Under its umbrella, the European Union covers countries with highly diverse configurations of capitalist political-economic institutions. In the macro-level political economy literature these differences have led scholars to generate a number of hypotheses about the relative gains or losses of individual member countries from important institutional innovations that advance integration, such as the formation of the European Central Bank and a common currency (cf. Hall and Franzese 1998; Iversen 1998). Moreover, individual citizens and labor market participants may perceive costs and benefits differently, contingent upon national wage-bargaining systems or welfare state policies. Domestic political divides between advocates and opponents of EU integration may play out differently and yield contrasting partisan alignments if polities are embedded in different institutional “varieties” of capitalism.

In this chapter, we explore how the diversity of capitalist institutions affects political contestation over EU integration in two respects. First, capitalist institutions affect the proportion of voters in each country who have an incentive to challenge EU integration. In other words, political economy shapes the “grievance level” that may provide the raw material of patterns of domestic contestation. Contingent upon existing national economic institutions, citizens calculate how their benefits (in terms of jobs, income growth, etc.) are likely to be affected collectively for most voters (“sociotropic” calculations). Second, they also may focus on their potential individual benefits and costs that result from changes in the expected economic payoffs induced by the consequences of European integration for national political-economic institutions.

This book grew out of three workshops held at the University of North Carolina Center for European Studies between October 1998 and May 2000 organized by Gary Marks, Marco Steenbergen, David Scott, and Carole J. Wilson. By the late 1990s the notion that the European Union was part of an overarching, multilayered polity was commonplace, as was the conviction that comparative politics provided a powerful set of tools for analyzing that polity. Scholars of social movements, interest groups, political parties, mass publics, legislatures, elites, and bureaucracies were drawn to the study of the European Union both to encompass it within existing theories and to refine those theories.

This is the intellectual background to our project. Our goal was to bring together comparativists who could shed light on the underlying structure of conflict in the European Union and who could relate this to the conflicts that shaped politics within European countries. The project draws on two scholarly traditions: the analysis of cleavages and dimensions of contestation that stems from the work of Stein Rokkan and Seymour Martin Lipset, and the analysis of political conflict in the European Union that originated in the writings of Ernst Haas and Philippe Schmitter.

At the time we were formulating this project we had the sense that we were engaging fundamentally new questions, or combining old questions in novel ways. The dimensionality of European integration and its connection to domestic contestation is indeed a relatively new topic.

Over the past half-century, Europe has experienced the most radical reallocation of authority that has ever taken place in peace-time, yet the ideological conflicts that will emerge from this are only now becoming apparent. This book originated in the efforts of a group of scholars to investigate the patterns of conflict – dimensions of contestation – that have arisen from European integration. The question that motivates us is a broad one: how does European integration play into the domestic politics of the member states? In this volume, we resolve this abstract question into a more precise and empirical one: to what extent and how are the issues arising from European integration connected to the dimensions of contestation that structure domestic politics? Is European integration assimilated within the major lines of conflict, above all the competition between left and right, or is it unrelated?

Rather than divide Europe by country, each of us examines one kind of group – citizens, national political parties, social movements, interest groups, members of the European Parliament, and European political parties – for the EU as a whole. We engage several kinds of data, including Eurobarometer surveys, party manifestos, expert evaluations of party positions, and elite interviews. We cannot claim to be of a single mind, but we do claim that we arrive at broadly consistent answers to our question. The aim of this chapter is to convey their substantive thrust.

By the second week of September 2000, truckers, farmers, and fishermen protesting against high fuel prices had paralyzed the economies and governments of Western Europe – cutting off the fuel supply of businesses and private citizens alike. Linked together through trade unions and engaging in wildcat actions, the protesters made good their threats to raise blockades in a matter of hours, armed with little more than their vehicles and cell-phones.

This round of protests against the high cost of fuel had started several weeks earlier in France, where fishermen barricaded fishing ports and turned away cross-channel ferries. Joined by truckers, farmers, and taxi drivers, they paralyzed refineries and oil depots, brought traffic on the Calais–Paris motorway to a standstill, and barricaded the streets of Marseille with tons of sardines and anchovies.

