Societal Actors in European Integration

Polity-Building and Policy-making 1958-1992

Jan-Henrik Meyer, W. Kaiser

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137017642
• eBook ISBN: 9781137017659
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Contributors to this volume outline how societal actors have been closely involved in European integration from the founding of the EU to the Maastricht Treaty. Based on newly accessible sources, the authors discuss the participation of political parties, business groups and civil society organizations in European polity-building and policy-making.

1

Beyond Governments and Supranational Institutions: Societal Actors in European Integration

Wolfram Kaiser and Jan-Henrik Meyer

At first sight, the financial crisis, which began in 2008, thoroughly reshaped European Union (EU) politics. Starting with the Single European Act (SEA) of 1987, the present-day EU had moved away from a more intergovernmental structure, strengthening the role of supranational institutions, the European Commission and most importantly the European Parliament (EP). Now, however, the crisis seems to have halted, if not reversed, this trend. Given the formidable financial risks and commitments at stake, national leaders, notably those of big and wealthy member states, appear to be back in the driver’s seat. In times of crisis, only national governments seem to have sufficient power to make credible commitments about resources.

Thus, the financial crisis could encourage another round in the debate over the more intergovernmental or more supranational character of European integration and EU politics. However, this perennial debate, which still underlies a fair share of writing about European integration, has increasingly become fruitless. It is based on the false assumption of a necessary trade-off in power between national governmental and supranational institutional actors. But EU politics is not a zero-sum game between opposed sets of institutional actors. Most importantly for our book, such a reductionist view overlooks the key role that a third type of actor namely, those who have variously been described as non-state actors or private actors, has played, and will continue to play, in EU politics and policy-making. By stressing their role as representatives of preferences of social groups in national societies and the emerging transnational European society, we prefer to characterize them as societal actors.

This book explores the emergence, organization and role in polity-building and policy-making of societal actors who are part of European integration, bringing together for the first time in a systematic manner what recent historical research based on a wide variety of original sources can tell us. We do not claim that societal actors were the real shapers and movers of European integration and Community politics and policy-making. Rather, we argue that various societal actors involved in network-type relations with national governmental and supranational institutional actors were often important for the formation of strategic political alliances, the definition of key political objectives and agendas as well as workable policy compromises. We hypothesize that societal actors provided the crucial glue for the EU’s political fabric and its policy-making, even if they did not and still do not normally receive the same media attention as national governments after European Council meetings, for example.

We approach the role of societal actors in European integration from two interrelated perspectives. Firstly, we consider their own Europeanization,¹ defined here as the establishment of organizational and/or more informal cooperative structures at the level of the European Communities (EC) and the present-day EU. We seek to analyse when, why and how societal actors responded to European integration by setting up office in Brussels, by founding a European umbrella organization or agreeing to meet regularly in a formal or informal manner to discuss European political issues, for example. Secondly, we discuss the involvement of societal actors in and their impact on European polity-building and policy-making. All chapters in this book address these two core dimensions in this sequence by drawing on a variety of case studies.

In this book we focus on polity-building that is the creation of institutions, procedures and institutional working patterns, and on policy-making. We find, however, that these two are easier to delineate conceptually than empirically. For instance, when the European Environmental Bureau (EEB) pleaded for more staff within the Commission’s Service for the Environment and Consumer Protection (SEPC), it supported institutional and policy objectives at the same time. Despite the EEB’s generally pro-European outlook, it was not primarily motivated by a desire to strengthen the European supranational institutions by reinforcing Commission staff levels. Rather, the EEB backed the expansion of this service, its main partner within the EC institutions, first and foremost because a larger SEPC meant a greater EC capacity in advancing environmental policy.²

In a similar way, the changing composition of all EC institutions as a consequence of the various enlargements, which were in part mediated by political parties, not only affected formal rules such as voting rights and informal practices – for example, bureaucratic traditions and modes of doing things imported into the EC by the newcomers – it also changed policy-making. British accession was central for the introduction of European bird protection in the 1970s, for example, not least because of the expertise, the lobbying and the transnational networking capacities of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.³

Crucially, drawing upon their transnational connections societal actors facilitated the transfer of new ideas from national societies and international organizations to the EC, thus contributing to the rise of new policy ideas and agendas. At the same time, the link to European societies helped institutional actors in Brussels to keep in touch with societal interests and debates which still took place predominantly in national public spheres and which national governments frequently intended to keep within the national container for a variety of reasons.

The chapters in this book cover developments and cases from 1958 to 1992. The Treaties of Rome, which were signed in 1957, came into force in 1958, and complemented the older European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) of 1951–2 with the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) and the more important European Economic Community (EEC), marking the beginning of European integration in the present-day EU. The treaties established the familiar institutions and covered a broad and slowly expanding array of policies. The most important of these – agriculture, trade, competition and development – feature prominently in this book, as do environmental and social policy, areas of new Community ambition in the 1970s. The three Communities merged their institutions in 1967, operating from then onwards as the EC.

We conclude our empirical exploration of societal actors in European integration in 1992, for three reasons. Firstly, the period after the Maastricht Treaty has been extensively studied and analysed by political scientists. This research is conceptually sophisticated, with a key interest in theory-building, and empirically based on publicly accessible documents and interviews. Secondly, drawing upon the conceptual and empirical fruits of this research, our goal is to put the findings of social science research on EU polity-building and policy-making into a longer-term historical perspective. We want to trace more long-term developments and possible path dependencies. At the same time, we are interested in change during this period – with respect to the structures, but also the focus of societal actors, which perhaps shifted somewhat towards engaging with policy-making. Thirdly, the chosen time frame also allows historians to make the most of their greatest advantages in transdisciplinary research on the EU by enabling a greater distance from their object of research, and consequently the ability to ask new questions. Such a distance frequently goes hand in hand with less excitement about allegedly novel phenomena. Thus, we seek to dispel the myth in contemporary social science research that the involvement of societal actors (especially so-called public interest groups) in EU polity-building and policy-making only really took off in the 1990s.⁴ Finally, access to archival sources which are now available for all but the last few years before the Maastricht Treaty can shed new light on past events.

