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The Limits of European IntegrationJuan Díez Medrano aa Department of Economic History and Institutions, UniversidadCarlos III de Madrid, Spain

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To cite this article: Juan Díez Medrano (2012): The Limits of European Integration, Journal ofEuropean Integration, 34:2, 191-204

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CONCLUSION

The Limits of European Integration

JUAN DIEZ MEDRANO

Department of Economic History and Institutions, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid,Spain

ABSTRACT This article summarizes the special issue’s main findings and analyticalcontributions, challenges some of the arguments, and suggests ways of pushing theresearch agenda forward. The contributions to this special issue emphasize the pene-tration of European institutions by actors set on slowing down or reversing the pro-cess of European integration and the growing weight of Eurosceptic views in thepublic sphere. In general, however, they express optimism as to the European Unioninstitutions’ ability to contain this dissent. At the same time, two of the articles exam-ine the role of contrasting visions of European integration in the explanation of theEuropean Union’s current financial and economic crisis. They emphasize Germany’schange of heart with respect to the meaning and goals of European integration. Thisconclusion claims that diversity of visions on European integration matters becausemost states and their citizens are reluctant to further transfers of competences andsovereignty. Agreement has thus become more difficult. Furthermore, it argues thatwhile Germany’s discourse on European integration has become more assertive, it isdifficult to ascertain whether this change reveals an overall change of heart or simplyresults from the specific nature of the problems that are the subject of political debate.

KEY WORDS: European Union, Germany, United Kingdom, France, institutions,visions of European integration

In August 2011, the Spanish government took the unprecedented step ofcalling for an urgent amendment to the Constitution that from then onwould commit the central and regional administrations to budgetary sta-bility. This amendment, approved in record time barely a month later,was only the second amendment ever to the Constitution approved in1978.1 The socialist government’s rush to pass the amendment throughCongress, despite hefty opposition from within the party and from regio-nal and leftist political parties and social organizations, testified to theseverity of the financial crisis that was affecting Spain and the European

Correspondence Address: Juan Dıez Medrano, Departamento de Historia Economica eInstituciones, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, c/Madrid 126, 28903 Madrid, Spain.E-mail: jdiezmedra@hotmail.com

European IntegrationVol. 34, No. 2, 191–204, February 2012

ISSN 0703–6337 Print/ISSN 1477–2280 Online/12/020191-14 � 2012 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07036337.2012.641091

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Union. So did the fact that the main opposition party, the conservativePartido Popular, unanimously backed the ruling party’s proposal.Although the term crisis has been used all too often during the Euro-

pean Union’s 50-year history, there is no more fitting word for the Euroz-one’s 2011 financial and debt predicament. Its timing could not have beenworse for it caps two decades of progress toward integration, punctuated,however, by repeated popular dissent (e.g., ‘No’ votes in referenda) andby division and indecision among the governments of the European Unionmember states on key reforms or policies. The cause and consequence ofthis rocky road toward European integration has been the erosion of pub-lic support for the European Union. Although in 2010 about half the citi-zens still thought that membership in the European Union is a good thing,many who in the past claimed not to know enough to say what they thinkof their country’s membership, have gradually come to enlarge the groupsof those who think that membership is neither a good nor a bad thing orwho say that membership is a bad thing. For some (see Marks and Hoo-ghe 2009) this trend expresses the transition from permissive consensus toconstraining dissensus. For others, it reflects something more subtle, whichis that the more people have learned about the European Union, the moreconfused they have become about the pros and cons of integration (VanIngelgom 2009).One of the most worrying aspects of the decline in public support for

