Theories of European Integration
Theories of European Integration
For many years,
the academic study of the European Communities (EC), as they were then called,
was virtually synonymous with the study of European integration. The
initially modest and largely technocratic achievements of the EC seemed less
significant than the potential that they represented for the gradual
integration of the countries of western Europe into something else: a
supranational polity. When the integration process was going well, as during
the 1950s and early 1960s, neo-functionalists and other theorists sought to
explain the process whereby European integration proceeded from modest sectoral
beginnings to something broader and more ambitious. When things seemed to be
going badly, as from the 1960s until the early 1980s, intergovernmentalists and
others sought to explain why the integration process had not proceeded as
smoothly as its founders had hoped. Regardless of the differences among these
bodies of theory, we can say clearly that the early literature on the EC sought
to explain the process of European integration (rather than, say,
policy-making), and that in doing so it drew largely (but not exclusively) on
theories of international relations.
In the first
edition of this volume, Carole Webb (1977) surveyed the debate among the then
dominant schools of European integration, neo-functionalism, and intergovernmentalism,
drawing from each approach a set of implications and hypotheses about the
nature of the EC policy process. Similarly, here we review neo-functionalism
and its views about the EU policy process, and then the intergovernmentalist
response, as well as the updating of ‘liberal intergovernmentalism’ by Andrew
Moravcsik in the 1990s.
In addition, we
examine more recent bodies of integration theory-institutionalism and
constructivism-which offer very different views of the integration process and
very different implications for EU policy-making.
Neo-functionalism
In 1958, on the
eve of the establishment of the EEC and Euratom, Ernst Haas published his
seminal work, The Uniting of Europe, setting out a ‘neo-functionalist’
theory of regional integration. As elaborated in subsequent texts by Haas and
other scholars (e. g. Haas 1961; Lindberg 1963; Lindberg and Scheingold 1970),
neo-functionalism posited a process of ‘functional spill-over’, in which the
initial decision by governments to place a certain sector, such as coal and
steel, under the authority of central institutions creates pressures to extend
the authority of the institutions into neighbouring areas of policy, such as
currency exchange rates, taxation, and wages. Thus, neo-functionalists
predicted, sectoral integration would produce the unintended and unforeseen
consequence of promoting further integration in additional issue areas. George
(1991) identifies a second strand of the spill-over process, which he calls ‘political’
spill-over, in which both supranational actors (such as the Commission) and subnational
actors (interest groups or others within the member states) create additional pressures
for further integration. At the subnational level, Haas suggested that interest
groups operating in an integrated sector would have to interact with the international
organization charged with the management of their sector. Over time, these
groups would come to appreciate the benefits from integration, and would thereby
transfer their demands, expectations, and even their loyalties from national governments
to a new centre, thus becoming an important force for further integration.
At the
supranational level, moreover, bodies such as the Commission would encourage
such a transfer of loyalties, promoting European policies and brokering bargains
among the member states so as to ‘upgrade the common interest’. As a result of
such sectoral and political spill-over, neo-functionalists predicted, sectoral
integration would become self-sustaining, leading to the creation of a new
political entity with its centre in Brussels.
The most
important contribution of neo-functionalists to the study of EU policy-making
was their conceptualization of a ‘Community method’ of policy-making. As Webb
pointed out, this ideal-type Community method was based largely on the
observation of a few specific sectors (the common agricultural policy (CAP),
and the customs union, see Chapters 4 and 15) during the formative years of the
Community, and presented a distinct picture of EC policy-making as a process
driven by an entrepreneurial Commission and featuring supranational deliberation
among member-state representatives in the Council. The Community method in this
view was not just a legal set of policy-making institutions but a ‘procedural
code’ conditioning the expectations and the behaviour of the participants in
the process. The central elements of this original Community method, Webb (1977:
13-14) continued, were four-fold:
1. governments accept the Commission as a
valid bargaining partner and expect it to play an active role in building a
policy consensus.
2. governments deal with each other with a
commitment to problem-solving, and negotiate over how to achieve collective
decisions, and not whether these are desirable or not.
