European Integration: From Nation-States to Member States

225 Pages·2012·3.245 MB·English

by  Christopher J. Bickerton

European Integration
From Nation-States to Member States
CHRISTOPHER J. BICKERTON
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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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 ‘renation-
alization’ 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 ‘non-
identified 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 intergovern-
mental 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 Brussels-
based 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 predecessorisn 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 rela-
tions, 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. At-
tempts 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 commit-
ment, 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 182
References 196
Index 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 71
4.1 Eurozone crisis in dates 144
5.1 European foreign policy cooperation in the 1980s 167
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
Xii List of Acronyms
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