The future of European integration studies: Social science or social theory?

Millenium

Volumn 28, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 371-391

  Moravcsik, Andrew ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0042344460     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/03058298990280020301     Document Type: Article

References (48)

1. Andrew Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
2. For contending views of de Gaulle, see Andrew Moravcsik, 'Grain and Grandeur: The Economic Origins of de Gaulle's European Policy', Journal of Cold War Studies (forthcoming)
3. and 'De Gaulle et l'Europe', Revue française de science politique (forthcoming in two parts, Fall and Winter 1999).
4. Though, as I have argued elsewhere, the EU probably has had very little to do with suppressing war in post-war Europe. See Andrew Moravcsik, 'Federalism and Peace: A Structural Liberal Perspective', Zeitschrift für internationale Beziehungen 2, no. 2 (1996): 123-32.
5. Thomas Diez, 'Riding the AM-track through Europe; or, The Pitfalls of a Rationalist Journey through European Integration', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 28, no. 2 (1999): 356.
6. Debates over the question whether European integration would be 'federal' (driven by conceptions of national identity) or 'functional' (driven by the extension of capitalist markets among democratic states) dates back to the 1920s. Two examples, both Hungarian, are the prominent Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi and my far less prominent great-uncle, Andreas Fleissig, who published books detailing of these two opposing views. See Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, Paneuropa (Vienna:: Paneuropa-Verlag, 1926)
7. and Andreas Fleissig, Planeuropa: Die soziale und wirtschaftliche Zukunft Europas (Munich and Leipzig: Von Dunkler and Humblot, 1930). The same dichotomy threads through European debates of each decade since, of which the writings of Altiero Spinelli, Jean Monnet, Ralf Dahrendorf, and Timothy Garton Ash are only the most salient contributions.
8. Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe, 27-35.
9. Diez, 'Riding the AM-track', 358.
10. Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe, 474-75.
11. Instead he quibbles with my assessment that economic interests were more important. Yet mine is the clear conclusion to be drawn from the evidence. For those who prefer a more nuanced formulation, I provide that in the text above, a formulation ignored by Diez.
12. Diez: 'Instead, my quarrels are mostly about what is missing in AM's account, and how the track that his journey rides on leads him to conceptualise both alternative approaches and the integration process as such in a very specific way that excludes other accounts, despite (or rather because) his explicit attempt to disprove them by including them in the form of alternative hypotheses'. Diez, 'Riding the AM-track', 358-59.
13. See Andrew Moravcsik, 'The Choice for Europe - Current Commentary and Future Research' (A Reply to James Caporaso, Fritz Scharpf, and Helen Wallace), Journal of European Public Policy 6, no. 1 (1999): 158-79.
14. Given Diez's concern with pure International Relations theory, it is important to note that my general claim is not that economics generally dominates geopolitics, but that in a modern democratic society issue-specific concerns tend to dominate linkages. This challenges the conjecture advanced by Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye in their classic treatment of complex interdependence, Power and Interdependence, in which they view issue linkage as a natural quality of modern international cooperation. This distinction becomes important when analysing more recent decisions - such as the Amsterdam Treaty provisions on a Common Foreign and Security Policy - in which I have argued that that issue-specific concerns, hence high foreign policy, play a more important role. See Andrew Moravcsik and Kalypso Nicolaïdis, 'Negotiating the Treaty of Amsterdam: Interests, Influence, Institutions', Journal of Common Market Studies 37, no. 1 (1999): 59-85.
15. Diez, 'Riding the AM-track', 361.
16. See Moravcsik, 'The Choice for Europe - Current Commentary and Future Research'. Note also that in shifting to this claim, Diez leaves behind his initial assertions about the primacy of a discourse among fundamental national identities concerning Europe and focuses on the narrower, but quite different issue of beliefs about cause-effect relations. Only in exceptional cases - e.g., German commitment to low inflation - do the two overlap.
17. For an elaboration of this rationalist notion, see Judith Goldstein and Robert Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
18. See Moravcsik, Choice for Europe, 41-49.
19. Moravcsik, Choice for Europe, Ibid., 37-38.
20. See also Andrew Moravcsik, 'Preferences and Power in the European Community: A Liberal Intergovernmentalist Approach', Journal of Common Market Studies 31, no. 4 (1993): 473-524.
21. See Moravcsik, Choice for Europe, 111-12.