3. governments, the Commission, and other
participants in the process are responsive to each other, do not make
unacceptable demands, and are willing to make short term sacrifices in
expectation of longer term gains.
4. Unanimity is
the rule, necessitating that negotiations continue until all objections are
overcome or losses in one area are compensated for by gains in another.
Issues are not
seen as separate but related in a continuous process of decision such that
‘log-rolling’ and ‘side payments’ are possible.
This Community
method, Webb suggested, characterized EEC decision-making during the period
from 1958 to 1963, as the original six member states met alongside the
Commission to put in place the essential elements of the EEC customs union and
the CAP. By 1965, however, Charles de Gaulle, the French President, had
precipitated the so-called ‘Luxembourg crisis’, insisting on the importance of
state sovereignty and arguably violating the implicit procedural code of the
Community method. The EEC, which had been scheduled to move to extensive
qualified majority voting (QMV) in 1966, continued to take most decisions de
facto by unanimity, the Commission emerged weakened from its confrontation
with de Gaulle, and the nation-state appeared to have reasserted itself. These
tendencies were reinforced, moreover, by developments in the 1970s, when
economic recession led to the rise of new non-tariff barriers to trade among EC
member states and when the intergovernmental aspects of the Community were
strengthened by the creation in 1974 of the European Council, a regular summit meeting
of EU heads of state and government. In addition, the Committee of Permanent Representatives
(Coreper), an intergovernmental body of member-state representatives, emerged
as a crucial decision-making body preparing legislation for adoption by the
Council of Ministers. Similarly, empirical studies showed the importance of national
gatekeeping institutions (H. Wallace 1973). Even some of the major advances of
this period, such as the creation of the European monetary system (EMS) in 1978
were taken outside the structure of the EEC Treaty, and with no formal role for
the Commission or other supranational EC institutions.
Intergovernmentalism
Reflecting
these developments, a new ‘intergovernmentalist’ school of integration theory
emerged, beginning with Stanley Hoffmann’s (1966) claim that the nation-state, far
from being obsolete, had proven ‘obstinate’. Most obviously with de Gaulle, but
later with the accession of new member states such as the UK, Ireland, and
Denmark in 1973, member governments made clear that they would resist the
gradual transfer of sovereignty to the Community, and that EC decision-making
would reflect the continuing primacy of the nation-state. Under these
circumstances, Haas himself (1976) pronounced the ‘obsolescence of regional
integration theory’, while other scholars such as Paul Taylor (1983), and
William Wallace (1982) argued that neo-functionalists had underestimated the
resilience of the nation-state. At the same time, historical scholarship by
Alan Milward and others (Milward 2000; Milward and Lynch 1993) supported the view
that EU member governments, rather than supranational organizations, played the
central role in the historical development of the EU and were strengthened,
rather than weakened, as a result of the integration process.
By contrast
with neo-functionalists, the intergovernmentalist image suggested that ‘the
bargaining and consensus building techniques which have emerged in the Communities
are mere refinements of intergovernmental diplomacy’ (Webb 1977: 18).
And indeed, the
early editions of Policy-Making in the European Communities found
significant evidence of intergovernmental bargaining as the dominant mode of
policy-making in many (but not all) issue areas.
