France and the European Union

After the Referendum on the European Constitution

Emiliano Grossman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780415442428
• eBook ISBN: 9781000155013
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The character of international trade has changed dramatically over the past twenty years. Previously published as a special issue of The Journal of European Public Policy, this volume provides a 'state of the art' study of the new trade politics.

Trapped by their ideas: French elites’ discourses of European integration and globalization¹

Vivien A. Schmidt

When the French voted no’ in the referendum on the Constitutional Treaty for the European Union, it sent shock waves throughout France as well as the rest of Europe. How could a country so patendy pro-European, which had exercised such significant leadership in building the single market and the single currency, now seemingly turn its back on the Europe of which it had been a major architect?

The negative outcome of the referendum did not in fact so much reflect French citizens’ sentiments about the European Union (EU) per se as their concerns about the impact of European integration and globalization on the national economy and polity. The no’ vote constituted neither a rejection of the EU as such - opinion polls across time show majorities favouring membership in the EU - nor even of the notion of having a ‘constitution’ - since before as well as after, majorities in opinion polls claimed to favour a constitution for the EU. The ‘no’ vote was not even so much about the Constitutional Treaty - although many complained about various parts of it (in particular Part III) - or its proposed institutional reforms. Rather, the negative outcome had to do primarily with national concerns about the tremendous changes France has experienced as a result of European integration and globalization, in particular since the mid-1980s. These concerns encompass not only EU-related economic policies - which many ‘no’ voters on the left condemned as reflecting the EU’s ‘excessive Anglo-Saxon neo-liberalism’ and its role as a conduit for globalization — but also the EU’s very institutional presence - which many ‘no’ voters on the right were convinced undermined national sovereignty and identity. An unpopular government, needless to say, did not help matters. But the outcome also reflects a longer-standing problem related to the failure of political leaders to develop sufficiently legitimating discourses about European integration and globalization and their impact on the national economy and polity.

With regard to the EU’s impact on the economy, French leaders have emphasized the EU’s economic benefits for France in their general discourse, invoking Europeanization as a shield against globalization, at the same time as they have mosdy shifted the blame to the EU for unpopular policies while taking the credit for popular policies without even mentioning the EU’s role. With regard to the EU’s impact on the polity, political leaders have remained trapped by a discourse that, beginning with de Gaulle, sought to deflect concerns about the EU’s effects on French sovereignty and identity through a discourse about France’s leadership in Europe and Europe’s benefits to national interests. Although this dominant discourse worked reasonably well in the early years, it has worked less and less well over time despite the incremental changes in ideas introduced by political leaders such as Mitterrand in response to new EU-related initiatives. By now, the discourse has lost much of its effectiveness as France’s leadership role has been slipping, its identity has come into question, the economy has stalled, and there are growing questions about whether the EU does actually serve national interests.

In making its case, this article uses the newest of the ‘new institutionalisms’ as its methodological approach: ‘discursive’ institutionalism (see Schmidt 2002: ch. 5; 2006: ch. 5). Discursive institutionalism focuses both on the substantive content of ideas - including cognitive arguments about their necessity and normative ones about their appropriateness - and on the interactive processes by which they are conveyed - consisting of a ‘co-ordinative sphere in which policy actors generate such ideas and a’communicative sphere in which political actors present those ideas to the public for deliberation. The ‘institutionalism’ in this discursive approach, moreover, suggests that our concern is not only with the content of ideas or ‘text’ but also with the institutional context in which, and through which, ideas are communicated.

In the French case, its institutional context as a simple polity in which governing activity has traditionally been channelled through the executive (also the case for the UK) ensures that its communicative discourse to the general public is more elaborate than its co-ordinative discourse, which tends to be highly restricted. This contrasts with more compound polities (like Germany and Italy), in which governing activity tends to be more dispersed through multiple authorities, and where the co-ordinative discourse among policy actors is concomitantly more elaborate, the communicative discourse thinner (see Schmidt 2006). But it contrasts even more with the EU, which is a highly compound polity with an especially elaborate co-ordinative discourse and a particularly thin communicative discourse. As such, the EU’s lack of‘fit’ with French institutions poses a significant challenge to France’s traditional institutional order as well as to democratic ideals attached to it - since superimposing the highly compound EU on France’s more simple institutions necessarily disperses the traditional concentration of authority in the French executive. Add to this the significant economic policy impact of the EU, and it becomes clear why what political leaders say in their communicative discourse to the general public about Europe is extremely important with regard to public responses to the EU.

