The European Union
While there are many textbooks about the European Union (EU), Clive Archer covers the essential elements of the EU clearly and concisely, outlining the key debates and issues it faces today. Making often complex concepts easily comprehended, this book enables the reader to quickly build a solid and well-rounded understanding of the EU’s history and present, covering:
key debates on Europe the ambiguous relationship with the US the EU’s internal and external activities structure and institutions future developments and new directions
The European Union is an essential purchase for all students of the European Union, European studies, politics and international relations. Clive Archer is a Research Professor in the Department of Politics and Philosophy, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, where he also holds a Jean Monnet ad personam Chair in European Integration.
Routledge Global Institutions Edited by Thomas G. Weiss The CUNY Graduate Center, New York, USA and Rorden Wilkinson University of Manchester, UK
About the Series The Global Institutions Series is designed to provide readers with comprehensive, accessible, and informative guides to the history, structure, and activities of key international organizations. Every volume stands on its own as a thorough and insightful treatment of a particular topic, but the series as a whole contributes to a coherent and complementary portrait of the phenomenon of global institutions at the dawn of the millennium. Books are written by recognized experts, conform to a similar structure, and cover a range of themes and debates common to the series. These areas of shared concern include the general purpose and rationale for organizations, developments over time, membership, structure, decision-making procedures, and key functions. Moreover, current debates are placed in historical perspective alongside informed analysis and critique. Each book also contains an annotated bibliography and guide to electronic information as well as any annexes appropriate to the subject matter at hand. The volumes currently published or under contract include:
The United Nations and Human Rights (2005) A guide for a new era by Julie Mertus (American University)
The UN General Assembly (2005) by M.J. Peterson (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
The UN Secretary General and Secretariat (2005) by Leon Gordenker (Princeton University)
Internal Displacement (2006) Conceptualization and its consequences by Thomas G. Weiss (The CUNY Graduate Center) and David A. Korn
United Nations Global Conferences (2005) by Michael G. Schechter (Michigan State University)
Global Environmental Institutions (2006) by Elizabeth R. DeSombre (Wellesley College)
The UN Security Council (2006) Practice and promise by Edward C. Luck (Columbia University) The World Intellectual Property Organization (2006) Resurgence and the development agenda by Chris May (University of Lancaster) The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (2007) The enduring alliance by Julian Lindley-French (European Union Centre for Security Studies) The International Monetary Fund (2007) Politics of conditional lending by James Raymond Vreeland (Yale University) The Group of 7/8 (2007) by Hugo Dobson (University of Sheffield) The World Economic Forum (2007) A multi-stakeholder approach to global governance by Geoffrey Allen Pigman (Bennington College) The International Committee of the Red Cross (2007) A neutral humanitarian actor by David Forsythe (University of Nebraska) and Barbara Ann Rieffer-Flanagan (Central Washington University) The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (2007) by David J. Galbreath (University of Aberdeen)
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) (2007) by Ian Taylor (University of St Andrews) and Karen Smith (University of Stellenbosch) A Crisis of Global Institutions? (2007) Multilateralism and international security by Edward Newman (University of Birmingham) The World Trade Organization (2007) Law, economics, and politics by Bernard Hoekman (World Bank) and Petros Mavroidis (Columbia University) The African Union (2008) Challenges of globalization, security and governance by Samuel M. Makinda (Murdoch University) and F. Wafula Okumu (Institute for Security Studies) Commonwealth (2008) Inter- and non-state contributions to global governance by Timothy M. Shaw (Royal Roads University and University of the West Indies) The European Union (2008) by Clive Archer (Manchester Metropolitan University) The World Bank (2008) From reconstruction to development to equity by Katherine Marshall (Georgetown University)
Contemporary Human Rights Ideas (2008) by Bertrand G. Ramcharan (Geneva Graduate Institute of International Studies)
Internet Governance The new frontier of global institutions by John Mathiason (Syracuse University)
UNHCR (2008) The politics and practice of refugee protection into the twenty-first century by Gil Loescher (University of Oxford), James Milner (University of Toronto), and Alexander Betts (University of Oxford)
The International Organization for Standardization and the Global Economy Setting standards by Craig N. Murphy (Wellesley College) and JoAnne Yates (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Institutions of the Global South by Jacqueline Anne Braveboy-Wagner (City College of New York)
Shaping the Humanitarian World by Peter Walker (Tufts University) and Daniel G. Maxwell (Tufts University)
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development by Richard Woodward (University of Hull) Non-Governmental Organizations in Global Politics by Peter Willetts (City University, London) The International Labour Organization by Steve Hughes (University of Newcastle) and Nigel Haworth (The University of Auckland Business School)
Global Institutions and the HIV/ AIDS Epidemic Responding to an international crisis by Franklyn Lisk (University of Warwick) Global Food and Agricultural Institutions by John Shaw African Economic Institutions by Kwame Akonor (Seton Hall University)
The World Health Organization by Kelley Lee (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine)
Institutions of the Asia-Pacific ASEAN, APEC, and beyond by Mark Beeson (University of Birmingham)
The International Olympic Committee by Jean-Loup Chappelet (IDHEAP Swiss Graduate School of Public Administration) and Brenda Ku¨bler-Mabbott
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) by Elizabeth A. Mandeville (Tufts University) and Craig N. Murphy (Wellesley College)
The Regional Development Banks Lending with a regional flavor by Jonathan R. Strand (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) Multilateral Cooperation Against Terrorism by Peter Romaniuk (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY)
Transnational Organized Crime by Frank Madsen (University of Cambridge) Pacebuilding From concept to commission by Robert Jenkins (University of London)
For further information regarding the series, please contact: Craig Fowlie, Publisher, Politics & International Studies Taylor & Francis 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon Oxford OX14 4RN, UK +44 (0)207 842 2057 Tel +44 (0)207 842 2302 Fax
[email protected] www.routledge.com
The European Union
Clive Archer
First published 2008 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
# 2008 Clive Archer All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-02972-0 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 978-0-415-37012-7 (hbk) ISBN 978-0-415-37011-6 (pbk) ISBN 978-0-203-02972-5 (ebk)
Contents
List of illustrations Foreword Acknowledgments Abbreviations
x xi xv xvi
Introduction
1
1
The debate on the nature of the EU
5
2
A brief history of European integration
19
3
Institutions and processes
33
4
The EU’s domestic policies
59
5
The EU’s external activities
99
6
Where to now?
134
Appendixes Notes Select bibliography Index
142 147 163 167
Illustrations
Map 1
EU member states and candidate countries
xx
Boxes 3.1 3.2 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 6.1
The main institutions of the European Union Other European Union institutions The European Monetary System The Treaty of Maastricht and EMU Reforms of the structural funds from 1988 to 2007 Justice and home affairs issues Paying for the policies: the EU’s budget The Treaty of Maastricht and the CFSP CFSP instruments The CFSP and the Constitutional Treaty ESDP operations The expansion of the EC/EU
34 44 74 76 87 93 96 110 113 121 124 135
Foreword
The current volume is the twenty-first in a dynamic series on ‘‘global institutions.’’ The series strives (and, based on the volumes published to date, succeeds) to provide readers with definitive guides to the most visible aspects of what we know as ‘‘global governance.’’ Remarkable as it may seem, there exist relatively few books that offer in-depth treatments of prominent global bodies, processes and associated issues, much less an entire series of concise and complementary volumes. Those that do exist are either out of date, inaccessible to the nonspecialist reader, or seek to develop a specialized understanding of particular aspects of an institution or process rather than offer an overall account of its functioning. Similarly, existing books have often been written in highly technical language or have been crafted ‘‘inhouse’’ and are notoriously self-serving and narrow. The advent of electronic media has undoubtedly helped research and teaching by making data and primary documents of international organizations more widely available, but it has also complicated matters. The growing reliance on the Internet and other electronic methods of finding information about key international organizations and processes has served, ironically, to limit the quality of educational and analytical materials to which most readers have ready access—namely, books. Public relations documents, raw data, and loosely refereed web sites do not make for intelligent analysis. Official publications compete with a vast amount of electronically available information, much of which is suspect because of its ideological or self-promoting slant. Paradoxically, a growing range of purportedly independent web sites offering analyses of the activities of particular organizations has emerged, but one inadvertent consequence has been to frustrate access to basic, authoritative, readable, critical, and well-researched texts. The market for such has actually been reduced by the ready availability of varying quality electronic materials.
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Foreword
For those of us who teach, research, and practice in the area, such access to information has been particularly frustrating. We thus were delighted when Routledge saw the value of a series that bucks this trend and provides key reference points to the most significant global institutions and issues. They know that serious students and professionals want serious analyses. We have assembled a first-rate line-up of authors to address that market. Our intention is to provide one-stop shopping for all readers—students (both undergraduate and postgraduate), negotiators, diplomats, practitioners from nongovernmental and intergovernmental organizations, and interested parties alike—seeking information about most prominent institutional aspects of global governance.
The European Union The European Union (EU) is unique among global institutions. Neither simply an intergovernmental organization nor a supranational institution, the EU is a complex set of international and transnational bodies drawn together for the purpose of uniting Europe. In this task it has been remarkably successful by bringing peace to a continent torn apart by the First and Second World Wars and deeply divided by the Cold War. It began as an experiment to assist in the reconstruction of Europe’s economic endeavors, but its success has enabled it to grow to the point where it has surpassed the United States as the largest economy on the planet. Ernst B. Haas’s early examination was aptly titled, Beyond the Nation-State.1 The EU is not, however, always remembered for the contribution that it has made to peace and prosperity in Europe. More often than not scorn is poured on the organization by Europe’s press for such things as the monthly transportation of large quantities of paperwork from Brussels to Strasbourg to facilitate the shifting location of meetings of the European Parliament (labeled a ‘‘traveling circus’’ by the British Daily Mail),2 attempts to standardize produce and merchandise such as the shape and size of bananas and condoms among other things (worried about by the UK’s Daily Telegraph),3 or the expenditure of European tax payers’ money on projects that appear to be of little value (see Germany’s Der Spiegel).4 But it is not just the press that decries the EU. All too often the organization is also the target of Euroskeptic and Europhile frustrations alike. The furor that surrounds the EU obscures both a coherent understanding of what it is and does (and what it is not and does not do), its raison d’eˆtre, and its real successes and failures. Few, for instance
Foreword
xiii
bother to specify precisely which bit of the EU they are talking about (European Commission, European Central Bank, European Parliament, European Council, or European Court of Justice). Or, in remarking on ‘‘Brussels,’’ many fail to identify one of the institutions associated with its past and present (such as the European Coal and Steel Community, the European Atomic Energy Agency, the European Economic Area, the European Economic Community, the European Free Trade Agreement and so on). Fewer still appreciate that the rise of the EU is intrinsically related to the rise of American power and US foreign policy in the post-war era. Without the Marshall Plan or the support of the US Defense Department, Europe’s industrial reconstruction could not have proceeded at the pace it did (or, most likely, been quite so spectacular).5 Moreover, had it not been for US support (not to mention some canny French negotiating),6 Europe’s imperial powers would not have been able to prolong their colonial ties with the developing world by sharing some of the financial burden of empire among the fledgling European Economic Community (EEC) through Part IV of the Treaty of Rome and, later, the Arusha, Yaounde´, Lome´ and Cotonou Conventions. The story of the EU is, of course, not complete without an understanding of the drive for a European constitution; the politics and political economy of the Eurozone; key political figures (Charles de Gaulle, Margaret Thatcher, and Helmut Kohl, among many others); debates about defense, immigration, development assistance, representation, and human rights; the further expansion of the EU, particularly to include members from the former Soviet Union as well as Turkey; and the role of Europe in the so-called global war on terror among other things. Given the potential size and complexity of a book on the EU, we needed a first-rate scholar with a track record in publishing the very best work in the area. We were delighted when Clive Archer agreed to write this book for us. He is a Research Professor in the Department of Politics and Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University, and Director of two research networks: the ‘‘Northern Dimension Initiative of the European Union’’ and the ‘‘European Security and Defence Policy and Northern Europe.’’ He is author of one of the best-selling books on international organizations—simply entitled International Organizations (now in its third edition)7—and author and co-author of two highly regarded books on Europe’s institutions.8 As one would expect from someone of Clive’s caliber, each page brims with knowledge and insight, and, all too rare in books of these kind, it is written in a crisp and clear style. If only all who were
xiv Foreword engaging in debate about the EU had first read this book, then many of the misperceptions that prevail would be corrected. Not only students, scholars, and practitioners would benefit from reading this excellent book, but also Europe’s press. As always, we look forward to comments from first-time or veteran readers of the Global Institutions Series. Thomas G. Weiss, The CUNY Graduate Center, New York, USA Rorden Wilkinson, University of Manchester, UK December 2007
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the Editors of the series, as well as Paul Cammack, Tobias Etzold, Neill Nugent, and Janet Mather, for their kind help and suggestions during the writing of this book. Thanks are also due to Emma Poole for her assistance in chasing on-line material, and to my wife, Liz Archer, for her understanding during the writing of the work and also for indexing the finished product. Some of the material in Chapter 5 was gathered while I was working with a transnational network on the European Security and Defense Policy and Northern Europe, which resulted in Clive Archer, ed., New Security Issues in Northern Europe: The Nordic and Baltic States and the ESDP (London and New York: Routledge, 2008). My thanks also to colleagues in that network for their insights. Clive Archer
Abbreviations
ACP AEMM AFTA AKP APEC ASEAN ASEM BRIC BSE CAP CEDEFOP CEECs CEN CET CFP CFSP CIs CoR Coreper CSF DG EAGGF EC ECAP ECB ECCP ECHO ECJ Ecofin
African, Caribbean and Pacific states ASEAN-EC Ministerial Meeting ASEAN Free Trade Area Justice and Development Party (Turkey) Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Association of South East Asian Nations Asia-Europe Meeting Brazil, Russia, India, China Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy Common Agricultural Policy European Center for the Development of Vocational Training Central and East European Countries European Standardization Committee Common External Tariff Common Fisheries Policy Common Foreign and Security Policy Community Initiatives Committee of the Regions Committee of Permanent Representatives Community Support Framework Directorate General (of the European Commission) European Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund European Communities European Capabilities Action Plan European Central Bank European Climate Change Program European Community Humanitarian Aid Office European Court of Justice Economic and Financial Affairs Council
Abbreviations ECSC ECU EDC EEA EEC EDA EEA EEC EESC EFSA EFTA EIB EMEA EMI EMS EMU ENP ENPI EP EPA EPC EPP-ED ERDF ERM ESCB ESDP ESF ETUC EU EUA EUMC EUMS EUPM EUR Euratom Europol FAWEU FIFG FRONTEX FSJ
xvii
European Coal and Steel Community European Currency Unit European Defense Community European Environment Agency European Economic Community European Defense Agency European Economic Area European Economic Community European Economic and Social Committee European Food Safety Authority European Free Trade Association European Investment Bank European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products European Monetary Institute European Monetary System Economic and Monetary Union European Neighborhood Policy European Neighborhood Policy Instrument European Parliament Economic Partnership Agreement European Political Cooperation European People’s Party – European Democrats European Regional Development Fund Exchange Rate Mechanism European System of Central Banks European Security and Defense Policy European Social Fund European Trade Union Confederation European Union European Unit of Account European Union Military Committee European Union Military Staff European Union Police Mission euro E (currency) European Atomic Energy Community European Police Office Forces answerable to the WEU Financial Instrument of Fisheries Guidance Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders Freedom, security and justice
xviii
Abbreviations
GAER GATT GDP GSP IGC IMF INTERREG ISPA IT JHA KFOR LDCs MCA MEP MGQ NATO NCBs NGOs OCCAR OCT OECD OEEC OMC OPs OPEC OSCE PCA PHARE PSC QMV QRs RDF REACH Sapard SEA SEM SME Stabex Sysmin
General Affairs and External Relations Council General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Gross Domestic Product Generalized System of Preferences intergovernmental conference International Monetary Fund Inter-regional cooperation program Instrument for Structural Policies for Pre-Accession information technology Justice and Home Affairs Kosovo Force Least Developed Countries Monetary Compensation Amount Member of the European Parliament maximum guaranteed quantities North Atlantic Treaty Organization National Central Banks Non-governmental organizations Organisation Conjointe de Coope´ration en matie`re d’Armement Overseas Countries and Territories Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Organization for European Economic Cooperation Open Method of Cooperation Operational Programs Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (EU-Russia) Poland-Hungary Action for Economic Reconstruction Political and Security Committee Qualified Majority Vote Quantitative Restrictions Regional Development Fund registration, evaluation and authorization of chemicals Special Accession Program for Agriculture and Rural Development Single European Act Single European Market Small and medium-sized enterprise System for the Stabilization of Export Earnings System for the Stabilization of Mineral Export Earnings
Abbreviations TEC TEU TFEU TREATI UK UN UNICE US VAT WEAG WEAO WEU WTO
xix
Treaty establishing the European Communities Treaty on European Union Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union Trans-Regional EU-ASEAN Trade Initiative United Kingdom United Nations Union of Industrial and Employers’ Confederations of Europe United States Value Added Tax (sales tax) Western European Armaments Group Western European Armaments Organization Western European Union World Trade Organization
Map 1 EU member states and candidate countries.
