Major Nation-States in the European Union & Bacon/Longman representative. Major Nation-States in the European Union 12 T his chapter is about the efforts to create Europe, a process

J. Richard Piper

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Major Nation-States in the European Union

12

This chapter is about the efforts to createEurope, a process that continues today asthe European Union drafts a new constitu-

tional treaty as its governing document andundertakes a dramatic eastward enlargement,adding ten new members in 2004. The story istruly a momentous one, representing perhapsthe most dramatic large-scale transformation ofthe past half-century in international politics;but it remains an unfinished story.

Europe gave birth to most of our contem-porary conceptions of what it means to be“modern” or “developed”: the nation-state,democracy, and both capitalistic and socialisticversions of economic modernity. However, italso gave rise to aggressive nationalism andgenocide, leading noted author Mark Mazowerto term it the “dark continent” (with a touch ofirony in that Europeans have traditionallyassigned that label to Africa). Since World WarII, the continent that first spawned the nation-state has moved further than any other area ofthe world to develop a Union that entails sub-stantial pooling of sovereignty among itsnation-states and has sought to adapt the insti-tutions of that Union to evolving modern con-

ceptions of democracy and an increasinglyglobal, market-oriented, economy. Why andhow the European Union has developed as ithas are the prime topics of this chapter. How-ever, the first step is to place the emergence ofthe European Union in its appropriate contextby discussing briefly the historical backdrop:the emergence of European nation-states,democracy, and capitalistic and socialistic ver-sions of modernity.

THE EMERGENCEOF EUROPEAN NATION-STATES,DEMOCRACY, CAPITALISM, AND SOCIALISM

Europe was the birthplace of the concept ofstate sovereignty and nation-states. Jean Bodin,a French political philosopher of the sixteenthcentury, is usually credited as the father of themodern notion of sovereignty, or supremeauthority vested in the state.1 Even beforeBodin, however, a number of European mon-archs had succeeded in asserting authority over

Chapter 2 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE

EUROPEAN UNION

“Europe has never existed. It is not the addition of national sovereignties ina conclave that creates an entity. One must genuinely create Europe.”

—Jean Monnet, often described as the “father” of the modern European Union,1952, cited by Elizabeth Knowles, Twentieth Century Quotations (1998), 270.

CHAPTER 2: The Development of the European Union 13

territories roughly comparable to those of mod-ern nation-states, amid the tangled web of polit-ical jurisdictions (often overlapping) thatprevailed in Europe after the fall of the RomanEmpire (476). Sizeable monarch-dominatedterritorial states had emerged gradually duringthe Middle Ages, often in tandem with devel-oping broad popular senses of shared historyand culture and eventually “national” languages.Between about 1000 and 1600, England andFrance became preeminent examples of suchdevelopment. Yet even there, the type ofnational identity and citizenship associated withmodern nation-states did not flourish until theera of the French Revolution and Napoleon I(1789–1815), with pockets of resistance evenafter that time. The process occurred even laterin Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe.Therefore, the modern nation-states have beena relatively recent phenomenon, even inEurope, where they first appeared. The incom-pleteness is due not only to resistance by minor-ity “nations” to assimilation into a dominantnational identity but also to immigration intoEuropean nation-states of new groups possess-ing distinctive national-ethnic identities andrevival of once latent national-ethnic feelingsamong some groups.2

Democracy possesses much earlier originsin European history than does the nation-state,because democracy in the sense of “rule by thepeople” (its literal meaning in ancient Greek),through direct participation of citizens in townmeetings, dates back to ancient Athens in thefifth century before the Christian era. How-ever, authoritarian governments, dominatedby unelected executives subject to few con-straints but lacking the nearly total controlover society claimed by modern totalitariangovernments, prevailed in European politicallife in most locales most of the time until thetwentieth century. Moreover, the ancientGreek form of democracy had not assignedpriority to protecting individual rights, hadmade no provisions for representation, and had

established no “constitutional” checks and bal-ances among governmental institutions, all keyelements of most modern conceptions of con-stitutional democracy.3

The English Magna Carta (1215) and Par-liament (late thirteenth century) provided earlybut limited models for modern constitutionaldemocratic concepts of guaranteed rights andpolitical representation. The Levellers of theEnglish Civil War (1642–1649) revived andmodernized a participatory version of democ-racy, while the Diggers of the same periodadvanced an early version of socialistic democ-racy. However, both groups were unsuccessfulin their own time, succumbing to the superiorpower of parliamentary and military elites ledby Oliver Cromwell.4 Even the French Revolu-tion of 1789–1799, despite its importance in thedevelopment of modern democracy, gave rise inthe short term to a new form of authoritariangovernment under Napoleon I.5 Modernconstitutional democracies, possessing uni-versal suffrage, competitive elections, and exten-sive protections of individual rights, were totake shape on a wide basis in Europe only in theearly twentieth century, within the frameworkof emergent nation-states. Moreover, theydeveloped in a long “wave” that swept fromnorthwestern Europe across the Continent inthe nineteenth and early twentieth centuries andthen receded after World War I, only toadvance again in a “second wave” after WorldWar II and then a “third wave” after 1974.6

Capitalism, a set of ideas and an economicsystem based on private ownership of property,pursuit of material gain, and market exchangesof goods and services, emerged gradually out ofthe European feudal system that prevailed inmost of Europe during the Middle Ages.Feudalism lacked the capitalistic idea of mate-rial gain as a normal pursuit of daily life andoperated primarily through agricultural manors,where most of the population lived and workedas serfs to the lords of the manors. In the townsand the few existing cities, guilds tightly

organized the daily lives of artisans. As RobertHeilbroner has emphasized, “society ran by cus-tom and tradition. The lords gave orders, andproduction waxed and waned accordingly.”7

[Before the capitalist revolution] “society ran bycustom and tradition. The lords gave orders, andproduction waxed and waned accordingly.”

Economist Robert Heilbroner,The Worldly Philosophers (1972), 27.

The capitalist “revolution” began trans-forming the basic feudal patterns in Europelong before it came to be conceptualized clearly.It did not crystallize into a clear model untilAdam Smith, a Scottish philosopher, articulatedit as such in his Wealth of Nations, originally pub-lished in 1776. Yet in its various forms, capital-ism was to reshape Europe and the world duringthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries.8

In the political field, classical liberalideologies, advocating free-market capitalismunder the slogan of laissez-faire (leave usalone), served as the foundation of some of thenew political parties and interest groups devel-oping in a democratizing Europe. Particularlyin northwestern Europe, classical liberal par-ties and interest groups enjoyed wide supportfrom the rising business and professionalclasses in society. However, traditional aristo-crats and established church leaders (especiallyRoman Catholic Church leaders) advanced atraditional conservative ideology, usuallysuggesting the need for some governmentaland religious constraints on capitalist devel-opment to curb excessive materialism and sus-tain those who were left behind by free-market competition. Meanwhile, Karl Marx,Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Beatrice and SidneyWebb, and others spawned a powerful Euro-pean socialist movement in the nineteenthcentury that envisioned a modernity based oncommon ownership of property and social and

economic equality, rather than the capitalismof Adam Smith or the classical liberal partiesand interest groups. Socialists nearly alwaysdrew strong support from the labor unionmovement that was emerging in Europe. “Theproletarians [members of the working class]have nothing to lose but their chains. Theyhave a world to win. Working men of all coun-tries, unite!” proclaimed Karl Marx andFriedrich Engels; and many workers inEurope responded to their call and similarcalls from other socialist leaders. From themid-nineteenth century onward, strugglesover distribution and the nature of economicmodernity in the democratizing nation-statesof Europe came commonly to take the form ofa partisan and interest group struggle in whichthe “left” (socialist and later communist par-ties and allied labor unions) pressed for someform of socialistic modernity, the classicalliberals in the “center” or “center-right”advocated capitalistic modernity, and thetraditional conservatives of the “right”invoked traditionalism (usually including reli-gion) to restrain capitalism and avoid social-ism. Though capitalistic patterns of privateownership, markets, and pursuit of profitscame to predominate in modern WesternEurope, these were substantially modifiedafter the 1880s by expanding social welfareprograms that provided a social safety net ofunemployment compensation, pensions, andhealth care for much of the population, oftenreflecting compromises among socialists, lib-erals, and conservatives. Eventually, consider-able consensus developed in support of aEuropean version of economic modernity thatalso involved considerable regulation andsteering of national economies by nationalgovernments. The result has been what manyobservers have termed “mixed economies”that blend elements of classical liberal capital-ism with governmental social welfare pro-grams and regulations.9

14 PART ONE: THE EUROPEAN UNION

the United States of America, and faced dimin-ishment of their influence in a bipolar world oftwo superpowers (the United States and theSoviet Union) confronting each other globallyin a Cold War, an increasing number of theirleaders began to consider seriously ideas ofpooling sovereignty and downplaying at leastsome aspects of nationalism. Some profferedvisions of a United States of Europe, eitherestablished on a federal basis with central insti-tutions sharing powers with states (roughly onthe American model) from the outset orbrought about by a functionalist approach inwhich member states would pool sovereignty inonly a few select sectors, with cooperation“spilling over” gradually into others, creating“ever closer union.”10

“. . . the understanding between European nationsmust be brought about . . . under a system offederal union fully compatible with respect fortraditions and for the characteristics peculiar toeach people.”

French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, 1932, citedin Timothy Bainbridge, The Penguin Companion to

European Union (1998), 23.

EARLY STEPS TOWARD WESTEUROPEAN INTEGRATION,1945–1958A widespread desire to avoid future world warsspawned by European nation-state conflictsplayed a major part in stimulating increasedinterest in European integration after WorldWar II. Such feeling was particularly strong inFrance and Germany, which had fought eachother in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870,World War I, and World War II. The newchancellor of West Germany emphasized in aspeech to his parliament in November 1949,“The Franco-German question is truly the

“The proletarians [members of the workingclass] have nothing to lose but their chains.They have a world to win. Working men of allcountries, unite!”

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848).

Amid pressures of nation-building, democ-ratization, and economic modernization,intense political-economic-military rivalriesamong the major European states (mostlynation-states by the late 1800s, though Austriaand Russia remained multi-ethnic empires intothe twentieth century) led to periodic wars thatproved increasingly disruptive of political, eco-nomic, and social life. Although a multipolarbalance of power system (multiple power cen-ters checking and balancing one another’spower) among major European states came tostructure global politics from the Peace ofWestphalia in 1648 into the twentieth century,World War I (1914–1918) and World War II(1939–1945) illustrated the sometimes devastat-ing consequences of organizing European lifearound a nation-state system in which govern-mental leaders regularly sought to mobilizetheir national citizens for the use of force toredress grievances emergent from developmen-tal crises and/or past wars.

