commentator on EU affairs in the columns of Newsweek and the pages of Prospect. The theoretical background of his work lies in the notion developed by, among others, Robert Keohane at Harvard—where Moravcsik was a younger associate—of an ‘international regime’, understood as a set of formal or informal principles, rules and procedures determining a common horizon of expectations, and so conduct, for inter-state relations. The particular problem addressed by Keohane’s major work After Hegemony (1984) was how high levels of cooperation could persist among the advanced capitalist states, once the paramountcy of the US that had been responsible for its post-war institutions—Bretton Woods, the IMF, GATT, NATO—passed away, as he thought it had in the early seventies.
The target of this conception was the dominant realist school of international relations theory in the USA, descended from Hans Morgenthau, which insisted on the ineliminably conflictual nature of relations between sovereign states in the world political arena. This standpoint, Keohane thought, could not make sense of the degree of pragmatic harmony between the leading states of the OECD after the collapse of Bretton Woods. Nor, however, could the alternative of neo-functionalist theory supply the answer: its stress on common ideals and economic ties was in Keohane’s words ‘naive about power and conflict’.4 He proposed instead a synthesis of realism and neo-functionalism that would leave both behind, by modelling as it were the tender-minded phenomenon of international cooperation with the tough-minded tool-kits of rational choice and game theory.
A decade later, Moravcsik started to apply this line of thinking to the European Community. This was a field, however, where the balance of intellectual forces—at any rate in North America—was the opposite of that which had confronted Keohane. Here it was the neo-functionalism developed by Haas and his pupils that enjoyed most influence, an approach that stressed the specificity of European integration as a process founded on functional economic interdependencies, but driven by federalist political ideals. For the neo-functionalists, this was a combination that was gradually leading to a sui generis structure of supranational character, undercutting national sovereignty in a way unlike any other inter-state arrangement of the post-war epoch.
Moravcsik’s manifesto of 1993, ‘Preferences and Power in the European Community: A Liberal Intergovernmentalist Approach’, took aim directly at this construction.5 The right starting-point for understanding the process of integration, he asserted, was not what was specific to but what was standard in the EU. The Community had to be seen as another variant of a common pattern of international cooperation, requiring no analytical instruments to capture it beyond those already supplied by regime theory. In analyzing it, pride of place should be given neither to the role of the European Commission in Brussels, nor to the Court in Luxembourg, let alone the Parliament in Strasbourg, but rather to traditional bargaining between member-governments whose key deals set the terms—and limits—of European cooperation. The principal refinement needed to standard regime theory was simply the inclusion of the domestic politics of each state within the theory. ‘Governments’, Moravcsik explained, ‘evaluate alternative courses of action on the basis of a utility function’, shaped ‘in response to shifting pressure from domestic social groups, whose preferences are aggregated through political institutions’.
The correct way to look at European integration was thus as an exemplar of ‘liberal inter-governmentalism’—liberal in that it supposed private individuals and voluntary associations as the basic actors in politics, and assumed that increased traffic in goods and services across borders would spur ‘reciprocal market liberalization and policy coordination’.6 This was an approach governed by rational choice theory—essentially an extrapolation of the procedures of neo-classical economics to other domains of life—modelling the conduct of states on the behaviour of firms. ‘The essence of the EC as a body for reaching major decisions remains its transaction-cost reducing function’, contended Moravcsik.7 True, this was an international regime which, unusually, involved governments in pooling and delegating elements of sovereignty. But they did so ‘as a result of a cost-benefit analysis of the stream of future substantive decisions expected to follow from alternative institutional designs’,8 which led them to prefer the efficiency gains to be realized by arrangements particular to the EC. Since states make rational choices, it follows that they seldom err in their decisions. Governments bargaining for advantage with one another remain firmly in control of the outcomes. ‘Unintended consequences and miscalculations’ have at best—so Moravcsik—‘played a role at the margins, as they always do in social life’.9
The Choice for Europe seeks to illustrate this vision by treating the history of European integration as a sequence of five ‘grand bargains’ between governments, to each of which Moravcsik devotes detailed attention: the Treaty of Rome in the fifties; the creation of the Common Agricultural Policy and the Luxembourg compromise in the sixties; the European Monetary System in the seventies; the Single European Act of the eighties; and the Treaty of Maastricht in the nineties. The argument is single-minded. At no point, Moravcsik maintains, was European integration driven either by geo-political calculations—France’s need to contain Germany; Germany’s need to recover respectability—or by federal idealism—Monnet’s dreams of supranationalism; or by considerations of social welfare—as Milward had argued, showing a regrettably weak grasp of American social science.10 Throughout, the primary motivation in the construction of today’s Union has been just the commercial interests of the contracting partners. The result of their rational computations has been ‘the most successful of postwar international regimes’.
This thesis is hammered home with a mass of dense documentation, most of it revolving around Franco-German relations, with admiring glances at Britain. De Gaulle is cut down to size as little more than a disingenuous lobbyist for French farmers. Macmillan, on the other hand, is hailed as a clairvoyant statesman, whose (failed) bid to get the UK into the Community was ‘an extraordinary act of leadership’.11 Indeed, from the first discussions of a common market at Messina onwards, ‘British diplomacy was far-sighted, efficient and well-informed—close to the ideal rational actor’.12 But in the overall balance-sheet of successive bargains, Moravcsik’s narrative intimates, it was Germany that shaped the process of integration most. From Rome to Maastricht, it can gradually be deduced, Bonn was generally more formative than Paris. Italy’s part in the story is ignored. The tale is one virtually without missteps. Governments, Moravcsik assures us, not only foresaw the immediate consequences of their decisions, ‘they almost never misperceived the direction of future change’.13
The sheer bulk and self-confidence of The Choice for Europe has made of it, notwithstanding many an objection from historians, the central reference in a field dominated by political scientists of not dissimilar outlook. Its inadequacy to its object is, however, quite clear. For what Moravcsik’s construction is ab initio unable to explain is why the standard objectives of inter-capitalist state cooperation, as codified in regime theory, could not have been achieved after the war in Western Europe by free-trade agreements of a conventional kind, without creation of any complex of supranational institutions or derogations of national sovereignty. Why shouldn’t the EC have looked more like NAFTA? From a ‘liberal intergovernmentalist’ perspective, the European Commission, the Parliament and the Court of Justice enshrined in the Treaty of Rome can only appear gratuitous: unnecessary headaches down the road on which the six governments of the mid-fifties were so prudently and soberly steering.
What such a conception ignores, of course, is the critical fact that the institutional origins of the European Community were deliberately framed in dynamic, open-ended terms—that is, unlike other forms of international agreement, they were declared to be stepping-stones in view of an ultimate objective whose exact shape was left unspecified. In the famous formula which has haunted Eurosceptics ever since, the first words of the Treaty of Rome spoke of an ‘ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’. It is this teleological aspiration that set European integration categorically apart from the normal world of international agreements. No stable equilibrium was aimed at by the first Coal and Steel Community, or the Common Market that followed it. On the
