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The State of the (European) Union: From the Single Market to Maastricht, from Singular Events to General Theories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Jeffrey J. Anderson
Jeffrey J. Anderson
Affiliation:
Brown University
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Abstract

This review article examines four recent volumes on the European Union, each of which takes as its substantive and theoretical starting point the relaunching of the European Community in the mid-1980s around the single market initiative. Taken together, they provide a comprehensive account of the momentous events leading up to the Maastricht summit. They also present an accurate reflection of the current state of the subfield. Their basic research agenda, a continuation of traditional approaches in Community studies, revolves around the “big bangs” of integration and the conventional models of neofunctionalism and intergovemmentalism. This scholarly continuity generates unwelcome consequences for the selection of research puzzles and for the robustness and reach of the findings. As a remedy, several strategies—some methodological, others theoretical—are outlined for generating new insights into the growing complexity of the European Union.

Type
Review Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , April 1995 , pp. 441 - 465
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1995

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References

1 In Keohane and Hoffmann, see Peter Ludlow, “The European Commission”; Wolfgang Wessels, “The EC Council”; and G. Frederico Mancini, “The Making of a Constitution for Europe.” In Sbragia, see B. Guy Peters, “Bureaucratic Politics and the Institutions of the European Community”; Martin Shaprio, “The European Court of Justice”; and Alberta Sbragia, “Thinking about the European Future: The Uses of Comparison.”

2 Part 2 of the Adams volume is especially good here, with contributions from several experts on business strategies in the new internal market. Readers will also find useful information in part 2 of Swann.

3 Shirley Williams, “Sovereignty and Accountability in the European Community,” in Keohane and Hoffmann; and Joseph Weiler, “After Maastricht: Community Legitimacy in Post-1992 Europe,” in Adams.

4 In Swann, see Christopher Milner and David Allen, “The External Implications of 1992”; and David Allen, “The European Community and the New Europe.” See part 3 of the Adams volume for excellent chapters by William Wallace, John Jackson, Gary Saxonhouse, and John Steinbruner and Susan Woodward.

5 Dennis Swann, “The Social Charter and Other Issues,” in Swann; Peter Lange, “The Politics of the Social Dimension,” in Sbragia; and Stephan Leibfried, “Europe's Could-Be Social State,” in Adams.

6 Moravcsik, “Negotiating the Single European Act,” in Keohane and Hoffmann; and Cameron, “The 1992 Initiative: Causes and Consequences,” in Sbragia. A comprehensive and insightful but essentially atheoretical discussion of the origins and implications of the SEA can be found in David Allen, “European Union, the Single European Act, and the 1992 Programme,” in Swann.

7 This explanation is advanced by Sandholtz, Wayne and Zysman, John, “1992: Recasting the European Bargain,” World Politics 42 (October 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Preference convergence around the SEA required two major transformations in domestic politics: Thatcher's 1979 accession to power in Britain and the conversion of the French Socialist government to market orthodoxy in 1983.

9 Moravcsik (fn. 6), 68. The “exception” was Britain's acceptance of qualified majority voting on internal market matters.

10 Moravcsik (fn. 6) overstates the ability of governments to conserve sovereignty in the aftermath of grand bargains. Contrary to his assertion that the SEA blocked related moves into the field of monetary integration (p. 69), the European Council, drawing on references to economic and monetary union in the preamble of the SEA as well as in Article 102a, asked the Commission in June 1988 to take up the issue and develop concrete proposals. The ensuing report provided the essential building blocks for the section of the Treaty on European Union relating to EMU. There is also evidence that the single market initiative quickly “spilled over” into concrete proposals for a common energy policy and into increased financial commitments and Community competencies in structural policy. The use of qualified majority voting in the Council of Ministers also soon expanded, albeit informally, beyond the limits established by the SEA. For detailed and illuminating discussions of these linkages, see Dennis Swann, “The Single Market and Beyond,” in Swann; Brian Tew, “Onwards to EMU,” in Swann; Wolfgang Wessels, “The EC Council: The Community's Decisionmaking Center,” in Keohane and Hoffmann; Gary Marks, “Structural Policy in the European Community,” in Sbragia; and Weiler (fn. 3).

11 A fine discussion of the functional relationship between the single market and a single currency can be found in Tommasso Padoa-Schioppa, “Key Questions on Economic and Monetary Union,” in Adams.