Significantly, the French communicative discourse to the general public about the EU and its impact has not been systematically examined across time - if it has been considered at all. Sometimes, accounts of European integration take a rational choice institutionalist approach to France’s involvement in EU construction, and impute interests to actors, regardless of their ideas or discourse, for example, by claiming de Gaulle to have been motivated primarily by economic interests (e.g. Moravcsik 1998; see critique in Parsons 2003: ch. 4). At other times, they take a historical-institutionalist approach, by considering the neo-functionalist mechanisms of ‘spillover’ by which the EU has developed into a supranational entity (Stone-Sweet and Sandholtz 1997). At yet other times, they offer a sociological institutionalist account of how national ideas about identity shifted in response to EU institutional development (Risse 2001). Even when they take ideas seriously as drivers of change - as in Craig Parsons’ (2003) detailed discursive institutionalist account of the ways in which French ideas about constructing EU institutions became the institutionalized ideas which constrained subsequent French leaders’ ideas and actions — the co-ordinative discourse of policy construction in the EU is the main focus of inquiry. Although this is extremely useful in providing insight into how the political battle of ideas among French political elites affected EU construction, it does not detail how these co-ordinative ideas were conveyed in leaders’ communicative discourse to the general public or in the public deliberations which helped to construct French public attitudes toward the EU.

Equally importantly, we do not acquire a sense of how the ideas projected in the communicative discourse fit with the material reality of EU institutional development over time. One of the main problems with the French discourse is that it has become increasingly disconnected from the realities that it purportedly describes. Taking ideas and discourse seriously, in short, helps us to explain not only the success of French leaders’ ideas in building the EU, making it an ever greater economic and institutional reality, but also their increasing failure to reconcile their ideas and discourse about France in Europe with the reality.

The article begins with a brief discussion of the economic and political-institutional challenges that the EU has posed for French ideas about itself in the EU. The article continues with an examination of political elites’ ideas and discourses about France and Europe, first in the years from de Gaulle to Mitterrand, then in the Chirac years. It concludes with an analysis of the referendum on the Constitutional Treaty.

THE EU-RELATED CHALLENGES TO IDEAS ABOUT FRANCE IN EUROPE

French political elites’ discourse of leadership in Europe had solid foundations in reality in the early years, as did their discourse about how European integration promoted national interests. Whether this was enough even at the time to obscure issues regarding the losses in sovereignty and identity remains in question. But there can be no question that, over time, the discourse of leadership became increasing hard to maintain in the face of a reality of diminishing French leadership in the EU and increasing EU institutional encroachments.

French leadership in the EU - as part of the Franco-German partnership - constituted the ‘motor’ for Europe, producing an ever-expanding European Community that brought such grand initiatives as the European monetary system, the single market, and the single currency. By the 1990s, however, France’s economic leadership role in Europe had begun to slip (Cole and Drake 2000). This is when French leaders had to give up their initiatives on EU-level industrial policy and give in on deregulation in the ‘services publics (public utilities) arena with regard to telecommunications and electricity, something which they had long resisted (Eising and Jabko 2001; Thatcher 2004). Moreover, once the budgetary austerity linked to the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) became more onerous in the early 2000s, France (along with Germany) lost the high ground in economic leadership, as it let its public deficit go above the agreed-upon criterion of 3 per cent rather than make the painful cuts to spending that would have been necessary. This said, France did succeed in getting the SGP criteria suspended, managed to delay reform of the common agricultural policy, and limit the remit of the trade negotiators in the Doha Round. But these can hardly be categorized as economic leadership.

Equally importantly, France has lost its claim to ‘political’ leadership in an enlarged EU, mainly as a result of the geo-political shift toward Germany. The partnership with Germany, moreover, which had constituted the ‘motor’ for Europe through much of the post-war period, was in tatters by the early 2000s, in particular at the time of the Nice Treaty. Only with the Iraq War was there a renewed rapprochement, which deepened at the time of the Constitutional Convention, when France compromised on its initial constitutional preferences in order to successfiilly engineer an institutional solution in tandem with Germany (Jabko 2005). The failure of the referendum on the Constitutional Treaty, however, killed off whatever hopes French elites had of building on this renewal of French leadership.

While the ‘bottom-up’ influence of France as leader in the process of European integration has been waning, the ‘top-down’ impact of Europeanization on France has been increasing. France has altered its policies across an ever-growing number of areas in response to EU mandates. In monetary policy, France fully transformed its monetary system from a state-directed credit allocation system informed by neo-Keynesianism to an EU-driven interest-rate based system informed by monetarism (Ross 2004; Howarth 2002). With regard to the welfare state, the austerity budgets linked to European monetary integration, combined with changing demographics, pushed France to cut pension costs as well as to rationalize expenditures in social services (Palier 2002). In competition policy, France has time and again been sanctioned by the EU for its market-distorting state aid to businesses, whether for its subsidies and bail-outs to individual firms, such as to Air France, or to an entire industry, as in the case of the textile industry (Le Gales 2001). Finally, compliance in the implementation of EU directives has been a serious issue for France in a range of areas, including environmental policy and social policy (Börzel 2001; Falkner et al. 2005).