Despite this limited time frame of just over 30 years, we recommend that historians adopt a much broader temporal perspective. Many of the societal actors, their organizational structures and policy objectives have a much longer history, at times dating back to the late nineteenth century. At the same time, the phenomena the contributors study in their chapters created continuities leading up to the present day. This becomes apparent in outlines in the final empirical chapter on developments since the Maastricht Treaty.

In the next few sections, we briefly introduce our working definition of societal actors. Secondly, we present the topics of the individual empirical chapters, each covering a specific type of societal actor and challenge of polity-building and/or policy-making. Thirdly, we introduce the core questions we have developed, in order to strengthen the cohesion of this book and to be able to arrive at common conclusions. All of the chapters address these questions with regard to their specific actors and cases. These questions, fourthly, relate to a multidisciplinary debate in European Studies, which we briefly outline before finally raising more general concluding questions about change over time and normative dimensions. We come back to these questions in the final concluding chapter of this book.

Defining societal actors in European integration

In this book, we use the term ‘actor’ as shorthand for a group of individuals or collective bodies representing certain collective preferences that can arise from their normative commitments and/or material or other interests. Collective preferences refer to shared interests that are meaningful to a sufficient number of people or collective bodies for them to be able to overcome collective action problems and organize around these interests.⁵ Collective actors can be established in a variety of legal and organizational ways. They are routinely represented by individuals acting on their behalf as authorized agents, who are often able to interpret their mandate quite freely. We argue that as a result the individual qualities of such agents frequently matter for policy processes and outcomes. Moreover, individuals may have multiple memberships of different collective bodies or actors, with overlapping but sometimes also contradictory interests. Given that multiple memberships tend to strengthen these individuals’ resources in terms of access to information, for example, such individuals are frequently core players, building bridges between collective actors.

We characterize the collective actors that feature in this book as societal actors, as they all claim to represent collective interests emerging from national societies and an emerging transnational European society. Most of these collective actors develop from the bottom up, organizing around certain interests shared by their members. Groups representing special, frequently business interests, relating to tangible economic benefits, are usually called interest or lobby groups. These are often viewed more critically from a normative perspective. In social science research, those groups representing general interests are routinely viewed more positively, since general interests relate to collective public goods, the benefits of which are more widely shared throughout society. Following the practice established by the United Nations, these groups have either been called non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or have been described as voluntary associations or civil society organizations, for example.⁶ Since the end of the Cold War, the Enlightenment concept of civil society, with its strong normative implications, has gone through a veritable renaissance.⁷ The European Commission has used the notion to beef up the legitimacy of its consultation procedures, and its own institutional legitimacy.⁸ By contrast, we want to steer clear of the strong and often misleading normative implications of all of these terms. Instead, the term ‘societal actors’ includes those who represent special and general interests. These are frequently much more difficult to distinguish empirically than conceptually, as some of the chapters in this book demonstrate. Moreover, the term also covers political parties as societal actors of a specific kind, organized from the bottom up, but acting within both the public sphere and representative institutions, with important bridge-building functions.

The term ‘societal actors’ helps us to avoid the rigid dichotomies between public and private or state and non-state actors, which are pervasive in political science research.⁹ The distinction between public and private actors carries the same problematic normative connotations as the juxtaposition of general and special interests. The second distinction in turn assumes an opposition of some kind between the state and the non-state actors. This terminology obscures the fact that most societal actors are linked to and implicated with the state in various ways, just as state institutions frequently rely on societal actors. The state is often an important source of funding for societal actors, and the key target of lobbying. Furthermore, as some of the chapters in this book make clear, state institutions frequently assist the creation of organized societal groups. Moreover, societal actors are often granted privileged access to information sources, consultation and decision-making circles in neo- or quasi-corporatist arrangements. In fact, the structures and nature of societal actors’ relations with the member states and the EU institutions are important questions for all the contributors to this book.

Societal actors in polity-building and policy-making

This book comprises nine historical chapters covering different societal actors engaged in polity-building and policy-making. The first two chapters a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Contributors
• 1. Beyond Governments and Supranational Institutions: Societal Actors in European Integration
• 2. Europeanization of Christian Democracy? Negotiating Organization, Enlargement, Policy and Allegiance in the European People’s Party
• 3. Shaping European Development Policy? Socialist Parties as Mediators from the International to the European Level
• 4. Regulating Markets: Peak Business Associations and the Origins of European Competition Policy
• 5. Developing a ‘European Strategy’: Business Groups and Trade Policy-Making in the Kennedy Round
• 6. Preventing Reform: Farm Interest Groups and the Common Agricultural Policy
• 7. From Development Business to Civil Society? Societal Actors in Development Cooperation
• 8. Demanding Democracy in the Workplace: The European Trade Union Confederation and the Struggle to Regulate Multinationals
• 9. Establishing a Constitutional Practice: The Role of the European Law Associations
• 10. Challenging the Atomic Community: The European Environmental Bureau and the Europeanization of Anti-Nuclear Protest
• 11. Beyond Maastricht: Societal Actors in European Integration Since 1992
• 12. Polity-Building and Policy-Making: Societal Actors in European Integration
• Index