The fishermen's actions had the desired effect: gaining concessions from the French government in the form of subsidy payments to offset fuel costs. But the government's capitulation, conversely, failed to stem the protests. Emboldened by the success of the fishermen, French truckers seized the initiative, blockading some eighty petrol depots and oil refineries across the country, shutting down the airport in Nice, and closing the channel tunnel, prompting the European Commission to launch an investigation into whether the French government was failing to uphold its obligation under EU rules to facilitate the free flow of goods and services.

As Steenbergen and Marks (Introduction) argue, the definition and substantive content of the political space is crucial for understanding the nature of political competition in the European Union. In the study of industrialized democracies, including the EU member states, scholars often define the policy space in terms of voter preferences over policy (see Gabel and Huber 2000). Since parties and representatives compete before an electorate, the ideological structure of voters' preferences is fundamental to understanding political contestation. Consequently, one common approach to defining the political space is empirically to examine how an electorate structures its policy preferences.

In this chapter, we attempt to describe the EU policy space in the same manner: by examining the structure (or lack thereof) of EU citizens' preferences over EU policy. However, it is important to note that voter preferences do not play exactly the same role in EU politics as in representative democracies. For one, the links between policy-makers and citizens are different in the European Union than in a typical representative democracy. The Council of Ministers – arguably the most important legislative body in the EU – consists of representatives of national governments elected in national, not EU, elections. It is relatively uncommon that national governments fall or lose elections due to their positions taken in the Council of Ministers. As a result, past research has, at least implicitly, dismissed the EU electorate as a salient constituent for these national representatives.

In the course of the 1990s, sociological approaches to the study of international relations have increasingly challenged the dominance of rationalist theories. The debate between “rationalism” and “constructivism” – as the sociological approaches are now usually referred to – constitutes currently the focus of theoretical controversy in International Relations. Since the rationalist theories failed to explain why the EU and NATO should expand to include the CEECs, I turn therefore to sociological institutionalism in an attempt to solve the puzzle of Eastern enlargement.

Constructivist approaches to the study of international relations are more united by their rejection of basic theoretical premises of rationalism than by common positions. The basic divide within the constructivist camp is the epistemological difference between “modernist” and postmodernist constructivism. Modernist constructivism does not, in principle, question the epistemological commitment of rationalism to an empirical and explanatory, causally oriented social science. It should be clear from the purpose of this book, to explain enlargement by confronting competing hypotheses with the empirical evidence, that I take constructivist analysis to be compatible with modernist epistemology.

In the theoretical chapter (chapter 4), I discuss the basic premises of sociological institutionalism in International Relations, describe how sociological institutionalists theorize international organizations and their enlargement, and develop hypotheses. Subsequently, I describe the cultural foundations of the Western international community and probe the ability of sociological institutionalism to explain the Eastern enlargement of NATO and the EU (chapter 5).

In a constructivist perspective, NATO and the EU are community organizations. Consequently, the first step in the sociological institutionalist analysis of their enlargement is to determine the community culture. I claim that NATO and the EU are regional organizations of the Western international community. The members of this community share a liberal political culture – a postnational identity based on liberal norms of domestic and international conduct. Moreover, both NATO and the EU pursue a moderately exclusive strategy of international socialization that entitles outsider states to become full members only on the condition of advanced internalization. The second step in the analysis consists in showing that NATO and the EU decided to admit the (most) successfully socialized CEECs, indeed.

The Western international community

Both NATO and the EU are organizations of the Western international community which is characterized by three core features. It is an interstate, liberal, and postnational community.

The Western international community is an interstate community. States have established and further developed the community organizations through international treaties. Only states can become members, and it is states that decide whether or not an outsider state is admitted. Moreover, the size or power of political entities is not a criterion for membership as long as these entities qualify as states. States with well below one million inhabitants such as Luxembourg are members of the community; substate regions, let alone cities, with well above that population are not.

Rationalist premises

Rationalist approaches to the study of international relations and international institutions share the premises of individualism, state-centrism, materialism, egoism and instrumentalism:

Individualism. Rationalist theories belong to the class of ontologically individualist theories which treat the individual actor (and not social structures) as the “ultimate source of social patterns” (Alexander and Giesen 1987: 13). Rationalist explanations of social interaction and its collective outcomes start with the actors whose identities, interests, and preferences they take as given and fairly stable over time.