After World War I, a few European lead-ers, such as Aristide Briand of France, soughtto move Europe beyond nationalism to aUnited States of Europe. Briand called for “asystem of federal union fully compatible withrespect for traditions and for the characteristicspeculiar to each people,” but to little effect.The Great Depression of 1929–1939 sparkedintensifying nationalism and sharp nation-statepolitical, military, and economic conflicts onthe road to World War II. After 1945, as WestEuropeans surveyed the massive destructionand loss of lives from the two world wars, pon-dered the political and economic successes of


keystone in the development of Europe.” Desireto avoid another European war was also verystrong in Italy, which had gained little frombeing on the winning side in World War I andhad lost in World War II under Mussolinibefore abandoning its alliance with Nazi Ger-many. Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxem-bourg, small nation-states that had been majorWorld War II battlegrounds, were, of course,looking for means to avoid future Franco-Ger-man battles on their territory.

“The Franco-German question is truly the key-stone in the development of Europe.”

West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer,November 15, 1949, cited by F. Roy Willis, France,

Germany, and the New Europe (1971), 66.

However, other geopolitical considerations,stressed especially by realist analysts (who focuson nation-states and their geopolitical “nationalinterests”), also came into play in WesternEurope. These included a French wish to con-tain West German power, a West German goalof escaping its Nazi past and finding reliableEuropean allies, and an Italian desire to regainrespectability. The common perceived threat toWest European governments posed by theSoviet bloc and the domestic Communist (andat times, as in Italy, Socialist) parties alignedwith it further encouraged increased coopera-tion among the West European leaders. More-over, the United States—now the superpower ofthe West in the confrontation with the SovietUnion and Communism—was nudging West-ern Europe toward integration by makingEuropean Recovery Program (Marshall Plan)assistance contingent on cross-national cooper-ation and by bringing many West Europeannation-states (but not initially West Germany)into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization(NATO), a collective security organization inwhich all members pledged to come to thedefense of one another if threatened by external

Communist attack. Therefore, West Europeanintegration ideas came to be linked to a highdegree with notions of “the West” versus “theEast” in an increasingly bipolar world, as well aswith desires to enhance national security, resus-citate national reputations, and avoid repetitionof wars among West European nation-states.11

Political-economic concerns, of the typeemphasized by liberal intergovernmentaltheorists (who, like the realists, focus on nation-state leaders’ motivations but assign highest pri-ority to political-economic objectives and theirbases in the major economic interest groupswithin nation-states) also exerted great influ-ence propelling West European leaders towardintegration after World War II. There wasgrowing agreement among national polit-ical and business leaders in Western Europe that freer trade among them would lead toeconomies of scale and allow each country tospecialize in the production of goods and ser-vices for which it was best equipped (what econ-omists term comparative advantage). As thewealthiest country in the postwar world, theUnited States offered a model for economicsuccess; and many West Europeans sought toemulate its large market with unrestricted tradeinside its boundaries. Moreover, the power ofthe United States and its clear preference forfreer trade and West European (and American)memories of the trade wars of the 1930s andtheir role in sparking World War II came intoplay in creating a political-economic environ-ment conducive to West European economicintegration efforts. As opportunities for indus-trial trade expanded in the early 1950s,increased numbers of West European leaderssaw potential benefits in trade liberalization.However, as liberal intergovernmental analystshave correctly emphasized, each West Europeannation-state assigned high priority to its ownindustrial, commercial, and agricultural inter-ests, backed by strong producer interest groups.Meshing these in a common European commu-nity would prove difficult and would shape the


in new European ties—showed no interest injoining the newly proposed Community. Nei-ther did the Nordic countries of Denmark,Norway, Iceland, and Sweden, though theyformed a loose cooperative Nordic Councilamong themselves in 1952, with Finland join-ing in 1955. Spain remained ostracized by WestEuropean governments for its dictatorshipunder Francisco Franco (1939–1975) and itsNazi-Fascist sympathies during World War II.It pursued for a time a policy of economic self-sufficiency, or autarky, without notable success.Thus, the movement toward the eventualEuropean Union began with a core of sixnation-states. Jean Monnet became the firstchairperson of the High Authority (the leadingexecutive body) of the new European Coal andSteel Community, responsible for formulatingand overseeing the common market in coal andsteel. The Council of Ministers, representingthe six member nation-states’ separate interests,was to act as a brake on supranationalism withinthe ECSC, beginning what would prove to be along-term pattern in the European Commu-nity/European Union.14

On October 24, 1950, influenced again byMonnet, the French government proposed thatthe six move toward further cooperation byestablishing a European Defense Community(EDC), which would develop a common defensepolicy. Anglo-American pressure for West Ger-man rearmament in the struggle against Sovietbloc Communism and West German Chancel-lor Adenauer’s suggestion of shared sovereigntyin the defense realm lay behind this French ini-tiative. Subsequently, at the suggestion of Italy,the EDC proposal came to incorporate a proposed European Political Community (EPC) also.

However, this European Defense Commu-nity idea aroused considerable opposition, espe-cially inside France itself. The EDC treaty waseventually killed in 1954 by a vote in the FrenchNational Assembly to postpone consideration ofit indefinitely, in the midst of widespread

distinctive forms that integration would take inWestern Europe, though environmental politi-cal-economic incentives to cooperate eased thepath to integration.12

The European Coal and Steel Community(ECSC), founded in 1951 by France, West Ger-many, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Lux-embourg (the latter three commonly referred toas the Benelux countries), and going into effectin 1952, represented the first major step towardthe establishment of what has become the Euro-pean Union. Jean Monnet, a French planningofficial, was the chief “father” of the proposalfor the ECSC. Though Monnet promulgated avision of a United States of Europe based uponfunctionalism, the chief immediate precipita-tor of his specific ECSC proposal was a Franco–West German crisis over the lifting of Alliedrestrictions on West German industrial recov-ery. Sparked by Cold War fears, Britain and theUnited States had overcome French objectionsand insisted on reviving West German indus-trial might. Seeing the likely resulting destruc-tion of his Modernization Plan for the Frencheconomy, Monnet sought to cope with the newsituation by proposing a supranational coal andsteel organization that would foster the pros-perity of these heavy industries in both majorEuropean countries. Robert Schuman, France’sforeign minister at the time, took the lead inputting the proposal into action, in the form ofthe “Schuman Plan,” publicly unveiled in aspeech on May 9, 1950, after gaining theapproval of both West German ChancellorKonrad Adenauer and the United States gov-ernment. Italy and the Benelux countries soonjoined with France and West Germany in nego-tiations to establish the European Coal andSteel Community.13

However, the British government, headedby Prime Minister Clement Attlee at the time—more interested in its economic ties to its for-mer empire (now the British Commonwealth),its “special relationship” with the United States,and its internal political-economic projects than


French concerns over West German remilita-rization and strong Soviet opposition to theEDC. As the European Defense Communityproposal died, the efforts to establish a supra-national political authority (EPC), which wouldencompass the EDC and the ECSC and moveinto other policy areas as well, also collapsed.The Western European Union (WEU) tookshape as a loose, intergovernmental organiza-tion including Britain and detached from theECSC and supranational aspirations. However,the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, domi-nated by the United States and also intergov-ernmental in structure, was to play the leadingrole through the Cold War in coordinatingWest European and North American defenseefforts. At this point, the movement towardEuropean integration shifted back to the polit-ical-economic sphere and away from the mili-tary-political sphere that had proved highlycontentious.15

At a meeting in Messina, Italy, in June1955, the foreign ministers of the six ECSCmember states adopted a proposal for the fur-ther integration of the members’ economies.Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg,the three smallest member states of the ECSC,played the largest roles in initiating thegroundwork and leading the preparations forthe Messina Conference. Paul-Henri Spaak ofBelgium, J.W. Beyen of the Netherlands, andJoseph Beck of Luxembourg (the latter ofwhom chaired the conference) played particu-larly prominent parts. At the Messina Confer-ence, Italy, the host country, gave strongsupport to the new economic-integrationefforts proposed by the Benelux countries.West Germany went along rather reluctantlyat first, and France was initially the least enthu-siastic of the six ECSC member states aboutproposals for a broad common market. How-ever, France liked the idea of a EuropeanCommunity for Atomic Energy more than itliked that for a European Economic Commu-nity and pushed successfully for its inclusion

on the agenda. Though invited to participate,Britain again declined the opportunity to beinvolved in the “European project.” Its politi-cal and business leaders remained focused onthe British Commonwealth and ties to theUnited States and strongly preferred a loose,intergovernmental free-trade association tothe kind of integration proposed at theMessina Conference.

The new efforts at Messina and subse-quent negotiations resulted in the Treaties ofRome in March 1957, which established theEuropean Economic Community (EEC) andthe European Community for Atomic Energy(Euratom) alongside the European Coal andSteel Community. The three communities as awhole came increasingly to be referred to asthe European Communities, or simply Euro-pean Community (EC); in 1967 their struc-tures were merged to a considerable extent.The EEC became the heart of the EC. Despitethe economic focus of the Rome Treaty estab-lishing the EEC, Paul Henri Spaak, who ledthe committee that prepared the Treaty,emphasized the long-term goals: “Those whodrew up the Rome Treaty . . . did not think ofit as essentially economic; they thought of it asa stage on the road to political union.” WalterHallstein, the West German representative atthe Messina Conference and the first Presidentof the EEC Commission, concurred: “We arenot integrating economies; we are integratingpolitics.” Only three years after the collapse ofthe proposals for the European Defense Com-munity and the related European PoliticalCommunity, European integration was mov-ing forward in striking ways that few wouldhave predicted in 1954.16

“Those who drew up the Rome Treaty . . . did notthink of it as essentially economic; they thoughtof it as a stage on the road to political union.”

Paul Henri Spaak, leader of the committee thatdrew up the EEC Rome Treaty, 1957.


EUROPEAN COMMUNITYDEVELOPMENT AND GAULLISTASSERTIONS, 1958–1969The European Communities (EC) began witha highly complex structure that gained somestreamlining with the merging of executivestructures in 1967 but remained quite compli-cated. Walter Hallstein, the first President ofthe Commission of the EEC, and some of hisassociates sought to play the leading suprana-tional roles in guiding European integrationthat were prescribed by functionalist advocatessuch as Monnet and emphasized in analyses bysuch neofunctionalist scholars as Ernst Haas.However, the “high politics” of making majorchanges in the European Communities gener-ally moved at a pace and in a direction dictatedlargely by the nation-state leaders of the mem-bers, particularly the leaders of France and WestGermany. From the outset, the concerns ofnation-state executives had made the EuropeanEconomic Community (EEC) less suprana-tional and more intergovernmental than theEuropean Coal and Steel Community (ECSC).As the Communities merged, intergovernmen-talism continued to predominate.18

Moreover, French President Charles deGaulle (1958–1969) was to prove an unusuallyassertive national leader, motivated in part by ageopolitical vision of a “Europe of nation-states,” guided by the executives of its majorstates (especially France!) to exercise a majorrole as a “third force” between the United Statesand the Soviet Union in global affairs. DeGaulle was also determined to employ the ECto protect French national economic interests,most notably by forging the nascent CommonAgricultural Policy (CAP) in a fashion thatwould both protect and modernize French agri-culture. Summing up the French approach,which de Gaulle often carried to extremelengths, one leading analyst has written, “Inessence, France wanted to retain its role as a

“We are not integrating economies; we areintegrating politics.”