Liberal intergovernmentalism
The period from
the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s has been characterized as ‘the doldrums
era’, both for the integration process and for scholarship on the EU (Keeler 2004;
Jupille 2005). While a dedicated core of EU scholars continued to advance the empirical
study of the EU during this period, much of this work either eschewed grand
theoretical claims about the integration process or accepted with minor modifications
the theoretical language of the neo-functionalist/intergovernmentalist debate. With
the ‘relaunching’ of the integration process in the mid-1980s, however, scholarship
on the EU exploded, and the theoretical debate was revived. While some of this
scholarship viewed the relaunching of the integration process as a vindication of
earlier neo-functionalist models (Tranholm-Mikkelsen 1991; Zysman and Sandholtz
1989), Andrew Moravcsik (1993a, 1998) argued influentially that even
these steps forward could be accounted for by a revised intergovernmental model
emphasizing the power and preferences of EU member states. In other words,
Moravcsik’s ‘liberal intergovernmentalism’ is a three-step model, which
combines: (1) a liberal theory of national preference formation with; (2) an
intergovernmental model of EU-level bargaining; and (3) a model of
institutional choice emphasizing the role of international institutions in
providing ‘credible commitments’ for member governments. In the first or
liberal stage of the model, national chiefs of government (COGs) aggregate the interests
of their domestic constituencies, as well as their own interests, and
articulate their respective national preferences toward the EU. Thus, national
preferences are complex, reflecting the distinctive economics, parties, and
institutions of each member state, but they are determined domestically,
not shaped by participation in the EU, as some neo-functionalists had proposed.
In the second
or intergovernmental stage, national governments bring their preferences to the
bargaining table in Brussels, where agreements reflect the relative power of
each member state, and where supranational organizations such as the Commission
exert little or no influence over policy outcomes. By contrast with
neo-functionalists, who emphasized the entrepreneurial and brokering roles of the
Commission and the upgrading of the common interest among member states in the
Council, Moravcsik and other intergovernmentalists emphasized the hardball
bargaining among member states and the importance of bargaining power, package
deals, and ‘side payments’ as determinants of intergovernmental bargains on the
most important EU decisions.
Third and
finally, Moravcsik puts forward a rational choice theory of institutional choice,
arguing that EU member states adopt particular EU institutions-pooling sovereignty
through QMV, or delegating sovereignty to supranational actors like the Commission
and the Court-in order to increase the credibility of their mutual commitments.
In this view,
sovereign states seeking to cooperate among themselves invariably face a strong
temptation to cheat or ‘defect’ from their agreements. Pooling and delegating
sovereignty through international organizations, he argues, allows states to
commit themselves credibly to their mutual promises, by monitoring state compliance
with international agreements and filling in the blanks of broad international treaties,
such as those that have constituted the EC/EU.
In empirical
terms, Moravcsik argues that the EU’s historic intergovernmental agreements,
such as the 1957 Treaties of Rome and the 1992 Treaty on European Union (TEU),
were not driven primarily by supranational entrepreneurs, unintended spillovers
from earlier integration, or transnational coalitions of interest groups, but
rather by a gradual process of preference convergence among the most powerful
member states, which then struck central bargains among themselves, offered
side-payments to smaller member states, and delegated strictly limited powers
to supranational organizations that remained more or less obedient servants of
the member states.
Overarching the
three steps of this model is a ‘rationalist framework’ of international cooperation.
The relevant actors are assumed to have fixed preferences (for wealth, power,
etc), and act systematically to achieve those preferences within the
constraints posed by the institutions within which they act. As Moravcsik (1998:
19-20) points out:
The term framework
(as opposed to theory or model) is employed here to designate
a set of assumptions that permit us to disaggregate a phenomenon we seek to
explain-in this case, successive rounds of international negotiations-into
elements each of which can be treated separately.
More focused
theories-each of course consistent with the assumptions of the overall
rationalist framework-are employed to explain each element. The elements are
then aggregated to create a multicausal explanation of a large complex outcome
such as a major multilateral agreement.
During the
1990s, liberal intergovernmentalism emerged as arguably the leading theory of
European integration, yet its basic theoretical assumptions were questioned by
international relations scholars coming from two different directions. A first
group of scholars, collected under the rubrics of rational choice and
historical institutionalism, accepted Moravcsik’s rationalist assumptions, but
rejected his spare, institutionfree model of intergovernmental bargaining as an
accurate description of the EU policy process. By contrast, a second school of
thought, drawing from sociological institutionalism and constructivism, raised
more fundamental objections to the methodological individualism of rational
choice theory in favour of an approach in which national preferences and
identities were shaped, at least in part, by EU norms and rules.