State-centrism. IR rationalism differs from the individualist orthodoxy, however, in that it regards the state, a corporate actor, and not the individual, as the central actor in international politics. In a rationalist framework, this is not problematic as long as the corporate actor has a unitary will, a unitary behavior, and a degree of autonomy. These conditions are covered by the state-as-unitary-actor assumption commonly held by rationalist theories in International Relations.

Materialism. Rationalist institutionalism in IR conceptualizes the international environment as an anarchical and technical environment characterized by the absence of hierarchical authority structures and by the predominance of material structures like the distribution of power and wealth. These material conditions are the most important explanatory factors for the processes and outcomes in international relations. The premise of materialism does not exclude that social norms or rules develop in the international system and effectively constrain states. After all, we are dealing with rationalist theories of international institutions.

In this chapter, I expand the analysis of NATO and EU Eastern enlargement in various ways: first, to a third European organization, the Council of Europe; second, to all European countries in the broad definition of the “OSCE region”; third, to the entire period since the foundation of the Western organizations; and fourth, to other enlargement events including the establishment of institutionalized relations between the organization and an outsider state and the withdrawal or exclusion of associated and member states. The rationale of these various extensions is to increase the number and variety of observations implied by the liberal community hypothesis about enlargement and, thereby, to put this hypothesis to a more demanding test than that of EU and NATO Eastern enlargement alone.

The tool for this test is event history analysis, a multivariate statistical analysis especially designed to analyze the conditions under which an event is more or less likely to occur. Before discussing the results of the event history analysis, I will specify the dependent variable “enlargement events,” present some descriptive evidence about their occurrence, and explain the research design.

Enlargement events

To analyze the expansion of West European regional organizations, I developed the Enlargement Database (ENLABASE). ENLABASE contains data on the development of institutional relationships between the European Union, NATO and the CoE, on the one hand, and the (up to) fifty-three countries of the OSCE region, on the other.

In this chapter, I analyze whether it was instrumentally rational for the CEECs to seek membership in NATO and for the NATO members to admit CEECs as full members to their alliance. If all states involved in the decision could expect to reap higher net benefits from the limited first round of enlargement than from other NATO–CEEC relationships, the rationalist explanation would be successful. I will argue, however, that rationalist institutionalism only succeeds in explaining the CEECs' bid to join NATO. It cannot account for NATO's enlargement decisions.

The CEECs and NATO membership

The security approach to enlargement, especially balance-of-threat theory, provides a largely convincing explanation of why the CEECs wanted to join NATO.

Russia was a potential threat to the CEECs. Although the Soviet Union ceased to exist, the Russian Federation has remained by far the most powerful country among the CEECs. It inherited most of the territory, population, and military forces of the Soviet Union and it is the only nuclear-weapon state and “great power” among the post-communist countries. Russia is not only more powerful than each individual CEEC but also poses a potential threat to them. An Eastern European state itself, Russia is located in the geographical proximity of the CEECs, and although Russia's offensive capabilities are not as high as those of the former Soviet Union, they remain considerable.

This part opens the second half of the book. In the first half, I analyzed and explained the outcomes of NATO and EU Eastern enlargement. In this and the following part, the focus will be on the enlargement process that brought about these outcomes. It is the central finding of the outcome analysis that Eastern enlargement is robustly correlated with the spread and consolidation of liberal democracy in the CEECs and that, therefore, it appears to be driven by the liberal values, norms, and collective identity of the Western international community. Here, the main research question will be: how did the community rules affect and produce the Eastern enlargement outcome?

As in the preceding chapters, the analysis will be theoretically informed by rationalist and sociological institutionalism. The theoretical assumptions of both schools lead not only to conditions of enlargement as such but also to hypotheses about the preferences of the actors, their political behavior, and the political process in which individual preferences and actions are transformed into collective outcomes. In chapter 7, I develop four process hypotheses based on different modes of action: habitual, normative, communicative, and rhetorical action. Since sociological institutionalism has so far provided the most convincing explanation of Eastern enlargement, I begin with the standard sociological hypotheses of habitual and normative action.

In chapter 8, I analyze state preferences and the initial decision-making process on Eastern enlargement and examine whether they conform to sociological institutionalist expectations. I will argue that this is not the case.

