled Eurozone economies. The EU's powers of oversight over national budgets are also expanded. November 2010- Ireland turns to the EU for a bail-out deal amounting to 85 billion euros. March 2011-The failed Franco-German Pact for Competitiveness is followed by a more successful pact for the euro, to be overseen by the Commission rather than by national governments. The lending capacity of the European Financial Stability Fund is raised to 440 billion euros and funds for the European Stability Mechanism will amount to 500 billion euros. May 2011— Portugal reaches a bail-out deal with the EU to the tune of 78 billion euros. June 2011-ECB exposure to debt of Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain estimated at 444 billion euros (Open Europe figures). July 2011—A second bail-out package for Greece is agreed, amounting to 109 billion euros. The plan also saw a reduction in the interest rates charged on emergency loans to Greece and some private sector involvement in the plan (involving a private-sector loss of around 20% on its loans to Greece). August 2011-The European Central Bank responds to rising borrowing costs on Spanish and ltalian bonds by intervening and buying up some of these countries’ bonds itself, raising further its exposure to Eurozone government debt. October 2011-EU finance ministers vote on the ‘six-pack’ reforms. December 2011-The first long-term refinancing operation (LTRO) launched by the ECB. February 2012— The second LTRO launched by the ECB. March 2012- Private-sector involvement in Greece's debt restructuring reaches 96% of the amount aimed at by the government.

Figure 4.1. Eurozone crisis in dates

ENTRENCHING

À EUROPE

OF MEMBER

STATES

The institutional consequences of these ongoing emergency loan plans are significant and in general represent a strengthening of the control exercised over national macro-economic policymaking by European institutions. This is not an expansion of supranationalism as such but rather an expansion in those external frameworks of rules referred to above as the post-1999 ‘new Maastrichts’. Consistent with the actions expected of member states, national executives have promoted further limitation strategies that bind their hands as much as possible in different areas of macro-economic governance. Member states agreed in October 2011 to what was referred to as the ‘six-pack’ of reforms. These reforms were further formalized in the form of a ‘fiscal treaty" signed in early March 2012 by all EU member states except two (United Kingdom and

European Economic Integration

145

the Czech Republic negotiated a controversial opt-out).®”" The main goal of this fiscal ‘compact’ is to tighten supervision over national government budgets. Based on a widely held view that the Eurozone crisis is the result of excess spending by governments, the proposals are designed to ‘lock-in’ prudent fiscal policy through an array of rules and a tightened sanctions regime. Article 3, for instance, outlines a ‘balanced budget rule’ which member states are expected to incorporate into national legislation, preferably directly into their respective national constitutions. The consequences of not doing so are to be determined by a decision of the European Court of Justice. Governments running excessive deficits can only avoid a sanction from the European Commission if the Council musters a qualified majority of votes against the sanction (the so-called ‘reverse voting mechanism’). The pact also demands that member states open up their national budgets to much greater outside scrutiny. Article 6 states that ‘contracting parties shall report ex-ante on their public debt issuance plans to the Council of the European Union and to the European Commission’. Any member state subject to excessive debt procedures will find themselves part of a ‘budgetary and economic partnership programme’ where structural reforms are drawn up with—and then overseen by—European Council and Commission officials, as is the case today in

Greece.”” Even more punitive measures have been suggested by outside observers. One suggestion made by high-profile economists in a November 2011 report on debt consolidation in the Eurozone was that this new excessive debt procedure should involve a promise that those countries unable to tackle imbalances would find themselves shut off from using the European Central Bank's credit facilities, their debt no longer accepted as collateral by the ECB in money market operations.®> These institutional reforms were agreed upon not without some controversy. The 2012 fiscal pact originally appeared as a Franco-German proposal in early 2011, labelled a ‘Pact for Competitiveness’. This pact had included the abolition of salary indexation schemes, a greater harmonization of corporate tax rates, a coordinated overhaul of national pension systems, and the inser-

tion of a debt alert mechanism into national constitutions.?* Its institutional form, however, was more national than European and bore the stamp of

81 The text for the fiscal ‘treaty’ can be found at: . Strictly speaking, it is an ‘inter-governmental agreement’ rather than a treaty as such.

82 Article 5, paragraphs 1 and 2, Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union. $ This was the recommendation of the report by members of the International Centre for Money and Banking Studies ([CMB). Sce B, Eichengreen, R. Feldman, J. Liebman, J. von Hagen, and C. Wyplosz, Public Debts: Nuts, Bolts and Worrles (Geneva:

$ A. Willis, ‘Franco German Observer, 4 February 2011,

“Pact

for Competiveness”

ICMB, 2011), 97.

hits immediate

opposition’, EU

146

European Integration

French and German design. Smaller member states shared the substantive commitment to welfare, labour market, and tax reform but preferred a European-wide framework that was less national in character. Sensing the opposition the ‘Pact for Competiveness’ would have generated within their neo-corporatist communities of unions and business interests, smaller member states spoke out against the plan. In the words of the acting Belgian Prime Minister at the time, Yves Leterne, ‘we must not let our social model be undone’. In response, the plan was taken up by the two European Presidents, Barroso and Van Rompuy, who suggested the Commission be responsible for its implementation. The disagreement was not over the content of the plan, only about its form. Moreover, the concern of smaller member states was with the effectiveness of the plan as much as with its Franco-German origins. At issue was the need for neutral, depoliticized rules rather than a politicized Franco-German bid for greater control within the Eurozone. As Sylvie Goulard, a French European Parliamentarian and critic of the Franco-German refusal to grant the Commission the requisite powers of supervision, put it: ‘who would believe in a highway code where responsibility for policing violations is given over to a committee of motorists rather than to automatic speed

cameras?*° The result of these deliberations was the fiscal pact: a pan-European framework for strengthening the governance of the Eurozone that had been stripped of its overt Franco-German bias. For all the disagreements about how to institutionalize the move towards greater control of national budgets, all member states have accepted the need for closer policing of national budgets and have remained fully committed to the preservation of the Eurozone as it stands. Though the pressure of its internal economic asymmetries may still be its undoing, the crisis has revealed the extent to which life outside the Eurozone for all its members—the powerful as well as for the more peripheral crisis-ridden members—is inconceivable. From the perspective of private investors, for whom what matters is the return on their investments, this can sometimes be hard to fathom. Greece, after all, accounts for only a small fraction of the total Eurozone GDP and yet great efforts have been made to keep it within the currency union. Whilst a more radical overhaul of the Eurozone might have made economic sense, the political resistance to such changes has so far has been too strong. The Papandreou government in Greece, for instance, faced down extensive street protests in order to vote through and begin to implement the budgetary conditions attached to its EU and IMF loans. Its technocratic successor, led by Lucas Papademos, continued in the same vein. Far from being proof of ideological commitment to European integration, this stance is best explained 85 S. Goulard, ‘La zone euro ne peut se réduire à une coopération intergouvernamentale’, Le Monde, 10 August 2011.

European Economic Integration

147

by the fact that any alternative is simply inconceivable. Indeed, it is unclear whether the Greek government at any stage formulated a national plan detailing how the country would implement an exit from the Eurozone. Back in the early 1980s, those arguing that France should leave the EMS and impose protectionist trade barriers in order to overcome its economic crisis

were—as noted earlier—described as ‘Albanians’, a term indicating that already by that time stand-alone national economic plans were considered wildly outdated. One can only speculate at the labels that would have been given to anyone seriously floating the idea in 2010 and 2011 that Greece should exit the Eurozone and reissue a new Drachma. When in November 2011 Papandreou peremptorily announced that he was going to hold a national referendum on the EU/IMF loan package, he invoked the ire both of his peers across Europe and most of Greece’s political class. The notion that Greece’s membership of the EU should be put to a vote in this way cost Papandreou his position as prime minister. The short-lived and muchmaligned idea of a referendum was evidence that in Greece, and in the rest

of the Eurozone, there is no viable alternative to EU membership.®° This same difficulty at envisaging life outside the Eurozone was evident in Silvio Berlusconi’s response to a marked rise in the borrowing rate offered by international bond markets to Italy in the course of 2011. Contrary to his strident tones of populist nationalism deployed under other circumstances, Berlusconi lamented what he saw as the national short-sightedness of France, Germany, and the ECB. He complained that only ‘communitarian governance’, represented by an ECB fully empowered to act as lender of last resort without having to gain the ‘political green light’ from member states, would scare speculators off and bring back down the spread (extra interest) currently charged to Italy in its refinancing operations. By insisting that the ECB obtain political permission to undertake bond buy-backs, Berlusconi argued that France and Germany were only thinking of themselves. This was foolish, he said, since ‘if today it’s our turn, tomorrow it can be Paris’s turn’. Eventually, faced with an unsustainable rise in borrowing costs for Italy resulting from internal political disputes between Berlusconi and his fractious governmental coalition, Berlusconi resigned and opened the door to a technocratic administration led by former European commissioner, Mario Monti. The goal of this change was to preserve at all costs Italy’s membership of the Eurozone, both an economic and existential necessity for Italy. This determination to preserve the Eurozone, and the support given to a steady tightening of the regulatory powers of the European Commission and Council in national macro-economic affairs, makes sense from the member 8 For a view on Papandreou’s referendum idea, see C. J. Bickerton, ‘Greece’s referendum is a good thing’, Le Monde diplomatique, 2 November 2011. Available at: Môckli (2009: 229).

'® Dave Allen and William Wallace, ‘European Political Cooperation: The Historical and Contemporary Background’, in D. Allen, R. Rummel, and W. Wessels (eds), European Political Cooperation: Towards a Foreign Policy for Western Europe (London: Butterworth Scientific, 1982), 27.

‘” Stanley Hoffmann, The European Sisyphus: Essays on Europe, 1964-1994 (Oxford: Westview Press, 1995), 113.

European Union Foreign Policy

159

1963 and 1967 and not to resort to one of those acts of revenge that only very old families and very old diplomatic services are capable of exacting?”.'® What is important about this period, however, is that such politicization in intraEuropean relations came from above. It was superimposed onto European states via the framework of the Cold War. What Hoffmann and Lacouture miss is the fact that the rivalries were not so much between France and Germany or between the UK and France. Rather, they were rivalries based on different relationships to the US and to the Cold War international order more generally. If we look closely at the European states themselves, we see a steady attenuation in nationalism as a guiding force of national foreign policy. Still evident in the 1950s, it gave way to far greater pragmatism in the 1960s. This reflects the fact that the post-war national corporatist framework in place in Europe during this time was national in form but not nationalistic as such. It was nationally defined because the obligations and rights contained within the post-war social contract went only as far as national borders. This constrained European economic integration, as detailed in Chapter 4, but did not necessarily limit foreign policy cooperation. As we shall see in the case of EPC and its demise in the mid-1970s, post-war national Keynesianism only limited foreign policy cooperation through the effects of an economic downturn. Under conditions of low growth, relations between European states became more conflictual as national governments sought to protect their domestic populations by introducing protectionist and beggar-thy-neighbour policies. Under conditions of strong economic growth, what continued to limit foreign policy cooperation were the divisions and rivalries that resulted from Cold War tensions. For instance, Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik was feared by France not so much because it signalled the return of a revanchist Germany but because of its impact upon Western European security and implications for the status of the Soviet threat. French opposition to British entry into the EC had been based less on Franco-British enmity so much as on the view, strongly held by de Gaulle, that the UK was a Trojan horse for US interests. He didn’t want these interests at the heart of the EC and thus rejected the British application for membership. The problem détente posed for Western European states was that it threatened both US disengagement from Europe and the continent’s neutralization. For countries that had reorganized their national defences around the presumption of Cold War rivalry in Europe, this would have been seriously destabilizing. As Pompidou put it to Brandt in 1971, ‘France had organized her defences after the Algerian War and built up her nuclear

'" Cited in Hugo Young, This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 423, Young described the Soames affair as ‘the most incandescent bilateral row between

France and Britaln since the war’ (Young

1998: 203).

