The Legitimacy of Regional Integration in Europe and the Americas

Achim Hurrelmann, Steffen Schneider, Achim Hurrelmann, Steffen Schneider

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781349576241
  9781137456991
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137457004
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Based on cutting-edge research, this edited volume examines how citizens and political elites perceive the legitimacy of regional integration in Europe and the Americas. It analyses public opinion and political discourse on the EU, NAFTA and MERCOSUR, arguing that legitimation patterns shape the development of regional governance.

1

Understanding the Legitimacy of Regional Integration: A Comparative and Mixed-Method Perspective

Steffen Schneider and Achim Hurrelmann

Shifts of political authority to regional integration projects such as the European Union (EU) are a key element of the globalization and denationalization trend in today’s world (for many, see Keohane and Milner 1996; Zürn 1998; Kahler and Lake 2009). The EU is, of course, the most prominent and advanced example of regional governance, but it is hardly the only case that deserves scholarly attention: The literature on the ‘new’ (wave of) regionalism documents that integration projects running the gamut of varieties – from free trade arrangements to more ambitious projects at least partially inspired by the EU – have become ubiquitous (van Langenhove 2011; de Lombarde and Söderbaum 2013). As a consequence, European and regional integration studies have come full circle: The genuinely comparative perspective assumed by the neo-functionalist pioneers of the 1950s and 1960s (Haas 1971; Schmitter 1970), abandoned by most Europeanists in the following decades, is increasingly rediscovered today (Börzel 2011, 2013; Börzel et al. 2012).

This burgeoning comparative perspective is underpinned by much agreement on the policy relevance of regional integration, but the debate on its precise meaning and effects goes unabated. Some authors view regionalism as a corollary to the broader globalization trend; others argue that it is a political countermovement to the denationalization of economic forces and the diffusion of the neoliberal policy agenda (Coleman and Underhill 1998; Hettne 2003). What this debate indicates is growing attention to the politics of regional integration. Scholars have begun to probe the extent to which it affects public opinion and political discourses, civil society mobilization and election outcomes. One prominent strand of the literature argues that international and regional governance is increasingly politicized and examines the scope and nature of this trend (Hooghe and Marks 2009; Zürn et al. 2012; Zürn 2014); another strand examines the link between politicization and the legitimacy of regional integration projects (Ribeiro-Hoffmann and van der Vleuthen 2007; Schrag Sternberg 2013).

However, the case of the EU arguably dominates both of these research agendas, and many existing studies on legitimacy in international relations have a strongly normative bent (for instance, Buchanan and Keohane 2006; Keohane et al. 2009). Against this backdrop, the present volume intends to fill a twofold gap in the literature. First of all, it offers a genuinely comparative view on the politicization and legitimacy of regional integration. Secondly, it considers politicization and legitimacy as multidimensional empirical phenomena best studied in a mixed-method perspective. In the remainder of this introductory chapter, we first elaborate on the two key concepts of the volume. Secondly, we justify our selection of regional integration cases. Finally, we provide an overview of the 12 chapters in Parts I through IV of the volume, each of which privileges a different methodological approach to examine politicization and legitimation processes in Europe and the Americas.

Concepts: Regional integration, politicization and legitimacy

Just like other international regimes, the existing cases of regional integration were initiated by member state governments, and their day-to-day governance processes have remained elite-dominated. Therefore, citizens’ interest in – and even their knowledge of – regional affairs was widely assumed to be low in comparison to their interest in national political affairs until fairly recently. With hindsight, the first steps towards regional integration in Europe and elsewhere do not appear to have been significantly politicized – not salient in the minds and public discourses of elite actors and citizens – and hence they seem to have enjoyed latent support, a ‘permissive consensus’ in the words of Lindberg and Scheingold (1970a). Uninformed citizens presumably granted political elites a free hand in handling ‘boring’ technical and regulatory issues at the regional level, and intergovernmental decision making on such issues did not give rise to public contestation.

This assessment is, however, increasingly questioned, at least in the European context. A number of authors have diagnosed growing politicization and a fading away of the permissive consensus since the 1990s (Hooghe and Marks 2009; de Wilde and Zürn 2012; Statham and Trenz 2013a, 2013b). The strongest evidence for this trend is provided by controversies about the EU in the wake of the Eurozone financial crisis and the unprecedented success of Eurosceptic parties in the 2014 European Parliament elections. However, the politicization of regional integration is arguably more than just a symptom of the exceptional circumstances of the Eurozone crisis; public contestation of the EU predates the crisis (Hutter and Grande 2014), and hence there is reason to doubt the claim that European integration has ever been entirely uncontested or depoliticized (Schrag Sternberg 2013).