the European Union is that it is especially noticeable among its top threeleading member states, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. InFrance, ‘Euroscepticism’ has diffused at a spectacular pace, with the per-centage of citizens who think that membership in the European Union is agood thing declining almost monotonically since the late 1980s; percent-ages around 50%, only observed in the late 1970s, have been the norm inthis country for most of the 1990s and 2000s and ‘net support’ (i.e., thepercentage of those who think membership is a good thing minus the per-centage of those who think membership is a bad thing), at about 20%,has never been as low as during the 1990s and 2000s. In fact, in 2010France is one of the countries in the European Union with the lowest lev-els of net support. In Germany, citizen support has fluctuated morewidely. In the second half of the 1990s it reached its lowest levels. Itrecovered afterwards but then sunk again since the onset of the economicand financial crisis in 2008. Finally, public opinion data sustain the UnitedKingdom’s image as the ‘reluctant’ European. Far from increasing, supportfor membership has not ceased to shrink since the 1990s: the percentagesof those who think that membership in the European Union is a goodthing declined almost uninterruptedly while the percentages of those whothink that it is a bad thing or neither good nor a bad thing increasedmonotonically. In 2010, the United Kingdom was the only EuropeanUnion country where ‘net support’ was actually negative! Support forEuropean integration in the European Union’s leading countries is thus atrecord low levels and, with the exception of Poland, only small countriessustain the flame of European integration.

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The paragraphs above contextualize the contributions to this specialissue. For these contributions’ main topics are ‘Euroscepticism’ in itsbroadest possible meaning and the European Union’s repeateddisagreements on further steps to integration and on solutions to the chal-lenges it periodically confronts. Rather than focus on citizens, however, asI have done above, the articles focus mainly on political elites at both theEuropean and national levels of governance. Through survey methods,qualitative interviews, participant observation, content-analysis of pressdocuments, and secondary sources, they provide us with an unusually richand broad description of the diverse set of visions prevalent in the Euro-pean Union concerning the functioning of its institutions and the futurecourse of European integration. In addition, some of the articles nicelyillustrate the relevance of institutional arrangements in empowering or dis-empowering specific actors. Finally, the articles provide us with insightfulexplanations for the cacophony that characterizes the European Union’sresponse to the 2011 economic and financial crisis.One message conveyed in this special issue, more obvious in some arti-

cles (e.g., Schmidt, Dehousse, and Thompson) than in others, is that thediversity of often irreconcilable views on the future of Europe that onefinds at both the European Union level and in the European Union mem-ber states partly explains the less than smooth path to integration of thelast two decades and the often exasperating slowness with which the Euro-pean Union has addressed major crises. The rich descriptive informationthat Leconte and Brack provide suggests that anti-Europeanism is not themain culprit. Indeed, the low prevalence of extreme anti-European viewsat all levels of government and procedural rules in key legislative institu-tions such as the Council, the European Council, and the European Parlia-ment have turned these views into little more than a minor and occasionalnuisance (in some cases, as Brack shows, Eurosceptic voices can even beconstructive). Meanwhile, other contributions suggest that, in the currentcontext of deep conflicting views on key integration issues, a gradual shiftin the balance of power between the European Union institutions (to theCommission’s detriment) coupled with Germany’s growing assertivenessand self-interested approach, have limited the European Union’s capacityto reach consensus on solutions to problems such as the 2011 financialand debt crisis.The article by Dehousse and Thompson shows that only 8% of

Commission higher-level officials are in favor of granting the Councilthe leading role in European Union affairs. This smallish group, whichthey call intergovernmentalists, distinguishes itself from the rest of offi-cials mainly in being more frequently opposed to the transfer of foreignand social policy competences to the European Union. Since the Coun-cil does not necessarily have to be an intergovernmentalist institution,provided majority decision-making prevails, it would be more accurateto use the label free traders to describe this group. The authors searchfor the explanation for these views in nationality, national civil servicestatus, and dominant religion among other variables. A conservativereading of the empirical associations, which avoids causal statements

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where causal primacy is questionable and causal mechanisms are miss-ing, is that nationality matters most and that free traders tend to beBritish.The EPs that Nathalie Brack calls Eurosceptic probably share many

characteristics with the Commission’s free traders, if at all, because theyalso tend to be a minority, British, and set against a political Europe.Brack goes a little further than Dehousse and Thompson, however, in dis-tinguishing sub-groups within this broad category. Thus, one is confrontedwith public orators, principled opponents to their country’s membershipin the European Union and set on discrediting and boycotting the processof European integration. Then, one finds absentees, who avoid anyinvolvement in parliamentary functions and limit their role to informingtheir local constituencies about laws and policies that undermine nationalsovereignty. This group includes both anti-membership and intergovern-mentalist individuals. Finally, Brack finds a third group, pragmatists, whoget involved in European Parliament affairs in a relatively constructiveway, so as to correct some of the deficits they see in the process of Euro-pean unification. Inefficiency, corruption, lack of both accountability anddemocracy, and loss of sovereignty, are the main issues that help articulatethis group’s views on Europe.In her study of the Council’s Presidency, Cecile Leconte shows that Euro-

