After having discussed the need for ‘normative impulses’ for effective social and political integration in Europe, impulses that can only come about ‘through overlapping projects for a common political culture’, Jürgen Habermas, in the title essay to The Postnational Constellation, immediately reassures his readers that such projects ‘can be constructed in the common historical horizon that the citizens of Europe already find themselves in’. And a moment later he indeed identifies an already existing ‘normative self-understanding of European modernity’. What, though, is this self-understanding of European modernity, and what is its specificity?

Some have objected to Habermas, or to all those who try to identify normative underpinnings for European political integration, that such European self-understanding is either entirely indistinct from the general self-understanding of the West, i.e. a commitment to human rights and liberal democracy, or highly problematic, because it makes overly ‘thick’ presuppositions, which are untenable against the background of European cultural diversity, and risks reviving non-liberal European political traditions. The proposition made in the following attempt to reconstruct the normative self-understanding of European political modernity is different. It suggests, on the one hand, that the general, universalist commitment to liberal democracy is insufficient to understand Western polities. The commitment to political modernity does not lead unequivocally to a certain institutional form of the polity. It is open to interpretation, and the existing polities that share this commitment are indeed based on a variety of such interpretations.

The shape of the new Europe is best appreciated through a particular understanding of the old Europe. My use of these terms does not coincide with Donald Rumsfeld's contrast – designed to divide so as to better control Europe – between the key pioneers of European integration and newer members from Central Europe. Attention focuses instead on the historical sociology of European territory and institutions over the last century. What matters most of all is the national question, for reasons so obvious that they can be stated immediately with both bluntness and force.

The central feature that differentiated the old Europe of a century ago from its contemporary variant was the presence of multinational empires, most notably those of the Habsburgs, Romanovs and Ottomans. These authoritarian regimes were faced with the challenge of modernity, that is, with the complex intertwining of nationalism, democratisation and industrialisation, the precise contours of which we still do not fully understand. None was able to meet this challenge intact; all fragmented into a series of separate nation-states, albeit dissolution in the Russian case was much delayed by the empire being placed under new management at the end of the First World War. The tectonic shift caused by the ending of imperial rule in the European heartland resulted in vicious practices of ethnic cleansing, population transfer and genocide, all carried out in the midst of the fog of world wars. Accordingly, it is entirely appropriate to call twentieth century Europe ‘the dark continent’.

The Eastern enlargement of the European Union (EU) has important implications for our understanding of the meaning of Europe. Although the precise nature of this process is uncertain, the very fact that it is underway is in itself of major significance. Indeed the very term integration may be inadequate when it comes to the current scale of Europeanisation, which consists not of one but several logics and not all of which can be understood in terms of integration. Europeanisation is not leading to a society, a state or a clearly definable geopolitical entity that rests on a cultural foundation, as is often assumed. Moreover, there is not one ‘Europe’, but several. In this respect, what is central is the question of modernity, or modernities and their civilisational forms.

The categories that are used to make sense of Europeanisation tend on the whole to be either descriptive or normative – ‘widening’, ‘deepening’, ‘integration’, ‘convergence’ – and thus fail to appreciate the dynamics of a multi-directional process. There is relatively little theoretical literature exploring the wider significance of the Eastern enlargement, which is generally seen only in terms of intergovernmentalism and of institutional design. The constitutional debate instigated by the Convention on the Future of Europe in February 2002 has, to a degree, opened a wider perspective on the emerging face of a bigger Europe, but the issues at stake go beyond what can be addressed by a constitution.

There is a remarkable contrast between the expectations and demands of those who pushed for European unification immediately after the Second World War, and those who contemplate the continuation of this project today – at the very least, a striking difference in rhetoric and ostensible aim. While the first generation advocates of European integration did not hesitate to speak of the project they had in mind as a ‘United States of Europe’, evoking the example of the USA, current discussion has moved away from the model of a federal state, avoiding even the term ‘federation’. Larry Siedentop's recent book Democracy in Europe expresses a more cautious mood:

Does this shift in climate reflect a sound realism, born of a learning-process of over four decades, or is it rather the sign of a mood of hesitance, if not outright defeatism?

The question of whether and, if so, when to constitutionalise the European Union (EU) entered serious public debate with the speech of Joschka Fischer at Humboldt University in 2000. In virtually all member states, prominent politicians subsequently felt compelled to express their opinion on this issue. Not surprisingly, they came up with very different versions of what such a European constitution should contain. Some wanted it in order to limit any further expansion of the competences of the EU; others wanted it in order to provide the EU with sufficient authority to cope with a wider agenda and a large number of members. But on two things there seemed to be general agreement: (1) the EU could not continue solely on the basis of treaties that have to be revised periodically and ratified by each member state – if only because this had already become much more difficult to do with fifteen members and even more so with twenty-five; and (2) this change in the fundamental institutional basis of European integration should happen sooner rather than later.

