European Journal of International Relations-2014-Webber-341-65.pdf.pdf - 0 views
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the future of European integration and the European Union is more contingent than most integration theories allow
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the role of domestic politics
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he extent to which Europe’s uniquely high level of political integration depends on the engagement and support of the region’s economically most powerful ‘semi-hegemonic’ state, Germany
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The European Union’s current crisis is symptomatic of a broader crisis or malaise of regional and international multilateralism
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he EU has proved an extraordinarily robust and crisis-resistant organization. It survived: the collapse of the European Defence Community project in 1954; France’s rejection of two British bids for accession in the 1960s; the empty-chair crisis precipitated by De Gaulle in 1965; the crisis concerning the UK’s contribution to the EU budget in the first half of the 1980s; the semi-destruction of the European Monetary System in 1992–1993; and the defeat of several proposed new treaties in referenda in Denmark, Ireland, France and the Netherlands since the end of the Cold War
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s serious as the EU’s crisis seemed to be in 2012, there was no unequivocal empirical evidence that the integration process had begun to unwind and the EU to disintegrate. Still no member state had ever left the EU, while several states were queuing to join it. Still no issue-area into which the EU’s competence had previ-ously been extended had been repatriated to the member states. There had still not been any observable formal or actual diminution of the EU’s decision-making and implemen-tation capacities
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far more regional organizations have failed, in the sense that they collapsed, than succeeded
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to ask to what extent there has been any change in the variables that have fuelled the integration process in the pas
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growing distrust among Europe’s big powers over ‘hard’ security issues is not at the root of Europe’s current crisis
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From a realist perspective à la Mearsheimer, European disintegration would hence most probably result from an American military withdrawal from Europe and a collapse of NATO
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uncertainty as to the durability or reliability of the American com-mitment to European military security has led to more rather than less security and defence cooperation between EU member states
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Classical intergovernmentalism focuses our attention on the evolution and degree of convergence of the stances of the French, German and British governments as determi-nants of the future of European integration. Trends in this trilateral relationship in the last two decades do not augur well for the EU’s future. Growing British Euro-scepticism has made Franco-German threats to exclude the UK from the integration process increas-ingly hollow — not because such threats cannot be implemented, but rather because the British government has been increasingly impervious to them
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The Franco-German ‘tandem’ can still exercise a decisive influence in the EU even after the post-Cold War enlargements from 12 to 27 member states, especially where the two governments form ‘opposing poles’ in the EU around which other member states can coalesce
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Intergovernmentalism implies that if a fundamental breakdown should occur in Franco-German relations, this would surely lead to European disintegration
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IR institutionalists argue that such organizations can achieve a high level of durabil-ity or permanence by helping states to overcome collective action problems, carrying out functions that these cannot (notably ‘facilitating the making and keeping of agreements through the provision of information and reductions in transaction costs’), monitoring compliance, reducing uncertainty and stabilizing expectations
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From an IR institutionalist perspective, the critical questions relating to the EU’s future are thus whether, especially in the enlarged EU, there are sufficiently pervasive common interests linking member states and whether, much as for intergovernmental-ists, the ‘most powerful states’ (Keohane and Nye, 1993: 18) — by which the US is as much meant as the ‘big three’ EU members — continue to support the integration pro-cess
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From an IR institutionalist as well as an intergovernmentalist perspective, the EU’s future seems likely to ride on the evolution of the Franco-German relationship,
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While the governments of “sovereign” member-states remain free to tear up treaties and walk away at any time, the constantly increasing costs of exit in the densely integrated European polity have rendered this option virtually unthinkable’
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For governments, perhaps. But when PM Cameron could not resolve this debate within his own party, he opted for a referendum he assumed he would win. It turned out to be thinkable for 52% of those who voted.
