The European Union and Supranational Political Economy

Riccardo Fiorentini, Guido Montani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317662709
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The financial crisis – originated in 2008 in the United States – had a dramatic impact on the world economy. The European Union was immediately involved, but its reaction to the crisis was clearly inadequate. The misgovernment of the European economy not only put at risk the European Monetary Union, but it also caused further hindrances to the recovery of the global economy.

The global financial turmoil shook deep-rooted beliefs. The doctrine of international neo-liberalism is more and more criticized. Nevertheless, the critics of neo-liberalism focus their attention on the relationship between the state and the market, as if the nation states, with their international organisations, have enough power for an effective global governance of the world economy. The model of European supranational integration, though seriously imperfect, can suggest some new way out from the crisis – even at the world level – based on a new relationship between the supranational government of the Union and the market.

In this book, several academic disciplines are involved: international economics, international political economy, international law, international relations, political theory and democratic theory. Adopting such a multidisciplinary theoretical perspective, the volume tries to answer the following question: Is a more supranational Europe able to provide a better government of the EMU? Does this reform involve more European democracy?

Part I
Birth of the supranational project

1
The birth of the European Community

Supranational ideals and national interests

Daniela Preda

The historiography of European integration

In recent years there has been a considerable development in studies on the history of European integration.¹ The fall of the Berlin Wall is clearly to be considered as in some ways ‘liberatory’ for this area of research. With the end of bipolarism through the disappearance in the East of the endogenous glue that forcibly held together diversity, and in the West of the exogenous glue (the Soviet threat) which for a long time represented the background to the integration process and was the reason for the crystallization of the system, the studies on European integration were finally liberated from a superficial interpretation that equated Europeanism and Atlanticism and from their long subjection to the history of international relations.

The strengthening of the European Union and the prospects for its enlargement within the context of a system that is by now clearly multipolar brings into question not only Europe’s place in the new global system but also the change in how Europeans live and feel about themselves. Still obscure in many regards, because interpreted for the most part – by a culture steadfast in its nationalistic point of view – as the continuation and development of the national phase of European history, the European Union can today become the focus of a broader reconstruction that takes into account Europe in all its complexity and, at the same time, as the offspring of national interest and ideals, in line with the conception of the state in the second half of the twentieth century.

If it is commonplace to state that the Second World War, with the collapse of the European system of states, the disappearance of European centrality in the world and the birth of bipolarism, created a true division in the history of Europe by decreeing the transition of ‘European unification’ from utopia to reality and marking the beginning of the process of European integration, the consequences of this interpretation are not always considered. Thus despite the broad consensus on this point, it is not uncommon that the recounting of historical events tends rather to emphasize those elements of continuity with the past.

The difficulty that historiography encounters in adopting a different point of view is analogous to a difficulty that involves culture as a whole, which is still in large part conditioned, in its way of analysing facts and its proposals for action, by the eighteenth-century idea that sees the national state as the natural outlet for the self-determination of peoples.² Accustomed to using the national state as the all-embracing canon of interpretation, immutable and absolute, history, economics, literature, art and, in a broad sense, culture have based their thought and development on this concept.

The meticulous construction of the national myth, which was superimposed on the spontaneous nationalities and supernationalities (Albertini, 1960, 1961a, 1961b, 1965) of the past, was developed during the nineteenth century through monumentalized works and theories. Historiography played a non-marginal role in this process. As Stuart J. Woolf emphasized, the obstacles historians have encountered, and will continue to encounter, in distancing themselves from the dogmas of nationalism are due to the fact that, on the one hand, ‘it has always been the historians themselves who have selected and structured the events and memories of the past that constitute the fabric of the national narrative on which the plot of national and nationalistic myths is woven’, and on the other the incontrovertible formulations of nationalism ‘have entered so deeply into our Weltanschauung as to become a category by which we classify our observations’ (Woolf, 1996: 7): a dogma, in fact.

