European Integration. Mark Gilbert

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СКАЧАТЬ European Parliament to ratify and shape the decisions reached by the member states has significantly increased. The sentences of the Court of Justice of the European Union (formerly the European Court of Justice) have established the supremacy of European law over national law, and the Court provides for judicial review of an overzealous Commission’s actions, or, more usually, of member states too indolent in implementing Community law.

In the last analysis, concern over this transfer of sovereignty to the EU’s institutions was the principal reason why, in January 2020, the United Kingdom finally and messily ended its troubled membership of the European project. “Brexit,” in the last resort, was caused by a widespread perception among the British people that the EU’s powers to make law had gone “too far.” It was necessary to “take back control.” Naturally, this perception was not unanimous, which is why the Brexit issue has provoked such lacerating political conflict. The case of Britain, in fact, has illustrated just how far integration has actually proceeded. The British have discovered the hard way that they could not leave the EU without significant political, economic, and psychological costs. At the same time, they could not stay in Europe without paying a price that millions of its citizens regarded as unacceptable.

      The British, incidentally, are by no means alone in feeling that the EU has exceeded its remit. Austria, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden all have right-wing populist parties that have gained in strength immensely since the previous edition of this book was published. To a greater or lesser degree, all of these parties oppose the EU and wish to reclaim sovereign power from Brussels, especially over immigration. Meanwhile, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland, while remaining nominally pro-EU (all three benefit financially from the EU’s regional development programs), have shown a spiky reluctance to adjust to the Union’s norms or principal policies.

      Since the turn of this century, moreover, some of the EU’s most high-profile projects—the Lisbon program to make the EU the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010; the would-be EU Constitution rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005; the idea of a common EU foreign policy; the attempt to establish a common EU frontier; the EU’s single currency, the euro—have met with mixed success or outright failure. Such projects were often hailed as giant steps toward building Europe, but member states, or their peoples, pulled back from the implications of “more Europe.”

      Supporters of European integration often say, echoing the words of the first president of the European Commission, the German diplomat Walter Hallstein, that European integration is like riding a bicycle: if you stop, you topple over. But it is also true, to develop the simile, that few cyclists have the muscles or the will to ascend the highest mountains and are quite content to spin along the foothills without breaking sweat. Since the introduction of the euro in 1999, the EU has launched itself at some stiff climbs: in every case, several countries’ legs have buckled, and the pack of riders has had to freewheel back downhill.

In other words, the aura of success that has enveloped the process of European integration for most (though not all) of the period since the 1950s is dissipating. If it disappears, there will be repercussions for how the story of European integration is told. The process of European integration is no more immune from revision than any other historical pro-cess.² The years since 2003 have revealed long-standing structural flaws in the so-called European construction, and a straightforward narrative of success, which Surpassing Realism was, on the whole, today appears difficult to justify. A history of the European Union, to be plausible, is one that, as well as capturing the authentic novelty of the process of integration and the indisputable idealism that it has engendered, looks back from the EU’s present and traces the causes of the current malaise—for malaise there is.

      In common with the book’s previous two versions, the text is structured chronologically. However, the similarity of method should not disguise the quite significant changes that have been introduced to the book’s contents. Chapter 2, which previously dealt with the five-year period between the war’s end in May 1945 and May 1950, when French foreign minister Robert Schuman proposed establishing an economic community for coal and steel products, now gives much more space to developments before 1945 and concludes with the decision to launch the Council of Europe—a body that was intended by many to be the first step toward a federal United States of Europe—in May 1949.

      The third chapter deals with the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and the abortive European Defense Community (EDC). Following the Schuman Declaration, the ECSC treaty was negotiated by six West European states (Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany); these same countries sought to construct a defense community, working in harmony with NATO, which was destined to evolve into a federal European political community. The French National Assembly shot this plan down in August 1954: foreign policy and defense cooperation has ever proved to be a thorny topic for the European project.

      By March 1957, however, “the Six” had nevertheless negotiated new treaties to promote cooperation in the field of nuclear energy and research, and—crucially—to establish the European Economic Community (EEC), which was a customs union for industrial and agricultural products. The negotiation of the EEC was a hard-fought battle, and many, notably the British government, underestimated the will of the Six to make the necessary compromises. These two treaties, especially the EEC, are the subject matter of chapter 4.

Between 1958 and 1969, the EEC was dominated by the personality and ambitions of the president of France, Charles de Gaulle. The great French leader was determined to transform the EEC into a vehicle for French foreign policy and was adamant, too, that the member states should remain the Community’s key decision makers. This “intergovernmentalist” approach clashed with the more “federalist” conception of the treaty preferred by the European Commission and other enthusiasts for supranational government, and also led de Gaulle to block the entry into the Community by Great Britain, which he regarded, not entirely falsely, as an American stooge. Chapter 5 deals with the indelible mark that de Gaulle left on the Community’s development, which was deeper than many historians of European integration have been wont to acknowledge.

      Chapter 6, “Weathering Storms,” and chapter 7, “Consolidation and Innovation,” are dedicated to the development of the Community in the 1970s. In retrospect, it is something of a miracle and a powerful testament to the sense of cohesion achieved by the EEC that Western Europe did not revert to economic nationalism in the 1970s. Wildly swinging exchange rates, rampant inflation, low economic growth, and soaring oil prices were a recipe for protectionism. Instead, cooperation intensified. From December 1974, the EC’s heads of state and government began to meet on a regular basis in what became known as the European Council. This quintessentially intergovernmental body swiftly became the EC’s strategic decision-making body. The EEC admitted Great Britain, Denmark, and Ireland to membership in 1973. The EC also strove to control the damaging effects of fluctuating exchange rates by instituting the European Monetary System (EMS) in 1979, and the member states agreed that the EC Assembly should be directly elected, making its pretensions to be an authentic parliament less risible. A string of sentences by the Court of Justice had, by the end of the 1970s, established that the Treaty of Rome conferred rights directly on the citizens of the member states and that the regulations and directives made by Community institutions enjoyed supremacy over conflicting national laws. These achievements were remarkable given the economic and political turbulence of the 1970s.

      The turning point in the history of European integration nevertheless undoubtedly comes between 1984 and 1992. A citizen transported forward in time from 1963 would have found the European Community (as it began to be called in the 1970s) of 1983 essentially similar to the EEC of twenty years before. Trade was much freer, but СКАЧАТЬ