sceptics have also attained leadership positions in European Union memberstates and she confirms that they are a heterogeneous group. Her story differ-entiates between strong Eurosceptics, like Vaclac Klaus’s wing of the ODCin the Czech Republic or Bossi’s Lega Norte, contrary to any form of politi-cal union at the European level, and soft Eurosceptics, mainly conservative,nationalist, or simply parochial politicians like Topolanek, Berlusconi, orOrban, fearful that their national political agenda may be compromised byliberal and multicultural supranational decisions, but also mildly protection-ist (e.g., France’s UMD). Although some among them are critical of the Euro-pean Union for its regulatory proclivity (Berlusconi, Klaus, Topolanek,Orban), others criticize the lack of regulation of institutions like the ECB(e.g., France’s UMD). Probably it would be fit to label the strong and softEurosceptics as free traders and intergovernmentalists, with their main wor-ries being political union and loss of sovereignty respectively.What we get from the articles referred to above is a cross-sectional view

of diversity in European Union institutions, which stresses shades ofEuroscepticism. By and large, it overlaps with my distinction between amajority dual supranational– intergovernmentalist and a minority inter-governmentalist visions (see Dıez Medrano in Katzenstein and Checkel2008), with the former open to political integration and the latter almostexclusively oriented to free trade. Implicit in the contributors’ discussionsis the idea that Eurosceptics are a growing force in European Union poli-tics. Although the contributors to this volume do not provide quantitativeevidence on trends, the number of Eurosceptic EPs has certainly increasedover the years. It is unclear what has happened in the other institutions,and the contributors to this volume do not enlighten us on this issue. Atthe Council level, for instance, while the number of Eurosceptic parties

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and political leaders has increased, this increase has run parallel to amajor expansion in the number of countries in the European Union.Broad consensus on further transfer of competences to the European

Union (especially if related to the functioning of the internal market) anda small proportion of intergovernmentalists mean that the Commissionwill remain a force for integration. The effectiveness of this groupdepends, however, on the views of those at the helm. Indeed, as Dehousseand Thompson show, the majority of Commission officers believe that theBarroso years have undermined the leading role of the Commission.Whether the Commission loses or regains a leadership role will thusdepend to a large extent on who succeeds Barroso and, indirectly, on thepolitics that lead to the choice of one or another President of the Commis-sion. The numerical weakness of different shades of Eurosceptic groups inthe European Parliament and at the Council lead to a similar prognosis:these institutions will not easily give up the integration project. Brack’sarticle helps sustain this prediction, by showing that institutional featuresof both the European Parliament and the Council’s Presidency help bufferthe impact of minority views. Brack tells us that the European Parliamenthas developed debate rules that limit the time available to ‘public orators’to criticize the European Union and sanction disruptive behavior. Mean-while, Leconte convincingly argues that the Council’s Presidency has lostautonomy to drive the agenda and therefore to promote the interests ofthose occupying it. Greater duration of the Presidency, multi-year pro-grams, and a more complex management organization have turned theCouncil’s Presidency into a much more collegiate institution.Euroscepticism would thus need to be far more widespread among

national elites to really have an immediate impact on the workings ofEuropean Union institutions. It is possible, however, that the Euroscepticpresence in these institutions and the fact that they remain able to voicetheir views, help delegitimize the European Union among the citizens andthus indirectly contribute to stall the integration process. This calls per-haps for prudence and responsibility among intellectuals, academics, andother public opinion leaders when they describe all discrepant views asEurosceptic. There are few political actors and groups that in fact identifythemselves as Eurosceptic. Why then attach the label to people like Berlus-coni or Gaullist members of the UMD, as Leconte does, or to any politi-cian and political group that opposes a view held by the majority of themember states in the European Union and to those who oppose furthertransfers of sovereignty, as we often see in the public sphere? Why is the2005 French ‘No’ vote treated by many as a vote against Europe? Lump-ing all these diverse views and behaviors as ‘Eurosceptic’ not only pro-motes the mistaken impression that there is only one legitimate Europeanintegration project; it also conveys that the Eurosceptic camp is much lar-ger than it is in fact, which risks increasing the level of rejection of theEuropean Union among the public.Schmidt’s article offers a less political, more abstract, classification of

visions of European integration, drawn mainly from content analysis ofdiscourse in the public sphere, and which applies not only to European