Even historiography, which, with respect to other disciplines, clearly should have been more prepared, due to its own methodology, to renounce any presumption regarding the existence of permanent substantial entities proper to teleological determinism, has not been able to avoid the difficulties of dealing with the revolutionary process represented by European integration, by the creation of a new state, in an area, moreover, already organized into national states on the basis of an agreement among the latter. Instead historiography undertook the task with obsolete instruments. In dealing in-depth with these historical transformations it has encountered the same difficulties that political scientists and legal scholars are forced to face on the theoretical and legal-constitutional level. The obstacle is clear: that which is revolutionary under the existing order by definition lies outside that which is codified.

It is understandable how the differing perceptions of the modern, post-1945 era have caused some people – the majority – to base their research on the chameleon-like concept of the reconstruction of national states (Milward, 1992; Milward et al., 1993) while others – few and for the most part heavily impeded by a strong nationalist orthodoxy closed to change – have operated inside the new context provided by the transition from the European system to the world system of states, striving to interpret the parable of the national states from this perspective.

What is missing, and there is still a need for today, is a unitary view of post-1945 Europe capable of interpreting the advancement of the new order (European integration) alongside the continuation of the old order (the neo-colonial uprisings, the grandeur); a view that is able to identify and motivate the coexistence in the political culture and in the action of states of ambivalent, ambiguous, at times contradictory and even incoherent attitudes that reflect the indecisive action of sovereign states, wavering between resignation over the de facto loss of their political independence and the foolish attempt to regain a bygone power.

After the Second World War there was a convergence between national interests and the process of European unification. If before the two World Wars national interests were pursued by means of a policy of national strength, starting from the Second World War only the policy of European integration can in some ways claim to be an authentic national policy. ‘Europe must federate or perish’, said Clem Attlee, leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party, in 1939.³ In March 1954, on the eve of the rejection of the EDC by the French National Assembly, Luigi Einaudi wrote:

The need to unify Europe is clear. The present states are dust without substance, none of which is capable of bearing the cost of its own defense. Only the union can allow them to continue on. The problem is not between independence and union, but between being united or disappearing.

(Einaudi, 1966: 89)

The apparent strengthening of the national states from the European integration process in reality hides their effective decline. The process of European integration has allowed the national states to strengthen themselves, but at the cost of a progressive shift of power toward the ‘community’ level. The state that is reconstituted is no longer the old sovereign national state, whose main task was to guarantee the security and, beginning in the twentieth century, the welfare of its citizens. This task has now been transferred to the higher level of the supranational state.

Only when historiography has favoured its dynamic and pragmatic character it has succeeded in correctly analysing the process under way. Europe is an unresolved problem that emerges where, procedurally, unification advances. The European Union, though created through the classically international procedure that is the treaty among sovereign states, was conceived from the start according to a plan far different from the normal one used in diplomatic relations; that is, from one which, by means of treaties, gives rise to situations purely of international cooperation. In other words, the European integration process cannot be viewed as merely an intergovernmental process destined to create an increasingly closer alliance among states which, though cooperating in several political-economic sectors, intend to preserve intact their sovereignty. From the beginning the Monnet project was by nature a true constitutional project, even if limited to a single sector. In fact, the states did not limit themselves to drawing up a simple international treaty but yielded part of their power to a structure that, composed of the fundamental institutions of democracy – those which Jean Monnet indicated as ‘les premières assises concrètes de la fédération européenne’ (‘the first concrete foundations of the European federation’)⁴ – possesses more than a few features of statehood.

The final result – the construction or breakup of the Union, the creation of a world political order as a corollary to the globalization process under way, or the perpetuation of anarchy – is unknown to us. What is important is that until now it is clear that, far from being dogma, the historiographical reconstruction of the modern era depends on elements of uncertainty: writing history – especially during periods of change such as the present one – means distancing oneself from explicative-predictive models and avoiding constructing ‘laws’ that govern and explain transformations.

We are asked to interpret a Europe in flux, considered in terms of the advancement of the unification process, thereby questioning the previous territorial arrangements; a nomadic, regionalist, pluralist, ‘integrated’ Europe that allows for flexible statehood models and variants in terms of membership, the Europe of unity in diversity. Knowledge of this Europe requires the adoption of a diachronic view of reality, of a methodology capable of adapting to change, one which broadens the horizons, leaving room for imagination and creativity. Such knowledge entails reference not only to institutions and diplomacy but to civil society and the complex phenomenology of its behaviour: economic, political, social, cultural and religious.

