Changing Borders in Europe

Exploring the Dynamics of Integration, Differentiation and Self-Determination in the European Union

Jacint Jordana, Michael Keating, Axel Marx, Jan Wouters, Jacint Jordana, Michael Keating, Axel Marx, Jan Wouters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429959714
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Changing Borders in Europe focuses on the territorial dimension of the European Union. It examines the transformation of state sovereignty within the EU, the emergence of varied self-determination claims, and the existence of a tailor-made architecture of functional borders, established by multiple agreements.

This book helps to understand how self-determination pressures within the EU are creating growing concerns about member states' identity, redefining multi-level government in the European space. It addresses several questions regarding two transformative processes – blurring of EU borders and state sovereignty shifts - and their interrelations from different disciplinary perspectives such as political science, law, political economy and sociology. In addition, it explores how the variable geographies of European borders may affect the issue of national self-determination in Europe, opening spaces for potential accommodations that could be compatible with existing states and legal frameworks.

This book will be of key interest for scholars, students and practitioners of EU politics, public administration, political theory, federalism and more broadly of European studies, international law, ethnic studies, political economy and the wider social sciences.

1
States, sovereignty, borders and self-determination in Europe

Michael Keating, Jacint Jordana, Axel Marx and Jan Wouters

Introduction

The nation-state, as a territorially delimited polity, based on the principles of sovereignty and unity, had its birth in Europe. Yet it is in Europe that it has come under most challenge. There has been a shift in policymaking and political authority both to the supranational and the sub-state level, as well as to transnational spaces crossing state boundaries. The relationship between nation and state has come into question, as movements for self-determination have emerged or re-emerged. It might be thought that the process of supranational integration and state fragmentation are contradictory processes, but they can also be complementary processes, questioning old spatial hierarchies, and there are common features and causes in both cases. Yet no clear spatial order or hierarchy has been established to replace the old one. Europe has not become a state in its own right, nor have the existing states fragmented into their component parts, in spite of challenges in places like Catalonia, Scotland or Flanders. This was the challenge that inspired our project on which this book is based, that is to find new ways of understanding that do not simply reproduce the vocabulary of the nation-state. Our focus is on the European Union, itself contested between those who understand it as a project to rescue the nation-state and those who see it as the harbinger of a federal arrangement or a new form of political order altogether.

In this opening chapter, we introduce the general framework and analyze the various transformative processes under the rubric of state transformation. It introduces key concepts that run through the following chapters including the inherently conditional and contested nature of the state, which is reconfiguring and rescaling in response to internal and external changes; the practical value of the concept of sovereignty for policymaking and government; the importance of territory and borders in politics; the notion of plurinationalism; and the key concept of self-determination. The chapter ends with a brief introduction into the structure of the book and the different contributions.

The myth of the nation-state

The dominant form of political unit in Europe has been the nation-state. In principle, this consists of a delimited territory in which are bound a system of government; a shared political identity; a common culture and set of symbolic references; a system of social communication with (usually) a common language; a spatially delineated economy; and a differentiated civil society. As civil and political rights expanded, a system of representation and eventually democracy were built on this, drawing on trust and common references to sustain peaceful contestation of power. Later, the nation-state became the basis for social welfare systems, drawing on (a) the affective solidarity that comes from shared identity; and (b) social compromises, notably between capital and labour, which have to share the same geographical boundaries. Economic and social systems were gradually ‘caged’ by the nation-state (Mann, 1993). Capitalism often developed within a national framework while eroding local production systems. The whole was capped by the principle of national sovereignty, in which the nation-state recognized superior authority and claims for universal jurisdiction disappeared.

There was always a paradox in all this as theories of national integration argued that, within states, modernization would result in the displacement of territorial differentiation with functional differentiation over homogeneous space. At the same time, the external boundaries of the state were presented as rigid and states themselves were reified and credited with agency and interests. The realist school of international relations saw such states as the building blocks of world order, pursuing their own self-defined interests.

From the early twentieth century, a key principle of international political order was that of national self-determination, beginning in the nineteenth-century rise of nationalism and crystallized in Woodrow Wilson’s precepts at the end of the First World War. As long as existing states could be assumed to be national, self-determination raised few problems. Rather, it could sustain political order and legitimacy; it is still used in this way by defenders of the actual states. Exceptions could be made during the mid-twentieth century for overseas colonies (the salt water doctrine), which could themselves become independent nation-states. More difficult is the case of nationality movements within existing states or the great European empires (Habsburg, Ottoman and Romanov), which grappled with their nationality’s questions in the nineteenth century and collapsed in the aftermath of the First World War. As Ivor Jennings (1956: 55) famously put it:

Nearly forty years ago a Professor of Political Science, who was also President of the United States, enunciated a doctrine which was ridiculous but which was widely accepted as a sensible proposition, the doctrine of self-determination. On the surface it seemed reasonable, let the people decide. It was in fact ridiculous because the people cannot decide until someone decides who are the people.