Introduction
During the latter half of the twentieth century, the history of Western Europe and increasingly of the rest of Europe was written in the mundane terms of treaties, regulations, directives, minutes of meetings and ministerial memos rather than in the more historical terms of the alliances, mass unemployment, war, slaughter and inhumanity that had defaced Europe in the first half of the century. A major contribution to this change was made by the process known as European integration. The institutional embodiments of that movement have been the European Communities (EC) and its successor, the European Union (EU). This move from dark poetry to dense prose in the framing of Europe may provide a less dramatic story, but it is nevertheless one that has wider lessons for political development. It has not been a straightforward glide from war and destruction to peace and construction, neither have the methods used by members of the EC and EU to regulate their relations been without controversy. Why then is the EU important? It is relevant for those living within its boundaries because it guides and affects so much of economic life, as well as other policy areas. The creation of a single economic market within the EU means that, broadly, companies within the EU can buy, sell and move money without meeting trading barriers, and that, more than before, EU citizens can seek work across the national boundaries of the EU member states as if they were within just one state. Furthermore 15 of the 27 members have the same currency, the euro, making economic intercourse between them that much easier and cheaper. Those living within the EU can rely on its legal system to protect them in a range of areas such as their work rights, their pensions, equality between the sexes and their right to set up small businesses outside their native land but within the EU. The EU’s institutions will not guarantee them a job nor does it guarantee that their pensions do not shrink in value or that there are no problems with the
2
Introduction
promotion of women, but it has been clearing away disparities based on nationality, age and gender. Second, the EU is of importance for the wider Europe. At best, the process of European integration that has the EU at its apex can be seen as a peace project in Europe. It has helped to contribute to the process whereby France and Germany, at each other’s throats from 1870 until 1945, decided to become so dependent on each other and entwined, that war was no longer a possible, let alone desirable, option. Border and territorial disputes were forgotten, made redundant by the increased porosity of frontiers within the EU and its predecessor, the EC. After the events of 1989, when the former communist-ruled states of Central and Eastern Europe threw off control from Moscow and their undemocratic governments, the EC, and then the EU, provided them with economic support but also acted as a beacon, representing the normal Europe of democracy, open societies and market economies, which these states could aspire to join. Any bilateral disputes were to be settled peacefully and the norms, rules and regulations of the EU were those to be followed for candidate states. The enlargement process of 2004 saw eight Central and East European countries (CEECs) and two Mediterranean island states join the EU, with Romania and Bulgaria joining in January 2007, and the prospect of membership held out for a few other European states. The EU has also had its failures in Europe. The disintegration of Yugoslavia was a blood-soaked drama acted out while the mundane details of the founding document of the EU were being negotiated. The EU, and the EC before it, has had an extended courtship with Turkey with some member states skeptical about the country’s European credentials, and the relationship with Russia has been one of uncertainty and disappointment. Nevertheless the process of European integration dominated Western Europe from the 1950s through to the end of the 1980s and then, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the politics of East and Central Europe outside Russia and a few of its immediate neighbors. Third, the EU has a global reach. The EC was clearly a trading bloc that negotiated with Japan and the United States and other countries in the world’s economic forums. The EU has had a presence in the foreign affairs of its member states and its influence can be felt in more than just trade matters. As yet, it may not act as a state, and whether it is going that way has been a bone of contention. Nevertheless, it has some state-like qualities in the international arena and its influence, combined with that of its member states, gives it clout internationally, whether in helping to re-build states in
Introduction
3
the Balkans or in the complicated World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations. Finally, the EU has importance because of its very nature. It is not a state, neither is it an international organization like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). The discussion about the EU’s nature can be seen in Chapter 1. It is, at least, a complex of international organizations, transnational connections and systems of governance. It is unique, and, as such, it attracts the attention of social scientists. Some politicians wish it to become a state like the United States of America; others fear that it might become just that. With its worldwide reach and complex institutional form, it is indeed a Global Institution. Nevertheless, it has been the creation of politicians, diplomats and bureaucrats, and its half century of existence (in one form or another) has been marked by differences over the way it should develop. At first within the EC of the Six, the debate was between the followers of the ‘‘Monnet Method’’ set down by the founding father of the Communities idea, the Frenchmen Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman, and President Charles de Gaulle. Later the battle lines were more between those who, like de Gaulle, favored a more intergovernmental approach to the EC’s development, for example, Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister in the 1980s, and those such as President of the European Commission from 1985 to 1994, Jacques Delors, who wanted the Commission to do more and to have more powers. By the fiftieth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome (signed in March 1957), there seemed to be a sort of consensus emerging that the EU, as the EC had become, should do less but should do it better. This debate has some echo of that across the decades within the United States between those who favored ‘‘Big Government,’’ as in President Lyndon Johnson’s ‘‘Great Society,’’ and those, such as President Ronald Reagan, who wanted Washington DC to do less but to act more effectively. That neither president got what he wanted was an example of what happens when ideas meet political realities, and so it has been with the EU. The aim of this book is threefold. The first is to place the process of European integration into a context. This will be undertaken in the next two chapters. Chapter 1 deals with the debate about the EU and European integration more generally. To some extent it reflects the disagreement outlined above between those involved in the policymaking process, but the debate goes further. It reflects on the possibility of changing the nature of relations between states and societies by European integration and its institutions. Chapter 2 provides a short
4
Introduction
account of the history of Europe, outlining some of the major elements of unity and division. For almost all of its existence Europe has been politically divided and even now there are those states that are outside the EU. Nevertheless, the continent has been united, and peacefully so, as never before. The second aim is to provide information about the EU. Chapter 3 gives some consideration to the institutions that have been and still are involved in the move towards the EU. The tension between community-based and state-based institutions continues and can be seen in the various decision-making processes of the EU. The development of the main areas of EU policy can be seen in Chapter 4, but their limitations are also shown. The rise of the EU has not been an unmitigated success story; indeed its activities have shown the problems of trying to formulate policies fitting most of the states of Europe outside of Russia. Likewise, the EU’s dealings with the rest of Europe and the rest of the world have seen major issues arise, as shown in Chapter 5. The EU is a large trade bloc with a global presence, but it has taken time to arrange its relationships with the other major trading countries and groupings in the world. Its links with the United States have been ones of a friend, competitor and occasional adversary. The third aim is to ask questions about the EU. This is done when examining the nature of the beast in Chapter 1, but also in covering the institutions, domestic policies and external presence of the EU. Particular questions arise in Chapter 6 when looking toward the future. To what extent can the EU expand? Does it make sense for its frontiers to stretch to the Middle East? How are the institutions evolving, and which policy areas might emerge? Finally, will the EU survive its turbulent middle age or is it in terminal decline? It is hoped that, as well as providing some answers to questions about the EU, this book will encourage the student of European integration to seek further information, and to that end a select bibliography is provided.
1
The debate on the nature of the EU
How can we best describe the European Union (EU)? The answer to this question reflects the ambiguity over the formation of the EU, through its predecessors as outlined in the Introduction. What its founders, and some of its member states, wanted it to be, is different from the plans outlined by others active in its growth. There has also been an academic debate that to some extent mirrors the dispute between the formulators of the EU. An analysis of the nature of the EU depends partly on whether one sees it from the top down—the international perspective—or from the bottom up, the national perspective. It also reflects whether it is seen in existing political terms or whether new concepts are needed to describe it.
Bottom up, sideways on or top down? The 1951 Treaty of Paris that established the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and the subsequent treaties that have led to the creation of the EU and elaborated on it, were all international treaties agreed between the governments of the member states. The EU clearly has an inter-state element that allows it to be compared with other international organizations (IOs). An international organization has been defined as ‘‘a formal, continuous structure established by agreement between members . . . from two or more sovereign states with the aim of pursuing the common interest of the membership.’’1 The EU fulfils these criteria. It is a formal structure that has been in existence, in one form or another, for over 50 years, and was established by its original six members and its existence confirmed by international treaty by its current 27 members. It was clear in the proposed Treaty on the Constitution, agreed in 2004, that the Union was there to serve its membership. It stated that
6
The debate on the nature of the EU [r]eflecting the will of the citizens and States of Europe to build a common future, this Constitution establishes the European Union, on which the Member States confer competences to attain objectives they have in common. The Union shall coordinate the policies by which the Member States aim to achieve these objectives, and shall exercise on a Community basis the competences they confer on it.2
But does the EU go further? The Union can be seen as more than just an international organization, containing a host of institutions, but more a state in the making. After all, the member states agreed a constitution. It makes law that can be directly applicable to the citizens of the member states. It has the elements of government—an executive, a legislature and a judiciary, though the relationships between these elements are not as clear-cut as in most states (see Chapter 3). It has diplomatic representation in foreign countries and is an important player on the world stage. It has a flag and a currency controlled by a central bank. However, a comparison with the United States will show that the EU is yet far from being a federal state. The EU has no one president, let alone a directly elected one. It has no army or police force. It is not, nor can it be, a member of the United Nations, and its representatives abroad do not have the standing of states’ ambassadors. There is no definition of state and Union powers as there is of state and federal powers in the United States. The 2004 Constitution that attempted a milder version of such a division was not ratified and was anyhow an international treaty rather than a constitution similar to that of the United States or to the Basic Laws of the Federal Republic of Germany. Nevertheless, there were those, such as John Pinder, who celebrated the establishment of the EU as a federation-inthe-making.3 The special nature of the EU, and its predecessors, means that it can be studied—and debated—at a number of levels. Looking from the bottom up, the EU can be examined as a framework for state and interest group policy. Intergovernmentalists, including liberal intergovernmentalists, have seen the EU as broadly an instrument for its member states and the interests within those states. Taking a more sideways-on approach, there is an emphasis on what the EU does itself, with its policy-making being seen in terms akin to that undertaken by the governments of its member states. There has been a debate between the federalists who saw a definite political form—a federation, albeit imperfectly formed—in the nature of the EU, and the neo-functionalists who saw a more gradual creation of a special
The debate on the nature of the EU
7
entity with the endpoint of federation being but one option. From a top-down perspective, the EU is placed in a wider international perspective, with its special nature resulting from developments in the international system such as globalization. These perspectives need not be mutually exclusive: one can take an intergovernmentalist view of the EU, accept that it has particular supranational institutions and place it in a wider globalist context.4 Also some understandings of the EU have worked at several levels, indeed stressing the range of levels. Indeed, multi-level governance approach has asserted that as the state no longer has a monopoly of European-level policy-making, ‘‘political arenas are interconnected’’ meaning that the ‘‘separation between domestic and international politics, which lies at the heart of the statecentric model, is rejected.’’5 Still, there have been debates over the nature of European integration. Much of the academic debate in the latter half of the twentieth century, when the European Communities (EC) and EU were being shaped, was between those who saw the venture as one that moved Western Europe toward something resembling a federal state, those who thought that European integration was in the hands of and at the service of the member states, and commentators placing the emphasis on the functional connections between the states. Those stressing the interstate nature of the EU examined the extent to which the institutions and polity of the EU has modified the behavior of the member states. This chapter will look at a number of the perspectives on European integration and its institutions and will outline how the debate on its nature has developed.
Federalism Federalism is a concept familiar to Americans and one that found eager recipients in Europe, especially the Federal Republic of Germany in the post-Second World War period. Federalist groups had been particularly strong in the resistance movements to Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during the war. They had felt that their nation-state— taken over by extreme right-wing groups—had failed its people and led them into conflict. They sought to embed their own country in a wider political system, that of a federal Europe. How this was to be done and in what form was a matter of some dispute. One influential group was the anti-Fascists imprisoned by Mussolini, the Italian dictator from 1922 to 1943, on the island of Ventotene. The Ventotene Manifesto of 1941 called for a European Federation and this was taken up by the European Union of Federalists (EUF) formed in 1946 by resistance
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The debate on the nature of the EU
groups.6 The notion was to reformulate the political map of Europe at a time when nation-states had proved either weak in the face of outside attack or open to abuse by extremists. Perhaps the high point for federalists was the European Congress, the meeting of government representatives as well as ‘‘the great and the good’’ in the Hague in May 1948. What emerged was the basically intergovernmentalist Council of Europe (see note 10 in Chapter 3) formed by the governments of Western Europe who mostly resisted having federalist institutions imposed on them. Nevertheless, the federalists hoped that those countries in Western Europe most affected by the war—France, Germany and Italy and the three Benelux states of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg— might still form the basis of a future federal core of Europe. In particular, they looked to the Schuman Plan and Monnet’s ideas of integration as the basis for such a scheme. In Schuman’s Declaration, he stated that ‘‘for peace to have a real chance, there must first be a Europe.’’ To that end, the Plan aimed at ‘‘the European federation which is indispensable to the maintenance of peace.’’7 While the Coal and Steel Community had more modest aims, the federal theme still ran through the life and times of the EC. Altiero Spinelli, one of those behind the Ventotene Manifesto, became a member of the European Parliament and was behind the Draft Treaty on the EU in 1984 that tried to set the EC on the path to federation. The issue came up again in the preparation for the Maastricht Treaty. Jacques Delors, then President of the Commission, described federalism to the European Parliament as ‘‘the consummate form of democracy’’ and his Commission managed to include a reference in an early treaty preamble to the ‘‘federal vocation’’ of the planned EU. This was a red rag to the British bull and the United Kingdom, among other states, demanded, and got, the removal of this reference.8 While the EU has not become a federation, there are nevertheless elements in its make-up that can be seen as federal-like, especially if the notion of federation is tied more closely to separating powers at various geographic levels rather than a particular state-like model.
Functionalism and neo-functionalism The functionalist approach to international politics is often associated with David Mitrany, who, though born in Romania, lived in Britain from 1912 to 1975. He was concerned that the rise of the sovereign state in the nineteenth and early twentieth century would interfere with international cooperation, including that in the economic sphere. He
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saw easier communications bringing societies closer together but governments increasing the barriers between those societies. New social and economic activities were not necessarily most efficiently organized to fit in to the boundaries of a state. He wrote: The new functions imposed upon our political institutions are compelling a complete reconstruction of the technique of government, on a purely practical basis. I reach that conclusion by asking at the outset not, ‘‘what is the ideal form for an international society?’’; but rather, ‘‘what are its essential functions?’’9 He suggested that international cooperation on functional matters— health, transport, trade for example—should be conducted globally across frontiers by expert and technocratic bodies and with regional groups. Writing in 1941, Mitrany accepted that certain functions might be best organized continentally (such as the railway system in Europe), while others like shipping needed intercontinental control and yet further activities, such as aviation, needed global supervision. The nature of the function in a field of activities such as those related to economic, cultural and social affairs would determine the institutions and powers needed to run them internationally, but these would also be quite flexible. In a memorandum to the British government, he foresaw the establishment of international functional bodies ‘‘with autonomous powers and tasks’’ that would link ‘‘authority to a specific activity’’ and would break away ‘‘from the traditional link between authority and a definite territory.’’10 There is little doubt that Mitrany hoped that these institutions would empty out many of the activities of the state and, in the process, build a world community.11 Mitrany wanted a peaceful cooperative world system after the Second World War. However, a number of his insights into the importance of functional cooperation across states can be seen in the growth of integration in Western Europe in the 1950s and 1960s. The new adaptation of functionalist theory—neo-functionalism—to European and Atlanticist institutions is seen in the works of a number of authors and was encouraged at first by the limited area of Community activity in the ECSC. Unlike Mitrany, many of those involved in creating the ECSC also believed in a federal Europe. This was noted by Ernst Haas in his study of the ECSC who, when examining the High Authority of the ECSC thought that: ‘‘The balance of ‘federal’ as against ‘intergovernmental’ powers seems to point to the conclusion that in all matters relating to the routine regulation of the common market, the High Authority is independent of government.’’12
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The debate on the nature of the EU
Haas saw an authority that could act independently of governments, but he also thought that a wider social process might result from this innovation. As well as the functional integration expected in the coal and steel industries, he identified political integration in its ideal type: ‘‘the process whereby political actors in several distinct national settings are persuaded to shift their loyalties, expectations and political activities toward a new center, whose institutions possess or demand, jurisdiction over the pre-existing national states.’’13 This ‘‘new center’’ would be the institutions of the ECSC, and later the EC, and the ‘‘political actors’’ the representatives of businesses, trade unions, consumer groups, as well as politicians and civil servants. As they turned their attention to the new center they would, according to Haas, find that policy in one area ‘‘can be made real only if the task itself is expanded.’’14 This represented a ‘‘spillover’’ from one policy area to another. In order to keep integration going in the first area (such as coal and steel) it had to be expanded to other policies such as social welfare, transport or agriculture, as all these affected the relative conditions under which each member country’s coal and steel firms competed. This was, for Haas, the expansive logic of European integration. This logic proved flawed. While the creation of an Economic Community and an Atomic Energy Community seemed to support the neo-functionalist hypothesis, events in the 1960s and 1970s tested it severely. The clipping of Commission’s wings by President de Gaulle of France and the ‘‘Eurosclerosis’’ of the 1970s (see Chapter 2, p. 48), meant that the neo-functionalist writers had to tone down their expectations. Lindberg and Scheingold thought in 1970 that the whole EC system was susceptible to crisis,15 and Nye thought that ‘‘the neofunctionalist approach still embodies a number of faults that reflect its origins in the 1950’s’’ and proposed to drop the idea of ‘‘a single path from quasi-functional tasks to political union by means of spillover.’’16 By the mid-1970s Haas himself had decided that regional integration theory was ‘‘obsolete in Western Europe,’’17 the problem being the greater turbulence in politics at that time, the ‘‘great social complexity’’ where ‘‘the number of actors is very large’’ whereby ‘‘each pursues a variety of objectives which are mutually incompatible.’’18 The EC’s institutions were just about keeping their heads above water. With the Single European Act of 1986 and the move to a Single European Market by 1992, as well as the move to the EU, the neofunctionalist ideas made something of a comeback. Haas’s notion of ‘‘spillover’’ was refined by Keohane and Hoffmann who saw the Mediterranean enlargement as providing a spur to institutional change in the early 1980s.19 Others saw the Treaty of Maastricht as putting
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wind in the neo-functionalist sails, especially as the outline within the treaty for economic and monetary union suggested an important ‘‘spillover’’ from the creation of the Single European Market.20 Neo-functionalist explanations of European integration have a number of shortcomings. First, as seen, they tend to be limited to particular periods and even to certain areas within the EC and EU. They seem to have their strengths in the 1950s, the 1980s and early 1990s and with economic aspects. Second, they have little to say about the institutional development of the EC and EU. The promise is made of greater Community activity, but little indication is given as to how this might affect the balance between the institutions. Finally, there has been an emphasis on the non-state actors within the EC, EU and the member states, that has led to a stress on the importance of elites. This has often ignored the growing gap between these elites and the voters and consumers who have often been far more skeptical about the European integration process than those in government. Eurobarometers have shown that the public, even in those states that founded the EC, have not shifted their ‘‘loyalties, expectations and political activities toward a new center’’ as Haas had expected, or have done so at a very slow pace.21
Intergovernmentalism As long as sovereign states have existed, they have cooperated with each other for their mutual benefit. This interaction has taken the form of trade, diplomacy and alliances. International organizations, on the international scene since the early nineteenth century, have represented a more permanent form of such cooperation. From the beginning of the EC, some observers treated them as international organizations, albeit quite sophisticated ones, that were reflecting the interests of the member states. One of the earliest writers who pointed to the limitations of European integration was Stanley Hoffmann who recognized that it was ‘‘condemned to be, at best, a success in the economic realm but a fiasco in ‘high politics.’’’22 Alan Milward saw the EC as being servants of the nation-state, much more in the tradition of international organizations. His core argument was [t]he development of the European Community, the process of European integration, was . . . a part of that post-war rescue of the European nation-state, because the new political consensus on which this rescue was built required the process of integration, the surrender of limited areas of national sovereignty to the supranation.23
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Milward disputed the notion that there is an antithesis between the nation-state and the EC which, he claimed, ‘‘was set in circulation by academic discourse.’’24 He challenged the view that ‘‘the process of economic development leads through interdependence progressively to integration’’25 and considered that whether an integrationist framework was used for future policy depended ‘‘on the nature of national, domestic policy choices.’’26 Milward backs his contention with a detailed historical account of the establishment of the European Economic Community, of the European politicians involved in that process and of the United Kingdom and Western Europe. Milward’s account represented a backlash against the neo-functionalist and federalist views that had dominated literature on European integration from the 1950s to the 1980s. It was also a historians’ approach as opposed to that of the political scientists. It was not Euroskeptic, but wanted to place European integration in a more state-oriented framework. It placed an emphasis on political choice within the member states of the EC, and this was perhaps its weakness. Milward’s final chapter, written in 1992, shows him struggling with the effects of the momentous international events of the previous three years. Nevertheless, his approach helped to lay the ground for that of another writer who stressed the role of not just governments but also national interest groups in the formulation of European integration.
