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The narrative of European integration was long dominated by the role of the participating member states, as personified in their respective presidents and prime ministers, in forging an ever-expanding set of institutions and an increasingly dense legal framework. This orthodox view saw nation states at the centre of the process, gradually pooling sovereignty to construct an ever-closer union. Analyses have differed as to the driving forces behind these processes. Debates in the 1990s between advocates of intergovernmentalism and supranationalism as the guiding explanatory frameworks still focused on an apparently self-contained European context, although the role of non-state actors did begin to feature more in the analysis. In contrast, more recent scholarship has contested the way the history of European integration has generally been framed in isolation from wider social, economic and political developments. Repositioning the processes of European integration in a global context requires that Europe as an historical entity be ‘provincialised’.
Just as Rome opened up its Pantheon to gods of every race and put men with black skin on the imperial throne […] Europe should declare itself ready, by virtue of these very roots, to include every other cultural and ethnic contribution, since openness is one of its most distinguished cultural features.’
As in Umberto Eco’s appeal to European cultural inclusivity on the basis of Roman history, Europe’s narrative about its culture(s) is almost as rich as its past. And it is similarly complex and convoluted, with the European Union (EU) appropriating the idea of ‘Europe’ as a unifying signifier that awkwardly balances the EU’s official motto ‘unity in diversity’, as it aims to be representative of the current twenty-seven constituent member states’ cultures. Yet this conceptual framework leaves out, for instance, European countries that are not EU members, as well as tendentiously the non-European ethnic and cultural minorities that have found a home on the continent and have historically contributed to the region’s culture and history.
From the late eighteenth century, Europe started rising to the top of the world. The first industrial revolution in Britain gradually spread over the continent and the first important steps of a second industrial revolution, partly by Germany, were made after the middle of the nineteenth century. By 1870, Europe produced 45 per cent of the world’s total income. Around the turn of the century, however, Europe lost its leading position, and produced only 27 per cent of the world’s total income by 1913. The combined per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of the overseas West (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) was already more than 70 per cent higher than that of western Europe.
On 26 July 2012, Mario Draghi declared in front of a group of about 200 London business people that he would do ‘whatever it takes to save the euro’.1 These seven words have been analysed to have made all the difference.2 By doing so, the European Central Bank (ECB) effectively ended a long period of uncertainty and indecisiveness. The markets needed a strong signal so that they knew that the young European currency would be supported politically and economically.
After summer 2012, the euro area did not experience the same level of crisis, although the sovereign debt crisis was truly resolved only in 2015 and there were still challenging times until then.
In July 1944, delegations from forty-five nations gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods to devise a monetary regime for the post-war world that aimed to replace the currency warfare of the 1930s and to provide a firm basis for the restoration of a multilateral world economy. Between 1971 and 1973, this system fell apart – and during the fruitless attempts at reform, the European Economic Community (EEC) took initial steps to move from the customs union and Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to monetary union. This shift in priorities is usually explained as an internal European process, but this chapter indicates that it needs to be understood within a wider context of the design flaws of the Bretton Woods system, failed reform by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and growing European criticism of the American response.
This chapter presents the relevant integration policy decisions from the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) Conference in Messina (1955) to the Single European Act (SEA) (1987). It will trace the genesis of the Rome Treaties (1955–7), the foundation of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) (1958–60), de Gaulle’s policies (1958–65), the development from the Merger Treaty to the Hague Summit (1965–9), the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and the ‘northern enlargement’ (1973). The question of whether the 1970s were times of ‘Eurosclerosis’ is answered. The path to ‘southern enlargement’, the settlement of the British budget dispute and the departure for reforms follow as further topics, whereby the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) and the European Monetary System (EMS) as well as the SEA are dealt with.
When did the first institutional forms of contemporary European unity emerge? There are essentially two approaches to answering this question. The first is to take the perspective of poets, writers and intellectuals. The second is to consider the projects and achievements of politicians. If we take the first approach, we must refer to all thinkers of European consciousness who imagined European unity, from the Abbé de Saint-Pierre and Victor Hugo to Émile Mayrisch and, more recently, Stefan Zweig. If we take the second, we must focus instead on institutional forms of unity, the ways in which citizens participate in it, and then assess its effects. We must present the most effective agents of unity, and explain their reasons for taking action.
