The Politics of European Integration

Common to policy and institutional integration is the duality of conflict that simultaneously occur at vertical and horizontal levels: first is the delegation of power and authority from the national to the EU level, and secondly, re-allocation of competences within the EU levels of authority (Beach, 2016, 46-53). While the first conflict is about expanding or retreating the degree of EU authority in policy areas, the second reflects the long-standing controversy between the two key modes of decision-making at the EU level: supranationalism and intergovernmentalism, with a range of possibilities in between.

Policy integration focuses on the extent to which the responsibility for particular policies is transferred to a higher level of government or jointly exercised or coordinated by more than one level. The scope, extent and salience of common policies is of major political significance to integration. The appropriate level of government for the exercise of different functions is a key issue in more advanced forms of political integration.

Institutional integration refers to the growth of collective decision-making among a group of states. The extent to which common institutions are or should be supranational in character is a debated subject in the literature. Supranational institutions can engage the citizens of member states directly, and can take decisions independently of, and in some cases, against the wishes of the member states. Intergovernmental institutions, by contrast, are those that result from the cooperation of national governments, and have no power beyond that permitted to them by those governments. 

Attitudinal integration is concerned with the sources of support or opposition to regional integration among the public at large and among the political and economic elites. Attitudes affect the development of policy and institutional integration. For instance, European public support for a more effective, credible and coherent EU foreign policy as well as external demands and expectations are one of the key factors shaping the actorness of the Union.

Political disintegration may be understood as a process whereby either the level or scope of political integration decreases, or when member states withdraw from the EU or from its policies (Eppler, Anders and Tuntschew, 2016, 11).

The principle of institutional balance in the EU implies that each of its institutions has to act in accordance with the Powers conferred on it by the Treaties, in accordance with the division of Powers. 

The Community method is characterised by the sole right of the European Commission to initiate legislation; the co-decision power between the Council and the EP, and the use of QMV in Council.

Renaud Dehousse and Paul Magnette (2012) divide the EU’s institutional history into successive phases: the foundations, the consolidation of the Community model, the ‘relaunch’: institutional change through task extension, adjusting the institutional system and the constitutional moment: and the uncertain legacy of the recent crises.

Luxembourg compromise in 1966.

Constitutionalization is the formalization of the rules of the game, which in an EU context, might involve a process whereby the treaties become over time-de jure or de facto- a constitution (Cini and Borragan (eds), 2016, 396).

The newly created EU was given a complex structure, the EC being supplemented by two intergovernmental pillars, in which the role of supranational institutions was strictly limited. In the view of the masters of the treaty, ‘political decisions’ were therefore to remain primarily in the hands of national governments (Dehousse and Magnette, 2012, 24). This mixed result confirmed the experience of the previous decades: transfers of sovereignty are more readily accepted when they are approached in a functional manner and when institutional issues are not handled separately (Dehousse and Magnette, 2012, 24). Despite compromise nsolutions of governments, the TEU did mark a further step on the road to the European integration (Bache and George, 2006, 169).

It is a term used by people who argue that the EU institutions and their decision-making procedures suffer from a lack of democracy and seem inaccessible to the ordinary citizen due to their complexity. The real EU democratic deficit seems to be absence of European politics

An underlying feature of the new intergovernmentalism is the paradoxical attitudes of member state governments towards integration: national governments have been rejecting expansion of the Community method to sensitive core policy areas. Yet, they have equally insisted that policy challenges require collective action at the EU level and cannot be addressed unilaterally (Puetter, 2016, 58). 

The contemporary European integration is marked by being different from both classical supranationalism which is associated with the empowerment of the Commission and the Court and from traditional intergovernmentalism which tends to obscure further EU authority rather than being its catalyst (Puetter, 2016, 57). As different from the traditional intergovernmentalists who identify the decision-making process in the Council with hard interest-based bargaining and power politics, the new intergovernmentalists maintain that the decision-making process needs to be understood in terms of member-states seeking to arrive at consensual agreements through deliberation and persuasion (Puetter, 2014).

Another feature of the new intergovernmentalism is the search through deliberation for consensus in EU decision-making. Policy-making has developed informally, escaping many of the legislative frameworks that characterized supranational law-making beyond the nation-state (Bickerton, Hodson and Puetter, 2015, 717). More specifically,
the new intergovernmentalism is consolidated through particular institutional mechanisms and practical routines which ensure that member states remain in constant dialogue over policy decisions (Puetter, 2016, 57). This institutional dynamic is reflected in the intensification of voluntary and decentralized policy co-ordination between the member states and occurred at all levels of the Council hierarchy. This new EU decision-making regime differs from hard intergovernmental bargaining in terms of its deliberative and consensual quality and is conceptualized as deliberative intergovernmentalism (Puetter, 2012).

Following Maastricht, the permissive consensus that characterized public attitudes during the earlier decades of integration broke down (Hooghe and Marks, 2009). Instead, there has been a growing constraining dissensus that has been evident in successive ratification failures, starting with the Danish rejection of the Maastricht Treaty itself and perhaps underlined most strongly when citizens of the Netherlands and France, rejected the Constitutional Treaty in 2005. The momentum of this popular dissent on integration developed into the rise of populism and Euroscepticism across Europe. It found particular expression in the 2014 EP elections, at which approximately one-third of the European Parliamentarians elected could be considered to have been against the mainstream pro-EU position (Laffan, 2016, 381). From this perspective, EU integration has become increasingly shaped by an unstable set of political dynamics that have increasingly pitted pro-integration elites against more sceptical populations (Bickerton, Hodson and Puetter, 2015, 717).

Communitarization is the shift of policy activity from the intergovernmental pillars to the Community pillar.

From a functionalist perspective, there would be no need for far-reaching institutional
change to the Community model as a result of national governments’ delegation more powers to supranational institutions as long as the Community limits itself basically to regulatory functions, or market-building policies, such as trade policy, competition policy and EMU and less on market-correcting and (re)distributive policies, such as the common agricultural policy, cohesion policy and environmental and social regulation. Instead, the Council should be made even more explicitly dominant as the core executive power within the Community (Hayes-Renshaw, 2012, 93). Indeed, the Community model provides the much needed institutional efficiency, policy effectiveness and accountability structures that are appropriate for regulatory functions. 

By contrast, the federal approach gives greater weight to supranational institutions than the intergovernmental ones. Supranationalism fulfils the expectations placed in integration at the outset: of providing a new form of politics transcending the nation-state. The pace and direction of the European integration is thus associated with gradual but more and more supranationalism until the policy areas dealt with at the EU levels are fully communitarized, that is, fall within the traditional Community method,
which gives distinct and exclusive powers to the Commission, the EP and the Council. The outcome of delegation of powers to supranational institutions would be the emergence of a bicameral legislative system. The Council, together with the EP, should become an explicitly representative and legislative rather than an executive institution (Hayes-Renshaw, 2012, 93).

Regulatory state is the expansion in the use of rule-making, monitoring, and enforcement techniques and institutions by the state, and a parallel change in the way in which its positive functions in society are being carried out (Cini and Borragan, 2016, 416).