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European Integration

armaments at great national expense. She was not prepared to carry out enforced reductions’.!” In another discussion with Brandt, Pompidou made it clear that what complicated relations between states in Europe was not intra-European enmity of old but the persisting tensions of the Cold War. In his words, European wars like those of the past are inconceivable. The probability is that there will be peace in Europe while relations between the Soviet Union and China remain as they are. One cannot, however, rule out the hypothesis that political upheavals—in Yugoslavia, for example—or a communist take-over in Italy or

even France might prompt a Soviet attempt to encroach on Western Europe.*° A good example of how Cold War tensions, not intra-European nationalist rivalries as such, shaped the foreign policies of European states at the time can be found in the differences between what Timothy Garton Ash called super-

power and European détente.*! For the main architects of superpower détente, Kissinger and Nixon, the goals were explicitly realist in inspiration and tied to a fixed idea about the US national interest. Mary Elise Sarotte says simply that for the US the goal was to ‘restructure the global balance of power’ in a way that could ease the country’s exit from conflicts like Vietnam. The disparate elements of the Nixon era’s foreign policy—opening of relations with China, exit from Vietnam, détente with the Soviet Union—were thus tied together in a single national vision. This clashed with Brandt’s understanding of détente and his pursuit of Ostpolitik. As Sarotte notes, Where Nixon and Kissinger repeatedly strove to create the broadest possible globe-spanning linkages between major world events ... Brandt and Bahr, in essence, strove to create

small but durable links to the other half of Germany’.** Brandt’s aim with Ostpolitik was reactive in that it responded to US moves towards détente with the Soviet Union. The goals, however, were neither geostrategic nor geopolitical. Brandt’s concerns were parochial and national. He wanted to improve relations between East and West Germany in ways that improved living standards in the East and that overcame some of the East/West division of Germany. Ostpolitik was notably not a bid to reverse the division of Germany but was a pragmatic reconciliation with it. Brandt’s efforts thus explicitly

' W. Brandt, People and Politics (London: Collins, 1976), 260. This was in fact particularly important for France because de Gaulle’s foreign policy had been based on the idea that civilian control of the French army after 1958 could be maintained by militarizing France’s role in international affairs. Such a role relied upon Cold War conflict both as a justification for France’s nuclear deterrent and as a means by which France could cultivate independent relations with non-European parts of the world.

? Brandt (1976: 271).

?! Timothy Garton Ash, In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993).

22 Mary Elise Sarotte, 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), 152.

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161

avoided raising any grand ideological questions pertaining to the East/West divide. His move ratified the status quo, ‘de-ideologized it’, and aimed for

gains that were tangible for individuals on both sides.>* As Sarotte put it, his policy was ‘an intriguing mixture of nationalism and pragmatism’.** Whilst the US was still caught up in ideologically driven pursuits of its national interest, Europe’s core states were far more pragmatic in terms of their relations with one another. Western Europe in this period was thus caught in a pincer-like movement: pressures of politicization from below channelled through national corporatist politics combined with politicization from above in the form of Cold War rivalries. Economic competition within Europe and ideological conflict internationally were the main forces constraining closer European foreign policy cooperation, not nationalist tensions as such. EPC was thus constrained in what it could achieve in the 1970s, with one exceptional moment when the actual nature of relations between Western European states was revealed. This moment was the EPC’s role in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe: the CSCE negotiations between the Soviet Union and the West in Geneva and Helsinki that ended with the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. The CSCE negotiations were a highpoint for European foreign policy cooperation in this period. In Môckli’s words, ‘submitting joint proposals for a CSCE agenda and for mandates on each issue at the Multilateral Preparatory Talks in Helsinki, the [European] Community countries for the first time acted as a united body on the international stage’.”” This was, he argues, ‘an impressive demonstration oftheir ambition to move towards a common foreign policy.. . It has justly been

described by a delegate as EPC’s true hour of birth’.?® The Helsinki Final Act signed in the Finnish capital in 1975 was the result of a long and complex set of negotiations held in Geneva. These negotiations included all European countries except Albania, the US, and Canada. The final agreement was organized into three separate baskets of issues: international security; international trade, technological exchange, and environmental cooperation; and the movement of peoples, ideas, and information, which included a commitment to human rights. Some historians have seen in this last human rights issue a key factor in bringing down the Soviet Union a decade and a half later.”’

23 R. L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Regan (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1994), 140. 24 Sarotte (2009: 159).

? Môckli (2009: 99).

26 Mäckli (2009: 99). Simon Nuttall also stresses the importance of the CSCE negotiations for

EPC and European foreign policy generally. See Simon Nuttall, European Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 14, 27" 1. M. Hanhimiiki, ‘Conservative Goals, Revolutionary Outcomes: The Paradox of Détente’, Cold War History, 8/4 (2008): 503 12; ¢f. . Suri, ‘Détente and Human Rights: American and West European Perspectives on International Change, Cold War History, 8/4 (2008), 527 45.

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European Integration

Whether or not the Helsinki Final Act was as central to Cold War history as some historians have suggested, the CSCE negotiations were important for the development of European foreign policy cooperation. They were an example of what was possible by way of cooperation when the politicizing effects of the Cold War and of intra-European economic competition were moderated. The prominence and activism of the EPC at this time and within these negotiations were made possible by the disinterest shown by the United States. Both Kissinger and Nixon were more concerned with the Middle East, Vietnam, and their own détente strategy. Michael Cotey Morgan writes that ‘Kissinger could not understand the need to hold a major international conference simply to confirm a postwar status quo that the West had implicitly accepted

for nearly thirty years’.”® ‘Instead of wasting time on what he saw as useless phrases’, Kissinger ‘preferred to focus on concrete issues’”” Tellingly, in Nixon’s memoires there was no mention of the CSCE negotiations or of the

Final Act.” The significance of US disinterest in the negotiations was that it removed the contentious and unresolved question of what relationship European states should have with Washington. This relationship, then as much as today, raised issues of leadership, independence, identity, and self-determination which tended to be divisive, as we saw with the Elysée Treaty of 1963. Without US involvement, European heads of state lost interest and gave their national officials considerable leeway in conducting the negotiations. The politicization of the negotiations was thus slight in comparison to other issues and other multilateral activities. The result, observes Môckli, is that the CSCE became more a bureaucratic project than a political one. This insulated CSCE negotiations from the daily events of both international and domestic politics. As Cotey Morgan remarks, ‘the conference seemed to have developed its own momentum, apparently oblivious to external developments’. Despite events such as the Yom Kippur War, the expulsion of Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn from the Soviet Union and changes of political leadership in the US, France, and the UK, the negotiations ‘continued to grind away’.>! This autonomy of officials gave to the CSCE negotiations their strong functional logic. As is evident from the Final Act itself, talks were organized into separate issue areas. Negotiations were complex and expert-dominated, which fitted well with the EPC. Its own contribution relied on preparatory work conducted by national experts seconded to purpose-built EPC working groups. For the purpose of the negotiations, an ad hoc working group was set up with a Commission representative in order to involve the Commission in the process. 8 M. Cotey Morgan, ‘The United States and the Making of the Helsinki Final Act’, in F. Logevall and A. Preston (eds), Nixon in the World: American Foreign Relations, 1969-1977 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 166.

79 Cotey Morgan (2008: 166). " Cotey Morgan (2008: 166). * Cotcy Morgan (2008: 172).

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These groups met every other month in the run-up to the conference but during the negotiations they tended to be ‘more or less permanently in

session’.’” De Groll notes that ‘out of this group there gradually arose a real community of interests’ able to exert influence within the negotiations.”” What bound the group together and ensured the success of the EPC was thus its mastery of a technically complex set of international negotiations. Given the range and complexity of what was being discussed, the CSCE working groups of the EPC were themselves divided up into subcommittees. De Groll writes that ‘there were about fifteen special committees of the Nine meeting every

week in Geneva’.”* As the highpoint of the EPC, the CSCE negotiations tell us a good deal about the nature of European foreign policy cooperation. The main actors were national officials and experts, not heads of state or leading political representatives. The substance was organized functionally in terms of issue area and freed of the grand political narratives that usually guided Cold War foreign policies. The negotiations were conducted in isolation both from the politicized arena of the global Cold War and in isolation from domestic political currents that had undermined the unity of European foreign policy efforts in the past. Unencumbered with the ups and downs of international and domestic politics, the negotiations in Geneva and Helsinki gained their OWn internal momentum and rationale. Whilst the EPC representatives were able to complete their CSCE negotiations, the broader progress of EPC was halted by the closing of this favourable window of opportunity. The return of Cold War tensions and US involvement in Europe, combined with economic crisis made more urgent by the OPEC oil embargoes, had the effect of stripping away from the EPC its isolation and autonomy. From the mid-1970s onwards, its development was held back by these politicizing effects. The OPEC oil crisis and the downturn in Western economies revealed in particular the way the social welfare obligations of European states interacted with Cold War rivalries in ways that mined European solidarity. Those countries considered ‘friendly’ by OPEC, such as France and the UK, faced higher oil prices but still enjoyed access to OPEC oil. France was so favoured that its foreign minister, Michel Jobert, acquired the

sobriquet of ‘Jobert of Arabia’.’> Other EPC member states, such as the Netherlands, were considered more hostile and faced oil embargoes. In response, the Dutch proposed that the European Community should pool its oil resources and grant embargoed countries access to the common pool. This met with strong French and British resistance. Writing in 1976 in a report commissioned by the EC, former Belgian premier Leo Tindemans warned

2 G. Groll, “The Nine at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe’, in D. Allen, R. Rummel, and W. Wessels (eds), European Political Co-operation: Towards a Foreign Policy for Western Europe (London: Butterworth Scientific, 1982), 65.

** Groll (1982: 67),

“ Groll (1982: 64).

"* Môckli (2009: 198).

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European Integration

darkly that ‘the Community is crumbling beneath the resurgence, which is felt everywhere, of purely national preoccupations’.’® The implications for EPC were serious. EC states found it difficult to reach a common position on the Middle East, with the erosion of a common outlook most apparent at the 1973 Copenhagen summit in December. Not intended to be a major diplomatic event, and with a number of EPC-related issues on the agenda, the summit of EC heads of state was disrupted by the unexpected attendance of four Arab ambassadors asking to meet with leaders of the EC Nine. Willy Brandt responded by arguing that the Israeli ambassador should be received in the interests of balance and it was finally agreed that the foreign ministers should

receive the delegation and then report back to the heads of government.”” Allen and Wallace colourfully recount that the Copenhagen Summit was ‘a fiasco, with an Arab oil deputation playing the role of Banquo at the Feast, allegedly on the secret and unilateral invitation of M. Jobert’.>® According Mockli, the French had forewarned their EC partners about the delegation but it was not enough to avoid acrimony and embarrassment. EPC was not entirely undone by this discord but it was a sign of the constraints under which it operated. Though EPC representatives were able to push forward with the CSCE negotiations, the year 1973 ended inauspiciously. As Môckli puts it, ‘the year 1973, having witnessed a remarkable rise and performance of EPC, ended in conspicuous failure’.°” Reasons for failure were tied to the two main constraints operating on EPC: the pressures of national economic crisis and a renewal in Cold War tension. The falling out over the Middle East was in part shaped by the divisive effects of US policy. The OPEC response was itself a reaction to US support for Israel in the 1973 war and an example of Arab nationalism hoping to exploit what it saw as US weakness both in Vietnam and in the collapse of the Bretton Woods framework. The escalation in the October War was also the result of superpower rivalry: the US went onto nuclear alert in late October without consulting its European allies as a way of deterring the Soviet Union from getting involved in the conflict. This confirmed European fears about being sidelined but did not generate enough of a common feeling to galvanize the EPC. Under pressure from the French, the Nine did agree on a Declaration of European Identity in

December 1973 and were able to decide on launching a Euro-Arab dialogue.”° 36 Leo Tindemans, ‘European Union’, Bulletin of the European Communities Supplement 1/76 (Brussels: European Commission, 1976). Available at: , accessed on 30 September 2009.

