The New Intergovernmentalism: States and Supranational Actors in the Post-Maastricht Era

546 Pages·2015·2.07 MB·English

by  Christopher J. Bickerton

Title Pages
University Press Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarship Online
The New Intergovernmentalism: States and
Supranational Actors in the Post-Maastricht Era
Christopher J. Bickerton, Dermot Hodson, and Uwe Puetter
Print publication date: 2015
Print ISBN-13: 9780198703617
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2015
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198703617.001.0001
Title Pages
(p.i) The New Intergovernmentalism
(p.ii) (p.iii) The New Intergovernmentalism
(p.iv)
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Contents
Title Pages
Dedication
Preface
List of Table and Figures
List of Abbreviations
List of Contributors
1 The New Intergovernmentalism and the Study of European Integration
Christopher J. Bickerton, Dermot Hodson, and Uwe Puetter
Part I Changing Conceptions of Law and Politics Post­Maastricht
2 A Union of Member States
Christopher J. Bickerton
3 The Roles of Law in a New Intergovernmentalist European Union
Paul James Cardwell and Tamara Hervey
4 Institutionalist Dynamics behind the New Intergovernmentalism
Thomas Christiansen
Part II Selected EU Policy Domains Since 1992
5 The New Intergovernmentalism and Experiential Learning in the Common Security and Defence Policy
Michael E. Smith
6 Integrating in Justice and Home Affairs
Sarah Wolff
7 The New Intergovernmentalism in Financial Regulation and European Banking Union
David Howarth and Lucia Quaglia
Part III EU Institutions in the Post­Maastricht Period
8 The European Council
Uwe Puetter
9 The Commission and the New Intergovernmentalism
John Peterson
10 The Court of Justice’s Dilemma—Between ‘More Europe’ and ‘Constitutional Mediation’
Marie­Pierre Granger
11 Legislative and Judicial Politics in the Post­Maastricht Era
Marzena Kloka and Susanne K. Schmidt
12 The European Parliament
Johannes Pollak and Peter Slominski
13 De Novo Bodies and the New Intergovernmentalism
Dermot Hodson
Part IV Critique and Conclusions
14 Understanding the New Intergovernmentalism
Simon Bulmer
15 Conclusions
Christopher J. Bickerton, Dermot Hodson, and Uwe Puetter
End Matter
References
Index
Dedication
University Press Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarship Online
The New Intergovernmentalism: States and
Supranational Actors in the Post-Maastricht Era
Christopher J. Bickerton, Dermot Hodson, and Uwe Puetter
Print publication date: 2015
Print ISBN-13: 9780198703617
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2015
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198703617.001.0001
Dedication
(p.v) For our partners and families
Page 1 of 1
Preface
(p.vi) (p.vii)
University Press Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarship Online
The New Intergovernmentalism: States and
Supranational Actors in the Post-Maastricht Era
Christopher J. Bickerton, Dermot Hodson, and Uwe Puetter
Print publication date: 2015
Print ISBN-13: 9780198703617
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2015
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198703617.001.0001
Preface
(p.vi) (p.vii)
Christopher J. Bickerton
Dermot Hodson
Uwe Puetter
Generally speaking, students of politics can be divided into
those who are interested in stability and those who seek to
understand change. This book has a foot in both camps. It is,
above all, an investigation into the changing dynamics of
European integration since the Maastricht Treaty was signed
in 1992. In the two decades since this milestone, the European
Union (EU) has witnessed a dramatic increase in the scope of
its activities in areas such as economic governance, foreign
policy, justice and home affairs, and, most recently, financial
supervision. And yet, in spite of such change, the basic
constitutional settlement agreed at Maastricht remains
remarkably stable. In 1992, the member states of the
embryonic EU agreed that new areas of policy-making would
not empower supranational institutions along classic lines and
so, by and large, it has remained.
Under the traditional Community method, the European
Commission is involved at key stages of policy initiation,
implementation, and monitoring and it falls to the Court of
Justice of the EU to uphold the rule of law. Since 1992,
national governments have tended to sidestep such delegation
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Preface
(p.vi) (p.vii)
in favour of deliberation in settings such as the European
Council, the Eurogroup, and the Euro Summit. Delegation,
where it has taken place, has tended to involve the creation
and empowerment of de novo bodies. The launch of the
European Central Bank in 1998 and the extension of its
powers from monetary to financial matters in 2013 is one
manifestation of this trend. The creation of the European
External Action Service, a new diplomatic corps, Frontex, a
new EU border agency, and the European Stability
Mechanism, a new financial rescue fund, are others.
Existing theoretical approaches struggle to explain this
paradoxical tendency towards integration without
supranational policy-making. Since the mid-1990s, governance
scholars have accumulated a wealth of empirical detail on new
modes of policy-making but they have tended to see such
developments as a deviation from the norm rather than what
they really are: the new normal. Research in the governance
tradition also shies away from thinking about the current and
future direction of the EU as a whole. Theories of European
integration are more comfortable with this subject matter but
there has been a lack of innovation in this field since the
debates between (p.viii) intergovernmentalism and
supranationalism in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This is
testament to the robustness of these earlier theories but also
to their tendency to downplay the importance of European
integration in the post-Maastricht period. In a sense,
supranationalists await the second coming of the Community
method, while intergovernmentalists date the end of European
history to c.1992.
This book offers a novel take on this post-Maastricht
integration paradox. Its point of departure is that EU policy-
making since 1992 can be understood as an instance of new
intergovernmentalism. In this kind of integration, EU policy-
makers remain willing to pursue collective solutions to shared
policy problems but they have become more reluctant to
delegate new powers to supranational institutions along
traditional lines. This reluctance, we argue, reflects tensions
within traditional processes of national preference formation
owing to changes in the post-Maastricht political economy and
a crisis of representation among political parties and pressure
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Preface
(p.vi) (p.vii)
groups. As a result of these shifts, we argue, national
governments are drawn more than ever into the EU policy-
making arena but they are either disinclined to delegate
further powers to the Commission and the Court of Justice or
unwilling to make the case for such transfers. Far from
resisting this tendency, the Commission, the Court of Justice
and the European Parliament have been largely supportive of
it, which is indicative of the fact that supranational institutions
are no longer hard-wired for the pursuit of ever closer union.
Contemporary theories of European integration tend towards
a sanguine view about the political challenges facing the EU.
For supranationalists, crises are a catalyst for deeper
integration while for intergovernmentalists they serve as a
distraction from the EU’s essential legitimacy via its
accountability to democratically elected national governments.
The new intergovernmentalism takes a different view. Crises
of trust and confidence are a perennial feature of European
integration, as are periods of intense institutional change, we
contend, but the post-Maastricht period is unique in seeing
both occur in tandem. In the 1970s, the stagnation in
European integration coincided with increased scepticism
among the general public about the benefits of being in the
European Economic Community. In the 1980s, conversely,
efforts to complete the single market took place at a time of
increasingly favourable public opinion concerning the
European project. The 1990s and 2000s, in stark contrast, saw
the EU extend its reach amid public disenchantment about the
benefits of European integration. These challenges have been
plain to see during the euro crisis, which has deepened
integration among some member states while widening
political dissent over the pursuit of ever closer union. Such
challenges reflect a trend towards integration without
legitimation over the last twenty years and the fact that the
EU now exists in a profound state of disequilibrium. A key
question that emerges from the research presented in this
book (p.ix) is whether the EU can survive in its current form if
policy-makers and the public continue to part ways.
As with so many intellectual investigations before it, this book
began life in a Budapest coffee house. The occasion was a
breakfast meeting between the three editors following a
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