European Integration. Mark Gilbert
statesmen and specialist texts in international relations theory, has ultimately derived from this renunciation of realpolitik.
By turning their backs on power politics, however, the nation-states of Europe did not suddenly become paragons of altruism. They remained protective of their economic, commercial, and political interests and invariably battled hard within the confines of the European Community to secure their goals. Toward the rest of the world, notably over agricultural trade, Europe has also regularly shown that it puts its own interests first, irrespective of the consequences for its principal partners and allies.
With hindsight, the most striking fact about the history of European integration is the tenacity with which the member states have defended their formal sovereign rights. The number of member states increased from the six original nations to nine in 1973, to ten in 1981, to twelve in 1986, to fifteen in 1995, to twenty-five in 2004, to twenty-seven in 2007, and to twenty-eight in 2013, while the sheer number of policies decided at the European level multiplied even more dramatically. However, the essence of the Community’s decision-making procedure has remained the same since the 1950s: major new policy departures are never made unless the member states have reached collective agreement. Only rarely does a “qualified majority” of member states compel their peers to accept a proposal against their will in the EU’s key legislature, the Council of the European Union. Moreover, when the member states negotiate amendments and additions to the treaties that are the EU’s de facto “constitution,” such changes must be agreed upon unanimously.
Indeed, the institutions and procedures of the European Union could not work for a week in the absence of the will to cooperate of the member states, especially the largest ones—Germany and France, but also Italy, Spain, and (since 2004) Poland. This salient fact, which is obvious, but not always fashionable to stress, means that the limit of European integration can be identified with some ease: it is that frontier beyond which lie the policy areas over which the member states of the Union are not prepared to relinquish sovereign power or, put more simply, do not wish the neighbors to intrude upon. The key political institution of the EU—the one where the big decisions are taken—is the European Council, the regular meetings of the member states’ heads of government that set the EU’s agenda, deal with its crises, and in essence, act as its cabinet.
This is not to deny that the Union possesses an important supranational dimension. It does. The European Commission, a committee of senior officials nominated by the member states, formulates, after consultation with the member states’ permanent representatives at Brussels, all proposals for new legislation and also keeps vigil over the member states’ implementation of European law. Since the 1992 Treaty on European Union (TEU), moreover, the power of the elected European Parliament to ratify and shape the decisions reached by the member states has significantly increased. The sentences of the Court of Justice of the European Union (formerly the European Court of Justice) have established the supremacy of European law over national law, and the Court provides for judicial review of an overzealous Commission’s actions, or, more usually, of member states too indolent in implementing Community law.
In the last analysis, concern over this transfer of sovereignty to the EU’s institutions was the principal reason why, in January 2020, the United Kingdom finally and messily ended its troubled membership of the European project. “Brexit,” in the last resort, was caused by a widespread perception among the British people that the EU’s powers to make law had gone “too far.” It was necessary to “take back control.” Naturally, this perception was not unanimous, which is why the Brexit issue has provoked such lacerating political conflict. The case of Britain, in fact, has illustrated just how far integration has actually proceeded. The British have discovered the hard way that they could not leave the EU without significant political, economic, and psychological costs. At the same time, they could not stay in Europe without paying a price that millions of its citizens regarded as unacceptable.
The British, incidentally, are by no means alone in feeling that the EU has exceeded its remit. Austria, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden all have right-wing populist parties that have gained in strength immensely since the previous edition of this book was published. To a greater or lesser degree, all of these parties oppose the EU and wish to reclaim sovereign power from Brussels, especially over immigration. Meanwhile, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland, while remaining nominally pro-EU (all three benefit financially from the EU’s regional development programs), have shown a spiky reluctance to adjust to the Union’s norms or principal policies.
Since the turn of this century, moreover, some of the EU’s most high-profile projects—the Lisbon program to make the EU the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010; the would-be EU Constitution rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005; the idea of a common EU foreign policy; the attempt to establish a common EU frontier; the EU’s single currency, the euro—have met with mixed success or outright failure. Such projects were often hailed as giant steps toward building Europe, but member states, or their peoples, pulled back from the implications of “more Europe.”
Supporters of European integration often say, echoing the words of the first president of the European Commission, the German diplomat Walter Hallstein, that European integration is like riding a bicycle: if you stop, you topple over. But it is also true, to develop the simile, that few cyclists have the muscles or the will to ascend the highest mountains and are quite content to spin along the foothills without breaking sweat. Since the introduction of the euro in 1999, the EU has launched itself at some stiff climbs: in every case, several countries’ legs have buckled, and the pack of riders has had to freewheel back downhill.
In other words, the aura of success that has enveloped the process of European integration for most (though not all) of the period since the 1950s is dissipating. If it disappears, there will be repercussions for how the story of European integration is told. The process of European integration is no more immune from revision than any other historical pro-cess.2 The years since 2003 have revealed long-standing structural flaws in the so-called European construction, and a straightforward narrative of success, which Surpassing Realism was, on the whole, today appears difficult to justify. A history of the European Union, to be plausible, is one that, as well as capturing the authentic novelty of the process of integration and the indisputable idealism that it has engendered, looks back from the EU’s present and traces the causes of the current malaise—for malaise there is.
In common with the book’s previous two versions, the text is structured chronologically. However, the similarity of method should not disguise the quite significant changes that have been introduced to the book’s contents. Chapter 2, which previously dealt with the five-year period between the war’s end in May 1945 and May 1950, when French foreign minister Robert Schuman proposed establishing an economic community for coal and steel products, now gives much more space to developments before 1945 and concludes with the decision to launch the Council of Europe—a body that was intended by many to be the first step toward a federal United States of Europe—in May 1949.
The third chapter deals with the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and the abortive European Defense Community (EDC). Following the Schuman Declaration, the ECSC treaty was negotiated by six West European states (Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany); these same countries sought to construct a defense community, working in harmony with NATO, which was destined to evolve into a federal European political community. The French National Assembly shot this plan down in August 1954: foreign policy and defense cooperation has ever proved to be a thorny topic for the European project.
By March 1957, however, “the Six” had nevertheless negotiated new treaties to promote cooperation in the field of nuclear energy and research, and—crucially—to establish the European Economic Community (EEC), which was a customs union for industrial and agricultural products. The negotiation of the EEC was a hard-fought battle, and many, notably the British government, underestimated the will of the Six to make the necessary compromises. These two treaties, especially the EEC, are the subject matter of chapter 4.
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