"7 Môckli (2009: 240-1).

38 W. Wallace and D. Allen, ‘Political Cooperation: Procedure as Substitute for Policy’, in H. Wallace, W. Wallace, and C. Webb (London: John Wiley & Sons, 1977), 238.

(eds),

Policymaking

in

the European

Communities

*? Môckli (2009: 244).

“ E. Bozo, La Politique Étrangère de la France Depuis 1945 (Paris: La Découverte, 1997), 67-8.

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The Cold War fed into national foreign policies in other ways as well, with different effects depending on the country in question. In West Germany, bomb attacks by a far left group had put the spotlight on the government’s role

in the Vietnam War.*! Though only a small minority supported the Red Army Faction

(RAF),

there was

a widespread

sense of disillusionment

with

the

country’s traditionally strong Atlanticist foreign policy. Ifestos notes that by 1980 pacifist sentiment had become very strong in West Germany and many Germans felt that “‘Western Europe is a frontline defence protectorate for the USA which lacks the freedom to express itself on the great issues of war and

peace’.‘* In Italy, the historical compromise of the 1970s between the Communists and Christian Democrats led to a more accommodating stance towards the Soviet Union. This also meant greater activism within the EPC to push for an independent European voice. Italy’s foreign minister, Emilio Colombo, played a key role in the launch of the 1983 Solemn Declaration.‘* In France, Giscard d’Estaing moved in the opposite direction, profiting from the demise of Gaullism to improve relations with the US. By the end of his presidency in 1980, however, France was once again pursuing its role of ‘third force’. Giscard d’Estaing’s visit to Moscow in 1980 was seen as a tacit French acceptance of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.** From 1973 through until the early 1980s, national strategies within Europe went in different directions, expressing the varied way in which Cold War tensions interacted with domestic political conditions. In Ifestos’s words, In 1973 (in the Copenhagen Report) and in 1982 (in the London Report)

[EPC

member states] did not change the picture because conditions as regards European integration did not change: the Western European political system continues to be decentralized; the nation-state system prospers and resists transfer of vital powers to supranational institutions; divergences of interest among the member states persist; and last but not least, geopolitical perspectives and linkages of the member states with their external environment are divergent as they ever

W€I'€.45

It is worth stressing, though, that the divergences were externally induced. They were products of Cold War tensions rather than of nationalistic Smith (2004: 118). °° Simon Nuttall was a British diplomat and member of the European Commission. °7 In his words, ‘although EPC produced policies of greater or lesser success and resonance on any subject under the sun, for many participants the value of EPC was less in this than in the process itself” (Nuttall 2000: 15).

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European Integration

circumscribed nature of EPC, he observed that ‘the magic of EPC did not work outside the charmed circle; one had to participate to fall under its spell’.°* In this respect, EPC expressed a fundamental change in the European state itself. Those national diplomats who participated in it were not acting as representatives of their own governments in a way that required them to defend a particular national position. In this sense, they were different from the ambassadors sent to Brussels to head the Permanent Representations.”® They were Political Directors in national foreign ministries, i.e. they were ‘officials in the home ministry with direct responsibility for the conception and implementa-

tion of policy’.°° Here, we see the meaning of member statehood in the foreign policy field: national interests are identified in the course of pan-European cooperation rather than being presented to other governments as a fait accompli. This introduces a state-to-state relationship into the heart of national government and challenges conventional views about the national interest as an expression of a state-society relationship, exogenous to inter-

state relations as such, and involving a national claim made by governments about the content of the public good.®! The freedom by which national executives and seconded officials were able to develop foreign policy in this way was circumscribed by the pressures of the Cold War and by the obligations placed upon national governments by the post-war social contract. As the latter was undone in the 1980s, there was less need to formulate distinctive national outlooks: hence the slow, but significant, development of EPC. The decline of class conflict relative to the 1970s was also significant: extreme left groups—from the RAF to the Red Brigades—were no longer politicizing government positions on US policies and on the Cold War more generally. The end of the Cold War was nevertheless crucial in removing from Western Europe the divisions and conflicts that had made foreign policy cooperation so difficult and in ending the practice of defining national foreign policy roles in terms of the Cold War order itself. What emerged in its place was, however, more continuity than change. The system of cooperation between member states was extended and deepened but institutional development remained slow, interests inward and parochial, and there was little appetite for the kind of dramatic institutional creativity that many studying European integration had come to hope for.

°* Nuttall (2000: 16). ? These ambassadors make up the two COREPER bodies and their existence dates back to the 1960s when a more permanent national presence in Brussels was seen as desirable by EC member states. See Chapter 1 for more details.

° Nuttall (2000: 16).

$! On the national interest as this kind of public justification, see Frederick Kratochwil, ‘On the Notion of “Interest” in International Relations’, International Organization, 36/1 (1982): 1-30.

European Union Foreign Policy EU

FOREIGN

AND SECURITY POLICY THE COLD WAR

171 AFTER

The above account of European foreign policy cooperation has argued that the shift from nation states to member states was masked in the foreign policy field by the politicizing of intra-European relations by the Cold War conflict. Whilst relations between Western European states were increasingly based on pragmatism, the Cold War continued to create divisions, such as the one between a Gaullist view of Europe’s international role and Adenauer’s preference for Atlantic unity. The pressures on national governments that came from its welfare commitments also prevented closer cooperation in times of economic difficulty such as in the 1970s. What occurred was thus a process of state transformation that remained relatively hidden from view, with foreign policy cooperation confined to a circle of national officials and national diplomats in the framework of EPC. The end of the Cold War removed these constraints and liberated member states from the politicizing shadow of Cold War rivalries. The expectation at the time was that the end of the Cold War would give rise to either a renewed round of conflict between nation states in Europe or would propel European states towards a more supranational form of foreign policy cooperation. Neither came to pass as cooperation between member states became the established norm of the post-ColdWar period. Given that the Cold War had masked this transformation in European states, many expected that the end of the Cold War would profoundly reshape political life in Europe. The reunification of Germany in particular was seen as a source of dramatic and unpredictable change, as was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the break-up of Yugoslavia. In all cases, the concern of Western policymakers was to preserve the status quo. As British Prime Minister John Major put it, early on in the Yugoslav crisis, ‘the great prize is to hold the federation together’.” The view that Cold War bipolarity had been a source of stability rather than instability in Europe was common and led many to expect serious instability in the 1990s. Writing in 1994, the Oxford historian Mark Almond suggested the Yugoslav conflict might even bring down the EU: ‘it may yet be that just as the assassination in Sarajevo in June 1914 precipitated the war which led to the collapse of the great European empires. . . so the antagonisms revealed by the Yugoslav war will set in train

2 Mark Almond, Europe’s Backyard War: The War in the Balkans (London: Manderin, 1994), 32. This approach was maintained until Germany unilaterally recognized Croatia and Slovenia as independent states. This forced the EC to change its position entirely and to support the independence of the different parts of Yugoslavia. For an extended account of the EC's policy towards Yugoslavia, see Barbara Delcourt, Droit et Souverainetés: Analyse critique du discourse européen sur la Yougoslavie (Brussels: P.LE.-Peter Lang, 2003).

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European Integration

the decay of the European Community”.°* This view was also held by French President François Mitterrand, for whom the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 signalled an attempt at keeping the post-Cold War European Community together. Eric Hobsbawm recounts how Mitterrand made a surprise visit to the Bosnia capital, Sarajevo, on 28 June 1992. The date was carefully chosen: it was the same day that Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated in 1914, the event that precipitated the start of the First World War. Mitterrand’s visit had been intended both to highlight the importance of solving the Bosnian crisis and to send a message about the historical significance of the Maastricht Treaty. His message to the French population was that voting yes for Maastricht was also a way of keeping Europe together and avoiding a bloody return to its pre-EC history. To dismiss these fears is not to view the early post-Cold-War period retrospectively, with the benefit of hindsight. Even at the time, Mitterrand and Thatcher were isolated in their emphasis on the threat of German revanchism and the possibility of renewed intra-European conflict. In conversation with Gorbachev in September 1989, Thatcher had made her feelings clear: ‘Britain and Western Europe are not interested in the unification of Germany’, she explained. It would, she argued, ‘lead to changes in post-war borders, and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the stability of the entire international situation’.°* Mitterrand visited the GDR in December 1989, a few days after FRG Chancellor Helmut Kohl had launched his 10 point reunification plan.°° As the historian Mary Elise Sarotte observed, these positions at the time left figures like Thatcher isolated. In Thatcher’s case, ‘perpetually at odds with the EC, in deepening political trouble at home...and soon to be at odds with both Washington and NATO

leadership,

[Thatcher]

had

trouble

finding like-minded

souls who

agreed with her strong desire to resist rapid change in divided Germany”.°° Mitterrand himself acted more pragmatically, changing position in response 63 Almond (1994: p. xvii).

64 Sarotte (2009: 28).

$> Sarotte (2009: 82). For a detailed account of Mitterrand’s policy and decisions in 1989-90 that argues that the French president made numerous mistakes and lacked foresight, see S. Cohen (ed.), Mitterrand et la sortie de la guerre froide (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,

1998). For a revisionist account that is more sympathetic to Mitterrand, see F. Bozo, Mitterrand, la fin de la guerre froide et l’unification allemande: De Yalta à Maastricht (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2005). Bozo notes that the conventional view of a French diplomatic corps and political leadership opposing itself to unification is based in large part on an overreliance on the memoires of one of Mitterrand’s closest advisers, Jacques Attali, what Bozo describes as ‘le problème Attali’ (Bozo 2005: 12). See J. Attali, Verbatim III (Paris: Fayard, 1995). Attali went on to lead one of the

few new institutions created after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). Bozo’s own view is that France was overcome by events in late 1989, that it did not seek to prevent reunification but rather aimed at encompassing it within wider structures, namely the then-EC.

$$ Sarotte (2009: 61).

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173

to attitudes and events around him. He was equivocal in his support of Kohl only until he had found a strategy that he felt best suited France’s interest. Mitterrand’s view seemed to be that German reunification was inevitable and the challenge was to make it work for France. His wager was, as historians have reported, that ‘if Paris let Bonn take the initiative on national unification, then Bonn would agree to practically anything that France wanted on European integration’.°’ In this respect, German unification was a bargaining chip Mitterrand was able to use in his negotiations with Kohl over the future direction for European integration. His actions were inspired less by realpolitik or genuine anti-German sentiment and more by a pragmatic adaptation to what was a fluid international situation. German reunification itself was remarkable for the lack of institutional change that it generated. Hobsbawm compares reunification in 1990 with the unification of Germany a century earlier. He notes that ‘the first [unification in 1871] was seen as the long-awaited achievement of an objective which, in one way or another, was the central concern of everyone interested in

politics in the German lands, even those who wanted to resist it’.°* In 1990, the situation was entirely different: reunification had been given up as a strategic goal back in the 1960s, as we saw with Brandt’s pragmatic Ostpolitik efforts. The changes in 1990 were striking for their speed and unexpectedness. As Hobsbawm observed, ‘No doubt among all their doubts and uncertainties about the future, most Germans welcomed the unification of the two Germanies, but its very suddenness, and the patent lack of serious preparation for it, demonstrate that, whatever the public rhetoric, it was the by-product of

unexpected events outside Germany’.°° Fitting with this suddenness was the lack of institutional ambition on the part of those pushing for Germany's reunification. The most idealistic and imaginative were the dissidents of East Germany, for whom the fall of the Berlin Wall was a chance to rebuild a new and better kind of socialism on the ruins of the old GDR. Far removed from such idealism, the GDR was simply assimilated directly into the existing West German constitutional framework. Sarotte describes this as the victory of the ‘pre-fab’ model over the ‘heroic aspirations’ of the GDR dissidents. Such a victory was at the time far from assured given that German reunification

67 Sarotte (2009: 82). Emphasis in original. ® Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 167. 69 Hosbawm

(1990:

168).