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Union officials but to political elites in general instead. As in the otherarticles, Schmidt’s main descriptive achievement is to elegantly convey thediversity of views on European integration and the European Union. Shedistinguishes between a pragmatist and a normative vision of Europeanintegration and then adds two compatible visions of the European Unionas foreign relations actor: one centered on the European Union’s use ofthe conditionality principle to spread democracy and human rights, theother centered on the European Union’s pioneering of a form of interna-tional politics that privileges multilateralism, humanitarian and peace-keeping functions. Schmidt gets more mileage from the first set of visions,for they help her illustrate and argue for the limited path-dependency ofdiscourse and allow her to make sense of the current European Unionstalemate in addressing the debt crisis. Her analysis focuses on Britain,France, and Germany, although other states also feature in thedescription.Britain is described as pragmatist, that is, as evaluating the European

Union in terms of national interest and of how much it contributes to pro-mote free trade and security (although national identity can lead to slightlydifferent national priorities). France and Germany are described as holdinga normative vision of European integration, where the European Unionand the attainment of European solidarity and cohesiveness are treated asvalues in themselves. Lest one views pragmatists as ‘selfish’ and normativ-ists as ‘generous’, it is perhaps more realistic to reformulate Schmidt’s dis-tinction and say that we are in fact dealing with two understandings ofthe potential contribution of the European Union to the national interest,with only the second one assuming that the national interest is best servedthrough the creation of a highly integrated and internally cohesiveEuropean Union. One would thus expect the former to be more opposedthan the latter to European integration policies and institutions that implya transfer of sovereignty and competences to the European Union and, onthe other hand, to be more resolute when it comes to admission of newstates. Empirically, this results in a strong overlap between the groups ofpragmatists, free traders, and intergovernmentalists and a high degree ofoverlap between normatively oriented states and supporters of the Com-munity method, of a political Europe, and of a supranational Europe. Thestate that best conforms to the first prediction is, obviously, Britainwhereas Spain would best conform to the second one.Schmidt’s article connects most directly the two general topics that

inspire and provide unity to this volume: the European Union’s growingdiversity of views and projects and its inability to act in a concerted fash-ion to confront major challenges. The implicit thesis in some of the arti-cles is that the integration process has become more difficult because of agreater diversity of views, including Eurosceptic ones, and the shift in thebalance of power between institutions, to the detriment of the Commis-sion. In turn both the diversity of visions of integration and the disempow-erment of the Commission are seen as partly related to the EuropeanUnion’s larger size. Once one looks away from the competences that fallunder the European Union’s first pillar, the need for unanimity or large

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qualified majorities to adopt decisions in foreign affairs and security andin justice and home affairs makes it easy for any country to slow down ordisrupt the process of integration. This explains why, in the last 20 years,small countries like Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands, Austria, and theCzech Republic have succeeded in creating as many problems as havelarge countries like the United Kingdom, France, or Poland. The lack of aunified stance on how to move forward, the constant revisions to previ-ously agreed treaty reforms in order to accommodate different countries’demands, not only slow down the process of European integration; theyalso lead to popular disaffection.Schmidt is probably on target when focusing on Britain, France, and