Liberal intergovernmentalism One of the most significant contributions in the late twentieth century to our understanding of European integration was made by Andrew Moravcsik and his liberal intergovernmentalist framework. It is ‘‘liberal’’ in the sense that it sees governments as bringing together and aggregating domestic interest groups within a state, and it is ‘‘intergovernmentalist’’ as it stresses the bargains agreed between states. Moravcsik sees the EU as a ‘‘successful intergovernmental regime designed to manage economic interdependence through negotiated policy co-ordination.’’27 The emphasis is thus on the interaction between the domestic political level of member states and the EU level, especially between the representatives of governments. This involves three elements: national preference formation, interstate bargaining, and institutional choice. Governments are not seen as unitary actors internally—domestic political groups contend to press their agenda within governments— but, most of the time, they act within the EU as if they were unitary.28 Though economic motivations are seen as dominant, geopolitical interests are portrayed as being significant, if secondary.29
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Looking at a variety of EC and EU negotiations at the inter-state level, Moravcsik concludes that the intergovernmental element is most important. A significant input by Commission officials or European parliamentarians could only be seen in one agreement, that of the Single European Act. Mediation in negotiations was more often undertaken by government members or individuals rather than by the Commission. It was not the supranational actors that influenced outcomes but more ‘‘the bargaining power of governments.’’30 The third element is that of institutional choice: why did governments decide to pool sovereignty in the EC and the EU? Moravcsik’s answer is that they wanted to anchor the commitments to agreements by their fellow member states.31 If you have given away something in negotiations in exchange for a future benefit, you will want to make sure that promise is delivered, and the supranational institutions of the EC and EU have been seen as efficient ways of enforcing basically international agreements. In Moravcsik’s terms, the EU is an institution built on rational assumptions and not on high hopes and ideals. He concludes that ‘‘(f)or most governments, inducing economic modernization – even with unpleasant side-effects – was the major purpose of European integration.’’32 Moravcsik’s interpretation has been criticized by Stone Sweet and Sandholtz who have placed the emphasis on the differing levels of supranationalism seen in the different policy sectors of the EU.33 They pointed to rule-making at a European level being able to deal with the consequences of the actions based in one state (such as pollution) crossing the borders of another, and saw the supranational institutions of the EU, such as the Commission, pursuing integration at varied rates in various policy areas. They also identified increasing transnational activities across frontiers by firms, organizations and interest groups that helped press for EU controls in matters such as company mergers. This placed the emphasis at the European level, in comparison with the weight given by Moravcsik to the national level. It may be that, rather than refute Moravcsik’s idea, Stone Sweet and Sandholtz have placed their emphasis on the policy areas where it is weakest.
New institutionalism Writers on the EU in the 1990s sought to move away from the seemingly endless battle between those who stressed the powers of the EU’s institutions and those who emphasized the power of member states. They used the New Institutionalism of March and Olsen to
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The debate on the nature of the EU
explain the EU as a political system that could be compared with others.34 These two authors wanted to return to the importance of institutions in political life after a period in which they had been downplayed in preference for a stress on political processes during the late 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, March and Olsen’s key work almost suggested that they had been mislaid for some while.35 However, March and Olsen’s concern was not just with the formal political institutions but also other structured relationships between various groups. The rules that governed these institutions favored access by some groups more than others and these institutions were also politically active themselves. Hall and Taylor have identified three sorts of new institutionalists whose works also have relevance for the study of European integration: rational choice, sociological and historical institutionalism.36 Rational choice institutionalism emphasizes an understanding of the context set by a particular framework of rules. Interest groups and political groups would choose the context that favored them most, even though this might be the EU and not their national setting. This could lead to supranational agents such as the Commission developing independence from their principals, the national governments. Pollack points out that EU member states’ governments have difficulty in overseeing what their agents (EU institutions) are doing, especially as the number and range of tasks increased. Also agents within a larger EU have a greater opportunity to play off one principal, or member state, against another, and with Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) in the Council, the Commission could construct its own winning coalitions.37 The main elements of sociological institutionalism is that it has defined ‘‘institutions’’ very widely almost to reflect culture. Second, the ‘‘self images and identities of social actors are said to be constituted from the institutional forms, images and signs provided by social life.’’38 Finally, the ‘‘logic of appropriateness’’ dominates rather than the ‘‘logic of instrumentality’’ in rational choice institutionalism. This can mean that social and political actors will tend to use institutions that are appropriate to their social aims rather than ones that may ‘‘pay off’’ according to a rational calculation. Historical institutionalism, as the name suggests, places the study of the EU institutions, in this case, in a particular time frame. They stress formal organizations and their rules and conventions. They point especially to ‘‘path dependency’’ which means that a decision that takes one down a particular road makes it easier to continue on that road rather than to turn back.39 They thus stress the ‘‘contextual features
The debate on the nature of the EU
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of a given situation often inherited from the past.’’40 Thus a study of the Common Fisheries Policy would not so much examine whether that policy made much sense in terms of the market for fish or the protection of fish-stocks but would seek to understand how the policy developed in a way that made it difficult to change even when it was clearly a failed policy (see Chapter 4). This approach has also examined the process of Europeanization and how the institutions of the member states have adapted to EU pressures.41
Europeanization Europeanization is a process to be described rather than a theory. Indeed, it can be seen as a number of processes and the word has been used in different ways in varying contexts. Johan Olsen, provides five possible uses of the term. First, it could mean ‘‘the territorial reach of a system of governance and the degree to which Europe as a continent becomes a single political space,’’ thus taking place as the EU enlarges. Second, it refers to the development of institutions at the European level with an ability ‘‘to make and enforce binding decisions and to sanction non-compliance.’’ Third, it could refer to the penetration of national systems of governance by the European political center. Fourth, there is the notion of exporting ‘‘political organization and governance that are typical and distinct for Europe beyond the European territory.’’ Finally, there is ‘‘the degree to which Europe is becoming a more unified and stronger political entity’’ in relation to some or all of the factors just mentioned. Olsen concludes that the territorial state has remained ‘‘highly adaptive when facing radical change in its environment’’ and that domestic institutional structures will show resilience and adaptability when faced with the various forms of Europeanization.42 Christoph Knill places the emphasis on the Europeanization of national administrations, ‘‘the crucial question of how European integration affects domestic administrative practices and structures.’’43 Europeanization is thus the impact of European policies on domestic administrations, Olsen’s third level. While the national European administrative styles and structures vary, ‘‘the increasing Europeanisation of domestic policy-making implies converging policy content.’’44 Knill then examines the conditions under which policy convergence leads to administrative convergence and, to do so, uses a modified historical institutionalist framework. He concludes that it is the ‘‘specific Europeanisation mechanism rather than the nominal category of policy area’’ that is most important when examining the
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The debate on the nature of the EU
domestic impact of European policies. These mechanisms of Europeanization are: prescription from Brussels of a concrete institutional model for domestic compliance (‘‘This is how you must do it’’), changing domestic opportunity structures to make it worthwhile to do things the Brussels’ way, and one having no institutional impact but changing domestic beliefs and expectations so that they fit in more with Europe’s method.45 Vink and Graziano admit that Europeanization shifts attention from the European to the domestic level, especially when it is concerned with the implementation of policy, thus reversing the glance of classic integration theory. Their definition of Europeanization is ‘‘the domestic adaptation to European regional integration’’46 thus giving it a slightly wider meaning than does Knill. Another way of dealing with the tension between the national and European level of governance has been found by Wessels in his fusion thesis. He sees integration as a third way between federalism and intergovernmentalism, used by decision-makers who want at least to make any necessary relinquishing of autonomy tolerable.47
Social constructivists Both intergovernmentalists and neo-functionalists place an emphasis on the role of interests in shaping European integration. Social constructivists place a greater stress on identity and see identity, as well as interests, being shaped by social environment. The study of European integration is not just of the action and reaction of the EU together with the member states and other outside influences, but also of the effect on national viewpoints of the process of integration. Reflecting the words of Jean Monnet, social constructivists examining European integration focus on ‘‘how ‘to build Europe’ over the years.’’ Governments are not ‘‘calculating machines who know what they want.’’48 Risse points to the contribution made by social constructivists to the study of European integration, insofar as they understood that social environment shapes the views of people and also individuals can change their social environment over time. As other authors wrote: ‘‘Institutions are human artifacts; people make them. At the same time, institutions constitute community, shaping how individuals see themselves in relation to others, and providing a foundation for purposive action.’’49 An important element was that of communicative practices that contributed to the ‘‘construction of Europe’’ and also to how people understood European integration.50 This brings one to a
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key issue for social constructivists, that of identity. For them, understanding European integration is not just about policy and institutions but also about European identity. In such matters as which states are allowed into the EU, this is a vital matter. If certain states such as Turkey, are not seen by important groups within the EU as being ‘‘European,’’ then their membership will be opposed on identity grounds, rather than because of any policy shortcomings. Hay and Rosamond see European integration as a ‘‘discursive construct’’ which may constrain actors. Thus it is ‘‘the ideas that actors hold about the context in which they find themselves rather than the context itself which informs the way in which the actors behave.’’51 As these ideas change, so do the possibilities for the EU and, in the words of Tonra referring to the EU’s external behavior, ‘‘The focus on beliefs, identity and norms opens new pathways for analyzing the EU’s international capacity.’’52
Globalists Those that view the EU from a ‘‘top down’’ approach are essentially concerned with explaining the role of the EU in World Politics or, at least, European international relations. At an early stage, Johan Galtung noted the international presence of the European Economic Community. Indeed he saw it as a ‘‘superpower in the making’’ and considered that it was already penetrating its economic and political periphery.53 Later research has stressed more the effect the other way, that of changes in the world economy on the EU decision-makers. Kelstrup outlined how moves to the single European market at the end of the 1980s was encouraged by a European fear of a loss of markets to the US and Japan, while others have seen the globalization of capital and commerce within the World Trade Organization affecting the progress of European integration.54 A neo-Marxist approach taken by Paul Cammack has seen the EU in terms of the wider forces of capitalism, whereby the EU is but one of the global and regional institutions such as the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that have promoted a culture of competition. He claims that the EU ‘‘is a major source of the global politics of competitiveness, in spite (or more likely because) of its rather conspicuous absence among some of its leading economies’’ though he identifies successive UK governments as making the running ‘‘in promoting the disciplines of competitiveness at both national and regional levels.’’55
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Conclusion Getting a theoretical handle on European integration is difficult for a number of reasons. First, ‘‘European integration’’ covers so much from the detailed politics of particular EU policy-making up to the role of the EU in world politics. It is therefore not easy to provide one explanation for a range of polities, policies and politics, and it is perhaps not surprising that the theory adopted depends very much on from where one is approaching the EU. To study a particular aspect of European integration may call upon a particular theory. Second, the EU cuts across a number of disciplines and can thus draw upon a number of approaches. It can muster the insights of the study of government as well as those of international relations. It can also draw on economic theory and sociological understandings. It needs a knowledge of history. To study the range of European integration will need an understanding of a rainbow of theories. Third, the nature of European integration has changed over time and so has its study. During the 1950s and 1960s much that was written about European integration, apart from the purely descriptive, included a neo-functionalist approach or one that made reference to federalism. These notions were revised during the 1970s and, as the EC moved through the Single European Act to the EU, so the theoretical approaches widened to include studies of the EU as a policymaking entity, as a new center for European identity, and as an international actor. European integration has become more complicated and has many more explanations than when it first appeared on the horizon. Indeed, this book displays the panoply of approaches to the EU. The next chapter provides a history of European integration within which the EU emerged. Chapter 3 concentrates on institutions and how they interact, a very political question. Chapter 4 is concerned with the internal policies of the EU, again a matter for political scientists but also economists. Chapter 5 on external policies concerns political scientists, especially those studying international relations.
2
A brief history of European integration
The purpose of this chapter is to provide some historical depth to an understanding of the process of European integration. It was not just an idea dreamed up by a few politicians and academics—it had and has a particular historical context. To understand this, a broad knowledge of the political history of the European continent is needed. European integration can be placed fairly precisely in both geographic and historical terms. It started as a process limited to Continental Western Europe, became much more inclusive of Western Europe and, within 50 years, engaged most of the countries of Northern and Central Europe, with states in the Balkans as well as in Turkey lining up for future membership. It encompasses events from shortly after the Second World War through to the start of the twentyfirst century, but what has taken place during that time makes little sense unless taken in a wider context.
The background The concept of Europe as a continent germinated in the late Middle Ages (during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries). Previously, much of what is regarded as European civilization—that of the Ancient Greeks and Roman Empire—was centered in the Mediterranean and stretched into Asia and Africa. With a divided Christian church— Catholic in Western Europe, Orthodox in the East—after the capture of Constantinople (now Istanbul) by the forces of the Ottomans and Islam, power in Europe started to drift towards the north and the west. The Catholic church saw much of Europe—that outside the control of Russia and the Orthodox church or the Ottoman Empire—as being united in Christendom and subservient, at least in spiritual matters, to the Papacy, the head of that church, in Rome.
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A brief history of European integration
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both feuding within the estates of Catholic Europe and the rise of Protestantism, mainly in Northern Europe, challenged the unity of Christendom. The Thirty Years War (1618–48) was a running sore for Europe that was only healed with the Westphalian treaties of 1648. These agreements not only drew up the peace treaty for the war, but represented an end to many of the pretences of Papal supremacy. The rulers of the European states were recognized as sovereign in their own entities, establishing the idea of ‘‘the sovereign state’’ and the notion of international politics based on relations among such states. Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Age of Exploration led to a world system consisting not just of states based on the European model but of empires carved out of the non-European world mainly by Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal. An attempt by Napoleon of France to create a land-based empire in Europe failed in 1815, but encouraged the rulers of European states to join together against the rise of any one power on the continent of Europe. These efforts degenerated into the creation of increasingly hostile power blocs in Europe, with one based around France and the United Kingdom, and the other around Germany after its unification in 1871. During the First World War (1914–1918) and the Second World War (1939–1945), a coalition of states—including the United States—successfully challenged German attempts to dominate Europe.
Western Europe from war’s end to a new beginning The Versailles Treaty that followed the First World War saw, not least at US insistence, the creation of a number of small nation-states from the remnants of the Russian, Ottoman, Austrian, and German empires in Europe. After the Second World War, there was no such grand settlement, but there was a general understanding about spheres of influence. Much of Europe looked to the major powers that had fought hard for this victory, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union. The areas where the Soviet Red Army had liberated countries from Nazi German control (mainly in East and Central Europe) came under the political and military control of the Soviet Union, the Communist successor state to Russia. The states in that region were placed in service to the Communist bloc run from Moscow. Under the strict control of Josef Stalin, the Communist party made its presence known in the political lives and structures of those states. By 1948, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had been included in the Soviet Union; Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, and Poland had
A brief history of European integration
21
communist-dominated governments; and Czechoslovakia was about to go that way. The Soviet Union had made sure that the non-communist parties in these countries either disappeared or became dominated by their local communist parties. This steady domination of the eastern part of the continent by Moscow had made the newly liberated states of Western Europe wary. In those countries, it was the British and Americans who were the liberators and all parties, including the communists, had been allowed into government. Again by 1948, the communist parties had been either voted or forced out of office in almost all of the West European states—though they still existed as legal political parties. The main concern of the United Kingdom and of governments in Western Europe was to keep US interest and involvement in the continent. This had been secured in 1947 with the massive aid program for Europe announced by US Secretary of State George Marshall, which became the Marshall Plan and Marshall Aid, and the advancing of the Truman Doctrine by which the US President promised American assistance to free people wishing to preserve themselves against tyranny, meaning communism. All these changes have to be seen in the context of the wider construction of international organizations at the end of the war with the creation of the United Nations, joined by almost all the sovereign states that had been on the winning side, and the economic organizations agreed by the Western world at Bretton Woods. These included the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), all aimed at preventing a return to the disastrous inter-war economic policies.1 The events of Easter 1948 crystallized the east-west split in Europe. The Soviet Union engineered a communist take-over in Czechoslovakia and put pressure on Finland to sign a treaty with Moscow. In response both to the US promise of assistance and the seeming political threat from the Soviets, the United Kingdom, France, and the Benelux states (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg), signed the Brussels Treaty that offered common protection against any aggressor. In June 1948, the Soviet Union, which had imposed a communist government on East Germany, occupied by its troops, blockaded Western access to the non-communist West Berlin which was under the control of the United States, the UK, and France. These events led to the signing in 1949 of the North Atlantic Treaty among the Brussels Treaty states, some of the other West European countries (Italy, Portugal, Denmark, Iceland, and Norway) and the two North American countries of Canada and the United States. The
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A brief history of European integration
treaty did not then have an organization attached but it was a demonstration of American commitment to Europe. This was also shown in the establishment in 1948 of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) with a membership drawn from Western Europe and with the United States and Canada as associates. Its main task was to help guide Marshall Aid. Finally, the parliamentary democracies in West Europe established the Council of Europe in 1948 to bring together its parliamentarians and to set out the positive side of their beliefs. So by the middle of 1949, much of Western Europe was covered by international institutions that not only bound the member states together, such as the Council of Europe or the Western Union resulting from the Brussels Pact, but, like the OEEC and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), helped to knit North America more tightly to Western Europe. The East European countries under Moscow’s control were conspicuous by their absence from these new institutions. Also absent was the newly formed Federal Republic of Germany— West Germany. Germany had been occupied by the victors of the Second World War in 1945, and the three Western ones—the United States, the UK, and France—had agreed to pool their occupied zones to create a new democratic country. However, France still wanted to keep control of the industrial Ruhr region of West Germany through fear that the industry there would again be used for armaments by a resurgent Germany. The British and the Americans wished the new West German government to take over these resources and put pressure on France to rethink its ideas about Germany.
