Differentiated Integration and Disintegration in a Post-Brexit Era

Stefan Gänzle, Benjamin Leruth, Jarle Trondal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367135300
• eBook ISBN: 9780429648847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Assessing the consequences of Brexit on EU policies, institutions and members, this book discusses the significance of differentiation for the future of European integration.

This book theoretically examines differentiated integration and disintegration, focuses on how this process affects key policy areas, norms and institutions of the EU, and analyses how the process of Brexit is perceived by and impacts on third countries as well as other organizations of regional integration in a comparative perspective. This edited book brings together both leading and emerging scholars to integrate the process of Brexit into a broader analysis of the evolution, establishment and impact of the EU as a system of differentiation.

This book will be of key interest to scholar and students of European Union politics, European integration, Brexit, and more broadly to Public Administration, Law, Economics, Finance, Philosophy, History and International Relations.

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Differentiation, differentiated integration and disintegration in a ‘post-Brexit-era’

Stefan Gänzle, Benjamin Leruth and Jarle Trondal

Introduction

In contrast to the ‘ever closer Union among the peoples of Europe’ invoked in the preamble of the Treaty of Rome, Frank Schimmelfennig and Thomas Winzen (2019) ponder whether the European Union (EU) is ‘growing ever looser’. In light of the popular vote taken on 23 June 2016 in the United Kingdom (UK) to leave the EU and the government’s subsequent decision to trigger Article 50 TEU, one may assume such a statement is correct. Following the Brexit vote, the UK is about to become the first member state in the history of European integration to engage in a process of disintegration. This does not only place the EU at a critical juncture; it also implies that a new chapter in the history of European integration is about to be opened. Obviously, the dust has yet to settle before one can fully assess the impact of Brexit on the EU and the UK from both political and societal perspectives. Thus, it is a timely task for practitioners and scholars of various EU-related disciplines to ponder what its implications for the future of European integration are in more genuine terms. Has European integration reached a tipping point and is supranational cooperation reverting to the ‘old patterns’ of intergovernmental relations of ‘sovereign’ states constituting the bedrock of international relations? Or is there still enough appetite amongst member states to forge a new form of ‘European sovereignty’ as originally proposed by the French president Emmanuel Macron in September 2017 after all (Macron 2017, p. 4)? Now more than ever, academics from different sub-fields of European studies should be brought together to discuss the causes and consequences of differentiated disintegration in general and Brexit in particular. This collection intends to pave the way for such debates.

Differentiated integration – both external and internal (see chapter two in this volume) – has become the trademark of European integration since the early 1990s. In the era of Brexit, however, it is now being complemented by the prospects of differentiated dis integration. By this term, we conceive of processes under which a member state withdraws from participation in the process of European integration or under which EU policies are transferred back to member states. This cannot simply be captured by putting existing theories of European integration into ‘reverse gear’ (see chapter three in this volume). Differentiated disintegration requires some original conceptualizations and theory-building, which is one of the objectives of this collection bringing together both leading and promising scholars working on the implications of Brexit on the study of European integration.

Our introduction serves three purposes. Firstly, it discusses the place of differentiation (a notion that encompasses both differentiated integration and differentiated disintegration) in contemporary European integration scholarship. Secondly, it briefly explores the history of differentiation in the EU prior to Brexit. Thirdly, it introduces the concept of differentiated disintegration. Our book, in turn, is divided into three sections. The first one explores differentiated disintegration from several theoretical angles (chapters two to four). The second one focuses on how this process affects key policy areas, norms and institutions of the EU (chapters five to eight). The third section analyzes how Brexit is perceived by and impacts on third countries as well as other organizations of regional integration in a comparative perspective (chapters nine to thirteen). Our conclusion (chapter fourteen) eventually summarizes the main findings and sketches out several avenues for future research. In short, our book aims to integrate the process of Brexit into a broader analysis of the evolution, establishment and impact of the EU as a system of differentiation, complementing the work of Leuffen et al. (2012) who defined the EU as a system of differentiated integration.

