European Integration. Mark Gilbert

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СКАЧАТЬ controls—still blocked the movement of citizens of EC member states from one country to another. The EC was primarily concerned with agriculture. In the early 1980s, agriculture took up nearly 80 percent of the Community’s budget, and the disagreements provoked by the costs of agricultural policy absorbed (it sometimes seemed) 99 percent of its energies.

Yet just ten years later, in 1993, our time traveler would have been astonished by the degree to which the Single European Act (SEA, 1986) and the Treaty on European Union (1992) were enabling people to move, buy, invest, and sell across the member states of what was now called the European Union. The traveler would, moreover, have been equally astonished at the policy responsibilities that had been transferred to the Community level and at the growing role played by the EU’s supranational institutions.

      Chapters 8 and 9 describe how this transfer of responsibilities was decided and how and why the member states decided to move forward so far and so fast to “complete the single market” and, in the teeth of fierce British opposition, to complement the single market with a plan for a single currency, an autonomous central bank, and enhanced powers for the directly elected European Parliament. The shock of the unification of Germany was the decisive impulse for this acceleration in the pace and scale of European integration. The French historian Frédéric Bozo has rightly dubbed the Treaty on European Union that emerged at Maastricht a “quantum leap” for the integration project as a whole.³

      The final two chapters are concerned with the EU as it has developed since Maastricht. In brief, it is a story of hopes dashed, or at least blunted. After Maastricht, and especially after the introduction of the euro in 2002, the EU enjoyed an Indian summer of favorable attention from the international punditocracy. The EU was depicted as an emerging superpower that would dominate the twenty-first century; an organization whose postnational institutions, environmental friendliness, commitment to peace and human rights, and general aura of sanctity made it an exemplar for the rest of the world—and especially for the “Toxic Texan” and the neoconservatives lurking within the Washington beltway. The EU would match the United States as a force in the world by virtue of its superior way of life, such commentators asserted boldly.⁴

      Such panegyrics to the EU’s soft power attributes were taken seriously by some surprising people. The EU in the late 1990s and early 2000s generated a mood of progressivism that recalls (to those who have read both literatures) the enthusiasm of many liberal intellectuals and scholars across Europe for the League of Nations in the 1920s and early 1930s. In both cases, ideals ran into hard facts. In the 1930s, it was the rise of fascism that exposed the League’s weaknesses; in the 2000s, economic issues and recalcitrant voters exposed the shortcomings of what this book has dubbed “EUphoria.”

Chapters 10 and 11 deal with both this mood of optimism and with the EU’s dashed hopes. Chapter 10 surveys four of the policy areas in which the EU took major decisions between 1992 and 2009: monetary union; enlargement to central and southeast Europe; the EU’s dissensions over issues of foreign policy, especially the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which split it into two angrily divided camps; and the negotiation of the EU Constitution, which, in hindsight, was an excessively bold step forward. The Constitution’s defeat at the hands of French and Dutch voters in 2005, which opens chapter 11, was emblematic. Europe’s leaders ought to have realized that their own soaring hopes for the continent’s political future were not necessarily shared by their voters.

      Chapter 11 concludes the book by examining the mood of deep crisis that has taken hold in the EU since the previous edition of this book was published and attempts to draw some tentative conclusions for the Union’s future. The period since the Lisbon Treaty entered into force on December 1, 2009, has been a grim decade of crisis management (or mismanagement), full of “alarums and excursions,” to cite the title of the best book on the EU’s difficulties in these years.⁵ The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune have peppered the EU from all sides, and the EU has taken a number of painful hits. The global economic slump almost caused the euro to crash; humanitarian disasters in Africa and Syria led to a flood of migrants arriving in the EU and tested the EU’s vaunted commitment to free movement of people to the breaking point; populist parties proclaiming their “sovereignist”—or nationalist—sympathies emerged. Most dramatically of all, as I mentioned above, the UK voted in June 2016 to leave the EU. “Brexit” has paradoxically shown the Union’s resilience, however. The British found it extremely difficult to disentangle themselves from the EU satisfactorily: it became a national psychodrama. Meanwhile, the twenty-seven remaining nations maintained a common front in the negotiations with the British: nobody tried to cut themselves a special deal before Britain departed.

      Still, despite its resilience, it is useless to deny that the EU today is looking like tarnished goods. Its future may be predictable by Madame Sosostris’s “wicked pack of cards,” but lesser mortals without this precious theoretical tool should acknowledge that almost anything, including the disintegration of the EU (but also the transformation of the EU, or a large part of it, into a political entity that has taken on more of the key competences of a nation-state), is possible over the next five to ten years.⁶

This summary of the book’s contents has already given away one point of narrative technique: the book is not what the historian Herbert Butterfield notoriously identified as “Whig history.”⁷ The study of European integration has sometimes been the last redoubt of history of this kind. In much the same way that scholars once depicted English constitutional history as a seesaw battle between reformist “Whigs” (Liberals) and reactionary “Tories” (in which British parliamentary democracy was at length perfected by Whig statesmen despite the low cunning and the self-interested opportunism of the Tories), many scholars of European integration have portrayed European integration as a historical process whose forward march has been hampered by states and national leaders (de Gaulle and Margaret Thatcher—indeed British leaders more generally—have a starring role as villains) irrationally attached to the principles of national sovereignty, which has resulted nevertheless in a unique polity that is an example to the rest of the world.

      The problem with seeing any history in terms of reactionaries versus progressives is that it “abridges”—to use Butterfield’s term—the historical process. According to Butterfield, the historian’s job is rather the “analysis of all the mediations by which the past was turned into our present.” It is to “recapture the richness of the moments, the humanity of the men, the setting of the external circumstances, and the implications of events.” When writing general history, which is of necessity a compressed summary of the whole, we have the right to expect, Butterfield adds, that the historian has not, by the selection and organization of the facts, “interpolated a theory . . . particularly one that would never be feasible if all the story were told in all its detail.”⁸

      I agree with Butterfield’s injunctions on how to write general history. I have accordingly concentrated on capturing the much that was contingent about European integration and on evoking the drama of its many crises. Europe might have taken any number of forks in the road: striving to convey how easily things might have turned out differently at every important juncture was the book’s major challenge (and the one, whatever the book’s defects, which I am most confident of having met). In addition, as I hinted earlier, I have made a deliberate choice not to advance a broad theory to explain the dynamic of European integration but to concentrate on clarifying the issues at stake at any given moment in the EU’s emergence and explaining specific outcomes in such detail as was possible, given the amount of space available.

      All the same, it is important СКАЧАТЬ