12 Cameron (fn. 6), 63; emphasis in original. Prior to 1986 the European Council was neither a Community institution denned in the Rome treaty nor a supranational institution along the lines of the Commission. It was included in the treaties by the SEA, although its precise role was left undetermined.

13 Cameron (fn. 6), 65.

14 Sbragia discusses the significance of the EC's treaty foundations (fn. 1).

15 For an alternative account of Community bargaining that places the emphasis squarely on institutions, see Martin, Lisa, “International and Domestic Institutions in the EMU Process,” Economics and Politics 5 (July 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Moravcsik (fn. 6), 69–75.

17 Moravcsik develops some of these arguments in “Preferences and Power in the European Community: A Liberal Intergovernmentalist Approach,” Journal of Common Market Studies 31 (December 1993)Google Scholar. Some might find his image of domestic politics peculiarly pluralist; he depicts a world in which “groups articulate preferences; governments aggregate them” and in which “the net economic interest of producers and popular preferences” determine national preferences (pp. 483 and 517, respectively).

18 See, for example, Wallace, Helen, Wallace, William, and Webb, Carole, eds., Policy Making in the European Community (New York: John Wiley, 1983)Google Scholar.

19 As quoted in LaPalombara, Joseph, “Parsimony and Empiricism in Comparative Politics,” in Holt, Robert and Turner, John, eds., The Methodology of Comparative Research (New York: Free Press, 1970), 128Google Scholar.

20 The changes of heart in France over political union and in Germany with respect to monetary union can be traced broadly to the end of the cold war and specifically to German unification. See Ernst-J. Mestmacker, “The New Germany in the New Europe,” in Adams; Hoffmann, Stanley, “French Dilemmas and Strategies in the New Europe,” in Keohane, Robert, Nye, Joseph, and Hoffmann, Stanley, eds., After the Cold War: International Institutions and State Strategies in Europe, 1989–1991 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Jeffrey Anderson and John Goodman, “Mars or Minerva? A United Germany in a Post—Cold War Europe,” in Keohane, Nye, and Hoffmann.

21 Martin (fn. 15) comes to a similar conclusion in her analysis of the bargaining dynamics associated with EMU at Maastricht (p. 134).

22 To identify the lowest common denominator in a bargaining situation, one must be able to establish the reservation prices of the negotiating parties. For an outside observer, this is no mean feat, since each party has an interest in concealing its position in order to increase the probability that the final agreement will represent an improvement upon its reservation price. However, a student of inter-governmental institutionalism must have a precise and accurate estimate of reservation prices; other-wise, it becomes very difficult to distinguish cases in which exclusionary threats are both operative and effective from those that represent simple, albeit well-concealed, lowest-common-denominator outcomes. The increased latitude of member states to opt out will further complicate the task of identifying reservation prices. My thanks to Celeste Wallander for suggesting this point and encouraging me to develop it.

23 See Haas, Ernst, The Obsolescence of Regional Integration Theory (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1975)Google Scholar.

24 The most celebrated case involves remarks attributed to Delors in early 1992; he prophesied reduced influence for small members in a widened and deepened Community. Danish opponents of the TEU used this story to strengthen their case in the June referendum campaign. This incident is all the more remarkable because the Commission, acting on personal instructions from Delors, had created an internal working group in January to prevent self-inflicted wounds of this nature. By way of a negative example, the episode underscores the importance of Commission leadership to the integration process, a point stressed in convincing fashion by Ludlow (fn. 1). It also points up the difficulty of incorporating leadership quality into models of the integration process, since it varies not only across Commission presidencies but also within any given Commission. How else to explain the rapid descent of the Delors Commission from far-sighted brilliance to astonishing, short-sighted ineptitude?

25 The Danish parliament rejected the SEA in 1986; a popular referendum overruled its decision. These roles reversed in 1992, with near fatal consequences for the TEU.

26 To their credit, Sandholtz and Zysman (fn. 7) argue that “1992 has so far been a project of elites. … [The] elites are unlikely to maintain that monopoly” (p. 127).

