Chapter 1: Integration Theories in the European Union Politics

Introduction

As a generic definition, the European integration refers to the process of political, legal, economic, industrial, social and cultural integration of states wholly or partially in Europe. Although the idea of an integrated Europe dates back to the 19th century, the legacies of two World Wars, particularly World War II, had a huge impact on the formation of European Community. Many theories, approaches or analytical concepts have emerged in order to explain the process and outcome of the integration in Europe. Ben Rosamond (2000:14-15) lists at least four approaches in order to examine the study of the EU/ European Integration. The first of these approaches would be to understand the EU as an international organization. Although it is possible to treat the EU as an international organization, the EU is evidently rather more than a straightforward instance of an international organization. The second treats the European integration as an instance of regionalism in the global economy. The EU is the example of a regional integration that has drawn the most international attention and that has had the most clearly evident effects both on its member states and on the states doing business with the EU (McCormick, 2008: 12). The third broad approach aims to treat the EU as a useful location for the study of policy-making process. Seeing from this perspective, the development of the EU affords an exciting opportunity to consider policy networks and the role of institutions in conditions where (old) national and (new) supranational politics overlap. The final approach would regard the EU as a sui generis phenomenon. Such an understanding has two departure points: a) EU and European integration are not treated as an instance of anything other than itself and therefore they cannot be a testing site for broader generalizations; b) EU as a historically-rooted phenomenon.

Throughout its history, there has been a debate about whether the EU is intergovernmental, supranational, or a combination of the two. It is largely true that while some of its institutions (e.g. the European Council and the Council of Ministers) are a good example of an intergovernmental organization, some other institutions (e.g. the European Commission and the European Court of Justice) represent the supranational characteristic of the EU. While one can consider federalism, functionalism, transactionalism, and neo-functionalism as liberal theories, (liberal) intergovernmentalism has a realist nature. Nowadays, another alternative approach, multi-level governance (MLG), has become commonplace in European studies in recent years and the term is usually used to capture the peculiar qualities of the EU’s political system (Rosamond, 2013: 115).

The Meaning of Integration

The term integration in this chapter generally refers to a political dimension. The meaning of political integration refers to uniting, unifying, and organizing in a group of two or more units. As for the European integration, Ernest Haas (1968: 16) explains integration as “a process whereby political actors in several distinct national settings are persuaded to shift their loyalties, expectations and political activities toward a new center, whose institutions possess or demand jurisdiction over preexisting national states”.

Early Integration Theories

• Federalism: By the end of the First World War, some thinkers such as Altiero Spinelli and Luigi Einaudi in Italy began to react strongly against excessive national sovereignty which they perceived as the root cause of the armed struggles of this century. These critics believed that the way to prevent recurrence of this bloodshed was to reorganize Europe into a federalist system— into a United States of Europe (Delzell, 2012: 767).
• Functionalism: Functionalism emerged as an alternative to federalist designs about the organization of the international system. Functionalism belongs to the liberal-idealist tradition of international relations theory and usually takes account of Immanuel Kant, John Jacques Rousseau, and Woodrow Wilson. The main figure of functionalism is David Mitrany (1888-1975).
• Transactionalism: Transactionalism differs from federalism and functionalism as it does not presume the need to establish federal bodies or functional agencies in order to ensure peace between nations. Transactionalism was pioneered by Karl Deutsch and his colleagues which focuses on the social rather than political or economic dimensions of integration in the 1950s. In other words, transactionalism seeks to ensure sufficient integration at a social level to make conflict unthinkable (Eilstrup- Sangiovanni, 2006: 29).

Contemporary Integration Theories

Neofunctionalism

Neofunctionalism, as a popular theory of the European integration in the 1950s and 1960s, focused particularly upon the integration project in Europe. It sought to explain what was happening in Europe, and to provide a conceptual framework within which developments in Europe could be understood (Cram 1996: 44). The final point is that neofunctionalism is often characterized as a rather elitist approach to the European integration. Although it sees a role for groups in the integration process, integration tends to be driven by functional and technocratic needs.

Intergovernmentalism

Intergovernmentalists view the European integration from the standpoint of national states searching for mutually advantageous bargains. Whereas neofunctionalism explains integration as the outcome of cooperation and competition among societal actors, intergovernmentalism explains integration as the outcome of cooperation and competition among national governments (Hooghe and Marks, 2019: 1115). Providing a conceptual analysis of the European integration, intergovernmentalism is generally associated with the state-centrism, which argues that states are the key actors in the international arena. In this respect, intergovernmentalism puts a heavy emphasis on the role of national states within the European integration. Intergovernmentalism reached its prime in the ‘doldrum years’ of the European Integration (Wiener & Diez, 2009: 6) during the 1970s, when the failure to get any further with political integration seemed to confirm most of its premises. Yet, like neofunctionalism, intergovernmentalism faced with events that did not fit its theoretical framework.