Timothy

Garton

Ash

makes

1780:

Programme,

a similar

German reunification. He cites one East German writer, Reiner what his response was to reunification: ‘I expect of Germany . .. will prepare itself for this day’. In other words, reunification had that the real challenge for the government lay in its ability to Germanies—a process that only began on 3 October, Timothy Present: Essays, Sketches and Dispatches from Europe tn the 1990s

point

Myth,

Reality

in his account

of

Kunze, who said when asked that after 3rd October 1990 it been so hasty and unexpected successfully integrate the two Garton Ash, History of the (London: Penguin, 1999), 57.

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European Integration

should have been the ideal opportunity for writing a permanent German constitution, replacing the Basic Law whose own status was formally a temporary one. Yet for Kohl, constitutional rewriting was to be avoided as much as possible. In Sarotte’s words, ‘the notion that West Germany’s de facto constitution would self-destruct in 1990. .. was breathtaking. Article 146 [of the Basic Law] was clearly the official road to unity, but executing it would be risky in the extreme’. Such a road ‘did not fit in the least with the prefab model

that Kohl was working so hard to develop’.”° Kohl’s preferred alternative was to use Article 23 of the Basic Law which allowed for parts of Germany to choose to put themselves under the Basic Law’s jurisdiction. This meant that the FRG was in effect incorporating the GDR much in the manner of the 1938 German Anchluss of Austria, requiring no change to the Basic Law. This was the option that was chosen and reunification took the form of the assimilation of the GDR into West Germany. A seemingly effortless end to what many had expected to bring renewed conflict back to the heart of old Europe. This ‘pre-fab’ model of German reunification has interesting parallels to another post-1989 development in Europe, the ‘velvet divorce’ of 1993 which saw the creation of two separate states, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In the eyes of some at the time, this was another example—alongside the break-up of Yugoslavia and fighting in the Caucuses—of a resurgent Eastern ethnic nationalism. In fact, as Tony Judt argued, this ‘divorce’ was as unexpected and as relatively painless as German reunification. It was, in his description, an unintended accident. In the years after 1989, public opinion in Czechoslovakia was accepting of a single Czech-Slovak state. The political class at the time had also agreed on the federal arrangement. What pushed the country to split was not nationalism so much as the collapse of political alliances that had been cemented under Soviet rule. The unifying force of anti-Soviet dissidence had kept disparate political forces together. In the absence of this binding agent, conflicts emerged. Former dissidents in particular lacked the authority and raison d'être they had enjoyed when mobilizing against Soviet power. As a replacement, they converted themselves to nationalist causes though without seeking full independence as such. Vladimir Meciar tried to use the Slovak nationalist following he had built up as leverage in his negotiations with Vaclav Klaus, prime minister of the Czech region. Klaus’s own view was that the Slovak region was a constraint upon the Czech economy’s transition towards market capitalism. Klaus thus gave way quickly to Meciar’s fiery demands and the latter, to his surprise, found himself head of an independent state. Judt sums up the curious affair: ‘the Czechoslovak divorce was a manipulated process in which the Czech Right brought about what it claimed not to seek while Slovak populists achieved rather more than they had 79 On the ‘heroic aspirations’, see chapter 3 of Sarotte (2009). On the victory of the ‘pre-fab model’, see chapter 4.

European Union Foreign Policy

175

intended; not many people were overjoyed at the result, but nor was there

lasting regret’.”! In this early post-Cold-War period, we see a widespread attempt to limit the institutional consequences of the change in the international order. The lifting of the Cold War shadow in Europe revealed a system of states keen to preserve the status quo and—when forced to accommodate themselves to its disappearance—concerned to minimize the subsequent changes. This reveals how these states have been transformed from within, evolving from nation states to member states in spite of the ongoing Cold War tensions. In his 1998 account of post-Cold War Europe, Jan Zielonka usefully distinguished between appearance and reality. Whilst post-1989 Europe had echoes of post1871 Europe, this resemblance was only superficial. In his words, ‘notall [ . . . ] European squabbles necessarily lead to military conflict, not all national ambitions are about imposing regional domination and not all interstate coalitions are about dividing Europe into new spheres of influence’.”* Sensitive to what had changed, Zielonka characterized post-Cold-War Europe as in the throes of ‘hegemonic atavism’: some states may appear to play the game of power politics but at issue is ‘petty parochialism’ rather than regional hegemony. Zielonka notes that ‘atavism remains what it is: a resemblance to a remote hegemonic ancestor, not a pattern dominating present-day politics’.”?

The lack was evident Foreign and of the CFSP

of any dynamic pushing for significant institutional development in the shift from European Political Cooperation to the Common Security Policy introduced in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. Studies have often identified it with the practice of French realpolitik: in

the same way that winning a commitment to monetary union was France’s

way of minimizing the geopolitical fallout of German reunification, so was CFSP a way of tying down German Macht before it was able to reassert itself in Europe. Such a reading of CFSP is consistent with the notion popular at the time of the Maastricht Treaty that, having been released from the straightjacket of the Cold War, European states would finally be able to assume the leadership role in international affairs that had been denied them by the bipolar conflict. As Mark Almond put it, the sentiment in European chancelleries at the time was that the Yugoslav war represented a perfect chance for the European Community to ‘master and thus banish the haunting doubts about its capacity to act as a counterweight to the two Cold War superpowers, the USA and USSR, on the international stage’.”* A leading voice of this kind of sentiment was ‘the Grand Duchy’s very own Metternich’, Luxembourg's "! Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: William Heinemann, 2005), 659. 72 Jan Zielonka, Explaining Europaralysis: Why Europe is Unable to Act in International Politics (London: Macmillan, 73 Zielonka (1998: 45-6).

"* Almond (1994: 31).

1998), 33.

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European Integration

foreign minister, Jacques Poos. He was the one who, on his way to Ljubljana in June 1991, described the Yugoslav crisis as ‘the hour of Europe’, adding that ‘if

one problem can be solved by the Europeans, it is the Yugoslav problem’. Yugoslavia, he insisted for good measure, was ‘a European country and it is

not up to the Americans’ to solve the crisis.” Viewed in this light, we might expect CSFP to embody this new-found European vocation for international affairs. In fact, the CSFP was a far more limited initiative, existing initially in word rather than in deed. As Michael E. Smith observed, CFSP was floated by Mitterrand and Kohl as a form of political union that would complement monetary union. However, ‘following their initial letter, Kohl and Mitterrand actually contributed very little to the discussion about what CSFP should involve’.”® Far from being a radical rupture and change from its predecessor, EPC, CSFP was a symptom of continuity at the regional level in the midst of dramatic changes internationally. CSFP was characterized by the same internal procedural developments Martin

Holland

noted in 1995, ‘the provisions agreed to in the Treaty on the Union [Maastricht Treaty] are remarkable more for their similarity than their difference from, EPC’”” In a similar vein, Stephanie noted that ‘since the installation of the CSFP in November 1993,

(Smith’s

‘institutionalization

of cooperation’)

as EPC.

As

European to, rather Anderson European

involvement on the world stage has not changed greatly’.”® Holland’s own view was that ‘whilst the expectations for a fully communautarized [sic] foreign policy were disappointed, foreign policy cooperation was advanced

procedurally’.”” As with the evolution of EPC, the shift to CFSP was internally driven and shaped by procedural concerns more than by a qualitative transformation in European foreign policy cooperation. Incredible given the scope of the changes taking place internationally, Smith notes that ‘the specific institutional reforms of EU foreign policy resulting from [the events of 1989-91]

largely reflected endogenous, path-dependent processes’.®® CFSP thus was a ‘natural, logical progression’ from EPC: it clarified the gains of EPC and integrated them into a modified set of CFSP norms.”' As the US journalist Elizabeth Pond put it, remarking on Europe’s less-than-heroic entry into the

73 Cited in Almond (1994: 32). 78 Smith (2004: 179). 77 Martin Holland, European Union Common Foreign Policy: From EPC to CFSP Joint Action and South Africa (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 24.

78 Stephanie B. Anderson, ‘Problems and Possibilities: The Development of the CFSP from Maastricht to the 1996 IGC', in P. Laurent and M. Maresceaum (eds), The State of the European Union: Deepening and Widening (London: Lynne Reinner, 1998), 126. 79 Holland (1995: 27).

% Smith (2004: 176).

9 Smith (2004: 176).

European Union Foreign Policy post-Cold-War world:

‘post Cold War

177

Europe is wary of grand designs.

Modesty, not charisma, is the hallmark of this new beginning’.® These modest foreign and security ambitions were matched in the defence field, notably in the failure of the Western European Union (WEU) to transform itself into the EU’s defence arm. The WEU had been established

in 1948 with the signature in March of the Brussels Treaty.°” Intended as a check against German revanchism, the WEU was soon supplanted by more powerful institutions as the concern of Western powers shifted from Germany to the Soviet Union. The treaty had also included economic, cultural, and social cooperation but the EC and the Council of Europe took over those roles. The WEU was left as ‘an organization without a mission’ until the 1980s when there was talk about reviving it.** In the Persian Gulf in 1987 and 1988, and again in the Adriatic Sea in 1992, WEU naval forces were deployed for minesweeping operations. WEU forces were also used during the Yugoslav war to enforce UN sanctions on the Danube and WEU-mandated officers were sent to Mostar in Bosnia as part of the EU’s administration of the city in 1995-6. These engagements, however, did not develop into anything more sustained or grandiose. The WEU's role remained more rhetorical than real. The Petersberg Tasks of 1992, which identified a wide range of roles for the WEU, including peacekeeping, humanitarian and rescue tasks, and the deployment of troops in crisis management roles, remained a wish list far beyond the capacity of member states to realize. Only four years after the WEU council had called for closer working relations with the EU did the two organizations hold their first meeting, and this was at the level of working groups.”° What lay behind the WEU's failure to take up the mantle of European defence was the lack of ambition on the side of European states themselves. The WEU was hamstrung by the collective refusal within the EU to pursue a common and independent European defence project. Coffey argued that the success of the WEU ‘will depend largely on [its] ability to make optimal use of its limited resources and to tailor its coat to fit the cloth’."° The supply of cloth, however, ‘was limited by the decision of the EU that it

82 Elizabeth Pond, The Rebirth of Europe (Washington, DC: Brookings Institute, 2002), 9. $ The full title of the treaty was the Brussels Treaty of Economic, Social, and Cultural Collaboration and Collective Self-Defence. The original signatories were Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and the UK. The WEU was completed by a protocol signed in Paris in 1954 that added Italy and West Germany as members, reflecting the decline in concern about German power in Europe. For details, see Julian Lindley-French and Katja Flickiger, A Chronology of European Security and Defence, 1945-2005 (Geneva: GCSP, 2005), 20. 4

Joseph I. Coffey, WEU

after the Second

(eds), The State of the European 1998), 114.