The launch of an idea The most important new idea was that advanced by Jean Monnet. He was a French, and international, civil servant who had remarkable political connections. He proposed a plan to the French foreign minister, Robert Schuman, that would solve the problem of how France could deal with West Germany. Trying to keep the Germans down was not succeeding when the British and the Americans wanted them revived economically. Attempting to keep control over the industrial Ruhr and Saar areas of Germany only bred German resentment. Monnet suggested that the French and German coal and steel industries, then the key ones for economic revival, should have their markets pooled under a ‘‘High Authority’’ with independent powers. Other West European states could join. Any growth would be mutual and these industries could scarcely be used to build armaments to use
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against each other. Monnet’s idea built on previous similar notions, but its advantage was that it was advanced as the Schuman Plan—from the French government—and immediately accepted by the West German government.2 The Plan thus offered a solution to the Franco-German problem and also dealt with fears of economic collapse after the end of the post-war economic boom by managing the revival of the coal and steel industries. The six core states of Western Europe—France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg— negotiated the Treaty of Paris (1951) that established the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) on the basis of the Schuman Plan. The United Kingdom stayed away from the talks. The British Labour government of Clement Attlee disliked the notion of a supranational authority above the nation-states represented by the High Authority. Labour had nationalized the coal and steel industries in the United Kingdom after coming to power in 1945, and they were not willing to allow control to slip away to a European body. Plans were advanced for similar functional communities in other areas apart from coal and steel. Transport was one, and defense another. The proposal for a European Defense Community (EDC) went far and was only stopped by the French National Assembly (parliament) in 1954 once it had reached treaty form. At that point, the United Kingdom stepped in and invited the six potential members of the EDC—the same six that had formed the ECSC—to join a less integrated Western European Union (WEU), a defense agreement that placed West German forces under NATO control and committed British armed forces to the defense of continental Western Europe even in peace-time. However, the Community idea did not die with the EDC. Trade negotiations had been dragging on within the OEEC in an attempt to build a free trade area in Western Europe, but there was bitter disagreement between the French, who insisted on including agriculture and advocated powerful institutions, and the British, who wanted agriculture excluded and weak institutions. In the end the negotiations broke down when the ECSC ‘‘Six’’ started their own talks, in Messina, Italy, about an economic community based on the ECSC ideas. From the start, in June 1955, the talks included a British observer, Russell Bretherton from the UK Board of Trade (trade ministry) rather than a foreign ministry representative. However, discussion of supranational institutions, customs unions and agricultural policy, led to his withdrawal by London. Bretherton reportedly left the six ministers with this advice:
24
A brief history of European integration the future Treaty which you are discussing a) has no chance of being agreed; b) if it was agreed, it would have no chance of being ratified; c) and if it were ratified, it would have no chance of being applied. And . . . if it were applied, it would be totally unacceptable to Britain. You speak of agriculture, which we don’t like, of power over customs, which we take exception to and of institutions which horrifies us . . . au revoir and bonne chance.3
The Six were not easily deterred from their objectives. By March 1957 they had signed two Rome treaties. One established a European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), for atomic energy was seen as the coming replacement for coal; the other set up the European Economic Community (EEC).4 The EEC had as its major aims the establishment of a customs union between the six member states that also included a Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and had a Commission with powers at least reminiscent of those of the ECSC’s High Authority. The British response was to round up like-minded West European states to form in 1960 the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), consisting of seven members.5 Their aim of creating an industrial free trade region meant that they did not have to include agriculture in their plans, neither did they have to agree common external tariffs for all their imports: each member was allowed to keep their tariffs to the rest of the world as long as they removed those with other EFTA members. The institutional format of EFTA was simple: basically it had a Council consisting of ministers or diplomats and a small secretariat. From Bretherton’s farewell to Messina in 1956 until the start of the United Kingdom’s successful membership negotiations with the EEC in 1970, leading to it joining on 1 January 1973, relations between the United Kingdom and the EC were rocky. Until mid-1961 it seemed that the British government was very much of the view expressed by Bretherton—the EEC was just not for the UK. However, the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan did an about-turn in 1961 and applied for EEC membership, much to the surprise of the EFTA states. The British were persuaded by the economic success of the EC, especially when compared with their own economic problems, and were also encouraged by the Kennedy administration in Washington DC. The United States thought that Western Europe was weakened by the division between the Six and the Seven, the EC and EFTA, and considered that the EC would be a sounder organization with British membership. However, a change had taken place within the EC. President de Gaulle had come to power in France and he was as skeptical of the
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powers of the EC’s institutions as had been the British. He also did not think that the UK government was ready to join the Communities, or maybe he did not want to share French partnership with Germany, on which the ECSC, Euratom and the EEC were based, with the British. Either way, he vetoed the first British application for membership in January 1963 and the second one (put in by the UK Labour government in 1965) in 1966. De Gaulle thought that the EC should be based on a ‘‘Europe of the Nation States’’ rather than on the promise of a federal Europe. He feared American influence in Europe and that the UK would be a ‘‘Trojan Horse’’ for the United States. He wanted the Commission to remain as technocrats implementing agreements made by the member states of the EC. Talk by the President of the Commission, Walter Hallstein, of the EC’s institutions following ‘‘a federal pattern,’’ must have worried the French president who carefully clipped the wings of the Hallstein Commission.6 In many ways, de Gaulle shaped the nature of the EC in the 1960s. It took decisions by unanimity in the Council of Ministers. When it looked otherwise, the French absented themselves from the Council until the other five states agreed in the ‘‘Luxembourg Compromise’’ of January 1966 to allow France to reject agreements it did not support, in effect leaving the default situation, that of unanimity in the Council, in place. The French-backed CAP was built up as the central common policy of the EC, and Commission attempts to reform it were sidelined. The United Kingdom and its free-trade friends were kept out. Nevertheless, the Community of Jean Monnet was not entirely buried. A customs union was established, and earlier than in the Treaty of Rome. A functioning Commission went beyond de Gaulle’s limited vision of it as a servant to the Council. The Luxembourg Compromise showed the other five members of the EC to be opposed to de Gaulle’s insistence on unanimity in the EC’s Council, and the way was left open for future decisions by majority vote. Perhaps most importantly, the European Court of Justice handed down decisions that insisted Community law should override national legal systems7 and that individuals could sue their own governments under Community law. In the latter case the Court rather dramatically proclaimed: that the Community constitutes a new legal order of international law for the benefit of which the States have limited their sovereign rights, albeit within limited fields, and the subjects of which compromise not only member states but also their nationals. Independently of the legislation of member states, Community law
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A brief history of European integration therefore not only imposes legislation on individuals but is also intended to confer upon them rights which become part of their legal heritage.8
While de Gaulle was putting the Commission in its place, the Court was quietly insisting on the supranational nature of EC law. Jean Monnet’s idea had not been lost.
The European Communities: wider and deeper President de Gaulle had accepted that the ECSC, Euratom, and EEC should have their institutions merged by a 1965 treaty that came into force in 1967. The separate Councils of the three institutions were unified and the two Commissions and one High Authority became a single European Commission. They already used the same European Assembly and Court. The three merged institutions became known as the European Communities (EC). However, it took a new president in France to allow the United Kingdom into the EC. On 1 January 1973, the UK, Denmark, and Ireland became members. Later that year the price of oil increased substantially in the world market and the economic growth seen in Western Europe since the 1950s stalled. The new British Labour government, in power from 1974, decided it wanted to renegotiate the terms of British membership. By the end of the decade the revolution in Iran had led to a further increase in oil prices. The unstable political and economic climate of the 1970s severely tested the EC. In the words of the prime minister who took the UK into the EC, Edward Heath, ‘‘the Community lost its momentum and, what was worse, lost the philosophy of Jean Monnet that the Community exists to find common solutions to common problems.’’9 There was no shortage of ideas from the friends and followers of Monnet. Indeed the Hague meeting of heads of state and government that had agreed the enlargement of the EC also advanced a proposal for economic and monetary union (EMU). However, in the face of general turbulence in the western money markets, plans for EMU were abandoned by 1974 (though brought back to life by the Commission and the Germans at the end of the 1970s). Likewise the foray of the EC states into foreign affairs had a mixed success. The EC states increased consultation on external policy outside the Communities’ remit, but rarely found unity on issues such as dealing with Middle Eastern states and the United States. The EC was suffering from economic ‘‘Eurosklerosis’’ whereby its economies were growing
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slowly when compared with those of the United States and Asia. It seemed that the most Communautaire advance of the 1970s was the introduction of direct elections for the European Parliament in 1979. Despite this bleak outlook, the 1980s brought a renewal of the European project with an advocate of the Community method in the form of Jacques Delors, President of the Commission from January 1985 to December1994. He took the EC towards the Single European Act, the Single European Market, EMU and the European Union. He did not have a straight run: in many of his efforts he was opposed by his nemesis in the form of the British prime minister from 1979 to 1990, Margaret Thatcher. The two agreed on the need for the Single European Market (SEM, see Chapter 4), with the four freedoms of movement for goods and services, labor and capital by the end of 1992. Also the enlargement to include Greece (1981) and Spain and Portugal (1986) was accepted by all sides. However, Mrs Thatcher considered the SEM to be the high-water mark of the EC and Jacques Delors saw it as part of the relaunching of the EC that would necessitate the Single European Act, and would lead to a single currency within a wider EU. The clash between Thatcher and Delors mirrored the earlier one between de Gaulle and Hallstein, only this time the President of the Commission had the French presidency on his side. At his most fervent, Delors expressed his hope for ‘‘a true federation’’ in Europe by the end of the twentieth century, in which the Commission should become ‘‘a political executive . . . responsible before the European Parliament and before the nation-states representatives.’’10 Mrs Thatcher, irked by some of Delors’ claims for the EC, riposted in 1988 with the Bruges Speech in which she advanced her neo-Gaullist view of Europe: We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them reimposed at European level, with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels . . . Willing and active co-operation between independent sovereign states is the best way to build a successful European Community.11 For a majority of the EC states, and the Commission, the SEM also meant the adoption of a single currency with EMU and the creation of a EU. Both these conclusions were opposed by Mrs Thatcher, but by 1990 she was out of office and, anyhow, outside events were affecting the future of the EC.
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A brief history of European integration
By the late 1980s the Soviet grip on East and Central Europe proved impossible to maintain and in the short period from 1989 to 1991, those countries threw off Soviet control and their Communist government, and the Soviet Union itself collapsed, splitting into 15 republics with Russia as the largest. There was a prospect of the states of Europe coming together in a common purpose, instead of being divided by religious wars, imperial designs, competing coalitions and ideological rifts. The fall in November 1989 of the Berlin Wall led two years later to a unified Germany within the EC. Meanwhile Yugoslavia had cracked apart with resulting warfare and, in 1990, Iraq had invaded Kuwait with a US-led coalition evicting the Iraqis in early 1991. During this period, the EC continued its integration process. Its response to the build-up of the four freedoms of ‘‘1992,’’ plans for a single currency and international events was the Treaty of Maastricht, signed in February 1992.
From European Union to European disunity? The Maastricht Treaty seemed something of a triumph for the integrationists. It set out the hard details of the creation of a single currency, the euro; brought together the foreign, security and interior aspects of cooperation with European Communities issues in one treaty; and even placed a foot in the defense realm, previously the concern of the state or alliances. It developed cooperation in social policy, research, technology, social policy, economic and social cohesion, and environmental policy (all issues dealt with by the SEA), and included new sections on culture, public health, consumer protection, and Trans-European Networks. Most of all, the EC was turned into the EU with the stated aim ‘‘of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe, in which decisions are taken as openly as possible and as closely as possible to the citizen.’’12 After the triumph of negotiating the treaty on the EU in December 1991 and signing it in February 1992, the train of European integration hit the buffers of reality. In the outside world Yugoslavia had descended into strife and bloodshed and the EC states had failed to intervene, mostly because they were divided about what action was needed, if any. The problems of a unified Germany were already beginning to appear, as were the costs which were exported to West Germany and the other EC members. Unemployment rose, the number of immigrants from East and Central Europe and from the conflict in former-Yugoslavia grew in Western Europe.
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On 2 June 1992 the Danish electorate rejected the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty in a referendum, and this was followed by a very narrow ‘‘yes’’ by the French electorate. In September 1992, international speculation forced the UK, Italy, and a number of other EC states out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM, see Chapter 4). Not surprisingly, the Conservative prime minister, John Major, had great difficulty in getting the treaty accepted by the British House of Commons but it was ratified in July 1993. Likewise, the Danes came back with a ‘‘yes’’ in their 1993 referendum after they were allowed to opt out of sections of Maastricht by the Edinburgh Council meeting of December 1992. The irony was that just the malaise that Article 1 of the Maastricht Treaty identified—that of seeming distant and opaque—was the very illness that the EC and then the EU risked taking on by dealing with so many issues of consequence to the citizen. It could no longer remain a bureaucratic organization covering trade issues, of little concern provided that the remedies helped the economy, or assisting agriculture which was of immediate importance to the dwindling number of farmers, so long as food could be found on supermarket shelves. An EU dealing with employment issues, the environment, transport, foreign affairs, immigration, asylum and public health would have to answer increasingly to the demands of the voters and to the concerns of the national politicians. The EU became a convenient whipping-boy when these issues went wrong but seemed unable to attract kudos when things went right. The EU that started work in November 1993 had a number of issues on its plate. First, there was the enlargement to include EFTA states. Austria, Finland, Norway, and Sweden had applied for membership, though Norway dropped out after an adverse referendum result in November 1994. From 1 January 1995, the EU had 15 rather than 12 members. Second, it had to deal with the Central and East European countries (CEECs). These had taken on democratic governments after years of communism and were looking to acceptance in the form of EU membership. The EC, and then the EU, had been reticent in its response. It had preferred the less than generous Europe Agreements with the CEECs (see Chapter 5) rather than offer them rapid membership. Third, its efforts in foreign and security issues seemed dependent on the United States. The Dayton agreement that ended the Yugoslav civil war was brokered by the United States. Finally, it moved towards the single currency. The economic turbulence of the early 1990s calmed and, by the end of the 1990s, 12 member states were ready to exchange their national currencies for the euro (see Chapter 4). Also, changes had to be made in the Maastricht
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Treaty in preparation for the enlargement of the Union to include the CEECs—this was attempted by the Treaty of Amsterdam 1997 (in force 1999) and the Treaty of Nice 2001 (in force 2003). Both agreements brought useful changes; neither prepared the EU fully for enlargement. Finally, the EU embarked on a number of reforms of the CAP and of its own payments that meant that it was potentially more financially sound by the end of the 1990s. Nevertheless, the Commission still had to resign in 1999 after financial and other irregularities came to light. The turn of the twenty-first century saw the EU facing challenges from within and without, making some real progress, but also suffering a crisis of confidence. On the positive side, the EU had, by 2000, introduced a program of reforms in the CAP that would eventually reduce its dominance of the EU budget and fold it into other policies such as those related to environment and rural development. On 1 January 2002, 12 of the member states introduced the euro as their single currency. In March 2000 the Lisbon Council agreed the strategic aim of transforming the EU into a region with the most dynamic and competitive economy in the world, though subsequent action did not live up to this ambitious goal. Also a rapid forward march was agreed for the European Security and Defense Policy after the Helsinki European Council. By the middecade, the Union had troops in former Yugoslavia, and had pieced together a Stability Pact for South-East Europe. By 2002 it was agreed that eight CEECs and two Mediterranean island states (Cyprus and Malta) should join the EU in May 2004, with membership by Bulgaria and Romania postponed until January 2007, and that for Turkey to an undetermined date. Agreements had also been reached with Russia and the African, Caribbean and Pacific states (see Chapter 5). After the attacks on the United States by terrorists on 11 September 2001, the EU countries came closer together on questions of protecting their own frontiers and on cooperation in fighting international terrorism. The economies of the EU heartland in Germany, France and Italy grew only slowly in the early 2000s and unemployment there crept up. In 2001 the member states decided that the Union needed another overhaul if it were to enlarge again, and established a Convention on the Future of Europe to examine EU policy-making, institutions, its world role and its legal standing. The Convention, consisting of parliamentarians, government representatives and people from civil society advanced a draft constitution which, after some changes, the member states included in an—impossibly long—Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe. In 2005 this was passed by a number of
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parliaments throughout the Union but was rejected in two referendums in France and the Netherlands—two of the old core states of the European integration. There were many reasons for this rejection unrelated to the treaty itself, but the grand process of integration had been stopped in its tracks again. The unity of the EU was also shattered by the response of its members to the Iraq War of 2003. The UK, Spain, and many of the new members waiting to join the Union backed the US military action. France, Germany, and Belgium stood out against it. The idea of a common foreign policy looked unrealizable. Nevertheless, the EU recovered and undertook a number of joint operations in the Balkans and Africa and kept a more-or-less united front in the face of Iran’s push to nuclear status. Where does the EU stand as it moves towards 2010? The conflict between Monnet’s Europe and a Europe of the nation-states seems to have been played out with neither side gaining an outright victory. The integrationists have had their successes. There is a clear Community way of making laws and taking decisions, although it is not used for all Union business. The Single European Market may not be complete but it is mostly in place. The presence of the EU in the world is recognized and the negotiating position of the European Commission on trade accepted. The writ of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) runs in 27 states on Community matters. However, the nationstates have not withered away. They still play a vital role in EU decisionmaking, especially in non-Community matters, and it should be remembered that a range of policy issues is outside the EU’s remit. For most people in most member states, their state is still the main point of political reference and of loyalty. The future of the EU is uncertain especially in two areas. First, with the voting down of the Constitutional Treaty, it is unclear where the boundaries of EU activity are. Will some states take back greater control of their agriculture and fisheries? Is the EU going to agree on one ‘‘social model’’ or will each state continue to choose its own and, if so, what consequences does that have on solidarity and cohesion within the EU? Will some states maintain opt-outs, especially from the euro? Second, where will the EU end? Will it include Balkan states other than Greece, Bulgaria and Romania and will it welcome Turkey? If so, it will extend its frontiers up to those of Iraq; will that be accepted by the people of Europe? If not, will the EU become more inward looking and exclusive? Will it take in Ukraine? How will that effect relations with Russia and what if, one day, an application was received from Moscow?
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Conclusion All the above questions indicate that the EU has come a long way since its inception from the Schuman Plan but also that it has not finished its journey. As yet, there is no united states of Europe but neither is it the end of history for European integration. The short history of European integration has shown how open the process has been both to outside forces and domestic pressures. A history of the next 50 years will include China, India, Brazil—as well as the United States and Russia— as outsiders shaping the needs of European integration, and the forces of globalization and the environmental challenge being key factors in Europe’s future. Nevertheless, the main agents of integration—the institutions of the EU—have started to make their own history, not least in the policies covered in Chapter 4 and in the international presence laid out in Chapter 5. The institutions and processes by which policy has been made and an international standing created will now be examined.
3
Institutions and processes
The institutional structure and its legislative processes differentiate the European Union (EU), and its predecessors in the European Communities, from international organizations such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Most international organizations have councils or assemblies consisting of the representatives of the member states, and secretariats that serve the assembly or council. Some have representatives of parliaments or of functional groups such as employers and trade unions.1 In the case of the EU, there is a complexity of institutions that represent not only the member states, but also the voters, functional groups, and regional and local governments. Furthermore, the Union has two other institutions not seen in the run-of-the-mill international organization: the European Commission and the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The European Commission, and its predecessor in the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) the High Authority, have the task of representing the interests of the Union as a whole. The ECJ is not the only international court, but it does have powers in the EU’s member states greater than those possessed by other international courts. Its decisions are applicable directly in the member states, not requiring interpretation by national courts, and they are also applicable to individuals, commercial enterprises and institutions. The legislative processes of the EU are also unusual. There is no one method of making a decision. Some are made in the way used in most international organizations, by the representatives of the member states (the Council) agreeing on a course of action by unanimity, or, on occasions, by a majority (often qualified) of those present and voting. However, a sizeable proportion of decisions are made by combinations of the EU institutions, the Commission, the Council, the European Parliament, the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) and the Committee of the Regions (CoR).
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Institutions and processes
At the start of the life of the European Communities, the normal pattern was that the Commission sent proposals to the Council which decided whether to accept or reject or send them back for re-consideration. The European Parliament (or Assembly, as it was then called) had a consultative role. As long as most of the European Communities’ legislation was technical and limited to a few areas, such as agriculture and trade that directly involved a relatively small part of the population, such a system of interplay between the technocratic Commission and state-based Council seemed appropriate. As the Communities started to legislate for a wider range of subjects of more immediate interest to the electorate, this cozy arrangement was increasingly challenged by the European Parliament, directly elected by the voters of member states from 1979. Once the European Communities became the EU in a blaze of publicity, European voters started to take greater notice of its activities, with the electorate in Denmark even rejecting the Maastricht Treaty that founded the EU at the first time of asking. By then the European Parliament had gathered a number of powers for itself (see Box 3.1) and was fully part of the EU decision-making processes. In some cases it only needed to be consulted, but in an increasing share of EU legislation the Parliament was part of the decision-making or at least its assent was needed (see below). How and why these institutional and decision-making changes took place needs some explanation.
Box 3.1 The main institutions of the European Union European Council After 1974 it was decided to hold regular meetings—at least twice a year—of the heads of state/government of the European Communities (EC) and the President of the European Commission. These meetings were acknowledged in the Single European Act and regularized in the Maastricht Treaty which made the European Council responsible for policies in Pillar Two (Common Foreign and Security Policy) and Pillar Three (Justice and Home Affairs). It also had a general leadership role across the EC and its meetings outline the main guidelines for action by the European Union (EU). The meetings are hosted by the prime minister or president from the country holding the Council Presidency.
