European Integration, Processes of Change and the National Experience

S. Börner, M. Eigmüller, S. Börner, M. Eigmüller

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137411242
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137411259
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In order to better understand processes of European integration, this book offers a new perspective that compares past experiences of change to current transitional moments at the European level. It addresses key questions about European society, EU integration and social change to reveal the social construction of emergent polities and societies.

Part I

European Integration Meets Historical Sociology: An Introduction

1

Comparing Processes of Change: How European Integration Can Learn from Past Experiences

Stefanie Börner and Monika Eigmüller

European integration is becoming more and more a process influencing not only politics and economics, but also the European citizenry. In the wake of this development, the scientific interest in European integration has also changed decisively: In addition to the analysis of the political and economic integration processes, the investigation of the societal causes and consequences of European integration is increasingly moving into the scientific spotlight (Díez Medrano 2003; Gerhards 2007; Recchi and Favell 2009; Favell and Guiraudon 2011). If the analysis not only concentrates on changing political or economic patterns but also on societal developments, then one major problem becomes crucial: the very limited time horizon on which a scientific investigation on the societal dimension of the integration process can be based. Twenty years (since the Maastricht Treaty and the invention of European Union Citizenship) or 30 years (since the Single European Act and the founding of a common market in 1986) do not appear to be an appreciable time period for tracing the societal consequences of institutional changes in the course of European integration. So it is not only the often cited (and even more often criticised) methodological nationalism of the scientific community (Chernilo 2006; Beck and Grande 2007) that makes it extremely difficult to conduct sociological research on European integration processes: the very short life span of the subject under investigation, its present-mindedness,¹ also constitutes a methodological problem for the research on European integration.

In the past, this led to an approach equally simple as difficult: To extend the time horizon artificially, questions of societal changes in the course of European integration have been discussed very often in the frame of the nation-state and its historical experiences. And indeed some first studies show impressively, how helpful such a view back into the past can be for the analysis of recent societal and political developments (see Obinger et al. 2005). However, such a recourse to the past and especially the very often implicitly accompanying comparisons between past and present have to be carefully reflected both methodologically and theoretically.

Introducing the ‘third lens’

Comparisons are a constitutive part of our language and social life. Hence, speaking and writing about the EU and its predecessors in comparative terms is no exception. Ever since its origination researchers, politicians and other observers compare the EU to existing political entities and organisations of economic co-operation in order to make sense of its structures and classify its features into the existing and already known social world.

Notions of the EU as a federal state (Scharpf 1988; Falkner 2011), the ‘United States of Europe’ (Verhofstadt 2006) or the kindred conception as a system of multi-level governance (Pierson and Leibfried 1995; Jachtenfuchs and Kohler-Koch 1996) whose ‘decision-making competencies are shared by actors at different levels’ (Hooghe and Marks 2001: 3) hint at the EU’s vicinity to classical state systems in the eyes of the respective observers. Others conceive the EU as a ‘regime sui generis’ (Lepsius 2000: 213), an autonomous entity that establishes relationships of domination among its members (Herrschaftsverband) (Bach 2008; Lepsius 2006: 111–112, 2013: 205ff.). Furthermore, concepts originally emerging within and applied to nation-states such as civil society and citizenship have become an entrenched part of the vocabulary that describes the EU (Eder and Giesen 2001; Rumford 2003; Colliot-Thélène 2011) and even its social qualities, foremost among them the ‘emergence of a European society’ (Díez Medrano 2008), are debated in the classical terms of a nationally pre-structured social world (e.g. Hettlage and Müller 2006; Fligstein 2008).

