The European Union

An Introduction

Mark Corner

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857736109
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The EU is one of the most notoriously complex international organisations. It is the only supranational organisation where nation-states agree to share sovereignty in some areas but not in others. At the heart of the EU debate across Europe are two opposing groups: one aims to devolve more sovereignty to the EU, with the aim of creating a European 'super-state' and the other wishes to devolve less, effectively relegating the EU to a mere discussion forum. In this accessible and engaging book, Mark Corner provides an essential introduction to the history and modern workings of the EU. Focusing on key themes in the union's development and the debates surrounding future enlargement, this book answers the key questions related to the EU and provides a 'one-stop shop' for anyone curious about future of Europe.

1

Introduction

Introducing the quagga

Figure 1. Painting of a quagga: Water colour on vellum parchment by Nicolas Marechal (1753–1802).

The key to understanding the European Union lies in recognising that it is not like anything else. Because it is always difficult to recognise and accept that something is different, the tendency is to see it instead as a disguised form of something familiar. Hence the quagga (a dangerous analogy, perhaps, seeing that this former inhabitant of South Africa, technically a subspecies of the plains zebra, is now extinct).The illustration in Figure 1 is a painting from the end of the eighteenth century of a quagga stallion in the menagerie of French King Louis XVI at Versailles. It is difficult to look at pictures of this creature and not to think that it should have made its mind up. Either it should have gone with the head and been a zebra, or it should have gone with the tail and been a horse. It is unsurprising that we think like this, because horses and zebras are all that we now know; the quagga looks odd because we never see one outside textbooks or computer screens.

Because of its uniqueness, the European Union is forever getting the quagga treatment and being told that it should ‘sort itself out’ as a horse or a zebra. It has become a candle burning at both ends, with one side trying to drag it back to being a collection of properly independent nation-states, and the other side trying to pull it forward in order to make it a single nation-state. The two positions are more alike than each would like to admit. At one end of the spectrum there might be a group of British or Hungarian nationalists; but at the other end of the spectrum is a group of European nationalists, waiting to wave their gold and blue flags with all the ardour of an American patriot waving the Star-Spangled Banner.

Both sides have the same problem – they cannot understand the nature of the European Union as a hybrid. They want to change it into what they are familiar with, and what they are both familiar with is the nation-state in its present form.

For one side, the 28 nations presently inside the EU are like 28 people stuck in a lift. They are all suffering from the foetid air, one has fainted, another claims to prefer to be dead and still the lift hovers between the third and fourth floors until the welcome sound of a firefighter (perhaps Mr Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party) is heard cutting a way through to free them and give them back their ‘space’. They will then go back to being autonomous nation-states living (and arguably quarrelling and fighting) together in the ‘normal’ manner.

From the other end of the spectrum comes the idea that a great nation-state in the making is being held up by extensive labour pains as it struggles to be born. A United States of Europe is to be created in the way that Italy and Germany were created in the nineteenth century. Those of this opinion would agree with the historian Benedetto Croce when he wrote:

[J]ust as, seventy years ago, a Neapolitan of the old kingdom or a Piedmontese of the sub-Alpine kingdom became Italians, not by denying that which they had been, but by elevating it and incorporating it into that new existence, so will the French, Germans and Italians and all the others elevate themselves to become Europeans and their thoughts will turn to Europe, and their hearts will beat for it, as they have done for their smaller fatherlands, which they will not have forgotten, but love the more.¹

Croce anticipated a ‘greater Italy’ in the way that Count Coudenhove-Kalergi later anticipated a greater Austria-Hungary in his influential Paneuropa, published in 1923, but in doing so they simply sought to reproduce the nation-state on a grander scale. As Michelle Cini puts it: ‘If anything, the federalist rhetoric did little more than highlight the enduring qualities of the nation-state, in that it sought to replicate it on a European scale.’²

The word ‘federalist’ (one of the most elusive words where discussions of the EU are concerned) may not be the correct one, but Cini’s point is a fair one. Both ends of the spectrum, whether ‘eurosceptic’ or ‘federalist’, are working with the same presupposition – that the present arrangement of nation-states is the only acceptable template. One side believes that the EU should become 28 autonomous nation-states; the other side believes that it should become one autonomous nation-state. Either way, they are both hooked on autonomous nation-states. But the EU is neither a knot that ought to unravel into a group of separate nation-states, nor a group of states in the process of turning themselves into the separate regions of a single nation-state. It is a body intended to deal with the limitations of the nation-state itself.

