European Integration and National Identity

The Challenge of the Nordic States

Lene Hansen, Ole Waever

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134599165
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The four Nordic countries, Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Norway, have all held referenda on their relationship to the European Union in the 1990's. These referenda catalysed heated debates: should Finland and Sweden give up neutrality? Should Denmark follow the European Union's move towards higher degrees of integration? And, had there been enough change in Norway to reverse the rejection of European Community membership in 1972? These key questions about the future of European integration are addressed in this highly topical book by examining the crucial role played by national identity.

1 Introduction^*

Lene Hansen

European integration became one of the most salient issues in Nordic foreign policy in the 1990s. Finland, Norway and Sweden applied for EU membership and held referenda on accession in the fall of 1994 and Denmark witnessed no less than three EU-related referenda, one on the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, one on the Edinburgh Agreement in 1993, and, finally, one on the Amsterdam Treaty in 1998. In all four countries, the governments were in favour of integration – and with the exception of Norway, they had the support of almost the entire political and economic establishment – yet, with the partial exception of Finland, this was a policy which confronted serious opposition among the Nordic voters. The Maastricht Treaty was rejected in Denmark in June 1992 by a 50.7 per cent no vote; Norwegian accession was turned down with 52.2 per cent against membership; and in Sweden only a slim majority of 52.3 per cent voted in favour. In Finland, by contrast, a, by Nordic standards, comfortable 57 per cent voted ‘yes’ (Arter 1995; Tiilikainen 1996). At the turn of the millennium, the Nordic EU members continued on their sceptical track: the rejection of Denmark’s accession to the third phase of the EMU in September 2000 was the most spectacular incident, but opinion polls published in July 2000 in the 53rd Eurobarometer supported this trend: Sweden had the highest number of any member country arguing that membership was a bad thing, and in Finland only 40 per cent were in clear support of membership.¹

This book seeks to understand the reserved approach to ‘the European question’ in Norden.² Why in three out of four countries did the vote split almost exactly in half? What were the major points of contestation and how did the opposing sides represent their European policy? Or, in the case of Finland, even if less than a majority expressed outright support for membership by the end of the 1990s, why was integration perceived as less of a contested issue than in the rest of Norden?³ Answering these question leads us to a study of the debates preceding the referenda in each of the Nordic countries. While those supporting integration fought to present membership of the EU as a precondition for political influence and continued economic growth – and as not seriously compromising national sovereignty – the no-side adopted sometimes a nationalist rhetoric, sometimes the argument that the Scandinavian welfare state would be seriously threatened inside an integrated Europe. Peter Lawler has argued that ‘Scandinavian scepticism about European integration exhibited a significant, if intellectually unfashionable, attachment to a positive understanding of the sovereign state which a generic term such as nationalism cannot fully capture’ (Lawler 1997: 566). Or, one could argue along similar lines that Norden exhibits dual nationalisms, that a ‘state nationalism’ which fears the demise of the Scandinavian welfare state co-exists alongside a traditional ‘cultural nationalism’ centred on the concern for national identity. This produces a political terrain where opposition to the EU has been argued mostly from the parties located at the two ends of the political spectrum, while social democrats, conservatives and liberals have been – as a general rule and with Norway as an exception – in favour (Sæter 1996: 143–5; Dahlerup 1997).

As the analysis of the four countries in Chapters 3 to 6 will show, the Nordic debates over Europe have evolved around the importance of national identity and the role of the state (Ingebritsen and Larson 1997; Lawler 1997). If we wish to fully understand the Nordic reluctance towards European integration we need, as a consequence, to study the way in which the political concepts ‘nation’ and ‘state’ are deployed in the debate on Europe. But our approach moves beyond studying the impact of national identity in some important ways. First, the analysis of a particular country will most often begin by tracing how the concept of the nation is related to the state, and how these constructions influence the current debate on Europe. But other concepts refering to larger collectivities such as ‘society’ and ‘the people’ (or Folk) may also be of relevance for fully comprehending the structure of the debates.

