Fluent Essays

Students are requested to analyse theories related to the concepts of Supranational Governance and Multi-level Governance, covered in the attached supporting reading documents using the matrix from the lecture: sum up the assumptions that lay at the core of a theory, describe in brief the logic and the role of supranational institutions in the European Integration process. Papers should be of no less than 10 000 and no more than 15 000 characters (excluding cover page and bibliography). theories_of_european_integration.pdf rethinking_european_polity.pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview Chapter 1 Theories of European Integration Chapter Overview The dominant approaches to understanding the early phase of European integration came from international relations (IR). In particular, the study of integration was dominated by the competing approaches of neofunctionalism and intergovernmentalism. Although neofunctionalist theory neatly fitted events in the 1950s and early 1960s, subsequent events led to its demise and the rise of intergovernmentalist explanations. While theorizing European integration has moved on significantly from these early approaches, much of what followed was either framed by this debate or developed as a rejection of it. The debate about whether the EU is characterized by intergovernmentalism or supranationalism still informs much of the academic work on the subject. ‘International theory’ has been too readily written off by contemporary writers seeking to offer theoretical treatments of the EU . . . (Rosamond 1999: 19) The signing of the Treaty of Paris in April 1951 by the governments of Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands (Chapter 6, p. 92) began the process commonly referred to as European integration (see Insight 1.1). This process has meant that the economies of participating states, and subsequently other areas, have been increasingly managed in common. Decisions previously taken by national governments alone are now taken together with other governments, and specially created European institutions. Governments have relinquished the sole right to make legislation (national sovereignty) over a range of matters, in favour of joint decision making with other governments (pooled sovereignty). Other tasks have been delegated to European institutions. It was something of a surprise to academic theorists of IR when governments in western Europe began to surrender their national sovereignty in some policy areas. For the first half of the twentieth century, the nation state seemed assured of its place as the most important unit of political life in the western world, especially in Europe. As such, the process of European integration constituted a major challenge to existing theories and generated an academic debate about the role of the state in the process. The two competing theories that emerged from IR to dominate the debate over early bac9544813_Book.indb 3 1/29/2011 12:17:09 PM THEORY Insight 1.1 European Integration European integration has a number of aspects, but the main focus of Chapter 1 is on political integration. Ernst Haas (1968: 16) provided a definition of European political integration as a process, whereby: political actors in several distinct national settings are persuaded to shift their loyalties, expectations and political activities toward a new center, whose institutions possess or demand jurisdiction over the pre-existing national states. The end result of a process of political integration is a new political community, superimposed over the pre-existing ones. Implicit in Haas’s definition was the development of a European federal state. More cautiously, Lindberg (1963: 149) provided a definition of political integration as a process, but without reference to an end point: political integration is (1) the process whereby nations forego the desire and ability to conduct foreign and key domestic policies independently of each other, seeking instead to make joint decisions or to delegate the decision-making process to new central organs; and (2) the process whereby political actors in several distinct national settings are persuaded to shift their expectations and political activities to a new center. The first part of this definition refers to two ‘intimately related’ modes of decision making: sharing and delegating. The second part of the definition refers to ‘the patterns of behaviour shown by high policy makers, civil servants, parliamentarians, interest group leaders and other elites’ (Lindberg 1963: 149), who respond to the new reality of a shift in political authority to the centre by reorientating their political activities to the European level. developments in European integration were neofunctionalism (Haas 1958; Lindberg 1963) and intergovernmentalism (Hoffmann 1964; 1966). Before discussing these two main positions in the debate, it is necessary to consider the intellectual context from which the idea of European integration emerged. Below we look first at the functionalist ideas of David Mitrany on how to avoid war between nations, then at the ideas of the European federalists, and finally at the ‘federalfunctionalism’ of Jean Monnet. We then turn to look first at neofunctionalism and then at intergovernmentalism, before looking at two later contributions to this debate: liberal intergovernmentalism and supranational governance. The Intellectual Background To understand the ideas that fed into the first attempts to theorize European integration, it is useful to start with one of the approaches that was influential after the Second World War about how to avoid another war. This ‘functionalist’ idea, which 4 bac9544813_Book.indb 4 1/29/2011 12:17:11 PM Mitrany and Functionalism David Mitrany (1888–1974) was born in Romania, but spent most of his adult life in Britain and the United States. He was not a theorist of European integration. His concern was with building a Working Peace System, the title of his Fabian pamphlet (Mitrany 1966; first published 1943). For Mitrany, the root cause of war was nationalism. The failure of the League of Nations to prevent aggression prompted debate about a new type of international system even before the outbreak of the Second World War. For those who blamed the failure of the League on its limited powers, the response was the development of an international federation. In other words, the League had not gone far enough and the same mistake should not be repeated: henceforth, nations should be tied more closely together. Mitrany did not agree with the idea of federation as the means of tying states together. He opposed the idea of a single world government because he believed that it would pose a threat to individual freedom. He also opposed the creation of regional federations, believing