Liberal Intergovernmentalism

Moravcsik (1993) has developed the intergovermentalist approach but agreed with many of the key principles, such as the assumption that nations could be seen as rational and departing from realists approach to the state. He also derived insights from classic intergovernmentalism which sees national interests arising in the context of the state’s perception of its relative position in the state system (Bergmann and Niemann, 2015). On the other hand, liberal intergovermentalism is more rigorous than its antecedents (Hoffman’s intergovermentalism) (George and Bache, 2001: 13), incorporating within both realist and neo-liberal elements (Rosamond, 2000: 136), and dealing explicitly with the interface between domestic and international politics. In other words, liberal intergovernmentalism is a synthetic approach that derives from both realist/liberal elements and domestic/international politics. Liberal intergovernmentalism conceives institutional outcomes as functional responses to cooperation problems. It anticipates that states will delegate or pool just enough authority to ensure that national governments will find it in their interest to comply with the deal. The typical outcome, then, is the lowest common denominator, but the level of integration that this entails will vary with the nature of the cooperation problem (Hooghe and Marks, 2019: 1116). Moravcsik (1998) argues that each state is distinct and each must be explained by a separate theory. He not only presents the basic structure of analysis, the tripartite analytical framework but also introduces each stage in detail, emphasizing factors that need special attention when examining negotiation outcomes. In his opinion, this structure is applicable for negotiations at the European level, as well as it is “generalizable to any international negotiation” (Moravcsik, 1998). The summary of the three stages formation developed by Moravcsik is as follows:

a. Stage One (Forming National Preferences): National governments are pursuing national interests that are formed domestically, aggregated through political institutions and shifting in response to outcomes of domestic competition for political influence. National preferences must be distinguished from temporary positions in the form of strategies or tactics. National preference formation plays a vital role in liberal intergovernmentalist tripartite framework as national preferences are the major determinant of state behavior on the international arena. “The most fundamental influences on foreign policy are the identity of important societal groups, the nature of their interests, and their relative influence on domestic policy (Moravcsik 1993: 483). In this stage, Moravcsik emphasizes that economic reasons play a greater role than geopolitical ones.
b. State Two (Reaching a Substantive Bargain): This stage is also considered as interstate bargaining. It is a stage when states work out strategies and engage in mutual bargaining to achieve realisation of their national preferences with the aim to do it more efficiently than through unilateral activities. Moravcsik puts forward two competing theories of bargaining: supranational and intergovernmental and strongly favors the latter. The purpose of these theories is to provide answers to two fundamental questions related to international negotiation: efficiency and distribution. In particular, the former considers the fact whether governments exploited all possible agreements while the latter examines how the benefits of negotiation were distributed.
c. Stage Three (Creating Regional Institutions): Once states are prepared to strike a substantive agreement to coordinate policy, liberal intergovermentalism theory moves into a third stage, in which it seeks to explain the establishment and design of international institutions. The idea of states delegating powers on international institutions is not in conflict with principles of liberal intergovernmentalism. To the contrary, states decide to empower institutional structures insofar as these help them to strengthen control over domestic affairs. The delegation of powers to an international institution results in the limitation of state sovereignty. Here, Moravcsik (1999: 67) examines two distinct ways of constraining sovereignty of a state: a) pooling of sovereignty; b) delegation of sovereignty.

Multi-Level Governance

The debate on multi-level governance (MLG) has become a catchphrase in EU studies since the early 1990s and continuously dominated the EU- related research agenda. The MLG holds a middle- ground between (neo) functionalism and (liberal) intergovernmentalism by not overstating or downgrading the role that subnational levels play within the day-to-day European politics. What it suggests is the transformation of states because of the independent role of EU level institutions and the participation of sub-national administrations in the implementation and monitoring stage of the regional policy-making process. The interplay between subnational and supranational actors does not address the sovereignty of states directly. Instead, it simply argues that a multilevel structure is being created by various actors at various levels. MLG acknowledges that there is a change in the mode of EU governance without assuming that the power of member states is in terminal decline. Hooghe and Marks (2001) even acknowledge that national governments are the most important players in EU governance. According to Richard and Smith (2004), a key tenet of multi-level governance is the dispersal of authority and decision-making to a wide range of bodies through a process of negotiation. The net effect is that policy-making has been transformed from being statecentered and state-driven activity to become a complex mix of hierarchies, networks, and markets. MLG crosses the traditionally separate domains of domestic and international politics to highlight the increasingly blurred distinction between these domains in the context of European integration. In identifying the applications of the MLG approach in EU governance, Bache and Flinders (2004:197) classify four different strands: “that decision making at various levels is characterized by the increased participation of non-state actors; that the identification of discrete or nested territorial levels of decision making is becoming more difficult in the context of complex overlapping networks; that in this changing context the role of the state is being transformed as state actors develop new strategies of coordination, steering, and networking to protect and in some cases, enhance state autonomy; and that the nature of democratic accountability has been challenged and needs to be rethought or at least reviewed”. In a nutshell, multi-level governance shows the way in which certain competencies are transferred from the national state ‘portfolio’ to the supranational level, and to the sub-national, public and private authorities.