European Integration and the Postmodern Condition

Governance, Democracy, Identity

Peter Van Ham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134539949
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This is the first book to look at the process of European integration by drawing on both established and new trends in postmodern thinking and analysis. The book asks how we can study the process of European integration in the current climate, and maps out the central elements of the academic debate dealing with the future of integration, and 'Europe' in general.
The author stimulates fresh readings of the European issue, encouraging the development of new analytical horizons. This is a significant cutting-edge contribution to debates in politics, comparative politics and European studies.

1 European integration and the challenge of postmodernity

Global metamorphosis

In the study of International Relations (IR), most orthodox approaches have been put into question, and no coherent, new paradigm for explaining and understanding daunting recent political phenomena seems to emerge.¹ Absolute and bona fide scientific/ideological maxims about what the world is, how it should be understood and where it is heading for, have lost their credibility.² With the end of the Gold War, the central metanarrative for the West has collapsed. Globalization and the promise of a more cosmopolitan world based on a postperspectivalist compression of time/space has provoked a general crisis in the strategic discourse in the West, challenging the piety of conventional thought and politics.³

We (the ‘we’ in this book should be read as an open invitation to join me in this conversation) are plainly living in an era of no longer/but not yet. Students of politics are engaged in varied attempts to chart the end of the ancient and the beginning of the new, which have involved numerous pronouncements on the ongoing struggle to establish workable structures of governance on local, regional and global scales. This process has unleashed a vehement critique of the overly state-centric and power-oriented nature of mainstream IR, based on the argument that Realist grand theory has shown itself incapable of living up to its promises, namely predicting and adequately explaining the consequential changes in global politics (most notably, of course, the demise of the Soviet superpower and the subsequent end of the Gold War).⁴ This book argues that the classic texts of IR are in many ways a lost cause and of little help in gaining a semblance of understanding of the serious challenges of contemporary European and global politics. The triviality of traditional approaches to IR is especially striking if we look at the new challenges facing mankind in an epoch where geographical entities will appear less fixed, solid and puissant than they once did, and where (most) no longer seem to control their destiny. Incessant societal transformation, embedded in a swirl of centralization and fragmentation, has problematized traditional ‘problem-solving’ rituals of mainstream theories, prompting a degree of intellectual vertigo that continues to bog the mind.

The ‘billiard-ball’ metaphor and its accompanying levels of analysis continues to look at complex political developments through the narrow lens of ‘power politics’, based on ahistorical assumptions and without a critical reflection of the fundamental philosophical premises of Western modernity.⁵ Its traditional themes include the central role of anarchy and the balance of power, the relationship between state identity and national interests, and the (limited) possibility for change in the structures of global politics. The dichotomous conception of ‘inside-outside’ which underlies most accounts of mainstream IR, does not allow us to understand how the European Union (EU) is changing the economic, political, social and cultural landscape in Europe. These categorical schemes of IR theory represent knowledge of these political processes in terms of generalized and universalized systems of political behavior, reducing global events to a ‘reflection’ of a supposed anarchical struggle for power among states based on the rational pursuit of their national interests. This theoretical embodiment of modernist rationality has made mainstream IR theory ‘the space in which knowledge and power, reason and violence are allowed, indeed encouraged, to converge’.⁶

There are few reasons to believe that these rigidly ordered patterns of understanding will be able to portray and elucidate the complex and turbulent global events we are witnessing today Globalization and fragmentation are undermining traditional notions of community and reduce the moral significance of nation-states and inter-state boundaries. Add to the strong brew of uncertainty such factors as the end of the Gold War and a variety of other ‘end’ and ‘post’-debates (from the ‘end of history, geography and the nation-state, to ‘post’-modernism, sovereignty and positivism), and it becomes clear that what we need is a profound reappraisal of questions of ontology and epistemology — of the way we think and act in the world and how we come to understand ‘reality’. This may be a global metamorphosis that not only erodes established paradigms, but that also calls for an alternative, more critical approach to the study of IR.⁷ We find ourselves clearly engaged in a new debate and a new project that, depending on one's perspective, may lead us to renewal and intellectual insight and/or cause serious scientific havoc. Obviously, we are not yet able to articulate coherent concepts of politics that can capture the uniqueness of this postmodern world. But we should at least give it a try.

In this book I concern myself with the question how to study the process of European integration in the current period of paradigm shift. I do not intend to provide a comprehensive overview of contemporary approaches to the study of European integration. This has been done in a number of other places.⁸ I will also not structure my work around a coherent research agenda which might offer ‘empirical answers’ that other scholars may use as the raw material in a process of accumulation of knowledge. My narrative of European integration is a personal one; it will result not in an all-embracing system but in nothing more (and nothing less) than an intellectual horizon that challenges and problematizes most traditional approaches. It is my intention to provide a cognitive map of the territory of academic debate which deals with the future of European integration, and ‘Europe’ in general. I will endeavor to delineate the changing forms of a rather chaotic surface, going back and forth between a range of disciplines, notably political science, European law and sociology. Despite this spatial disorientation, the rudimentary leitmotif of this book is that the nation-state as we know it today can no longer claim to be an exceptional actor in world politics; it is now one source of authority among several.⁹ I argue that this requires new political and institutional frameworks beyond the state, which widen the boundaries of policy-making and the existing dialogic community. My effort is therefore closely linked to the critical project (as defined, for example, by Andrew Linklater),¹⁰ which tries to identify the possibilities and needs for change in existing political structures and arrangements in order to create space for new political and cultural moves.

