The Routledge Handbook of Critical European Studies

Didier Bigo, Thomas Diez, Evangelos Fanoulis, Ben Rosamond, Yannis A. Stivachtis, Didier Bigo, Thomas Diez, Evangelos Fanoulis, Ben Rosamond, Yannis A. Stivachtis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429957499
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This handbook comprehensively defines and shapes the field of Critical European Union Studies, sets the research agenda and highlights emerging areas of study. Bringing together critical analyses of European Union politics, policies and processes with an expert range of contributors, it overcomes disciplinary borders and paradigms and addresses four main thematic areas pertaining to the study of the European Union and its policies:

• Critical approaches to European integration;

• Critical approaches to European political economy;

• Critical approaches to the EU's internal security;

• Critical approaches to the EU's external relations and foreign affairs.

In their contributions to this volume, the authors take a sympathetic yet critical approach to the European integration process and the present structures of the European Union. Furthermore, the book provides graduate students and faculty with ideas for future research activity and introduces critical analyses rooted in a broad spectrum of theoretical perspectives.

The Routledge Handbook of Critical European Union Studies will be an essential reference for scholars, students, researchers and practitioners interested and working in the fields of EU politics/studies, European integration, European political economy and public policy, EU foreign policy, EU freedom of movement and security practices, and more broadly in international relations, the wider social sciences and humanities.

Part I

Critical theoretical approaches to European integration

Introduction

Towards a critical theorising of European integration

Thomas Diez

Discipline and critique

The theoretical treatment of European integration from its beginning has suffered from a normative bias. Theoretical approaches have been largely focussed on the explanation and possible enhancement of integration. This is of course understandable. For one, the ruinous brinkmanship of nation states in the first half of the twentieth century made their entanglement in regional integration processes a preferable strategy for peace. Even today, integration is credited with the institutionalisation of peace among European Union (EU) member states, and the transformation of border conflicts, so that in 2012, it even received the Nobel Peace Prize. In addition, the general problem that analysts tend to be drawn to an organisation because they are attracted by it, also applies to the EU. If you didn’t think European integration was an exciting political project, you wouldn’t want to be bored by its institutional complexities in order to write about it.

This normative bias has led to a blind spot of European integration theory, which has often displayed a teleological tendency. The idea of an ‘ever closer union’ (Preamble, Treaty on EU) was not something to be questioned. Instead, scholars often endorsed it and wrote towards its realisation. Even intergovernmentalists, who continued to see the member states as the driving forces, and thus also as the main constrainers of integration, normally were not sceptical about integration as such but about its limits. Among the classic integration theories, neofunctionalists and federalists were clearly committed to the integration project. Integration theory has thus long ignored questions of resistance and disintegration, although one should not forget that Lindberg and Scheingold (1970) identified the ‘permissive consensus’ in order to highlight its problems and forecast politicisation, or that Philippe Schmitter (1970), confronted with the ‘doldrums era’ of the late 1960s to early 1980s (Keeler 2005, 557), started to theorise the possibilities of ‘spill-back’ and ‘spill-around’ to complement the logic of spillover, which neofunctionalists had seen as the mechanism behind the integration of successive policy fields.

What is more, European integration theory, in its commitment to the real existing EU (and its predecessors), has done little in the way of reflecting on alternative integration models and strategies. Works on the Leitbilder of integration (Schneider 1977) remained marginal to the debate, perhaps because they did not fit the increasingly positivist Anglo-American mainstream in the discipline. Thus, integration theory not only lacked a proper engagement with the possibility of integration reversal, but also offered few imaginations or sympathetic critiques of alternative European political orders that could be fed back into the broader public debate.

The chapters of this section on Critical Theories of European Integration demonstrate that this situation has changed fundamentally. Such critical theories may not (yet) be the mainstream (presumably they would not be critical then), but they have become an important voice in the canon of integration theory and have a lot to offer to present debates about the legitimacy and presumed crises of European integration.

Disciplinary histories are of course always impositions of power and marginalising. One important strand of analysis that has provided such a marginalised account of European integration is Marxism. Especially in the late 1960s and 1970s, scholars such as Ernest Mandel (1967) highlighted the concentration of capital in the common market and saw the need to work towards the internationalisation of unions. They also called for a greater historical awareness of integration theory to link integration to longer-term economic, societal, and political processes (Cocks 1980).

Disciplinary histories also draw boundaries of what is part of the discipline and what not. What counts as European integration theory? Questions of European identity became pertinent in the 1970s, leading to the establishment of the Eurobarometer, yet their focus was on quantitative measurement (e.g. Inglehart 1970). Anthropological studies of the practices of governance in Brussels (Shore 2013), or interrogations of European identity and its linkages to colonial histories (Hall 2002) rarely surfaced.

One of the main sources of critical theorising on European integration was the wave of critical and constructivist approaches that reached the discipline of International Relations (IR) from the mid-1980s onwards in what is sometimes referred to as the ‘fourth debate’ (Wæver 1996). Drawing on a variety of critical social theories, scholars started to deconstruct concepts that had previously often been taken for granted, such as sovereignty and anarchy. They offered alternative interpretations of international history that relied on a variety of actors rather than only states. They became interested in the cultures and identities that are produced through and that drive international politics.

