Europe's Malaise

The Long View

Francesco Duina, Frédéric Merand

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839090431
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Europe is struggling. Its challenges include weak economic growth, populism, geopolitical tensions, Brexit, the EU's legitimacy crisis, and much more. Some of the dynamics at work may encourage further integration, but others are undermining it.
This volume of Research in Political Sociology seeks to adopt a 'longer' view to make sense of Europe's current 'malaise'. Written just before the COVID-19 pandemic, it asks vital and long-term questions about the EU. Are the current challenges unprecedented or do they have roots in, or connections to, past events and developments? Is there a 'big' picture which we should keep in mind? Are there bright spots, and what do they suggest about Europe's present and future?
To engage in such questions, leading scholars draw from historical and comparative sociology, as well as comparative politics. They offer analyses that see the EU as an instance of state formation. They grapple with the question of identity and institutions, exploring in that context the extent and limit of citizens' support for more Europeanization. Taken together, they put forward exciting, far-reaching, and illuminating perspectives of enduring relevance as Europe moves toward an uncertain future.

The Nature of the European Union

Brendan O'Leary

Abstract

The European Union (EU) is not a state, though it has some statelike attributes; it is not an empire, though it includes many former European imperial powers; and it is not a federation, though Euro-federalists seek to make it one. There is, however, no need to argue that the Union is a singularity, nor to invent novel terminology, such as that deployed by “neo-functionalists” and “intergovernmentalists” to capture its legal and political form. The EU is a confederation, but with consociational characteristics in its decision-making styles. This conceptualization facilitates understanding and helps explain the patterns of crises within the Union.

Keywords: European Union; state, theories of; empire, theories of; federation; confederation; consociation

Teaching the European Union (EU) successfully requires avoiding several initial mind-blockers. EU specialists tend to insist on the novelty of their subject, to focus on its allegedly unprecedented attributes, and to use, understandably, an in-bred terminology. ¹ Frequently, and with atypical lightheartedness, they quote the quip of former Commission President Jacques Delors that the Union is an UPO – an unidentified political object. This elegant phrasing, even more impressive in French, conforms with the insistence that the Union is a unique novum – unique in its non-American meaning, i.e., a singularity, albeit not foreseen in the science fiction of artificial intelligence. We are also told that the EU displays innovative “variable geometry,” but, “what, pray, is constant geometry?” Some EU specialists come close to suggesting that their subject is incomparable. Impliedly, the EU's nature can only be understood through deep immersion in its treaties, institutions, and policies, accompanied by long sojourns in the European Quarter of Brussels, preferably interrupted by a Master's degree at the College of Europe, and provisionally capped through completing a joint PhD and JD dissertation at the European University Institute in Florence, composed in three major world-languages, namely, English, law, and economics. For them the EU is a big N of 1.

Other guides, by contrast, employ very broad but less valuable abstractions to encapsulate the EU. For example, Gary Marks and Liesbet Hooghe, describe the EU as “a system of multi-level governance.” Yet most polities, with the exception of some city-states and numerous micro-states, have had multiple levels of administration or government, as the authors illustrate in their excellent study of regional governments (Hooghe, Marks, & Schakel, 2010). “Governance,” by contrast, is among the vaguest of expressions in widespread usage, the blame for which, perhaps mistakenly, may be assigned to the former Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who published The Governance of Britain shortly after leaving office. Both components of his title misled: it was about the Government of the United Kingdom (Wilson, 1976). Similarly, we are instructed that the EU is “a political system” in the best political science textbook in English on the European Union, initially written by my former colleague Simon Hix – later editions are coauthored. That hardly helps the neophyte, however. The reference invokes David Easton's framework, replete with inputs, outputs, and feedback loops, and implicit black boxes surrounded by demands and supports (Easton, 1965/1979). The political system tag, I suspect, is used by Hix to avoid immediate immersion in debates between so-called “inter-governmentalists” and “neo-functionalists,” because his goal, accomplished with skill, is to transfer rational choice analytical politics from its original site of application (the United States) across the Atlantic (Hix, 1999).