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Council of the European Union (Council of Ministers) Even though the Council is a single body, it meets in different configurations attended by the ministers from member states appropriate to the subject under discussion. From enlargement in 2004 there are nine such configurations, a reduction from 22: General Affairs and External Relations (GAER, mainly attended by foreign ministers); Economic and Financial Affairs (Ecofin, attended by finance ministers); Agriculture and Fisheries; Transport, Telecommunications and Energy; Competitiveness; Justice and Home Affairs (attended by interior ministers); Environment; Education, Youth and Culture; Employment, Social Policy, Health and Consumer Affairs. Until 2004, the Presidency of the Council rotated by alphabetical order every six months among the member states. From 2004 a six-month rotation has been agreed. The country holding the Presidency spotlights a few issues for progress during its term, but it normally acts as a facilitator for agreements on tough issues and should not be seen to push its own interests too much during its Presidency. Commission proposals to the Council are sent to the Committee of Permanent Representatives (Coreper), consisting of national ambassadors of the members states of the EU, which prepares the work for Council meetings. Material is divided between that which the Council can pass without further scrutiny (‘‘A’’ points) and that needing the Council’s attention (‘‘B’’ points). Coreper has a large number of working groups that prepare material for its meetings. How the Council deals with matters before it, depends mainly on the treaty basis. Most decisions are by consensus but when a vote is needed, there are three options. Unanimity was the rule until the 1980s, but was removed by the Single European Act for acts needed for the creation of the Single European Market. It is still required for certain issues such as harmonization of indirect taxation and legislation on health and safety, as well as most of the decisions relating to Pillar Two, the Common Foreign and Security Policy, and the Police and Judicial Cooperation in Criminal Matters still under Pillar Three. A simple majority may be required for procedural issues. The qualified majority vote (QMV) can be used for many legislative acts. This involves a system of weighted votes for each state, as well as a qualified, rather than a simple, majority.
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Institutions and processes
The weighting introduced by the Treaty of Rome has been adapted several times, not least in response to an influx of new members. It was realized that the enlargement of 2004 could seriously slow down business in the Council if states could form blocking coalitions, and might produce anomalies whereby legislation was agreed against the wish of certain large states representing most of the EU’s population. The Treaty of Nice succeeded in transferring about 40 treaty provisions from unanimity to QMV. The treaty also produced complicated weighting and QMV systems both for the run-up to enlargement and for an enlarged EU, and this has been adapted for the EU of 25 and then 27 members.2 Without the changes in the ill-fated Constitutional Treaty and then the Reform Treaty, the EU is stuck with this system. The Constitutional Treaty would have transferred to QMV about 30 new policy areas previously open to national vetoes. Web site: consilium.europa.eu
The European Commission The European Commission is the guardian of the treaties that make up the EU, and has a special role in making EU legislation. Its administration is divided into 23 directorates-general, each dealing with a particular functional area such as Justice, Freedom and Security, Economic and Financial Affairs, Agriculture and Rural Development, Enlargement, and External Relations. There are also 10 Internal Services, such as budget and translations, and five General Services, such as Press and Communications, and the Secretariat-General. Each Commissioner also has a group of assistants, the cabinet, headed by a chef de cabinet, who coordinate and keep an eye on policy. The members of the European Commission—the Commissioners— are nominated by the member states acting in common agreement for a renewable five-year term. Since 1995, the Commissioners, including the person nominated by the member states as President of the Commission, must then be approved by the European Parliament (EP). The Court of Justice can remove a Commissioner from office because of a serious offence or because he or she no longer fulfills the required conditions. The EP can also dismiss the Commission in its entirety. Since the Nice Treaty, a Commissioner shall resign if requested by the President of the Commission, with
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the approval of the College (Article 217.4, TEC). In 1999 members of the Santer Commission were accused of mismanagement and corruption and censured by the EP. After an adverse independent report, the whole Commission resigned and was replaced by a new Commission under Romano Prodi in September 1999. Previous to the 2004 enlargement, the larger member states— France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom—nominated two Commissioners and the other member states one. With enlargement it was agreed that each member state nominates one Commissioner. Since the Nice Treaty, the President has had increased powers: the Commission now has to ‘‘work under the political guidance of its President’’ (Article 217.1, TEC). When the Commission takes office, the President allocates each Commissioner a portfolio served by a directorate-general. There are five Vice Presidents of the Barroso Commission (2004–2009, see Appendix 1). Members of the Commission are not to accept instructions from any government or outside body. The Commission has four functions: to ensure the application of the provisions of the treaties and those provisions enacted by EU institutions; to formulate recommendations or opinions when required by the treaties, or where the Commission deems it necessary; to use its own powers of decision as set out in the treaties and to take part in preparing acts of the Council and of the EP; to implement rules laid down by the Council, according to the competence conferred by the Council. The College of Commissioners, the Commission meeting as a whole, takes decisions mostly by consensus but by majority vote if need be. The Commission has 120 Delegations in non-EU countries and also has Delegations to the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. In effect this is the EU’s ‘‘diplomatic service.’’ Web site: ec.europa.eu/index_en.htm
The EP The European Assembly of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and then of the European Economic Community (EEC) and
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European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) originally consisted of national parliamentary members nominated by their home parliaments. However, members sat according to membership of political groups—socialist, Christian democrat, and liberal being the three largest—rather than in national groupings. In June 1979 the first direct elections for the EP were held and, since then, have been held across the member states every five years. In June 2004 the sixth directly elected Parliament was chosen by the electors of the then 25 member states of the enlarged EU, but only on a turnout of 45.6 percent of the electorate, with particularly low votes in some of the new member states—17.0 percent in Slovakia, 20.9 percent in Poland and 28.3 percent in the Czech Republic. Each member state is allocated a number of seats. In the 2004–2009 Parliament Germany has 99, the UK, France, and Italy 78 each, Spain and Poland 54 each; the next eight states have between 18 (Austria and Bulgaria) and 35 seats (Romania); the next five either 13 or 14; and the smallest six states between five seats (Malta) and nine (Latvia). The largest political grouping is that of the EPP-ED (277 seats), followed by the Socialist Group (217 seats) (see Appendix 2). The parliament’s seat is Strasbourg in France although many meetings, especially of committees, are held in Brussels in Belgium. It is run by a bureau consisting of its President and Vice-Presidents and members of the College of Quaestors. The five Quaestors, normally drawn from the EP’s largest parties, assist with the management of the parliament, looking after the interests of the members. The President oversees the activities of the EP and represents it outside the parliament. He or she signs the budget once it is adopted and all legislation is passed under co-decision (see above). The EP shares legislative powers with the Council of the EU and can accept, reject or amend legislation sent by the Council, and has to accept some forms of legislation for them to become EU law. It can now suggest laws to the European Commission. Its approval is needed for EU agreements with third countries and for the appointment of a new Commission. It can dismiss the European Commission. It examines the EU budget which has to be accepted by the EP to become valid. It appoints the European Ombudsman, and has to be consulted on other appointments, such as those to the European Court of Justice (ECJ). Web site: www.europarl.europa.eu
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Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) This consists of one judge from each of the 27 member states, assisted by eight Advocates-General who prepare the cases for the court. The Court members are appointed by common accord by the EU member states for a period of six years. They are chosen from those holding high legal office in their own country and ‘‘whose independence is beyond doubt.’’ They can sit as a full Court for important cases, or in a Grand Chamber for cases involving member states or Community institutions, or, for most cases, in chambers of three or five judges. The task of the Court is to ‘‘ensure that in the interpretation and application of [the] Treaty the law is observed.’’ Direct free access to EU law can be gained through EUR-Lex (eur-lex.europa.eu), by which it is possible to consult the Official Journal of the EU, treaties, legislation and caselaw. The Court has powers over the EC side of the EU (Pillar One) but only a limited role in Pillars Two and Three matters. Community law is directly applicable in the member states. Community law has direct effect: national courts are obliged to recognize and enforce rights and obligations arising from it. There is primacy of Community law in the areas where the EC has competence—it cannot be over-ridden by national parliaments or courts. Individuals, companies, organizations, and institutions can appeal to the Court after having exhausted their national remedies. Web site: www.curia.europa.eu The Court of First Instance is an independent court attached to the ECJ and comprises of at least one judge from each member state. It has the first hearing of cases related to appeals against a decision, actions for damages and failure to act. In 2005 an EU Civil Service Tribunal was established to deal with the variety of cases related to those employed by the EU, which were clogging up the Court of First Instance. From its establishment in 1989 until the end of 2004, the Court had decided over 4,000 cases. The Court of Auditors, created in 1975, consists of one national from each member state and these are expected to have a competency in accounting. Its 27 members are appointed for a six-year term by the Council of Ministers, after consultation with the EP. The Court examines the accounts of the revenue and expenditure of the Community and any bodies set up by it and checks whether
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the financial management has been sound (eca.europa.eu/presenta tion/audit_institution/index_en.htm). It was unable to ‘‘sign off’’ most of the payments from the EU’s budget in 2004, as in previous years, mainly because of poor national controls relating to the Common Agricultural Policy and structural measures (see Chapter 4). Web site: eca.europa.eu
Institutions and decisions: a brief history The original Schuman Plan for the ECSC stated that control of the Franco-German coal and steel production (and those of other member states) should be placed under ‘‘a common High Authority.’’3 During the negotiations for the Treaty of Paris that established the ECSC, Jean Monnet resisted any change to his idea of the new Community being run by a technocratic High Authority but, in the end, had to accept that it would report to an Assembly of parliamentarians and that, on certain key issues, it would need the support of the governmental members of a Council of Ministers.4 Also legal matters would have to be dealt with by a Court. The four key institutions that dominated the later Communities and Union can thus be seen in the ECSC, though the balance of power between them was different from that seen in the later organizations. The High Authority was deemed to be ‘‘supranational,’’ above the nation-state, whereby the member states could not reject those of its decisions that they did not like.5 According to Article 9 of the Treaty of Paris, its members shall consist of nine members . . . chosen on the grounds of their general competence . . . The members of the High Authority shall, in the general interest of the Community, be completely independent in the performance of their duties. In the performance of these duties, they shall neither seek nor take instructions from any Government or from any other body. They shall refrain from any action incompatible with the supranational character of their duties.6 Between Monnet’s original idea and the Treaty of Paris this notion was already watered down somewhat by the creation of the other three institutions, especially the Council of Ministers which could block specific actions of the High Authority. The Council could, and did, prevent the High Authority from taking action in the case of a
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‘‘manifest crisis’’ in the coal or steel industries caused by lack of demand in the market.7 Indeed by 1956 it was the opinion of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs that ‘‘the High Authority, little by little, has had to limit itself to the role of a guardian of the letter of the treaty and to renounce that of a promoter of common policy.’’8 The institutional battles fought within the ECSC did not encourage a replication of the High Authority model in the negotiations, from 1955 to 1957, for the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom). Furthermore, while such an institution may have fitted the limited sectoral remit of Euratom (atomic energy), it was unlikely to be accepted for the wide-ranging EEC covering, as it did, the politically sensitive areas of agriculture, trade, and competition. It seemed more sensible to recognize from the start that, to be effective, proposals from any institution representing the good of the whole Community (as claimed by the High Authority and Commission) would also have to be accepted by the member states, acting in the Council of Ministers. Thus the ‘‘Community method’’ of sharing decision-making between institutions (see below) was born. The EEC and Euratom each had a Commission with more limited powers than those of the High Authority. Nevertheless, the Commissioners were supposed to act in the general interest of the EEC (or Euratom) once in office and, at the start, their term of office was four years (extended to five by the Maastricht Treaty), freeing them from the annual fear of dismissal. The Commissioners are, however, nominated by the governments of the member states, acting in common agreement, though since 1995 the European Parliament has exercised a growing oversight of appointments (see Box 3.1). The College of Commissioners operates under collective responsibility whereby its decisions—taken by majority vote if necessary—are those of the College as a group. It is serviced by 26 functional Directorates-General (DGs) and service offices such as publications, in effect the bureaucracy of the Commission, with each DG headed by a DirectorGeneral. The Commission can be said to represent the ‘‘Community interest’’ within the system. In the Treaties of Rome of 1957 that established the EEC and Euratom, the Commission had the exclusive right to propose legislation to the Council of Ministers. The Commission had only a limited right to make laws itself. After the signing of the Rome treaties, the European Assembly became the parliamentary institution for the EEC and Euratom, as well as the ECSC, and the ECJ also functioned for all three Communities. A merger treaty in 1965 brought together the Council of Ministers
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of the three Communities and merged the High Authority of the ECSC and the two Commissions, those of the EEC and Euratom, to create one Commission. The Council of Ministers was strengthened in the Rome Treaties compared with the Paris Treaty. Nevertheless, it depended on the Commission to send it laws to accept or reject. These were sifted by national officials meeting in the Committee of Permanent Representatives (Coreper), and its various committees, before being placed before the Council. To start with, these decisions were almost always taken by unanimity—if any one state disagreed with a Commission proposal, it would either fall or be sent back for re-drafting. This dealt the Council, and thus the member states, a strong hand in the EEC and, for instance, allowed President de Gaulle of France to face down attempts by the Commission in the mid-1960s to increase powers of its own and those of the Assembly. The Luxembourg Compromise of January 1966 in effect accepted the need for all member states in the Council to accept proposals before they became Community policy.9 With the first enlargement of the European Communities (EC) in January 1973, its institutions began another round of development. The European Assembly, with its new British, Danish, and Irish members, moved toward being recognized as the European Parliament. The first direct election of members was held in June 1979; before national parliamentarians were nominated to the Assembly by national parliaments (see Box 3.1). The European Parliament strengthened its powers especially in relation to rejecting the EC’s budget. In 1975 a Court of Auditors was established to review the EC’s financial management, an uphill task as much of the expenditure is undertaken by national and local authorities. Parallel to the EC institutions, the members of the EC began to discuss a range of foreign policy and other related issues (such as international terrorism) in the process of European Political Cooperation (EPC). Though this process was limited to the EC members, it was entirely inter-governmental, though the President of the Commission was invited to the meetings of the Heads and State and Government of the EC, later known as the European Council.10 This was underpinned by the meeting of foreign ministers in the form of EPC and a system of ‘‘correspondents’’ in each of the foreign ministries tasked to keep in contact with each other, and a regular telegram system.11 In effect, this inter-governmental method of cooperation established itself as the alternative to the Community method. In 1986 the EC members adopted the Single European Act (SEA) which brought together the two systems—EC and EPC—at least in
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one document. In order to prepare for the Single European Market (SEM, see Chapter 4), the SEA extended both the powers of the European Parliament and majority voting in the Council. Under another heading, the SEA set out the institutions of EPC: the European Council, the meetings of foreign ministers with the President of the Commission present, the Presidency of EPC (being the same as the Presidency of the EC’s Council), a Political Committee consisting of senior officials from member states’ foreign ministries, the European Correspondents Group of civil servants implementing EPC decisions, a number of working groups, and a Secretariat in Brussels. It was this duality in the SEA—Commission institutions for EC policies and EPC for cooperation in other areas—that was the precursor to the institutional structures of the Maastricht Treaty. The aim of EPC was ‘‘jointly to formulate and implement a European foreign policy.’’12 Both the Gulf War against Iraq of early 1991 and the Yugoslav crisis later that year seemed to show that it had not had much success. The Treaty of Maastricht, signed in February 1992, incorporated major institutional change for the EC and EPC. By bringing together these two in one institutional form, the EU, it consummated what had been started in the SEA. However, the attempt to capture collective policy formulation in a range of areas in one common document led to a number of stresses and strains, as well as to a vastly complex treaty. The Maastricht Treaty created an EU built on three so-called pillars. Pillar One is the European Community; Pillar Two is the Common Foreign and Security Policy of the Union; and Pillar Three covered Justice and Home Affairs.13 The division was similar to that seen in the SEA but with EPC being divided between Pillars Two and Three. The European Council became responsible also for policies under Pillars Two and Three. There were a number of institutional creations. The post of European Ombudsman was established, taking up the idea from the Nordic states of having an independent investigator of maladministration. The Committee of the Regions (CoR) was set up which, like the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC), was an advisory body, but consisting of representatives from local and regional authorities rather than the trade unions, employers and interest groups of the EESC (see Box 3.2). The institutions associated with Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), mainly the interim European Monetary Institute (EMI), and its successors, the European System of Central Banks (ESCB) and the European Central Bank (ECB), had their basis in the Maastricht Treaty.
