form an effective counterweight to the United States on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other.2
Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister from 1979 to 1990, was perhaps the most forceful advocate of the sovereigntist vision of the European Union (at the time, the European Community) as an organization promoting cooperation among independent and distinct member states. She elaborated on this view in her famous speech at the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium, in 1988:
My first guiding principle is this: willing and active cooperation between independent sovereign states is the best way to build a successful European Community. To try to suppress nationhood and concentrate power at the centre of a European conglomerate would be highly damaging and would jeopardise the objectives we seek to achieve. Europe will be stronger precisely because it has France as France, Spain as Spain, Britain as Britain, each with its own customs, traditions and identity. It would be folly to try to fit them into some sort of identikit European personality. . . . We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels. Certainly we want to see Europe more united and with a greater sense of common purpose. But it must be in a way which preserves the different traditions, parliamentary powers and sense of national pride in one’s own country; for these have been the source of Europe’s vitality through the centuries.3
A prominent voice on the integrationist side was Helmut Kohl, the chancellor of Germany from 1982 to 1998 and a tireless advocate of a united Europe. In April 1992, shortly after the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, which would turn the European Community into the European Union, Kohl said, “The Treaty on European Union marks a new, decisive step in the process of European integration that in a few years will lead to the creation of what the founding fathers of modern Europe dreamt of after the last war: a United States of Europe.”4
José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission from 2004 to 2014, also laid out a strongly integrationist vision. He talked of political union and supranational democracy: “Regarding the need to perfect our political union and enhance the democratic legitimacy that should underpin what I call Europe 3.0, it should be based on the Community method as the system of checks, balances and equity between the institutions and the Member States that offers the best starting point for further supranational democracy.”5 The “community method” is a way of making policy that gives prominent roles to EU-level institutions, as opposed to the “intergovernmental method,” in which the governments of the member states play the leading part. Barroso’s use of the term “community method” underscores his view of the EU as a “supranational democracy,” a “political union” of the EU member states under the umbrella of the EU institutions.
Tony Blair, the British prime minister from 1997 to 2007, was one of many representatives of the intermediate position. As a Labourite, Blair was relatively pro-EU in comparison with his Conservative Party compatriots, but he wanted the elected heads of member-state governments to rein in the unelected European Commission. He called for the European Council, representing the heads of government, “to set out a clear, focused and strong platform of change for Europe. I mean a proper programme – almost like a manifesto for change – that is sufficiently precise that afterwards the commission knows exactly what it is supposed to do and has the full support of the council in executing it.”6
So there has always been serious divergence of opinion – even diametric opposition – regarding what the EU should be trying to achieve, as well as what path it should take to reach its goal. Charles de Gaulle wanted a Europe of sovereign nations coming together to form a bloc large enough to fend off the Soviet Union on the one hand and counter the domination of the United States on the other. Margaret Thatcher wanted willing cooperation between sovereign member states in order to advance prosperity and liberty in a Europe of related but distinct peoples. Helmut Kohl wanted a United States of Europe and set about trying to achieve it as one of the principal architects of the Maastricht Treaty on European Union. José Manuel Barroso wanted a “perfected political union,” a supranational democracy with the community method somehow functioning to provide checks and balances between the member states and the EU institutions. Tony Blair wanted an efficient European Commission carrying out the agenda given to it by the member states. These widely differing visions explain why a serious observer of the EU has to admit that it is impossible to establish with certainty what the EU is.
The disagreement on the question “What do we want the EU to be?” renders unanswerable the next question, “How do we achieve what we want to achieve?” How, then, has the EU been so successful in maintaining its seemingly inexorable forward movement toward a supranational dream? How has it escaped the paralysis that typically comes with uncertainty and division over goals?
One of the answers is that the EU – despite the well-known fact that it sometimes does seem nearly paralyzed in its slowness – can be exceedingly pragmatic. If the question “What do we want to achieve?” pertains to an easily identifiable and relatively urgent short-term or medium-term goal, the EU often does well. An EU statement, policy paper, even EU treaties can go forward without consensus among the parties through the pragmatic use of constructive ambiguity – by phrasing the controversial parts in such a way that each party can interpret them according to individual preference. When it comes to policy implementation, skillful, persistent pragmatism has led to many successes. The EU has accomplished major things – for example, developing an EU-wide single market, promoting trade, introducing the euro, and growing from six to twenty-eight member states – via pragmatic pursuit of specific ends.
At the same time, these specific accomplishments through short-term pragmatism cannot occur without somehow affecting the overall trajectory of the EU toward either the supranational or the sovereigntist pole. And here, the cards are stacked against the sovereigntists. With each agreement on a short-term goal, the sovereigntists lose a bit more ground to the supranationalists. In fact, the supranationalists have already rigged the game. Within the supranational institutional context of the EU, pragmatic cooperation – whenever it occurs and regardless of the short-term end – can be sold to the public as visionary. The integrationists can claim each accomplishment achieved by means of cooperation among member states, within the institutionally supranational EU, as proof of the validity of the supranational vision. With each example of cooperation, the achievement of the vision appears closer and becomes more plausible.
THE EU ENIGMA
Here again is Alcide De Gasperi’s opaque question: “Which road are we to choose if we are to preserve all that is noble and humane within these national forces, while co-ordinating them to build a supranational civilisation which can give them balance, absorb them, and harmonise them in one irresistible drive towards progress?” He gave an answer, of sorts:
This can only be done by infusing new life into the separate national forces, through the common ideals of our history, and offering them the field of action of the varied and magnificent experiences of our common European civilisation. It can only be done by establishing a meeting-point where those experiences can assemble, unite by affinity, and thus engender new forms of solidarity based on increased freedom and greater social justice. It is within an association of national sovereignties based on democratic, constitutional organisations that these new forms can flourish.7
What does this mean? What is an “association of national sovereignties?” It is unclear. In answering his own question, De Gasperi in reality left it unanswered. At any rate, one somehow gets the sense that a clearly defined forum for cooperation of sovereign nation-states is not what he had in mind. A garden-variety international organization just does not seem to encompass his grandiose vision of world-historical change, emanating from Europe. Yet De Gasperi does not seem to have been advocating the abolition of the European nations and the formation of a single European nation-state, a United States of Europe. He wanted it both ways.
If