While Marks, Hooghe, and Hix cannot be accused of conceptualizations that are obviously wrong, precisely because they go for the vague, the same cannot be said of more popular if not populist intellectuals. Mark Leonard, for example, was sufficiently premature to describe the EU as “the ruler of the 21st century,” which makes the Union sound like a collective time-lord from Dr Who. He compounded his metaphors by declaring that the EU resembles VISA, the credit agency, though presumably not because of VISA's propensity to encourage debt addiction (Leonard, 2005). Less popular, and more typical of the academy is Stefan Bartolini's description of the Union as “post-sovereign, polycentric, incongruent and neo-medieval” (Bartolini, 2005). That is not going to help initiate the average Millennial in understanding the Union. Let us therefore go through several negations – not in any Hegelian sense – to provide, if we can, a clearer and more useful conceptualization.

The EU's Members Are States, but the EU Is Not a State, or Is It?

This author once cowrote an account of theories of the state (Dunleavy & O'Leary, 1987), so should be equipped to answer the question just posed. Point one: a state for our purposes is an independent sovereign entity, i.e., not to be confused with states in the US federation, or the Indian union, or provinces in Canada, or Länder in Germany and Austria. The United States is a state, though that title used to be pluralized (sentences beginning “The United States are…” may be found in pre-Civil War literature). Point two: a state is not a nation. Apologies to US high-school teachers, journalists, and political scientists, but what most Americans describe as nations are independent sovereign states, a high proportion of which are not nations, or at least not mono-national. The United Nations, it has been well said, is founded on a double-lie; it is neither united, nor comprised of “nations;” it is a club of currently recognized states. Point three: there are nation-states, nationalizing states that want to be nation-states, bi-national states, and multinational states; and some non-national states (such as the Vatican), and pre-national dynastic kingdoms survive (e.g., the Sultanate of Brunei). By these standards, the EU is multinational, because it contains multiple nations, and comprises numerous member-states that define themselves as nation-states – though it has bi-national members, e.g., the Flemings and Walloons of Belgium, and some multinational imperial rumps, e.g., the Kingdom of the Spains, and until January 31, 2020, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Just when things are getting clearer, however, the EU specialist will insist that the EU is not multinational, but rather “post-national,” and the very same person may use the expression “supra-national” to describe some EU institutions or policies. Each of these terms, however, may mislead. The expression “post-national” is descriptively false if it suggests that any significant number of the member-states have ceased to be nation-states. None have abandoned their “national characters” – though they update them constantly. Moreover, the EU has not, at least not yet, created a pan-European identity that has significantly superseded the national identities of the citizens of the Union, a fact noted before recent xenophobic and ethno-populist resurgences (Checkel & Katzenstein, 2009; Fligstein, 2008). Small numbers of EU citizens have a self-styled cosmopolitan European identity as their primary political identity, and perhaps allegiance, but they do not rule the EU – at least not all of its institutions, yet. For most EU citizens their “national” identity and citizenship are primary, though for many a European identity and their national citizenship are complementary. Even if the European identity became more important than member-state identity across the majority of the Union's citizens, it would not be clear that this “Euro-identity” would be “non-national.” It might well be a new continental-scale national identity, one that conceivably may resemble many extant national identities, such as China's, replete with its own mythologies, including a story of Europe's emergence, distinctiveness, and shared Christian (or post-Christian) culture. Such constructions are already in the marketplace of ideas (Le Goff, 2007).

But what of the “supra-national,” when it is not a synonym for “post-national”? As far as I know this expression first emerged in widespread usage, in French, to define arrangements that allowed for law and policy to be made “above” the national states that formed the European Coal and Steel Community (Haas, 1968). It would be futile to try to eliminate this usage, but such laws and policies emerge from the agreements of said member-states, who have made subsequent treaties that sometimes permit laws and policies to be made on the basis of qualified majority voting. They do not then emanate from “above” the states, but from “within” and “through” them. In Eurospeak, they make “co-decisions,” even if the legislative initiatives formally hail from the allegedly supra-national Commission. ² So, the EU is multinational, but certainly not yet “post-national.” And there may be better and older ways to describe so-called “supra-national” government.