that this would simply reproduce national rivalries on a larger scale. Any political reorganization into separate units must sooner or later produce the same effects; any international system that is to usher in a new world must produce the opposite effect of subduing political division. Instead of either of these possibilities—a world federation or regional federations— Mitrany proposed the creation of a whole series of separate international functional agencies, each having authority over one specific area of human life. His scheme was to take individual technical tasks out of the control of governments and to hand them over to these functional agencies. He believed that governments would be prepared to surrender control because they would not feel threatened by the loss of sovereignty over, say, health care or the co-ordination of railway timetables, and they would be able to appreciate the advantages of such tasks being performed at the regional or world level. As more and more areas of control were surrendered, states would become less capable of independent action. One day, the national governments would discover that they were enmeshed in a ‘spreading web of international activities and agencies’ (Mitrany 1966: 35). These international agencies would operate at different levels depending on the function that they were performing. Mitrany gave the example of systems of communication. Railways would be organized on a continental basis; shipping would be organized on an intercontinental basis; aviation would be organized on a universal basis. Not only would the dependence of states on these agencies for their day-to-day functioning make it difficult for governments to break with them, but the experience THEORIES OF EUROPEAN INTEGRATION was particularly associated with the writings of David Mitrany, informed the United Nations movement. It was a theory of how to achieve world peace, rather than a theory of regional integration, and it took a very different approach to the question from the European federalists, who wanted to subordinate national governments to an overarching federal authority. The ideas of both the functionalists and the federalists were brought together in the ‘functional-federalism’ of Jean Monnet, which in turn provided one important source of intellectual inspiration for the neofunctionalist theory of European integration. 5 bac9544813_Book.indb 5 1/29/2011 12:17:11 PM THEORY of the operation of the agencies would also socialize politicians, civil servants, and the general public into adopting less nationalistic attitudes and outlook. Spinelli and Federalism 6 bac9544813_Book.indb 6 A completely different approach to guaranteeing peace was devised during the war in the ranks of the various Resistance movements. It was a specifically European movement, and whereas Mitrany aimed explicitly to depoliticize the process of the transfer of power away from national governments, federalists sought a clear transfer of political authority. The European Union of Federalists (EUF) was formed in December 1946 from the war-time Resistance movements. It was particularly strong in Italy, where the leading figure was Altiero Spinelli. Federalism appealed to the Resistance groups because it proposed superseding nationalism. It is important to bear in mind that whereas in Britain (and Russia) the Second World War was a nationalist war (in the former Soviet Union, it was ‘the great patriotic war’), in countries such as France and Italy it was an ideological war. Resistance fighters drawn from communist, socialist, and Christian democratic groups were in many cases fighting their own countrymen—Vichy supporters in France, Italian Fascists in Italy. While being held as political prisoners of the Fascists on the island of Ventotene, Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi (1897–1967) produced the Ventotene Manifesto (1941), calling for a ‘European Federation’. It argued that, left alone, the classes ‘most privileged under old national systems’ would seek to reconstruct the order of nation states at the end of the war. While these states might appear democratic, it would only be a matter of time before power returned to the hands of the privileged classes. This would prompt the return of national jealousies and ultimately, to renewed war between states. To prevent this development, the Manifesto called for the abolition of the division of Europe into national, sovereign states. It urged propaganda and action to bring together the separate national Resistance movements across Europe to push for the creation of a federal European state. The EUF adopted the Ventotene Manifesto, and began agitating for an international conference to be called that would draw up a federal constitution for Europe. This ambitious proposal was designed to build on what Milward called ‘the wave of hope for a better world and a changed future for the human race which had swept across Europe’ and which included an ‘extraordinary wave of enthusiasm for European federation’ (Milward 1984: 55). The strategy of the EUF was to exploit the disruption caused by the war to existing political structures in order to make a new start on a radically different basis from the Europe of national states. They aimed to achieve a complete break from the old order of nation states, and to create a federal constitution for Europe. Their Congress took time to organize, though. It eventually took place in The Hague in May 1948 (see Chapter 5, p. 83). By that time, the national political systems had been re-established, and what emerged from the Congress was an intergovernmental organization, the Council of Europe, not the new federal constitutional order for which the federalists had hoped. Many federalists then turned to the gradualist approach that was successfully embodied in the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). 