Walter Hallstein, first President of the EECCommission, 1957.

Both quotations cited by Derek Urwin, The Community of Europe (1991), 76.

Neo-functionalist analysts of the movementfrom the ECSC to the EC described, in a man-ner somewhat similar to such functionalistadvocates of European integration by incrementsas Jean Monnet, the extent to which the limitedcooperation in the coal and steel sphere had now“spilled over” to the much broader cooperativeendeavors established and planned for the Euro-pean Community (including development of acustoms union (ending all tariffs among the sixmembers and adopting a common external tariff)and a Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), withthe assistance of supranational actors such as JeanMonnet, who had resigned from the HighAuthority to lead the European Movement, abroad array of political activists from all six mem-ber states. They also stressed the leadership forfurther integration that would emanate from theCommission, the Court of Justice, and the Par-liamentary Assembly (later Parliament) of theEuropean Community. However, it was soon tobe evident that the nation-state leaders, still inmost cases wedded to concepts of national inter-est and concerns about their own domestic pow-ers and power bases, and possessing strongexecutive and legislative roles in the EuropeanCommunity through the Council of Ministers,were not about to lose control over the Europeanintegration process to supranational elites ortechnocratic mechanisms. Business, agricultural,and labor interest groups within the memberstates reinforced the political leaders’ inclina-tions. Charles de Gaulle, the new chief executiveof France, was a leader who was intent on hispressing own nation-state’s political-economicand geopolitical interests, as he understood them,with special vigor.17


great power and to harness the resources of theCommunity to this effect.” While ChancellorKonrad Adenauer of West Germany and theleaders of the other four member states of theEC were less assertive than de Gaulle in theirnational demands than de Gaulle was, they, too,sought distinct national advantages (especiallyeconomic ones) through the EC, as liberalintergovernmentalism suggests and later chap-ters on individual member states and theEC/EU will detail.19

“In essence, France wanted to retain its role as agreat power and to harness the resources of theCommunity to this effect.”

Alistair Cole, “National and Partisan Contexts of Europeanization” (2001), 18.

A considerable convergence of the tradegoals of the six member states of the EC in aglobal environment of expanding trade andeconomic growth led to a rapid movement toachieve a customs union among the six by1968, eighteen months ahead of the originalschedule. British efforts to displace the Euro-pean Economic Community with a completelyintergovernmental free-trade associationfocused on trade ended up as only a looseEuropean Free Trade Association of Britainand six smaller European nation-states (Aus-tria, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, andSwitzerland). By 1961, the British governmenthad decided to seek the membership in the ECthat it had previously shunned. The relativelyweak performance of the British economy vis-à-vis the EC six, waning British trade with theCommonwealth, and American encourage-ment for Britain to join the EC all playedimportant parts in this shift. Meanwhile, insidethe EC, national bargaining over the shape ofthe Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), thefoundations of which were laid in 1958, provedmore difficult than other trade agreements inlight of divergent national objectives among

the members, though it, too, ended with abroad agreement.20

Discord among the member states andbetween the Commission and national leaderswas so sharp during the 1960s in some otherareas that it threatened to paralyze the new EC,despite progress toward the integration of tradeand agricultural policies. One issue of con-tention was the British application for member-ship, which was twice vetoed by de Gaulle’sFrance despite support for the British fromother member states. Another source of tensionwere the French drives to turn European inte-gration in a decisively intergovernmental direc-tion in line with the Gaullist conception of a“Europe of nation-states” and to weakenAtlanticist ties with the United States in accordwith the Gaullist vision of a European “thirdforce” in global politics. De Gaulle’s efforts ledto the first summit meetings of the chief execu-tives of the six member states and the unveilingof the Fouchet Plan, which would have sub-stantially restructured European integration onan intergovernmental basis. However, the sum-mit meetings did not become fully institution-alized at this time (doing so later, in 1974); andthe Fouchet Plan encountered strong opposi-tion from Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg (which saw diminishment ofsupranationalism as likely to result in French orFranco-German domination) and lack of enthu-siasm from West Germany and Italy (whichfeared that it might weaken NATO and disruptthe EEC). Meanwhile, EEC Commission Pres-ident Hallstein and the Commission sought togain a source of revenue independent of themember state contributions that had been fund-ing the EEC, expansion of powers for the Euro-pean Parliament (which parliamentary membersand the Netherlands had been advocating withincreasing vigor), and closure on the CommonAgricultural Policy (CAP). When Hallsteintook the lead in proposing a “package” to com-bine these three issues and move integrationforward, he encountered intense opposition


(1969–1974), and the new West German chan-cellor, Willy Brandt (also 1969–1974), eventhough the two men were not personally close,as their successors, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing(1974–1981) and Helmut Schmidt (1974–1982)would be. The EC’s Hague Summit of chiefexecutives in December 1969 provided an arenafor the member state leaders to “relaunch”European integration.

However, the increasing instability of inter-national currency markets, the slowing of globaland European economic growth, and the globaloil embargo and price increases of 1973 createdan environment that spurred divergent nationalresponses by member states and was not con-ducive to bold new steps toward integration. Per-haps the most critical development was thecollapse of a key part of the Bretton Woods mon-etary system that had been adopted back in 1944and that had since then underpinned the cur-rency exchanges of the non-Communist world.Under the Bretton Woods Agreement, theUnited States was bound to buy and sell unlim-ited amounts of gold at the official price of $35an ounce. A major problem was that global con-fidence in the dollar plummeted in the1968–1971 period due to large American balanceof payments deficits as a result of spending on theVietnam War and a simultaneous domestic waron poverty. Abruptly, in 1971, the Nixon admin-istration in the United States terminated theAmerican obligation to maintain the BrettonWoods exchange rate. Because the currencies ofthe EC member states had been denominated indollars, the end of stable exchange rates with thedollar meant instability in the EC members’exchange rates with each other also.22

WIDENING, LIMITED REFORMS,AND “EUROSCLEROSIS,”1969–1984The years between 1969 and 1984 were markedby two enlargements, widening the EC to

from de Gaulle’s France. Furthermore, deGaulle was concerned about a fourth issue, along-scheduled change called for in the EEC’sRome Treaty to reduce national veto powers inthe Council of Ministers in favor of majorityvoting on an array of issues. The result was the“empty chair” crisis of 1965, in which Franceboycotted the Council of Ministers meetings fora seven-month period. The outcome of the cri-sis was the Luxembourg Compromise agreed toin January 1966, which retained the practice ofunanimity in Council of Ministers meetings onall major matters, informally accepted limita-tions on activism by the Commission and itspresident, and left the other issues to beresolved separately. In effect, the LuxembourgCompromise resolved the ambiguity in theEEC’s Rome Treaty between supranationalismand intergovernmentalism in favor of the latter.The 1958–1969 patterns concerning Europeanintegration indicated the limitations of the neo-functionalist analysis and pointed to the impor-tance of both political-economic (liberalintergovernmental) and geopolitical (realist) cal-culations by nation-state leaders as forces shap-ing the contours of European integration.21

De Gaulle left office in 1969, easing theway for the entry of Britain (and Ireland andDenmark) to the EC, though there is some evi-dence that de Gaulle himself was shifting hisviews on EC expansion before his retirement,once he had secured the type of Common Agri-cultural Policy that his government and Frenchagricultural interests demanded (and thatBritain strongly opposed). In general, deGaulle’s departure appeared to offer theprospects of reduced national tensions withinthe EC on a number of fronts. In particular, theFranco–West German collaboration that hadcharacterized de Gaulle’s relationship with WestGerman Chancellor Adenauer, which haderoded badly under new West German leader-ship and the pressures of the crisis of 1965,seemed to be reviving under the leadership ofthe new French president, Georges Pompidou


include Britain, Ireland, and Denmark in 1973(while at the same time Norwegian voters in areferendum rejected EC entry) and Greece in1981. Negotiations for a third enlargement, toinclude Spain and Portugal, also neared con-clusion and were to culminate in their entry in 1986. However, a side effect of thewidening of the European Community wasincreased diversity of nation-state positions onmajor issues.

Britain as a new member of the EC nearlyalways adopted an intergovernmentalist stance,fiercely resisting most supranational proposalsand defending its leaders’ conceptions of theBritish national interest. Though French lead-ers also tended toward intergovernmentalismand an emphasis on the need to preservenational sovereignty, the British and Frenchpreferences rarely jibed with one another. Onmatters of agricultural policy, relations with theUnited States, and business competition, forexample, the British and French governmentsengaged in often-bitter conflicts. Therefore,British entry markedly increased the difficultiesof finding common ground among EC memberstates. Denmark was to prove almost as stauncha defender of intergovernmental approaches asthe United Kingdom. Despite its small size, it,too, demonstrated considerable ability to con-found the supranational goals of some Euro-pean integration advocates. Ireland, the thirdnew member in 1973, proved somewhat moreeager to promote EC consensus and advancesupranational development of the EC thanBritain or Denmark, and Ireland soon began toutilize EC financial assistance quite successfullyto boost its previously backward economy.Greece, Spain, and Portugal, like Ireland,lagged behind the rest of the EC in per capitawealth. Together, they constituted what manyobservers termed the “poor four.” Their entrybrought heightened emphasis on the need toaddress the large economic gap between wealth-ier and poorer areas of the EC if integrationwere to proceed successfully.

Even apart from the increasing diversityof national goals that expansion of member-ship injected into the EC, the global economicenvironment of the period seriously compli-cated efforts at European integration duringthis period. As noted previously, the BrettonWoods system underwent major modificationin 1971, causing national currencies to fluctu-ate markedly. Economic growth slowed, too,particularly as enormous oil price increases atthe time of the Middle Eastern war of 1973put major new pressures on most Europeaneconomies. The result was an atmosphere ofeconomic upheaval and distress that oftenevoked conflicting national responses. There-fore, integration proceeded at a rather unevenpace, with a number of false starts despitesome achievements.

