The Europeanization of European Politics

C. Bretherton, M. Mannin, C. Bretherton, M. Mannin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349446148, 9781137275387
• eBook ISBN: 9781137275394
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book presents a comparative perspective to the study of European politics, focusing on the unique and transformative effect of European Union on the politics of its member states - in effect, the Europeanization of European politics. For no other world region is there a similar intensity of Treaty and other obligations on a set of neighboring states, nor a comparable depth of of supranational governance. The concept of Europeanism as an evaluative theme is used to explore this unique, sui generis, region, its states, and its political transformation in the 21st century.

PART I

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Approaches to Analysis

CHAPTER 1

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Europeanization and European Politics

Michael Mannin

This book places contemporary European politics in comparative setting and seeks to explain political transformation in its constituent states in the twenty-first century. There is nothing unusual in this objective. Comparative method has been the bedrock of political analysis since Aristotle. But, the obvious difference in this enterprise is the supranational structure of the EU, with its intrusive, institutionalized characteristics, that complicates explanation of European state political transformation. No otherworld region has a political and economic institutional overlay to match this European phenomenon. Explaining political change, therefore, within such a regional entity, implies the need for tools to match the complexity that the EU adds. Thus, if we accept the sui generis (unique), character of the EU, then its component member states are also sui generis. This has caused some difficulties for commentators on the European political scene. It has brought an additional category to the coterie of political science experts—the Europeanist—whose mission is to explain the complex inner workings of the EU alongside those who continue as country experts, international relations, or regional studies scholars, who also seek, through the prism of their particular subject area, to explain “Europe.”

The concept of Europeanization provides the opportunity to bring together these subdisciplinary approaches to the study of the region, within a comparative framework that attempts to overcome the complexity of its subject. In order to get to that point, however, there is an imperative for some historical background—for substantial and theoretical reasons. The brief historical perspective that follows has a dual purpose. First, as a signpost to the Europe of today as it has emerged through several developmental stages, each of which includes events, ideas, structures, and memories that form the basis of today’s Europeans’ perceptions of themselves and the of idea of Europe itself (Flockhart 2010). It reveals conflicting as well as shared images of the past that help explain the complexity of the EU/European political reality and give background to the country and policy chapters that follow

A second reason for a historical perspective is of theoretical importance, as it provides the concept of Europeanization, our key tool in this comparative study, with a pedigree. This in turn helps us to explain its complexities, so providing “an understanding of the origins and shifting sociological, normative and ideational contents of Europeanisation across space and time” (Flockhart 2010: 80). In effect, we shall argue that EU-ization emerges as a significant part of a paradigm of Europeanism, as well as a process or tool of comparison; and can be better understood by appreciating prior historical “Europeanizations” that have contributed to the construction of today’s European (EU) reality.

Europe and Europeanization: A Historical Perspective

When, how, and in what way has Europe been viewed as an idea? By attempting to answer these questions, we go some way to identify the conceptual components of Europeanization and its value as a tool of comparative analysis. We also identify factors that help distinguish Europeanization from globalization or Americanization and some historical notions of a European “self” and “other.” Thus our overview takes us toward a historical sociology of Europe and, particularly, discussion of another contested area—European identity formation. For each of the stages of Europeanization/European development examined below has contributed to a cumulative perspective on what today’s Europe is and is not. We will return to this discussion later, but here we provide a brief summary of the incremental stages of Europe’s emergence as a cultural, political, and societal entity; and as an idea that has allowed the concept of Europeanization itself to emerge.

While there have been many attempts to periodize European history, here we utilize an adapted version of Flockhart (2010) that directly addresses the evolution of the concept of Europeanization. While six historical periods are identified, here we focus primarily upon those which are most directly associated with contemporary Europeanization. Hence our discussion of the first three periods is relatively brief.