The attributes of statehood now need to be briefly elaborated. Political scientists and sociologists invariably cite Max Weber, who told us that the state has an essence, namely,

[T]he modern state can only be defined sociologically in terms of a specific means which is peculiar to the state, as it is to all other political associations, namely physical violence. (Gewaltsmakeit)

He went on,

Every state is founded on force (Gewalt), as Trotsky once said at Brest-Litovsk. That is indeed correct… Violence is, of course, not the normal or sole means used by the state… But it is the means specific to the state. [A] state is that human community which (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a certain territory, this ‘territory’ being another of the defining characteristics of the state. (Weber, 1919/1994)

This definition emphasizes domestic sovereignty. Weber's formula has three components: monopoly of force; territory; and legitimacy. By these criteria, the EU is not a state. There is no EU-wide police force, no EU-wide gendarmerie, and no European army, to enforce Union authority. Policing the single market is a function of the Court of Justice of EU but requires the cooperation of the courts and police of the member-states. The EU's territory is coextensive with those portions of its member-states that are within the EU, and its customs union, and single market; and the EU acts as the coguardian of two protectorates, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosova, outside the boundaries of its member-states. ³ Legitimacy, that conceptual morass from which no traveler returns, may be left aside, but let us agree that the EU's is not ubiquitous. By contrast, all the member-states of the EU are states by Weber's definition, even if their legitimacy varies.

We are not yet out of the statal woods, however, because other disciplines do not defer to Weber. International lawyers, generally better paid than political sociologists, insist that the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States specifiesthe criteria that a State, which they always capitalize, must meet, namely

The State as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with other States. (Montevideo Convention, 1933)

The EU has permanent residents and citizens. It has already been argued that it has a definite territory, even if it expands and contracts, so (a) and (b) are satisfied. The EU has a government, albeit multiheaded. Namely, the European Council (of heads of states and government), the Council of Ministers, and the Commission. The EU has other attributes of a government, a Council, a Commission, a (bicameral) legislature, a court, and important independent public bodies, most famously the European Central Bank. Therefore criterion (c) is met. Last, but not least, the EU has the recognized capacity to enter into relations with other States, notably but not only in trade agreements. There are EU ambassadors to member-States and (non-member) States, and both the former and the latter send ambassadors to the EU. Quod erat demonstrandum. In (dated) international law the EU would seem to be a State, but in (dated) political science and sociology it is not. Can this contradiction be resolved? The answer, as we shall see, is yes, if a confederation is a State, and if the EU is a confederation constituted by its member-states. But further analytical steps are required to drive home this claim.

Additional “dimensionalizing” of the state helps. A synthetic neo-Weberian definition – not an original contribution to the annals of political thought – performs that expansion. Namely,

A modern state is (i) a differentiated and impersonal institution that is (ii) politically centralized though not necessarily unitary; that (iii) generally exercises an effective monopoly of publicly organized physical force and (iv) of authoritatively binding rule-making (or sovereignty) over persons, groups, and property; and that (v) is sufficiently recognized by a sufficient number of its subjects, and (vi) of other states, that it can (vii) maintain its organizational and policy-making powers within (viii) a potentially variable territory. (O'Leary, 2001)

The EU matches some of these eight dimensions. Its institutions are partly differentiated from its member-states and subjects. Impersonal office-holding is the norm: it is not familial, tribal, hereditary, feudal, or patrimonial. The EU is not unitary, but EU law, shepherded by the Court, seeks to be cohesive and appropriately uniform and predictable. The EU, except in some English imaginations, is strikingly difficult to describe as politically centralized. It has three cities in which capital functions are permanently exercised, in Brussels, Strasbourg, and Luxembourg, Other c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Editor
• Editorial Advisory Board
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• About the Contributors
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Europe's Malaise: Insights From Comparative and Historical Social Science
• The Nature of the European Union
• The Habsburg Myth and the European Union
• National Identity and the Citizens′ Europe
• In Search of a Cure? Far-right Youth Activism and the Making of a New Europe
• Crossing the Race Line: “No Polish, No Blacks, No Dogs” in Brexit Britain? or, the Great British Brexit Swindle
• An Economic Recipe for Backlash
• Sovereignty Matters: The Mainstreaming of Populist Politics in the European Union
• Is the European Union's Role in the World in Crisis Too? A View from Latin America
• Index