One of the largely unsuccessful endeavorswas the European Exchange Rate Agreement,popularly referred to as the “snake-in-the-tunnel” arrangement, based on the 1970Werner Report (drafted by Luxembourg PrimeMinister Pierre Werner with the backing of theFrench and West German governments) andlaunched in 1972, which sought to stabilizeexchange rates among the members’ currenciesin a time of global economic turbulence. Insteadof leading to monetary integration, as washoped and anticipated at its establishment, thesnake-in-the-tunnel approach largely disinte-grated as all EC participants except West Ger-many and the Benelux countries abandoned itby 1976. Relatively high-inflation states, such asItaly, Britain, and France, pursued monetarypolicies that made it extremely difficult to keeptheir currencies pegged at relatively consistentratios to the deutsche mark of the low-inflationeconomic leader of Europe, West Germany.Replacing the snake arrangement in 1979 wasthe somewhat similar European Monetary Sys-tem (EMS), with an Exchange Rate Mechanism(ERM), which in effect again made the strongWest German currency the benchmark for theother participants. It proved somewhat more


notably in the landmark Cassis de Dijon case in1979 (discussed further in Chapter Four), inwhich it ruled against West German regulationsthat kept a French liqueur out of West Ger-many. Nevertheless, nontariff barriers erectedby member states to protect favored firms con-tinued to constrain trade within the EC duringthis period—a problem that would be addressedmore fully than ever before as part of an effortto revitalize the EC in the 1980s.

Despite a widespread European pessimismthat stressed the conflicts, paralysis, and failuresin the EC, some reforms of the period proveddurable contributions to long-term Europeanintegration. The introduction in 1970 of ECrevenue sources independent of the nation-stategovernments (previously blocked by France),the development of an intergovernmental Euro-pean Political Cooperation (EPC) after 1970,the institutionalization of summits amongnational chief executives in the form of theEuropean Council in 1974, the establishment ofthe European Regional Development Fund(ERDF) in 1974, and the institution of directelections to the European Parliament in 1979(previously blocked by France and Britain) wereamong important reforms of the era.

The independent revenue sources that theEC received from 1970 onward consisted of tariffs on agricultural and industrial goodsimported into the European Communities fromthe outside world. In addition, the agreement of1970 gave the EC a portion (initially limited tono more than 1 percent) of national revenuesfrom the value added tax, a form of hidden salestax employed by all member states. Though theEC/EU budget would remain small in compar-ison with the budgets of its member states(never to the present constituting as much as 4percent of the total of the members’ nationalbudgets), the 1970 reform was an importantstep toward supranational development.

European Political Cooperation (EPC),also established in 1970, was explicitly inter-governmental in structure and purpose. Aimed

durable than its predecessor, due largely tomore serious Europe-wide efforts to curb infla-tion in the 1980s than in the 1970s. However,the system with its Exchange Rate Mechanismstill created much dissatisfaction outside ofWest Germany, lost several of its key partici-pants in 1992, and eventually gave way to theEconomic and Monetary Union founded underthe terms of the Maastricht Treaty of 1992.

If the monetary integration efforts of the1970s illustrated some of the problems thatcame to be described as “Eurosclerosis” bymany observers, so, too, did a prolonged battleover the EC budget precipitated largely byBritish complaints that they were being com-pelled to pay more than their fair share of thebudget and growing conflicts among the mem-bers states over the burgeoning costs of theCommon Agricultural Policy (CAP), whichmany felt imposed unfair burdens on certainstates (such as Britain and Italy) and on con-sumers generally. The conflicts over the Britishbudgetary contributions festered into the 1980s,as did those over the CAP, creating a climate ofdistrust and anger among member states asattention focused increasingly in many states ontheir individual costs and benefits stemmingfrom EC membership.

Also creating national obstacles to Euro-pean integration in ways that neofunctionalistshad failed to predict were the nontariff barriersto trade that emerged increasingly in state aftermember state during the 1970s. As noted previ-ously, the EC had succeeded in removing inter-nal industrial tariff barriers by 1968, well aheadof schedule. However, as business corporationspossessing close ties to national governmentsfaced new problems in the 1970s, includingoften the threat of bankruptcies, the govern-ments of the EC member states moved fre-quently to assist them through both directfinancial aid and national specifications and reg-ulations designed to keep out products of othermember states. The European Court of Justiceintervened to overrule some of these, most


at improving coordination of member states’foreign policies, it provided for state foreignministers to meet twice per year and their sub-ordinates to meet on a more frequent basis totry to hammer out compatible approaches. EPCwas to be the forerunner of later efforts at fur-ther coordination. Nevertheless, many memberstates have remained jealous of their preroga-tives on foreign and defense matters; and poli-cies have often diverged significantly.

The European Council was an importantinstitutional development of the period. Theheads of the member state governments hadmet in their first “summit” back in February1961. While such meetings had occurred fromtime to time since then, an agreement in 1974institutionalized summits and officially termedthem meetings of the European Council. The European Council has since then been apermanent component of the EC/EU institu-tional structure. Intergovernmental in natureand operating primarily on the basis of consen-sus, European Council meetings have oftenproved important means of calling attention tomajor issues and resolving difficult impasses.

Though developed originally in large partdue to British (and Irish and Italian) demandsfor reallocation of the EC budget in a mannerthat would benefit their own nation-states, the European Regional Development Fund(ERDF) created in 1974 would eventually proveone of several developments that would encour-age decentralization within the member states,because it stimulated many subnational units topress for European assistance. It also spawnedother regional or structural expenditures, mak-ing this category of spending second only toagriculture in the long term as a claimant on asignificant share of the EC/EU budget.

The innovation of direct popular electionsto the previously appointive European Parlia-ment was perhaps just as striking in its long-term effects as ERDF. Strongly resisted in the1970s by many intergovernmentalists, particu-larly in Britain and France, who saw it as a step

toward strengthening of a supranational insti-tution, this innovation did generate pressures inthe 1980s and beyond for granting additionalpowers to the Parliament. It also made the Par-liament the only popularly elected body abovethe nation-state level anywhere in the world.23

Despite some EC reforms in the 1970s, asthe United States and Japan gave evidence ofvaulting ahead of Europe in the global economyof the 1980s, particularly in the realm of mod-ern technology, there was a growing sense inEuropean political and business circles thatadditional reform of the EC was in order. Oneproposal to revive European integration was theGenscher-Colombo Plan, put forward in 1981by the foreign ministers of West Germany(Hans-Dietrich Genscher) and of Italy (EmilioColombo). It called for adoption of additionalcommon policies, strengthening of the Euro-pean Parliament, extension of majority votingin the Council of Ministers, and an increase inthe EC budget. Though this plan had littleimmediate impact, largely because it did notenjoy the full endorsement of the chief execu-tives of the major member states, it contributedto an upsurge of discussions about renewing thedrive for European integration in an environ-ment in which many participants and observerssaw reform as essential to compete effectivelywith the United States and Japan. In the mean-time, however, the French government pursuedeconomic strategies in 1981 and 1982 that weresharply at odds with those of both Britain andWest Germany.24

INTEGRATION REVITALIZED,1984–2000Despite the long era seen by many as one of“Eurosclerosis,” there were signs in 1983–1984of a renewed drive to advance European inte-gration. A major spur for change was an emer-gent consensus on the need for the EC toadvance toward a single market economy in


inherent in the SEA, was willing to accept(reluctantly) the institutional reforms of theSEA only because of their linkage in a packagewith a strict timetable leading to the 1992 estab-lishment of a single market, removing most sig-nificant national trade barriers within theEC—a cherished goal of British Prime MinisterMargaret Thatcher. Although tariffs had beenremoved within the EC by 1968, many nationaltrade barriers remained and had even prolifer-ated during the 1970s. As noted previously theneoliberal consensus emergent at the top levelsof most European governments and large busi-ness corporations in the mid-1980s in responseto globalization pressures was a major contrib-utor to the single-market reforms. Despite thegrowth of this consensus, most European social-ist leaders saw the need to balance the single-market reforms with a Social Charter and anenhanced social dimension to the EC, thoughthese proved rather vague and ambiguous inpractice. Nonetheless, Thatcher opposed themwith vehemence. Therefore, Britain refused onpolitical-economic and ideological grounds toendorse even a watered-down Social Charter.26

The next major change in the EuropeanCommunity, including the establishment of theEuropean Union, came with the Treaty onEuropean Union, popularly known as the Maas-tricht Treaty, signed in Maastricht, the Nether-lands, in February 1992. The end of the ColdWar and the reunification of Germany providedimportant backdrops to this Treaty. However,liberal intergovernmental analyses highlightingpolitical-economic calculations have providedmore insights into the processes of the negotia-tions than realist analyses focused on geopoliti-cal considerations. Many of the critical decisionstook place before German reunification andwere not profoundly affected by it. The Maas-tricht Treaty, like the previous major stepstoward European integration, reflected intensenation-state bargaining and complex compro-mises among the major member states that werehighly focused on economic concerns.27

order to spur modernization through competi-tion and cope with the globalized economy andthe roles in it of American- and Japanese-basedmultinational corporations. In the environmentof the era, an ideology that Europeans generallytermed neoliberalism but that was commonlydescribed in the United States as “Reaganiteconservatism” (or, in somewhat more extremeform, economic libertarianism) was gainingsupport among political and business elitesaround the world. Though socialism and highlyregulated versions of capitalism were deeplyentrenched in most of Western Europe, the fail-ure of François Mitterrand’s Socialist effort torevitalize the French economy by state effortsto increase consumer demand and take owner-ship of key industries brought the Socialist-ledgovernment of France to a point of acceptingthe single-market preferences already evident inthe governments of Britain and West Germanyas well as in the top circles of European busi-ness. When Jacques Delors became president ofthe European Commission in 1985, he foundthat the greatest degree of consensus among themajor nation-state governments of the EC cen-tered on establishment of a single market. Theresult of collaboration among the nation-stateleaders and Delors and the Commission was theSingle European Act of 1986 (SEA), includingboth institutional changes and single-marketreforms that would go far by 1992 to create afree-trade area within the EC/EU.25

The SEA represented the first major revi-sion of the treaties establishing the EuropeanCommunities. It formally recognized the Euro-pean Council and European Political Coopera-tion, expanded the use of non-unanimousvoting in the Council of Ministers (finally mov-ing beyond the Luxembourg Compromise of1966 that had preserved the national veto powerlargely intact), added to the powers of the Euro-pean Parliament, and added new treaty articleson environmental, cohesion, and research andtechnology policies. Britain, long resistant tothe degree of supranational development


The Maastricht Treaty laid the foundationand provided a schedule for an Economic andMonetary Union (EMU) to replace the EMSand its separate national banks and national cur-rencies with a European Central Bank (ECB)and a common currency before the end of thedecade. France, Italy, and other member stateswere able to persuade a reluctant Germany togive up the preeminence long enjoyed by itsown central bank in favor of the new EuropeanCentral Bank (ECB). However, in return, Ger-many shaped the structures and powers of theEconomic and Monetary Union and gained thelocation of the ECB in Frankfurt, Germany.Meanwhile, Britain was able to opt out of thecommon currency project in light of its govern-ment’s assurances that it could not obtain par-liamentary ratification of the Maastricht Treatyat home without such an opt-out.