27 See Putnam, Robert, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games,” International Organization 42 (Summer 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Evans, Peter, Jacobson, Harold, and Putnam, Robert, eds., Double-Edged Diplomacy: International Bargaining and Domestic Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

28 Martin (fn. 15) shows that ratification requirements associated with the TEU endowed domestic actors with the opportunity to influence bargaining over treaty revisions. For a more general discussion of international relations, domestic politics, and ratification, see Milner, Helen, “International Theories of Cooperation among Nations: Strengths and Weaknesses,” World Politics 44 (April 1992), 492–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 The subject of “social legitimacy” is explored in depth by Weiler (fn. 3). On citizen support for European integration, see Eichenberg, Richard and Dalton, Russell, “Europeans and the European Community: The Dynamics of Public Support for European Integration,” International Organization 47 (Autumn 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The authors present a methodologically sophisticated quantitative analysis of public attitudes toward the EC and conclude that the link between citizen consensus and supranational bargains will grow increasingly stronger.

30 See inter alia Lijphart, Arend, “Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method,” American Political Science Review 65 (September 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Przeworski, Adam and Teune, Henry, The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry (New York: Wiley, 1970)Google Scholar; and Ragin, Charles, The Comparative Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

31 Sbragia (fn. 1). Back in the 1980s William Wallace endorsed “the federal analogy” as a means of understanding Community political interactions, but he declined to elaborate. Wallace, “Less Than a Federation, More Than a Regime: The Community as a Political System,” in Wallace, Wallace, and Webb (fn. 18), 406–10.

32 See the literature on Germany's “joint task” legislation of the late 1960s, which introduced cooperative federal policy-making arrangements in the fields of regional and agricultural policy, as well as in other areas. Scharpf, Fritz et al. , Politikverflechtung (Kronberg/Ts., FRG: Scriptor Verlag GmbH, 1976)Google Scholar.

33 The first scholar to investigate the parallels between German federalism and the EC was Scharpf, Fritz, “The Joint-Decision Trap: Lessons from German Federalism and European Integration,” Public Administration 66 (Autumn 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 The structural funds consist of the European Social Fund, the guidance section of the Common Agricultural Program, the European Regional Development Fund, and (as of Maastricht) the cohesion fund. In combination, they seek to improve the spatial distribution of investment and social capital within the Community. See Marks (fn. 10).

35 For a discussion of “most similar systems” and “most different systems” research designs, see Przeworski and Teune (fn. 30).

36 Much of the best literature in comparative politics and comparative political economy makes effective use of comparisons employing two to six cases. Examples include (but are not limited to) Heclo, Hugh, Modem Social Politics in Britain and Sweden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974)Google Scholar; Tarrow, Sidney, Between Center and Periphery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Hall, Peter, Governing the Economy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Katzenstein, Peter, Small States in World Markets (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985)Google Scholar. The comparative case method also plays a prominent role in leading studies in international relations; see, e.g., Snyder, Jack, Myths of Empire (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

37 For a balanced discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of this approach, as well as concrete methodological guidelines for constructing a valid (or “cotenable”) counterfactual claim, see Fearon, James D., “Counterfactuals and Hypothesis Testing in Political Science,” World Politics 43 (January 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Ibid., 176.

39 The impact of institutions is usually assumed rather than tested empirically. Sandholtz and Zysman (fn. 7) contend that bargaining dynamics in the 1980s were not at all similar to those in the 1950s precisely because the supranational institutions created by the elite bargains of the 1950s helped to fashion agreements in the 1980s. Moravcsik (fn. 6) counters that the predominantly inter-governmental character of bargaining in both periods overshadows this difference. Neither article tests the assertion in an explicit paired comparison. Of course, a comparison of the Rome treaty and the SEA cannot completely isolate the putative impact of institutions; there remain important differences between the two cases, such as the volume of international capital flows. The careful researcher is unlikely to be overwhelmed by such complications, however. To reiterate a theme of the preceding para-graphs, methodological rigor is a relative term, and the goal should be to increase it wherever possible.

40 See Riddell, Peter, The Thatcher Government (London: Martin Robertson, 1983)Google Scholar.

41 For example, the shift to qualified majority voting in the 1980s, which predated the SEA, changed the dynamics of intergovernmental coalition building and negotiation within the Council of Ministers. It also prompted an ongoing transformation of interest-group lobbying strategies, which in turn will influence Council bargaining and perhaps the integration process itself. Since interest associations can no longer count on the national veto in the Council to protect their interests, they have begun to seek out allies among their foreign counterparts. The intent of these transnational group alliances is to encourage the building of qualified majorities in the Council that are compatible with their interests. See Jeffrey Anderson, “German Industry and the European Community in the 1990s,” in Volker Berghahn and Jeffrey Anderson, eds., European Strategies of German Big Business in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Berg, forthcoming). My thanks to Lisa Martin for encouraging me to develop the broader point contained in this paragraph.