82 Coffey (1998: 128). e Coffey (1998: 129).

Maastricht’, in P. Laurent and M. Maresceaum

Union: Deepening and Widening (London:

Lynne Reinner,

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European Integration

does not require the defence capabilities that a “great power” should theoret-

ically possess’.®’ At the time, observers found this lack of institutional creativity on the part of European states surprising. Many had indeed expected that post-Cold-War Europe would see a dismantling of NATO and the creation of a European alternative. This was even the expectation of US policymakers, for whom the enduring success of NATO was initially something of a surprise. NATO's rapid enlargement developed only as a conscious policy once the US realized that there would be no European challenge to NATO’s hegemonic role in European security and defence. In the early 1990s, there were in fact three very different routes down which European security could have travelled.®® One was the preservation of NATO, albeit involving much closer cooperation with Russia. The second was to develop a distinctive European security institution. This might have been based upon the WEU or a modified CSCE. The third option was to assimilate all security and defence issues into an expanded EU, with NATO and other competing security institutions disbanded. What is striking about the discussion in the early 1990s was how open-ended it was. In his 1991 article, Zielonka does not suggest that any of the three options is much more likely than the other two. A combination of all three seemed as likely as the failure to realize any of them individually. Looking at more recent developments, the moderation of the institutional changes undertaken remains a striking feature of European foreign policy cooperation. In line with the notion of ‘power avoidance’ discussed at the beginning of the chapter, we see in the evolution of CSFP, the development of a common security and defence policy from 1999 onwards, and the institutional evolution of the EU’s foreign policy tools (High Representative, External Action Service) an internally driven continuity consistent with this book’s argument about state transformation. Individual developments have tended to follow a logic of problem-solving with respect to the status quo (what

Smith

describes as functional

norm-driven

change)

rather than the

pursuit of power-political ambitions. Marginal increments have prevailed over grand transformations of institutional design. This also holds true for the justifications given for the developments that have taken place. New instances of pan-European cooperation are said to follow professional and practical logics rather than properly political ones. This is true of the evolution of the CSDP where the growing evidence of convergence between different national militaries in Europe is treated as purely a practical matter of technical harmonization and interoperability.

7 Coffey (1998: 129). 88 For a discussion of these three options in detail, see J. Zielonka, ‘Europe’s Security: A Great Confusion’, International Affairs, 67/1

(1991):

127-37 (135-7).

European Union Foreign Policy

179

As Mérand has observed, the sociological change within national armies in Europe—a phenomenon of considerable importance given the significance of armies and army organization as barometers of social change—is striking. In lieu of competing claims to universality made by rival citizen-armies, today we have a professionalized and ‘cosmopolitan-minded’ set of militaries who tend to share a common idea about what military power is for. What prevails today is what Mérand describes as ‘a professional soldier model, based less on a lowskilled mass army driven by patriotism and more on a high-skilled, flexible

force available for changing goals, often multinational in character’.° Identifying the emergence of a ‘common professional ethos’ that spans national military apparatuses in Europe, Mérand attributes this development to the physical proximity of soldiers within a context of the increasing numbers of multinational missions in which European states are taking part. The CSDP alone has launched well over twenty missions in the last decade.” In his words, ‘armed forces live Europe when they experience it on the field’. It is this ‘concrete experience of learning about new cultures and new ways of

doing’ that ‘creates a common, European sense of belonging’.”' In place of an army career steeped in nationalism, soldiers today are increasingly defined by

their profession.”” As Mérand puts it, ‘while European armed forces remain diverse, social representations in the field are converging around the template of the culturally interoperable soldier’.”* Such a soldier is ‘skilled, flexible to work with fellow professionals from different countries, and is task-based

rather than driven by patriotism’.”* Mérand

is certainly right about the changing nature of the subjective

experiences of professional soldiers. Advertisement campaigns to attract new

recruits often highlight an army career as a means of individual self-realization rather than being about serving one’s country.”> However, we can add to this change in subjective experiences the more long-standing and objective

* Mérand (2008: 60). 9 For an updated account of the CSDP missions, see Howorth (2012). See also G. Grevi, D. Helly, and D. Keohane, European Security and Defence Policy: The First Ten Years (Paris: EUISS, 2009). It is notable that virtually no new ESDP missions have been launched in the last couple of years. Eurozone crisis management has taken over as the EU’s number one priority,

relegating ESDP into the background. I Mérand (2008: 68). See also Frédéric Mérand, ‘Dying for the Union? Military Officers and the European Defence Force’, European Societies, 5/3 (2003): 253-82.

O

O

”* Mérand (2003: 259). * Mérand (2008: 64). “ Mérand (2008: 60).

? In Cooper’s words, ‘Where once recruitment posters proclaimed YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU!, they now carry slogans such as JOIN THE ARMY: BE ALL THAT YOU CAN; self-realization has replaced patriotism as a motive for serving in the armed forces. And while soldiers still die bravely for their countries, today they may also sue them for injuries sustained in war’. In Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century (London: Atlantic Books, 2004), 51.

180

European Integration

transformation of the European state. What lies behind the transformation in the military ethos is a change in the state itself. The weak national or societal dimension to contemporary soldiering reflects the uncoupling of the state from society that is a marked feature of member statehood. As an institution with an important mediating role to play between individuals and the state as a ‘community of association’, the army has not escaped the dismantling of state-society relations that have marked the European state over the last thirty years. Yet rather than being a uniquely post-Cold-War phenomenon, we have seen that this development goes back further: the shift in the formation of national foreign policies reflected a broader change in state-society relations that began after 1945 but was contained from above and below by the Cold War and post-war national Keynesianism respectively. This general process of state transformation helps us make sense of why the same pragmatism and orientation towards a professionally bound rather than nationally defined ethos of conduct prevails across different policymaking fields, as prevalent in foreign and security policy as it is in macro-economic governance.

CONCLUSION This chapter has recounted in detail the development of the EU's foreign and security policy, from its stillborn beginnings in the European Defence Community to its expanded post-Cold-War incarnations of CFSP and CSDP. The chapter argued that this development is best understood as a set of contrary trends present within the European state itself: a growing consensus and pragmatic set of relations between individual European states offset by a strong politicization of inter-state relations due to Cold War tensions. The post-war national Keynesian consensus, though national in form, was not nationalist as such. This laid the basis for closer and more consensual relations between Western European states. The Cold War rescue of the nation state and the divisive effects of US leadership in Europe meant that foreign policy cooperation was limited. The renewal of economic conflict in the 1970s also brought out the national elements of European social democracy more forcefully than in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result, there were many constraints operating upon European foreign policy cooperation during the Cold War: politicization from above and from below limited the room for manoeuvre of national governments. One important event was the leadership exerted by European states within the CSCE negotiations in the early 1970s. This, it was argued in the chapter, was made possible by superpower détente and the resulting disinterest of the US in the negotiations. The form that European leadership took—led by experts, highly

European Union Foreign Policy

181

technical negotiations, and a functional approach to security issues—presaged what became CFSP and CSDP. In the course of the 1980s, the EPC framework expanded and strengthened but in a way that reflected the transformation in the state in Europe towards member statehood. The most striking feature of EPC was its lack of publicity and the way national officials and experts were able to elaborate common interests in isolation from both domestic societal pressures and Cold War tensions and rivalries. This rarefied setting, conducive to the development of a strong esprit de corps, has been extended further in the post-Cold-War period with foreign and security policymaking still run by national officials but concentrated in Brussels and entrenching the divide between national governments and national populations that is a feature of member statehood. This study of EU foreign policy cooperation as a product of collaboration between member states provides an answer to the mystery of why the EU has consistently failed to stamp its authority on international affairs. From the end of the Cold War until the present day, there has existed a marked lack of institutional creativity. This reflects the fact that foreign policy cooperation has been driven by a self-referential process of institutional adaptation rather than by powerful social currents that have in the past been the basis for dramatic institutional change. Europe’s lack of ambition in foreign policy, its predilection for ‘power avoidance’, thus needs to be contextualized and seen as one aspect of a deep set of changes in European societies and European statehood.

Conclusion

This book has taken up one of the key challenges of European integration, namely identifying the nature of the European Union. It has argued that such a general enterprise can be done without effacing one or another of the EU’s paradoxes. In particular, the book has highlighted two key features of the EU that have bedevilled work on European integration. The first is the appearance of the EU as something separate from and lying above national societies in Europe. This appearance of externality is in fact only appearance: looking at the precise workings of the integration process and EU policymaking, we find a proliferation of national representatives and national officials working together in a multitude of ways. Approaches that characterize the EU as purely an expression of inter-state negotiations choose to ignore its external appearance. Other approaches that treat the EU as a new and discrete actor or polity fail to grasp the way in which national actors remain central to the whole integration process. The second feature of the EU that has been difficult to grasp is its technocratic appearance. Some identify this as pure ideology behind which lurks the more familiar reality of class interest and realpolitik. Others have taken the technocratic appearance at face value, representing European integration as a post-ideological project pursued by functionalist dynamics or as a multi-level governance system to whom the petty squabbles of national politics are largely alien. In the spirit of those attempts made by scholars to characterize the EU as a whole, this book has put forward its own account. It argues that European integration needs to be thought of as a process of state transformation and not one that is either national or supranational. As a result of this transformation, we can describe the present-day EU as a union of member states. Having set out its stall in this way, this conclusion will consider two questions in more detail. The first question is about the political consequences of member statehood. What implications does this form of state have for understanding contemporary European politics? How can we situate the concept of member state in the ongoing debate about the EU’s lack of democratic legitimacy? The conclusion argues that member statehood helps us understand why populism and technocracy have emerged as two dominant

Conclusion

183

trends in contemporary European political life. The second question is whether or not member statehood can be considered as more than just a European phenomenon. Is this form of state present more generally in international society? And can the concept of member state be used as a basis to analyse some of the dynamics of twenty-first-century international politics? The conclusion will end with a discussion of future avenues for research that follow on from this argument about state transformation and regional integration.

POPULIST

TECHNOCRACY OR THE OF MEMBER STATEHOOD

POLITICS

Depoliticizing of key decision-making is a vital element in bringing power

closer to the people.! Two seemingly contradictory trends that stand out in contemporary European politics are those of technocracy and populism. From independent central banks to a plethora of regulatory agencies, it has become normal to see political authority outsourced to experts. When an ash cloud disrupted air travel in Europe in 2010, many were struck by how the fate of travellers lay in the hands of regulators, not governments.“ Observing these developments, a number of scholars argued that growing technocracy stems from a reorganization of political life around the goal of risk management. This idea was articulated in the early 1990s by the British sociologist Anthony Giddens, who observed that anxiety in late modern society came from the clash between the promise of risk management by experts and the inherent riskiness of life under capitalism. The central political challenge of the twenty-first century was, for Giddens, not the socialization of the means of production but the management of risk in a world lacking the comfort of moral absolutes. In his words, We cannot seize ‘history’ and bend it readily to our collective purposes. .. Yet none of this means that we should, or that we can, give up in our attempts to steer the juggernaut [of modernity]. The minimizing of high-consequence risk transcends all values and all exclusionary divisions of power. ‘History’ is not on our ! A cabinet minister under Tony Blair, cited by Peter Mair, ‘Ruling the Void? The Hollowing of Western Democracy’, New Left Review, 42 (November-December 2006), 25-51 (26). * At the time, many (including officials from the European Commission) complained of excessive deference being paid to climate scientists. Reliance on the predictions of a single, London-based, research institute, the London Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre, led to a Europeanwide ban. A debate ensued about how to weigh up the security risks of travel against the social costs of outright travel bans.,

184

Conclusion

side, has no teleology, and supplies us with no guarantees .. . What is needed is the creation of models of utopian realism.’