The Treaty also established three distinctstructures of policy-making, termed “pillars”:1) the European Community and the policiesassociated with it; 2) the Common Foreign andSecurity Policy (CFSP), the renamed and reor-ganized European Political Cooperation; and 3) most aspects of Justice and Home Affairs(JHA) policies. The latter two were to be largelyintergovernmental, while the first would have asignificant supranational character and encom-pass a widening range of public policies. Againthe result represented a compromise among theleaders of the major member states. In thisinstance, the chief division was between Ger-man, Italian, and Spanish orientations towardenhanced supranationalism and British andFrench insistence on extensive intergovern-mentalism.

As for the social dimension favored by mostsocialist governments and labor-union leaders,it was relegated to a Social Protocol to theMaastricht Treaty, endorsed by all memberstates except Britain but (as with the previousSocial Charter) fairly vague and ambiguousregarding promotion and protection of workers’rights. Because on the common currency plans,

Britain and Denmark both opted out of partic-ipation in the project, and because Britain optedout of the Social Protocol, the early 1990s wit-nessed a two-track system in which some Euro-pean Union members agreed to integrate morefully than others. This outcome was a compro-mise reflecting the differing orientations ofmember state governments and what theywould agree to undertake. Eventually, Britainwould agree to the incorporation of the SocialProtocol into the Amsterdam Treaty of 1997,following the election of a new Labour govern-ment headed by Tony Blair. However, the ideaof allowing different members of the EuropeanUnion to integrate to varying degrees (whatsome have termed differentiated integration)became increasingly widespread, as enlargementand prospects of further widening to encompassCentral and Eastern European states advanced.

The Maastricht Treaty generated consider-able public controversy in Europe—more thanany European integration moves that had beenmade since the European Defense Communityof the 1950s. Margaret Thatcher, now BaronessThatcher of Kesteven, serving in the House ofLords, denounced Maastricht as “a treaty toofar,” and did her best to arouse opposition inBritain. Denmark’s voters rejected the Treaty ina 1992 referendum, accepting it only later, withrevisions. The French electorate endorsed it bya very narrow margin, following a highly divi-sive referendum campaign there. The Treatyalso generated considerable parliamentaryopposition in a number of national parliamentsamong the member states, as well as challengesto its constitutionality in judicial proceedings.Furthermore, the ongoing project to institute acommon European euro currency proved con-troversial. The sluggishness of economicgrowth in Europe and the relatively high unem-ployment rates of the 1990s led to widespreaddiscontent, especially among Socialists, Com-munists, and labor unions, with the strict crite-ria that the EU national leaders mandated forparticipation of states in the EMU, because


by European integration and of democratic andsocial deficits in what many citizens viewed asan overly elitist and overly capitalistic EuropeanUnion. Nationalistic concerns also remainedalive and well in many member states, particu-larly in Britain, Denmark, and France, but alsoelsewhere. In fact, even supranational Germany,now that it had achieved reunification, showedsome signs of placing increased emphasis on itsnational interest as something separate fromsupranational development.

TOWARD EASTWARDEXPANSION AND A EUROPEANUNION CONSTITUTION, 2000–Although the future of the EMU and the eurocurrency remain subjects of intense debate, twoother issues have come to the forefront of dis-cussions concerning the European Union since2000. One major issue, percolating since theend of the Cold War and the collapse of Com-munist regimes throughout Central and East-ern Europe in the 1989–1991 period, hasfocused on the timing, means, and implicationsof eastward widening of the European Union.By 2002, 13 Central and Eastern Europeannation-states, including Turkey (which is mostlyin Asia and considered by most observersunlikely to be admitted to the EU in the nearfuture) had gained official recognition by theEuropean Union as prospective entrants. TheAmsterdam Intergovernmental Conference of1997 had been expected to address the institu-tional and policy implications of eastwardexpansion with some specificity, but member-state conflicts were too severe to fulfill theseexpectations in the Amsterdam Treaty thatemerged. Therefore, the subject had to be revis-ited at the 2000 Intergovernmental Conferenceand revisited again at the Nice Summit ofDecember 2000. Although this summit provedunusually rancorous and fed speculation of apossible breakdown of the long pattern of

these emphasized control of inflation, often atthe cost of growth and jobs, and were often usedto justify cuts in social spending by nationalgovernments. In spite of wide concerns andcommon predictions that many prospectiveadherents to the common currency would beunable to meet the established criteria, 11 mem-ber states adopted the common currency onschedule in 1999, with Greece joining soonthereafter (leaving Britain, Denmark, and EUnewcomer Sweden as the three nonparticipat-ing EU members). However, a major strugglecontinued over the extent to which nationalgovernments could and should impose con-straints on the European Central Bank and ori-ent it in a direction favorable to socialist andlabor union concerns.28

[Maastricht is] “a treaty too far.”Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher,

June 28, 1992, cited in Stephen George, An Awkward Partner (1998), 248.

Therefore, the 1984–2000 era witnessedthe development of both the single market andthe single currency and considerable revampingof EC/EU structures (as well as further widen-ing, with the addition of Portugal and Spain in1986 and of Austria, Finland, and Sweden in1995). In contrast to Portugal and Spain, thelast three entrants were all relatively wealthyand immediately became net contributors to theEU budget. Of the three, Sweden proved themost resistant to further European integration,joining Britain and Denmark in rejecting mem-bership in the Economic and Monetary Union,for example. On the other hand, Austria andFinland generally favored further integrationand adopted the common currency as soon as ittook effect. Despite the formation of the Euro-pean Union and fairly dramatic movementtoward supranational development in a numberof fields during the 1984–2000 years, the periodwas also one of rising criticism of the path taken


Franco-German cooperation in the EC/EU, itdid manage in the Nice Treaty to address majorissues of restructuring the European Commis-sion to accommodate new members, reweight-ing the votes in the Council of Ministers,revamping national seat allocations in the Euro-pean Parliament, and making other structuralchanges to cope with enlargement. It also madesome clarification of processes allowing differ-ent states to pursue European integration at dif-ferent rates, an important method of reconcilingthe wish to widen to include diverse new mem-bers and at the same time allow further deepen-ing among existent members that wished toproceed in that direction. Annexed to the Treatyof Nice, signed by member state governmentsin February 2001, was a Declaration on theFuture of the Union. Left to be clarified in thefuture were the legal status of a Charter of Fun-damental Rights (a bill of rights) approved bythe Nice Summit but not made legally bindingon member states and the possibility of a con-stitution for the European Union.29

The negotiations over eastward expansionof the EU proved arduous; but by 2003, it wasevident that ten of the accession nation-stateswould join the European Union in 2004:Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Sloveniafrom the former Communist bloc, plus Cyprusand Malta. Bulgaria and Romania were slatedfor likely entry to the EU in 2007. In June 2004,Croatia moved onto a fast track toward likelyEU entry by 2009. Such a major widening ofthe European Union brought further discussionof how to restructure EU institutions and adjustpolicies and policy-making processes to avoidstalemate and increased costs. Because previousexpansions had never involved entry by morethan three new member states at a time, thescheduled addition of ten new members in oneyear in 2004, with two additional entrants likelyin 2007, and still another entrant likely by 2009,represented a major new challenge to the Euro-pean Union. Beyond the sheer numbers of new

states to fit into the EU structures, the newmember states were significantly poorer thanthe EU average in terms of per capita grossdomestic product, and most of their economieswere much more heavily agricultural than theEU average. One result was increased impetusfor a constitution that it was hoped wouldstreamline EU institutions and clarify lines ofaccountability.

At the urging of the German government,with the support of many others who saw theneed for an EU constitution or constitutionaltreaty, the EU agreed to hold a constitutionalconvention to be followed by an Intergovern-mental Conference to review its internal con-stitutional arrangements. German ChancellorGerhard Schröder and Foreign MinisterJoschka Fischer brought forth proposals for anew constitution for the EU, evoking both sup-port and criticisms from other member stateleaders in 2001–2002. Early in 2002, a constitu-tional convention, headed by former FrenchPresident Valery Giscard d’Estaing, met todevelop constitutional recommendations andcontinued its work until June 2003, when it pre-sented the draft of a constitution. Some politi-cal leaders and analysts preferred to call theproposed new constitution a “constitutionaltreaty,” since it could take effect only when rat-ified by all of the 25 member states that wouldconstitute the EU in 2004.

Romano Prodi, the president of the Euro-pean Commission, hailed the draft as a “hugeleap forward” for the European Union. A seniormember of the convention emphasized, “Whatwe are doing is moving off a treaty track and onto a constitutional track, and we will now rollforward on that track.” While less enthusiasticthan Prodi or the unidentified conventionmember, the heads of state and government atthe Porto Carras, Greece, meeting of the Euro-pean Council in June 2003 gave the draft theirbroad endorsement. However, other observers,such as Quentin Peel of the Financial Times,have criticized it as “depressingly long and


would apply to all EU laws, though not tonational ones, in deference to concerns (such asBlair’s) over national sovereignty. One uniden-tified senior figure in the convention stressedthe importance of this change in developing aEuropean identity: “It was the Bill of Rights thatcreated American identity. They were Ameri-cans and so they had rights. It will be the samewith Europeans.” The new constitutional draftalso proposed to revise a number of majoraspects of the central institutions of the EU.Among the most important of these were thecreation of a president of the European Coun-cil (now rotated every six months among mem-ber states) and a foreign minister/vice presidentand vesting them with significant new powers.The hope of the framers was to enhance thepotential for strong, coherent leadership andaccountability. However, some critics fearedpossible conflict between the president of theCommission and the president of the EuropeanCouncil. The convention rejected proposals tocreate a single president of the EU as too radi-cal a change. The new draft also provided for nomore than 15 voting members of the Commis-sion, so that its size would not become too largeto be manageable and so that the presidentwould possess greater control over those pri-marily responsible for proposing and executingEU laws. However, this proposal encounteredforceful criticism from leaders of many smallmember states, who expressed fears of losingtheir countries’ votes on the Commission, andwas eventually abandoned in favor of a systemallocating each member state one Commissionseat until 2009 and providing for a reduction ofthe Commission at that time to two-thirds thenumber of the member states. The new consti-tutional draft also proposed to expand the law-making powers of the European Parliament andto alter procedures for qualified majority votingin the Council of Ministers, as well as to movethe EU in the direction of supranationalism orfederalism in some policy domains (particularlyjustice and home affairs). Still other new

wordy.” Some, especially in Poland, Spain, andItaly, have been miffed by its failure to empha-size the role of Christianity in European history.While some European federalists have sug-gested that it does not move the EU far enoughtoward supranational development, many inter-governmentalists fear that it goes too far in asupranational direction. Seeking to reassure thenumerous British Euroskeptics, who continu-ally perceive EU threats to British sovereignty,Prime Minister Tony Blair declared, “There isno way Britain is going to give up our indepen-dent sovereign right to determine our tax pol-icy, our foreign policy, our defense policy andour own borders.”30

“What we are doing is moving off a treaty trackand on to a constitutional track, and we will nowroll forward on that track.”