These examples demonstrate attempts to grasp a new phenomenon as well as the difficulty to do so against the background of a social science landscape that has been highly state-centred for a long time and that leaves a strong (and of course extremely valuable) legacy of nationally pre-structured concepts and theories. Given this legacy, social scientists constantly ‘employ concepts that implicitly or explicitly refer to a universe featuring sovereign states and “their” surrounding national societies’ (Schmitter 1996b: 132) and thus to a particular form of political and social organisation. Despite their highly illustrative character, these comparisons often come at the price of unconsciously suggesting that national and European central structures and authorities tend to be the same (and often the EU is criticised for this very same feature or a lack thereof). Lots of these implicit comparisons reflect past processes through the classical theories, which were meant to explain them, or through the outcomes of interest, without speaking about their emergence, i.e. the series of events that led to their coming into being.

However, the inflationary use of a comparative rhetoric cannot be attributed to the lack of imagination given that the EU itself lacks proper concepts and theories of self-description, since it indeed ‘shares interesting commonalities with several’ without ‘fit[ting] neatly into any class of political phenomena’ (Marks 1997: 23). According to Gary Marks, a deeper understanding of the EU can be gained through three different lenses: The first lens views the EU as an international organisation, such as the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA). The second lens treats the Union as a state-like entity and thus compares it to federal regimes (e.g. Kelemen 2004; Sbragia 2004). These two synchronous modes of comparison gain comparative insights by drawing parallels between existing political entities but differ in their interpretation of the nature of the EU. While the former emphasises the bargaining processes between national governments (Moravcsik 1993), the latter pays more attention to the ‘institutional arrangements that link constituent governments to the centre’ (Marks 1997: 23–24). In contrast, the third lens introduces a different angle that compares the EU to preceding processes of policy creation. Hence, this approach treats the questions whether the EU is an intergovernmental or a multi-level entity or which actors pursue which interests as open ones. Rather, it ‘conceives of the European Union as an emerging polity’ (ibid.: 24).

In order to avoid undue analogies, this volume adopts this third lens-approach as proposed by Marks and expands it to include the societal dimension of the integration process as well. This specific comparative perspective – referred to here as diachronic comparison – is marked by a variance across time (instead of the much more common way of comparing across territorial units) and often even combines variation in both the spatial and the temporal dimension (see Bartolini 1993). The contributions presented here do not reject drawing parallels or applying concepts to a new research object, but they claim to dig deeper into the original logic of the past processes, which are then compared to single aspects of European integration. Such a diachronic perspective analyses variation over time and therefore emphasises the importance of processes – their incremental and contingent character, acknowledges the openness of the processes at hand as well as their multidimensionality, namely that they do not only focus on macro-processes but also institutional and organisational aspects as well as their micro-foundations. Provided the investigation concentrates not only on political processes but also on societal changes, the latter becomes even more important.

Before we introduce the aims and the content of the volume in more detail, this section gives a concise and systematic overview of these existing third lens-approaches, i.e. approaches that view European integration in the light of past experiences. During the last two decades, methodological nationalism and the limited time horizon of social processes related to the integration process have been triggering a new wave of historical sociological scholarship. In contrast to the works introduced above, these authors shift the focus from concepts that describe results to processes, i.e. processes of state formation, nation building, institution building, policy negotiation or the emergence of categories of public action. They differ in their observation and explanation on the ‘reorganization of state-society relations’ (Klausen and Tilly 1997: 3), but they converge in their efforts to better understand processes of European integration and hence take their processuality serious. Thus, they extend the timeframe of European integration way beyond its official (contractual) starting point in 1957, when the Treaty of Rome established the European Economic Community.

A new historical sociology of European integration? A macro perspective

The first type of historically informed studies on European integration are macro-analyses that draw on historical configurations of such broad topics as territorial borders, domestic political structures or identity formation and as such stand in the tradition of classical historical sociology. They conceive the EU as a specific type of regional integration and a polity in the making that is equipped with institutions that rapidly gain competences and increase their legislative and political activities, but whose final shape is still open (Caporaso 1996; Marks 1997; Kelemen 2005; Zielonka 2006).