Pre-Enlightenment Europeanizations

To describe Greek and Roman civilizations and the emergence of Christianity as “pre-Europe” may seem curious. The Greek legacy of democracy; and the republicanism, legal administration, and citizenship of the Roman Empire, within which Christianity emerged, are potent bequests. But there is no linear connection between these legacies and their current manifestations. Democracy is a modern phenomenon, for the Greek (Athenian) demos lasted only 185 years and Roman law “one of the pillars of European civilization” (Davies 1997: 173) fell into disuse—to be rediscovered to compete with canon law in the Middle Ages. The Roman Empire was primarily centered on the Mediterranean basin and excluded swathes of northern and eastern Europe. The collapse of the empire and its division into eastern (Byzantine) and western (Catholic) value systems suggests a more divisive legacy. However, the manner in which the period continues to be heralded as the procreator of contemporary values gives it mythical status as the first Pax Europa (Flockhart 2010).

Subsequently, the spread of Christianity to northern Europe, together with periodic shocks of invasion and counter invasion (the Crusades) provided not only a universal church with Rome at its centre, but a European “significant we” (Christendom) pitted against a “significant other” (Islam). In this period—roughly 700 to 1500—there emerged a messy cultural-geographic European unity, evidenced through the pervasive moral force of the Catholic Church and an often competing political entity, the Hapsburg Empire (Davies 1997; Hobson 2004). The Hapsburgs provided not only an eastern and southern defense against Islam but also the political dynamics for the emergence of the nonconformist religious movements of the Reformation.

Between 1500 and 1700, the terms “Europe” and “the West” were increasingly utilized to denote cultural distinctions between peoples (Delanty and Rumford 2005: 35). The period featured “the rise of the West,” a European outward expansion through discovery of the Americas and the sea routes to Asia, facilitated by technological innovation (Headley 2008). The Other became associated with rival empires—the Ottoman to the south-east and emergent Russia to the east. At the same time European/Western civilization was seen to represent progress, when contrasted with the “state of nature” evidenced in the New World. This externalization of European values continued as an aspect of the Enlightenment and beyond.

Europeanization and Modernization—1700 to 1919

The era of the Enlightenment, and the political and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, are viewed as providing the foundational values and practices of Europeanization today. The modern state and state system, together with bureaucracies with effective social and technological capacities, emerge to match the urbanization and politicization of a more mobile European populace. Notions of tolerance, freethinking, and reason, utilizing a scientific method of “proof,” reinforced the belief in Europe (or an extended notion of “the West” to include North America) as superior to other civilizations. The secular state, republicanism, civil society, nationalism, and social solidarity, together with the economic driver of capitalism, are all products of a modernizing Europe and emerge “as the undeniable features of European civilization” (Delanty and Rumford 2005: 38).

Reason and rationality, however, also produced elements of European civilization that do not fit comfortably with the ideals of contemporary Europeanism. National and military rivalries within Europe extended to many parts of the world, particularly in the nineteenth century, through European imperial ventures. Reason and rationality were used to justify colonialism, as European values were forcibly imposed on non-European civilizations. Christian values were reinforced/paralleled by scientific reasoning that supported notions of racial superiority and social Darwinism. In effect, the Enlightenment contained a set of ideas that at once produced the best of European values and the worst. More specifically, white Western elites, in competition for the benefits of colonial expansion, broadcast variants of Europeanization through their imperial excursions (Headley 2008; Zielonka 2006).

Europeanization through Ideological Division—1919 to 1989

The great European war of 1914–1918 had significant ideological consequences, arising from the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and the collapse of imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary in the following year. The old order was most directly challenged by the emergence of the Soviet Union, which represented an immediate ideological threat to established European values. At the same time, the United States, emerging as a major world player, attempted to determine the terms of the postwar order, advocating notions of democracy, open economic markets, and, significantly, self-determination and internationalism.

The subsequent struggles between fascist, communist, and liberal democratic Europe vividly illustrate different interpretations of European history/Europeanization. Fascism, and especially Nazism, “contains the most extreme version of euro-centrism and Western civilisation that has ever existed” (Davies 1997: 38). Both fascism and communism utilized extreme nationalism as a rallying force and both provided “an ideological framework for a new universal vision of Europe . . . Both attempts failed” (Davies 1997: 36). Competing totalitarian ideologies provided different and partial interpretations of European history, but remained significant as powerful statements of “Otherness” for the formation of a contemporary, liberal European identity.