A similar idea was developed by Ulrich Beck in his notion of ‘risk society’ and more recently by those working on what is called ‘experimental governance’.* Zaki Laidi has argued that risk aversion is the basis upon which the EU acts in international politics and that transatlantic tensions come from a clash between Europe’s preference for technocratic governance and the United States’ preference for traditional realpolitik as two different ways of managing twenty-first-century international relations.° Indeed, in his book The Rise of the Unelected, Frank Vibert argues that the role played by these unelected, risx-managing experts has become so prevalent within Western democracies that ‘we should take the new bodies as a whole and view them as composing a new branch of government and forming the basis of a new separation of

powers’.° Accompanying

this expansion in technocratic governance in Europe has

been a dramatic shift in the nature and practice of political contestation. Populism, as an ideology and discourse that pits ‘the people’ against the elites, is increasingly challenging the place traditionally held by the main political parties of Left and Right. From Marine Le Pen in France to Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, we see traditional political alliances rubbing up against—and in some cases assimilating—new anti-establishment populist leaders and movements. The rise of populism is not only affecting the political Right in Europe. In the French presidential election of 2012, populist leaders constituted the two poles of political debate: Marine Le Pen on the Right and JeanLuc Mélenchon on the Left. Indeed, it often seemed as if the themes and ideas of the campaign came from these two leaders, with the two mainstream candidates—Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande—borrowing from what the more radical and outspoken candidates were proposing.’ In an influential article, Cas Mudde argued that a ‘populist zeitgeist’ exists in Europe. Instead of

* Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), 153-4. * Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992). Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin (eds), Experimentalist Governance in the European Architecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Union: Towards a New

> On the EU as a risk-averse power, see Zaki Laïdi, ‘Is Europe a Risk-Averse Actor?’, European Foreign Affairs Review, 15 (2010): 411-26. On the clash between governance and sovereignty as ordering principles of international affairs, see Zaki Laïdi, La Grande Perturbation (Paris: Flammarion, 2004), 77-158.

® Frank Vibert, The Rise of the Unelected: Democracy and the New Separation of Powers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 2. ” In Hollande’s case, we see this with his emphasis on targeting France’s rich via a 75 per cent income tax and his declaration at the beginning of the campaign that his enemy was the ‘world of finance’. With Sarkozy, a hard line on internal security issues, on immigration, and vague intimations of trade protectionism and reneging on some aspects of the 1985 Schengen Agreement all suggested a strong courting of the National Front electoral base.

Conclusion

185

thinking of populism as a pathological component of European democracies, he argued that we should acknowledge that it has entered the political mainstream.® Mark Leonard, in widely diffused pamphlet on Europe’s political crisis, identified the central political cleavage in Europe as ‘Jean Monnet versus Marine Le Pen’, i.e. EU-level technocracy versus national populism.’ The general presumption in writing on technocracy and populism is that these are opposite trends. To paraphrase Vivien Schmidt, if technocracy is to be defined as policy without politics, then we can think of populism as politics without policy."° In Leonard’s récit, European-level technocracy has fuelled a national populist backlash. Framed in this way, we can assume a fundamental antagonism between these two concepts.!" Technocracy requires trust in elites, for instance, whereas populism mobilizes around anti-elitist sentiment. Technocracy also appears to embody that which is reasonable and dispassionate in social life; populism, in contrast, embraces the domain of the spontaneous and the emotional. There are, however, good reasons to think that the relationship is more complex. Merely anecdotally we can observe that the two trends are intertwined. In France, for instance, Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidency of 2007-12 combined populist rhetoric on immigration and the economy with a governing style that empowered experts (often nominated by the President) at the expense of his own government ministers. One French political scientist captured this curious mixture of managerialism and populism in the term ‘Sarkoberlusconisme’, suggesting that both Sarkozy and Silvio Berlusconi shared the same political style."” In the Netherlands, since 2010 a coalition that is colourless and managerial in appearance has relied upon a controversial populist, Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party (PVV), for parliamentary

survival.'?

® Cas Mudde, ‘The Populist Zeitgeist’, Government and Opposition, 39/4 (2004), 541-63. ? Mark Leonard, ‘Four Scenarios for the Reinvention of Europe’, European Council on Foreign Relations Essay (London: ECFR, 2012), 2. Available at: , accessed on 29 March 2012. For a series of responses to Leonard’s pamphlet, see: . ' Vivien Schmidt, Democracy in Europe: The EU and National Polities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Schmidt's argument is that the EU stands for ‘policies without politics’ and that national polities have become ‘politics without policies’. She means that policymaking powers have moved from national capitals to Brussels whilst the political institutions and actors central to democratic politics (parliaments, political parties etc.) remain national. !! See for instance the work of D. Albertazzi and D. McDonnell, Twenty-First Century Populism: The Specture of Western European Democracy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 4-5. See also M. Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1998). !? Pierre Musso, Le sarkoberlusconisme (Parts: Editions de l’Aube, 2008). ‘* Atthe time of writing, Mark Rutte's conlition government was still in power supported by the PVV. Budgetary austerity measures, however, were threatening to tear apart the fragile alliance between the liberals (VVD) and the populists.

186

Conclusion

More substantively, both in Eastern Europe and in Latin America a populist resurgence has coincided with a rigidly technocratic implementation of eco-

nomic and social reforms.'* This has led some to ask whether at a deeper level there may not be a dependent or complementary relationship between the two trends. Slavoj Zizek put this point most forcefully in an essay on populism. Rejecting the easy formulation that imagines today’s political field as merely ‘polarized between post-political administration and populist politicization’, he argues that: Phenomena such as Berlusconi demonstrate how the two opposites can even coexist in the same party: is the Berlusconi movement Forza Italia! not a case of post-political populism, that is, of a mediatic-administrative government legitimizing itself in populist terms? And does the same not hold to some degree even for the New Labour government in the UK, or for the Bush administration in the US? In other words, is populism not progressively replacing multiculturalist tolerance as the ‘spontaneous’ ideological supplement to post-political administration, as its ‘pseudo-concretization’, its translation into a form that can appeal to individ-

uals’ immediate experiences?'” A rich and suggestive account of the possible relationship between technocracy and populism is provided by Nadia Urbinati. In her account of populism, what she emphasizes is its hostility not to democracy as such but specifically to representative democracy. Populism, she writes, ‘defers the political dialectics among citizens and groups, revokes the mediation of

political institutions, and maintains an organic notion of the body politic’.'® However critical it may be of political mediation, populism is not critical of state power as such. In Urbinati’s words, ‘in spite of its vociferous antagonism against the existing political order, populism has a deeply statist vocation; it is impatient with government by discussion because it longs for limitless decisionism’.!” This also means that populism is impatient with other kinds of political mediations that can exist within society: political parties, individual deliberations and exchanges, the voice of public intellectuals. In short, for Urbinati the common characteristics of populist political experiences have been a strong anti-parliamentarianism combined

!4 On Latin America, see for instance M. A. Centeno and P. Silva, The Politics of Expertise in Latin America (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998); P. Silva, In the Name of Reason: Technocrats and Politics in Chile (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); K. Weynand, ‘Neopopulism and Neoliberalism in Latin America: How Much Affinity?" Third World Quarterly, 24/6 (2003):

1095-115.

On

Eastern

Europe,

see

Ivan

Krastev,

‘The

Strange

Death

of

the

Liberal Consensus’, Journal of Democracy, 18/4 (2007): 56-63; David Ost, The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).

!* Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 268. '® Nadia Urbinati, ‘Democracy and Populism’, Constellations, 5/1 (1998): 110.

7 Urbinati (1998: 110).

Conclusion

187

with the promotion of ‘an unmediated conception and practice of political action’.!® Populism and populist politics is thus marked by hostility to the idea of reasoned individuals deliberating amongst themselves and—if acting collectively—doing so as willing and conscious individuals rather than as an anonymous mass. In this respect, Urbinati notes that ‘elitism seems to be the hidden logic of populism, in spite of its anti-intellectual rhetoric’."” It is in this hostility towards representative politics and its hidden elitism that we can see the complementary relationship between populism and technocracy. As with populism, technocracy rests upon a critique of individual capacities for decision-making. The presumption is that collective processes tend to become hostages to special interests and that only the neutrality of an expert can assure good governing outcomes. Though its starting position is

different from that of populism, technocracy is thus equally damning in its view of representative political institutions. Legislative assemblies are instances of pure log-rolling and political parties are instances of special interests dressing themselves up in the language of common interests. As Guy Peters put it, a prominent theorist of the shift from government to governance, ‘society is now sufficiently well-organized through self-organizing networks that any attempts on the part of government to intervene will be ineffective

and perhaps counter-productive’.”° Giandomenico Majone makes a similar argument in explaining why national governments in Europe have preferred European-level regulation to cooperation between national regulatory agencies. In his words, ‘when it is difficult to observe whether governments are making an honest effort to enforce a co-operative agreement, the agreement is not credible’. A solution to this is ‘to delegate regulatory tasks to a supranational authority with powers of monitoring and of imposing sanctions’.*! Focusing on the ineffectiveness of national representatives in resisting public opinion pressures, Majone also argues that ‘perhaps the greatest advantage of EC membership in a period of far-reaching policy changes, is the possibility of delegating potentially difficult decisions (such as the elimination of state aid to industry, the enforcement of competition rules, trade liberalisation and strict implementation of environmental regulations during economic recession) to supranational non-majoritarian institutions’.””

‘* Urbinati (1998: 116). ” Urbinati (1998: 113). 20 Cited by Mair (2006: 26). For an extended discussion of the different modalities and difficulties of regulation, see Giandomenico Majone, Dilemmas of European Integration: The

Ambiguities and Pitfalls of Integration by Stealth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). *! Giandomenico Majone, ‘Understanding Regulatory Growth in the European Community”, in D. Hine and H. Kassim (eds), Beyond the Market: The EU and National Soctal Policy (London: Routledge, 1998), 21 | 22

Mujone

(1998:

21-2).

188

Conclusion

As Peter Mair observed, this was the guiding idea of New Labour’s preference for depoliticized policymaking conducted by independent experts. As he noted, Tony Blair himself often emphasized the managerial and apolitical aspects of his role as Prime Minister.””’ In his vision of the Third Way, the heavy hand of central government would give way to the lighter touch of collaboration between key ‘stakeholders’: local communities, specialists and experts, and private companies. Mair quotes one of Blair’s closest cabinet colleagues as saying that ‘depoliticizing of key decision-making is a vital element in bringing power closer to the people’: an example of how the technocratic preference for weak representative institutions can align itself with a populist critique of political representation.** If populism and technocracy converge in their common critique of political representation, we can see how they fit with member statehood as a form of state. Indeed, we can say that populism and technocracy are two sides of the member state coin. As argued in Chapter 2, member statehood is based upon a presumed antagonism between state and society such that the national government understands its vocation as that of limiting the power and discretion of national populations. In Chapter 3, we saw that the historical roots of this antagonism lay in the 1970s and 1980s and in the clash between the rising expectations of domestic publics and the inability of states to meet these expectations in an age of economic and social crisis. The dismantling of the state-society relations of post-war national Keynesianism had the effect of hollowing out representative politics at the national level in Europe. Mediating political institutions, such as unions and class-based parties, were steadily dismantled or their authority within the decision-making process heavily curtailed. This did not signal a retreat of the state so much as a reorientation towards its administrative and governance-related role and the attenuation of its associational and relational identity. Member statehood thus emerged through a process whereby political life in Europe has become less mediated and less centred around the actions of representative bodies. The consequences of this unmediated form of politics are to be found in the rise of technocracy and populism. These two trends combine, in a Europe of member states, into what we can call here the emergence of populist technocracies. 2> This also comes out in Blair’s autobiography. See Tony Blair, A Journey (London: Hutchinson, 2011). A reoccurring theme in Blair’s book was his belief that he knew what the ‘ordinary voter’ in the UK wanted and that the Labour Party did not. Blair seems constantly to have been at war with his own party and may have kept on Gordon Brown as his chancellor for so long, in spite of the execrable relationship that existed between the two of them, as a concession to the party base. ?* Evidence of depoliticization being presented as instances of local empowerment is extensive in the case of New Labour. Alasdair Roberts quotes Blair as saying in 2004: ‘People have grown up. They want to make their own life choices’. In Alasdair Roberts, The Logic of Discipline: Global Capitalism and the Architecture of Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 8.

