The European Union does not fit easily within the confines of the orthodox neo-realist theory of international relations. Those indoctrinated by it tend to treat European integration as a somewhat more elaborate form of trans-national alliance dominated by the relative power and national interests of its unequal member-states, a sort of “soft empire.” Its institutions supposedly have no distinctive role or capacity of their own and simply serve to reproduce the prevailing relations of power among the members.
Taken to the extreme, its underlying purpose was presumed to be the containment of the region’s primary external enemy, the Soviet Union. With its disappearance the EU should logically have dissolved itself. When this did not happen (nor was even suggested), it became necessary to invent other raisons d’être for its persistence. Hence, in the so-called “liberal version” of the theory, it was admitted that the policies of its member-states were also at least partially influenced by various sub-national private actors, particularly those of business firms with industrial and financial interests in trading within the region. This may have helped to explain its persistence, but it did nothing to explain its extension into more and more policy domains.
The theory that I have been exploiting (and simultaneously changing) in these Europolitan Papers is radically different. It begins with the assumption that regional integration when conducted consensually between participating national states can be transformative, not merely reproductive. Once some sub-set of allegedly sovereign national states agrees to combine resources to address a common problem that they are incapable of resolving individually, they create new regional institutions and, potentially, new citizen expectations. In resolving these initially ‘functional’ issues, they inevitably discover that their collective efforts tend to generate consequential changes in adjacent domains – often ones that were not initially anticipated. Moreover, the regional agents that they have initially empowered have a self-interest in identifying these side-effects and exploiting them to expand their organizational tasks. At the core of this approach (and the limit of its current applicability) is the presumption that the national regimes involved are not only democratic, but they also tolerate the formation of trans-national interest associations and social movements that are capable of identifying and responding to these side-effects and of influencing both their respective governments and their respective citizenries. Europe, so far, has been unique in conforming to these pre-conditions, but it may not remain so unique.
The theory is not only about the potential for transformation but is itself transformative. In other words, it assumes that the identity and behavior of those involved will change as the process of regional integration evolves. It begins with the modest functional changes that are triggered by ‘negative’ integration, i. e. by a removal of existing inter-state barriers to trade and other exchanges. These are of interest to only a relatively small proportion of the respective populations, but they tend to trigger the need for some degree of ‘positive’ integration, e. g. measures to ensure that the respective agents play according to the same rules and regulations. These, in turn, tend to affect wider and wider publics – including those who had no direct or immediate interest in the initial exchanges. Moreover, the shift from negative to positive measures has an important latent political impact; namely, it tends to involve issues about the legitimacy of how these policies were decided. Simple functional problem-solving by experts across national borders can be self-legitimating, provided the results conform to original expectations. When it comes, however. to agreeing upon and enforcing generally binding rules that may affect not only those directly involved in cross-border transactions but also all those indirectly affected within national borders, citizens are more likely to question how they were taken and who participated in the process. In other words, the self-fulfilling legitimacy of well-intentioned and well-informed “technocracy” is limited, even more so when foreigners are involved in making the decisions.[1]
***
Discussions for and against the European Union tend to focus on its impact upon the region itself – understandably so. However, its more significant and enduring impact could be global. Europe may have pioneered in this process of creating a regional “intermediary” polity between the national and the global level of aggregation, but the experiment is being observed (and occasionally and imperfectly imitated) by others. The sheer number of international organizations that define themselves as “regional” has increased almost exponentially in recent decades, even if none of them has yet to remotely acquire the decisional capacities or public visibility of the EU. There is hardly a nation-state that is not a member of at least one of them.[2]
Behind these efforts lies a novel conception of how the prevailing (and manifestly dysfunctional) system of international politics could eventually be transformed. Instead of assuming that an enduring global and peaceful order would depend upon either a “World Government” with its own citizens and denizens or a “World Compact” between all or almost all national governments, it could emerge piecemeal once a finite number of regions would have created their distinctive political institutions (without dissolving those of their national member-states) and ensured peaceful relations within their enlarged territorial domains. Gradually, first by negotiating bi-regional treaties regulating commercial and social exchange between each other and, subsequently, by creating an even more encompassing system based on continuous negotiation among an increasing number of participating regions, one could imagine a novel system of world order that would not only respect the diversity of interests and identities of its component units, but establish the sort of “perpetual peace” based on mutually advantageous commerce that Immanuel Kant imagined long ago. Such a peace would not only embody the absence of the use or even the threat of violence in relations between the participating national states, but it would also be “a working peace system” (to use the expression of David Mitrany) capable of resolving the functional conflicts that inevitably emerge from their economic and social exchanges.[3]
The European Union represents a critical component in this “Peace by Pieces” strategy. Its success or failure will have ramifications that go far beyond its own borders. It is both novel enough and large enough to have a significant impact on other potential world regions, even if none of the literally hundreds of international regional organizations (IROs) in existence has yet to acquire a similar capacity for multi-layered governance.
There are five institutional characteristics at the core of its (so far, unique) transformative potential: (1) the mutually assured relation between both ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ measures for promoting and then governing infra-regional exchanges; (2) the existence of a supra-national Court of Justice that effectively defends the supremacy of regional law and, thereby, ensures that the positive measures are respected by wider publics; (3) the ‘closed’ nature of membership which prohibits member-states from ‘openly’ negotiating or simultaneously participating in other analogous regional organizations; (4) the liberal democratic nature of all of its national regimes that not only promotes competition between political parties, but also tolerates the formation of trans-national associations and movements, thereby, opening up the possibility for the formation of a regional civil society; and (5) the early establishment of a core bureaucracy with a degree of political autonomy and own resources – human and material – that go beyond those of the usual “secretariats” that characterize international organizations.
As I have noted supra, even with these institutional advantages, the process of European integration has neither been linear nor without conflict. And, at the present moment, it is facing an unprecedented number and variety of challenges that could even threaten its very existence. Not only are they coming simultaneously, but most of them have not been produced by the process of integration itself, as was presumed by my initial “neo-functionalist” theory. Also, for the first time, mass publics within the member-states are involved and do not seem to be as “functionally” predisposed to favor the process as I had presumed. Simply because the EU has successfully exploited previous crises to expand both the scope and authority of its institutions is no guarantee that it will continue to be able to do so, especially when the current crises are occurring simultaneously and involve substantive matters that it was not designed to deal with.
The message I have attempted to convey in this Europolitan Paper is that the fate of European integration is relevant, not just for those who live within its borders, but for the future of those who live anywhere on this Earth.
Philippe Schmitter
Emeritus Professor
European University Institute
Comments
Readers are welcome to send comments to egpp@eui.eu. Comments will be reviewed before publication below and will include the name of the author.
[1] I was a direct participant observer of this effect. One day, in the small locality where I live in Tuscany, there was plastered on the walls of its municipality a decree limited the length of the hunting season and the identity of the birds and animals that it was heretofore permitted to kill. Completely unprepared for this event, the hunters in my neighborhood (and there were many) immediately recognized this as a transposed rule of the EU and blamed it on environmentally over-zealous “Scandinavians” who do not know how good these birds really taste. My subsequent impression was that local authorities prudently neglected to apply the proscriptions.
[2] Israel may be the only one.
[3] David Mitrany, A Working Peace System (London: Quadrangle Books, 1966), reprinted from original edition, 1943.