International Relations Theory and the Politics of European Integration

Power, Security and Community

Morten Kelstrup, Michael Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134611904
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

International Relations Theory and the Politics of European Integration focuses on the roles of community, power and security, within the European Union. It features contributions from highly respected international scholars, and covers subjects such as:
· sovereignty and European integration
· the EU and the politics of migration
· the internationalisation of military security
· the EU as a security actor
· money, finance and power
· the quest for legitimacy with regards to EU enlargement.

1 Europe is not where it is supposed to be

R.B.J. Walker

Europe as known quantity/quality

Europe, as so many analysts insist, is changing, growing, developing. Frequent references are now made to the New Europe: to somewhere – a geographical place – or something – a cultural, political, economic or military presence, or achievement, or possibility – that is bold and dynamic, its revered traditions now tinged with auras of millennial or globalizing innovation.

The precise character of such change, growth or development is strenuously contested. It is framed in many ways in voluminous literatures, not least because the terms ‘change’, ‘growth’ and ‘development’ connote quite diverse possibilities of temporal movement. In the form that is perhaps most familiar to theorists of international relations, these literatures express well-rehearsed debates between those who fixate on changing patterns of intergovernmental relations and those entranced by utilitarian accounts of economic, and consequently political ‘integration’. The term integration is especially interesting in this context in that it manages to combine images of growth in scale or size with progressivist (modern, liberal) accounts of development, and thus carries more than its fair share of metaphorical baggage.¹ More broadly and often more provocatively, though often in sprawling narratives and loose characterizations, some of these literatures tell bold stories about a globalizing economy or an emerging condition of postmodernity. Clearly, something is going on ‘in Europe’, as one says. Its novelties demand explanations and responses: especially, I want to emphasize here, explanations and responses that do not rely on unchallenged assumptions about where and therefore what Europe already is.²

Despite the many variations on the theme of change in Europe that might be identified, the prevailing narratives striving to make sense of the various patterns of transition that scholars have examined in contemporary Europe tend to be expressed in highly constrained metaphors of scale and teleologies of emergence. These narratives simultaneously tell us where Europe is, what it is, and what it is becoming in terms set by specifically modern discourses of spatiality and temporality. Not only does knowing where Europe is, fixing it in a cartography inscribed by, say, the Atlantic Ocean to the West, the North Sea/Scandinavia/the Baltics to the North, the Mediterranean/Africa to the South, and the Urals/Balkans/Serbs/Albanians/Turks to the East, enable us to know what is contained in that (not quite so) obvious territorial space, but knowing what Europe is because we know where it is also shapes our capacity to know what Europe must become, and is becoming.

Whether in the popular imagination or the categories of scholarly analysis, and whether as a somewhere or a something, Europe is often portrayed as somehow becoming bigger. More states seek to join the European Community. NATO incorporates eastwards. It thus seems natural enough to claim that Europe is expanding, enlarging, becoming grander both in territorial reach and in institutional capability. Accounts of change are thus subject to narratives of growth framed through metaphors of size, although any strutting that might be warranted as a consequence is sharply circumscribed by the acknowledged hegemony of American military force and economic competition on a global scale.

Claims about increasing size permit and even encourage assumptions that Europe is somehow growing up, attaining some kind of maturity, though perhaps not quite the kind of autonomous subjectivity that Kant once envisaged as the ultimate ground of freedom and moral conduct. Europe is understood as becoming somehow more European. For many observers, there is a clear and increasingly pervasive sense of an emerging European identity, even of the development of some kind of European citizenship, one that is being established at the expense of already entrenched national identities and citizenships.³ This emerging sense of a more European Europe accompanies hopes for new institutions of governance, policymaking and law which have become inscribed across the familiar landscapes of national communities and jurisdictions, as well as by some sense that Europe is something that requires its own currency and even its own security policy. Here the narrative is less about scale as a matter of mere size than about a pattern of integration that is both creating new levels of transnational solidarity and governance that are somehow above existing states and, as a consequence, eroding the powers and authorities of those supposedly lower jurisdictions. Europe, it seems, is not only growing up in the sense of maturing, leaving its supposedly more primitive nationalist past behind, but – and this is the apparently obvious but quite strange possibility that provokes my remarks here – is being constructed upwards, vertically, erected on some lower realms of state, nation, region or locale. Whether read quantitatively or qualitatively, as growth or development/ maturation, Europe is easily envisaged in metaphors of higher and lower, of levels of authority and subordination. We know where and what it is, and must be, in geographical or territorial space; after all, what could be more natural? But we also know where and what it is within vertical spaces that are being erected above that territorial space, and we are easily persuaded that this is natural as well (for a recent synoptic discussion that should dispel such assumptions, see Casey 1997). All we then need to ask, perhaps, is how high Europe can go: a question that already hints at a degree of absurdity, more than a dash of metaphysics, and a large repertoire of political practices, hidden in modern discourses of higher and lower.

