however, can it be realized suddenly or completely. Well before the ill-fated European Convention, Schmitter had dismissed the possibility that such proceedings could succeed. Constitutions are born of revolutions, putsches, wars, economic collapses, not of routine peacetime conditions. The only way the European polity could—democratically—be constitutionalized would be through a Constituent Assembly with a mandate approved by a prior referendum of all European citizens. In the interim, the way forward must be a return to Monnet’s method, now relying not on economic spillovers to advance integration, but on political increments of democracy to transform it in similar, gradually cascading fashion—petits pas once again yielding, in the end, grands effets.
It is appropriate that the most cogent programme for the democratization of the EU should come from an heir of neo-functionalism: the charge that Monnet’s method precluded one could not be more directly refuted. But Schmitter’s intellectual background includes more than Haas. His reflections end with a final, disabused twist. Where is the force that might take up his programme? One historical agent has been unequivocally strengthened by the EU, he writes. ‘That is the European bourgeoisie’. Could it rise to the challenge? Alas, it is too comfortably ensconced in power as it is, with little reason to alter the status quo. ‘Ideologically, its “liberal” positions have never been more dominant; practically, its “natural” opponent, the organized working class, has been weakened’. Were integration to come under threat from below, the bourgeoisie would be much more likely ‘to seek retrenchment behind a phalanx of technocrats than to take the risk of opening up the process to the uncertainties of transparency, popular participation, mass party competition, citizen accountability and redistributive demands’.87 Indeed. There is an echo here of Weber’s disappointment with the German bourgeoisie of his time. But in the EU, no quest for a charismatic leader to resolve the impasse—Weber’s solution—could be of avail. Perhaps after all, democratization of the European polity, like liberalization of the economy before it, will have to come like a thief in the night, overtaking all agents—elites and masses alike, if in uneven measure—before any are fully aware of what is happening.
Schmitter’s construction thus at once refutes and confirms Majone’s critique of the ‘Monnet method’. A radical iconoclasm of democratic ends is joined, for lack of anything credible that is better, with a sceptical reversion to traditional stealth in means. Yet in these reflections, a frontier common to all the theorizations so far considered starts to be crossed. The language of class does not belong to the discourse of Europe. Schmitter’s freedom with it reflects a working background in Latin America, where the vocabulary of rule has always been more robust, and a personal culture extending well beyond the triter Anglo-Saxon verities, as far as the exotic shores of pre-war corporatism or post-war socialism. He once authored a paper describing the EC as ‘a novel form of political domination’.88 What such intimations indicate is a gap. The reigning literature on Europe spreads across disciplines: politics, economics, sociology, history, philosophy, law are all represented. Missing, however, in the recent literature is any real political economy of integration, of the kind that Milward offered of the founding years of the Community. For that, one has to move outside the bounds of liberal discourse on Europe.
Unsurprisingly, the best work on this—all too uncomfortably concrete—terrain, of class forces and social antagonisms, metamorphoses of capital and fissures of labour, alterations in contract and innovations in rent, has been done by Marxist scholars. Here what has been called the Amsterdam School, a group of mainly Dutch scholars inspired by the example of Kees van der Pijl, who pioneered the study of transnational class formations, has led the way. The result has been not only a great deal of detailed empirical research into the business metabolisms of integration, but a consideration of the wider array of forces sustaining the turn the EU has taken since the eighties. Putting Gramsci’s conceptual legacy to ingenious use, this is a line of interpretation that distinguishes between ‘disciplinary’ and ‘compensatory’ forms of neo-liberal hegemony (as it were: Thatcher’s and New Labour’s) within the Union, and—developing a hypothesis first suggested by Milward—seeks the social base of these pendular forms in a new rentier bloc with an over-riding interest in hard money, whose complex ramifications now extend into the better-off layers of the private-sector working class itself. Parallel with this work, a spirited revisionist history of both the ideological origins and the economic outcomes of integration, each contravening received opinions, is under way—it too proceeding from Marx rather than Ricardo or Polanyi. Even in this heterodox left field, it should be said, the US presence is visible. The leading collection of the Amsterdam School, A Ruined Fortress? (2003), is orchestrated by a chair-holder from upstate New York, Alan Cafruny; the editor and principal contributor to the revisions of Monetary Union in Crisis, Bernard Moss, is an American based in London.89
What explains the strange pattern of expatriation—it would plainly be wrong to speak of expropriation—of European studies, understood as enquiry into the past and future of the Union? American dominance of the field in part, no doubt, reflects the famously greater resources, material and intellectual, of the US university system, which assures its lead in so many other areas. There is also the longer tradition and greater prominence in the US of political science, the discipline for which European integration is the most obvious hunting-ground. More generally, an imperial culture has to monitor major developments around the world: it could be argued that contemporary China or Latin America do not differ substantially from Europe, so far as the balance of scholarship is concerned. Still, the much greater density, not to speak of ancestry, of university research in today’s Union would not lead one to expect particularly similar outcomes.
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