European Integration. Mark Gilbert
and ambitions of the president of France, Charles de Gaulle. The great French leader was determined to transform the EEC into a vehicle for French foreign policy and was adamant, too, that the member states should remain the Community’s key decision makers. This “intergovernmentalist” approach clashed with the more “federalist” conception of the treaty preferred by the European Commission and other enthusiasts for supranational government, and also led de Gaulle to block the entry into the Community by Great Britain, which he regarded, not entirely falsely, as an American stooge. Chapter 5 deals with the indelible mark that de Gaulle left on the Community’s development, which was deeper than many historians of European integration have been wont to acknowledge.
Chapter 6, “Weathering Storms,” and chapter 7, “Consolidation and Innovation,” are dedicated to the development of the Community in the 1970s. In retrospect, it is something of a miracle and a powerful testament to the sense of cohesion achieved by the EEC that Western Europe did not revert to economic nationalism in the 1970s. Wildly swinging exchange rates, rampant inflation, low economic growth, and soaring oil prices were a recipe for protectionism. Instead, cooperation intensified. From December 1974, the EC’s heads of state and government began to meet on a regular basis in what became known as the European Council. This quintessentially intergovernmental body swiftly became the EC’s strategic decision-making body. The EEC admitted Great Britain, Denmark, and Ireland to membership in 1973. The EC also strove to control the damaging effects of fluctuating exchange rates by instituting the European Monetary System (EMS) in 1979, and the member states agreed that the EC Assembly should be directly elected, making its pretensions to be an authentic parliament less risible. A string of sentences by the Court of Justice had, by the end of the 1970s, established that the Treaty of Rome conferred rights directly on the citizens of the member states and that the regulations and directives made by Community institutions enjoyed supremacy over conflicting national laws. These achievements were remarkable given the economic and political turbulence of the 1970s.
The turning point in the history of European integration nevertheless undoubtedly comes between 1984 and 1992. A citizen transported forward in time from 1963 would have found the European Community (as it began to be called in the 1970s) of 1983 essentially similar to the EEC of twenty years before. Trade was much freer, but even trade in merchandise was still obstructed by a host of nontariff barriers. Physical barriers—passport and customs controls—still blocked the movement of citizens of EC member states from one country to another. The EC was primarily concerned with agriculture. In the early 1980s, agriculture took up nearly 80 percent of the Community’s budget, and the disagreements provoked by the costs of agricultural policy absorbed (it sometimes seemed) 99 percent of its energies.
Yet just ten years later, in 1993, our time traveler would have been astonished by the degree to which the Single European Act (SEA, 1986) and the Treaty on European Union (1992) were enabling people to move, buy, invest, and sell across the member states of what was now called the European Union. The traveler would, moreover, have been equally astonished at the policy responsibilities that had been transferred to the Community level and at the growing role played by the EU’s supranational institutions.
Chapters 8 and 9 describe how this transfer of responsibilities was decided and how and why the member states decided to move forward so far and so fast to “complete the single market” and, in the teeth of fierce British opposition, to complement the single market with a plan for a single currency, an autonomous central bank, and enhanced powers for the directly elected European Parliament. The shock of the unification of Germany was the decisive impulse for this acceleration in the pace and scale of European integration. The French historian Frédéric Bozo has rightly dubbed the Treaty on European Union that emerged at Maastricht a “quantum leap” for the integration project as a whole.3
The final two chapters are concerned with the EU as it has developed since Maastricht. In brief, it is a story of hopes dashed, or at least blunted. After Maastricht, and especially after the introduction of the euro in 2002, the EU enjoyed an Indian summer of favorable attention from the international punditocracy. The EU was depicted as an emerging superpower that would dominate the twenty-first century; an organization whose postnational institutions, environmental friendliness, commitment to peace and human rights, and general aura of sanctity made it an exemplar for the rest of the world—and especially for the “Toxic Texan” and the neoconservatives lurking within the Washington beltway. The EU would match the United States as a force in the world by virtue of its superior way of life, such commentators asserted boldly.4
Such panegyrics to the EU’s soft power attributes were taken seriously by some surprising people. The EU in the late 1990s and early 2000s generated a mood of progressivism that recalls (to those who have read both literatures) the enthusiasm of many liberal intellectuals and scholars across Europe for the League of Nations in the 1920s and early 1930s. In both cases, ideals ran into hard facts. In the 1930s, it was the rise of fascism that exposed the League’s weaknesses; in the 2000s, economic issues and recalcitrant voters exposed the shortcomings of what this book has dubbed “EUphoria.”
Chapters 10 and 11 deal with both this mood of optimism and with the EU’s dashed hopes. Chapter 10 surveys four of the policy areas in which the EU took major decisions between 1992 and 2009: monetary union; enlargement to central and southeast Europe; the EU’s dissensions over issues of foreign policy, especially the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which split it into two angrily divided camps; and the negotiation of the EU Constitution, which, in hindsight, was an excessively bold step forward. The Constitution’s defeat at the hands of French and Dutch voters in 2005, which opens chapter 11, was emblematic. Europe’s leaders ought to have realized that their own soaring hopes for the continent’s political future were not necessarily shared by their voters.
Chapter 11 concludes the book by examining the mood of deep crisis that has taken hold in the EU since the previous edition of this book was published and attempts to draw some tentative conclusions for the Union’s future. The period since the Lisbon Treaty entered into force on December 1, 2009, has been a grim decade of crisis management (or mismanagement), full of “alarums and excursions,” to cite the title of the best book on the EU’s difficulties in these years.5 The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune have peppered the EU from all sides, and the EU has taken a number of painful hits. The global economic slump almost caused the euro to crash; humanitarian disasters in Africa and Syria led to a flood of migrants arriving in the EU and tested the EU’s vaunted commitment to free movement of people to the breaking point; populist parties proclaiming their “sovereignist”—or nationalist—sympathies emerged. Most dramatically of all, as I mentioned above, the UK voted in June 2016 to leave the EU. “Brexit” has paradoxically shown the Union’s resilience, however. The British found it extremely difficult to disentangle themselves from the EU satisfactorily: it became a national psychodrama. Meanwhile, the twenty-seven remaining nations maintained a common front in the negotiations with the British: nobody tried to cut themselves a special deal before Britain departed.
Still, despite its resilience, it is useless to deny that the EU today is looking like tarnished goods. Its future may be predictable by Madame Sosostris’s “wicked pack of cards,” but lesser mortals without this precious theoretical tool should acknowledge that almost anything, including the disintegration of the EU (but also the transformation of the EU, or a large part of it, into a political entity that has taken on more of the key competences of a nation-state), is possible over the next five to ten years.6
This summary of the book’s