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Pan‐European Integration: A Real or Imagined Community?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Helen Wallace
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Extract

EUROPEAN INTEGRATION — THE PHRASE WAS USED SO EASILY TO connote a process that might, over a period, incorporate most of the continent. But in the four decades when the cold war segmented Europe the notion of extensive integration seemed irrelevant; in practice integration has been consolidated as an essentially West European phenomenon. The policy scope, the economic application, the security implications and the institutional frameworks of integration became concentrated around the core countries of Western Europe. Similarly the underpinning understandings about solidarity and mutual commitment were formulated on the assumption that a hard boundary separated those Europeans capable of being engaged from those who were prevented from so doing. There were few among those who studied this West European process who kept the wider Europe in mind. Ghiţa Ionescu was unusual in always keeping an eye open to developments in both parts of the continent, a legacy that all of us who worked with him cherish. The burden that he leaves us is of trying to figure out whether integration can be given substance as a process for pan-Europe.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , April 1997 , pp. 215 - 233
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1997

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References

1 The main academic statement of this is in Christian Deubner’s Deutsche Europapolitik: von Maastricht nach Kerneuropa?, Nomos Verlag, 1995. Advocacy of core Europe has become increasingly powerful in the practitioner debate in France, Germany and the Benelux countries.

2 For an analysis of British difficulties see Helen Wallace., ‘At Odds with Europe’, Political Studies, 1997 (forthcoming).

3 See Webb, Carole., ‘Theoretical Perspectives and Problems’, in Wallace, Helen, Wallace, William. and Webb, Carole (eds), Policy‐Making in the European Community, Chichester, Wiley, 1983, pp. 1–42 Google Scholar.

4 Deutsch, Karl W. et al., Political Community and the North Atlantic Area, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1957 Google Scholar.

5 It should be noted that Italy has remained remarkably different in many of its features from the Franco‐German core, retaining a large state industrial sector, a banking system resistant to external pressures, and a family‐dominated sector for small and medium‐sized firms, along with an unmodernized public administration. Part of the EMU debate is about whether Italy can take part without having first become structurally more convergent.

6 The key issues were both symbolic and substantive: Swedish snuff, the Nordic alcohol monopolies, Austrian Alpine transit, and the importance of inserting into the Treaty of Accession EU protection for high environmental standards in the acceding countries, even to the extent of leveraging promised changes in the EU acquis. See Avery, Graham., The Commission’s Perspective on the Enlargement Negotiations, Falmer, SEI Working Paper, 1995 Google Scholar.

7 For an attempt to disentangle the simplifications see Kaldor, Mary. and Vejvoda, Ivan., ‘Democratization in East and Central European Countries’, International Affairs, 01 1997, pp. 59–82 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A volume on the broader study will be published by Pinter.

8 Milward, Alan S. discusses these issues thoroughly in relation to the original Six members of the EC in The European Rescue of the Nation State, Routledge, London, 1992 Google Scholar.

9 Smith, Alasdair. et al., The European Union and Central and Eastern Europe: Pre‐Accession Strategies, Falmer, SEI Working Paper, 1996 Google Scholar.