The ‘new institutionalisms’ in rational choice
The rise of
institutionalist analysis of the EU did not develop in isolation, but reflected
a gradual and widespread re-introduction of institutions into a large body of theories
(such as pluralism, Marxism, and neo-realism), in which institutions had been
either absent or considered epiphenomenal, reflections of deeper causal factors
or processes such as capitalism or the distribution of power in domestic
societies or in the international system. By contrast with these
institution-free accounts of politics, which dominated much of political
science between the 1950s and the 1970s, three primary ‘institutionalisms’
developed during the course of the 1980s and early 1990s, each with a distinct
definition of institutions and a distinct account of how they ‘matter’ in the
study of politics (March and Olsen 1984, 1989; Hall and Taylor 1996).
The first arose
within the rational-choice approach to the study of politics, as pioneered by
students of American politics. Rational choice institutionalism began with the
effort by American political scientists to understand the origins and effects of
US Congressional institutions on legislative behaviour and policy outcomes. More
specifically, rational choice scholars noted that majoritarian models of
Congressional decision-making predicted that policy outcomes would be
inherently unstable, since a simple majority of policy-makers could always form
a coalition to overturn existing legislation, yet substantive scholars of the
US Congress found considerable stability in Congressional policies. In this
context, Kenneth Shepsle (1979, 1986) argued that Congressional institutions,
and in particular the committee system, could produce ‘structure-induced
equilibrium’, by ruling some alternatives as permissible or impermissible, and
by structuring the voting power and the veto power of various actors in the decision-making
process. More recently, Shepsle and others have turned their attention to the
problem of ‘equilibrium institutions’, namely, how actors choose or\ design
institutions to secure mutual gains, and how those institutions change or
persist over time.
Shepsle’s
innovation and the subsequent development of the rational choice approach to
institutions have produced a number of theoretical offshoots with potential applications
to both comparative and international politics. For example, Shepsle and others
have examined in some detail the ‘agenda-setting’ power of Congressional committees,
which can send draft legislation to the floor that is often easier to adopt than
it is to amend. In another offshoot, students of the US Congress have developed
‘principal-agent’ models of Congressional delegation to regulatory
bureaucracies and to courts, and they have problematized the conditions under
which legislative principals are able-or unable-to control their respective
agents (Moe 1984; Kiewiet and McCubbins 1991). More recently, Epstein and
O’Halloran (1999), and others (Huber and Shipan 2002) have pioneered a
‘transaction-cost approach’ to the design of political institutions, arguing
that legislators deliberately and systematically design political institutions to
minimize the transaction costs associated with the making of public policy.
Although
originally formulated and applied in the context of American political institutions,
rational-choice institutionalist insights ‘travel’ to other domestic and international
contexts, and were quickly taken up by students of the EU. Responding to the
increasing importance of EU institutional rules, such as the cooperation and co-decision
procedures, these authors argued that purely intergovernmental models of EU
decision-making underestimated the causal importance of formal EU rules in shaping
policy outcomes. In an early application of rational-choice theory to the EU, for
example, Fritz Scharpf (1988) argued that the inefficiency and rigidity of the
CAP and other EU policies was due not simply to the EU’s intergovernmentalism,
but also to specific institutional rules, such as unanimous decision-making and
the ‘default condition’ in the event that the member states failed to agree on
a common policy. By the mid-1990s, George Tsebelis, Geoffrey Garrett, and many
others sought to model the selection-and in particular the functioning-of EU
institutions, including the adoption, execution, and adjudication of EU public
policies, in terms of rational choice. Many of these studies drew increasingly
on relevant literatures from comparative politics, and are therefore reviewed
in the second part of this chapter.
By contrast,
sociological institutionalism and constructivist approaches in international relations
defined institutions much more broadly to include informal norms and
conventions as well as informal rules. They argued that such institutions could
‘constitute’ actors, shaping their identities and hence their preferences in
ways that rational-choice approaches could not capture (see next section).