42 See also Goodman, John, “Do All Roads Lead to Brussels?” in Ornstein, Norman and Perlman, Mark, eds., Political Power and Social Change (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1991)Google Scholar.

43 Peters (fn. 1), 76.

44 Marks (fn. 10).

45 Ibid., 221. In his study of EC social policy, Lange (fn. 5) identifies similar dynamics, which are leading to “a neopluralist Europe [characterized by] temporary coalitions of interests and governments” (p. 256). On EC neopluralism, see Philippe Schmitter and Wolfgang Streeck, “Organized Interests and the Europe of 1992,” in Ornstein and Perlman (fn. 42), 46–67.

46 In their excellent introduction, Keohane and Hoffmann venture a similar conclusion and list several alternatives that constitute the core of what follows here. Unfortunately, none of their fellow authors takes up the challenge. Robert Keohane and Stanley Hoffmann, “Institutional Change in Europe in the 1980s,” in Keohane and Hoffmann, 9.

47 Moravcsik (fn. 17) argues that “the most fundamental task facing a theoretical account of European integration is to explain these bargains” (p. 473). He proposes to study the EC/EU as an international regime for policy coordination. To explain and predict the integrative bargains on which the regime rests, he employs a sequential theoretical framework based on national preference formation and interstate strategic interaction. His framework generates plausible, often insightful post hoc explanations, but its complexity and huge informational requirements render it less useful for predicting the future course of integration.

48 Sandholtz and Zysman (fn. 7).

49 See, for example, Moravcsik (fn. 6); and Burley, Anne-Marie and Mattli, Walter, “Europe before the Court: A Political Theory of Legal Integration,” International Organization 47 (Winter 1993), 52nCrossRefGoogle Scholar. The role that Sandholtz and Zysman (fn. 7) attribute to the international economy as “trigger” is not consistent with classical neofunctionalist dynamics.

50 For example, Keohane and Hoffmann (fn. 46) argue, “[This] hypothesis indeed would have predicted the strengthening of European institutions, but that revival could have occurred at any time after 1973” (p. 23). Sandholtz and Zysman clearly state that the international trigger was necessary, but insufficient in and of itself to elicit the SEA response.

51 Classic examples of “challenge-response” studies in comparative political economy include Katzenstein, Peter, ed., Between Power and Plenty (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Gourevitch, Peter, Politics in Hard Times (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Gourevitch, Peter et al. , Unions and Economic Crisis (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984)Google Scholar; and Lange, Peter, Ross, George, and Vannicelli, Mauricio, Unions, Change, and Crisis (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1982)Google Scholar.

52 Garrett, Geoffrey, “International Cooperation and Institutional Choice: The European Community's Internal Market,” International Organization 46 (Spring 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a critique, see Burley and Mattli (fn. 49), 50–51.

53 Garrett, Geoffrey and Weingast, Barry, “Ideas, Interests, and Institutions: Constructing the European Community's Internal Market,” in Goldstein, Judith and Keohane, Robert, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

54 Tsebelis, George, “The Power of the European Parliament as a Conditional Agenda Setter,” American Political Science Review 88 (March 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Sandholtz and Zysman (fn. 7), 107n.

56 As with any analytical framework, there is a skill in knowing when to use it. Readers will find a vigorous yet nuanced defense of the approach in Tsebelis, George, Nested Games (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990)Google Scholar, chap. 1.

57 See Rhodes, R. A. W., Beyond Westminster and Whitehall: The Subcentral Governments of Britain (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988)Google Scholar; idem, The National World of Local Government (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1986)Google Scholar.