The nation-state thus provides a less firm foundation for political order than the political and legal sciences have often assumed. In some ways, it can be seen as a myth, a powerful story whose force is not dependent on its factual accuracy but more on its uses. The term itself is used in very different ways. In the discipline of international relations, it refers to a sovereign state – although sometimes states are seen as sovereign by definition. In comparative politics, it refers to the situation in which the state and the nation are congruent, as opposed to plurinational states where the relationship is contested. In either case, the nation-state is always a claim, a normatively charged aspiration, which may to a greater or less extent be realizable.

In the early twenty-first century, as the nation-state has lost much of its functional capacity and its mystique, its inherently conditional and contested nature is ever more visible. States are reconfiguring and rescaling in response to internal and external changes (King and Le Galès, 2017; Leibfried et al., 2015; Keating, 2013).

Rescaling

In the late twentieth century, coinciding with the end of the Cold War, there were debates about the end of territory (Badie, 1995) and the end of history (Fukuyama, 1992). This was the very apotheosis of modernization theory, in which the very foundations of the differentiated political order would disappear into an undifferentiated global finality. History, of course, continued. As for territory, what was often being described was not its termination but rather the end of the nation-state and the unique definer and controller of territory. Political, economic and social orders were, rather, reterritorializing but at new scales, above, below and across states. The coincidence of state, governing order, economy, society and identity could no longer be taken for granted (Jessop et al., 2008; Keating, 2013).

Economic change was impelled by new forces at the global level, including free trade, capital mobility and the rise of the transnational corporation. At the same time, it was localizing, with the rediscovery of territory as a factor in production. There is a global division of labour and some of the industries that might appear to be prime candidates for de-territorialization, like financial services or software design, are remarkably concentrated spatially, often at the sub-state region or city level. There are several versions of this new regionalism in economics. The New Economic Geography (Krugman, 2011), builds on neo-classical assumptions but emphasizes how proximity can reduce transaction costs and exploit economies of agglomeration. Other accounts draw on institutional economics and focus on institutions in government and civil society in promoting that balance of competition and cooperation in which capitalist markets thrive (Scott, 1998). There is a move away from the traded dependencies of transaction costs models to untraded interdependencies in the form of tacit knowledge and face-to-face exchange, which are seen as important for innovation and for flexible specialization. Institutional accounts fade into sociological accounts, focusing on the characteristics of local societies, and these in turn fade into cultural explanations, focusing on the characteristics of the population, including social capital. Territory thus becomes a factor of production, not always defined, as in the past, by proximity to raw materials or markets, but by social and cultural characteristics as well as labour supply. Global investors themselves are sensitive to the importance of territory as a location of production and distribution.

Other functional systems are similarly rescaling. Universities, traditionally national in their orientation, now compete in global markets while also linking to local and regional markets. Welfare systems are reacting to the mobility of workers by acquiring a transnational reach while also adapting to local labour markets and pressures (Ferrera, 2005). Environmental questions have global causes but local impacts.

Rescaling, by separating functions previously coinciding under the aegis of the nation-state, has caused tensions and political oppositions, in particular concerning the separation of economic regulation from the social protection for the losers of change (Bartolini, 2005). It is widely noted that this has caused new social and political cleavages between those, often the highly educated and mobile, who can benefit from globalization, and those left behind, dependent on weakened national welfare states. The situation is exacerbated to the degree that new levels of functional management, whether at the sub-state or the transnational level, have been insulated not only territorially but also institutionally from national democracy by being entrusted to technocratic institutions. The construction of the European currency union, around the euro, is predicated on the doctrine of central bank independence and a particular economic orthodoxy. Institutions for economic development at the regional and urban level have often similarly been built upon a technical logic and depoliticized.

The process is sometimes referred to as the rise of multilevel governance (Bache and Flinders, 2004; Hooghe and Marks, 2001; Piattoni, 2010), but that is a rather depoliticized concept, rooted in technocratic and functionalist theories of political order. What is happening is more political. The migration of functional systems to new levels and beyond existing systems of democratic representation has called into being new forms of opposition. At the same time, states have sought more effective instruments of management and to regain leverage over matters that have escaped their purview. The result is the building of new institutions at the supranational and sub-state scales and demands for their democratization and opening to non-economic interests. Hence the debates about democratizing Europe and balancing market Europe with a social dimension. Hence, too, the demand for accountable sub-state institutions open to a plurality of social interests. In sum, this is a demand for the rescaling of government. Technocratic governance thus provokes a counter-move towards representation, expansion of competences and interest intermediation that is the core of government.

Sovereignty

Sovereignty is another principle that appears simple in principle but is very difficult in practice. It refers to the location of ultimate authority or the foundation of legitimate political order. According to one school, this can only be in one place since anything different would violate the principle of sovereignty itself. That place is usually defined as the state, sometimes the ‘Westphalian state’ although the idea that state sovereignty was established in the treaties of Münster and Osnabruck in 1648 has been questioned. Some scholars see it as a later development, even dating from the nineteenth century (Osiander, 2001). It has both an internal dimension, referring to control over territory, and an external one, in which the state is an untrammelled actor in the international order.