Historical
institutionalists took up a position between these two camps, focusing on the
effects of institutions over time, in particular on the ways in which a
given set of institutions, once established, can influence or constrain the
behaviour of the actors who established them. In its initial formulations (Hall
1986; Thelen and Steinmo 1992), historical institutionalism was seen as having
dual effects, influencing both the constraints on individual actors and their
preferences, thereby making the theory a ‘big tent’, encompassing the core
insights of the rationalist and constructivist camps.
What makes
historical institutionalism distinctive, however, is its emphasis on the effects
of institutions on politics over time. In perhaps the most sophisticated
presentation of this thinking, Paul Pierson (2000) has argued that political
institutions are characterized by what economists call ‘increasing returns’,
insofar as they create incentives for actors to stick with and not abandon
existing institutions, adapting them only incrementally in response to changing
circumstances. Thus, politics should be characterized by certain interrelated
phenomena, including: inertia, or ‘lock-ins’, whereby existing
institutions may remain in equilibrium for extended periods despite
considerable political change; a critical role for timing and sequencing,
in which relatively small and contingent events at critical junctures early in
a sequence shape events that occur later; and path-dependence, in which
early decisions provide incentives for actors to perpetuate institutional and
policy choices inherited from the past, even when the resulting outcomes are
manifestly inefficient.
Understood in
this light, historical institutionalist analyses typically begin with rationalist
assumptions about actor preferences, and proceed to examine how institutions can
shape the behaviour of rational actors over time through institutional lock-ins
and processes of path dependence. In recent years, these insights have been applied
increasingly to the development of the EU, with various authors emphasizing the
temporal dimension of European integration (Armstrong and Bulmer 1998).
Pierson’s (1996b) study of path-dependence in the EU, for
example, seeks to understand
European
integration as a process that unfolds over time, and the conditions under which
path-dependent processes are most likely to occur. Working from essentially rationalist
assumptions, Pierson argues that, despite the initial primacy of member
governments in the design of EU institutions and policies, ‘gaps’ may occur in
the ability of member governments to control the subsequent development of institutions
and policies, for four reasons. First, member governments in democratic societies
may, because of electoral concerns, apply a high ‘discount rate’ to the future,
agreeing to EU policies that lead to a long-term loss of national control in
return for short-term electoral returns. Secondly, even when governments do not
heavily discount the future, unintended consequences of institutional choices
can create additional gaps, which member governments may or may not be able to
close through subsequent action. Thirdly, the preferences of member governments
are likely to change over time, most obviously because of electoral turnover,
leaving new governments with new preferences to inherit an acquis
communautaire negotiated by, and according to the preferences of, a previous
government. Given the frequent requirement of unanimous voting (or the high
hurdle of QMV) to overturn past institutional and policy choices, individual
member governments are likely to find themselves ‘immobilized by the weight of
past initiatives’ (Pierson 1996b: 137). Finally, EU institutions and policies
can become locked-in not only as a result of change-resistant institutions from
above, but also through the incremental growth of entrenched support for
existing institutions from below, as societal actors adapt to and
develop a vested interest in the continuation of specific EU policies. In the
area of social policy, for example, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has
developed jurisprudence on issues such as gender equity and workplace health
and safety that certainly exceeded the initial expectations of the member
states; yet these decisions have proven difficult to roll back, both because of
the need for unanimous agreement to overturn ECJ decisions and because domestic
constituencies have developed a vested interest in their continued application.
At their best,
historical institutionalist analyses offer not only the banal observation that
institutions are ‘sticky’, but also a tool kit for predicting and explaining under
what conditions we should expect institutional lock-ins and
path-dependent behaviour.
More
specifically, we should expect that, ceteris paribus, institutions and
policies will be most resistant to change: where their alteration requires a
unanimous agreement among member states, or the consent of supranational actors
like the Commission or the Parliament; and where existing EU policies mobilize
cross-national bases of support that raise the cost of reversing or
significantly revising them. Both factors vary across issue areas, and we
should therefore expect variation in the stability and path-dependent character
of EU institutions and policies. To take one example, the EU structural funds
might at first glance seem to be an ideal candidate for path-dependent behaviour,
much like the CAP. By contrast with the CAP, however, the structural funds must
be reauthorized at periodic intervals by a unanimous agreement among the member
states, giving recalcitrant states periodic opportunities to veto their continuation.