Modes of action

The process hypotheses – postulating how the decision to expand NATO and the EU came about – draw on different modes of action and posit different conditions that produced the enlargement outcome. I will formulate and examine four such hypotheses: habitual, normative, communicative and rhetorical action. In this section, I classify these hypotheses according to an abstract criterion. In later sections and chapters, they will be explained in greater detail and translated into concrete expectations on NATO and EU enlargement. The criterion I propose for classifying the process hypotheses is the conceptual point at which the community rules are assumed to affect the decision-making process on enlargement. In other words, it is the point in the sequence of social action up to which the process is considered to be determined by individual choices and bargaining power alone.

In abstract terms, the process of social action can be conceived as a sequence of four stages or levels. The first is cognitions, that is, the set of beliefs or ideas actors hold about the world and the actors' ways of thinking and making decisions. The second level is the goals actors set for themselves and seek to attain through their actions. The third is the individual behavior actors choose in light of their goals and cognitions. Finally, two or more individual behaviors form an interaction that brings about a collective outcome. Social rules can become influential at each of these stages or levels.

In this part, I have developed and applied a community approach to enlargement on the basis of sociological institutionalist assumptions. According to this approach, states seek to join and are admitted to regional organizations if they share the identity, values and norms of the international community these organizations represent. NATO and the European Union are European organizations of the Western international community. I therefore hypothesized that they would admit those CEECs which have come to share the liberal identity of the Western community and have internalized its liberal norms of domestic and international conduct.

To evaluate the community approach and the liberal community hypothesis, I have drawn on three kinds of empirical evidence. First, the formal rules of NATO and the EU show that liberal identity, values, and norms are constitutive for the organizations and their enlargement. Second, the official discourse on enlargement demonstrates the organizations' commitment to their community-building mission and the priority of the liberal community rules as criteria for the selection of new members. Third, on the behavioral dimension, the selective establishment of institutional relationships and the opening of accession negotiations with the CEECs seems to be strongly correlated with the degree to which CEECs comply with the community rules and have institutionalized liberal democracy.

On this evidence, the community approach is able to explain why the Western organizations are prepared to admit CEECs in spite of net material costs for their members.

The preferences of the states involved in Eastern enlargement and the initial EC and NATO decision-making process on enlargement strongly contradict the expectations derived from the sociological-institutionalist process hypotheses of habitual and normative action.

(H1 and N1) In the EC case, the CEECs' immediate and general request for membership corresponds to the hypothesis of habitual action but the membership bids of CEEC governments with authoritarian tendencies are not compatible with the hypothesis of normative action. The failure of the sociological-institutionalist process hypotheses is most obvious in the NATO case: even the most reform-minded CEEC governments did not regard joining NATO as a corollary of their democratic identity, values, and norms or as a taken-for-granted response to the post-Cold War challenges. Rather, initially they preferred neutrality or collective security to alliance membership.

(H2 and N2) The enlargement preferences of EU and NATO member states were not uniform. There was strong and persistent divergence with regard to the desirability of (fast) enlargement and the selection of new members both among and within the member states. Whereas a minority of actors may have been motivated by the community values and norms in their preference for a strong commitment to admitting democratic CEECs, the general distribution of preferences cannot be accounted for by collective rules.

(H3 and N3) In the immediate post-Cold War period, lasting roughly from 1989 to 1993, the Western organizations did not offer membership or commit themselves in principle to the admission of liberal-democratic CEECs.

Material self-interest and power differentials shaped the reluctant Eastern enlargement process of NATO and the EU in its early stages. Ultimately, however, community rules and rhetorical action produced the decision of the major Western organizations to expand to Central and Eastern Europe.

Material self-interest in security and welfare goes a long way in explaining the initial preferences of the member and outsider states on the speed and scope of Eastern enlargement. By and large, the distribution of states' preferences mirrored the varying degree of interdependence with the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and interdependence varied mainly with geographical proximity. Member states in the vicinity of Central and Eastern Europe regarded enlargement as an instrument to stabilize their neighborhood and to create favorable conditions for economic exchange. The other member states were more concerned about the effects of enlargement on the efficiency of the organizations and their own membership benefits and generally drew up a negative balance. By contrast, for the CEECs, EU and NATO membership promised to increase their security and welfare. At any rate, the enlargement preferences of the member and candidate states reflected self-interested calculations of individual, “national” utility, not collective identity, values or norms.

The distribution of preferences and bargaining power also accounts for the initial outcomes of the enlargement process: association to NATO through NACC and PfP and association to the EU through the Europe Agreements.