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Samenvatting European Union Politics John McCormick
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SAMENVATTING | EUROPEAN UNION POLITICSJOHN MCMORMICK
CHAPTER 1 | UNDERSTANDING INTEGRATION
States and nations
Although there is little agreement on the definition of the state, most scholars would agree
that it is a legal and political arrangement through which all large-scale political communities
are organized, combining territory with sovereignty, independence and legitimacy.
• Territory → states operate within fixed and populated territories marked out by legal
boundaries.
• Sovereignty → the institutions of the state have a monopoly over the expression of
legal and political power within its boundaries.
• Independence → states do not come under the jurisdiction or control of other states
or international organizations.
• Legitimacy → the authority of a state and its institutions is recognized by the
inhabitants of the territory and by the governments of other states.
Alongside states, we must also understand the sometimes competing claims of nations. If a
state is a legal and political entity, then a nation is mainly a cultural entity → a group of
people who identify with one another on the basis of a shared language, ancestry, history,
culture, territory, religion, myths and symbols. Pushed far enough, identification with
nations may spawn nationalism → a belief in the value of preserving the identifying qualities
of a nation and promoting its interests.
• Because few states coincide with nations, nationalism has often sparked
intercommunity conflict and political instability.
International organizations
Just as we have seen a growth since the end of the Second World War in the number of
states, so we have seen the growth of interstate cooperation. This had varying motives:
• Promoting peace;
• Encouraging trade;
• Sharing ideas and resources;
• Reducing duplication;
• Addressing shared problems.
International organizations are bodies set up to promote cooperation between or among
states, based on the principles of voluntary cooperation, communal management and
shared interests. Most international organizations fall into one of two major categories:
• International nongovernmental organizations whose members are individuals or the
representatives of private associations.
, • Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) whose members are states and whose goal is
to promote cooperation among state governments.
Taken far enough, international cooperation can evolve into regional integration → a
process in which political actors in several distinct national settings are persuaded to shift
their loyalties, expectations and political activities towards a new center, whose institutions
possess or demand jurisdiction
over the pre-existing national
states. This usually happens
when a group of states forms a
regional integration association
(RIA) → an organization within
which independent states work
to encourage cooperation and
the pooling of authority and
resources for the mutual
benefit of its members.
From federalism to
neofunctionalism
In surveying the ruins left by the Second World War, many Europeans were prompted to
argue that states had lost their credibility and their political rights because they could not
guarantee the safety of their citizens. There was now a concern that elites would rebuild the
state system, raising the danger of a revival of interstate tensions and so of renewed conflict
and war.
• The answer to the problem lay in federalism → an effort to replace the European
state system with a European federation.
David Mitrany (among others) was critic about federalism and his treatise became the basis
of functionalism → states create functionally specific interstate institutions and agencies,
regional integration will develop its own internal dynamic, and peace can be achieved
through the creation of a web of interstate ties without the need for grand
intergovernmental agreements. Later on, Haas tried to generalize ‘the process by which
political communities are formed among sovereign States’ and give birth to the theory of
neofunctionalism → the theory that states are not the only important actors in efforts to
integrate, and that supranational institutions, interest groups and political parties all play a
key role.
• Spillover → a key element in neo-functionalist theory, describing the pressures
through which cooperation among states in one area of policy will lead to pressures
to cooperate in other areas.
,Building on Haas, Nye argued that regional integration involved an integrative potential that
determined the extent to which different groups of states were likely to succeed in their
efforts, and that this depended on several conditions:
• The economic equality and compatibility of the states involved;
• The extent to which the elite groups that controlled economic policy in the member
states thought alike and held the same values;
• The presence and the extent of interest group activity, the absence of which made
integration more difficult.
• The capacity of the member states to adapt and respond to public demands, which
depended in turn on levels of domestic stability and the capacity – or desire – of
decision-makers to respond.
The spotlight moves to governments
Hoffman argued that neofunctionalism concentrated too much on the process of integration
without paying enough attention to the global context. Hoffman focused on the idea of
intergovernmentalism → a theory/model based on the idea that key cooperative decisions
are made as a result of negotiations among representatives of the states involved.
Intergovernmental ideas stand in contrast to supranationalism → a theory/model based on
the idea that intergovernmental organizations become the forum for the promotion of the
joint interests of the states involved in cooperation, and that there is a transfer of authority
to these intergovernmental organizations.
The key to understanding how the EU has evolved is probably to combine
intergovernmentalism and supranationalism, seeing them not as two points on a spectrum
of cooperation but as complementary aspects of the process of integration.
• An attempt to combine the two approaches led to development of the theory of
liberal intergovernmentalism → a theory combining elements of neofunctionalism
and intergovernmentalism, arguing that intergovernmental bargains are driven by
pressures coming from the domestic level.
The final theory of note that comes out of international relations is constructivism → a
theoretical approach that focuses on the social construction of interests and the manner in
which they influence and shape institutions.
Summary
• Academic debates about the origins and history of the EU have been dominated by
theories of international relations, which portray the EU mainly as an international
organization driven by decisions taken by the governments of the member states.
• How we think about the EU depends in large part on how we think about states and
their changing role and powers in the world since 1945.
, • Our understanding of European states also demands an understanding of nations,
which have played a key role in determining political and social relations among
Europeans since at least the French Revolution.
• Since the Second World War there has been a marked growth in the number of
international organizations, set up to promote cooperation among states, and based
on the principles of communal management, shared interests and voluntary
cooperation.
• Realists argue that humans are self-centered and competitive, that we live in an
anarchic global system lacking an authority above the level of states that is capable
of helping them manage their interactions, and that states must use conflict and
cooperation to ensure their security.
• Liberals believe in the possibility of cooperation to promote change, view states and
international organizations as key actors in the global system, and stress their mutual
interdependence.
• Functionalists argue that the best way to achieve global peace is through the creation
of functionally specific interstate institutions, which bind states into a web of
cooperation.
• Neo-functionalists argue that states, supranational institutions, interest groups and
political parties all play a role in integration, which is driven by a process of spillover
through which governments find themselves cooperating in a growing range of policy
areas.
• Intergovernmentalists take the focus back to the deliberate and conscious decisions
of governments, and argue that the pace and nature of integration has been
ultimately driven by state governments pursuing state interests.
CHAPTER 2 | WHAT IS THE EUROPEAN UNION?
Where to start?
There are at least five possible
approaches to pinning down the
character of the today’s EU, but each
presents its own problems.
The comparative approach
While the European Economic
Community might reasonably have
been studied as an IO until as late as
the passage of the 1986 Single
European Act, much has since
changed: the process of integration has accelerated, the relationship between EU
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