We distinguish four stages¹ of studies of differentiation: (1) the ‘early’ studies of differentiated integration, which started emerging in the post-Maastricht 1990s; (2) the post-euro and ‘big bang enlargement’ stage, which mostly focused on policy-based differentiation; (3) the post-Lisbon period, which triggered substantial efforts in theorizing and conceptualizing differentiated integration; and, eventually, (4) an emerging new ‘generation’ or phase, which aims at explaining how the multi-faceted EU crisis (or ‘polycrisis’, in the words of Zeitlin et al. 2019) will shape the future of European integration after Brexit through the lens of differentiation. The chapter shows how the increasing volume and forms of differentiation of the EU is followed by differentiation in the study of it. Unfortunately, the preceding three stages of studies have not led scholars to conceptually agree over what differentiation ultimately means, how this phenomenon should be studied and what its main sources and consequences ultimately are. One reason for this could be that ‘EU governance research tends to follow a pattern of self-centered and self-referring national focuses’ where ‘the national agendas with their specific preoccupations and interests still matter’ (Larat and Schneider 2009, p. 181). Thus, this fourth emerging stage of studies on differentiation is needed to come to some sort of scholarly agreement over its consequences for the future of European integration.

Before focusing on the notion of differentiation itself, a common understanding of ‘integration’ is needed, yet is not often provided in the literature. We choose a less attended definition by James G. March (1999, p. 134) who understands integration as the imagination of ‘a world consisting of a set of parts. At the least, integration is gauged by some measure of the density, intensity, and character of relations among the elements of that set’. Subsequently, he suggests three parameters for integration: consistency among the parts, interdependence among the parts and structural connectedness among the parts. In short, differentiated European integration should be gauged by the differentiation of the density, intensity and character of relations among the elements of a set of countries. Similarly, differentiated disintegration could be equally assessed by lower density and intensity of consistency, interdependence and structural connectedness. Yet, as the following discussion suggests, different stages of studies have studied and interpreted differentiation in different ways (Goetz and Meyer-Sahling 2008; Kohler-Koch and Larat 2009).

Differentiation in Europe – a historical overview

Differentiation is not an entirely new phenomenon neither in the history of other systems of regional integration nor in European integration itself. With regards to the latter, there has been a burgeoning literature devoted to the study of differentiation ever since the phenomenon became more mainstream in the aftermath of the Treaty of Maastricht, one of the EU’s sauts qualitatifs in terms of integration. Even though the Brexit process can be best conceived as a ground-breaking case of differentiated disintegration, there are several examples of disintegration – tentatively conceived as withdrawal from membership – that have occurred throughout the history of European integration: Algeria (1962), Greenland (1985) and Saint Barthélémy (2012) have departed from the European Community/Union albeit for very different reasons (see chapter twelve in this volume). None of these entities, however, have left the Community/Union as a ‘full’ member, as is most likely going to be the case with the UK, although the country had already secured several significant ‘opt-outs’ to the extent that it has been described as an ‘awkward partner’ (George 1998) of the EU altogether.

Differentiation can take various forms which are often intertwined, such as functional, institutional, spatial/territorial as well as temporal differentiation (see e.g. Stubb 1996, and contributions to Dyson and Sepos 2010). Turning to the EU, differentiation can almost be categorized as the ‘natural’ state of affairs because of the Union’s very character as a ‘composite polity’ and as a ‘compound of states’ – as famously put in the Maastricht judgement of the German Constitutional Court. European integration can be perceived as a process borrowing federal as much as confederal aspects in terms of its governance. Only a few of the EU’s competences are exclusive, most being shared with member states or completely left in the realm of the nation or member state. While EU countries have morphed from ‘nation-states’ into ‘member states’ (Bickerton 2012), they also exhibit traits of hybrid statehood which implies that they can easily revert to more classical notions of autonomy-seeking nation statehood. Turning from the EU’s polity to its policies, we find that many of them – such as the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) or, more obviously, regional and cohesion policy which have emerged only in sketches and constantly developed over time – often benefit from windows-of-opportunity or taking the form of side-payments to member states in order to ferment significant changes. With European integration advancing in a non-linear way, one may understand differentiation in terms of both a cause and effect of regional integration.

