The Political History of European Integration

Hagen Schulz-Forberg, Bo Stråth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136947131
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Maastricht Treaty in 1992 was based on neoliberal ideas of a market-driven European economy and democracy, and continues to be seen as a step towards a new stage of unification: towards a more federal Europe based on market integration. The authors demonstrate that European integration as a federal project actually came to an end around 1970. The European Economic Community (EEC) - the precursor of EU - was never thought of as a democracy. The authors locate a shift in thinking about legitimacy and further integration in the 1980s when the idea of a European democracy was connected with a plan for the internal market: the market would pave the way for democracy. Since then, there has been a growing tension between the official line about a democratic EU and the institutional capacity to carry it through. This tension undermined integration. The book suggests that, instead of democracy-through-market, there are signs of increasing social disintegration, political extremism and populism in the wake of economic integration. Providing a more realistic historical understanding of European integration, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, history and European studies.

Part I A historical outline

Confronting teleological understandings of European integration

1 The mythical foundation and the turbulent founding years

DOI: 10.4324/9780203848265-1

The mythical foundation of Europe

Like all social organizations, particularly nations, the European Union (EU) has a foundation myth, even though it is far from being a nation. Myths are a crucial part of social integration (Stråth, 2000c). They stabilize societies and legitimize power relationships, and therefore should be subject to critical questioning. Stabilization and destabilization of the myths and power relationships of democratic societies are two mutually interactive processes: critique-crisis-reintegration. Deconstruction goes hand-in-hand with reconstruction.

The mythical underpinning of Europe is a story about a few far-sighted men who decided on a visionary supranational project with the implication that the European peoples have since then been welded together in ever-tighter forms under enjoyment of peace, prosperity and welfare. The narrative is based not only on the depiction of its founding fathers, but also on a number of sequential basic concepts to describe a project advancing towards a distant goal. In the 1950s, the key term was integration. From the 1970s onwards it became identity, and in the 2000s the key terms were public sphere and — for a short period — constitution (Stråth, 2006). The myth is derived from the banal history of the European construction itself, first born as an institution, which aimed to solve the historical conflict between Germany and France over coal and steel, and then developed into the European common market through integration, and later into the European Union through identity. This is the myth of Europe as a teleological progress, marching towards a predetermined goal.

The foundation myth tries, like the European public sphere discourse, to transcend obvious contradictions between language and practices, between goals and implementation of goals. According to the official historiography, today’s EU is built on the Schuman Plan from 1950. The Day of Europe is 9 May, the day when the French Foreign Minister launched the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) Plan. One important dimension of the ECSC, which continued in the European Economic Community (EEC) and the EU, is that political power and authority is more centralized than the possibility of claiming political responsibility. In this sense, ECSC/EEC/EU cannot be called democratic organizations. This is an obvious difference from national parliamentary democracies. This fact has not prevented the emergence of the language of a democratic EU. There is a discrepancy between the European Union as an economic project and as a political and social project. Basically, the EU is an economic project: a set of market rules. There is no budget worthy of the name with a distributive capacity.

As a set of market rules, the EU increasingly regulates dimensions of social life, however. It closes in on the everyday life of Europe’s populations. Market expansion in (Western) Europe began after the Second World War with the elimination of import quotas, and continued with the reduction of customs duties. It continued with the establishment of a common customs wall towards third countries. The European Communities became a customs union in 1968. According to conventional economic theory, market development requires harmonization of standards in order to guarantee free and equal competition. The engine of the market is free competition, which, in turn, and in a contradictory way, requires the standardization of rules. The setting of standards is, of course, not a neutral act, it is rather full of power implications. The drive towards standardization by means of dismantling so-called technical, environmental, health or social barriers of trade is a power game, which gets ever closer to everyday life. The power over the rules is easily interpreted as a top-down imposition and full of legitimacy implications. In this sense, markets are politics, but a different kind of politics than redistribution via budget transfers. The bias in this kind of politics has led to considerable legitimacy problems for the administrative machinery (the ‘comitology’) in Brussels. Since the 1990s, these developments have — probably also in attempts to re-establish lost legitimacy — promoted the decentralizing power migration from the Commission to the Council and the shift of the legal focus from the acquis to the open method of coordination, from hard law to soft law. The strange debate about subsidiarity also fits into this framework: rules should be equal for all, but the political decisions about them should be decentralized. The conceptual shift from the European Community to the European Union with the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 promoted imaginations of a step in a federal direction, but political practices went in the opposite direction and reinforced the power of the member states.