Furthermore,
because the structural funds are explicitly framed as redistributive transferring
money from rich states and regions to poor ones, we see an uneven pattern of
reliance upon and support for the structural funds among member states and
their citizens. The practical upshot of these differences is that EU
governments have been able to reform the structural funds more readily, and
with less incidence of path-dependence, than we find in the CAP, which has
indeed resisted all but the most incremental change (see Chapters 7 and 9).
In sum, for
both rational-choice and historical institutionalists, EU institutions ‘matter’,
shaping both the policy process and policy outcomes in predictable ways, and
indeed shaping the long-term process of European integration. In both cases,
however, the effects of EU institutions are assumed to influence only the
incentives confronting the various public and private actors-the actors
themselves are assumed to remain unchanged in their fundamental preferences and
identities. Indeed, despite their differences on substantive issues, liberal
intergovernmentalism, rational-choice institutionalism, and most historical
institutionalism arguably constitute a shared rationalist research agenda-a
community of scholars operating from similar basic assumptions and seeking to
test hypotheses about the most important determinants of European integration.
Constructivism, and reshaping European identities and
preferences
Constructivist
theory did not begin with the study of the EU-indeed, as Thomas Risse (2004) points
out in an excellent survey, constructivism came to EU studies relatively late,
with the publication of a special issue of the Journal of European Public
Policy on the ‘Social Construction of Europe’ in 1999. Yet since then
constructivist theorists have been quick to apply their theoretical tools to
the EU, promising to shed light on its potentially profound effects on the
peoples and governments of Europe. Constructivism is a notoriously difficult
theory to describe succinctly. Indeed, like rational choice, constructivism is
not a substantive theory of European integration at all, but a broader
‘meta-theoretical’ orientation with implications for the study of the EU. As
Risse (2004: 161) explains:
[i] t is
probably most useful to describe constructivism as based on a social ontology
which insists that human agents do not exist independently from their social
environment and its collectively shared systems of meanings (‘culture’ in a
broad sense). This is in contrast to the methodological individualism of
rational choice according to which ‘ [t] he elementary unit of social life is
the individual human action’. The fundamental insight of the agency-structure
debate, which lies at the heart of many social constructivist works, is not
only that structures and agents are mutually co-determined. The crucial point
is that constructivists insist on the constitutiveness of (social) structures
and agents. The social environment in which we find ourselves, ‘constitutes’
who we are, our identities as social beings. (references removed) For
constructivists, institutions are understood broadly to include not only formal
rules but also informal norms, and these rules and norms are expected to
‘constitute’ actors, i. e. to shape their identities and their preferences. Actor
preferences, therefore, are not exogenously given and fixed, as in rationalist
models, but endogenous to institutions, and individuals’ identities
shaped and re-shaped by their social environment. Taking this argument to its
logical conclusion, constructivists generally reject the rationalist conception
of actors as utility-maximizers operating according to a ‘logic of
consequentiality’, in favour of March and Olsen’s (1989: 160-2) conception of a
‘logic of appropriateness’. In this view, actors confronting a given situation
do not consult a fixed set of preferences and calculate their actions in order
to maximize their expected utility, but look to socially constructed roles and
institutional rules and ask what sort of behaviour is appropriate in that
situation. Constructivism, therefore, offers a fundamentally different view of
human agency from rational-choice approaches, and it suggests that institutions
influence individual identities, preferences, and behaviour in more profound
ways than those hypothesized by rational-choice theorists.