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Box 3.2 Other European Union institutions European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) The EESC has 345 members drawn from the 27 member states of the European Union (EU) and who are, according to the Treaty of Nice, ‘‘representatives of the various economic and social components of organized civil society.’’ These are divided into three groups: employers; employees; various interest groups, including those from farming, consumers’ organizations, craftsmen, small and mediumsized enterprises, social and environmental non-governmental organizations and professionals. On certain occasions the EESC has to be consulted in the EU decision-making process, although the extent of its influence has been limited to a detailed and specialist input to legislation. On average the EESC delivers about 150 advisory documents and opinions per annum. Web site: www.eesc.europa.eu
Committee of the Regions (CoR) The CoR was established in 1994 to provide local and regional authorities with an input into EU decision-making, similar to that enjoyed by functional groups in the EESC. It has 345 members chosen by local and regional authorities throughout the 27 member states. Its presence derives from about three-quarters of EU legislation being implemented at local or regional levels. It is also an attempt to bring the EU closer to the localities that it serves. The Commission and Council have to consult the CoR when proposals are made with repercussions at the local or regional level. The Maastricht Treaty named five such areas—economic and social cohesion, trans-European infrastructure networks, health, education, and culture—and the Amsterdam Treaty added five more—employment policy, social policy, the environment, vocational training, and transport. Also, the Council, Commission or Parliament can consult the CoR on matters that have important implications for the regions, and the CoR can take its own initiative by placing matters on the EU’s agenda. Web site: www.cor.europa.eu
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European Ombudsman The first European Ombudsman took office in 1995. He or she is appointed by the European Parliament for a renewable five-year term and can investigate complaints of maladministration against the EU’s bodies and institutions (except its courts). This occurs when these public bodies fail to act in accordance with a rule or principle binding upon it. A citizen of the EU, or resident in it, or a business or association in the EU can complain to it. Complaints are about unnecessary delays, abuse of power, discrimination and refusal of information in the EU context. Web site: www.ombudsman.europa.eu
European Central Bank (ECB) The European System of Central Banks (ESCB) is the framework within which the ECB acts. The ESCB consists of the representatives of the national central banks (NCBs) of the member states, and the ECB. The ECB Governing Council takes decisions and the NCBs participates in the preparation for and implementing of decisions. Those from the non-euro part of the ESCB do not take part in decision-making concerning the eurozone policy. The ECB was established on 1 June 1998, replacing the European Monetary Institute which had been working since 1994. It issued the single currency, the euro, from 1 January 1999 with the introduction of the third stage of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU – see Chapter 4). The Bank has a six-member executive board which is appointed by heads of state and government for a non-renewable term of eight years. The ECB’s main decision-making body is the Governing Council consisting of the ECB’s executive board and the governors of the central banks of countries participating in the EMU, and it formulates monetary policy. The ECB’s main aim is, according to its web site ‘‘to maintain the euro’s purchasing power and thus price stability in the euro area.’’ The General Council is made up of the President and Vice President and the governors of all the central banks of all member states. Web site: www.ecb.eu
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European Investment Bank (EIB) The EU’s international financing institution was established in 1958 by the original six European Economic Community (EEC) states. Its shareholders are now the 27 member states of the EU and most of the EIB’s resources come from bond issues and the capital market. Its aim is to provide or guarantee loans on a non-profit basis for investment projects that contribute to the integration, balanced development and economic and social cohesion of EU member states. Special areas for action are projects that protect the environment, improve communications, strengthen competition, help urban development, ensure secure energy supplies and support small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The EIB also provides support for the African, Caribbean and Pacific countries (see Chapter 5) and the southern Mediterranean states under the Euro-Med program (see Chapter 5), and it has provided resources for the Accession countries about to join the EU. In 2004 the bank borrowed EUR 50 bn and signed financial contracts worth EUR 43.2 bn. The Board of Governors of the EIB consists of a minister, usually the finance minister, from each of the 27 member states. It sets out credit policy guidelines, approves the annual accounts and appoints the Board of Directors, the Management Committee and the Audit Committee. The Board of Directors, headed by the President of the Bank, has the sole power of decision for loans, guarantees and borrowings. The member states nominate 27 of its 28 members, the other being nominated by the European Commission. The Board can also co-opt up to six expert members. The Management Board is the EIB’s executive body and recommends decisions to the Board of Directors. It consists of the President and seven Vice-presidents, nominated by the Board of Directors. The Audit Committee reports to the Board of Governors concerning the management of the EIB’s accounts. Web site: www.eib.org
European Investment Fund The Fund was established in 1994 as a specialized institution of the EIB to support SMEs within the EU. Most of its capital is provided by the EIB (60 percent) and the European Commission (30 percent). Web site: www.eif.org
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Some main agencies (and headquarters): European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (Bilbao, Spain) European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products (EMEA, London, UK) European Center for the Development of Vocational Training (CEDEFOP, Thessaloniki, Greece) European Environment Agency (EEA, Copenhagen, Denmark) European Food Safety Authority (EFSA, Brussels, Belgium) European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia (Vienna, Austria)
The range of subjects covered by Community action in Pillar One was increased and further complications were introduced to the decisionmaking systems. Competence on areas such as environmental policy and economic and social cohesion, covered in the SEA, was extended, and was introduced for industrial competitiveness, culture and consumer protection. The power of co-decision was brought in and the assent and cooperation procedures extended (see below), increasing the European Parliament’s (EP) powers. Furthermore, the notion of subsidiarity was introduced whereby ‘‘decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen.’’14 This seemed to be a recognition that the EU, with its increased scope for action, might well become distant from those on whose behalf it was acting, the people in its member states. Since the coming into force of the Maastricht Treaty in November 1993, the member states of the EU, which it founded, have made a number of attempts to adjust its institutions and law-making, mainly in response to events such as enlargement of its membership. The Amsterdam Treaty of 1997 (effective from 1 May 1999) further erased differences when the institutions dealt with the ECSC, Euratom and the Economic Community (now called the European Community). However, it failed to take action in other institutional areas such as the size of the Commission and the weighting of votes in the Council. Some of the important advances came in the non-Community areas of Pillars Two and Three. Previously when the Presidency had been involved in EPC or Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) matters, it had been in the form of the current Presidency of the Council plus its immediate predecessor and successor—the so-called ‘‘troika,’’ named after the sled drawn by three horses. This was reshaped to include the current Council President, the Commissioner
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for External Affairs and Secretary-General of the Council. This last figure was given extra duties under the Amsterdam Treaty, becoming the High Representative for the CFSP. After the treaty came into force in 1999, Javier Solana, the retiring Secretary-General of NATO, took up this post and became an influential player in the EU’s external policy. Under his command, the Policy Planning and Early Warning Unit was established to allow the EU to have its own input into thinking about the CFSP (see Chapter 5). The Amsterdam Treaty moved common visa, immigration, and asylum policy from Pillar Three to the EC First Pillar and also brought the Schengen agreement (on border control) into the EU system (see Chapter 4). Amsterdam also extended the scope of co-decision into 15 old competences and eight new ones and simplified the procedure.15 The Treaty of Nice (signed 2001, entered into force 2003) attempted to tackle a number of the institutional problems left unsolved by Amsterdam. With the prospect of enlargement to a membership of 25 and, later, 27, the institutional arrangements that had been fashioned for the Community of the six and adapted for the Union of 15, seemed in need of renewal. Indeed Article 2 of the protocol on the institutions in the Amsterdam Treaty talked about an intergovernmental conference (IGC, such as that at Nice) whereby member states could ‘‘carry out a comprehensive review of the provisions of the Treaties on the composition and functioning of the institutions.’’16 Because of basic disagreements between the states, the Nice Treaty just managed the bare necessities of change—and then postponed some key institutional decisions to the Constitutional Treaty. The issue of the size of the Commission was addressed. The prospect of enlargement meant that a Commission of over 20 members (the size then) could bring about greater confusion with overlapping portfolios, not to mention some Commissioners being over-worked while others would scarcely have enough to justify their existence. At Nice, it was agreed that the Commission after enlargement would have one Commission from each state, but that the maximum number of Commissioners would be fixed at 27, after which not all member states will be able to nominate their own Commissioner.17 This meant that— in the future—some EU members would not have one of their nationals on the College of Commissioners. While the Commissioners are certainly not meant to represent their national interests—just the opposite—it is often felt that they are able to inform the Commission of national sensitivities and their presence in the Commission is frequently seen as a matter of honor, especially by the smaller states who fear being overlooked.18
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The Nice Treaty also gave an unclear answer to the question of Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) in the Council of Ministers. Before Nice, the weighting system allowed 10 votes for the largest states down to two votes for Luxembourg, with the small states not being able to block a decision made with the support of the larger states and one other state. The Nice Treaty made plans for an EU of 27 states, which happened on 1 January 2007. The new system gave the four largest states 29 votes and the smallest, Malta, three. Council acts by QMV would require 255 votes out of 345, cast by at least two-thirds of the members. When a decision is being adopted by QMV, a member state could request, under Article 205.4 (Treaty establishing the European Communities, TEC) and Article 23.2 (Treaty on European Union, TEU), verification that the states constituting the majority represent at least 62 percent of the EU’s total population before the decision is adopted. As a result, according to one practitioner, ‘‘the final outcome is complex, difficult to explain and undoubtedly runs counter to the general desire . . . not to make Council decision-making more difficult.’’19 Enhanced cooperation was also refined in the Nice Treaty (see below) and it made changes to the other EU institutions. The division of labor between the Court of Justice and the Court of First Instance (established in 1989; see Box 3.1) was clarified and the way cleared for Judicial Panels to help ease the workload of the Court of First Instance. There was also a widening of the groups represented in the European Economic and Social Committee. A Declaration in the Final Act of the Treaty fixed Brussels as the meeting place for the European Council. The Charter of Fundamental Rights for the European Union was introduced, though it was not part of the treaty and its contents were not binding on the ECJ (see Appendix 3). Despite all this tinkering with the treaties, it was still felt that only the minimum had been achieved at Nice and that, with the coming enlargement, a comprehensive review of EU institutions and law-making was needed, and that the sort of intergovernmental conference represented by the Maastricht, Amsterdam, and Nice meetings was perhaps not the best way to do this. As a result of the Laeken Council, a fresh and more comprehensive approach was made to changing the EU’s treaty basis.
What the Constitutional Treaty tried to do The Constitutional Treaty represented an attempt to tidy up this patchwork quilt of legislative methods, but its rejection by the French and Dutch electorate has led member states to try for the more modest
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Lisbon Treaty. Rather than rely purely on an intergovernmental conference to draw up a new treaty, a Convention was created to do the groundwork. The Convention included representatives from the governments, parliaments and civil society of the member states and the applicant states,20 as well as the European Parliament. It met under the presidency of Giscard d’Estaing, a former French president, and drew upon a wide-ranging debate within the member and applicant states. The Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe (or, in short, the Constitutional Treaty, see Appendix 3), signed in 2004, attempted several tasks. First, it made the changes in the institutions and decision-making deemed necessary for the efficient functioning of the Union after it had been extended in May 2004. A new Council double majority voting system would require decisions to be backed by 55 percent of the member states representing 65 percent of the EU population. The European Commission would be cut to two-thirds of the number of member states from 2014. The EP’s powers would be strengthened especially in its right of co-decision. The number of members of the EP (MEPs) was to be reduced to 750. Second, it brought together all the various Communities and Union treaties—from Paris signed in 1951 to Nice in 2001—into a comprehensive and ordered document. Third, it introduced changes agreed by the member states. The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the Union was included as Part II of the treaty. The powers of the Union, and those shared with the member states, were enumerated. The Union would be given legal personality (Article I-7) and the possibility of voluntary withdrawal by a member state covered (Article I-60). What were previously issues under Justice and Home Affairs in Maastricht but divided between Pillars One and Three in the Treaty of Amsterdam were brought together in Articles 257–77 under the heading of ‘‘Area of Freedom, Security and Justice.’’ The European Council would be chaired by a president elected for a two-and-a-half-year period. The position of a Union minister for foreign affairs was to be created and this person would be a member of the Commission. If the member states had aimed to produce a thoroughbred horse in the Constitutional Treaty, they ended up with a camel. It suited the duties expected of it but was not very attractive. Once it was decided to place the treaty before the electorates of a number of European states, its future looked bleak. Even before the British voters got the chance to show their disdain for it, the treaty was rejected by the French and Dutch electorates in 2005. This rejection may have had more to do with a general popular reaction to politicians and the EU
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more generally than a detailed consideration of the Constitutional Treaty. However, asking the average voter to say ‘‘yes’’ or ‘‘no’’ to a document consisting of 448 articles, 36 protocols, 2 annexes, and 50 declarations begs a dusty answer. After a two-year period of reflection, the member states agreed on the basis for the Lisbon Treaty which would replace the Constitutional Treaty, could be acceptable to national parliaments and would not need referendums in member states. These proposals make up the business of the 2007 intergovernmental conference that aimed to agree on a draft that would be accepted by all members before the June 2009 EP elections. The Lisbon Treaty consisted of two main clauses: one reforming the TEU and the other altering the TEC which is to take the new name of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU).21 Reference to the EC is to be changed to EU and the Union is to have a single legal personality, meaning that it can be a signatory of international treaties. However, the Lisbon (or Reform) Treaty is not to have a constitutional character and the symbols of the EU—flag, anthem, motto—are not to be adopted in the treaty. The TEU clause is divided into six titles based on the existing TEU and amendments agreed for the Constitutional Treaty. Cross-reference is made to the Charter of Fundamental Rights (adopted at the Nice IGC), making it legally binding, except in the UK which has an optout. The Charter is thus excluded from the new treaty. Other key elements are: The EU will only act within the competences conferred upon it. National parliaments have longer to examine draft directives than in the Constitutional Treaty, and they will be able to check whether EU acts are in accordance with subsidiarity (see above p. 47). After opposition from Poland, double majority voting in the Council is only to be introduced from November 2014 and then after further consideration. The Union Minister for Foreign Affairs is renamed the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policies. The amended TEC becomes the TFEU and basically reflects Parts III to V of the Constitutional Treaty (see Appendix 3). The role of the member states is underlined; the UK is to have an opt-out on judicial cooperation in criminal matters and police cooperation. The need to combat climate change is included in Article 174 on the environment and the spirit of solidarity between member states is included in the section on energy cooperation.22
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Should the Lisbon Treaty be adopted by 2009, the EU should function more easily but it will not end the ongoing dispute between those who want more powers for the EU and those who wish to entrench the power of the member states. It may well be that the Constitutional Treaty represented the high-water mark of the type of European integration that resulted from the 1950 Schuman Declaration.
Legislative processes in the EU The work of the EU covers a wide range of issues of varying importance to the member states. It is perhaps not surprising that laws are made and decisions taken in a number of different ways. If the EU is considered to be a legislative machine, the procedures can be seen in terms of input, process, and output. Input into the EU’s legislative procedure can be received from a variety of sources, including member states, the European Council, the Commission, the EESC, the CoR, and a variety of non-governmental organizations and actors. Indeed the source of some of the key legislation that created the single market within the EU has become a matter of some dispute among writers. Some, such as Sandholz and Zysman, have emphasized the role played by transnational business, especially the European Round Table of Industrialists, encouraged by the Commission under Jacques Delors.23 Others, such as Moravcsik, have stressed the importance of key member states as the most important source of such policy.24 While the Commission and member states remain important sources of EU legislation, the Union provides the opportunity for parliamentarians and interest and pressure groups to influence legislation from the beginning especially in specialist areas. Concerning the process of making legislation, the three main decisionmaking methods used by the first pillar of the EU (the European Community) are consultation, co-decision (Article 251 TEC), and the assent procedure. The cooperation procedure is still used in a few cases. Consultation is based on the traditional law-making procedure in the EC, whereby the Commission proposes legislation, the EP is consulted and the Council decides whether to pass it. Legislation is prepared within the DGs of the Commission, though may be suggested by outside bodies. Once adopted by the College of Commissioners, it is sent to the Council which forwards it to the European Parliament and other bodies—such as the EESC and the CoR—as required. The draft then returns to the Council for the Committee of Permanent Representatives (Coreper) and its network of committees to work on
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it. It is then classified as belonging either to section A of the Council’s agenda, which is passed without further discussion, or to section B which contains issues the Council may debate further. Throughout this process the Commission can amend proposals. Once the Council has passed the legislation—according to the relevant legal basis—it becomes law and is published in the Official Journal. Under this procedure, the Council consults the European Parliament (in a number of cases this is obligatory) but is not obliged to adopt any EP amendments to the legislation—the Parliament can thus only delay its passage. If the Council wishes to change a Commission proposal, it must do so by unanimity. The areas covered by the consultation procedure are agriculture, customs union issues, police and cooperation in criminal matters, issues of EU citizenship, visas, asylum and immigration, harmonization of direct tax and excise duties, discrimination issues and certain transport issues. Enhanced cooperation (see below) uses this method. On taxation matters the Council has to agree matters by unanimity.25 Most ordinary legislation is adopted by the EU after a process of co-decision by the EP and the Council.26 As with consultation, legislation is proposed by the Commission. The EESC and the CoR, as well as a range of national and European interest groups, are involved in a widespread consultative process. The EP has joint decisionmaking powers with the Council and there can be up to three readings of legislation in the EP. If the EP rejects a proposal, the Council cannot adopt it. A Conciliation Committee deals with disagreements between the EP and the Council on particular legislation. Co-decision, was established by the Maastricht Treaty, and simplified and extended by the Amsterdam and Nice treaties and now covers 43 areas, such as free movement of labor, rights of establishment, the internal market, and social policy. In the 1999–2004 legislative period, 418 co-decision procedures were successfully completed and in the same period only failed to settle differences on two occasions.27 The assent procedure was introduced by the Single European Act and extended under the Maastricht Treaty. It requires the EP either to accept or reject a Council proposal or the passage of a treaty, an agreement or legislation. The procedure is similar to that of consultation, except that the EP cannot amend a proposal. In some cases— electoral reform and enlargement—an absolute majority of its members (393 after 1 January 2007) has to agree before assent is given. Issues covered by the assent procedure are: tasks of the ECB and amendments to the ESCB’s statute, the main decisions about structural and cohesion funds, some international agreements, the EP’s electoral
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process, the accession of new member states, and the imposition of sanctions on existing member states, as allowed by the Amsterdam Treaty, and the initiation of enhanced cooperation (see below). The cooperation procedure was introduced by the SEA. It allowed the EP to be more involved in the legislative process, especially over Single European Market issues. The EP can reject a Council proposal at second reading, but after an attempt at conciliation the Council can in theory overturn this vote by an absolute majority, but has not yet done so. The Amsterdam Treaty replaced most cooperation procedure by co-decision, except for some areas of economic and monetary union. The above Community methods are not used in the Second and Third Pillars of the EU: the Council does not have to wait for a Commission proposal; both the Commission and the EP have limited roles. The European Council or the Council make decisions by consensus, with QMV being allowed on a few occasions. The Court of Justice does not have authority over decisions in the areas of CFSP and Police and Judicial Cooperation in Criminal Matters (formerly Justice and Home Affairs, JHA). In these fields the important instruments are joint action, common position and the framework decision.28 Joint action is, according to Article 14 TEU, where ‘‘operational action by the Union is deemed to be required.’’ Such actions ‘‘lay down their objectives, scope, the means to be made available to the Union, if necessary their duration, and the conditions for their implementation.’’ They are relevant for the CFSP as, since the Treaty of Amsterdam, decisions and framework decisions have replaced joint actions in the field of police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters. These are legal instruments under the TEU that are intergovernmental in nature. Decisions and framework decisions are adopted by the Council of the European Union unanimously on the initiative of the Commission or a Member State. A common position, according to Article 15 TEU defines ‘‘the approach of the Union to a particular matter of a geographical or thematic nature. Member States shall ensure that their national policies conform to the common positions.’’ In Article 34.2a TEU it can be used to define the EU’s approach to a particular matter in relation to police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters. The common position is intergovernmental in nature and is adopted unanimously by the Council of the European Union. A framework decision is one that, according to Article 34.2b TEU, member states adopt under Pillar Three, Provisions on Police and Judicial Cooperation in Criminal Matters, ‘‘for the purpose of approximation
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of the laws and regulations of the Member States.’’ They are ‘‘binding upon the Member States as to the result to be achieved but shall leave to the national authorities the choice of form and methods.’’ These methods of decision-making in Pillars Two and Three all stress the importance of national input and consensus. However, they all aim at getting the member states working more closely together in what, after all, is seen by many as being the core of the sovereign state—its ability to defend its people internally and externally. The Maastricht Treaty allowed for a number of ‘‘opt outs’’ by some states from certain policies, and from their decision-making process. The UK had already not signed the Social Charter and opted out of the treaty’s social policy protocol (though it joined in 1998 after the election of a Labour government).29 The UK and Denmark (later joined by Sweden) stayed out of the Third Stage of the Economic and Monetary Union, and Denmark later achieved exemptions from the defense aspects of the European Security and Defense Policy, European citizenship and cooperation on home affairs issues. The adoption of the euro by 15 states within the EU framework (as of 1 January 2008), means that 12 are not included, and this has sometimes caused friction between the EU’s economic decision-making (for all 27 member states) and the decision-making for the euro countries. The Maastricht Treaty introduced provisions in Articles 43–45 for closer cooperation (later enhanced cooperation). This meant that fewer than the full membership of the EU, though at least a majority, could use the procedures and mechanisms of the EU to cooperate in furthering the objectives of the Union. The idea was to allow most of the EU members to cooperate on European Community (First Pillar) matters where one or more member state was reluctant to participate. It was only to be used ‘‘as a last resort’’ (Article 43a TEU). It also allowed for closer cooperation in Justice and Home Affairs issues under Pillar Three. The Treaty of Amsterdam extended closer cooperation to areas not ‘‘within the exclusive competence of the Community,’’ that did not interfere with EC activity and had the authorization of the Council, using a QMV, on a Commission proposal. However, any state could in effect stop this process by requesting that the issue be referred to the European Council (Article 11.2 TEC). Amsterdam also allowed opt-outs of Pillar Two (CFSP) policies by introducing the practice of the ‘‘constructive abstention’’ whereby states opposed to a proposal would not veto it but merely abstain, thus allowing the other member states to take action. It also finessed the use of closer cooperation in Pillar Three. The Nice Treaty changed closer cooperation to enhanced cooperation and streamlined the
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process somewhat, making its introduction easier.30 It introduced enhanced cooperation for Pillar Two, except for matters with defense and military implications, and also it replaced closer cooperation in Pillar Three, now called Provisions on Police and Judicial Cooperation in Criminal Matters. The open method of coordination is a way of achieving greater convergence between member states in particular policy areas, especially those associated with the Lisbon process (see Chapter 4). It is not supposed to dilute the objectives of the EU or be used when legislative action through the EU is possible, but could be used to achieve ‘‘certain common objectives.’’31 When it comes to the output and implementation of what the EU decides, a number of factors come into play. Again, the pillar structure of the EU is important. Pillar One produces Community law and produces four types of legislation: regulations, directives, decisions, and opinions and recommendations. Regulations are generally applicable, binding in their entirety (they must be observed as written and in full), and directly applicable in all member states which means they take immediate effect and do not need national interpretation. Directives are binding as to the results to be achieved to each member state to which it is addressed, but the form and method for obtaining the result is left to the national authorities. A decision is ‘‘binding in its entirety upon those to whom it is addressed’’ (Article 249 TEC) which may be commercial enterprises, states or individuals. Recommendations and opinions have no binding force but have sometimes been used by the Court of Justice in reaching their judgments. In the case of the most usual form of Community legislation, the directive, it is up to the member states to transpose it into national law, with the Commission supervising this process. Indeed the Commission publishes an annual record of the implementation of single market legislation showing that not all member states are as assiduous in this task.32 But who actually implements this law? The Commission outlined the current situation: At present, Article 202 of the EC Treaty provides that responsibility for implementing European legislation lies, in principle, with the Commission, where such implementation is necessary at Union level and where it is hence not in the hands of the Member States. However, the treaty entitles also the Council to reserve the right to exercise its implementing powers directly in specific and exceptional cases.33
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This gives the impression of the Commission being more active in implementation than is the reality. The Commission has some powers to implement certain common policies, such as competition policy, aspects of fisheries policy and some of the humanitarian aid programs. In other cases, such as the Common Agricultural Policy and structural funds, it shares implementation with the member states. In the end, Community law is like much national law—it depends on a variety of agents for implementation at the local level. These can be environmental health officers, national government civil servants, veterinary surgeons, taxation officials and local government officers. That the Commission has little chance to monitor, let alone do much about, the uneven implementation of Community law can be a sore spot, especially for those countries that feel they implement this law while others have a more ‘‘take it or leave it’’ approach to Community law.
