European Integration and Disintegration

East and West

Robert Bideleux, Professor Richard Taylor, Richard Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134775217
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

Europe has changed radically since 1989 and continues to change at great speed. This book deals with the principle problems and challenges confronting Europe in the aftermath of the Cold War and the collapse of European communism.
Whilst endeavouring to strike a balance between East, West, North and South, the volume is more concerned with the changing political, economic and cultural morphology of Europe, and of the relations within it, than with the formal institutional arrangements of the European Community and its successor, the European Union. There are already numerous books on the institutional development of the EU, but relatively few with a wider compass and institutional interpretations of European integration.
The book shows that the study of European integration should be taken in the round, avoiding a narrow and self-centered concern with the development of the 'lesser Europe' of the EU. It demonstrates that integration should be seen as neither an inexorable predetermined process, nor as an automatic consequence of high levels of economic interdependence, but rather as something that proceeds in fits and starts and sometimes suffers reverses.

1 Introduction

European integration and disintegration

Robert Bideleux

Schemes for European integration are almost as old as the idea of Europe as a distinct political and cultural entity and much older than the conception of a Europe of nation-states. The birth of the idea of Europe went hand in hand with the emergence of the first schemes for European integration. Indeed, the conception of Europe as a distinct entity, i.e. as something more than a mere ‘geographical expression’, presupposed or implied a potential basis for European cohesion and integration. On the other hand, Europe has long been subject to relatively high degrees of political, economic and cultural division and fragmentation. Europe, after all, pioneered the ideas of nationalism, nation-states and national self-determination that still threaten to fragment Eastern Europe and states such as Belgium, Spain and possibly even Italy (or Britain) into ever-smaller political units. Europe has also been profoundly divided between North and South, between East and West, and between the Protestant, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox worlds. Historically, Europe has been characterized more by division and conflict than by unity and harmony.

Europeans have long disagreed as to which states and peoples should properly be included in Europe. Britons have often equated Europe with ‘the Continent’. Britain's accession to the EC in 1973 was usually described as ‘going into Europe’. Poles and Spaniards, similarly, speak of ‘the return to Europe’ in relation to membership of the European Union. There have also been long debates as to how far countries such as Russia, Turkey, Albania, Georgia, Armenia, Israel or Morocco should be included in Europe, politically, militarily, culturally or economically. They are certainly very different in some ways from Western and Central Europe, which have frequently been urged to unite against ‘the Russian menace’ (whether Tsarist or Soviet) and against Islamic foes (whether they be the Arabs, the Ottoman Turks, OPEC or Saddam Hussein). Many Russians as well as West Europeans still question whether Russia, which straddles the Eurasian landmass, is more European than Asiatic: this theme is taken up by Richard Taylor in Chapter 13.

The factor that must always be borne in mind in any consideration of Europe is that definitions of Europe and the configurations of European states are fluids rather than solids. They are constantly changing. In all probability, the Europe that we think we see now has no more permanence or solidity than the economic and cultural parameters and state configurations of Europe's past. This suggests that it can be reshaped by conscious design. Thus people who profess an undying allegiance to a particular nation or nation-state, which they regard as a constant or eternal feature of the political and cultural landscape, are suffering from a sad and potentially dangerous delusion. The idea of the nation and of a European order based upon sovereign nation-states is of relatively recent origin and is likely to be as ephemeral or short-lived as all previous European state configurations. It is on the eternal fluidity of European states systems, rather than on any deterministic belief in a teleological progression towards a preordained ‘federal goal’, that federalists should rest their hopes for a federal Europe in the twenty-first century. Since national allegiances are ‘all in the mind’, they are not fixed or ‘set in concrete’ for all time, but are subject to change, as identity and allegiance always have been. It is no accident that the seemingly solid and unassailable bipolar European order established in 1945–9, at the height of the Cold War, has already disintegrated since 1989 and that there is a debate over whether it has been replaced by multipolarity (as many Europeans fondly imagine), or (as many Arabs and Latin Americans would see it) by a unipolar ‘New World Order’ characterized by increased US hegemony. The nature of the new European order is one of the themes taken up by Philip Lawrence later in Chapter 4.

