L’Édit de Caracalla ou plaidoyer pour les États-Unis d’Occident, Paris 2002; extracted in Régis Debray, ‘Letter from America’, New Left Review II/19, January–February 2003.
20. Leonard, Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century, p. 23.
THEORIES
2007
Larger now than the Roman Empire of two thousand years ago, more opaque than the Byzantine, the European Union continues to baffle observers and participants alike. Concepts have failed even its most prominent actors and analysts. For De Gaulle it was simply, and somewhat contemptuously, ce machin. For Jacques Delors, whose sympathies were the complete opposite, it still remained a kind of flying saucer—an ‘unidentified political object’, as he called it. For the leading constitutional authority on the EU, it is a golem. Such perplexities are not just quirks of terminology. They correspond to a painful reality, the enormous structural gap between the institutions of Europe and its citizens, attested by every opinion poll, steadily sinking rates of participation in Union elections, not to speak of popular understanding of its decision-making processes. This distance is in turn reproduced in the literature about the EU. Here writing falls into two widely differing categories, with only occasional crossovers between them. There is a popular literature aimed at a general audience, produced by publicists—or, less frequently, politicians—that enters into the mediasphere, becoming an element in the intellectual ether. Shifts of register within it need to be attended to in their own right.
On a far vaster scale is the professional literature about the EU, by now a veritable industry, with a perpetually expanding assembly line of journals, monographs, papers, conferences, research projects, collections, commentaries and more. No less than three hundred Jean Monnet chairs of European studies now adorn universities and institutes across the Union. Little of the huge output of this world penetrates any wider public consciousness, the bulk of it remaining as technical as the regulations and directives of Brussels themselves, sometimes more so. But if this is partly due to its subject matter, it is also a function of the discipline that dominates academic discussion of the EU, political science. Alfred Cobban’s definition of this branch of learning—a device ‘for avoiding that dangerous subject politics, without achieving science’—has not lost its sting fifty years later.
A more or less concurrent French and American invention—today’s Sciences-Po was founded in 1872, in the wake of France’s defeat in war with Prussia; the Civil War was the comparable watershed in the US—political science crystallized in the twentieth century as a distinctively American enterprise. This may have something to do with what is the most striking single feature of the scholarly literature on the EU today. Few of the leading contributions to it are written by Europeans. Virtually all the most original recent work on the Union comes, in one way or another, from America. Indeed, there is a sense in which the field was largely an American creation. Historically, few would contest that the first serious theorization of European integration was the work of an American scholar, Ernst Haas, whose study of the European Coal and Steel Community, The Uniting of Europe, appeared in 1958, a year after the Treaty of Rome was ratified, setting a paradigm for analysis of the Common Market that remained dominant for a quarter of a century. Haas’s standpoint was, famously, neo-functionalist: that is, focussed on the ways in which the ECSC, sprung from a convergence of interest groups—businesses, parties, unions—in the original Six, had unleashed a dynamic process of integration. In that process, he argued, the interdependence of economic sectors would lead, in a slow cascade of spillovers, to a steadily more extensive pooling of sovereignty in supranational institutions.
Although Haas’s intellectual framework derived entirely from the American political science of the period, his motivation was biographical. Coming from a German Jewish family that emigrated from Frankfurt for Chicago in the late thirties, when he was in his early teens, he was led—as he later explained—to study European unity by his boyhood experience of the costs of nationalism. With the re-emergence of De Gaulle as a decisive actor on the European stage in the sixties, followed by the economic turbulence of the early seventies, Haas came to the conclusion that in underestimating the continuing force of national sentiments, he had over-rated the technical automaticity of integration in Europe.1 He ended his days writing a massive two-volume comparative study of nationalism across the globe. But his neo-functionalist paradigm, though not without its critics—Stanley Hoffmann was an early case—founded a tradition that produced works like those of Leon Lindberg and others, remaining a central reference point in the field ever since.2
In the eighties, Haas’s legacy would be sharply attacked by Alan Milward, whose European Rescue of the Nation-State, argued no less famously that the European Community, far from being a supranational project weakening traditional sovereignties, was the product of a continental drive to strengthen them, moved by a post-war search for security—social and national; welfare and defence—that had nothing to do with functional spillovers between interdependent industries.3 This was in every way an intellectual landmark: nothing was the same after it. But already in these years, the founding states of the Treaty of Rome produced no research comparable to this contribution from Britain, not itself even a member of the European Economic Community in the period under study. Nor, when Milward’s later research concentrated mainly on his own country, has continental work compensated. In France, no native scholar could be found to fill the first chair in European studies at the Sciences-Po: a Belgian, Renaud Dehousse, had to be imported instead. In Germany, with its long tradition of Rechtslehre, distinguished constitutional theorists like Dieter Grimm have made punctual interventions of note, some in debate with normative philosophers like Habermas. But no syntheses of the order of Kelsen or Schmitt have been forthcoming. In Italy, if the European University Institute in Florence has rotated many an eminence, it has been more in the style of an extra-territorial enclave than a native centre of production. In the past decade, the magnetic compass has swung back, more decisively than ever before, to the United States.
Europeans are certainly not absent from the landscape of scholarship of Europe. But they do not occupy its commanding terrain. That has become a province of Greater America—that is, of thinkers born, based or formed in the United States. Of the half dozen or so most important current theorists of European integration, there is scarcely a cis-Atlantic native or career among them. This is not simply a product of an American predominance in political science. In history, economics, sociology, philosophy, jurisprudence: wherever we look, the pattern is the same.
No attempt to understand the EU today, or where it might be going, can bypass this bloc of writing. Its popular accounts of the Union are straws in the political wind. Of more intellectual significance is what the best-qualified minds trained on the Union now have to say about it. Their reflections can be divided into two broad sets of argument, each posing the question of the nature of the EU. The first treats this as a problem of history, the second as an issue of policy. Roughly: what kind of historical phenomenon is the Union? What sort of political future could it—or should it—have? The two agendas overlap, obviously, since a judgement as to what the EU has been is likely to govern what is thought possible or desirable for it to become, and few authors restrict themselves to either. But the distinction itself is clear enough, and one can begin with the history.
1
Setting the pace has for some time been Andrew Moravcsik’s The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht (1998), widely hailed as the leading synthesis since Milward. Director of the European Union Program at Princeton, where his wife Anne-Marie Slaughter