Germany as the states whose similarity or difference of visions of integra-tion best explains the hesitant pace and the characteristics of Europeanintegration in the last 20 years. The shift of institutional power from theCommission to the Council and the downgrading of the Council’s presi-dency, as described by Leconte, have certainly strengthened the role oflarge and powerful states within the European Union. One can in factspeculate that one reason why small countries have proven capable of dis-rupting plans for European integration is that the United Kingdom wasnever strongly behind those plans.The comparison between Britain, France, and Germany offers Schmidt

an opportunity to argue against strong path-dependency in discourseabout European integration. She sees Germany as the main obstacle to aconcerted approach to the current debt crisis, because of how it draggedits feet with respect to the rescue packages for Greece, its reluctance to aEuropean Union level economic government, and its opposition to theinstitutionalization of Eurobonds. Schmidt sees in this behavior and inGermany’s abstention at the UN’s Security Council during the vote on the2011 resolution to militarily intervene in Libya clear evidence of a shift inGermany’s vision of European integration, from a strictly normative oneto one that also includes a strand of self- interested pragmatism.Persuasive as they are, the arguments developed in this special issue

could be perhaps complemented by an interpretation that focuses less ondiversity than on commonality and that looks at the 2011 crisis in thecontext of the various ‘crises’ that the European Union confronted sincethe drafting of the Maastricht Treaty. The commonality that one shouldstress is the widespread lack of support for further transfers of sovereigntyamong European Union member states. A correct interpretation of the ser-ies of crises in the past two decades and of the lack of a quicker responseto the current debt crisis may also require a more nuanced assessment ofthe role of Germany in the crisis.While it has often been noted that the European Union is a moving tar-

get, the full implications of this are often forgotten in explanations of thesuccession of ‘crises’ since Denmark’s Maastricht referendum. In 1968 asix-member state customs union, in 1993 a single market and an institu-tional design comprising three pillars, two of them political, in 2001 amonetary union restricted to a subset of countries, in 2007 a 27-memberstates complex set of economic and political institutions, Europe has uni-

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fied to an unimaginable extent and in a very short time. Thus, a crisis likethe ‘empty Chair’ in 1966 cannot be interpreted in the same way as the‘No’ vote on the European Union constitution, simply because what wasput to a referendum in 2005 would have been unthinkable in De Gaulle’s1966 France. The European Union undergoes an increasing number of cri-ses because a great deal of integration has already taken place and neitherthe population nor the states’ leaders support a fully supranationalEuropean Union. With Maastricht, European unification reached the limitsof competence- and sovereignty-sharing that all members had no problemsto accept. Since then each new proposal for further integration has riskedcrossing a line that one or various members do not want to cross. In thisrespect, it is useful to remember that when probed by interviewers, citi-zens, largely ignorant of the difference between transfers of competencesand transfers of sovereignty, reveal a strong resistance to supranationalgovernance (see Dıez Medrano 2003). Content-analysis of discourse in thenational public spheres of France, Germany, the United Kingdom, andPoland, also shows that German, French, and Polish political elites sup-port a dual intergovernmental–supranational integration project, whereasBritish political elites support an intergovernmental one (Dıez Medrano2008).No European Union member state has seriously and consistently sup-

ported the creation of a United States of Europe since Maastricht. Compe-tences that neither the population nor the elites of all countries want totransfer, such as welfare state policies, create no problems, simply becausenobody with power proposes to transfer them to the European Union. Thesame happens with foreign and security policy: citizens would favor acommon foreign policy and a European army, but political elites haveuntil now maintained the largely intergovernmental character of the sec-ond pillar as well as independent and sovereign armies.The trouble with communitywide low support for further transfers of

competences and sovereignty is that, at the current stage of integration, ithas become increasingly difficult to reach consensus whenever a state orcoalition of states proposes a specific reform that implies either a newtransfer of competences or some additional pooling of sovereignty. Areview of the political issues that have slowed down integration in the pasttwenty years indeed reveals that the only thing they share in common isthat one or more states (the governments or the population, or both)opposed the integration proposals put before them. Aside from this lowestcommon denominator, there is no relation whatsoever between the factorsthat led the Irish to vote ‘No’ on the Nice and Lisbon treaties referendaand the factors that lead the Dutch against the Lisbon Treaty or the rea-sons why Germany dragged its feet on the rescue plan for Greece, to namejust some examples. In a nutshell, if there is more and more disagreementon how to proceed toward European integration it is precisely because theEuropean Union has become bigger and achieved a great deal of integra-tion. Of course, this growing but expected lack of consensus becomesmagnified by political actors and the media when they frame it as ‘crisis’rather than as normal disagreements in a democratic and decentralized