It is the progressive pressures of globalization which necessitate such a widening of the boundaries of existing political communities (most notably within the nation-state). Although globalization's risks and problems are clear (especially the deepening of material inequalities), it also opens up room to change contemporary social and political patterns and structures. For example, in much of the western world the competition for global markets has replaced the traditional quest for military power and territory With the gradual shift of economic and political authority away from the nation-state, power has become only tangentially linked with territoriality This gradual (and far from completed) disconnection of territoriality as a source of authority and prosperity raises a number of significant questions for the study of policy-making on the European level, and within the EU in particular. This implies that spatial modes of representation may gradually be paralleled by other forms of organization, with important implications for democratic theory and practice, the organization of European society and the place and role of Europe in the world at large. This book is concerned with all these elements of the debate and suggests how these developments and questions are interlinked and how the process of European integration takes shape in (and is itself shaped by) a globalizing world order.

Traditional theories of European integration try to explain why states have decided to integrate and have not merely opted to co-operate on an ad hoc basis, or chosen for other options of co-operation or even conflict.¹¹ They have tried to explain why the process of European integration started to take a concrete, institutionalized form after World War II, and not at an earlier or later date.

Three ‘schools’ have dominated the debate on these questions. First, there is the ‘Idealist’ school, which emphasizes the impact of persons and ideology to explain the origins and development of the European integration project. It argues, for example, that only after the destruction of World War II could a visionary political elite led by ‘founding fathers’ such as Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman and Konrad Adenauer, persuade European states to embark on a program of integration with the ultimate goal of European federalism. Second, there is the ‘Functionalist’ school (also labeled as the ‘institutionalist’ approach); this emphasizes gradualism and a bottom-up approach to integration, based on the concept of ‘spillover’, which assumes that common policies in a ‘low-politics’ field will inevitably result in pressures to integrate in other policy areas, triggering a snowball effect that may well end in a federally structured Europe. Its main argument is that, although international integration may be initiated by governments, once established, they develop their own momentum and lock states into patterns of collective behavior in a search for supranational policy solutions.

Third, there is the ‘Realist’ school (also called the ‘intergovernmentalist’ approach), which emphasizes that European states have only decided to cooperate and integrate after a careful cost-benefit analysis based on clear conceptions of their ‘national interests’. Each step on the way toward the current European Union has been deliberate; therefore the nation-state stays ‘in control’ through an ongoing process of bargaining in which the state is the principal actor. Andrew Moravcsik, one of the academic proponents of this view, argues that ‘European integration resulted from a series of rational choices made by national leaders who consistently pursued their national interest … When such interests converged, integration advanced’. This leads him to conclude that the European ‘integration process did not supersede or circumvent the political will of national leaders, it reflected their will’.¹² From this Realist (or intergovernmentalist) point of view, the EU is little more than an association of convenience between a number of states that is keen on preserving national sovereignty and optimizing power and prosperity.

These two ‘Why’-questions (why integration?, and why now?), continue to be central to the understanding of the European project. With only a few exceptions, scholars entering the debate on European integration have rooted their approach in one (or more) of these three traditions. Perspectives have changed over time and with academic fashion, but on the whole remain indebted to state-centric thinking and premised on stalwart notions of national interests, national sovereignty and state-based democracy The scientific hegemony of these three ‘schools’ of thought has been established during the 1970s and 1980s, and much of the current intellectual vocabulary has been created during this timeframe. In the earlier phases of the academic debate, relatively few scholars have approached the EG/EU as a new and unique phenomenon, but have rather tried to understand the European project as a functional, intergovernmental structure aimed at co-operation. This attitude changed only gradually with the introduction of the Single European Act (SEA) in 1987 and the signing of the Maastricht Treaty on European Union in 1992. But these two documents are the clearest expression of an ongoing process that is now creating a new and incomparable Euro-polity: a European political community that in many cases eludes the explanatory powers of established, orthodox paradigms.¹³

In thinking through the nature and dynamics of European integration, one soon comes to realize that this process is unique. However one wants to read the EU^1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 European integration and the challenge of postmodernity
• 2 Globalization and Europeanization: Parallel processes (parallel puzzles)?
• 3 European identity beyond the state: Reading the EU
• 4 Sovereignty, territoriality and the representation of political space
• 5 European governance and the pursuit of promiscuous policy-making
• 6 Europe's essential vacuum: Democracy and citizenship as political derivatives
• 7 Europe and/as the Other: Alterity, enmity and cultural hybridness
• Bibliography
• Index