Conclusion

189

Understood as the political forms corresponding to member statehood, we can see how the relationship between populism and technocracy is different from what is generally understood today. Specifically, it is misleading to associate technocracy with the European Union and populism with an atavistic form of national political mobilization, as Mark Leonard has done. Technocracy and populism are instead the two poles of national political life, which are then distilled in rather concentrated ways at the European level. We can see this chronologically, where the pathologization of majoritarian politics as an elite response to the end of the post-war Golden Age characterized European politics in the 1970s and 1980s. This became the basis for the relaunch of European integration from the mid-1980s onwards. The expansion of European-level regulation, as detailed by Majone, is a product of this new scepticism towards the governing capabilities of representative institutions. To

present

contemporary

populism

as a reaction

to pan-European

technocracy is thus a wrong-headed presentation of cause and effect that serves only to reinforce the image of the European Union as something external and separate from Europe’s member states. If anything, this account will fuel further attacks on representative political processes in Europe, thus deepening Europe’s political crisis. Presented in this way, the idea of the EU as a union of member states sheds new light on the democratic deficit. Far from being a contingent event to be remedied by various acts of ‘politicization’, the democratic deficit is a constituent feature of European integration. The process itself rests, most notably in its more recent post-1985 phase, on the hollowing out of representative democracy at the national level. As Eric Hobsbawm has observed, it is misleading to speak of the democratic deficit of the EU since ‘the EU was explicitly constructed on a non-democratic (i.e. nonelectoral) basis and few will seriously

argue that it would have got where it is otherwise’.>> He accepts that ‘it may be transformed into a directly democratic entity, but if it is, its character will be profoundly changed’. Remedying this democratic deficit thus must pass through a revival of representative democracy at the national level. The problem here is that, in the eyes of many, majoritarian politics at the national level has become the preserve of populist demagogues. This author remembers a debate at Oxford University in 2009 where national referenda on EU treaties were seen as tantamount to opening the door to Europe’s populist far right movements. The keynote speaker, Joschka Fischer, presented his audience with a choice in dealing with the economic and financial crisis: a pan-European economic governance solution that would expand technocratic control over macro-economic policymaking or a renationalizing of this policy * Eric Hobsbawm, ‘An Afterword: European Union at the End of the Century’, in K. Klausen and L. Tilly (eds), European Integration in Social and Historical Perspective: 1850 to the Present (Rowman & Littlefield: Oxford, 1997), 268 -9,

190

Conclusion

field with its attendant dangers of xenophobic populism.>® Here we see in its clearest form the outlook of national elites of Europe’s member states: democracy is equated only with populist mobilization and their national publics appear to them as an unmoveable mass of prejudices. To give up democracy up to populists in this way is rather like the News of the World journalist, Paul McMullan, who argued in front of the Leveson inquiry in the UK in 2011 that privacy laws serve only to protect paedophiles. Is there anything that can take us beyond populist technocracy? The first step would be to reclaim democracy from both populists and technocrats at the national level. In doing so, however, we must accept the radical indeterminacy of any properly democratic movement. The EU may or may not be part of Europe’s future. Having the confidence to embrace this uncertainty should be the first step towards the political reinvention of Europe.

MEMBER

STATES

IN INTERNATIONAL

POLITICS

The European Union is often treated as sui generis: it is a product of unique circumstances that have not been replicated elsewhere. Some efforts in comparative regionalism have been made, but they are dwarfed by the scale of work done on the EU that treats it as lying outside of the comparative field.*’ Refocusing European integration towards dynamics of state transformation, and notably the shift from nation states to member states, opens up the possibility that what we observe in Europe may also exist in different ways— and to varying degrees—in other parts of the world. In short, it is worth considering whether member statehood can serve as a useful tool with which to analyse the broader dynamics of international politics. There are three reasons why the concept of member state may prove useful in the study of contemporary international affairs. One is simply the sheer ubiquity of international institutions as an elementary feature of the national life of states. Few are those states able or willing to pursue their social existence outside of the many opportunities that exist at the international level for close

26 Joschka Fischer was giving the annual European Studies Centre Lecture, on 25 February 2009, at St Anthony’s College, Oxford. %7 For such efforts, see for example Alex Warleigh-Lack and Ben Rosamond, ‘Across the EUNew Regionalism Frontier: Invitation to a Dialogue’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 48/4 (2010), 993-1013. For a very useful overview article, whose theoretical approach echoes the focus on the state in this book, see Shahar Hamieri, “Theorizing Regions Through Changes in Statehood: Rethinking the Theory and Method of Comparative Regionalism’, ‘First View’ Article, Review of International Studies, 38 (2012): 1-23. Hameiri argues that ‘at the heart of the politics of regionalisation is the attempt by actors and coalitions to relocate the governance of particular issues beyond the scope of national governance and politics’, 2.

Conclusion

191

cooperation between national governments and between national officials. Indeed, what is striking is how much participation in these different international fora exists as a marker of statehood. For emerging middle-income countries, for instance, those one would assume to be most attached to their independence because of the national outlook of their strengthening and assertive bourgeoisies, a key goal is that of joining international organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

(OECD). For other states, groupings such as the G20 provide a key access to international policymaking. In historical terms, rarely has the international system been so institutionalized and rarely have states been so bound up in regional and international forms of collective deliberation and policymaking.?® A second important reason is that the dynamics identified above as forming the basis of the shift to member statehood are present also beyond Europe. Key institutional features of member states—such as independent central banks, the introduction of fiscal rules in order to isolate national legislatures from spending decisions, the proliferation of independent regulatory bodies and outsourcing to the private or semi-private sector of some state activities such as infrastructure development—are by no means unique to Europe. In fact, such features exist even more prominently elsewhere. Alasdair Roberts, in his book The Logic of Discipline, argues that this particular ‘architecture of government’ is a feature of political life in the United States and in many other non-European

countries.””

The

mechanism

of constraining

national

power through external limitations upon sovereignty, with the effect of integrating national officials and representatives into international policymaking fora and isolating them from their own domestic societies, is replicated across the globe. It has become part of the lexicon of international affairs—from IMF conditionality to UNDP post-conflict state-building initiatives—precisely because the post-1945 ‘embedded’ liberal order that corresponded to the national Keynesian consensus of the post-war era was so extensive in its influence.”° The restructuring of national corporatism since the early 1970s has worked itself out very differently depending upon the national context but ? On the centrality of international organizations to world politics, see Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).

# Alasdair Roberts, The Logic of Discipline: Global Capitalism and The Architecture of Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). For a cognate account, albeit one deploying rather different conceptual tools, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

"9 For an account of international state-building that recommends the building of state institutions prior to the introduction of electoral democracy, in order to avoid problems associated with majoritarian democracy, see Roland Paris, At War's End: Building Peace After Civil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). See also Francis Fukuyama, StateBuilding: Governance and World Order in the Twenty First Century (London: Protile, 2004).

192

Conclusion

it exists as the common thread shaping political processes and outcomes across national societies. Its consequences are also evident well beyond Europe. US politics, for instance, has not escaped the rise of populism and technocracy as two interwoven trends. Indeed, David Bromwich has remarked on the combination of these trends in the political style of Barack Obama. In his words, Obama has ‘two distinct registers of diction’: ‘one for talking to very clever but abstracted people, the other for talking to well-meaning people who

are very young or very old’.”! He goes on: ‘in the higher idiom he talks of a “critique” of policy and “trend lines” and the ways to “incentivise” better care and “prioritise” the next steps of government assistance to show that we are “doing everything we can to accelerate job creation”’. This, notes Bromwich, is ‘the language of a technocrat, the man at the head of the conference table’. In contrast, ‘in the lower idiom, there are lots of “folks who oppose me”, “a whole bunch of folks”, interspersed with vaguely regional comfort words like “oftentimes”’. This, we can add, is the language of the populist. The third reason is that scholarly work on contemporary global governance tends to hold on to the traditional idea of international organization as a product either of inter-state bargains or as the harbinger of a new, postnational world order. In this respect, there are interesting parallels between work on European integration and work on international organization and global governance. Realist and liberal approaches to IR treat international organizations as products of state-to-state negotiations that reflect either underlying antagonisms or positive-sum solutions to problems of imperfect information. Social constructivist approaches tend also to present international organizations as the creation of states but reflecting a set of common norms rather than simply a product of the balance of material forces. In both cases, they retain a conceptual attachment to the nation state as their unit of analysis. Alternatives to these approaches tend instead to look beyond the

state.>® The early functionalist work of David Mitrany was interested not in European integration but in international organization more generally. Gov-

ernance theories, as with the EU, relativize the state and point to the proliferation of non-state actors that together make up a new kind of global community. Even critical theories find themselves divided along these lines: a long-standing debate between Marxists, for instance, has been over whether

*!

David

Bromwich,

“The

Fastidious

President’,

London

Review

of Books,

32/22

(2010):

3-6. Available at: , accessed on 3 April 2012.

? Barnett and Finnemore go even further, arguing for a study of international organizations that replicates that of the state undertaken by neo-Weberian scholars in the 1980s. International organizations are, for Barnett and Finnemore, relatively autonomous actors that should be studied separately from states, as specific organizations that contain many traits of bureaucracies as studied by Weber in the early twentieth century. See Barnett and Finnemore (2004: chapters 1 and 2).

Conclusion

193

international organization represented a post-national form of ‘super-imperialism’ (Kautsky’s view) or whether it would only heighten national rivalries

and end in another round of intra-state war (Lenin’s view).>> In the case of IR scholarship on regionalism, Hamieri remarks that there is also a strong tendency to study this phenomenon in light of where it sits on the spectrum of regional integration. In his words, work on regional integration as a process ‘essentially refers to regional projects moving from one level to another; for example, from a vaguely defined regional space to a highly institutionalized region with capacities to act independently in world politics’.>* For these reasons, work on international organization that stresses the way the growing institutionalization of international affairs is a product of transformations in statehood can help to overcome this particular divide in international relations scholarship.

A RESEARCH

AGENDA

The aim of this book has been to present an argument about integration as a process of state transformation. Far from being the ambition has been to open up European studies to some new inquiry. There are a number of such avenues which flow from argument, each of which is outlined in more detail below.