Senior constitutional convention member, quotedin The Economist (June 21, 2003), 51.

“There is no way Britain is going to give upour independent sovereign right to determineour tax policy, our foreign policy, our defensepolicy and our own borders.”

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, quoted in theNew York Times (June 21, 2003), A2, on the powersthat he would not permit a new EU constitution to

take from Britain.

The new constitution, or constitutionaltreaty, as presented by the constitutional con-vention (subject to amendment or rejection)consolidated the provisions of all previoustreaties into a single document. However, itwent well beyond mere synthesis and summa-tion to make a number of substantive changes inthe European Union. One notable innovationwas that it proposed to incorporate the Charterof Fundamental Rights into European law (asthe Nice Treaty stopped short of doing), ineffect providing a European bill of rights that


features were provisions by which a memberstate could withdraw from the European Unionand by which the EU could suspend a memberstate’s voting rights. Neither of these mattershas been the subject of previous treaties, thoughthey are obviously matters of great importance.Table 2.1 summarizes major changes called forby the proposed new constitution.31

An Intergovernmental Conference of thegovernments of all 25 states that would be EUmembers in 2004 began meeting in October2003 to consider the constitutional proposals.However, sharp conflicts soon emerged. InDecember 2003, a summit of EU national

heads of government and state failed to reachagreement on the constitution. Among variouscontroversial issues, the most contentiousproved to be the proposal to alter qualifiedmajority voting rules in the Council of Minis-ters, the chief legislative body of the EU and aprimary center for the expression of distinctivemember state interests. Spain and Poland,which had won 27 Council votes apiece (com-pared with 29 each for France, Germany, Italy,and the United Kingdom) flatly refused toaccept the proposed shift to a system that wouldreduce their influence by requiring only amajority of member states representing at least


TABLE 2.1 Major Provisions of the Proposed EU Constitution

Charter of Fundamental Rights. This is a “bill of rights“ for EU citizens that includes not just the freedoms fromgovernment (freedom of speech, freedom of the press) of the U.S. Constitutional Bill of Rights but also such“positive freedoms“ as the right to strike, the right of workers to be informed and consulted, and the right to afree job placement service. The Charter’s provisions are to apply only to European law, not to the laws of theindividual member states. This Charter was previously approved as part of the Nice Treaty in 2001 but was notmade legally binding at that time.

New Institutional Leadership Positions. The two major ones are to be the President of the European Council(previously rotated every six months among the member states, now to be held by a single individual chosen bythe European Council for a term of two and one-half years, with election for a second term permissible) and theEU Foreign Minister (replacing two separate positions of Commissioner for Foreign Affairs and EU Foreign PolicyRepresentative).

Revised Institutional Structures. The most important revisions are to be the changes in the membership of theEuropean Commission, the major executive body of the EU, to one per member state until 2009 (with areduction to a number of members corresponding to two-thirds of the number of member states subsequently),whereas the five largest states previously each had two members while each other state had one; the expansionof the powers of the European Parliament, the elected legislative body of the EU that shares lawmaking powerswith the appointive Council of the EU/Council of Ministers; the altering of the qualified majority votingrequirements in the Council of Ministers (to a requirement for a majority vote representing at least 55 percent ofthe member states representing at least 65 percent of the EU population, from the previous requirement for aqualified majority vote of 71 percent using a weighted voting system); and abolition of the “three pillar“structure of EU decision-making that had been established by the Maastricht Treaty of 1991.

Provision for Leaving the EU and for Suspension of EU Membership Rights. The constitutional draft provides forthe first time that a member state can leave the European Union by giving a notice two years in advance,subject to negotiations with the Commission and Council and approval by a qualified majority vote of theEuropean Council, with the consent of a majority of the European Parliament. It also provides for suspension ofvoting rights of a member state for “serious persistent violation of fundamental principles,“ by a reinforcedqualified majority vote of the Council, disregarding the vote of the relevant member state for which suspensionis being considered.

means that often baffle even the best-informedobservers and that vary from one policy domainto another. The “democratic deficit” in the con-temporary European Union is a widespreadconcern. The continuing strength of Europeansocialist values in the midst of the revival offree-market capitalism globally and within theEC/EU since the mid-1980s has also mobilizedmany Europeans in opposition to the trends evi-dent in the single market, the Economic andMonetary Union (EMU), and a variety of otherEU public policies. Moreover, nation-stateidentities have remained strong; and these havespawned continuing resistance to Europeansupranationalism. Therefore, a democratic-socialist-nationalist combination of concerns,rooted in the historical developments discussedat the beginning of this chapter, may yet affectthe course of European integration. However,unless there are dramatic changes in the evidentpatterns of major EU initiatives being drivenlargely by major nation-state leaders attentiveprimarily to the concerns of the executives oflarge business corporations, such a turn ofevents appears unlikely.

60 percent of the EU population to approvemost Council decisions. In the wake of theDecember 2003 failure to gain the requisitemember state support for the planned EU con-stitution, Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahearn(because Ireland was serving as EuropeanCouncil president in the first half of 2004) tooka leading role in bringing European leaders toa compromise that brought enough consensusto win the leaders’ tentative approval of a some-what revised constitutional draft in June 2004.However, many remained dissatisfied with theconstitutional compromise; and the need to winratification in all 25 member states posed adaunting challenge. Clearly, the EuropeanUnion has remained a work in progress as thenew millennium has begun.32

“It was the Bill of Rights that created Americanidentity. They were Americans and so they hadrights. It will be the same with Europeans.”

EU Constitutional Convention Delegate, quoted inThe Economist (June 21, 2003), 52.

In considering constitutional development,of course, the European Union is likely to focusrenewed attention on popular concerns aboutits development up to the present day. Theseconcerns are rooted in the European historicalexperience discussed at the beginning of thischapter: the development of democracy, thecapitalistic and socialistic versions of economicmodernity, and the modern nation-state. Well-entrenched European conceptions of democ-racy have suggested to many that there areserious deficiencies in the European Union.Most of the time, EC/EU “high politics” havebeen largely the preserve of nation-state leaderswho often have shrouded their actions in thesecrecy of European Council and Council ofMinisters negotiations and worked closely withcorporate moguls and central bankers. Mean-while, EC/EU “low politics” have often oper-ated in even greater secrecy and by complex


TABLE 2.2 The Widening Process,1951–2004

The Original Six Belgium, France, Germany (1951 ECSC, (West)*, Italy, Luxembourg, 1957 EC) Netherlands

1973 Denmark, Ireland, United Kingdom

1981 Greece

1986 Portugal, Spain

1995 Austria, Finland, Sweden

2004 Czech Republic, Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia,Lithuania, Malta, Poland,Slovenia, Slovakia

* East Germany became a part of the German Federal Republic and the EuropeanCommunity in 1990.

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVESON HOW AND WHYTHE EUROPEAN UNION HASDEVELOPED AS IT HAS

Theoretical models in political science andrelated disciplines seek to enable us to under-stand the forces that have guided politicalbehavior. Thus, theories of European integra-tion direct our attention to forces that haveshaped the development of the European Union

over the past five decades. Throughout theabove account, there have been references toneofunctionalist, realist, and liberal intergov-ernmental theoretical approaches in particular.

Neofunctionalist TheoryNeofunctionalist theory has assigned an impor-tant role to supranational leaders (such as thoseoften found in the European Commission andits bureaucracy) as important actors spurringintegration and have argued that economiccooperation in limited arenas has led to“spillover” to other economic and politicalcooperative ventures, which have in turn fos-tered further supranational development. Forexample, it portrays the ending of tariffs (importtaxes) among the six EC members in the 1960sas generating pressures to create a more gen-uine common market by linking the currenciesof member states in the 1970s and 1980s, end-ing many other barriers to trade in the late1980s and early 1990s, and then moving on to acommon currency in the 1990s. Underlyingmost neofunctionalist theories has been thenotion that national economies have becomeincreasingly interdependent in a globalizationprocess that has enhanced prospects in the lastfive decades for supranational cooperation.

The overview in this chapter has suggestedthe utility of considering the global economicenvironment’s effects on European integration.However, it has indicated that some environ-mental effects, such as the turbulence of the1970s, evoked European nation-state responsesthat stalled and even partially reversed integra-tion. Furthermore, it has suggested thatnation-state leaders have remained far moreimportant actors shaping the “high politics” ofmajor steps toward (or away from) Europeanintegration than neofunctionalist theory indi-cates. In the example cited above, national gov-ernmental responses to global economicturbulence in the 1970s actually increasednational barriers to trade (contrary to the neo-functionalist model). Furthermore, German,


TABLE 2.3 Major Steps in the DeepeningProcess, 1951–2003

1951 Treaty of Paris establishing European Coaland Steel Community.

1957 Treaties of Rome establishing EuropeanEconomic Community (EEC) and EuropeanAtomic Energy Community (Euratom).

1958 Foundation for the Common AgriculturalPolicy (CAP).

1968 Completion of the customs union.

1979 Agreement on the European MonetarySystem (EMS).

1986 Agreement on the Single European Act withsingle market target and expansion ofCommunity powers in various policydomains.

1992 Treaty on European Union (Maastricht Treaty)establishing European Union with threepillars.

1999 Implementation of the common monetarypolicy and single currency for 11 EU memberstates (12 with addition of Greece).