For some legal scholars, sovereignty is a normative principle about the location of authority (Walker, 2003). The fact that some states are strong and others weak is, from this perspective, irrelevant. Political scientists, on the other hand, tend to link sovereignty to state capacity so that if the state is no longer able to manage functional systems or to make its presence felt on the world stage it has lost sovereignty. We can take both conceptions to be useful, depending on the question at stake.

It has been argued that the state has lost functional capacity in the face of global economic pressures, social complexity, international interdependence and the proliferation of ‘wicked issues’ not amenable to traditional policy solutions and instruments. This indeed is one reason for rescaling government, the better to get a grip on issues that have escaped its purview. European integration and regional devolution, in this reading, do not weaken the state but enable it to govern more effectively. Other observers, however, see the rise of transnational order and substate government as diffusing state authority and weakening its control. Power is diffused vertically both to new territorial scales and horizontally to organized interests and civil society.

It is also argued by some that sovereignty in the legal or normative sense has also been diffused, shared and divided (MacCormick, 1999). In the ‘post-sovereign’ conception, multiple normative orders can exist without a strict hierarchy or any single way of resolving competing claims. Such a conception is in one way a highly modern way of thinking, responding to the diffusion of power in a multilevel and rescaled world. Yet it also harks back to older ideas and traditions and has a particular appeal in those places where unitary authority, or the state as its only fount, were never completely accepted – Scotland and the Basque Country are examples (Keating, 2001). This opens the way for a radical reconceptualization of the foundations of political authority. It is possible to see the European Union as partaking elements of sovereignty without effacing its member states. Within the state it is possible to recognize more than one source of original authority, including the Basque historic rights or fueros (Herrero de Miñon, 1998) and the distinct Scottish doctrine of sovereignty that differs from the monist doctrine of Westminster (MacCormick, 1999, 2000). Sovereignty, in this formulation, ceases to be an entity that a polity possesses and becomes a claim to authority, which may coexist with other claims and thus is to be negotiated rather than merely asserted. The confluence of the rise of transnational authority in the European Union (and the European Convention on Human Rights) with sovereignty claims at the sub-state level makes this particularly relevant. The Northern Ireland peace settlement, with its complex arrangements for power sharing, within the province and between it and two sovereign states, exemplifies the possibilities. States, however, have continued to assert absolute doctrines of sovereignty, even as the substance of it is diluted and reshaped.

Territory and borders

Political science, international relations and law have tended to treat territory as a sharply delineated territorial grid with fixed boundaries. State borders are particularly sharply defined so that one place cannot be in two states at the same time and sovereignty claims are made in relation to specific lines on maps. This idea, widely held by political actors, is at the root of most nationality conflicts, given the disagreements about borders and where they should be drawn. In social and economic geography, however, thinking has moved on. Territory is seen not as a purely topological but as a sociological concept, defined in relation to the social content of a given space. Territory itself can be mapped in different ways. One is to draw boundaries, to enclose social and economic systems and differentiate them from neighbours. Another is to identify central places, with varying degrees of connectedness to peripheral ones and without sharply delineated borders. Following the constructivist turn in social science, territory is socially constructed and given meaning by political, social and economic actors and by citizens. These meanings may be historic, cultural, economic, political, social, topographical or even gastronomic and the various meanings do not necessarily coincide. Relational approaches to territory define it by transactions, which may be between non-contiguous spaces, breaking with the assumption of bounded territories altogether. So ‘global cities’ (Scott, 2001; Sassen, 2000) are places, but caught in transnational chains of activity around the world.

It follows from this that borders must also be reconceptualized. Territories might be defined differently for different purposes, as in the case of the Basque lands, which have multiple definitions, relying on historic, linguistic, identitarian and institutional markers, all the way from the three historic provinces of the Basque autonomous community, to an extension to Navarre, three French provinces and, in some formulations, well beyond that. Catalonia may be defined as the present autonomous community, or extended to include French Catalonia (Roussillon) or, using linguistic criteria, the Països Catalans, language encompass the region of Valencia, the Balearic Islands, Andorra, Roussillon and the town of Alghero in Sardinia. Fernand Braudel (1986) discusses the case of Gascony, a historic place but with multiple geographical definitions and meanings. The point is not that any of these can be proven empirically to be correct but that they may all be useful for particular purposes. The ambition of states to make them coincide on a rigid territorial grid is always difficult, and sometimes impossible, to achieve.

The term ‘border’ (frontière, frontera, frontiera, Grenze) is applied to states but also to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 States, sovereignty, borders and self-determination in Europe
• PART I Blurring of EU borders across member states
• PART II National self-determination with EU member states
• PART III Conclusions
• Index