European exhaustive, avenues of the above

1. The first avenue is to expand the empirical study of European integration conducted in Chapters 4 and 5. Taking as its hypothesis the claim that integration is about the intensified cooperation between national representatives and national officials that occurs under the banner of consensus-seeking and problem-solving rather than that of traditional inter-state negotiation, it would be worth investigating in detail other policy fields. This could include a detailed study of justice and home affairs, for instance, or policy areas traditionally subsumed under the title of the Community Method. Indeed, one criticism of the argument presented here can be that it focuses on policy areas that are typically the preserve of governments: macro-economic policymaking and foreign and security policy. As such, it may not be surprising to see national officials playing such an important role. The argument of the book, as developed in Chapter 1, is broader and suggests that the key features of integration it highlights are characteristic of integration as a whole and not just "* For an extended discussion of Marxist theory and its use in addressing contemporary questions of international organization, see Chris J. Bickerton and Philip Cunliffe, ‘International Organisation as Social Organisation: Towards a Dialectical Approach’, paper presented at the International Studies Assoclation annual convention, Montreal, 16-19 March 201 1. “* Hamileri (2012: 3).

particular policy fields or policies that fall under specific categories of decisionmaking. A more substantial investigation of the EU’s different policies would help substantiate this claim in more detail. 2. The second avenue is to refine the theoretical treatment of the concept of member statehood. This would involve working out its implications more fully in terms of political representation in Europe and to engage with work done in democratic theory that has touched upon similar dynamics but from the perspective of liberal constitutional theory. Work by Marcel Gauchet, JanWerner Miiller, and others, on the transformation of democracy in Europe after 1945, has focused on the invention of a strongly liberal tradition with important constraints placed upon majorities.”> The theme pursued by these authors is the evolution of Western democracy after the experience of fascism. Some of the institutional developments they focus on are pertinent also for the development of the member state. A more systematic rapprochement between the concept of member statehood and the work of these historians of political thought would help enrich the discussion and sharpen the contrasts between the approach pursued here and that of Gauchet and others. As noted in earlier, these authors situate European integration within the tradition of post-war welfarism. This book argues that today’s EU is cut of a more recent cloth. 3. A third avenue is the comparative dimension. The approach adopted here has been to use the comparative method lightly, drawing out similarities rather than highlighting the pertinence of national differences. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the shift from nation state to member state has proceeded differently depending on which country one focuses on. A very fruitful line of research would be to undertake national case studies of member statehood, which could then be used as a basis for more systematic comparisons. The experience of Southern European states, like Portugal, Spain, and Greece, for whom European integration as a process has firmly coincided with their political and social development after the end of authoritarian rule, would merit closer study. Here the importance of EU membership takes on a new dimension: these countries are member states par excellence as any idea of national existence outside of the EU is associated with a fascist and authoritarian past. A similar study could be made of those Eastern European states that joined the EU in 2004. Their own transition to the market and to liberal democracy occurred in close interaction with the EU. In cases such as Hungary, we see what appear to be movements against the member state paradigm: strong nationalist sentiment combined with anti-EU feeling. Nevertheless, national governments in these countries are very keen to maintain working relations with their European peers. The contrasting dynamics of > See in particular Marcel Gauchet, L’Avènement de la démocratie: Tome 3, A l'épreuve des totalitarismes 1914-1974 (Paris: Gallimard, 2010). See also Miiller (2011), especially chapter 4 on ‘self-disciplined democracies”.

Conclusion

195

nation and member statehood seem to pull these societies in different directions. 4. A fourth avenue of research is to take the study of member states out of Europe and to the international dimension. Here focused case studies can be a useful starting point, alongside a theoretical elaboration of the concept of member state as it relates to existing work on statehood and international society. One such study could be membership of the OECD, looking at the discourse and actions of either new members

(Chile) or countries actively

seeking membership (Russia, Columbia) in order to determine how and why their national existence is so tied up to these international institutions. For a long time, the EU has been both omnipresent in European political life and considered far removed from everyday concerns. Its appearance as something outside of national politics has lent to it an air of mystery but has also discouraged those active in national politics from taking on European-level policymaking. In national election campaigns, the European dimension of national political life often disappears from view, only to reappear once new governments have been elected and begin to take part in European summits and meetings. The dominance of expertise and technocracy as the language of EU politics has been a boon for scholars able to position themselves as privileged experts in their own right but it has deterred many from engaging in a more general debate about European integration and the workings of the EU.

By reframing European integration as a process of state transformation, and by identifying member states as lying at the heart of today’s EU, this book aims to provide a framework via which individual citizens can engage with European policymaking. The analysis presented here places the relationship between national populations and national governments at the heart of the integration process. It argues that attempts by governments to insulate themselves from public expectations have evolved over time into the idea that animates today’s member states: the pursuit of external constraints upon political power as the best defence against the excesses of majoritarian politics. This pathologization of representative democracy has had the effect of pushing European politics into its current political malaise where populism and technocracy combine as two poles of a post-ideological political spectrum. By providing an account of how we have arrived at this point, the book can hopefully serve as a basis for thinking about what we can do to work our way out of it.

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Index Adenauer, Konrad, 84, 157, 171

Anderson, Perry, 1, 2, 32, 75, 82 Austria, 38, 63, 77, 85-86, 89, 118, 127, 174 Belgium, 90, 103-104, 118-120, 124 n.30, 177 n.83 Berlusconi, Silvio, 147, 185-86

123,

Blair, Tony, 7, 183, 188

Eurozone crisis, 145, 147 Foreign Policy, 167, 169 n.56 European Constitution, see also Constitutional Treaty, 42-45, 62-64, 68 European Council, 44, 53, 126, 139, 141, 145 European integration Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), 56, 115, 121

Brandt, Willy, 157, 159, 164

Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), 125, 131 Monetary Union (EMU), 24 n.11, 116

Chirac, Jacques, 42, 62, 97

Single European Act (SEA), 17, 30, 114, 125-28, 167-68

Cold War,

10, 17, 151-52, 156-66, 169-72,

175, 180-81 Comité de représentants permanents (COREPER), 29-32, 37, 170 Committee for Civilian Aspects of Crisis Management (CIVCOM), 29, 31-33 Common

Agricultural Policy (CAP), 77

Community Method, 2 n.6, 22, 34, 39-40, 47, 138, 193 comparative politics, 10-11, 26 n.16 consensus, 4-5, 14, 16-18, 21, 41-42, 52, 81, 85 n.47, 88, 97, 148

economic policy, 35-38 foreign policy, 27-29, 31-33 permissive, 4 Cooper, Robert, 60, 179 Council of Ministers, 30, 35, 37, 41, 45, 47, 115 Debré, Michel, 88 De Gaulle, Charles, 30, 87 Democracy, 33, 40, 63, 70, 82, 108, 194 constrained democracy, 75 n.3 representative democracy, 26 n.16, 78 n.15, 186, 189-190, 195 social democracy, 13-14, 72, 74 n.2, 100, 107, 121, 124, 128, 132, 180

The Crisis of Democracy report, 93-95 Denmark, 6, 40, 135, 137 n.62 détente, vii, 17, 151, 157, 159-60,

162, 180

European integration theory, 48 applied to foreign policy, 28

intergovernmentalism, 23, 29, 31, 33, 39-41, 46, 48 multi-level governance, 22, 26, 48, 181 neofunctionalism, 9, 48 neo-Marxis, 22-24, 26-27, 49, 56, 58 n.23 pragmatic turn, 8-10 supranationalism, 9 n.29, 29, 40-41, 46, 48 EU foreign policy Common Foreign and Security Policy (CESP), 27, 151, 175 Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), 27, 28 n.18, 178 European Political Cooperation (EPC), 30, 151, 157-58, 175 Eurozone crisis, 5, 17, 23, 114, 142, 145, 179 n91 Fabius, Laurent, 36 Finland, 104 n.116, 105, 118 France, 6, 11 n.36, 17, 43, 45-46, 49, 60,

61 n.35 contradictions of national corporatism, 86-88

crisis of national Keynesianism and national responses, 92-93, 95-98 European economic integration, 123, 125-26, 128, 134-136, 139, 147

superpower détente, 152, 157, 160, 180

Fifth Republic, 87, 88 n.59, 88 n.60 foreign policy, 156, 158-160, 162-63,

Economic and Financial Committee (EFC),

165, 168-69, 172 n.65, 173, 175, 177 n.83

35, 37-38, 139 Eurogroup, 34-37, 137, 139 European Central Bank (ECB), 2, 34, 140, 143-45 European Commission, 5 n.12, 7, 26, 28, 35, 37,45, 104, 115, 130, 139, 141, 182 n.2

Fourth Republic, 86-87, 88 n.59, 121, 156 French Communist Party (PCF), 84, 156 Gaullism, 158, 165 ‘Golden Age’ growth, 77, 79-80

216

Index

France, (cont.) in the European economy, 117-120 populism, 184-85 turn to member statehood, 101-103

Laidi, Zaki, 154, 184 Leca, Jean, 3

Lisbon Treaty, 5, 37, 42-45, 53 Maastricht Treaty, 6, 39, 62 n.38,

Germany, 11, 156, 159 Basic Law, 174 crisis of national Keynesianism, 90, 97, 103, 126 East Germany, 157, 160 European economic integration, 117-120, 123, 127, 134-35 Euroscepticism, 6 Eurozone crisis, 147 foreign policy, 159-160, 168-69, 171 n.62, 172-73, 177 monetary union, 134 n.54 national corporatism, 79-80, 84 postwar economic miracle, 77 reunification, 173-75 West Germany, 158, 160, 165, 165 n.41, 174

Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry, 97-98, 126, 165 Gonzalez, Felipe, 140 Greece, 36, 54 n.8, 77 n.10, 103, 117-118, 120, 127, 140, 157, 194 Eurozone crisis, 142-47 Hall, Peter, 2 Heath, Edward, 97, 97 n.91, 158 Hoffmann, Stanley, 27, 158 Hollande, François, 184, 184 n.7 Ireland, 43, 77 n.10, 117-119, 127, 130 n.45, 142, 144

Italy, 49, 102 Casa per il mezzogiorno, 79 corporatism, 79, 85 corruption, 85-86, 89 crisis of national Keynesianism and national responses, 90-91, 97, 105, 105 n.119

European economic integration, 113, 117-119, 124 n.30, 127

105 n.119, 125, 131, 133, 155, 167, 172, 175-176 Mérand, Frédéric, 28, 32, 179

Merkel, Angela, 47 Milward, Alan, 9, 14, 56, 77-82, 115, 123 Mitterrand, Francois, 98, 172 Moravcsik, Andrew, 103 n.109, 116, 126-27, 130, 134 Müller, Jan-Werner, 72, 75 n.3, 194 Netherlands, viii, 33, 38, 45, 49, 80-81, 96, 105, 117, 118, 120, 127, 134, 163, 177 n.83, 184-185 Nixon, Richard, 91, 160, 162

ontology, 3, 7-9 Open Method of Coordination (OMC), 138-140

Ostpolitik, 157-60, 173 Padoa-Schioppa, Tomaso, 33-34 Patten, Chris, 45 Political and Security Committee (PSC), 28-33, 35, 37-38, 41 n.77

Pompidou, Georges, 126, 159-60 populism, 18, 182-87, 189-90, 192, 195 Puetter, Uwe, 33, 35-37, 47 n. 94 Red Army Faction (RAF), 165 referendum, 5, 36, 43, 137 n.62, 147 Dutch, 45 French, 42, 45-46 Rossi, Ernesto, 8

Sarkozy, Nicolas, 34, 184-85, 184 n.7 Schmidt, Vivien, 87, 121, 185 Schumacher, Kurt, 84 socialism, 124, 173

foreign policy, 156, 160, 165, 177 n.83

Spain, 77 n.10, 117-20, 140, 142, 144, 194

Maastricht criteria, 132, 132-34 populism, 186

Spinelli, Altiero, 8 State forms of, 54-60 national corporatist, 13-14, 74-76, 78, 80,

postwar,

76-77, 81, 83 n.36

Justice and Home Affairs (JHA), 22, 39-42, 44, 193

82, 84, 90, 93, 96, 101-102, 107-109, 136

State transformation, 12, 22, 49, 51, 54, 56-58, 71, 182-83

Kagan, Robert, 154 Keynesian consensus, 16-17, 76, 79, 80 n.25, 94, 120, 123-27, 129, 132, 134, 148, 151, 166, 180, 191 Kissinger, Henry, 158, 160, 162

in economic integration, 113, 120, 131, 134, 137

in foreign policy, 151, 154, 171, 178, 180 in international relations, 190 new research agenda, 193

Index Strauss-Khan, Dominique, 35 Streeck, Wolfgang, 121, 157 n.11 Sweden, 84, 88, 98 n.94, 101, 104 technocracy, 14, 18, 75, 75 n.3, 182-83, 185-90, 192, 195 United Kingdom

217 national corporatism, 80, 89 postwar economy, 77 Thatcherism, 106, 134

Weiler, Joseph H. H. on European integration, 8 n.26, 67-69 on the principle of constitutional tolerance, 16, 52, 55, 61-64, 72

Eurozone crisis, 144

foreign policy, 158-59, 166, 168, 172

Zielonka, Jan, 3 n.9, 7, 23 n.5, 175, 178