I remain convinced that both of these assumptions were (and still are) wrong. The EU does not need a constitution, not only because it has not done badly with a quasi-constitution based on successive treaties, but also because the flexibility provided by the lack of an agreed distribution of competences between it and its member states and, especially, the absence of a common definition of its political end-state (the so-called finalité politique) are precisely what the EU will need in the coming years when it will have to face the dual challenges of governing the effects of monetary unification and coping with the dislocations generated by enlargement.

There is a state of uncertainty, not about the desirability of a European civil society (as Gandhi said of Western civilisation, it sounds like a good idea) but about its reality. I have become, if anything, somewhat more tentative about the claims one can make for the existence of anything one might want to call civil society at a European or European Union (EU) level, as distinct from the several and sometimes overlapping civil societies located in the individual member states of the EU. The existence of a section called ‘civil society’ on an EU website publicising relevant conferences and so forth provides only limited reassurance here. There are of course numerous civil society organisations with a European/EU reference, ranging from the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) to more informal social movements and lobbying organisations representing the interests of consumers, cyclists and others. There is also of course the European Social Forum, emerging in 2002 out of the global social movement, the World Social Forum, and playing an equally prominent if occasional role. The question is whether all this amounts to something we might meaningfully call a European or EU civil society.

Two books have had a particular influence on my thinking. One is Michael Billig's Banal Nationalism, the other is Larry Siedentop's Democracy in Europe. Referring to such everyday examples as national flags outside public buildings, Billig points out the extent to which nation-state categories frame our social experience and our most basic assumptions:

Peace and prosperity in Europe: anyone who remembers the zero hour of 1945 and all that went before it feels grateful every day for these achievements. We also know who and what can take credit for the flourishing landscapes which have replaced trenches and ruins. Above all, it is the people of Europe who have learnt the lesson of history and worked vigorously to create a better world. But then there was also the USA, safeguarding and promoting the new opportunities of the postwar era. NATO and the Marshall Plan are code words for the commitment for which we Europeans are obliged to be eternally grateful. Both the actions of the people and the USA's assistance have now been strengthened and made lasting by the process of European unification, itself one of the remarkable achievements of recent decades.

And yet precisely this process has made headway only falteringly, subject to detours and prone to occasional accidents. Churchill's splendid vision of 1945 fell on ground on which, to be sure, some flowers bloomed but where no-one had the courage – or found the right conditions – to pave the way to this royal road. There has never been political union in Europe. Should there be? This is my question here. If we do not believe in a world spirit – a spirit which was expressed in Churchill's speeches in Strasbourg and Zurich and which, inevitably if not always recognisably, clears the way for a United States of Europe – then we must ask why we should aspire to the ‘ever closer union’ of Europe as set out in the Treaty of Rome which established the European Economic Community (EEC).

In the third millennium, postnationalism looks set to replace nationalism as the dominant political paradigm. The twentieth century witnessed the break-up of the great national empires – British, French, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian – as well as a number of devastating world wars resulting from the internecine rivalries between nation-states. The terminal death-rattles of nationalist belligerence (on the European scene at any rate) sounded on the streets of Belfast where republicans and loyalists fought their last battles before finally reaching peace in 1998, and in the villages of Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo where Balkan ethnicities clashed in genocidal hatred before an international accord was secured. Widening the focus, the events of 11 September 2001 made it dramatically clear that wars of the twenty-first century cannot be confined to specific nation-states, or national empires, but traverse boundaries and borders with disturbing ease. Al-Queda is as postnationalist as the American Way of Life it targets.

In several writings over the last two decades, the German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, argues for what he calls a ‘postnational constellation’ as a response to the current political situation in Europe. Noting the erosion of the territorial sovereignty of nation-states, Habermas expresses the hope that this may open up a new space for: (1) cultural hybridisation; (2) transnational mobility and emigration; (3) cosmopolitan solidarity, predicated on a neo-republican balance between private and civic liberties opposed to the neo-liberal disregard for social justice; and (4) constitutional patriotism (on a federal European scale inspired by principles of coordinated redistribution and egalitarian universalism).

INTRODUCTION

An essential ingredient of politics is winning. What counts in politics is the passing of a bill, the amendment of a proposal, getting a policy accepted, or the enforcement of a decision. However, in general, it is impossible to win by staying alone. In politics, including European politics, it is necessary to form winning coalitions in order to enforce decisions.

Surely, in any political system, individual preferences with respect to a decision-making problem will diverge. Consequently, conflict will be at the heart of politics. However, this does not mean that coalitions are not important. In order to resolve conflict in political decision-making processes, cooperation and hence coalition-formation is essential. Conflict and cooperation are different sides of the same coin. Indeed, even if conflict is so strong that no resolution is possible, coalition-formation is still essential: in the extreme, it is necessary in order to revolutionise the system itself.