Other continents have also seen the emergence of regional organizations with significant governance functions in recent decades. This development raises the question of whether growing politicization – or the alternation of politicized and depoliticized phases of regional integration – is truly restricted to the EU or rather represents a global phenomenon. There is certainly prima facie evidence for such cycles of politicization and depoliticization in the Americas. In North America, regional integration was vigorously debated and played a significant electoral role in the member states when it was initiated in the late 1980s with the Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA) and developed further to become the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) including Mexico in 1994. The issue occasionally returned to the public agenda, and while there is arguably less contestation at present, new regional initiatives such as the ill-fated Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) after 2005 also fostered public debate and civil society mobilization (Ayres and Macdonald 2009; Pastor 2012).

In Latin America, too, much (trans)national civil society mobilization around regional integration and against its presumptive neoliberal bias has occurred – most prominently in the case of Mexico, where the Zapatista uprising coincided with the entry into force of NAFTA. Similar evidence abounds in South America: The Mercado Común del Sur (Common Market of the South, MERCOSUR) and other regional initiatives such as the Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, ALBA) or the South America-wide Unión de Naciones Suramericanas (Union of South American Nations, UNASUR) have also been touted as a counterweight to the forces of economic globalization and the free trade agenda of the Washington Consensus (Grugel 2006; Dabène 2009; von Bülow 2010).

There is a strong, if ambiguous, link between politicization and the legitimacy of regional integration projects: Some observers argue that a modicum of politicization is a necessary prerequisite for the (democratic) legitimacy of emerging regional polities such as the EU (Zürn 2014); others regard politicization as ‘constraining’ (Hooghe and Marks 2009) – that is, as an impediment to further integration – because it presumably implies growing legitimacy challenges for regional organizations. Yet, while the literature on the alleged legitimacy deficit of the EU is now extensive (for many, see Díez Medrano 2003; McLaren 2006; Thomassen 2009; Fuchs and Klingemann 2011; Duchesne et al. 2013; Schrag Sternberg 2013), the same cannot be said for genuinely comparative treatments of the levels and foundations of support for regional integration projects.

The term legitimacy denotes the rightfulness of political authority, but a normative and an empirical – or an actor’s and an observer’s – perspective on legitimacy have to be clearly distinguished (Barker 2007: 19–21; Hurrelmann et al. 2007: 7–8). In the actor’s perspective, political scientists formulate their own normative criteria and legitimacy assessments. In the observer’s perspective, as first advocated by Max Weber (1978: 212–301) in his seminal analysis of legitimate political authority, the legitimacy beliefs, claims or assessments of rulers and their subjects or citizens are examined as social facts, using empirical methods.

The present volume concentrates on this empirical strand of legitimacy research, which tends to follow David Easton (1965, 1975) in further distinguishing legitimacy from the broader notion of support for – or identification with – political communities and regimes. In line with Easton, individuals may support a regime in return for the specific benefits it produces (specific support) or grant diffuse support of a more generalized kind. Legitimacy is the type of diffuse support that is underpinned by citizens’ explicit recognition of political authority – here: authority vested in regional governance arrangements – as rightful, appropriate or at least acceptable (the second type of diffuse support distinguished by Easton and much subsequent public opinion research is trust). Conversely, a withdrawal of support may be diagnosed where regional integration is evaluated as corrupted, inappropriate or unacceptable. Thus, legitimacy assessments, just like the self-legitimating claims of political elites, draw on normative benchmarks and justifications, but they are citizens’ or rulers’ own benchmarks – which need to be studied empirically – rather than the ones political scientists might consider to be appropriate (see, for instance, Ribeiro Hoffmann and van der Vleuten 2007 for such a normative perspective on the legitimacy of regional integration).

Implied in this understanding of regime support and its foundations is the notion that legitimacy is socially constructed rather than being a regime attribute that lends itself to objective measurement by an external observer. In this volume, we use the term legitimation (and delegitimation) when referring to the processes or practices involved in the (re)production or withdrawal of legitimacy. As Rodney Barker (2001: 26) has pointed out, only legitimation is directly accessible to empirical research:

‘[L]egitimacy’ does not exist as a feasible subject of empirical or historical inquiry, in the same sense that God does not exist as a possible subject for social scientific study. We need to speak of both legitimacy and God when describing the actions of people engaged in politics and religion, but when we do so, we are describing their actions and language, not any independent phenomenon.

In other words, inferences on individual legitimacy beliefs or aggregate levels and foundations of support for a regime and its institutions must ultimately be based on the observation of such behavioural or discursive practices of (de)legitimation. These practices arguably come to the fore in the phases of politicization that both the EU and the regional integration projects of the Americas seem to have experienced in recent decades. While regional integration might not persistently occupy the top spot of the political agenda, legitimacy is most likely to be at stake when the salience of regional governance arrangements peaks and there is more public contestation of their powers and policy biases, their democratic quality or their impact on the national values and identities of member states than usual. Put differently, a certain level of politicization is a necessary prerequisite for (de)legitimation processes: A regime that is not politicized cannot be legitimate or illegitimate; it is merely ‘a-legitimate’ (Steffek 2007: 190).

