ABSTRACT
In the Chinese language, the ideograph for crisis and for opportunity is the same.1 In the languages of Europe, they are not the same – although they may be connected through a complex set of political processes. Moreover, it is by no means assured whether, if the connection exists, it will be positive or negative, i.e. that it leads to a better or a worse outcome. Nothing could be more apposite than this connection today in Europe, which is suffering from not one but three concurrent crises: (1) its common currency, the euro; (2) its common institution, the European Union (EU) and (3) its common political regime, liberal democracy. Needless to say, the simultaneity of these crises – the likelihood that they will affect each other – makes it much more difficult to predict the outcome. In this chapter, I will focus primarily on the potential impact of these crises and their effect on the process of European integration – with the understanding that this could eventually have a significant impact on the practice of democracy within the EU member states. We begin with the observation that there is nothing new about crises in this process, from its very beginning in the early 1950s with the European Coal and Steel Community. One could even say that crises have been an integral part of it and, moreover, they have tended to have a positive effect. The usual reaction by member governments has been to respond by increasing the authority and expanding the tasks of the institutions of the EU and its predecessors (ECSC, EEC, EC) in order to resolve the crises. The underlying reason for this seems obvious. It begins with the unprecedented nature of the process of integrating sovereign national states peacefully into an encompassing regional organization. The actors involved have an intrinsic difficulty in acting rationally because it is so difficult to assess the costs and benefits of possible courses of action: first, because the range of alternatives (especially given the presumption of peaceful negotiation among relative equals rather than violent imposition by the strongest) is so different from analogous choices made during their respective processes of national integration; second, because however well-considered their policies and well-intentioned their implementation, they are bound to generate unexpected and, often, undesired consequences; and third, if these were not enough, the ECSC/EEC/EC/EU has repeatedly changed its overriding goal from integrating the market for coal and
steel, to providing regional security, to promoting trade in industrial goods, to subsidizing agriculture, to encouraging cross-national investment, to liberalizing financial flows, to coping with the competitive pressures of globalization – not to mention the more recent ones of coordinating police cooperation, controlling borders, standardizing visa and asylum requirements, regulating energy networks, improving regional transport systems and producing a common foreign and security policy. Each time the process has expanded its compétences, the stakes in the game have involved ever more complex packages of policies whose interactive effects and emergent properties have proven more difficult to predict. And, if all this were not enough, one of the greatest successes of European integration has been the incorporation of new member states – 22 in addition to the original six. Each time this has occurred, the effects on existing policy commitments and the likelihood of agreeing upon new ones has become less predictable. The present crisis of the euro and the ‘sovereign debt’ of several of its member states is a near perfect example of how causal complexity, unanticipated consequences and decisional uncertainty can have a significant and cumulative impact on regional integration. Some 41 years ago, in an article revising the neofunctionalist approach, I imagined four successive ‘good’ crises that the EU might face in the future and that might drive the process further.2 What each was supposed to do was to build upon frustrated or disappointed member expectations in the pursuit of some common objective. This would compel actors to redefine either the tasks or the level of authority (or both) of regional organizations by reaching a collective agreement that would ‘spill-over’ into previously unsatisfactory or ignored policy areas. What has (heretofore) made the EU unique is precisely this capacity to exploit successive crises positively by repeatedly breaking out of its momentary zone of organizational indifference. At least until now, no other regional organization has acquired this dynamic characteristic. My fourth ‘transcending’ crisis was virtually identical to what is presently occurring with regard to the euro (Figure 2.1). In theory, I argued it should compel actors in member states: (1) to engage in more comprehensive policy coordination across sectors and policy arenas, thereby institutionalizing at the supra-national level the mechanisms of policy harmonization, budgeting and taxation characteristic of a federal government; and (2) to break out of predominantly national political alliances and form more salient supra-national ones, thereby laying the foundation for the establishment of the most important missing element in the Euro-polity, namely a distinctively European party system. In short, this was supposed to be the crisis that would drive the EU from economic to political integration. Unfortunately, in practice, the outcome – at least so far – has been the opposite. Member governments seem to be retreating to more restrictive and nationalistic calculations of interest. Led by overt German recalcitrance (but supported quietly by other ‘Northern’ states), there has been little sign of the sort of cross-national partisan solidarity or the need for comprehensive policy coordination that I had anticipated. Some members have even experienced the revival of extreme right-wing
nationalist parties and movements that are overtly contrary to any further ‘spillovers’. A few of them even advocate outright withdrawal, not just from the euro, but from the EU as such. The emerging Euro-polity seems further than ever from acquiring its distinctive party system. Moreover, mass publics – rather than favouring more integration in gratitude for the benefits it has given them – have by and large expressed hostility to the prospect. Could it just be that the ‘good’ crisis that I imagined some 40 years ago has turned out to be a very ‘bad’ one? For not only is the crisis of greater magnitude at the supra-national level than expected, but it also seems to have penetrated much deeper and more negatively into national political institutions and public opinion. It is even plausible to imagine a vicious triangle emerging: first, the collapse of the euro; then the collapse of the European Union; and finally, the collapse of democracy in its member states. Let us look at these three crises to assess how serious are their implications and how closely they may be related to each other.