Dealing with theory

Political theories concerning the European Union can often seem abstruse. Is it a federation or is it a confederation (federation lite?). Is it heading in the direction of Germany or the USA (‘federations’) or more in the direction of the 13 American states with their Articles of Confederation after victory against the British in late eighteenth-century America (1771–88) or the German Confederation that followed the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and lasted till 1871 (‘confederations’)? Or will it be something ‘in between’ a federation and a confederation, like (on some views) Switzerland (which has in any case changed from being a ‘confederation’ to a ‘federation’ in the course of its history)? The permutations are endless, opening up infinite linguistic opportunities as the attempt is made to put a name to each one. Is it a sympolity or perhaps a compound polity? Is it a mixed commonwealth or an organised synarchy or a consociation?³ Is it best seen as multidimensional with multilevel governance (and/or post-national governance)? On it goes, each new proposal generating a new discussion enabling academics to maintain their output and so stave off the lack of a productivity bonus.

But, ironically, this endless search for the right description of the EU comes partly from a failure to accept a point very simply put by Ben Rosamond: ‘We need to break out of the “state fixation” that characterises so much of the routine academic and political discourse about the EU.’⁴ For, when these descriptions of commonwealths, consocial mixes, synarchies and so on are unpacked (if they can be), it turns out that the intellectual problems are often created by an unwillingness to see the EU as it is and instead to fit it into existing models of international relations (IR) theory. As Rosamond says: ‘rather than trying to fit the EU into IR theory, perhaps IR theorists need to look carefully at their established theoretical toolkits if they are to properly comprehend the EU.’⁵

In his book Understanding the European Union: A Concise Introduction, John McCormick quotes a saying that ‘the EU works in practice but not in theory’.⁶ Whatever such a remark is meant to mean, it surely provides us with some encouragement to get on with describing what the European Union does and not be too tied up with the complex theories about its nature. This book will try to allow the EU to speak for itself as the strange animal it undoubtedly is. Perhaps it lacks even the unity (despite its odd markings) of a quagga. It may be even stranger than that, and certainly not the sort of creature that easily heads the ‘sponsor an animal’ lists through which zoos help to maintain themselves. It is more of a duck-billed platypus, subject to frequent academic critiques of the ‘surely it can’t really be a mammal if it lays eggs’ variety. But the important thing is to observe it in its habitat. That is why a substantial part of this book deals with practice.

Outline of the book

The European Union: An Introduction does not contain separate chapters going through each institution in turn. There is no need to repeat the familiar guided tours of Commission, Court of Justice, Parliament and so on that inform many other books. We are not going to go through the quagga stripe by stripe. There will be substantial chapters on the history (Chapter 2) and anatomy (Chapter 3) of the EU, but the emphasis of at least half the book will be upon examining EU activity in particular areas, providing specific examples. It is surprising how little attention is paid to this in introductions to the EU. As one of the best introductions to date, Anand Menon’s Europe: The State of the Union, puts it:

Actually, there is far too much discussion about how the EU works. Observers and practitioners alike spend inordinate amounts of time describing decision-making processes and institutional configurations, and far less examining what the Union actually does and how well it does it.⁷

It is this observation above all others that convinces me it is worth attempting another introduction to the EU, despite there being some very good introductions already (such as the McCormick book mentioned above). For even McCormick does very little to illustrate the EU at work, even though he concedes that ‘polls find that most Europeans don’t know how it [the European Union] works’.⁸