Second, it is our claim that these ‘crucial concepts’ are tied together in conceptual constellations, that the specific constructions of each concept – for example of the nation along cultural/German or political/French lines – are linked to one another in a particular way, and that this constellation is constitutive for the way in which European integration can be constructed politically. It is, in short, the central claim of this book that these concepts have a structuring influence on the way in which ‘Europe’ can be articulated in a particular, national context. Or, put differently, when political actors argue in favour of a certain policy towards Europe, they do so through a presentation of how this ‘Europe’ fits with a particular construction of ‘Finland’, ‘Norway’, ‘Sweden’ and ‘Denmark’. Specific constructions of Europe are thus constrained – and enabled – by the way in which the concepts of state, nation, etc. have been formed historically. A pro-EU project articulated within a given national context has to include a vision of how ‘Europe’ strengthens the idea of the nation and the state – or at least of how it does not pose a threat to these ideas. Those opposing integration attempt, on the other hand, to convince the public that the EU does indeed involve a threat to national identity and/or political independence. This is not to say that one will find an explicit use of the word ‘nation’ or ‘state’ in every single argument over Europe, for it might be that the concept of the nation is taken for granted to such an extent that it does not need to be directly referred to.

Although the discourse analysis approach to foreign policy presented by Ole Wæver in Chapter 2, as well as the specific methodological principles accompanying it, are applied to a specific set of states, namely the Nordic ones, it should be emphasised that this theoretical framework has a more general applicability. Ole Wæver’s discourse analysis foreign policy theory was, in fact, originally conceived in a project which took the debate on Europe in France and Germany as its empirical case in point (Wæver and Holm, forthcoming). This project included, besides Ole Wæver, who also wrote the analysis of Germany (Wæver 1992b, 1996, 1998b), Ulla Holm and Henrik Larsen, both of whom have modified and applied the theoretical framework to France (Holm 1993, 1997, 1999) and France and Britain (Larsen 1997). Although not following the detailed methodology of discursive levels, presented in Chapter 2, to a similar extent to the chapters in this book, two of the contributors, Iver B. Neumann and Lene Hansen, have used significant parts of it in studies of Russia (Neumann 1996a) and Slovenia (Hansen 1996).⁴

This chapter proceeds in the following way: first, it presents the debate on the EU’s legitimacy crisis; second, it defines our poststructuralist approach and discusses the difference to alternative constructivist studies of national conceptualisations of Europe; third, it addresses the challenge to constructivism which has been presented by Andrew Moravcsik, the leading scholar within the liberal intergovernmentalist approach; and, fourth, it argues the relevance of the ‘Nordic choice’ and presents a brief history of the Nordic region and the difference between the way in which ‘Norden’ and ‘Europe’ have been constructed.

The Legitimacy Debate

The four Nordic countries are interesting ‘Europeans’ not least because they include – together with Britain – some of the most reluctant integrationists (Miljan 1977). The Nordic cases are in this respect highly relevant for those beyond the Nordic area who are interested in the ongoing debate over the legitimacy crisis of the EU. This debate seeks to understand why a gap has developed between the attitudes of national elites on the one side and a significant part of the electorate on the other. National governments and the EU’s own representatives have in general constructed existing and increased levels of European integration in more positive terms than large parts of the populations. Indeed the ‘break on integration’ currently in evidence can, in most cases, be located at the level of the EU members’ populations rather than – as traditionally expected – in the states’ unwillingness to give up sovereignty. Opinion polls such as those compiled in the Eurobarometer provide one useful indication of the degree of legitimacy crisis across the EU as a whole, as well as inside each of the member states. But referenda have the advantage over polls in that they not only provide us with a concrete measure of the degree of support for integration, but also tend to generate debate: they force political actors to argue why a particular policy towards integration is called for. Polls might allow one to identify a legitimacy crisis, but they cannot in and of themselves be used to identify why integration is seen as unwanted by a large part of the electorate.⁵ Debates surrounding referenda – or other high profile events such as the sanctions imposed on Austria in 2000 – facilitate, on the other hand, a study of the reasons why the EU is seen as legitimate or not.