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Whilst historical-institutionalist scholars generally focus on constraints and the ‘“stickiness” of historically evolved insti-tutional arrangements’ and provide ‘explanations of continuity rather than change’, they nonetheless recognize that critical junctures or crises can bring about ‘relatively abrupt institutional change’
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‘punctuated equilibrium’
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‘As transnational exchange rises, so does the societal demand for supranational rules and organizational capacity to regulate’
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growing economic interdependence seems increasingly to fore-close other, unilateral policy options and to compel member governments to forge or acquiesce in closer integration
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Most federations fail (Lemco, quoted in Kelemen, 2007: 53). Multinational federa-tions, of which the EU is certainly an example, may be more prone to failure than others (Kelemen, 2007: 61)
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it is still not evident that European-level political party groups can ‘discipline’ or ‘moderate’ the positions taken by their national member parties on EU issues
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R institutionalism and, more so, clas-sical intergovernmentalism are more circumspect about the EU’s future. Viewed from these perspectives, European integration is a more contingent phenomenon, resting on the scope of member states’ common interests, which has arguably narrowed following successive waves of enlargement, and/or on the extent of hegemonic leadership or con-vergence of interests among the EU’s three big powers. The latter has diminished in as far as the UK has proved hostile to closer integration on most issues, leaving the EU’s fate in these perspectives increasingly in the hands of the Franco-German duo
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Contrasting post-2000 EU politics with that of the preceding half-century, I sug-gest that European integration is threatened by sharply rising hostility towards the EU in the domestic politics of the member states. Contrasting Europe with other regions, I argue that a ‘semi-hegemonic’, pro-integrationist Germany accounts for the uniquely high level of political integration in Europe, but that there is a significant and growing risk that Germany’s commitment to the European ‘project’ will wane in future
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Hegemonic stability theory derives the indispensability of hegemonic leadership for economic openness and stability from public-goods theory, holding that only large states have a material incentive to supply non-excludable ‘collective’ goods rather than to ‘free-ride’. Germany has strong economic and political incentives in the maintenance of a politically and economically stable Europe that its governments have historically seen as being best secured through integration
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In some member states, notably but not only in the UK, there was of course always significant domestic political opposition to European integra-tion. Nonetheless, in the post-Cold War and post-Maastricht Treaty period and especially during the last decade, hostility towards the EU and closer European integration has arguably transformed the domestic political context of EU decision-making to the point where one could more accurately speak of an ‘unpermissive dissensus’ that severely constrains the room for manoeuvre of member governments on EU issues
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At the same time as the balance of political power in many member states has tilted sharply towards ‘anti-European’ political forces, the capacity of governments to control the EU agenda in the member states — a prerequisite for the smooth functioning of the processes of negotiation and ratification of EU policies — has been eroded
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tension between the requirements or logic of domestic politics, on the one hand, and those of the EU (and international financial markets), on the other
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, Germany has increasingly visibly assumed the role of the Eurozone’s and the EU’s ‘indispensable’ member
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growing levels of economic exchange and economic interdependence do indeed create pressures on governments to institutionalize their economic ties. However, levels of political integration in East Asia, the Asia-Pacific and North America are not even remotely comparable to those in Europe
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It is rather the presence, in the form of Germany, of a pro-integrationist regional hegemon that best explains Europe’s comparatively very high level of political integra-tion
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What has made the EU exceptional in respect of regional political integration is neither an exceptionally high level of economic integration nor the presence of a ‘leading state’ as such, but rather the fact that, compared with other ‘lead-ing’ regional powers, the member state that occupies this role in the EU — Germany — has pursued a much more radical agenda involving the creation of a quasi-federal European state
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Germany needs good and close relations with other European states to avert the risk of diplomatic isolation and a resurgence of traditional ‘balance-of-power’ politics in the region
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EU policy choices do not disproportionately reflect German preferences. Compromise and consensus, not a German diktat, are the rules in EU decision-making
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As a regional paymaster, but hitherto not typically a disproportionately influential rule-maker, Germany was long more a ‘semi-hegemonic’ than ‘normal’ hegemonic power in the EU
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A Grand Coalition of pro-European Social and Christian Democrats, on the other hand, may, as the experience of other EU member states suggests, spawn the emergence and growth of new national-populist parties and/or, for electoral-political motives, the transformation into Euro-sceptical movements of those established parties that would then be in the opposition
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Since this article was written, the Alternativ für Deutschland party, a far-right populist, anti-immigrant, anti-EU, racist party, has made some inroads in local assemblies in Germany. They don't yet appear a major threat at the national level, though.
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the EU’s future is more contingent
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the EU is very vulnerable to domestic political backlashes manifested in the rise of national populism in the member states, particularly so long as few citizens in the member states share a strong European identity and there are no strong pan-European political parties that can effectively integrate and mediate their conflicting interests
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German domestic politics therefore matters more for the EU’s future than that of any other member state
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n more than 60 years, the European integration process has confronted and survived many crises. But it has never so far had to confront a crisis ‘made in Germany’.
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The plethora of regional and pluri- or minilateral trade agreements signed across the world over the last decade or so cannot disguise the fact that most regions in the world remain at best only very weakly politically integrated and regionalorganizations therefore cannot be relied upon to institutionalize and secure peaceful cooperation among their members.
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Is it possible that, as hegemonic stability theory would suggest, the roots of the gathering crisis of interna-tional multilateralism are to be found in the ‘end of the United States’ unipolar moment’ (Layne, 2006) and the arrival at long last of the long-anticipated decline in the capacity as well as willingness of the US to play the role of a stabilizing international hegemon?
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