Conclusion: the clash of approaches In the various legislative processes of the EU we see the clash of ideas that has haunted the Communities and the Union since the ECSC was first suggested in 1950. On the one hand is ‘‘the Community method.’’ This comes from Monnet’s notion that the interest of Europe (or of the European Communities) should be considered as a whole. The appropriate way of making and taking decisions would be—as Monnet wanted for the ECSC—by a body that could, independent of any governmental influence, look after the interests of the Communities or Union. This is what the High Authority represented and it is still the philosophy behind the European Commission. Such powers would make the EU supranational, and would challenge the position of the member states and their democratic basis. Over the years ‘‘the Community method’’ has become a compromise on Monnet’s original notion. It started with the acceptance of the Commission fashioning legislation for the representatives of the member states—the Council— to accept or reject. It eventually included the EP as the democratic element acting in tandem with the Council in making co-decisions. Community or Union interest was thus to be balanced by national concerns in the Council and by democratic accountability in the Council, where the representatives of elected governments sat, and in the EP. The alternative view has seen the EU and its predecessors as a battleground for states’ interests. Thus, the important work has been undertaken in the European Council and in the Council of Ministers. Unanimity has to be maintained in these bodies so that unwelcome
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legislation is not foisted on unwilling states. Important areas—defense, taxation, social welfare—should be kept in the hands of the member states (or regional authorities) and the EU should be allowed to function in a very defined list of policy areas. This was the approach of President de Gaulle of France and Margaret Thatcher of the UK. It is a view that has some support in the Nordic states, some of the Central and East European countries, as well as the UK and in most Euroskeptic circles. It is the ‘‘Europe of the Nation States’’ approach. The tug-of-war between the two approaches to the institutions and legislative processes of the EU and its predecessors can be seen in the history of European integration. It was there in the original negotiations for the ECSC, in the battle between President de Gaulle and the Hallstein Commission and Mrs Thatcher and the Delors Commission. The tension is present in the dominance of the Community method in most of the areas covered by Pillar One of the EU, and in the Europe of the States approach taken to decisions in Pillars Two and Three. However, a synthesis has emerged. The Community method in itself takes account of state interests to a sizeable degree, and decisions taken on Pillars Two and Three matters have increasingly had a Union input. The difficulties in agreeing simplified decision-making in the Constitutional Treaty and its successor show that the struggle continues in the legislative process to balance Union-wide interests with those of particular sectional and national groups.
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The EU’s domestic policies
A central part of the European Union (EU) is its creation of a single market. The European Economic Community (EEC), agreed in 1957, contained the plans for a core element of this market—the customs union. In 1957 the six signatories of the Treaty of Rome, in common with other European states, had tariffs on many of the imports from other countries; they subsidized some exports and also had quantitative restrictions (QRs) on some imports that determined for that product a limit in value or amount to what could be allowed in. There was a twostep element to a customs union. The first was the eventual abolition of tariff barriers and QRs on the trade between the member states, creating a free trade area between the six states. The second element was that these states should have the same tariffs—a Common External Tariff (CET)—and QRs for imports from all other countries, forming a customs union. Once the CET and free trade area eight-year timetable was agreed in the Treaty of Rome, the creation of a customs union was a fairly automatic process. Before the governments agreed an accelerated timetable—as wanted by business—they first had to put in place the EEC’s agricultural policy. France, in particular, insisted that if there were to be a customs union—which was thought to benefit mostly Germany—then the politically important French farmers should also be assisted by an agricultural common market. Indeed, a second important element in the Treaty of Rome was the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP, see below). It was laid down in the treaty that there should be a policy but its details were left to later negotiations. It was only in 1962 that this process was completed, and there were efforts to tie its acceptance to changes in the EEC’s institutions—greater powers for the European Parliament (EP) and majority voting in the Council—but these were resisted by President de Gaulle of France (see Chapter 2).
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The next major stage in the economic fusion of the EC was the move toward a Single European Market (SEM), started with the Single European Act in 1986 and reaching an important milestone with the ‘‘1992’’ project. The aim here was to take the EC beyond just being a customs union toward becoming one market within which there was freedom of movement of not just goods (as in a common market) but also services, capital, and labor. The Maastricht Treaty aimed at a further stage, that of economic and monetary union which was partly achieved with the introduction of the single currency from 1 January 1999. The building blocks of economic unity within the EU will now be examined: the CAP, the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP); the SEM and economic and monetary union (EMU). The chapter will end with an examination of the social, environmental, and structural policies of the EU, as well as what became known as Justice and Home Affairs.
The CAP The idea behind the CAP was based on three elements. First, agricultural products should move freely within the EC with a market based on common rules. Second, an influx of cheaper imports from outside would be prevented by a system of Community preference. Finally, the whole system would be financed through an EC fund, the European Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund (EAGGF). The aims of the CAP set out in Article 39 of the Treaty of Rome were to increase agricultural productivity, ensure a fair standard of living for those employed in the sector, to stabilize markets; to assure supplies and to ensure reasonable prices for consumers. Some of these aims were potentially in conflict (for example the interests of the farmers in higher prices to ensure their living standards, and that of consumers in lower prices). There certainly had to be a compromise between them, and how this was done was at the heart of the CAP. However, from the beginning the CAP was dogged by one factor. In the period from 1958 to 1962 when the system was established, the six governments came under strong political pressure from both French and German farmers to fix the intervention at a high level, thus encouraging farmers to overproduce and receive generous payments from the EAGGF. A plan was advanced by Commissioner Mansholt in 1968 to cut these prices and to make the use of farmland more efficient. However, these notions were again resisted by the French and West Germans and by 1973 rising market process meant that much of the reform was shelved.1
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The EAGGF had two elements, that of guidance and that of guarantee. The guidance element was aimed at structural improvements in agriculture and has been increasingly important in connection with the EU’s regional policy (see below). The main part of the expenditure was the guarantee section which has provided price and market support for EU agriculture. Throughout its life the CAP has been used to support mainly dairy products (especially at the start of the CAP), cereals and oilseeds, and meat, especially beef. A number of pricing methods were used to support these products. The notion has been that farmers within the EC should get the same basic price for at least a number of agricultural products. Each year a target price was fixed, for example for wheat, representing the best one that could be found within the EC, and this would be adopted as the EU price for wheat for the year, giving its growers a good return on their harvests. The intervention price would typically be about 10 percent lower than the target price. Should the price for the product fall below the intervention price because of overproduction, authorities intervene on behalf of the Commission to buy up the EC surpluses at that price, using the EAGGF. The excess is then stored and could be released onto the market should the price go above a certain level. In theory the system would prevent shortages but discourage gluts. The threshold price is that set for particular agricultural imports into the EU, and is the price at which such imports do not undercut the EU product. Levies placed on the import price bring it up to the threshold price. Also farmers can get export restitution—subsidies—for exporting certain products. The currency fluctuations of the 1970s and 1980s affected the financing of the CAP which had been established during a period of relatively stable currencies. The Commission expressed the prices for an agricultural product in European Currency Units (ECU), the denomination it used for its accounts, and the amounts paid out to farmers were done so in national currencies in the days before the common currency of the euro. However, shifts in exchange rates could increase or decrease payments substantially, so governments decided on an exchange rate for their currency—the ‘‘green lira’’ or ‘‘green pound’’—in the case of the CAP payment and stuck to it. However, these exchange rates for these ‘‘green’’ currencies soon got out of line with the official exchange rates and farmers complained when they lost out. The governments then tried to undo some of the effect of the green currencies by introducing Monetary Compensatory Amounts (MCAs) after 1971, to offset the green currency distortions. This complex system has only been dismantled with the introduction of the euro.
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By the 1980s the CAP was beginning to resemble the cuckoo in the EC’s nest. It took some 80 percent of the EC’s budget, was a burden to both the taxpayer and the consumer and was adversely affecting agriculture in the rest of the world. Subsidies on EC exports meant that these were undercutting local growers’ prices in third countries. Agriculture was a source of dispute between the United States and the EC with the United States at first accusing the EC of exporting its subsidized surpluses and undercutting US exports. After a while, the United States started to subsidize some of its own products and both sides had to agree cut-backs. This led to tough negotiations in the Uruguay Round of GATT (see Chapter 5). Furthermore the system of interventions had built up ‘‘mountains’’ of certain stored products, butter being the most notorious, which it seemed that no one wanted. From the mid-1980s there has been a number of attempts, some more successful than others, to reform the CAP and to readjust the balance between farmer, consumer, and taxpayer and between the exporters and importers. During the 1980s, expenditure on the CAP rose so much that it threatened to bankrupt the EC.2 The EC tried to increase its income from Value Added Tax (sales tax) and from national contributions, but these methods hit national resistance, especially from the UK government of Mrs Thatcher. Governments had already had to pay co-responsibility levies to match EC subsidies on milk, and the EC started to pass on its deficits caused by the CAP from one year to another. The only real reforms were the introduction of dairy quotas in 1984, which limited the amount of milk produced, and maximum guaranteed quantities (MGQ) in cereals and some other products, production above which would incur a penalty rather than a payment. Furthermore, farmers could get relief from penalties by the use of ‘‘set-aside’’ whereby land was not farmed. The CAP had gone from paying farmers to overproduce to paying some not to grow crops. In setting out more reforms in 1991, the Delors Commission noted that between 1975 and 1991 CAP-guaranteed expenditure had risen two and a half times in real terms, but that 80 percent of the support was going to 20 percent of the farmers. In other words, big landowners and agri-business were doing well out of the CAP. This brought internal pressures for CAP reform at the start of the 1990s. An external pressure was the conclusion of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) Uruguay Round. Playing off pressure for internal reform and the demands of the Uruguay Round, the agriculture Commissioner, Ray MacSharry, introduced reforms in 1992. These reforms included a part shift of payments away from support of prices to directly paying farmers. Payment for set-aside was allowed
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even for large farms. However, the major changes resulted from the GATT Uruguay Round agreement on agriculture, signed in April 1994. The four major elements were: an average reduction of agricultural tariffs by developed states of 36 percent, with no cut less than 15 percent; a reduction of subsidized agricultural exports by 36 percent in expenditure terms; domestic policies distorting trade to be turned into an aggregate measure of support and reduced by 20 percent; certain policies, however, were safe from international challenge.3 The next incentive for change was the Commission’s ‘‘Agenda 2000’’ in preparation for enlargement. Their notion was to be a move away from product support to greater help for the farmer and the rural lifestyle. The main stumbling blocks were still large payments for arable, beef and dairy farming, but a system had to be in place to which the new Central and East European Country (CEEC) members could adapt at an early stage. Their agriculture was emerging from 40 years under communism and it was important to minimize unnecessary disruption. The 1999 Berlin European Council agreed to delay reforms to dairy prices until 2008 and the Agenda 2000 cuts of 20 percent to arable land support were reduced to 15 percent.4 This was a victory for President Chirac on behalf of the French farmers, but only staved off the inevitable reforms. The need of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to tackle agricultural support and the necessity of keeping CAP payments to the CEECs manageable have led the CAP budget to fall after the increases just after the Berlin agreement. Three other CAP-related decisions were made in Berlin. A new special instrument for agriculture and rural development (Special Program Accession for Agriculture and Rural Development, Sapard), priced at some E529 m a year, was established to help the accession states. Second, environmental aims were included into the CAP. Finally, rural development became the ‘‘second pillar’’ of the CAP, with the aim of assisting the local and farming communities by providing infrastructure and services.5 After enlargement, the CAP has become less about the quantity of food produced and more about its quality. Food scares in the 1980s and 1990s have made consumers more wary of what they might be eating. BSE (‘‘mad cow disease’’) in British cattle herds, ‘‘foot and mouth’’ disease, genetically modified food, beef with growth-inducing hormones have all seen consumers shy away from particular foods, to the cost of the agricultural producer. As part of the direct payments, farmers are now expected to respect the environment, food safety and animal welfare standards, known as ‘‘cross-compliance.’’ The link between subsidy and production is being broken in a process called
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‘‘decoupling.’’6 The system of payment has also been reformed. The 21 Common Market Organizations (CMO) that used to govern the individual markets in beef, olive oil, veal and other products, were replaced in 2006 by one single CMO.7 A year earlier the financing of the CAP was simplified by the creation of two new funds, the European Agricultural Guarantee Fund (EAGF) and the European Fund for Rural Development (EFRD). The EAGF carries out the work of the guarantee side of the old EAGGF, including direct payment to farmers. This is managed jointly by the member states and the Commission which also funds directly activities such as veterinary, promotional and administrative measures. The EFRD takes over the guidance side of EAGGF and Sapard and is managed jointly by the member states and the Commission.8 From the start, the CAP has been the core common policy of the EC and EU. It has acted as a support for the farming community and has provided secure supplies of food at reasonable prices. However, this has been at a price, that of over-production, heavy subsidies, and distortion of world markets. The worst excesses of the CAP seem to be over: it now takes about 40 percent of the EU’s budget9 and the beef and butter ‘‘mountains’’ (intervention stocks) are low compared with those of the twentieth century.10 International negotiations, such as the WTO rounds, could see further reductions in tariffs. The CAP is becoming more about supporting the rural lifestyle, environmental services and diversification.11 The CAP is often portrayed as representing what is wrong with the ‘‘Monnet method’’ in the EU. In fact, the attempts to reform the system came mainly from within the Commission. Margaret Thatcher, not a great admirer of the CAP, nevertheless saw that making agriculture a national policy would be more disastrous and related how the main imperfections of the policy were a result of national delegations, especially the French and the Germans, inflating the CAP payments for the benefit of their farmers.12
The CFP The CFP is associated with the CAP, not least because it deals with a foodstuff and is therefore covered by Articles 38.1 and 38.4 of the Treaty of Rome requiring a common market in agricultural products. The foundations for the CFP were laid in June 1970 at a time when four countries with large fishing industries—the United Kingdom, Denmark, Ireland, and Norway—were applying for EC membership. Furthermore, the move to the EC’s Common External Tariff had hit French fishermen whose market had previously been protected by high
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tariffs. As a result the French fishermen pressurized their government to back a policy that would bring them advantages.13 Furthermore, Iceland was in the vanguard of international moves to extend national control over fishing grounds within 50 and then 200 nautical miles of their coast, thereby excluding fleets from a number of West European states from these grounds. The main agreements of the CFP, accepted before negotiations had started with the four applicant countries, were: all EC vessels would have access to the fisheries zones of all the member states; the fishing industry would be modernized with structural funds; an internal EC market in fish would be created with Producers’ Organizations (POs) running a system of intervention prices; a reference price would be established for the import of the main types of fish.14 The applicant states managed to get some adjustments to the policy: six-mile zones around the EC’s coast, extended to 12 miles in certain areas off Denmark, France, Ireland, and the UK, were reserved for fleets that had traditionally fished there. By the early 1980s the fisheries zones of most states had been extended up to 200 nautical miles. In January 1983, the CFP was reformed so that all the waters up to the 200-mile limit was to be regarded as the EC fishery zone, though a 12-mile coastal zone was to be restricted to vessels with a record of fishing there. The Commission decided on the Total Allowable Catches (TACs) for particular species with national quotas based on traditional fishing patterns, the needs of areas dependent on fishing and the compensation for losses of traditional grounds in non-EC grounds. Endangered species were to be protected and other conservation measures taken. Non-discriminatory rules were to be enforced within the national sectors and supervised by EC inspectors. Agreements were made with third states such as Norway and Sweden.15 Spanish and Portuguese entry into the EC in 1986 brought more problems for the CFP. The two states doubled the number of EC fishermen and increased fishing capacity by 75 percent.16 To start with, each of the newcomers had a long transitional period, meaning that access was restricted to their waters, but their fishing fleets took full advantage of EC grants to modernize. Furthermore by the 1990s Spanish fishermen were buying British boats to gain access to UK fishing quotas, so-called ‘‘quota hopping.’’
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Spanish membership just magnified the problem of over-fishing. There was little short-term cost, and big financial and political gains, for the Council to agree large fishing quotas, even against scientific advice. In 1992 the Council rejected Commission attempts to cut substantially the TACs by reducing fleets by 40 percent over six years. A compromise reduced fishing of endangered species by 30 percent and of overexploited stocks by 20 percent. In 1998 national quotas were introduced for six fish stocks in the North Sea. Also the Council rejected a ban on damaging drift nets in 1994, with only a partial ban agreed in 2002.17 By 2002 the Commission admitted that the CFP was not ‘‘effective enough . . . to conserve fish, protect the environment, ensure the economic viability of the European fleets and provide good quality food to consumers.’’18 The watchword became conservation. The EU took a more precautionary approach towards calculating TACs; it included fishermen in its Regional Advisory Councils; state aids for new vessels were phased out; multi-annual recovery and management plans for stock recovery were adopted; and further measures taken to protect vulnerable species.19 Once again a common policy has been brought to near collapse—in this case because stocks of fish have been disappearing—not because of the Community input but because member states have plundered this common resource at little immediate cost to themselves.
Achieving the SEM The creation of a common market among the members of the EU whereby goods and services can flow between the member states without any national barriers has been brought closer by the actions of the EC and then the EU. Labor and capital still face some barriers but even these, especially the flow of finance, are much freer than in any time since early last century. Thus the internal market aspects of an economic union have been brought closer. However, other aspects of such a union are incomplete: much of taxation policy, central and local budgetary matters and government intervention on a range of economic matters remains in national hands. The creation of the customs union within the EC was not the final step. One important difference between economic transactions between countries and those within countries was the need in the former to move between currencies, the theme of the next section. Even after the creation of a customs union—and before the creation of a single currency—other barriers to a single market in the EC needed tackling.