2001 Nice Treaty providing for the eastwardexpansion and further deepening of the EU.

2002 Convening of the constitutional conventionto develop a constitution for the EU.

2003 Draft constitution; convening ofIntergovernmental Conference on theconstitution.

integration at most critical junctures. How-ever, they have also focused on the major rolesof economic interest groups in influencingnational governmental bargaining objectives,thus establishing links to comparative politicsanalyses of domestic influences on govern-mental decision-makers in a fashion that findsconsiderable support in the later chapters ofthis text on individual states and theirapproaches to the EC/EU.35

Despite drawing fairly heavily upon liberalintergovernmental theory, the account in thistext remains eclectic. More than most liberalintergovernmental theorists, it stresses theimportance of both the global political economyand the global distribution of power amongnation-states as important contextual variablesinfluencing European integration. It alsostresses the importance of ideas that sometimestranscend nation-states. The Cold War and thepredominance of the United States in “theWest” shaped the early efforts at integration andkept them focused on West European pooling ofsovereignty. The end of the Cold War and thereunification of Germany altered the distribu-tion of power (markedly increasing that of Ger-many) and some political behavior patterns(increasing the concerns of other member statesto contain Germany) within the EC/EU, andalso created pressures for eastward enlargement.Patterns in the global economy have some-times encouraged, sometimes limited or evenreversed, European integration. Growing globalfree trade and obvious benefits from it afterWorld War II conditioned West Europeanpolitical and business elites to accept pooling ofsovereignty in the ECSC and then the EEC.The turbulence of the early 1970s revived con-siderable economic nationalism in Europe andcontributed to “Eurosclerosis.” The rise ofneoliberal or economic libertarian ideas andcompetitive pressures from external forces inthe 1980s and 1990s spurred the single-marketand many subsequent new dimensions of Euro-pean integration.

French, Italian, and other national leadersshaped the Economic and Monetary Union toreflect their own goals and domestic political-economic interests, while British, Swedish, andDanish national leaders have so far resistedadoption of the common currency. Despite theapparent limitations of neofunctionalism as anexplanatory model, the cumulative effects ofmultiple “low politics” decisions by a mixtureof supranational, national, and subnational offi-cials have unquestionably shaped importantaspects of EC/EU development. Moreover,there have been some spillover effects, albeitusually channeled and sometimes blocked bynational governments.33

Realist TheoriesThe realist theories and their variants havestressed the importance of nation-state actorswho compete for power and pursue distinctivenational geopolitical interests. It downplayssupranational actors, broad global patterns exceptfor the power struggle among nation-states, anddiverse domestic influences on national leaders.Though realism helpfully places European inte-gration in the context of the bipolar balance ofpower that emerged during the Cold War andcalls attention to the effects of the end of theCold War and the reunification of Germany, itsability to explain most of the specific patternsemergent in Europe since the 1950s appearssomewhat limited.34

Liberal Intergovernmental TheoryThe overview presented here has relied moreheavily on liberal intergovernmental theoreti-cal perspectives than on either neofunctional-ism or realism. Liberal intergovernmentalapproaches, most notably Andrew Moravcsik’s,have, like those of the realists, emphasizednation-states as the major political units andrational calculations by national governmentalexecutives as the key ingredients in the majorbargaining processes that have shaped EC/EU


Other Theoretical ApproachesSome recent approaches that fall short of beingfull theories shed light on some of these points.Those loosely grouped as constructivistapproaches have stressed the importance ofsocially constructed shared understandingsamong actors about their environment androles, cautioning against overemphasis on thenation-states and their leaders’ supposed ratio-nality. For example, concepts of “the West” andof “Europe” have conditioned actors’ behavior.The nation-state is itself a rather ambiguousconcept constructed by human beings and givensomewhat different meanings in differentlocales at various points in time.36

Furthermore, as will become evident insome later chapters of this text, there is evidencein some instances to support a recent historicalinstitutionalist critique of liberal intergovern-mental theory for overestimating the extent towhich national executives have been able tocontrol the processes of European integration.Briefly, Paul Pierson, the leading proponent ofhistorical institutionalist analysis, has con-cluded, “When European integration is exam-ined over time, the gaps in member-statecontrol appear far more prominent than they doin intergovernmentalist accounts.”37 Piersoncalls attention to the somewhat autonomousactions of some EU institutional actors (as sug-gested also by neofunctionalists), to the likeli-hood of unintended consequences of nationalactors’ decisions pertaining to integration, andto the possibility of changes in national leaders’preferences over time—all points that will beencountered later in some of the nation-statechapters of this study.

Two illustrations of the types of gaps inmember state control described by historicalinstitutionalism may be helpful. One exampleconcerns the European Court of Justice (ECJ)and the member states. The activist decisions ofthe ECJ in many major cases have enabled it toaffect the EC/EU and the member states far

more profoundly than the nation-state govern-ments that established it ever foresaw. Becauseof the great difficulty of formally reducing itspowers through new treaty provisions, theEuropean Court of Justice has enjoyed consid-erable leverage vis-à-vis the member states.However, as the liberal intergovernmentalmodel suggests, pressures from member stategovernments have led the ECJ to exercise grow-ing caution since the 1980s in challenging theirinterests. (See the discussion of the EuropeanCourt of Justice in Chapter Three for elabora-tion on these points.)

Another illustration, covered in more depthin Chapter Eight, concerns the EU and the gov-ernment of Germany, generally judged as themost powerful member state of the EU inrecent years. At the insistence of German Chris-tian Democratic Chancellor Helmut Kohl, whowas heavily influenced by the German centralbank, the Economic and Monetary Union(EMU) established in the 1990s was accompa-nied by strict criteria requiring that memberstate governments keep their public debt andannual deficits to specific low levels or sufferpenalties. However, Kohl himself later found itvery difficult to stay within the prescribed lim-its. Moreover, the succeeding German SocialDemocratic–Green coalition governmentchafed at the “straightjacket” in which a previ-ous German government had helped to place itthrough the EMU provisions. Therefore, overtime, German governmental control over theEconomic and Monetary Union process wasless complete than liberal intergovernmentaltheory seemed to suggest. Again, however, asliberal intergovernmental theory suggests, theGerman government (supported by the Frenchgovernment) proved strong enough to resist atleast the initial efforts by the European Com-mission to discipline it for violating the EMUdeficit limits.38

One other limitation on the liberal inter-governmental theoretical model is that it under-states the diversity of EU policy-making


European Council, the Council of Ministers,the European Parliament, the EuropeanCourt of Justice, and the European CentralBank. Chapter Three will examine their roles,powers, and interactions in contemporaryEurope, as well as the changes in them that arelikely to occur in the near future.

SUMMARY

■ Europe, the continent that spawned thenation-state, has now moved further thanany other area of the world to create aunion that entails substantial pooling ofsovereignty.

■ Modern nation-states have been relativelyrecent and incomplete phenomena even inEurope; many contain minority ethnicregions due to history, and many have newethnic minorities due to immigration.

■ Constitutional democracy now prevails inall of the states in the European Union, butauthoritarianism and totalitarianism are stillrecent memories in some; many critics per-ceive a “democratic deficit” in the Euro-pean Union institutions.

■ Contemporary Europe emphasizes mixedeconomies, possessing “capitalistic” mar-kets and private ownership and “socialistic”provision of social services and governmen-tal regulation of business; the social dimen-sion is generally more extensive than in theUnited States’ version of a mixed economy.

■ Neofunctionalist theory concerning Euro-pean integration, associated with scholarssuch as Ernst Haas, stresses the roles ofsupranational leaders and views economiccooperation among nation-states in limitedareas as likely to spill over to encourage fur-ther supranational development.

■ Realist theory, associated with scholars suchas Hans Morgenthau, emphasizes intergov-ernmental features of the EU and the pri-macy of nation-state leaders who rationally

patterns. Chapter Four illustrates some of thedifferences in policy-making processes acrosspolicy domains in the EU. Furthermore, recentemphases on “multi-level governance” callattention to the involvement of various levels ofgovernment in such policy domains as environ-mental and regional policies, particularly in themost decentralized EU nation-states, such asGermany and Spain.39 Again, this point willemerge with increased clarity once this textaddresses Germany and Spain in particular inlater chapters.

Despite the amendments to liberal inter-governmental theory that have been suggestedabove, liberal intergovernmentalism provides auseful model that guides much of the analysis inthis text. To summarize its main points, themajor nation-states have been the primaryengines of European integration and haveshaped the major decisions affecting how it hasoccurred (and failed to occur). Within thenation-states, executive leaders (presidents,prime ministers, and major cabinet ministers)have played the largest roles in defining nationalinterests and determining national approachesto the European integration processes. Eco-nomic interests, particularly those articulated bythe executives of large business corporations(and by some agricultural interests), have playedbigger roles than any others in influencing thebehavior of national executive leaders in keyEuropean negotiations. Nevertheless, under-standing of how and why European integrationhas developed as it has is often furthered bydrawing appropriately on pertinent pointsraised by other theoretical frameworks andapproaches.

* * *Against the backdrop of this overview of thedevelopment of the European Union, it istime to turn our attention next to the centralinstitutions of the contemporary EuropeanUnion and how they operate. Chapter Twohas alluded briefly to many of these institu-tions, such as the European Commission, the


pursue distinctive national geopoliticalinterests.

■ Liberal intergovernmental theory, associ-ated in particular with the scholar AndrewMoravcsik, stresses bargaining amongnational leaders in the EU (much as realisttheory does) but also emphasizes the eco-nomic context of this bargaining and thelarge roles of major economic interestgroups in influencing national leaders’ bar-gaining objectives.

■ This text draws upon these and other theo-retical perspectives while giving particularemphasis to liberal intergovernmental theory.

■ The creation of the European Coal andSteel Community (ECSC) in 1952 byFrance, West Germany, Italy, and theBenelux countries marked the first majorstep toward European integration.

■ Spillover occurred to some extent in thecreation of the European Economic Com-munity and the European Community ofAtomic Energy through the Treaties ofRome in 1957, but efforts to establish aEuropean Defense Community failed dueto French opposition.

■ The 1960s saw the European Communi-ties’ creation of a customs union and aCommon Agricultural Policy but also sawnational assertiveness, particularly in theactions of French President Charles deGaulle, who blocked much proposed supra-national development and blocked BritishEC entry.

■ The European Community widened signif-icantly in 1973 (Britain, Denmark, and Ire-land) and 1981 (Greece) and adopted somesupranational reforms; however, the 1970swas a period of much national infightingwithin the EC and of considerable eco-nomic stagnation.

■ European integration accelerated after1984, with the Single European Act of 1986

and the Maastricht Treaty of 1992; furtherwidening occurred with the admission ofSpain and Portugal in 1986 and Austria,Finland, and Sweden in 1995.

■ The European Union has sought to con-solidate its treaty provisions and alter someof its key institutions in a constitutionthrough a process that included a constitu-tional convention in 2002–2003 and thatcontinues through 2004; national differ-ences have complicated the constitutionaldevelopment process.

■ The European Union undertook its mostambitious widening ever, with ten new mem-ber states admitted in May 2004; Bulgariaand Romania have been scheduled for EUentry in 2007; Croatia has been recognizedas an accession candidate with a likely entrydate in the 2007–2009 period; Turkey hasbeen recognized as an accession candidatebut without a date for entry as of mid-2004.