58 Keohane and Hoffmann (fn. 46), 10.

59 See Putnam (fn. 27), 435.

60 See, for example, Marks (fn. 10). See also Liesbet Hooghe, ed., EU Cohesion Policy and National Networks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

61 In a recent article, Moravcsik advances a similar argument based on a principal-agent model of domestic politics. See Andrew Moravcsik, “Why the European Community Strengthens the State: Domestic Politics and International Cooperation” (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York, September 1994). This paper is part of an emerging debate over whether the EC expands or restricts the autonomy of the member governments; see also Gary Marks, Liesbet Hooghe, and Kermit Blank, “Multilevel Politics and Regional Mobilization in the European Union,” and Mitchell Smith, “From the Third Image to the Second: The European Union and British Employment Policy” (Papers presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York, September 1994). Regrettably, the debate is in danger of being miscast. Those who see state autonomy expanding stress the capacity of international negotiations and institutions to redistribute domestic political resources in favor of national executives vis-à-vis interest groups. Those who see mainly constraints on state autonomy focus on shifts in the distribution of competences and authority between the national and the supranational levels. Clearly, the two conclusions are hardly incompatible. States may in fact be gaining autonomy from certain domestic groups while simultaneously losing autonomy to the EU. The implications of this seeming paradox are worth exploring.

62 For empirical evidence drawn from one of the structural funds, see Anderson, Jeffrey, “Skeptical Reflections on a ‘Europe of Regions’: Britain, Germany, and the European Regional Development Fund,” Journal of Public Policy 10 (October-December 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 The new institutionalism embraces two schools—historical and rational choice—that share much the same research agenda. For an overview of the two, as well as contributions written in the historical vein, see Sven Steinmo, Thelen, Kathleen, and Longstreth, Frank, eds., Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar. A work representative of the rational choice tradition is North, Douglass, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64 Writing in the early 1980s, Wallace, Wallace, and Webb (fn. 18) advocated a policy approach to the Community that directed attention away from the Community's formal institutions (pp. 57–58).

65 Cameron (fn. 6). Sbragia's discussion (fn. 1) of the Community as a treaty-based organization constitutes an exception. Yet the fact remains that only one of the thirty-seven Contibutors to these volumes focuses on a theory-informed empirical puzzle about the relationship between EC international institutions and domestic politics. See the excellent chapter by John Woolley, “Policy Credibility and European Monetary Institutions,” in Sbragia.

66 On “constitutionalization” in the EC, see Mancini (fn. 1); Shapiro (fn. 1); Burley and Mattli (fn. 49); and Weiler, Joseph, “The Transformation of Europe,” Yale Law Journal 100 (June 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Martin (fn. 15).

68 This subject is one of several addressed by the Consortium for 1992, led by Peter Lange and Gary Marks; an edited volume is expected sometime in 1995. See also Paul Pierson and Stephan Leibfried, eds., Fragmented Social Policy: The EC Social Dimension in Comparative Perspective (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, forthcoming).

69 This is a central claim of historical institutionalists; see fn. 63. The authors in Keohane, Nye, and Hoffmann (fn. 20) discuss numerous examples in which the post-1989 foreign economic and security strategies of the U.S., the major Western European powers, and the Soviet Union flowed logically from change and continuity in international institutions generated by the end of the cold war. Yet their attempts to link institutions to the formation of national preferences rely on a less substantial body of empirical evidence. For example, Goodman and I (fn. 20) argue that Germany's commitments to various international organizations are “embedded in the very definition of state interests …; they [are] ingrained, even assumed” (p. 60). In effect, we infer this conclusion from interview data and an assessment of postunification state behavior. To document it conclusively, we would have to show that West German interests prior to membership in the EC or NATO were measurably different from what they are today, a task we do not explicitly undertake.

70 My discussion focuses on the effects of membership versus nonmembership. Similar questions could be generated about the impact of qualitative changes in membership, such as those created by big bangs in integration, or of participation versus nonparticipation in certain Community policy regimes. See Sandholtz, Wayne, “Choosing Union: Monetary Politics and Maastricht,” International Organization 47 (Winter 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and David Cameron, “British Exit, German Voice, French Loyalty: Defection, Domination, and Cooperation in the 1992–93 ERM Crisis” (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., September 1993).

71 The best treatment on both counts is Bulmer, Simon and Paterson, William, The Federal Republic of Germany and the European Community (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987)Google Scholar. See also George, Stephen, An Awkward Partner: Britain in the European Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and George, Stephen, ed., Britain and the European Community: The Politics of Semi-Detachment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

72 Naturally, the advent of a multitrack EU undermines the uniformity of the supranational institutional context.