For instance, it is important to explain the complex (and still rather uncertain) place of the EU’s new External Action Service, but does it not help in understanding it to describe some of the things it actually does, as this book tries to? That is why Chapter 7 on external relations looks at the situation in the Horn of Africa in some detail. Since the end of 2008, with a mandate to continue at least until the end of 2014, an EU naval force has been operating in and around the Gulf of Aden. Containing ships (mostly frigates) from various EU countries and reconnaissance aircraft from others, it has been mandated to deal with piracy and has a British rear admiral based in Northwood in the UK as its operation commander. Is that not relevant to the discussion? Does an EU introduction have to stop at a dry definition of what a particular policy area covers without examining some of the particular operations that take place within it? In each section of the chapters devoted to particular policy areas, this book will look carefully at specifics, giving examples in order to provide a clear illustration of how departments actually carry out their work and in order to give some concrete meaning to buzzwords and phrases such as ‘multilevel governance’. If there are all these international, regional, national and sub-national ‘actors’ at work, we need to see some of the ‘plays’ they perform in order to understand what such expressions mean.

The chapters of this book lead naturally towards a conclusion concerning just what the EU is and what grandiose claims about ‘the EU as a global leader’ might mean. The argument here is that, once we recognise that the EU is neither a group of states crammed together in unfortunate circumstances and struggling to be free of one another, nor a single state struggling to be born, we can look at it as it is – ‘Europe’s experimental union’, as the title of one book on the EU describes it.⁹

So is this a ‘europhile’ book? If it is a ‘europhile’ book, it is so only in the sense that it believes that, by letting the EU speak for itself, it will acquit itself well. But it is not a ‘europhile’ book in the sense of wanting to join all those who (confusingly) talk about ‘ever more Europe’, ‘ever deepening integration’, ‘creating a single polity’ and so on. It genuinely believes in the EU as a hybrid that works, but this is to set it against some of those ‘europhiles’ who think that a couple more treaties (and the relegation of the UK to some sort of ill-defined and self-inflicted ‘associate membership’) will allow the EU to sail on into the sunny waters of superstatedom.

As I have argued elsewhere,¹⁰ the EU would have far more influence if it presented itself as a model of sovereignty-sharing between states that could be practised elsewhere (and even globally) than if it presented itself as a stage along the tortuous path from regionhood to statehood. If the latter were the case, all that would have been produced by 60 years of sovereignty-sharing would be another big state, a United States of Europe, which would simply become one of the ‘big Six’ players in a twenty-first-century rerun of the dangerous great power game that steadily tore Europe apart in the century after the Battle of Waterloo. Instead of being an example of how states could work together in a more peaceful and effective manner, the EU would just become another state rubbing up against, and risking conflict with, the rest. If the 28 (or however many it finally is) member states were to turn themselves into one big nation-state, then they would have ceased to demonstrate that their partial sovereignty-sharing system can enable states to coexist peaceably while remaining themselves. They would have forfeited what arguably entitled them to the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the European Union in 2012, namely a system that has at the very least helped nation-states with a long history of conflict to live at peace with one another.

Therefore I would resist (if the choice were to be mine) the designation ‘europhile’ as much as that of ‘eurosceptic’. I believe that the EU is a unique and precious institution (which is quite europhile enough for many people!), but precisely for that reason I have no desire to see it turned into a state. I have my suspicions of those for whom every crisis is an opportunity to move it up to another level of integration, because changing up a gear and becoming a state is as bad as changing down a gear and becoming several states. The EU is a system for keeping states but managing their relations with one another – and, given the carnage that states have caused through their unmanaged relations with each other in past centuries, this does not seem to be such a bad idea. To that extent at least, this is a book in favour of the quagga.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Biography
• 1 Introduction
• 2 History
• 3 Anatomy
• 4 The single market
• 5 Agriculture and aquaculture
• 6 A Europe of regions
• 7 External relations
• 8 The greening of Europe?
• 9 Conclusion
• Notes
• General observations concerning sources
• Abbreviations, definitions and further reading