This approach obliges the historian to adopt appropriate conceptual tools – ‘overturning the previous point of view’ (Albertini, 1973), to use an effective image of Albertini’s – and a methodology that allows him to shift from a synchronic interpretation of historical processes under way to a diachronic one. As a result there is the need to adopt a new historiographical point of view, one that is ‘European’ and no longer national, pluralist and no longer centralist, interdisciplinary and no longer monothematic, historicist and no longer static. A point of view that leaves room, on the one hand, for the new international context characterized by the death throes of the European system of states and the shift to the world system of states, and on the other for the emergence of a group of actors, reflecting the achievement of a mature conception of the democratic participation of the masses in political power.

The leap, in itself revolutionary, of the national states to a supranational state, which by its nature does not fall within the boundaries of the present order, is the result of converging actions aimed at clearly indicating the final objective and mobilizing the necessary political and social forces as well as at making the hypothetical aims politically viable and acting to achieve them. Mario Albertini theorizes in this regard about the existence of two factors: initiative (thinkers, theorists, movements, precursors of the times), which is able to perceive the new but does not possess the power to achieve it, and execution (governments, diplomacy, institutions, administrations, interests), which has the power but is constrained by its role to move daily along the existing ground. In this way, according to the situation factors of ‘construction’ or of ‘integration’, acts of ‘initiative’ or of ‘execution’ can be favoured in the historical reconstruction of European integration.

Moreover, as in any episode containing revolutionary elements, in the European unification process as well the actions of individuals within or on the margin of governments and movements are often decisive in influencing and at times provoking events. The movement, if it ever takes place, from sovereign states to the United States of Europe cannot but appear, even in its initial phases, as in large part the result of the action of men who, having identified in advance the crisis points, and for this reason feeling ‘called on’ to undertake an historical task, work from inside the crisis to alter the context, with more than one even dedicating his life to achieving the goal.

The historical origins of European union process in the context of the new international order

The interwar period marked a change in international relations. The First World War represented the breakdown of the system of equilibrium among the states which for several centuries had dominated international relations, basing itself on the system of European public law; the Second World War sanctioned its end. The slow and gradual transformation of the historical setting generated over the centuries by powerful factors of integration such as growing economic interdependence and the lingering death throes of the European system of states had already been set in motion, both vertically (the removal of class barriers, the strengthening of the states) and horizontally (among the various economic-political areas). The decline of European national states began to concretely manifest itself during this period, when it became clear that the size of the states represented a decisive obstacle to the complete development of the productive forces. On the other hand, political unification progressed much more slowly than economic unification. The war had become increasingly larger in scope; the destructive potential of new arms made it practically impossible to distinguish belligerents from non-belligerents, military objectives from civil ones, thereby making the entire world a single community with a common destiny. In the new European and international context, political thought gradually broke away from doctrines that could not keep pace with history, abandoning false solutions, utopias and, from a new perspective, examining the paths to take to construct peace and the approach to adopt to deal with the question of the relations among states and the conception itself of state and nation.

The Second World War marks a watershed. By accentuating the weaknesses due to the division of the continent and amplifying the crisis of the nineteenth-century nation state, the Second World War appeared to make choosing valid and immediately applicable alternatives unavoidable. The unitary ideal, which had always been a counterpoint to the evolution of the modern state and the progressive division of Europe, ceased to belong to the ethereal realm of utopia and began to embody a precise political project able to act on reality and deeply modify the course of events. Starting in 1945, these projects took on a new concreteness, imperiously entering the political struggle, acting as strongly on government policy as on the hopes and expectations of the people. The Second World War spawned the minute diffusion of unitary ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I Birth of the supranational project
• PART II Europe between confederalism and federalism
• PART III Policy issues
• PART IV Political economy: from internationalism to supranationalism
• Index