A growing
number of scholars has argued that EU institutions shape not only the behaviour,
but also the preferences and identities of individuals and member governments (Sandholtz
1993; Jørgensen 1997; Lewis 1998). This argument has
been put most forcefully by Thomas Christiansen, Knud Erik Jørgensen, and Antje Wiener in their introduction to the special issue
of the Journal of European Public Policy (1999: 529):
A significant
amount of evidence suggests that, as a process, European integration has a
transformative impact on the European state system and its constituent units. European
integration itself has changed over the years, and it is reasonable to assume
that in the process agents’ identity and subsequently their interests have
equally changed. While this aspect of change can be theorized within
constructivist perspectives, it will remain largely invisible in approaches
that neglect processes of identity formation and/or assume interests to be
given endogenously.
In other words,
the authors begin with the claim that the EU is indeed reshaping national
identities and preferences, and reject rationalist approaches for their
inability to predict and explain these phenomena. Not surprisingly,
constructivist accounts of the EU have been forcefully rebutted by rationalist
theorists (Moravcsik 1999; Checkel and Moravcsik 2001).
According to
Moravcsik (1999: 670) constructivist theorists raise an interesting and important
set of questions about the effects of European integration on individuals and states.
Yet, he argues, constructivists have failed to make a significant contribution
to our empirical understanding of European integration, for two reasons. First,
constructivists typically fail to construct ‘distinct falsifiable hypotheses’,
opting instead for broad interpretive frameworks that can make sense of almost
any possible outcome, and are therefore not subject to falsification through
empirical analysis. Secondly, even if constructivists do posit
hypotheses that are in principle falsifiable, they generally do not formulate
and test those hypotheses so as to distinguish clearly between constructivist predictions
and their rationalist counterparts. Until constructivists test their hypotheses,
and do so against prevailing and distinct rationalist models, he argues, constructivism
will not come down ‘from the clouds’ (Checkel and Moravcsik 2001).
Constructivists
might respond that Moravcsik privileges rational-choice explanations and sets a
higher standard for constructivist hypotheses (since rational-choice scholars typically
do not attempt to test their own hypotheses against competing constructivist formulations).
Many ‘post-positivist’ scholars, moreover, dispute Moravcsik’s image of EU studies
as ‘science’, with its attendant claims of objectivity and of an objective, knowable
world. For such scholars, Moravcsik’s call for falsifiable hypothesis-testing appears
as a power-laden demand that ‘non-conformist’ theories play according to the rules
of a rationalist, and primarily American, social science (Jørgensen 1997: 6-7). To the extent that constructivists do indeed
reject positivism and the systematic testing of competing hypotheses, the
rationalist/constructivist debate would seem to have reached a
‘metatheoretical’ impasse-that is to say, constructivists and rationalists fail
to agree on a common standard for judging what constitutes support for one or another
approach.
In recent
years, however, an increasing number of constructivist theorists have embraced
positivism-the notion that constructivist hypotheses can, and should, be tested
and validated or falsified empirically-and these scholars have produced a spate
of constructivist work that attempts rigorously to test hypotheses about
socialization, norm-diffusion, and collective preference formation in the EU (Wendt
1999; Checkel 2003; Risse 2004: 160). Some of these studies, including Liesbet
Hooghe’s (2002, 2005) extensive analysis of the attitudes of Commission
officials, and several studies of national officials participating in EU
committees (Beyers and Dierickx 1998; Egeberg 1999), use quantitative methods
to test hypotheses about the nature and determinants of officials’ attitudes,
including socialization in national as well as European institutions. Such
studies, undertaken with methodological rigour and with a frank reporting of
findings, seem to demonstrate that that EU-level socialization, although not
excluded, plays a relatively small role by comparison with national-level socialization,
or that EU socialization interacts with other factors in complex ways.
Other studies,
including Checkel’s (1999, 2003) study of citizenship norms in the EU and the
Council of Europe, and Lewis’s (1998, 2003) analysis of decision-making in the EU’s
Coreper, utilize qualitative rather than quantitative methods, but are
similarly designed to test falsifiable hypotheses about whether, and under what
conditions, EU officials are socialized into new norms, preferences, and
identities.