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polity. Citizens then get the impression that European Union members arealways squabbling, thus unable to govern, and this in turn contributes tofurther erode support for the European Union and provides ammunitionto Eurosceptic voices. The economic problems faced by the EuropeanUnion since the early 1990s (e.g., general economic downturn in the firsthalf of the 1990s and slow growth since, Germany’s economic problemsin the early 2000s, the financial and economic meltdown since the 1980s)have further eroded the population’s faith in national and European gov-erning institutions. To grasp this it simply suffices to superimpose linesrepresenting economic growth and citizen support for the EU on a graph(see Figure 1). The information for both GDP growth and support refersto the European Union’s membership size on the year of the estimation.Also, the data in Figure 1 represent GDP growth three-year mean averagesshifted two years forward from the year to which they refer to, in order toreflect the assumption that the public does not instantaneously react tochanges in economic performance. The correlation coefficient representingthe overlap between the two trend lines is 0.43. One can also see thatsince the 1990s, net support has been more sensitive to economic slow-down than to economic recovery. In sum, citizen loss of confidence inpolitical institutions, including the EU, and elite reluctance to furthertransfers of competences and sovereignty beyond what has been achievedso far probably go a long way toward explaining the turbulent last twodecades in the history of the European Union.In this process, the three most powerful states in the European Union —

France, Germany, and the United Kingdom — have played a major role.Throughout, the United Kingdom has displayed little taste for more inte-

Figure 1. Real GDP growth and net support for the EU

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gration, beyond the institutionalization of an intergovernmental frame forsecurity and defense through the 1993 Treaty of European Union. Blair’sprofessed sympathy for the European Union did not mean greater supportfor supranational governance (except for the signing of the Social Charter)and public opposition to European integration let him very little maneu-vering space. Here and there, Blair, Brown, and recently Cameron, havecertainly engaged with other European Union states to achieve somethingcollectively and have even led the process (e.g., Blair’s pro-European offi-cial speeches, Brown’s leadership on the wake of the 2008 financial crisis,Cameron’s backing of a common response to the Libyan crisis). Thisbehavior is perfectly consistent, however, with the pragmatic vision of theEuropean Union prevailing in British discourse on Europe and with theUnited Kingdom’s principled opposition to a supranational project. Coop-eration, yes; union, no. In this sense, more evidence is needed to sustainSchmidt’s perception of a changed discursive vision of Europe in Britain,one which would now assign Britain a leadership role.France, as Schmidt also points out, has remained wedded to a normative

vision of Europe. This normative vision, which sees the European Unionas a good in itself, is for the most part intergovernmental (l’Europe desPatries), however, and when supranational, Presidentialist (in the sense ofbeing focused on the strengthening of the Council and the EuropeanCouncil) (see Dıez Medrano 2008). Fearful of its diminished role onceGermany re-unified, France pushed for monetary unification, but mainlyto regain some measure of sovereignty by getting some control over mone-tary policy. In the end, France was only half-successful at this, for it wasnot able to subordinate the European Central Bank to a Euro-area eco-nomic government and thus stir the Bank’s policies away from Germany’smonetary orthodoxy. Apart from monetary union, on most other impor-tant integration issues France has been less of a leading force. It draggedits feet on the enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe, behaved inco-herently with respect to the admission of Turkey (first advocating it in anill-disguised attempt to slow down enlargement negotiations, then oppos-ing it), positioned itself defensively on the movement of service workersthrough the European Union (e.g., Bolkenstein Directive) and on the freemovement of workers in general (i.e., Sarkozy’s expulsion of Roma peo-ple), and, as Schmidt demonstrates, acted in a passive and unpreparedway with respect to the Treaty for the Constitution of Europe. The recentfinancial crisis, however, has offered the French government a novelopportunity to renew its push for an institution that reduce the ECB’sindependence and thus potentially increase the leverage that France exertson economic and monetary policy: a Eurozone European Council presidedby the President of the European Union.2

Schmidt, like many non-German commentators, blames Germany forthe European Union’s slow and perhaps inadequate reaction to the 2011financial and debt crisis in the European Union. Schmidt goes farther,however, and argues that this reflects a change in Germany’s discursivevision of Europe, one that is now driven by a great deal of pragmatismand self-interest. There are different angles from which one can evaluate