22. This is not, incidentally, because Diez is concerned with the role of ideas. From theories of public opinion to theories of decision-making, political science provides many examples of testable ideational theories.
23. Diez suggests that ideational theories might predict variation across issue-areas, as well as nation-states. It is unclear, however, precisely why he believes this to be the case, or what theory of such variation he proposes. Why, in Diez's approach, should the deep structure of national meta-narratives vary by issue?
24. For a more detailed discussion, see Andrew Moravcsik, 'Is Something Rotten in the State of Denmark? Constructivism and European Integration', Journal of European Public Policy (Special Issue on The Social Construction of Europe, forthcoming).
25. Diez, 'Riding the AM-track', 358.
26. Diez, Riding the AM-track Ibid., 358.
27. 'The integration process seen from AM'S perspective starts from domestic interests in a world of internationalising markets, without taking into account the feedback effects from the European institutions in which these actors are now located. Thus, important ingredients of both neofunctionalism and cultural or historical institutionalisms are largely kept out of the picture'. Diez 'Riding the AM-truck', 360.
28. See Moravcsik, Choice for Europe, 87-90, 473. This is a far more convincing interpretation of the existing archival data than Diez's preferred interpretation, which is that the British could not conceive of membership until they had proposed the FTA.
29. For a debate on the data, see Moravcsik, 'Is Something Rotten in the State of Denmark?'
30. Helen Milner, Resisting Protectionism: Global Industries and the Politics of International Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
31. Michael Bailey, Judith Goldstein, and Barry Weingast, 'The Institutional Roots of American Trade Policy: Politics, Coalitions, and American Trade Policy', World Politics 49, no. 3 (1997): 309-38.
32. Diez maintains that my empirical analysis is 'beside the point' because 'institutional choices severely limit future policy alternatives, and thus preference formation'. This is incorrect on both theoretical and definitional grounds. First, I do maintain that institutions constrain state behaviour through credible commitments, so we agree. Second, it is essential, as I argue in Chapter One of The Choice for Europe, to distinguish preferences, on the one hand, and strategies or policies, on the other. According to the conventional definition of 'preferences', the one I employ in the book, an institutional constraint on the possible policies one can choose constrains policies but not preferences. Finally, my argument about the primacy of commercial considerations does not require in any case that such shifts be entirely exogenous.
33. Paul Pierson, 'The Path to European Union: An Historical Institutionalist Account', Comparative Political Studies 29, no. 2 (1996): 123-64.
34. See Moravcsik, Choice for Europe, 489-94.
35. This ambiguous phrase - a little reminiscent of Cold War polemics - seems to charge me with being a reformist liberal (at best) and politically irresponsible (at worst).
36. Diez, 'Riding the AM-track', 359.
37. Diez's ideal is 'a network of functionally and regionally decentralised constituencies, bound together by a variable geometry of co-operation and supranational decision-making'. He elaborates as follows: 'European governance then derives its legitimacy from wide and direct participation of citizens in matters of their concern, from allowing the articulation of diverging identities, and only in part from output-factors such as increased environmental protection and enhanced regional economic performance. Such an arrangement differs fundamentally from the modern state system in that it blurs inside/outside distinctions and undermines the notion of the state, or any political subject, as a sovereign and an ontological given. Instead, it may foster a notion of "radical interdependence" between constituencies and the recognition of diversity and unity in a setting of "One Europes, Many Europes'". Diez, Riding the AM-track Ibid., 367.
38. Diez, Riding the AM-track Ibid., 366.
39. Diez, Riding the AM-track Ibid. Diez continues: 'The questions arising would then be, how to assess such a conceptualisation normatively, to investigate the rules of its marginalisation, and to look for traces in current integration debates that would help to enhance its status if one sees this as a valuable task. But to make the network visible to the analyst in the first place, one has to start from a very different set of assumptions than they are prevalent in AM's case. First, one would have to move beyond the explanation of concrete institutional outcomes. Second, one would have to be explicitly concerned with the political consequences of one's own writings. And third, one would have to start from seeing European integration in a wider setting, beyond intergovernmental bargains, in which it is not a rational choice of integration alternatives that is at stake, but the struggle for the formulation of such alternatives'.