Since cooperation is an essential ingredient of politics, coalition-building cannot be neglected in the modelling of political decision-making. A framework that explicitly deals with cooperation and coalitions is cooperative game theory. In this chapter, we will use cooperative game theory to analyse decision-making in European politics.

However, cooperative game theory has a serious drawback: it is mainly geared towards solving games in terms of payoff structures, not in terms of coalitions. For quite some time, political scientists have been aware of this fact (e.g. see Riker 1962).

The aim of this study is to apply and compare different explanations of legislative decision-making in the European Union (EU). Two features of the research design are particularly important with respect to achieving this aim. First, the selection of cases must cover a sufficient number and variety of cases to count as a test of the explanations. Second, a way of thinking about very different decision situations has to be devised, such that they can be compared, in terms of the applicability of different explanations in any given situation, and in terms of the performance of explanations in different situations. Stating explanations in the form of models is part of the endeavour to facilitate comparison. Another part is the conceptualisation of decision situations spatially. Political controversies are conceptualised as issue continua or scales, with actors placed at different positions on these issues. The Commission proposal on tobacco products will be used to illustrate the data collection process. One of the issues raised by this proposal was the size of the health warning on tobacco products: see the second issue described in Figure 2.1. At one end of this issue continuum, we find the status quo position at that time, consisting of relatively small warnings. At the other end of the continuum, we find the alternative of very large health warnings using very strong language. Intermediate alternatives are placed on positions between these two alternatives. This way of defining issues is essential to the comparison of different explanatory models' performance.

INTRODUCTION

The view that institutions are important to decision-making has led to a large number of game-theoretical models that aim to understand and explain the European Union's legislative process. As these models stress the sequential features of the legislative process as well as the differences in decision-making power of the various actors involved, they are referred to as procedural models. Departing from the ‘older’ legislative procedures, such as the consultation procedure (Steunenberg 1994a; Crombez 1996) and the cooperation procedure (Tsebelis 1994; Moser 1997a), this literature has expanded to include the more recently adopted procedures, including the two different versions of the co-decision procedure (Garrett 1995; Crombez 1997, 2000a; 2006; 2000c; Steunenberg 1997). In this chapter, we focus on the procedural models developed for the European Union and test some of these models empirically.

The procedural models of EU decision-making are related to a broader rational choice literature in which political outcomes are regarded as the combined result of political preferences and institutions (Shepsle 1989; Shepsle and Weingast 1995; Ostrom 1986; Dowding 2002). This literature developed as a response to studies, especially focused on the United States Congress, which approached politics as a simple account of majority rule. The main expectation from these studies was that voting cycles might frequently occur, which would make politics chaotic and arbitrary, and make it almost impossible to predict outcomes.

INTRODUCTION

According to the account of European Union (EU) decision-making proposed in this chapter, this is a bargaining process during which actors shift their policy positions with a view to reaching agreements on controversial issues. Formal institutions, such as the procedural rules explored in Chapter 3, matter in this process. They define the set of actors included in the process and their relative weight or power. The observation that actors shift their positions, and cajole or compel others to shift theirs, is central to our conception of political bargaining. Practitioners of European affairs reported that flexibility in actors' initial policy positions is an important feature of the decision-making process. During one interview an informant was asked why the actors were so polarised in terms of the policy alternatives they ‘favoured most’ at the outset of the discussions. He responded: ‘That's not so unusual. At the start of the negotiations, the positions tend to be more extreme. As the discussions get underway, we realise what is politically feasible, and converge gradually toward those points’. In this chapter, we compare two different models of the bargaining process in which actors shift from the policy positions they favour most at the outset of the discussions.

The models we focus on in this chapter are the position exchange model (Stokman and Van Oosten 1994) and the challenge model (in other studies this model is also referred to as ‘the expected utility model’, Bueno de Mesquita 1994).

INTRODUCTION

This book examines how legislation is made in the European Union (EU). Taking decisions in the European Union requires overcoming controversy and disagreement. European decision-makers' ability to resolve controversy has been tested by three developments. First, the number of member states increased from six to 25, with the prospect of further enlargement in the near future. Second, changes to the formal decision-making procedures increased the institutional power of the European Parliament. Third, the European Union expanded its involvement in policy areas from its focus on the internal market and freedom of movement across borders to include economic and monetary union, environmental policy, competition, and social policy among others.

There are numerous recent and high-profile examples of the challenges European decision-makers face in reaching political agreements amid controversy. One such example concerned the question of whether Germany should be given an official warning under the Stability Pact for its excessive budget deficit. Germany was not allowed to vote on the proposal to give such a warning, since the warning was directed against itself. Nonetheless, with the help of the Italian Presidency, it managed to turn unanimous support for the proposed warning into a vote against the proposal. The European Commission opposed this decision, and successfully overturned it in the European Court of Justice. This outcome, and the way it was achieved, challenged the view that important decisions need the support of all member states, even when this is not formally required.