The apparent groundswell of support for regional integration in Europe since 1945 has in a sense been misleading, since it is clear that European integration has always meant different things to different people. For Europe's bankers and aristocrats, it may have represented a nostalgic desire to return to the Europe of cosmopolitan capital cities, relatively free trade and unrestricted travel (i.e. no passports and border controls) that existed before the First World War. For ‘European-minded’ socialists and technocrats, European integration represented an opportunity to plan, to regulate and to build on a scale that would transcend European national boundaries and allegiances. But for free-traders, it meant precisely the opposite: a reduction in regulation, planning and state intervention and a freeing of markets for goods, capital, labour and services. For many Roman Catholics, European integration was to be a means of uniting Christian Europe against the ‘threat’ of communism and the Soviet ‘menace’ and of binding Western Europe more closely to the USA and NATO. This was a latter-day version of medieval attempts to unite Christendom against the ‘threat’ of Islam and the Turkish ‘menace’. Over the centuries, indeed, the vast majority of schemes for European integration and confederation have been predicated on a presumed need to unite against a common external foe and a perceived ‘threat’ to Christian and/or European values and civilization. This, above all else, has been what has persuaded their proponents and supporters to consider a ‘pooling of sovereignty’, especially in such sensitive areas as defence and, in the cases of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) (1951) and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) (1957), ‘the production of the means of waging war’. The major schemes for West European integration after 1945 were in part ‘new editions’ of the nineteenth-century calls for Europe to unite against ‘the Russian menace’, metamorphosed into ‘the Soviet threat’. Now that this perceived external threat has seemingly been laid to rest by the disintegration of first the Soviet bloc and then the Soviet Union and possibly the Russian Federation, ‘wider’ European integration and even a pan-European confederation have become more feasible, on paper at least. Yet the will or the motivation to integrate and to confederate has palpably diminished, as much of the previously existing fear (and hence discipline and cohesion) has been dissipated by the removal of the perceived external ‘threat’; and the fragile integrative achievements of post-war Western Europe threaten to unravel in the face of the destabilizing effects of the new European disorder.

For General de Gaulle and for many ‘European-minded’ socialists, however, European integration was a means of giving Western Europe a more independent position in the world, as a ‘third force’, equidistant between the two superpowers and capable of resisting American as well as Soviet hegemonism, at a time when many West Europeans felt overshadowed by the two superpowers or dominated by a superpower condominium. They saw a confederal union of states as a means of reasserting West European autonomy and freedom of manoeuvre, i.e., Western Europe as an independent actor on the world stage. For some, the primary goal was to form an exclusive regional bloc, embracing only West European states (even excluding Britain, so long as de Gaulle was in power). For many ‘Atlanticists’, however, European integration was only part of the wider process of reducing and removing barriers to trade, an ongoing crusade initiated by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1947. By the end of the 1950s this had fully reintegrated Western Europe into the international economy, reversing the autarkic tendencies of the interwar years and of the Nazi ‘New Order’. Thus, for each current in the European movement, ‘Europe’ has represented a different vision, a different set of goals, ideals, mechanisms and instrumentalities. For all that, these disparate ideas about Europe and European integration have continued to generate strong passions and commitment and a sense (or possibly an illusion) of inexorable movement towards ‘ever closer union’.

In the ‘new’ post-Cold-War Europe of the early 1990s, however, disintegration was much more in evidence than integration. Comecon, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia disintegrated with astonishing suddenness and sometimes tragic consequences. Political disintegration among Europe's former communist states went hand in hand with economic and social disintegration, once the brief initial euphoria and sense of ‘liberation’ from communist dictatorship subsided. Western Europe, meanwhile, was afflicted by severe economic recession, rising social discontent, widespread disillusionment with old established political parties and politicians and a consequent ‘crisis of governance’. The crisis of the 1945–89 European order coincided with (and exacerbated) a crisis of the state as an institution in the West:

It is no longer the function of the state to protect its citizens against a well-defined single threat: the prospect of Soviet tanks rolling over Europe. The uncertainties of the present situation are multiple, diffuse. In this sense the state, too, is an orphan of the [former] Soviet Union. Deprived of its regal Hobbesian security mission, it seems incapable of finding solutions to the economic crisis and powerless to confront unemployment and monetary turmoil. The globalization of financial markets has deprived the state of its ability to control financial flows.¹