40. Diez, Riding the AM-track Ibid., 368.
41. I leave aside another optimistic aspect of my analysis. In a time of growing Euroscepticism, my approach predicts not only stability, but the future deepening and widening of the EU. I have elaborated this point in detail elsewhere as follows: 'I believe The Choice for Europe supports [an] optimistic prognosis. In an era where democratisation has pacified Western Europe, talk of federalism triggers deep public suspicion, and technocratic planning (central banking excepted) has fallen out of fashion, Europe is nonetheless proceeding toward enlargement, monetary integration, and an ever deepening single market. There is an underlying functional reason for this, namely the consistent increase in support for the economic integration of Europe. The resulting invested interests are the major guarantors of its future stability. From this perspective, are not the true "Eurosceptics" those who believe that the EU is fragile because it rests on fears of refighting World War II, hopes of realizing federalist dreams, the intermittent "political will" of national leaders, and the unintended consequences of prior actions? And are not the true "Europeans" those who view the EU as a stable form of pragmatic cooperation deliberately tailored to the enduring, increasingly convergent national interests of European firms, governments, and citizens?' See Moravcsik, 'The Choice for Europe - Current Commentary and Future Research', 176.
42. For the normative and policy implications of the theories tested in The Choice for Europe, see Andrew Moravcsik and Kalypso Nicolaïdis, 'Federal Ideals and Constitutional Realities in the Treaty of Amsterdam', The European Union 1997: Annual Review of Activities (Special Issue of Journal of Common Market Studies) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998): 13-38
43. and Andrew Moravcsik, 'Europe's Integration at Century's End', in Centralization or Fragmentation? Europe Facing the Challenges of Deepening, Diversity, and Democracy, ed. Andrew Moravcsik (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1998), 1-58.
44. Diez, 'Riding the AM-track', 366.
45. Diez, Riding the AM-track 366. Ibid.
46. Here is another example where Diez seems to imply that difficult empirical issues can be resolved by conceptual fiat. Diez begins his essay by suggesting that what is at stake between us is differing understandings of what the EU is. Following John Ruggie, Diez maintains that the EU is 'multiperspectival' and 'post-modern' in that it 'lacks...a single centre of power, a single identity, and an overarching hierarchy' (357-58). He makes much of this metaphor, which, he seems to think, implies the need for a different, more ideational analysis than the one I provide. In fact our disagreement on this point is more rhetorical than real. Surely my argument is compatible with the existence of shifting issue-specific transnational and transgovernmental coalitions wielding influence over policy on the basis of varying national preferences and power. Indeed if one accepts, as I do, that EU governments are engaged in essentially ad hoc, issue-specific cooperation unconstrained by any common identity, cooperation in which governments do not surrender sovereignty unless it is necessary to lock in others. we should expect to see the emergence of just such an incoherent structure. Far from contradicting my rationalist approach, the absence of hierarchy, shared identity, and a single power follows directly from it, as Keohane and Nye, liberal modernists both, observed a quarter century ago in their analysis of 'complex interdependence'. It is surely no surprise, except perhaps to a nineteenth century realist, the modern international system, like the modern nation-state, is pluralist and non-hierarchical. In fact it is not me, with my Madisonian notion of European politics, but Diez, with his Rousseauian notion that collective identities dictate state behaviour, who should find it difficult to account for the exceptional depth of European cooperation absent a common European identity. My only quibble is semantic. I would prefer to use the word 'pluralist', rather than 'multuperspectival' to describe the Europe we observe today. The substance of the EU project - enhanced economic prosperity through controlled reciprocal market liberalisation - appears to me to be quintessentially modern, while its form seems more pluralist than post-modern.
47. To be fair, this sort of thinking is hardly unique to postmodernists; it is shared by many political activists. A few years back at a small, obscure, and closed academic meeting I was lectured by an eminent German professor - a man of the traditional post-war centre-risht - after I ventured the opinion that perhaps post-war Franco-German peace was due to the democratic peace more than European integration. He quietly took me aside and angrily asked: 'How can you be so politically irresponsible?' (See Moravcsik, 'Federalism and Peace'.)
48. Diez, 'Riding the AM-track', 359.