Chapter 2: The Politics of European Integration

Introduction

Studies on the European integration politics aim to combine the EU institutions and its multi-level system of governance with the polity features of the Union.

The new intergovernmentalism is a new step in the European integration with particular features which are detectable in all institutional domains and with regard to all aspects of EU politics (Puetter, 2016, 60-61).

Conceptualizing European Political Integration

The term integration has been used in distinctive ways:

• integration as a process
• integration as policy-making
• integration as endgoal
• integration as international influence

Key Features of Political Integration

These features are multidimensional (comprising policy, institutional, security and attitudinal dimensions), multimethod (combining various policy-making methods ranging from intergovernmentalism to the Community supranational method) and multi-level (based on the interaction between the national and the European level and also entailing other levels below and beyond the state and thus situating the EU in an international and globalizing context).

Sub-Dimensions of Political Integration

Sub-Dimensions of Political Integration are;

• policy integration
• institutional integration
• civilizing/security dimension
• attitudinal dimension

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.

Institutional integration refers to the growth of collective decision-making among a group of states.

Security integration applies to Karl Deutsch’s et al. (1957) notion of a “security community” whose members no longer regard physical force as a legitimate means of resolving disputes and who display significant capacities to communicate with each other by means of institutionalized procedures.

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

Political Integration: Neither Progressive nor Unidirectional

The idea of the European integration as an elite project and the idea of a permissive consensus was challenged when the debate about the EU democratic deficit resurfaced after the failure of the referendum on the Treaty of Maastricht in Denmark in 1992. As a result, the domestic context and most notably identity and mass politics have returned back to EU research field.

This leads to the assertion that neither progressive nor unidirectional, the European integration is rather bidirectional and contains both integrative and disintegrative processes along its sub-dimensions.

European Political Integration From the Treaty of Rome to the Present

Helen Wallace (2009), one of the leading scholars of the European integration, has reflected that the political development of the EU since the 1950s in successive phases has occurred with a focus on the key people involved, on the policy tools they used, on their symbols and culture, and on the connections with the wider world.

The Foundational Period

In this period, a pioneer group of people, a core of politicians, public officials and entrepreneurs acquired the determination and the capabilities to work on a shared European project.

Pragmatist Politics of the Mid-1970s and Beyond

The period is marked by “pragmatic intergovernmentalism” through new institutions, new tools and some new policy areas, such as regional policies, structural funds and the environment. The period is also marked by the emergence of intergovernmental cooperation, especially in monetary policy and foreign policy (Wallace, 2009, 15).

Maastricht and Beyond

The Maastricht Treaty of 1992 was shaped by a combination of internal debates and positions, as well as attempts to react to a number of external shocks.

The European Council has become apparent over the last four decades as the most powerful among/in the traditional Community institutions (Hodson and Peterson, 2017, 8). It exercised several functions without any legal treaty basis for them, ranging from providing strategic guidelines, decision making capacity in economic governance, foreign and security policy and amending the treaties

The European Council has a dominant role in the development of the EU and it has some significant implications for the institutional balance which means that 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 EU has flourished more easily in those periods in which policy entrepreneurs were able to exploit opportunities, but this has become harder with a broader policy agenda, more contestation among institutions and among member states, and declining popular support.

Institutional Change in the European Union

Being the basis of the European integration is the task of managing high levels of interdependence and the provision of collective goods and the attainment of the common good for European states and societies all. The EU is neither a state nor a traditional international organization, but rather a unique experiment embedding the national in the European and the European in the national.

The Original Community Model

The EU had a political purpose, often associated with two alternative ideas and ideologies: the functionalist approach and the federalist approach. The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) gave rise to the original Community model the core of which was the delegation of powers to an independent, technical and depoliticized body. As such, the first European Community was truly supranational in character yet fell short of a federal union.

The Community Model in Transition

After the Commission guaranteed all member states’ support for reforms, it was able to push the integration forward by cultivating linkage between single market and single currency. Under Delors, the Commission regained its role as the motor of integration but it was only able to play that role because of the support coming from French President Mitterrand and German Chancellor Kohl.

The European Union Torn between Functionalism and Constitutionalism

The post-Maastricht period of the European integration was one of institutional adjustment and institutional innovation by means of new modes of governance.

This period was not characterized by major new projects, rather the institutional change was motivated by two concerns:

a. the willingness to respond to the criticisms of democratic deficit by bringing EU governance closer to European democratic standards,
b. the need to institutionally prepared for the Eastern enlargement

Democratic deficit 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.

Post-Maastricht European Integration: The New Intergovernmentalism

Through the New Intergovernmentalism

Beyond Cold War-related developments, the governance of the EU has been subject to significant change in the post-Maastricht period. As the EU has departed from the Community method and has begun deepening in an increasing number of sensitive policy areas associated with monetary, external and internal security in the 1990s, new dynamics of intergovernmentalism has become discernible in European politics.

Features of New Intergovernmentalism

Puetter (2016, 57) associates the new intergovernmentalism with three arguments:

a. the integration paradox
b. the deliberative intergovernmentalism as a new form of EU governance in highly prominent areas of EU activity such as economic governance and foreign and security policy and that prevails over the classic Community method
c. a new phase in the European integration

The European Union as a Polity

Competing visions of Europe’s future each reflected a particular and ideal institutional model and a particular ultimate end-goal; broadly divided into federal approaches aiming at transcending the nation-states system and functionalist approaches aiming at re-building (rescuing) the nation-state in postwar Western Europe. The EU is the site of an open-ended struggle between the supporters of these two approaches.

The supporters of functionalism defend the institutional status quo of the EC/ EU. On the other hand, their future plan does not go beyond an “intergovernmental” union of states to embrace a federal union of peoples.

The EU as Efficient or Unstable Polity

It can be concluded that the logic of functional integration gave way to a new mode of governance, namely, the new intergovernmentalism in key policy areas.

The EU began to gradually move away from a regulatory polity by expanding the scope of the European integration into core state areas that were more sovereignty sensitive and also publicly salient.

EU Politics Constrained

The post-Maastricht phase of European integration has become associated with the new research agenda of postfunctionalism.

The changes in European public attitudes and notably the replacement of the pre-Maastricht permissive consensus with constraining disagreement of the following decades demonstrate the constraining impact of the attitudinal change for the prospect of deeper integration by means of policy and institutional reforms. Moreover, there has been growing doubts among European citizens regarding the EU’s problem-solving capacity and its ability to provide collective goods for the majority.