Brexit , the immigration crisis , Europe-wide economic stagnation, rising geopolitical tension in the eastern and southern border areas , populist, EU-critical political mobilisation in all member states , and increasing difficulties in striking a deal about anything in the union. These are some of the well-known current problems of the European Union. The sheer number of problems , not to mention the difficulty of solving even one of them, is a good reason for asking whether there is any point in publishing yet another book about a union which may well fall apart in the near future.
We think there is.
First, we believe that the union is probably emerging from its current problems . How exactly this will happen and what kind of union it will be in the future is unknown at the moment, but we can study the facts, pay attention to trends and make educated guesses. This is what the contributions to this compilation are all about.
Second, even if the union collapses or becomes marginalised so that it loses most of its power to shape the future of Europe, as has been predicted by some scholars and a vast number of populist politicians, its heritage and its member states will still be here, and within the ruins of the union they will provide the building blocks of a future Europe. This too is discussed in the contributions that follow.
There are some background assumptions upon which the book is built. First, the union originally emerged as a customs union, and this has left an imprint on its political and administrative footing in the world. It has made the understanding of politics curiously economistic in the union, so that it approaches all political issues from the perspective of markets. Second, the more the union has enlarged from a customs treaty of six Western European countries towards an economic and political union of the current 28 members from all regions of Europe, the more serious the problems of co-ordination have become between the abundance of member states and different interest groups. Third, taken together, these two characteristics make policy design in the EU an extraordinary case of confederation polity in its own right, demanding considerable devotion, negotiating skills, time and patience on the part of politicians and administrators engaged either in the EU system or one of the member statesâand sometimes the citizens also want to have a say. Fourth, the constant expansion from a post-Second World War peace plan between six countries to a union of 27 or 28 member states (depending on whether the UK, which now is somewhere in between, is counted in or out) with some 0.5 billion inhabitants is such an extraordinary process that it provides good reason to ask whether we are dealing with an empire in the making (see also Zielonka 2006; Foster 2015; Behr and Stivachtis 2016). All the chapters in the book deal with one or more of these questions, and the opening and closing Chaps. 2 and 13 aim to cover most of the discussion by dealing with all four.
Chapter 2, The Emergence of the European Union as a Very Incoherent Empire, by Risto Heiskala, has two functions. First, it offers a concise description of the EU so that even a previously uninformed reader can follow the arguments in the other contributions and appreciate the points made. The chapter begins by showing that the union began as a peace plan to pacify the troublesome and violent continent of Europe after the collapse of all European empires in the Second World War. Today, the union is a political community originating from a succession of international treaties and waves of enlargement, which have turned the original coal and steel union of six countries in the early 1950s into a political union of the current 28 member states. The analysis reveals that the EU is âan economic giant, a political dwarf, and a military wormâ, as Mark Eyskens, the former Belgian Minister of Foreign Affairs, famously said in 1991. The second function of the chapter is to introduce the question of what kind of political entity the EU is, and to open a discussion on the future of the union and its alternative scenarios . The chapter maintains that, even if the EU does not possess all the qualities of a federal state, it can nevertheless be described as an empire in the making, which in future could be the third contemporary empire with global reach, alongside the USA and China . At the same time, it is obvious that the EU still lacks some features necessary to be a genuine imperial power, such as a co-ordinated army and foreign policy. Whether it is in the process of developing such capacities, and is thus an empire in the making, is an issue left open here, but it is recalled in the closing chapter of the book (Chap. 13) by the same author.
Chapter 3, An Extending Empire of Governance: The EU in Comparison to Empires Past and Present, by Robert Imre, continues the discussion about whether the EU is an empire, and if so, what kind of empire it is. The chapter takes as its point of departure a fundamental political question about types of empire in terms of discussing the development of multinational territorial co-operation . This discussion is sometimes simplified to involve a choice between a federal state and a collection of sovereign âpower-containersâ, meant to represent modern nation- states, while in reality it is much more complex . The chapter analyses the historical development of the concept of empire, and compares the development of the EU to recent developments elsewhere. European empires wax and wane, as shown by the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian and German empires, the receding British and French empires in the face of decolonisation, and the rise of the USA and the Soviet Union as empires in the post-Second World War period. Dismantling the Soviet empire still leaves us with Russia and China as âregional hegemonsâ with claims on empire status . The USA can be seen as an âaccidentalâ empire with little or no claim on areas outside its modern territorial divisions , solidifying its place in the global order through proxy wars and financial dominance. China and Russia have both claimed extra-border territories , while providing irredentist historical arguments for expansion and at the same time employing soft and hard power strategies around the world. In comparison, what does the new pan-European construct look like? Following careful analysis of the eastern enlargement of the union, the chapter concludes that, even if the EU cannot be understood as a military empire, it is an empire of governance in the sense that the huge collection of regulations it has transferred to the legislatures of its member states, particularly in the phase of membership negotiations but also subsequently, homogenises its various member states.
Chapter 4, A Promoter of Values or a Shopkeepersâ Empire? Economy and Society in the Europe 2020 Strategy and Trade Polic...