ENDNOTES

1. Jean Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth,Abridged and translated by M.J. Tooley (NewYork: Barnes and Noble, 1967); George H.Sabine, A History of Political Theory, 4th ed.(Hinsdale, IL: Dryden, 1973), 372–385.

2. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress, 1992); Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship andNationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); David A.Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: InventingNationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Har-vard University Press, 2001); Stephen Wood,Germany, Europe and the Persistence of Nations(Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), Ch. 1.

3. Richard Wollheim, “Democracy: Its History,” inJames A. Gould and Willis H. Truitt, eds.,Political Ideologies (New York: Macmillan, 1973),30–37; Terence Ball and Richard Dagger,Political Ideologies and the Democratic Ideal, 3rd ed.(New York: Longman, 1999), 20–24.


13. François Duchêne, Jean Monnet: The First States-man of Interdependence (New York: Norton,1994); Charles Williams, Adenauer: The Father ofthe New Germany (New York: Wiley, 2000), esp.357–61.

14. David Gowland and Arthur Turner, ReluctantEuropeans: Britain and European Integration,1945–1998 (Harlow: Longman, Pearson Educa-tion, 2000), 9–39; Stephen George, An AwkwardPartner: Britain in the European Community, 3rd

ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998),12–22; John W. Young, Britain and EuropeanUnity, 1945–1992 (New York: Longman, 1997),1–19.

15. Edward Fursdon, The European Defense Commu-nity: A History (New York: St. Martin’s, 1980); F.Roy Willis, France, Germany, and the NewEurope, Revised ed. (Stanford: Stanford Univer-sity Press, 1968), 130–84; F. Roy Willis, ItalyChooses Europe (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1971), 41–53.

16. Derek Urwin, The Community of Europe: A His-tory of European Integration since 1945 (New York:Longman, 1991), 71–84. The quotations are onp. 76.

17. Neofunctionalist analyses in political sciencehave included Ernst Haas, The Uniting of Europe:Political, Social, and Economic Forces 1950–57(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958);Leon Lindberg, The Political Dynamics of Euro-pean Integration (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 1963); and Leon Lindberg and StuartScheingold, Europe’s Would-Be Polity (EnglewoodCliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970). Haas subse-quently modified his analysis in “TurbulentFields and the Theory of Regional Integration,”International Organization 30 (Spring 1976),173–212.

18. Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe, esp. Ch. 2;Urwin, The Community of Europe, 78–84.

19. The quotation is from Alistair Cole, “Nationaland Partisan Contexts of Europeanization,” 18;Edward Kolodziej, French International PolicyUnder de Gaulle and Pompidou: The Politics ofGrandeur (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,1974); Willis, France, Germany, and the NewEurope, 273–365; Moravcsik, The Choice forEurope, Ch. 3.

4. George P. Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in theSeventeenth Century, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper,1959); Sabine, A History of Political Theory,441–458.

5. Susan Dunn, Sister Revolutions: French Lightning,American Light (New York: Faber and Faber,1999); Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolu-tions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1979), 174–205.

6. Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democ-ratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman,OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

7. Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers: TheLives, Times, and Ideas of the Great EconomicThinkers, 4th ed. (New York: Simon and Schus-ter, 1972), 27.

8. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York:Dutton, 1957); Heilbroner, The Worldly Philoso-phers, 16–72.

9. Andrew Heywood, Political Ideologies: An Intro-duction (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), Chs. 2–4;Ball and Dagger, Political Ideologies and the Demo-cratic Ideal, Chs. 3, 4, 5.

10. European federalism was strongly advocatedafter World War II by Altiero Spinelli of Italy,among others. See Spinelli, Towards the EuropeanUnion (Florence: European University Institute,1983). Jean Monnet of France was a leading pro-ponent of functionalism. See Monnet, Memoirs,translated by Richard Mayne (Garden City, NY:Doubleday, 1978).

11. The leading realist scholar of the postwar erawas Hans Morgenthau. See Morgenthau, PoliticsAmong Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace,3rd ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964). Amore recent realist analysis of global politics isRichard Crockatt, The Fifty Years War (NewYork: Routledge, 1996). For a realist analysis ofnation-states’ motivations and behavior vis-à-visEuropean integration specifically, see ThomasPederson, Germany, France, and the Integration ofEurope: A Realist Interpretation (London: Pinter,1998).

12. Andrew Moravcsik is the founder of liberalintergovernmental theory. See Moravcsik, TheChoice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Powerfrom Messina to Maastricht (Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 1998).


20. Rosemary Fennell, The Common Agricultural Pol-icy: Continuity and Change (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1997), Chs. 1 and 2; Moravcsik, The Choicefor Europe, Ch. 3; Urwin, The Community ofEurope, Ch. 7.

21. Urwin, The Community of Europe, Ch. 8; Moravc-sik, The Choice for Europe, Ch. 3; Kolodziej, FrenchInternational Policy Under de Gaulle and Pompidou.

22. Haig Simonian, The Privileged Partnership:Franco-German Relationships in the EuropeanCommunity, 1969–1984 (Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1985); Urwin, The Community ofEurope, 139–54.

23. Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe, Ch. 4; Urwin,The Community of Europe, 154–228.

24. Urwin, The Community of Europe, 221–228;Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe, 331–333.

25. Charles Grant, Delors: Inside the House thatJacques Built (London: Nicholas Brealey, 1994)assigns a major role to Delors. Moravcsik, TheChoice for Europe, Ch. 5, builds a convincing casefor the primacy of French, West German, andBritish chief executives in the process.

26. Gowland and Turner, Reluctant Europeans, Ch.18; George, An Awkward Partner, Chs. 6, 7.

27. Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe, Ch. 6; MichaelBaun, An Imperfect Union: The Maastricht Treatyand the New Politics of European Integration(Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996); J. M. Grieco,“The Maastricht Treaty, Economic and Mone-tary Union and the Neo-realist Research Pro-gramme,” Review of International Studies 21, 1(January 1995), 21–40.

28. James Walsh, European Monetary Integration &Domestic Politics: Britain, France, and Italy(Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000); BernardBenoit, Social-Nationalism: An Anatomy of FrenchEuroskepticism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997); Alis-tair Cole, Franco-German Relations (Harlow:Longman, 2001), 128–144.

29. Hugh Schofield, “Key Points of the EU’s His-toric Agreement at Nice,” Agence FrancePresse, December 11, 2000; Stephen Castle,“The Deal—Big Four Emerge Triumphant afterDiplomatic ‘Coup’,” The Independent, December12, 2000; Peter Ludlow, “The Treaty of Nice:Neither Triumph nor Disaster,” ECSA Review14, 2 (Spring 2001), 1–4; Gráinne de Búrca,

“The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights,”ECSA Review 14, 2 (Spring 2001), 9–10.

30. The senior convention member’s quotation isfrom “Special Report: Europe’s Constitution,”The Economist (June 21, 2003), 51. The Peel quo-tation is from Quentin Peel, “Europe’s Consti-tution Misses Its Moment,” Financial Times, June17, 2003, 15. The Prodi and Blair quotations arefrom Frank Bruni, “Leaders Broadly Back aDraft Charter for the European Union,” NewYork Times, June 21, 2003, A2.

31. The quotation is from “Special Report:Europe’s Constitution,” The Economist (June 21,2003), 52. Bruno de Witte, “Après Nice: Timefor a European Constitution?” ECSA Review 14,2 (Spring 2001), 10–11; William Pfaff, “Europe’sUnification Debate Needs the Sound of FreshVoices,” International Herald Tribune, January 11,2001, 6; Edmund Andrews, “Germans OfferPlan to Remake Europe Union,” New YorkTimes, March 1, 2001, A1, A3; Suzanne Daley,“French Premier Opposes German Plan forEurope,” New York Times, May 29, 2001, A6;“Nice Uncle Gerhard and the Little’Uns,” TheEconomist 358 (February 3, 2001), 50; GeorgeParker and Daniel Dombey, “‘Not Perfect butMore than We Could Have Hoped for’:Europe’s Draft Constitution,” Financial Times,June 20, 2003, 13; Richard Baldwin and MikaWidgren, “Europe’s Voting Reform Will ShiftPower Balance,” Financial Times, June 23, 2003,13; “Special Report: Europe’s Constitution,”The Economist (June 21, 2003), 51–54.

32. “A Difficult Birth,” The Economist, 371 (June 26,2004), 53–54; Gaby Hinsliff and Ian Traynor,“Europe’s Grand Folly,” The Observer, December14, 2003; “Proving the Case for a Constitution,”Financial Times, December 15, 2003, 14; GeorgeParker, “Atmosphere of Resignation as LeadersWalk Away,” Financial Times, December 15, 2003,4; Stefan Wagstyl, “Failure May Have Impact onEU’s Long-Term Future,” Financial Times,December 15, 2003, 4; John Tagliabue, “DraftCharter Slips Away; Europe Asks, Now What?”New York Times, December 15, 2003, A9.

33. Haas, The Uniting of Europe; Lindberg, The Polit-ical Dynamics of European Integration; Lindbergand Scheingold, Europe’s Would-Be Polity. See


2004, 4; Ed Crooks, “EU May Yet Pay the Priceof Not Playing by the Rules,” Financial Times,November 26, 2003, 4; George Parker, “Minis-ters Conduct Late-Night Burial for EU FiscalFramework,” Financial Times, November 26,2003, 4.

39. There is a growing number of studies empha-sizing “multi-level governance” patterns in theEuropean Union. See, for example, Gary Marks,Liesbet Hooge, and Karen Blank, “EuropeanIntegration from the 1980s: State-Centric v.Multi-Level Governance,” Journal of CommonMarket Studies 34, 3 (1996), 341–378 and Lies-bet Hooghe and Gary Marks, Multi-Level Gov-ernance and European Integration (Lanham, MD:Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). Most would notclassify these studies as constituting a full theory,and this author has not done so.

note 17 for full citations of these and Haas’s latermodification.

34. Pederson, Germany, France, and the Integration ofEurope.

35. Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe.36. See, for example, Rey Koslowski, “A Construc-

tivist Approach to Understanding the EuropeanUnion as a Federal Polity,” Journal of EuropeanPublic Policy 6, 4 (1999), 561–578. Ben Rosa-mond, Theories of European Integration (NewYork: St. Martin’s, 2000), 171–174, discusses avariety of constructivist approaches and theircommon themes.

37. Paul Pierson, “The Path to European Integra-tion: A Historical Institutionalist Analysis,”Comparative Political Studies 29 (April 1996), 126.

38. Bernard Benoit, “Surprise at Eichel’s ‘EmotionalResponse,’” Financial Times, November 26,


Major Nation-States in the European Union & Bacon/Longman representative. Major Nation-States in the European Union 12 T his chapter is about the efforts to create Europe, a process

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