William Outhwaite’s chapter is an intriguing piece of analysis of some of the terms involved in the disintegration field. It sits well beside Ben Rosamond’s chapter on (dis) integration theory. Several of the academic terms used are actually widely referenced in the practitioner community. Many are culled from Leon Lindberg’s and Stuart Scheingold’s Europe’s would-be polity (1970), developing Ernst Haas’s neofunctionalist approach – in the end the theory that practitioners mainly return to – perhaps because in the 1970s that was the fashion, and it was then that they were ambitiously studying ‘Europe’. The key terms are: equilibrium, spill-over, spill-back, forward linkage, system failure and system transformation. But do they cover the issues persuasively?

Hiatus in the integration process, what Lindberg and Scheingold (1970: 194) call equilibrium, was always the federalist fear. It involves achievement of sufficient integration in a given sector that no further integration to other functional areas (‘forward linkage’ in Lindberg and Scheingold terms) might seem possible, thus halting calls for further ‘deepening’ of integration. The relevant sectoral elites are content. ‘Equilibrium’ is achieved, and that is what they desired – unless, that is, they have separate political ambitions, for example the achievement of a federal Europe.

Equilibrium is, then, a pause in the integration bicycle ride. It is more positive than negative, because there is no identifiable spill-back, and there are thus seemingly no hostages to European fortune. Supporters of the ‘bicycle theory’ of integration traditionally believed a pause in the bicycle ride automatically implied collapse. But, opt-outs, a seeming setback for example, are always reversible later, so the integration process itself may not be fundamentally undermined by opt-outs. Equilibrium thus has nothing to say or prove about the integration process itself: no spill-back, no disintegration and thus no system failure. True, there would be no further integration (whether spill-over or forward linkage) for a departing member, but it would not be the end of integration for the others, even if system transformation might now seem a far-off goal. Stopping the bicycle ride for one member state, whether temporarily or permanently, would not mean everyone else falling off the enormous 28-member-ridden bicycle.