The tension has increased since the 1990s between strong Commission interests for more standardization (which, in turn, has provoked growing popular protests against interference in every-day life by ‘Brussels’) and the member state governments, trying to respond to the protests in their electorates.

In the conventional view, normative rules and legislation provide the framework of politics. The law constitutes the arena in which politics performs and in which conflicts are being resolved. The rules of the EU game are labelled acquis communautaire: what has been achieved in common. The view is obviously cumulative. Ever more rules are added on to the legal stock. The European Court of Justice (EcoJ) interprets these rules authoritatively and judges what is right and wrong, conformable and not conformable to EU law. The political practices and the power shift since the 1990s speak another language, however. Christian Joerges and Martti Koskenniemi have developed theories on the relationships between the legal and the political and between European law and national law, which make the developments since the 1990s understandable (Koskenniemi, 2005 [1989], 2001; Joerges, 2005a, 2005b, 2007; Joerges and Rödl, 2008). They confront convincingly the strict separation between politics and law and emphasize the fluidity, entanglements and contextuality between the two dimensions of the regulation of societies. Politics create and implement rules in reaction to a confluence of political and social pressures. Implementation of rules is as much a political as a legal issue.

Formal treaties become, in this view, flexible arrangements with a wide margin of discretion. Rule-complexes change from formal public law institutions to informal ‘regimes’, which come about not through formal procedures, but by way of converging practices redescribing the world through new languages. Environmental regimes, human rights regimes, trade regimes, security regimes or public health regimes, for instance, replace an outdated vocabulary of territorial sovereignty. This global transition is also fully visible within the machinery of the EU.

Martti Koskenniemi has described the world of many (functional) regimes in terms of fragmentation:

‘Should the importation of hormone meat or genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to Europe be articulated in terms of the global trade regime or the global environmental (or health) regime? Should boundary-crossing humans be thought of as a human rights problem or a security problem? To decide on such questions in some rational way, there ought to be a superior system, a regime of regimes — a ’constitution’ in the legal idiom. But there is none. Which is why regimes will continue to deal with whatever they can lay their hands on. In the end, that regime will win whose application will, for whatever reason, no longer be challenged. The procedures world of regimes is a world of hegemony, of pure power.’

(Koskenniemi, 2009: 407)

A second step collapses the distinction between law and regulation. In regimes, legalization is a policy choice between harder and softer techniques of regulation. Soft law alternates with hard, private constraint with public. A procedure’s third step means a move from the language of formal government to informal governance. Government connotes administration and division of powers under assumptions of accountability, while governance refers to management of disagreement through negotiation and administrative sanctions, but rarely through formal settlement.