These narratives of size and emergence are difficult to resist. They constitute a powerful common sense. Indeed, it is quite difficult to think about whatever it is that is going on in Europe without them. Europe is bigger than France. Europe is more mature than the UK. Europe is above Italy, above Barcelona, Frankfurt and Amsterdam. Consequently, as the seemingly perennial argument goes, Europe may, or perhaps may not, become integrated at a higher level than all its constituent parts, its recalcitrant nationalities, its parochial regions, its merely local villages, towns and cities. These narratives may provoke certain well-known forms of resistance. Bigger may usually be understood to be better, but the growth of new bureaucratic regimes in Brussels encourages familiar complaints about instrumental rationalities and local sensitivities. Moreover, so many forms of ‘power’ now seem to be characterized more by exquisite miniaturizations and deft mobilizations than by large and immovable force. But what could Europe possibly be if not something emergent, a new hierarchy of levels above the parochial and increasingly constrained states below? Europe promises greater cosmopolitanism, greater efficiency, greater power, and perhaps above all, greater legitimacy.⁴ Away with the petty parochialisms, put local identities in their proper – local – place, elevate more universal principles to facilitate both more efficient modes of social and economic organization and more inclusive forms of cultural and political community. Resistance may not be entirely futile, but, in the dominant codes, it is certainly reactionary, chauvinistic, nationalistic and outmoded, the preserve of Gaullists, Thatcherites and political realists obsessed with the inevitability of state power and interstate conflict.

As with much common sense about modern political life, however, it is wise to be cautious about what it presumes to tell us about contemporary structural and political transformations, whether in Europe or elsewhere. Indeed, one might argue that the very obviousness of the equation of scale with maturity and verticality ought to raise many warning bells. Neither Brussels nor Strasbourg are as high as the Alps or the Pyrenees, and Kantian Reason is not quite as high as the moon. More crucially, metaphors of scale, especially, and the teleologies of emergence they enable, are closely associated with the practices of modern sovereignty, which among many other things enact an account of authority inscribed simultaneously on vertical and horizontal axes, on a vertical (legal, ethical) scale of higher and lower authority and a horizontal (territorial) scale of inclusion and exclusion.

Indeed, one of the important characteristics of the contemporary literatures on the New Europe is that they so often reproduce the practices of sovereignty even as they argue that the sovereignty of European states is being eroded, undermined, dissolved, superseded, transcended, or any of the many other terms that are so firmly implicated in sovereigntist discourse and which now converge in claims about the integration of Europe at some higher level. In a nutshell, much of the literature on the New Europe, whether in relation to its political economy, cultural identity or security interests, expresses a profound nostalgia for an imminent return of the Great Chain of Being, for some kind of hierarchical universe reminiscent of medieval Christiandom, as a replacement for the horizontal universe of modern nation-states. Given the ways in which claims about the modern sovereign state were established both against such pre-modern hierarchies and as ways of incorporating such hierarchies into the new territorial spaces of early-modern Europe, contemporary re-enactments of an old debate between territorial and vertical forms of authority should come as no great surprise. But it should also come as no great surprise when Europe, wherever and whatever it is, refuses to be cast in the moulds of either territorial or vertical forms of authority; refuses to be where it is supposed to be.

Such, at least, is the possibility I want to canvass here. I especially want to do so by attending to the ways in which we refer to Europe both as a something and a somewhere. If we assume that we can understand what Europe is by examining where it is, and then examine where it is in terms of the kinds of accounts of political space that encourage us to shift automatically from a horizontal grid of territorialities to a vertical grid of supposed levels, we will, like both the nationalist/intergovernmentalist and integrationist schools of analysis that inform so much of our understanding of emerging forms of European politics, miss much of what makes it possible to make claims about a New Europe that exceed the legitimation strategies of existing political elites.