The impact of the EU can be seen not only in terms of policies but also in terms of institutions. The lack of institutional fit of the highly compound EU with France’s simple polity affects French institutional structures, policy-making processes, and even politics.

The EU undermines the unitary architecture of the French state by diffusing the power of the executive through EU-level decision-making. The loss of executive autonomy is evident not only in the EU’s policy impact but also in the increase in the autonomy of subnational authorities through direct access to EU venues and resources and in the independence of the judiciary which has responsibility for carrying out EU law even against the executive. The EU also affects France’s statist policy-making patterns by opening up EU-level access in policy formulation to interests traditionally denied access at the national level, while demanding regulatory or legalist policy implementation in place of the traditional pattern of accommodation. This has been a particular problem with regard to interests which, lacking input in EU-level policy formulation and denied national-level accommodation in policy implementation, engage in confrontation on issues they oppose - as in the case of public service workers and truck drivers protesting against deregulation (Schmidt 2006: ch. 2, 3).

Finally, the EU is unsettling to France’s majoritarian politics, where the very presence of the EU, combined with the ambiguity of the EU’s interest-based compromises and consensus-oriented politics - a kind oVpolicy without politics - is likely to cause problems for an electorate which expects its votes to translate immediately into action through the politically demarcated policies of a clearly divided right and left (see Schmidt 2006: ch. 4). The EU’s direct effects on French politics can be seen in the fact that it became a source of cross-cutting cleavages for parties on the right as much as the left in the referendum on the Constitutional Treaty. Its indirect effects involve removing more and more policy areas from the national political arena, thereby narrowing the policy repertoire and space for political deliberation (see Mair 2006). This leads to an increasing ‘politics without policy (Schmidt 2006: ch. 4), in which national electorates are frustrated by the inability of elected leaders to deal directly with the questions which are of greatest concern to them, such as globalization and immigration.

All of this contributes to the main on-going problems in French electoral politics: voter demobilization, on the one hand - evident in the increasing levels of abstentionism in French elections (Bréchon 2002: 103) - and voter extremism — evident not only in the referendum on the Constitutional Treaty but also in the 2002 presidential election, in which the Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, did not make it into the second round because of the proliferation of candidates on the extreme left: and a low participation rate (71.6 per cent). This meant that the extreme right candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen, ran against Jacques Chirac in the second round, and lost in a landslide to Chirac, as the French rallied to show the world that it was not extremist (with a 79.7 per cent participation rate). The 2007 presidential elections could be seen as a reversal of this twin trend of abstentionism and radicalization, given the high rates of electoral participation (83.8 per cent in the first round, 84 per cent in the second round) and the rejection of the political extremes (in the first round, on the right Le Pen at a low of 10.4 per cent, down from 16.9 per cent in 2002; on the left with only one candidate of the six candidates above 2 per cent, at 4 per cent). But the 2007 election could just as easily be seen as an exceptional moment, explainable by the prospects of political renewal, given the absence of an incumbent and the generational shift in candidates; the hopes for policy renewal, given the general dissatisfaction with the immobilism of the previous 12 years under Chirac; and utility votes in the first round that reduced the votes for the political extremes in favour of electable candidates on the right (Nicolas Sarkozy at 31.18 per cent), left (Ségolène Royal at 25.87 per cent), and centre (Franọois Bayrou at 18.57 per cent).

These difficulties of institutional adaptation also challenge French ideas about the organizing principles of democracy which have roots in the French Revolution and Jacobin philosophical principles. Although these ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: France and the EU: from opportunity to constraint
• 1. Trapped by their ideas: French élites’ discourses of European integration and globalization
• 2. Farm conservatism in France: revisiting the weak state thesis
• 3. Regulatory agencies, the state and markets: a Franco-British comparison
• 4. Europeanization of the French electricity policy: four paradoxes
• 5. Making and breaking the rules: French policy on EU ‘gouvernement économique’
• 6. Differential impact: Europeanizing French non-state actors
• 7. The European dimension in French public opinion
• 8. Political institutions under stress? Assessing the impact of European integration on French political institutions
• 9. Puzzling out the EU role in national politics
• Research agenda section
• Index