Recent studies of the European community law and the role of the ECoJ demonstrate the entanglement and the shifting relationships between law and politics and between national and European centres of judicial and political power. Milène Wegmann, in an analysis of the European competition law, demonstrates how the initial influence of US anti-trust law when the ECSC was established and German ordoliberal theories on competition — both founded on the interwar experiences of the big global price and production cartels in key industries — merged with national interests in strong and big industries. The emergence of the European competition law reflected the shifting power relationships between various interest representatives and power centres. Economic political goals of the Commission, which aimed at the promotion of the competitive capacity of small and medium enterprises, clashed and merged with national political goals promoting big industries in ways that made any rigorous implementation of the community law difficult. The implementation of the monopoly law, for instance, has oscillated between prevention of abuse and prohibition. Rules against horizontal agreements between enterprises and abuse of market-dominating positions were hardly applied in the 1960s and 1970s. With the neoliberal turn in the 1990s, fusion control was introduced and implemented (Wegmann, 2008; cf. Wegmann, 2001). Marcus Höreth has, in an important study, compared the ECoJ and the US Supreme Court, and found that the possibilities of the court in Luxemburg to set its own constitutional political preferences exceed those of the Supreme Court in Washington. He refers to ‘the self-authorisation of the agent’, which means the ECoJ has exploited the lack of a critical European public debate in the development of its legal power, which at the same time is political power (Höreth, 2008; cf. also Schmidt, 2008). The question is whether the power of the ECoJ has been declining for a few years, exactly because of the lack of connection to the issue of democracy. However, the missing democratic corrective power does not come from a critical European public sphere, where the critique would be formulated and channelled through a representative European Parliament, but from nationalist and populist critique. One recent expression of such a trend was the declaration of the German Verfassungsgericht on the Lisbon Treaty in June 2009 (see Introduction), where it seems to argue in the direction of a national superiority of judicial interpretation, thereby turning the principle of the ECoJ as the last instance upside down. The practical implication of the Karlsruhe declaration is still unclear, but the direction is very clear.

The EU legal framework has been called multi-level constitutionalism. This should not be misunderstood as a very stable or static order. The focus of dominating legal level of authority adjusts to shifts in the political conjunctures.

This view on the connection between law and politics eliminates many misunderstandings of how the European machinery works, and sheds important light on the migration of power since the 1990s from the Commission to the Council, from the legal to the political, and from the European to the national. This view also sheds light on the emergence of the language of a democratic EU in the 1990s, despite the lack of legal as well as institutional framing. Democracy was what the intensified market integration required for legitimacy reasons, and the rhetoric on bringing the EU closer to the citizens emerged.

The question of a European democracy was not part of the interpretive horizons around 1950. Then, the problem of the founders was not democratic legitimacy at the EU level, but the provision of a legal framework for a robust international order for (Western) European peace, economic growth, and distribution of welfare that could provide legitimacy at the level of the nation-state. One important critical question is the more precise conditions under which the idea of a supranational democratic EEC/EU came about, since it did not exist at the outset.

A historical outline of the foundation years

In the 1920s, in the lack of institutionalized international political power, economic transnational power emerged. Governments lost control over the economies to a global order of transnational cartels. Instead of the contours of a world government, envisaged in the idea of the League of Nations and the Paneuropean Union, global capital governance emerged when international cartels in key production areas divided the world markets through secret price and product agreements (Gillingham, 1991). Against the backdrop of this development, governments lost control of not only the economic, but also the social question when the economic depression recurred in much more intense and tense forms than ever before in the early 1930s. Under conditions of transnational economic governance and political impotence, the world order collapsed under the pressures of the social question.

Not only the experiences of the collapse of world capitalism in the 1930s, but also the experiences of Fascism and Communism, provided the interpretive framework at the time of the foundation of the ECSC in 1951. Out of bitter experiences, after 1945 Europe’s Christian Democrats knew how the rule of the people could be abused. Democracy had brought Fascism and Nazism to power. At the time of the Berlin Blockade and the Korean War, the Moscow-controlled Communist Parties in France and Italy had the support of some 25–30 per cent of the electorate. In September 1947, Stalin had established the Comintern, which instructed the Communist parties in France and Italy to take an intransigent line in their countries’ politics and clamped down sharply on the Communist-controlled countries of the Soviet bloc.

Through the construction of the ECSC, Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer and Alcide de Gasperi thought that they could create an order where the executive power was protected from populist attacks and unreliable voters, constructed more robustly than the League of Nations had been. They were keen to avoid a new Weimar scenario. The framework was the Cold War and Communism was the big threat.