We can, however, derive a more positive perspective from the period, as it heralds the development of notions of internationalism and international organization, particularly after the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919. The interwar years saw the creation of the League of Nations (in 1919, to be replaced by the United Nations in 1945) and, in Europe, the stillborn Briand Plan for European Unity (1930). The defeat of fascism by 1945, the desperation of postwar economic and human dislocation and the uncertain objectives of a peacetime Soviet ally, produced a political perspective friendly to a Europe wide postwar future. By 1949, a US recovery program and military bulwark in the shape of the Marshall Plan and NATO created the conditions for an alliance of North America and Western Europe, whose shared “Other” was an Eastern (Soviet) enemy. The European vision of a continent-wide federation, the Council of Europe (1949), was no match, at the time, for the security offered by NATO. Cold war division produced two competing notions of European unity that were to last until the momentous events of 1989 which, in ending East/West ideological divisions, permitted the reuniting of Europe and the enlargement of the EU to 27 member states.

Contemporary Europe and EU-ization

Today, Europe is dominated by the formation and enlargement of the EU during the second half of the twentieth century. Notions of worldwide functional integration prevalent during the interwar years were adapted to fit a European stage, with particular notions of the role of the state, social welfare, and foreign policy that emerged as either nuanced or markedly different from US liberal market internationalism. This is manifest in the “significant we” of a European/EU identity.

The expansion in scope of the EU, from its narrow origins (1951) as the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) to a proto-federation during the late 1990s, represents an EU-ization of continental Europe and thus a vision of Europe’s future less reliant on the Euro-Atlantic model of the mid-twentieth century. The EU has also been described as a “normative power” that attempts to diffuse European values externally (Manners 2002; Flenley, chap. 13). The most significant difference between this and earlier periods of Europeanization lies in the structures and institutionalized processes of policy formulation that are self reflexive, detailed, and expansive in scope (Flockhart 2010). It is this EU-ization that forms the major focus of this volume. Nevertheless, its explanation, and indeed definition, must be considered against other periods of Europeanization that have contributed to European identity formation and notions of non-Europe in the twenty-first century (Delanty and Rumford 2005).

Lessons from History

This brief historical survey suggests a number of factors important for the definition and application of the term Europeanization. First, it has a historical genesis that is important to how we view Europe and European identity today. Indeed, past Europeanizations have been diffused, shaped, and consolidated into the EU’s contemporary ideational structure. These we suggest are “background concepts” that may be significant in fully explaining contemporary phenomena (Adcock and Collier 2001). Second, the important but fragile notion of European identity is both a social and historical construct. Recognizing the complexity of its origins assists in understanding different interpretations of Europe and different reactions to Europeanization. We shall return to this discussion in the conclusion, but now move on to consider the definition of Europeanization.

Europeanization as a Paradigm?

Europe’s history has a salient role in solving the definitional problems associated with analysis of the region’s politics today, for selective constructions of history give meanings to the EU as a political project. Thus, from this historical interpretation, we can observe a conceptual continuity and also recognize its adaptive capacity that facilitates an understanding of the present. We can term this Europeanism, a concept that has much the same paradigmatic quality as Marxism, liberalism or, more recently, globalism. Having recognized the complex temporal baggage that impacts on contemporary visions of Europe, our remaining task is to make sense of and operationalize the concept of Europeanization.

First, we identify the paradigm within which Europeanization in its various forms is contained. Europeanism is identified as “the political, economic and social values that Europeans have in common” (McCormick 2011: 201. See also Habermas and Derrida 2003). McCormick lists these core values—communitarianism, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and secularism. Other recent discussion of this concept springs from notions of a European public sphere (Fossum and Schlesinger 2007) and of a European demos (Weiler 1999). These qualities may be seen as either core or ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on the Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• List of Abbreviations
• Part I   Approaches to Analysis
• Part II   Country Studies
• Part III   Policy Studies
• Part IV   Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index