As a result,
the metatheoretical gulf separating rationalists and constructivists appears to
have narrowed considerably, and EU scholars have arguably led the way in confronting
and-possibly-reconciling the two theoretical approaches. Three scholars (Jupille,
Caporaso, and Checkel 2003) have recently put forward a framework for promoting
integration of-or at least a fruitful dialogue between-rationalist and constructivist
approaches to international relations. Rationalism and constructivism, the
authors argue, are not hopelessly incommensurate, but can engage each other through
‘four distinct modes of theoretical conversation’, namely:
competitive
testing, in which competing theories are pitted against each other in explaining
a single event or class of events;
a ‘domain of
application’ approach, in which each theory is considered to explain some
sub-set of empirical reality, so that, for example, utility-maximizing and strategic
bargaining obtain in certain circumstances, while socialization and collective preference
formation obtain in others;
a ‘sequencing’
approach, in which one theory may help explain a particular step in a sequence
of actions (e. g. a constructivist explanation of national preferences) while
another theory might best explain subsequent developments (e. g. a rationalist explanation
of subsequent bargaining among the actors); and
‘incorporation’
or ‘subsumption’, in which one theory claims to subsume the other so that, for
example, rational choice becomes a sub-set of human behaviour ultimately
explicable in terms of the social construction of modern rationality.
Looking at the
substantive empirical work in their special issue, Jupille, Caporaso and Checkel
(2003) find that most contributions to the rationalist/constructivist debate utilize
competitive testing, while only a few (see, for example, Schimmelfennig 2003a)
have adopted domain of application, sequencing, or subsumption approaches.
Nevertheless,
they see substantial progress in the debate, in which both sides generally accept
a common standard of empirical testing as the criterion for useful theorizing about
EU politics.
Integration theory today
European
integration theory is far more complex than it was in 1977 when the first edition
of this volume was published. In place of the traditional neo-functionalist/ intergovernmentalist
debate, the 1990s witnessed the emergence of a new dichotomy in EU studies,
pitting rationalist scholars against constructivists. During the late 1990s, it
appeared that this debate might well turn into a metatheoretical dialogue of
the deaf, with rationalists dismissing constructivists as ‘soft’, and
constructivists denouncing rationalists for their obsessive commitment to
parsimony and formal models. The past several years, however, have witnessed
the emergence of a more productive dialogue between the two approaches, and a
steady stream of empirical studies allowing us to adjudicate between the
competing claims of the two approaches.
Furthermore,
whereas the neo-functionalist/intergovernmentalist debate was limited almost
exclusively to the study of European integration,3 the contemporary
rationalist/ constructivist debate in EU studies mirrors larger debates among
those same schools in the broader field of international relations theory. Indeed,
not only are EU studies relevant to the wider study of international
relations, they are in many ways the vanguard of international relations
theory, insofar as the EU serves as a laboratory for broader processes such as
globalization, institutionalization, and socialization.
Despite these
substantial measures of progress, however, the literature on European integration
has not produced any consensus on the likely future direction of the
integration process. At the risk of overgeneralizing, more optimistic theorists
tend to be drawn from the ranks of neo-functionalists and constructivists, who
point to the potential for further integration, the former through functional
and political spillovers, and the latter through gradual changes in both élite and mass identities and preferences as a result of prolonged and
productive cooperation. In empirical terms, these analysts frequently point to
the rapid development of new institutions and policies in the second and third
pillars, and the increasing use of the so-called ‘open method of coordination’
(OMC) to address issues that had been beyond the scope of EU competence. Rationalist
and intergovernmentalist critics, on the other hand, tend to be sceptical
regarding claims of both spill-over and socialization, pointing to the poor record
of Commission entrepreneurship over the past decade and the sparse evidence for
socialization of national officials into European preferences or identities,
noting that the Commission has proven to be a poor stimulator of political
spill-over in recent years. For these scholars, the EU may well represent an
‘equilibrium polity’, one in which functional pressures for further integration
are essentially spent, and in which the current level of institutional and
policy integration is unlikely to change substantially for the foreseeable
future (Moravcsik 2001: 163).
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