In this respect, not much has changed since the heyday of the literature on European integration in the 1960s and 1970s (still helpful commentary may be found in Pentland forthcoming and de Vree 1972). In an interesting and still relevant commentary on this literature, Ernst Haas once noted that for all its theoretical and methodological sophistication, most scholars of European integration were all too easily seduced by an imagery of Europe as an emerging state, a bigger version of the states being incorporated into it, a higher version of the states being incorporated below it (Haas 1970). Then, as now, the central theoretical debates hinged on a debate between those who claimed that European politics would continue to be structured as a system of states or would gradually be reconstructed, become integrated, in ways explainable in utilitarian (functionalist or neo-functionalist) terms, so as to create a Europe that grows both larger and upwards.

Contemporary advocates of the states-system view now tend to draw less on a post-Westphalian model of statecraft and diplomacy among sovereigns than on so-called neorealist (that is, utilitarian) and liberal-institutionalist accounts of conflict, cooperation and bargaining strategy. Advocates of supranational institution-building now draw less on images of the sovereign state writ large than on more disaggregated images of state formation, sometimes federal, sometimes multicentric, but almost always rooted as a hierarchy of levels within a spatially defined community (see, for example, Marks et al. 1996). Those who in my view quite rightly reject the territorial imagery of intergovernmentalism that is shared by Stanley Hoffmann’s traditional institutionalism of three decades ago and, say, Andrew Moravcsik’s economistic liberalism more recently, especially tend to look to some kind of return to the metaphysics of continuity from lower to higher, from earthly to heavenly, that everyone thought had been finally destroyed by the flat spaces and autonomous subjectivities of modernity.

It is not difficult to read the history of debates about European integration as largely a story of claims about the relative priority of horizontal space and vertical space, of territorial space and a spatially conceived hierarchy of higher and lower. There is some irony in the extent to which these debates reproduce a central struggle in the transition from medieval to modern forms of political authority. Irony turns into a more puzzling contradiction when attempts to understand historical and structural change are automatically translated into categories of spatial containment, whether horizontal or vertical.

Europe as a puzzle

It may well be that these two images, of a territorial states-system driven less by strategies of conflict than by calculi of cooperation and of an emerging hierarchy of levels of community and governance, do indeed offer most of what is needed to explain and understand the change in contemporary Europe. Still, once attention strays away from the explicit debates about integration and intergovernmental cooperation, Europe can easily appear more as a puzzle than as a known quantity/quality. This, as Diez has emphasized, is what makes the recent attempt to analyse the European Union resemble attempts to name an unknown animal (Diez 1999: 598). In very general terms, there are three fairly obvious general reasons for this.

One is that Europe seems to be a very complex phenomenon. One might, for example, want to think about Europe in terms of political economies of production or the circulation of capital, or patterns of population movement and immigration, or the place of it largest cities, or the constitution of regions, or its flows of information, or its negotiations of an eastern boundary, or its struggles over specific sites of authority over this, that and the other. That is, one might want to begin not with assumptions about what and where Europe is but with some sense of wonder about how it is that all those processes and dynamics that might be identified as relevant to an understanding of Europe can indeed be imagined in terms of a coherent geographical and ontological whole. As with concepts of a state or a nation, it is all too easy to assume that Europe simply exists and thus to stop thinking about the conditions under which this assumption comes to be taken for granted or how this assumption is put into practice.

In this context, one of the most striking characteristics of the debate between intergovernmentalists and integrationists has long been the wilful simplicity of the primary categories of analysis deployed on both sides. Much descriptive fat hangs on thin conceptual bones. The search for anything like a plausible theory of the state is a long hard slog. Extraordinarily crude distinctions between high and low politics (the very condition of the possibility of functionalist and neo-functionalist theories and the basic ground of intergovernmentalist responses to them) or material practices and immaterial ideas (like the pre-nineteenth-century accounts of language, culture, ideology and discourse favoured by more recent liberal economists),⁵ serve to undermine almost every attempt to claim some degree of rigour in either conceptualization or method. In this context, the imageries of both a states-system and a hierarchy of levels seem just too simple, as Haas rightly insisted.