Still, it is remarkable that until recently, differentiation has not been seriously explored in the vast field of European integration theories. This has been attributed ‘to the fact that the conditions present in Western Europe were unusually favorable to the generation/cultivation of spill-overs from one functional arena to another and from lower to higher levels of common authority’ (Schmitter and Lefkofridi 2016, p. 2). The ‘permissive consensus’ – meaning that the process of integration was passively approved by public opinion or at least not actively contested – has allowed to perceive European integration almost as a one-way street for a long time, resulting in a steady progression towards a ‘closer union of peoples and states’ as confirmed in the preamble to the Treaty of Rome. None of the established grand schools of thought of the likes of liberal intergovernmentalism, neo-functionalism and social constructivism have proposed research programs on differentiation. This holds with the exception of Philippe Schmitter and Ernst B. Haas, the doyens of neo-functionalist thinking, who also remind us that any serious theory of regional integration needs to account for reverse processes, hence disintegration, as well (Schmitter 1969).

Most importantly, however, differentiation should not be just understood as yet another form of or response to crisis. The process of European integration is abundant with examples of fundamental crises, such as the ones triggered by the failure of the European Defence Community in 1954, the empty chair crisis of 1965–1966 or the ‘euro-sclerosis’ of 1970, to name but three. Differentiation is not a crisis per se; it rather might be understood as a variant of integration. The following sub-sections briefly outline how differentiation has been explored in various fields of literature and research over the past two decades.

The first stage (1990s and early 2000s): defining and discovering differentiated integration

While certain limited elements of (legal) differentiation are present in the Treaty of Rome (see e.g. Hanf 2001), the idea of differentiation as a genuine strategy of integration mostly finds its roots in the Tindemans (1975) report, which laid the foundations of a ‘multi-speed Europe’ without explicitly mentioning this notion (Stubb 1996). The broad concept of differentiation appeared for the first time in the primary Community law in 1986, as stated in Article 8c of the Single European Act (now Article 27 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union [TFEU]):

When drawing up its proposals with a view to achieving the objectives set out in Article 7a [now Article 26 TFEU, author’s note], the Commission shall take into account the extent of the effort that certain economies showing differences in development will have to sustain for the establishment of the internal market and it may propose appropriate provisions. If these provisions take the form of derogations, they must be of a temporary nature and must cause the least possible disturbance to the functioning of the internal market.

Despite a few publications based on the Tindemans Report and the Single European Act written in the 1980s (Ehlermann 1984; Grabitz 1984; Wallace et al. 1983; Wallace and Ridley 1985), academic discussions on differentiated integration arose in the early 1990s for three main reasons. First, several opt-outs from the Maastricht Treaty were granted to the UK and Denmark in 1993, leading towards more institutionalized differentiation and raising questions on the future of European integration. Second, the end of the Cold War opened the door to the future ‘big bang enlargement’, creating new challenges for the future of European integration with the potential diversification of national interests and possibilities of non-traditional differen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Differentiation, differentiated integration and disintegration in a ‘post-Brexit-era’
• 2 Negotiating differentiated disintegration in the European Union
• 3 Europeanization in reverse gear?
• 4 Democracy and (dis)integration
• 5 Brexit and the European Economic Area: semi- and quasi-EU citizenship as by-products of external differentiation
• 6 European migration policy: Frontex, differentiation and Brexit
• 7 The European Commission and the member states facing differentiated (dis)integration: the challenges of Brexit
• 8 Towards an ‘ever more differentiated Union’? Measuring demand for European (dis)integration
• 9 Bang-a-boomerang? Sweden, differentiated integration, and EMU after Brexit
• 10 Governing a ‘post-Brexit’ Europe and the case of Norway: integration without membership in an affiliated state
• 11 Differentiation, Brexit and EU-Turkey relations
• 12 Differentiated (dis)integration in Europe and beyond: historical and comparative perspectives
• 13 Differentiated disintegration and third countries: the implications of Brexit for relations between the EU, the UK and Australia
• 14 Conclusion: whither differentiated (dis)integration in a ‘post-Brexit-era’?
• Index