However, various recent studies suggest that international organizations and regimes are indeed confronted with growing legitimacy requirements not only by member state governments but also by national societies (Steffek 2003, 2007; Zürn 2004; Zaum 2013). Thus, while regional integration projects continue to be largely elite-driven, they too are increasingly unlikely to be viewed as ‘a-legitimate’ by the national societies that are subject to their decisions, or to enjoy a ‘permissive consensus’ all the time. Consequently, explicit regime support becomes a key political resource where public attention to regional integration and the authority transfers it entails is growing. Like international regimes in general (Hurd 1999), regional organizations usually have no strong coercive powers and cannot always rely on favourable cost-benefit calculations by member states and their citizens. Hence, compliance with their decisions, their further development and their greater or lesser success may increasingly depend on their capacity to mobilize adequate levels of regime support of the legitimacy type.

Cases: Regional integration in Europe and the Americas

What drives politicization and (de)legitimation processes? What is the impact of these processes, and which additional factors mediate it? We submit that comparative analysis is required to produce more general insights into the dynamics of politicization affecting regional integration projects, to explain varying levels and foundations of regime support and to assess the effects of societal legitimacy on the future development of regional governance. This book focuses on Europe, North America and South America precisely because the historical dynamics, institutional features and policy impact of regional integration projects on these continents differ greatly (Table 1.1).

Regionalism in Europe has the longest history and is most advanced. Created in the 1950s to secure peace on the European continent and increase economic prosperity, this regional project – labelled the European Union since 1993 – has more than quadrupled the number of its member states, which reached 28 in the summer of 2013; the EU has taken on a huge array of decision-making responsibilities that leaves hardly any fields of member state policy untouched and notably includes the creation and regulation of a Common Market and a regional currency; it has also developed powerful supranational institutions with the capacity to issue binding Europe-wide legislation and court decisions.

By contrast, North American regionalism is much more recent, limited to three member states (the United States, Canada and Mexico), weak in terms of institutions and restricted in its policy scope, rule-making and adjudicative powers. Its main achievement, NAFTA, came into force in 1994 and established a free trade area with national treatment rules for investment – not an EU-like Common Market. NAFTA institutions and decision making remain firmly intergovernmental; there is no supranational legislation, and while procedures for the binding adjudication of conflicts over treaty rules exist, these are affected by significant compliance problems, especially on the part of the United States (Clarkson 2008).

Finally, in South America, regional integration efforts date back to the 1960s but have, according to two prominent observers, ‘a poor record when it comes to concrete accomplishments’ (Malamud and Schmitter 2011: 140). MERCOSUR, the case we focus on in the present volume, was established in 1991 by Argentina and Brazil together with their smaller neighbours Paraguay and Uruguay; Venezuela formally joined in 2012. While the gap between rhetoric and reality diagnosed for other South American integration projects might also hold for MERCOSUR (Malamud 2005), it has nevertheless been counted among the regional integration projects ‘that have reached the greatest level of formal accomplishment after the EU’ (Malamud and Schmitter 2011: 135). The initial objectives of economic development and of democratic consolidation in the wake of roughly two decades of military rule (strengthened by the 1998 Protocol of Ushuaia), as well as the bloc’s set of institutions and its international legal personality (established in the 1994 Protocol of Ouro Preto), indicate the EU’s role as a model. However, MERCOSUR has not yet completed its development towards a Common Market, and the envisaged customs union – let alone a political union of its member states – remains incomplete.¹

Table 1.1 Regional integration projects in Europe and the Americas

Considering such differences, it has often been suggested that comparisons between various regional integration projects – and especially between the EU and all the others – are of limited utility. Much of the European integration literature treats the EU as sui generis, and many contributions to the literature on the ‘new’ regionalism in other parts of the world have in turn questioned the appropriateness of theoretical approaches and concepts gleaned from EU studies (Hurrell 2005: 46–51; for a critical perspective on this mutual fencing-off, see Warleigh-Lack 2006). In line with the growing literature on comparative regionalism (Acharya and Johnston 2007; Sbragia 2008; Laursen 2010; Söderbaum and Sbragia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Understanding the Legitimacy of Regional Integration: AComparative and Mixed-Method Perspective
• Part I  Politicization and Legitimation Trends in European and American Regionalism
• Part II  Regional Integration and Public Opinion
• Part III  Regional Integration and Public Discourses
• Part IV  The Contentious Politics of Regional Integration
• Part V  Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index