The complacent ‘triumphalism’ of the assembled EC Commissioners and heads of government at Maastricht was stopped in its tracks by the initial Danish rejection of the Maastricht Treaty in June 1992 (discussed by Nikolaj Petersen in Chapter 6) and by the near rejection of the Treaty by the French electorate in September 1992. Moreover, the initial euphoria of German unification turned sour in the wake of the subsequent economic and social collapse of post-communist East Germany, the consequent escalation of the costs of unification, the ensuing rise in German (and therefore West European) real interest rates and the accompanying rise of the extreme Right – not only in Germany, but also in other West European states afflicted by lethal combinations of economic recession, ‘crisis of governance’ and widespread fear of large-scale immigration from the disintegrating East and economically depressed, conflict-ridden North Africa, especially Algeria. In 1993 Europe witnessed the near collapse of one of the main pillars of West European integration, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, which threatened to derail the West European programmes for Economic and Monetary Union and for a Single European Market. Even more seriously, perhaps, the British and Danish ‘opt-outs’ from the Maastricht Treaty threatened to undermine one of the fundamental tenets of the EC, the principle that, once rules were adopted, they had to be applied equally to each of the member states. (Otherwise, the latter would be encouraged to ‘pick and choose’ which EC policies and laws they would implement and enforce and the whole process of West European integration could steadily unravel or lose cohesion and discipline.)

Superficially it seems paradoxical that, on the one hand, the EU has achieved more impressive and far-reaching economic, political and even cultural integration than any other major union of states or supranational regional bloc and yet, on the other hand, the continent of Europe is still deeply afflicted by forces of disintegration. In reality, however, European societies and polities have long been characterized by continuous tension between the forces of integration (promoting greater harmony, cooperation, ‘drawing together’, cohesion, prosperity, complementarity, interdependence and division of labour) and the forces of disintegration (fostering inter-state and internal friction and warfare, beggar-my-neighbour protectionism and inter-ethnic or sectarian strife), both at national and supranational levels. Until the 1940s, the main focus was on national integration, and one would encounter some quite deterministic views of the process of national integration. For example, according to the most influential analyst of the process by which the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved into nation-states:

The whole history of the nineteenth century is a demonstration of a sociological law, according to which among masses of the same nationality, living under different sovereignties, there develops, with the rise of economic and cultural life, an irresistible current tending toward the unification of the whole national body into one single political and economic organization.²

Since the 1940s, however, the focus has of course shifted to supranational European integration. The forces fostering cohesion and integration, including Europe's shared values, elements of a common European culture and civilisation, the variegated (albeit fractured) European market and the consequent interdependencies and complementarities between European economies, have given rise to various conceptions and theoriz-ations of European integration, most notably: European federalism; neo-functionalism; theories of interdependent development; and the ‘transactional’ theory of regional integration elaborated by Karl Deutsch.³ Since the late 1970s, however, these theories have been widely rejected and/or discredited on the grounds that they are unduly teleological or deterministic. They postulate ineluctable movement towards a predetermined outcome; an irresistible, technologically determined progression towards ever-increasing contact, communication, economic interdependence and division of labour between European states and regions, both at supranational and at subnational levels, accompanied by a steady proliferation of international regulatory tasks or ‘functions’ that can best be handled by supranational agencies. ‘Integration’ is itself a very loaded, normative, teleological term. Nevertheless, these theoretical approaches and the tendencies they claim to discern have both reinforced and drawn strength from European federalist theses that the European nation-states system, along with the underlying ideas of ‘the nation’ and ‘national self-determination’ as the appropriate basis of the European political order, were obsolescent or outmoded and a threat to European peace and prosperity. European federalists argued that there was an increasing need for a supranational federation with dir...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• European Integration and Disintegration
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: European integration and disintegration
• 2 French motives for European integration
• 3 Churchill and Europe: a revision
• 4 European security: a new era of crisis?
• 5 The UK in Europe: an awkward or accommodating partner?
• 6 In the strategic triangle: Denmark and the European Union
• 7 The crisis of the Italian state
• 8 The Southern enlargement of the EC: Greece, Portugal and Spain
• 9 National identity in a united and divided Germany
• 10 The Comecon experiment
• 11 Poland’s ‘return to Europe’, 1989-94
• 12 Bringing the East back in
• 13 The double-headed eagle: Russia – East or West?
• 14 In lieu of a conclusion: East meets West?
• Index