Solidarity is a contested and elusive concept. Nevertheless, it has made a considerable contribution to the shape and character of European Union (EU) integration from pre-European Economic Community (EEC) days to ongoing debates in the Conference on the Future of Europe. Indeed, solidarity has been characterised as ‘both the raison d’être and the objective of the European project’.1 Yet that impact has been achieved despite a less than obvious ‘fit’ between classical notions of solidarity and the complex system that constitutes the EU. Without adopting any essentialist approach to the meaning of solidarity, orthodox expositions emphasise close ties between individuals that involve sharing or redistributing resources, usually carrying connotations of political action and often situated in the social sphere. Put another way, solidarity is frequently understood as an affective condition defending particular values and usually most effective at local levels.
Coinciding with radical regional and global changes, the period 1986–93 is a fascinating time in the history of European integration. The fall of the Berlin Wall (November 1989) opened the prospect of ending the division of the European continent and the bipolar world order, raising fundamental questions for both international and intra-European relations.
The momentous events coincided with a renewed dynamism in European integration.1 In June 1985, the member states of the European Communities (EC) had adopted a Commission White Paper with almost 300 measures required to complete the internal market of goods, services, persons and capital by the end of 1992.2 The Single European Act (SEA), a series of treaty amendments aimed at more democratic and effective policy-making, laid the constitutional groundwork for the realisation of this ambitious plan.
How democratic were the European Communities, and later the European Union (EU), how democratic did they need to be, and what would this mean in the first place? Throughout the course of European integration, none of the answers was self-evident, and all were the stuff of continuous discursive construction, reconstruction and contestation. In this chapter I trace shifts and clashes in collective imaginations of EU democracy since 1950, exploring how what it made sense to say about EU democracy changed over time. I analyse discourses, or ensembles of ideas, concepts, narratives or categories, through which meaning was given to ‘democracy’, for the case of the EU and its institutional predecessors (for the sake of better readability, I sometimes use the label ‘EU’ to refer both to the EU as such and to its institutional predecessors in this chapter).
Studying the relationship between the process of European integration and nuclear energy means coming to grips with two of the central issues of the international system that emerged from the Second World War. Ever since the fateful dropping of two nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one of the key questions of international politics has been whether the power of the atom is compatible with a world of nation states or whether its immense destructiveness needs a radical rethinking of the international system and the creation of some form of supranational framework to manage it. But is the atom really shareable, or – as General de Gaulle supposedly said – le nucléaire ne se partage pas? Such a question is obviously linked to the second issue, namely what can be achieved by the experiment of European integration. How far can it go? How much of their traditional powers are European nation states willing to abandon, and how far are they willing to go in sharing some of their most jealously guarded national secrets and prerogatives? Can Europe truly share the management of nuclear energy, in all its scientific, civilian and military applications? And if so, to what purpose? Is the ultimate goal of European integration the restoration of a Europe puissance or something else?
It is a truism that not all citizens hold the same opinions when it comes to the European Union (EU), European collaboration, integration, the euro and more. That is rather logical. Why would they? The EU today covers a vast range of policy areas and it seems perfectly legitimate to support some initiatives more than others. Some citizens might be satisfied with how the EU operates, but do not feel that they reap the (economic) benefits, or vice versa.
In general terms, the past decades have seen a significant rise of Euroscepticism across many EU member countries. At the same time, support for pro-EU parties has also increased. This may seem contradictory, but it could also be a hint that EU attitudes can be mixed, ambivalent or multidimensional. We currently do not have a very good overview of how different dimensions of attitudes to the EU have developed over time. Most research was constrained to very limited indicators of public support in most public opinion surveys.
The cities in the title of this contribution were the locations of summits at which European Community (EC)/European Union (EU) leaders made historic decisions that shaped the future of the European project. At three of those summits – Maastricht in December 1991, Amsterdam in June 1997 and Nice in December 2000 – leaders agreed on changes to the founding treaties on which the EC and the EU are based. Of the three treaty changes, which subsequently bore the names of the cities themselves, Maastricht was by far the most consequential, not only because it ushered in the EU but also because of its provisions for Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and cooperation on Justice and Home Affairs.