What does it mean to historicise the EU? In general terms it can be described as dissecting the development of the EU through combining existing theory traditions with historical sociology (see McNamara 2010: 129), thus comparing single sections of EU evolution to already completed periods of state-building or social integration. Dissecting is one of the key skills of the seminal works of Stefano Bartolini (2005) and Saskia Sassen (2005). Both study the historical configurations of political structuring and identity formation, drawing a line back to nation building and beyond. This brings Bartolini to conclude that European integration can be conceived as the ‘sixth major developmental trend in the history of Europe since the sixteenth century’ (2005: 364). Also for Klausen and Tilly ‘European integration did not begin with the Treaty of Rome’ (1997: 5). Such a long-term perspective allows unpacking the construction of political authority, categories of belonging and so on. This approach is marked by an enhanced awareness of the contingent character of these processes and therefore by the belief that nation-states are not given either, naturally (Anderson 1991; Börner 2013). Hence, the units of comparison are processes: political and social structures and institutions in the making. Drawing analogies while considering the differences is a key element of these comparative works:

The Westphalian model encourages us to see regional integration centring on the EU as a re-enactment of the traditional processes of state-building from the seventeenth through to the twentieth centuries. Yet huge differences exist. Wars, religious conflict and taxation were critical for the construction of nation states, much less so for the EU. Class conflict was important in the emergence of nation states and continues to be important in international integration, though in strikingly different ways. […] Similarly, the expansion of citizenship, growth of state powers in the provision of welfare, and spread of democracy were all thought of as state achievements in the sense that they all gravitated toward a single place, a national executive, legislature, political party, or symbolic document, such as a constitution. By contrast, European integration is polycentric and lacking in a single, centralised, political location. (Caporaso 1996: 35–36)

Gary Marks inquires into a more recent period of Western European state-building in order to get to know more about European integration. Just as the modern state, the EU results from ‘self-conscious political creativity’ (Marks 1997: 24); however, as a constructed set of political institutions that is meant to solve problems of authority distribution and collective goods and in contrast to many state systems, it lacks a clear master plan with respect to its whole, i.e. it is not established according to any blueprint or architectural principle of government (ibid.: 25–26). What is more, the EU was not being built because of prevailing ideas of the ruling classes and the masses, but despite them. The ‘challenge was to create a European polity in the absence of “Europeans”’ (ibid.: 30) – a task that is by no means unknown to national elites. For instance, the processes that led to the formation of social security systems immediately come to mind. While in England state welfare lacked public support given the dominant liberal paradigm of self help, the Bismarckian social security schemes suffered from the political opposition of the working classes as well as the missing national identity (e.g. Börner 2013). A deeper understanding of these processes can thus help to avoid the essentialising of certain concepts as inherently national.

In his book Restructuring Europe, Stefano Bartolini also suggests a series of analogies to the reader, but the author does not forget to highlight the contrasts either: While for more than 100 years market forces were bound within state structures, at the end of the twentieth century ‘we have witnessed a “striking back” of the market at the expense of the state’ (Bartolini 2005: 364). The author considerably reworks the concepts of Stein Rokkan and Albert O. Hirschman in order to apply them, fruitfully, to the EU and establish a theory of integration that encompasses both the national and the European experience of structuring and restructuring. In contrast to many of his colleagues, Bartolini does not end with studying the macro structures of the emerging polities, but he is also interested in the individual orientations shaped by them. Therefore, he concludes that European integration challenges the familiar coherence between identities, practices and institutions. This means that although at the micro-level European integration ‘opens up new behavioural opportunities’ (Bartolini 2005: 378), the EU until now is obviously not able to establish what might be perceived as primordial ties.

To sum up, these authors emphasise the long lines and existing continuities of European integration and, in pointing out crucial differences to preceding (and co-existing) polity structures, enhance our understanding of the different processes and problems linked to it. Thus, they raise the awareness of the respective historical alternatives and the innovative character of the EU on the o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Part I European Integration Meets Historical Sociology: An Introduction
• Part II Comparing Processes of State Building
• Part III National Social Policy-Making and European Perspectives
• Part IV Constructing Societies Now and Then
• Index