The primary aim was never to create a democratic organization, but to establish a system of protection that would make their nation-states safe for democracy. The language to describe the new institutional setting is indicative; with the High Authority, which later became the Commission, as the body of centralized power. There is no better illustration of this interpretation than the ECSC Treaty itself, signed in Paris in May 1951 in the middle of the Korean War. One of the reasons for the highly pragmatic and authoritarian decision-making structures in the High Authority was Jean Monnet’s experience in the secretariat of the League of Nations. This international body was unwieldy because of the unanimity rule. Disagreeing became a power political tool and decisions were continuously adjourned. According to Monnet, it was vital to provide a more effective structure in order to secure effective decision-making processes and the swift implementation of decisions.

However, the long-term dream of development towards a federal Europe was an undercurrent of the pragmatic construction of the ECSC. Such dreams were promoted by memories of the war. The resistance movements had imagined a federal Europe as their post-war goal. This goal was emphasized in the big conference on Europe’s future in The Hague in the spring of 1948, for example, and continued discursively and also institutionally with the Council of Europe. No doubt the federal dream remained in the mind of Jean Monnet, the key figure of European integration until the 1970s. Monnet’s long-term federalism was technocratic, and based on a European state capacity rather than on ideas of popular will via parliamentary representation. Others saw the motor of a democratic European federalism in a federal assembly made up of representatives of a European people rather than the governments (Pollak, 2007: 148).

The Marshall Plan put American dollars into the hands of Europeans to buy the tools of recovery from America. The rest, convertible currencies, good labour relations, balanced budgets and free trade, would depend on the Europeans themselves. One of several ideas in the US administration about how to deal with Europe after the war was to use Marshall Aid for launching a United States of Europe (USE), based on the blueprint provided by the United States of America. European leaders vehemently rejected this idea, but continued to live in the illusion that the federal Europe would somehow arrive automatically. While the federal idea prevailed as a vague lodestar, institutional development went in other directions. In 1947 the USE plan was transformed into the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), under the aegis of the USA, with the aim of managing the Marshall Plan and promoting cooperation among the nations of non-Communist Europe. In 1961, it was reshaped into the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The original 20 members were from Western Europe (including Turkey) as well as the USA and Canada. Finland (1969) and the Pacific ‘Western’ states of Japan (1964), Australia (1971) and New Zealand (1973) followed. In a second wave of expansion, Mexico (1994), the Czech Republic (1995), Hungary (1996), Poland (1996) and South Korea (1996) joined the group. Spain, although a founding member of the OECD, was excluded from European institutions until after the death of Franco in 1975. The OECD was a case of enlargement without deepening, but, unlike the EU, it did not build up an imaginary rhetoric of a democratic Europe.

Functionalist theories in political sciences underpinned the federal dreams. Karl W. Deutsch (1957) and Ernst B. Haas (1958) were amongst the academic protagonists active in the construction of an interpretive framework within which, following the historical model of the German Zollverein, (Western) Europe would grow together through free trade and, in the wake of the inner market without barriers of trade, tighter communication would eventually cement a (West) European people. The American post-war plan for a USE shifted under the resistance of the European leaders from something created through political action towards something that would somehow develop automatically. The plan was linked to what we today would call the theory of functional incrementalism. Ultimately, the federation of the USE would emerge. From early on, a tension was built into the European integration project. Long-term dreams about a federal Europe coexisted with short-term operative questions. Such dreams were nourished by the nineteenth-century peace movement with their peace congresses, by the interwar Paneuropean Movement and by the resistance movement during the Second World War, which had developed plans for how to prevent future European wars. Some emphasized technocratic coordination and statehood, others popular will and representative democracy.

This was a tension between language and institutions, institutions established by Realpolitik about military power and control of power on the one side and the language of federal dreams on the other. This was also a tension between top-down and bottom-up perspectives. The teleological image of Europe on a slow but steady march towards a predetermined goal emerged and decreased the tensions. These federal dreams raised the horizons of future expectations during the grey days of the Cold War. In the early 1950s, several federal plans were designed (see below). All, however, fell when it came to implementation. The ambition to close the gap between rh...