Of course not everyone involved in critical theorising of the EU came from IR. But given that most of European integration theories had their origins there, the debates about critical and constructivist theories in IR acted as a sort of door opener, which allowed feminists, sociologists, anthropologists, critical economists, and political geographers to raise their voices, and be heard. Perhaps these explorations of whether ‘another Europe’ (Manners 2007) or ‘another theory is possible’ (Manners and Whitman 2016) cannot quite yet be called mainstream. Yet they have drastically changed the landscape of thinking about European integration. Indeed, they have led to a reflective re-writing of European integration theory’s own history (Rosamond 2000) and have become an undisputed part of major textbooks (Wiener et al. 2019).

‘Critical’ in the context of these works does not equate to a rejection of European integration. Indeed, one of the main contributions of the critical IR debate was the problematisation of the territorial state and its marginalising and exclusionary tendencies. Following this line of argument, most of the authors writing within critical European integration theory shared with their predecessors a normative commitment to transcending or at least questioning the appropriateness of the nation–state. From this perspective, European integration offered an opportunity of re-shaping political organisation. Yet this also implied a commitment to further highlighting, analysing and interrogating any continuing practices of domination, marginalisation and exclusion. By and large, the critique offered by critical theories of European integration was not a radical rejection, but a sympathetic one, trying to bring to the fore the normative concerns underpinning European integration.

Critical investigations

The chapters that follow in this section provide an overview of the different critical theoretical perspectives on European integration that have developed since the mid-1980s. They outline the development of each approach, including its main authors, the arguments they have made, and the criticisms they have received. They thus offer a starting point for further exploration. Written by some of the main contributors to the individual approaches, they also make clear assessments of the current state of the art, its strengths and its weaknesses.

The first chapter presents a historical-materialist approach. In IR’s fourth debate, those committed to post-Marxian thinking frequently turned to the work of Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci. Among Gramsci’s contributions is his emphasis on social forces rather than classes, and on the importance of ideational factors. While this brought some to follow Laclau and Mouffe (1985) in their predominantly discursive interpretation of Gramsci, others insisted on the continued importance of materialist factors. Andreas Bieler was among the latter (e.g. Bieler and Morton 2008), and in this chapter, he and Jokubas Salyga take up some of the Marxian arguments of the 1970s in their emphasis on the central role of transnational capital for European integration. Their hope lies with social movements forcing a politicisation of the equation of integration with the common market.

Another influential reference point for critical and constructivist voices has been German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who frequently spoke out in favour of integration but also against a reductionist economic understanding of the EU (Habermas 2011; Habermas and Derrida 2003). His critique of the nation–state, and his arguments in favour of deliberative democracy, have however also inspired many political theorists in their engagement with European integration. One of the most prominent authors of this line of thinking has been Eriksen (e.g. 2006). In his contribution to this handbook, he reviews the consequences of Habermasian thought for the conceptualisation of a Leitbild for European integration. In doing so, he is critical of Habermas’ more recent emphasis on the importance of member states for the legitimacy of the integration process. To Eriksen (2019), the problem of dominance can only be overcome through further steps towards political union and not by safeguarding member state interests.

While Habermas’ understanding of discourse was a normative one, implying a change in political practice, most critical scholars have used discourse in the sense of a set of articulations that produce meaning. In contrast to Bieler, they thus follow Laclau and Mouffe’s discursive interpretation of Gramsci, but even more have taken their inspiration from Michel Foucault and other French philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, who were often, albeit wrongly, lumped together as ‘poststructuralists’. One of the main purposes of this body of work is to unsettle established, ‘common-sense’ meanings of ‘Europe’, ‘integration’, and other core concepts, through demonstrating their contestedness and historical contingency (Diez 1999). Caterina Carta, whose own work has used this approach to analyse European foreign policy (Carta 2014), demonstrates the breadth of this work in Chapter 3.

In the following chapter, Jessica Lawrence starts from a different aspect of Foucault’s work, his conception of governmentality, dating back to his lectures at the Collège de France in the latter half of the 1970s. These lectures have been an inspiration to many who wanted to explore the changing power dynamics in the governance of modern societies. They allowed conceptualising governance beyond the practices of governments and captured the ways in which we govern our selves as much as the changing conceptualisations of norms and standards and their power effects. As Lawrence shows, this is particular important to uncover the circulation of power in the formally non-centralised and non-hierarchical political system of the EU, both inside (see Walters and Haahr 2005) and outside (see Kurki 2011).

Questions of power and identity are also central to postcolonial approaches. The colonial legacy of EU member states is hardly part of mainstream narratives of European identity, and migrants continue to be the Other that at the same time is excluded and against which a European identity is constructed. Catarina Kinnvall, whose work has highl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of editors
• List of contributors
• Critical European studies: An introduction
• Part I: Critical theoretical approaches to European integration
• Part II: Critical approaches to European political economy
• Part III: Critical approaches to European Union’s internal security
• Part IV: Critical approaches to European Union’s external relations and foreign affairs
• Index