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these statements. The issue of what is the best European response to thedebt crisis, for instance, has no agreed upon answer. One cannot thusblame Germany for legitimately advocating individual state responsibilityand balanced budgets. What is beyond doubt, however, is that Germanyresisted rescuing Greece and other troubled EMU states and has consis-tently opposed further European integration in the shape of the ECB’slegal capacity to issue Eurobonds. This opposition to what has beenlabeled a ‘transfer union’ in the German public sphere could be seen asviolating, at least on the surface, the normative vision of European inte-gration that most scholars and commentators would agree had until nowcharacterized Germany’s approach to the European Union. Indeed, avision of the European integration process predicated on the normativevalue of a European community (existent or in-process) requires a demon-stration of solidarity between its member states. Further support forSchmidt’s claim that Germany’s discourse on European integration haschanged is the growing tendency for this discourse to be framed in termsof national interest. This change of frame has not been lost to Germanpublic commentators and politicians alike, who have reflexively discussedthe issue and developed explanations for the changeOne question that is difficult to answer is whether the pragmatist turn

in German discourse on Europe reflects the specific character of the inte-gration issues being debated or a genuine change in Germany’s approachto European integration. In the last 20-something years, Germany has bro-ken ranks with France and Britain on few important issues: the early rec-ognition of Croatia and Slovenia (in 1991, against the wishes of France),the governance of the Euro (disagreement with France), the Libyan warcoalition, and the reaction to the Eurozone’s debt crisis. Of all theseinstances, the recognition of Croatia and Slovenia is the most blatant caseof Germany’s assertion of independence and national interest, and it hap-pened very soon after German re-unification. In the other cases, one couldargue that Germany has displayed a mixture of newly found assertivenessand behavior that is consistent with core German policies. The Libya pol-icy, for instance, is perfectly consistent with the Iraq policy (even thoughat the time Angela Merkel accused Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of alack of solidarity with the United States). It reflects a strong reluctance inGermany to enter into military missions abroad (with Afghanistan the oneand controversial exception). Also, German monetary policy has been con-sistent over the years and rests on firm convictions about the primacy ofprice stability over other macroeconomic concerns, and, one could argue,about the moral value of ‘thrift’ in German society. In pre-German re-uni-fication years, Germany never pressed for a common European currencyand then it only agreed to it in order to obtain France’s blessing for there-unification of Western and Eastern Germany after the fall of the BerlinWall. In the following years, against a backdrop of public opposition tothe Euro, German political elites and the media were split on EMU, andthe German government made German support conditional on the rest ofthe EU members’ acceptance of the stability pact. Neither the Bundesbanknor the German government or the leading German media were happy

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about the adoption of the Euro by the EU’s Mediterranean countries (seeDıez Medrano 2003). The consistency of Germany’s position on monetaryunification and Euro-governance over the years thus makes it difficult tobelieve that Germany would have behaved differently on this issue at someother stages in the European integration process. In sum, the discursiveshift in German discourse reflects to a great extent the specific character ofthe topics that have been on the negotiating table in the past decades. Sec-ondarily, however, the recognition of Croatia and Slovenia and publicstatements and debates on Germany’s return to ‘normalcy’ suggest that re-unification, the key goal around which much of Germany’s postwar for-eign policy was articulated, may also have contributed to the discursiveturn that Schmidt discusses.The paragraphs above suggest that traditional European integration

visions in the European Union’s leading states and the specific integrationissues that were debated in the 1990s and 2000s aligned the United King-dom, France, and Germany on a cautious and even defensive course onEuropean integration. One can speculate that this reluctant attitudeinspired some of the steps undertaken in the last two decades toward dis-possessing the European Commission of its central position among Euro-pean Union institutions and to diminish the powers vested in the Council’sPresidency. The United Kingdom, France, and Germany could in this waybetter secure the defense of their national interests in a 27 member statesEuropean Union. The main problem that the European Union currentlyfaces is that to the general lack of ambition on the part of its leadingstates, one must add a lack of consensus between the three, and especiallybetween the two Eurozone members, Germany and France, as to how toaddress the debt crisis. It is less a problem of contrasting visions aboutEuropean integration as one of clashing national interests combined withcontrasting beliefs concerning the outcomes of different economic andmonetary policies.The articles in this volume do not claim to propose new theories or ana-