Another is that if Europe is changing and developing as dramatically as most commentators suggest, it would be unwise to rely on deeply entrenched accounts of what such change and development must be like. Evidence supporting either the continuing presence of states or emerging patterns of integration and proliferating levels of governance ensure that scholarly judgements easily imitate the dyadic logic that politicians use to rouse sentiments for or against Europe, for or against sovereign jurisdiction. These are the great alternatives, after all, that have long been articulated by the most influential European political thinkers. They define the most prominent contours of European achievements and tragedies, its hopes of Enlightenment and universality, its counter-hopes of Romanticism and specificity, its investments in reason and sentiment, its arrogances, its memories of brutality, its landscapes of inclusion and exclusion that are even now being re-inscribed on its eastern (and all other) horizons.

Despite the historical and discursive force of these dyadic alternatives, however, they seem to be at best partial, incomplete guides to more elusive phenomena. Any plausible account of what Europe is arguably demands multiple perspectives and proliferating labels. Its states and its integrations are embedded in flows of capital, technologies and peoples, in resurgent regionalisms, in decentrings of identity and authority, in layered institutions, in overlapping jurisdictions, in global hegemonies, in local sites of global productions, communications and exchanges, in networks of relations between cities and corporations, and so on.

Perhaps most instructively, far from resting easily on the classical imagery of a potential shift from fragmentation to integration, from a pluralistic system of state communities to an integrated community, contemporary shifts towards some kind of common identity or structure of governance are accompanied by renewed emphases on diversity, on pluralisms, on differences.⁶ As a great outpouring of recent pluralistic political theory suggests, this emphasis on diversity, pluralism and difference increasingly eludes the conventional modern political translations of all claims about difference into affirmations of sovereign statehood and autonomous individuality (Among many, see Butler and Scott 1992; Connolly 1995; Corlett 1989; McClintock et al. 1997; Tully 1995). Differences have come to seem somehow more diverse, at the same time that the ideal of Europe as a familiar-looking even if rather large state have come to seem increasingly chimerical. The guarantees of pluralism affirmed by a system of national states have come to seem increasingly problematic not only because of the challenges of integration but also because the sovereign state and the system of sovereign states have always offered a very limited understanding of the possibilities of cultural and political diversity. Once one is forced to take the claims of diversity in Europe seriously, that is, as not identical to a limited array of national and individual subjectivities, the teleologies and metaphors of size and development, indeed the entire discourse counterposing a logic of state systems to a logic of integration loses much of its force.

Indeed, it might be argued that perhaps the least useful interpretation of any evidence that European states have limited sovereignty is that states are withering away and that a supranational European authority is emerging. And perhaps the least useful interpretation of any evidence that Europe is a place of cooperations, common institutions of law and governance, and so on, is that states are in the process of withering away. The dyadic logic of national and supranational alternatives is very deeply entrenched in the modern European imagination, but suspicion of its classical accounts of what it is and must be is probably the primary condition under which any more useful scholarly enquiry must proceed. Europe is in many ways a profoundly unknown phenomenon, and not least in terms of questions about subjectivity and agency, about the character of political authority and the subjects who do or should constitute that authority.

Third, and crucially, while the prevailing forms of debate about intergovernmentalism and integration proceed on the basis of assumptions about what politics is, the character and location of politics are increasingly the greatest mystery of European life. Symptomatically, even the most cursory examination of recent literatures...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Integration and the politics of community in the New Europe
• 1 Europe is not where it is supposed to be
• 2 International theory and European integration
• 3 European communities in a neo-medieval global polity: The dilemmas of fairyland?
• 4 The art of war and the construction of peace: Toward a virtual theory of international relations
• 5 Sovereignty, anarchy and law in Europe: When legal norms turn into political facts
• 6 Gendered communities: The ambiguous attraction of Europe
• 7 Contested community: Migration and the question of the political in the EU
• 8 When two become one: Internal and external securitisations in Europe
• 9 The European Central Bank and the problem of authority
• 10 ‘And never the twain shall meet?’: The EU’s quest for legitimacy and enlargement
• 11 The EU as a security actor: Reflections from a pessimistic constructivist on post-sovereign security orders