1/29/2011 12:17:11 PM The plan for the ECSC was known as the Schuman Plan because it was made public by the French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman, but it is generally accepted that it was drawn up within the French Economic Planning Commission (Commissariat du Plan), which was headed by the technocrat Jean Monnet. It was the task of the Planning Commission to guide the post-war reconstruction and modernization of the French economy, and it was through his experiences in this task that Monnet came to appreciate the economic inadequacy of the European nation state in the modern world. He saw the need to create a ‘large and dynamic common market’, ‘a huge continental market on the European scale’ (Monnet 1962: 205). He aimed, though, to create more than just a common market. Monnet was a planner: he showed no great confidence in the free-market system, which had served France rather badly in the past. He placed his faith in the development of supranational institutions as the basis for building a genuine economic community that would adopt common economic policies and rational planning procedures. Coal and steel were only intended as starting points. The aim was to extend integration to all aspects of the western European economy—but such a scheme would have been too ambitious to gain acceptance all at once. There had been a clear indication of this in the failure of previous efforts to integrate the economies of France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. There was also a new factor in the equation, the key factor prompting Monnet’s plan: the emergence in 1949 of a West German state. For Monnet, the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany posed two problems in addition to that of how to create an integrated western European economy. The first problem was how to organize Franco–German relations in such a way that another war between the two states would become impossible. To a French mind, this meant how to control Germany. The pooling of coal and steel production would provide the basis for economic development as a first step towards a ‘federation of Europe’. Stimulating the expansion of those industries for peaceful purposes would provide an economic alternative to producing war materials for those regions of Europe that had been largely dependent on providing military material. The second problem facing Monnet was the very practical one of how to ensure adequate supplies of coking coal from the Ruhr for the French steel industry. The idea of pooling Franco-German supplies of coal and steel would tie the two states into a mutual economic dependency, in addition to taking out of the immediate control of the national governments the most basic raw materials for waging another war. Mitrany (1966) described Monnet’s strategy as ‘federal-functionalism’. It is not clear, though, how far Monnet was a federalist at all. He might be seen as a supreme pragmatist who proposed the ECSC as a solution to the very practical problems described above. To solve these problems, Monnet adopted a solution similar to that of Mitrany: remove control of the strategically crucial industries—coal and steel—from the governments and put it in the hands of a free-standing agency. This was the High Authority of the ECSC, and in Monnet’s original plan it was the only institution proposed. The development of other supranational institutions came from other pressures (see Chapter 7). The High Authority was the prototype for the later Commission of the European Economic Community (EEC), which became central to the neofunctionalist theory of European integration. bac9544813_Book.indb 7 THEORIES OF EUROPEAN INTEGRATION Monnet and Functional-Federalism 7 1/29/2011 12:17:11 PM THEORY International Relations Theories of European Integration Realism was the dominant approach in IR in the 1950s. It assumed that sovereign states formed the fundamental units of analysis for understanding IR. The appearance of the European Community (EC) therefore provided fertile ground for those who wished to develop a critique of this dominant approach. Neofunctionalism was the name given to the first theoretical attempt to understand European integration. Its implied critique of realism led to a counter-theory from within a broadly state-centred perspective, which became known as intergovernmentalism. The debate between these two broad positions has evolved over time, but the central issues of dispute remain much the same today as they were in the 1950s. Neofunctionalism Starting with the analysis of the ECSC by Ernst Haas (1958), a body of theorizing about European integration known as neofunctionalism was built up in the writings of a group of US academics (see Insight 1.1, p. 4). These theorists drew on the work of Mitrany and Monnet in particular. In addition to Haas, the main figures in this school of analysis were Leon Lindberg (1963; 1966), and Philippe Schmitter (1970). Neofunctionalism was a pluralist theory of international politics. In contrast to the more traditional realist theories, it did not assume that a state was a single unified actor; nor did it assume that states were the only actors on the international stage. In the concepts that it used, it anticipated later writings on global interdependence (Keohane and Nye 1977). In the first period of European integration, neofunctionalism appeared to be winning the theoretical debate. Neofunctionalism sought to explain ‘how and why they (states) voluntarily mingle, merge and mix with their neighbours so as to lose the factual attributes of sovereignty while acquiring new techniques for resolving conflict between themselves’ (Haas 1970: 610). There were four key parts to the neofunctionalist argument, as follows. (1) The concept of the ‘state’ is more complex than realists suggested. (2) The activities of interest groups and bureaucratic actors are not confined to the domestic political arena. (3) Non-state actors are important in international politics. (4) European integration is advanced through ‘spillover’ pressures. 8 bac9544813_Book.indb 8 In contrast to realists, neofunctionalists argued that the international activities of states were the outcome of a pluralistic political process in which government decisions were influenced by pressures from various interest groups and bureaucratic actors. In common with the general tenor of US political science at the time, it was often assumed that these pressures constituted the complete explanation for government decisions. So, if the analyst could identify the strength and direction of the various pressures accurately, it would be possible to make predictions about government behaviour in IR. 1/29/2011 12:17:11 PM THEORIES OF EUROPEAN INTEGRATION Using the concepts that were later called ‘transnationalism’ and ‘transgovernmentalism’ (Keohane and Nye 1977: 129–30), neofunctionalists expected nationally based interest groups to make contact with similar groups in other countries (transnationalism), and departments of state to forge links with their counterparts in other states, unregulated by their respective foreign offices (transgovernmentalism). Neofunctionalists pointed to the activities of multinational corporations to illustrate their argument that non-state actors are important in international politics. However, for neofunctionalists, the European Commission was the most important non-state international actor. The Commission was believed to be in a unique position to manipulate both domestic and international pressures on national governments to advance the process of European integration, even where governments might be reluctant. This contrasted with realist explanations of IR, which f ... Purchase answer to see full attachment