Throughout the 1990s a debate over the causes and solutions to the legitimacy crisis has taken place (Hansen and Williams 1999). One set of authors has taken a liberal political position claiming either that a European citizenry already exists, and that the EU’s crisis stems from the absence of adequate structures of political representation at the European level (for example Featherstone 1994: 151; Lodge 1994; Wiener and Sala 1997: 597), or that a European political community can and should be created through the introduction of these structures (Howe 1995). Another set of authors argues in response that the precondition for a solution of the crisis is the construction of a European cultural identity and that attempts to follow the liberal political route will aggravate the crisis, not resolve it (Smith 1992; Obradovic 1996). A major weakness of this debate has been, however, that it has taken place almost exclusively at the general European level. The implicit assumption has been that the legitimacy crisis is the same throughout the whole of the EU, that, for example, the strengthening of political representation at the EU level through the European Parliament would lead to increased legitimacy in all member states. In contrast, the analyses in this book argue that ‘the’ legitimacy debate is composed for the most part of a set of national debates, and it might well be that while some initiatives undertaken at the EU level might ameliorate the legitimacy crisis in one country, they might exacerbate it in another.

The field of European studies needs therefore to draw more attention to the specifics of particular national debates on Europe. Seen in this light, it is particularly beneficial to study those countries which have held referenda and where the ‘crisis perceptions’ are apparently biggest, namely the Nordic states. Do those critical of the EU seem most concerned with the absence of all-European representative political institutions, as held by the liberal position, or do they think that those institutions already in place pose a threat to national sovereignty and identity? The Nordic referenda provide a ‘test’ not just of the public’s ‘yes or no attitude’ to integration, but also of the assumptions about integration, national sovereignty or cultural autonomy that have underpinned the debate.

Presenting Poststructuralism

The debate between rationalist and constructivist approaches to International Relations (IR) has recently reached the field of European integration studies, adding to the already lively debate between liberal intergovernmentalists and institutionalists (Jørgensen 1997; Christiansen et al., 1999; Diez 1999; Moravcsik 1999a and 1999b; Puchala 1999; Kelstrup and Williams 2000). A similarly vibrant debate over the difference between constructivism and poststructuralism (or postmodernism as it is often labelled by those who do not sympathise with this position) is now on offer. (See, for example, Adler 1997; Campbell 1998a: 216–22; Katzenstein et al. 1998: 674–8; Ruggie 1998: 35; Wæver 1998a.) It is clearly beyond the scope of this chapter to go through each of these controversies; we would, however, if pressured, define ourselves as poststructuralists in the sense that our primary and most abstract concern is with the production of structures of meaning. More concretely, this implies that our research is focussed on national discourses on European integration, and we are in this respect close to the work done by other authors who have carried out discourse analysis of foreign policy (for example Jutta Weldes (1996; 1999), Roxanne Lynn Doty (1996), and David Campbell (1998a)).⁶ We might, however, be more structuralist than some of these authors in our claim that key political concepts of state, nation, society and ‘the people’ are highly influential – indeed structuring – for the way in which policies of ‘Europe’, and European integration, can be argued. This is not, however, as will be explicated in more detail by Ole Wæver in Chapter 2, to make the structurally determinist claim that these constellations can never be rearticulated. The most basic layer of discourse, that comprising the concepts of state and nation, is assumed to be highly resilient to change, not least because it has a historical trajectory which tends to give it a ‘taken for granted’, sedimented quality. But resilience should not be mistaken for impossibility, and our theoretical framework does therefore incorporate the possibility of change, even at the most deeply institutionalised level. The pressure for change can arise from external developments which challenge existing representations, as in the Danish case where the deepening of European integration in the 1990s has made a construction of the EU as pure intergovernmental cooperation increasingly difficult to sustain, thus challenging the basic state–nation construction. Or, one might trace change to individuals or institutions which seek to make an inroad into the debate by adopting an approach to Europe which implies a rearticulation of state and nation. While change is thus both possible and traceable the importance of the structure implies that attempts to construct a European policy which simply ignore the dominant constellation will in all likelihood fail to attract serious recognition within the debate. There is furthermore the difference between our theoretical approach an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Series editor’s preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Identity, communities and foreign policy: discourse analysis as foreign policy theory
• 3. Sustaining sovereignty: the Danish approach to Europe
• 4. This little piggy stayed at home: why Norway is not a member of the EU
• 5. Sweden and the EU: welfare state nationalism and the spectre of ‘Europe’
• 6. Finland in the New Europe: a Herderian or Hegelian project?
• 7. Conclusion
• Index