lytical approaches to the study of the European Union and its institutions.They situate themselves squarely in the institutionalist camp and simplytry to empirically illustrate the role of institutions in empowering or dis-empowering certain actors. For instance The Commission officials inter-viewed by Dehousse and Thompson provide accounts of power shifts orpolicy developments in the European Union in which institutional changeplays a fundamental role. Similarly, Brack claims that new proceduralrules at the European Parliament make it more difficult for Eurosceptics tomonopolize public debate. In general, all these articles provide a taste ofwhat systematic empirical enquiry could contribute to the analysis of theimpact of institutions on European Union political developments.A second analytical contribution in this volume is the insight that

although there is some path-dependence in national discourse about theEuropean Union and European integration, there is room for deviationsfrom this path, as Schmidt illustrates when discussing the British and Ger-man views. Schmidt suggests historical turning points (e.g., German re-unification; a major crisis) as propitiating these changes. What she does

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not do, however, is explain the specific content of national discourses thatdeviate from the path. I would argue that intense transnational interactionbetween political, media, and intellectual actors in the European Unionpublic sphere leads to a broadening of the repertoire of appropriatenational discourse to encompass legitimate discourse in other EU memberstates. This is what makes it possible for a British Premier to switch to aGerman-type discourse, if the national interest calls for it, or for a Germanpolitician to use British discourse. Thus, it was odd but not entirelyextravagant to hear Zapatero use the talk of ‘national champions’ whenopposing Eon’s attempt to take-over the Spanish company ENDESA in themid-2000s. It was odd because ‘national’ talk was not part of typicalSpanish leftist discourse on European affairs but it did not sound extrava-gant because one had heard it being frequently used by French politicalleaders. Thus, as the European Union ‘ages’ and grows in membership,national discursive repertoires will merge into a highly flexible Europeandiscursive repertoire, which increases the states’ margin for politicalmaneuvering and also the diversity of visions being articulated in the pub-lic sphere. More generally, it would be interesting to shift from an institu-tionalist to a network perspective in order to see how the degree andcharacter of exchange and interaction between European Union memberstates shapes discourse and its dynamics.The word ‘cacophony’ is frequently used when describing the politics of

European integration. The articles in this volume suggest that this cacoph-ony can be simplified into a narrow set of discourses, rooted in nationalculture, and that this narrow diversity may in fact free national discoursefrom the constraints imposed by previous pronouncements. At the sametime, they express an institutionalist-based optimism on the EuropeanUnion’s capacity to contain Eurosceptic forces. As the 2011 debt crisisillustrates, however, neither the emancipation of discourse on Europeanintegration from the national straightjacket, nor institutional bricolage,will favor the cause of European unity unless all member states share in avision of Europe founded in equal parts on individual responsibility andsolidarity.

AcknowledgementsThis article has been written with support from the Fundacion Rafael del Pino.

Notes

1. The first one dates back to 1992 and refers to the right of non-Spanish European Union citizens to

vote in municipal elections.

2. The fact that France and Germany have jointly made this proposal says actually little about howthe two countries imagine the prerogatives of this restricted European Council. It is indeed unlikely

that Germany would agree in granting supervisory functions over the ECB to the new institution.

References

Dıez Medrano, J. 2008. The public sphere and the European Union’s political identity. In Europeanidentity, eds. J.T. Checkel and P.J. Katzenstein, 81–111. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dıez Medrano, J. 2003. Framing Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Marks, G., and L. Hooghe. 2009. A postfunctionalist theory of European integration: from permissive

consensus to constraining dissensus. British Journal of Political Science 39, no. 1: 1–23.

Van Ingelgom, V. 2009. Integrer l’Indifference: Une approche comparative, qualitative et quantitative,de la legitimite de l’integration europeenne. Unpublished doctoral dissertation defended jointly at

Science Po and l’Universite de Louvain-la-Neuve.

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