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In June 1985 the new Delors Commission proposed sweeping away most remaining barriers to an EC single market. The aim was to establish within the EC the four freedoms of movement of goods, services, capital, and labor. The Cecchini Report claimed that the removal of barriers to these ‘‘four freedoms’’ would bring a gain of some 4.5 percent of the EC’s Gross Domestic Product.20 The British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, saw the move to the ‘‘four freedoms’’ as a way of reviving the Treaty of Rome’s ‘‘liberal, free trade, deregulatory purpose.’’21 Certainly, the Commission managed to get significant support from European business for their plans.22 The idea was to create a SEM within the EC by 31 December 1992, mainly by the use of about 300 measures that would abolish physical, technical, and fiscal barriers to the ‘‘four freedoms.’’ The physical barriers were the controls still experienced at frontiers between EC states, such as delays and administrative costs for interstate trade that added about 2 percent to trading costs.23 Various forms and documents were replaced by the Single Administrative Document for trade between the EC countries in 1988 and this was later extended to the EFTA countries and abolished altogether by 1 January 1993. The technical barriers to trade were removed by harmonizing technical standards throughout the EC area. Previously the Commission had attempted to get common safety and technical standards agreed throughout the EC states, but in pursuing the SEM, it tackled the problem in three ways. It promoted EC standards through the work of the European Standardization Committee for Electrical Products and the European Standardization Committee (CEN). Second, under the Single European Act’s (SEA) new articles on approximation of laws, the Commission produced harmonized versions of health and safety laws. Finally, the Commission enforced the consequence of the Cassis de Dijon case whereby the European Court of Justice (ECJ) had broadly ruled that standards accepted in one EC state were acceptable in the other states. A good that could be legally sold in one EC state, could be sold in all the others. Also the Commission liberalized public procurement, so that bids for public authority contracts could be submitted by firms from other EC states; and it encouraged the mutual recognition of educational qualifications. The fiscal barriers to trade involved differences between the indirect taxes in EC countries. The sales tax (Value Added Tax, VAT) levels varied, so did those of the excise duties on alcohol and tobacco, on average being higher in northern Europe than in the Mediterranean EC members. The Commission advanced proposals to approximate
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VAT rates throughout the EC, but these proved unpopular once electors in a number of states realized that it meant higher prices. However, a modest form of harmonization was agreed in October 1992, as was a deal on the harmonization of excise rates. The aim of creating the SEM by the end of 1992 caught the public imagination and was a substantial project that received support from politicians across most of the political spectrum. Though not total, a greater freedom of movement was achieved for the four areas of goods, services, capital and labor by the start of 1993. There remained some areas where clearly more work was needed, especially in the service industry and in the movement of labor. Competition policy was strengthened by the push to the single market. Opening the inner-EC frontier increased the possibility of large firms forming Europe-wide monopolies, and the expected benefits of competition being undermined by national state aid. Competition policy is a common policy where the Commission has tough powers in the four areas of anti-trust and cartels, mergers, state aids, and liberalization. Article 81 TEC prohibits agreements between firms that restrict competition, including cartels whereby competitors fix prices or market-share. Article 82 forbids firms abusing a dominant position in the market. The Commission can investigate such cases and impose fines. In 2006 the Commission fined the IT firm, Microsoft, E280.5 m for non-compliance with an Article 82 decision.24 Since 2004 national competition authorities and courts can apply these provisions. The Commission has fewer clear powers over mergers, but has pursued cases of market domination through mergers. In 2006 notifications to the Commission of mergers reached a record number of 356. In the end no prohibitions were made against any of the 352 cases dealt with, though 13 proceedings were started.25 The Commission also has wide powers in controlling state aids. Under Article 87 TEC, aid provided by national public authorities to undertakings on a selective basis is generally prohibited, but with certain exceptions to promote a ‘‘well-functioning and equitable economy.’’26 In 2006 the Commission found that the State Aid rules were breached in only 2 percent of the 710 cases where it made a final decision.27 On liberalization, the Commission has tried to open to greater competition markets such as transport, energy, postal services, and telecommunications. It has required network operators of, for example, a railway or telephone system, to give competitors fair access to their network. The main aims are lower prices and better conditions
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for consumers and these have been seen in two sectors in particular, telecommunications (especially mobile phones) and air travel.28 In both, the Commission has pressed for a single market across Europe. The push for a SEM had other consequences. To move to the SEM, the SEA had introduced further qualified majority voting into the Council. Also the SEM led to increased pressure for EC action in other areas. Freedom of movement of labor necessitated greater cooperation over terrorism, immigration and criminality, especially smuggling. One of the main barriers to a single market, the variety of EC currencies, remained, but there was increased pressure to move to a single currency. Also other non-EC European countries wanted to be within the SEM. These pressures led to two agreements in the early 1990s: the Maastricht Treaty and the European Economic Area (EEA) agreement. The core of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty was the creation of the single currency, the euro, but the treaty also created the EU, changing the running of the integration process. The EEA, including six of the seven European Free Trade Association (EFTA) states (Switzerland had its own separate but similar arrangement), led to the ‘‘four freedoms’’ being extended on a mutual basis to those countries by 1 January 1994.29 Nevertheless, the Commission still had plenty of work during the rest of the 1990s to achieve a more complete single market. The Commission’s White Paper on Growth, Competitiveness and Employment in 1993 linked three themes. There were plans for greater private and public investment in transport, telecommunications, energy and environmental projects across the member states. There was a stress on the solidarity between those in work and the unemployed, between the generations and ‘‘between the more prosperous regions and the poor or struggling regions . . . in the fight against exclusion.’’30 Finally, the areas where the single market still had to be completed were outlined: industrial and competition policy, commercial policy, and the free movement of labor. The EU’s industrial and competition policy in the 1990s had two major elements which were sometimes contradictory. The free market encouraged further competition within industry by making sure that companies were not subsidized or that national firms were not favored in procurement, but even by 2006, only about 16 percent of all EU procurement was publicly advertised and open to cross-border bidding.31 Particular key industries were liberalized, especially those of telecommunications, electricity, and gas. However, there was also pressure from some in the Commission to support key industrial sectors such as information technology (IT) and aerospace, with the 1993
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White Paper outlining how some 574 bn ECU could be spent on mainly big projects by 2000.32 Not for the first time, the Commission tried to solve the EU’s competitiveness problems by a combination of free market and market direction. Under the Maastricht Treaty (Article 133.3 TEC), trade agreements are negotiated with other states by the Commission using a mandate from the Council. However, such agreements exclude services and intellectual property where negotiating rights are shared between the Commission and member states. Despite this, the EU negotiated a wide range of treaties with third countries that affected the EU market itself. The Europe Agreements with the CEECs to some extent opened up the EU market to those states that were eventually to join the Union in 2004 and 2007. A range of agreements were signed with other regional groupings (see Chapter 5). The free movement of labor should have been eased by the Schengen Accord (see Justice and Home Affairs, below) coming into force in 1994, and which abolished frontier controls between most EU states. By March 2001, the border controls between 13 of the 15 EU states and also with Norway and Iceland had come down. Nevertheless, workers were unlikely to move from one member state to another unless there were economic motivations and the conditions and pay were better in the host state than back home. By the late 1990s, apart from the movement of Italian workers in the 1960s, there had not been a high mobility of labor within the EC and EU, even after the rights of EU migrant workers had been established in areas such as employment, residency, pensions, training and family situation. While the follow-up to the creation of the SEM had produced results—some 2.5 million jobs were created in the single market in the decade since its launch on 1 January 1993—the twenty-first century brought new challenges to the EU as an economic organization.33 There were still gaps in the SEM, especially in services and the free movement of labor. The large economies of Asia were awakening and affecting Europe: Chinese goods flowed into the EU making China the Union’s second largest import partner by 2005,34 and service jobs went to India and South-East Asia. Then the CEECs were about to join the EU, with the challenge of bringing these economies at least up to the EU average. The EU responded with its Lisbon strategy ‘‘to strengthen employment, economic reform and social cohesion as part of a knowledgebased economy.’’35 The means to be used were strengthening investment in research and development, encouraging entrepreneurship and innovation and widening participation in the labor market.
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The aims reflected a political compromise within the EU: free marketeers wanted the stress placed on economic reform, whereas parties on the left wanted employment as a goal. Left-wing parties and the Christian Democrats both saw the need for social cohesion, as neither wanted their societies torn apart by raw market forces. Also the Lisbon goals were to be achieved by the open method of coordination (OMC). This seemed to be an extension of the methods already used to coordinate economic policies under the EMU and ‘‘in the employment chapter of the Amsterdam Treaty.’’36 The OMC was an alternative to the Community method of policy-making with its dependence on the Commission to initiate policy and the Council and EP to agree on its details. Instead common EU guidelines on aspects of the Lisbon strategy were to be turned into national policies which would then be monitored, compared, evaluated and reviewed. Indicators and ‘‘benchmarks’’ would demonstrate which states had best practice in each policy area, which others could then follow. The ECJ was cut out of the process. The mid-term report on the Lisbon strategy—the Kok Report of 2004—painted a gloomy picture. Some gains had been made, especially in getting women back into the workplace and in spreading IT, but, on the whole, most goals of the Lisbon strategy were being missed. Job creation had halted; implementation of single market legislation had worsened; intra-EU trade in goods had stagnated; and environmental targets were not being hit. Furthermore, the EU was facing a revived US economy plus growing competition from India and China; it had just admitted the CEECs which were further behind in reaching the Lisbon targets; and it had faced a number of economic and political problems such as the pricking of the IT stock market bubble, rising oil prices, as well as war and terrorism.37 Since that report, the EU’s single market has experienced two main stimuli. The first was the effect of enlargement of the free movement of labor, though this proved to be a delayed factor for much of the EU. The living standards of the CEECs were clearly well below those of even the poorer EU-15 they were joining in 2004. Many EU-15 governments feared that freedom of movement of labor from day one of membership for the new CEEC members would result in a flood of workers into their countries with wages being undercut and welfare provisions being neglected by employers who found a new pool of non-unionized labor. This was a form of ‘‘social dumping.’’38 As a result of these fears, all but three—Ireland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom—of the EU-15 postponed free movement of labor from the accession states for up to seven years. Nevertheless, the effect on the
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UK, Irish and, to a lesser extent, Swedish economies of the wave of east and central European workers has mainly been positive. The migration has helped these workers though both the social and economic results are a matter of contention.39 The second major event is the Services Directive. One aspect of the Lisbon strategy involving the Community process was the move to liberalize the trade in services across the EU. The service sector provides 70 percent of the EU’s economic output. The Commission advanced the Services Directive in January 2004 and immediately met substantial opposition. The Commission proposed that what met the standards for a service in one state—whether banking, accounting, insurance—could be exported to all other states. Given that the standards for some services were low in some EU-15 countries and even lower in a number of the new members, the fear was that this ‘‘country of origin’’ principle would undermine controls and standards, especially in the older EU member states. The original directive was substantially changed by center-right and socialist parties in the EP and inevitably represented a compromise. The directive established an EU ‘‘internal market in services through the removal of legal and administrative barriers to the development of service activities.’’40 This means in practice that EU member states cannot impose extra requirements for foreign EU service providers, whether plumbers, hairdressers or IT experts, compared with home providers of these services. However, member states can require foreign EU providers to obey the national provisions on public policy, public health, and environmental protection. Otherwise those providers can stick to their home regulations. Member states also have to set up ‘‘one-stop shops’’ where foreign providers can arrange all the necessary administrative detail, and this should be available through e-mail. A number of areas were excluded from the directive, including services already covered by existing directives—such as financial services—as well as sensitive sectors such as health and social services. EU states have three years in which to implement the directive.41 With this directive’s implementation and with the eventual inclusion of the CEEC workforce into the freedom of movement of labor by the start of the next decade, the goal of a single market within the EU comes closer. There will still be areas where EU directives have not yet been fully transposed into national law, but there will be a considerable freedom of movement for goods, services, labor, and capital. A key element in encouraging this ‘‘market without inner frontiers’’ has been the creation of monetary union in the EU with a single currency, the euro.
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Towards EMU Monetary union is brought about by replacing national currencies by a single currency or by permanently fixing exchange rates between national currencies, and by introducing common monetary and financial rules with common institutions, without allowing for any national restrictions. The 1957 Treaty of Rome did not have economic and monetary union as a specific aim but did emphasize the need to coordinate national economic policies (Article 103 EEC), as well as maintaining confidence in the currencies while keeping a high level of employment and stable prices (Article 104 EEC).42 From 1970 there were three attempts to move to an EMU within the EC and then the EU. The Hague Summit, at which the Six agreed to United Kingdom membership of the EC, tried to match widening of membership with a deepening in the policy areas. The 1971 Council of Ministers adopted a program for the achievement of EMU by 1980. Economic decisions would be transferred to the Community level, with EMU acting as a catalyst for political union. There would be free movement of capital within the EC and the exchange rates between the national currencies would be fixed.43 The new system was to be based on what became known by the metaphor of ‘‘the snake in the tunnel.’’ The ‘‘tunnel’’ element was based on the Smithsonian Agreement of December 1971. This was the deal made between Western states after the US dollar—the rock on which Western economic revival had been based since 1945—had been devalued in August 1971. It permitted a margin of fluctuation of 2.25 percent above and below the value of the dollar by other currencies. The EC’s response was to create a system whereby the exchange rates between the strongest and weakest EC currencies were gradually narrowed, with a limit of 2.25 percent from July 1972. The slim snake-like representation of this movement between EC currencies could then fluctuate within the wider limits of the Smithsonian Agreement, the ‘‘tunnel.’’ The EC central banks would intervene to keep their own currencies within the ‘‘snake’’ and to keep the collective EC currencies within the Smithsonian ‘‘tunnel.’’ In April 1972 the ‘‘snake’’ included the currencies of the six EC member states plus those of the countries about to join on 1 January 1973. Because of currency speculation, the British pound was forced to leave the system in June 1972 and it was followed by the Irish punt, the Italian lira and, in January 1974, the French franc. The first attempt at monetary union did not properly make the link between the economic and monetary side of the union. Monetary
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union would not work while Germany and the Benelux states had low inflation and France, Italy, and the United Kingdom had rampant inflation. Also the Arab-Israeli War in October 1973 and the subsequent recession was accompanied by price inflation in Europe. The second attempt to introduce an EC-based monetary system seemed to learn from the problems of the ‘‘snake in the tunnel.’’ By the end of the 1970s France and Germany decided that a binding monetary and economic system was needed for their two economies. In March 1979 the Council had agreed on the European Monetary System (EMS).44 The EMS had four elements (see Box 4.1). The flexibility in the system allowed currencies to re-align within the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), the last such move being that of the French franc in 1987. By 1991, Norway, Finland, and Sweden—three non-members—linked their currencies to the ERM. After 1979, the main states in Europe— the United Kingdom, France, and Italy—followed the tighter economic and monetary disciplines of Germany with its strong currency. However, the free movement of capital within the EC had not been achieved and countries could use exchange controls to protect their currencies. Nevertheless, countries such as the United Kingdom and Italy were unable to protect their national currencies when they were again subject to international speculation at the start of the 1990s.
Box 4.1 The European Monetary System The European Monetary System (EMS) had four related elements: The Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). Participating currencies were bound together, only fluctuating up to a certain level. All would intervene if exchange rates came under pressure. The European Currency Unit (ECU) was the value of a weighted basket of the currencies of the participating states. The ECU was also the central denominator against which national currencies fluctuated. The European Monetary Co-operation Fund (EMCF) pooled 20 percent of the gold and dollar reserves of the participating states to pay for interventions to maintain exchange rates. Credit facilities: short- and medium-term loans were made to help prevent currency fluctuations.
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The EMS in its 1980s form failed at the start of the 1990s, again because it was not able to rebuff a speculative wave that played on the basic weaknesses of economies within the system. Even the collective system of support could not protect the targeted currencies against an onslaught of speculation aimed at knocking a currency off its perch. The speculation itself was instigated by the knowledge that, despite a certain convergence of economies during the 1980s, by the early 1990s, some—such as that of the United Kingdom and Italy—were showing structural weaknesses that, because of the ERM, were not being reflected in the value of their currencies. It was during the time that the EMS was being tested—and finally found wanting—that plans for a single currency were being forged. The third and final attempt to pursue EMU came with the creation of the single currency, the euro, and can be seen in the Maastricht Treaty. It built on the EMS but learnt the lessons of a system that was collapsing as the treaty was being negotiated. In fact its genesis goes back to the mid-1980s when Jacques Delors became president of the European Commission. The first indication of this goal was in the Single European Act of 1986 which contained the commitment ‘‘to enhance the Community’s monetary capacity with a view to economic and monetary union.’’45 This was opposed by Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister, who saw the Act as a necessary means to achieve the SEM (see above, p. 67). Delors’ view was that this market should be complemented by the creation of economic and monetary union, including a common currency, and overseen by a political union. One insider has described this as a strategy of Russian dolls which, when opened, reveal another doll inside and so on.46 The Hanover European Council set up a committee on the EMU of bankers and experts under the chairmanship of Jacques Delors. The Delors Report was placed before the Madrid European Council in June 1989 and, for Mrs Thatcher, ‘‘it confirmed our worst fears’’ with the three-stage move to EMU.47 The outcome was the convening of an intergovernmental conference (IGC) of all the member states. The United Kingdom, joined by Denmark, opted out of the system. Some key elements of the EMU are worth mentioning. First, with the failure of earlier attempts in mind, there was a serious effort to achieve economic conversion before monetary union was attempted. The tool for this was price stability, in effect low inflation, and this reflected the way that earlier attempts at EMU had been destroyed by economic divergence and high inflation rates in certain countries. Second, the whole system consisted of institutions that aimed at driving the states toward adoption of a single currency and keeping them
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within that currency. Already a possible tension between this aim—the creation and maintenance of EMU—and any divergence between member state economies can be detected. The powers to prevent an economy within the single currency from getting out of hand either seem too weak (if not enforced) or draconian (if rigorously implemented). Third, a system of institutions to oversee the single currency were created that would be parallel to ECOFIN, the EU’s Economic and Finance Council. Finally, it was accepted that the United Kingdom, Denmark, and possibly some other states, would stay out of the system, at least for the time-being. It was felt that any attempt to force an unwilling United Kingdom into the single currency would have negative consequences that would outweigh any possible gains. From mid-1992 to mid-1993 the EMS came under extreme pressure. The Italian lira was devalued, the pound sterling was suspended from ERM membership and some members re-introduced exchange controls. In August 1993 the whole system was prevented from collapse by the adoption of 15 percent fluctuation bands for all members, allowing currencies to find their own level on the market. This uncertainty was accompanied by economic recession in the early 1990s and it seemed that the move to a single currency might not be the priority of the member states. Nevertheless with the improved economic conditions of the late 1990s and the addition of two states with the enlargement of 1995— Austria and Finland—who wished to join the euro, the Council was able to indicate in 1998 that all those states that wished to join the single currency, with the exception of Greece, would be able to. The United Kingdom, Denmark, and then followed by Sweden, wanted to stay with their national currencies. Although the economies of the member states were converging, some of the states identified as fit for Stage III membership had public debts over 60 percent, but were allowed under the bar because this debt was being reduced (see Box 4.2).
Box 4.2 The Treaty of Maastricht and EMU The treaty created new Title VI (now Title VII) of the treaty. The main points are: Convergence: the Council is responsible for supervising the period of convergence by drafting the ‘‘broad guidelines of the economic policies’’ of member states (102.2); members were to
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‘‘regard their economic policies as a matter of common concern and shall coordinate them within the Council . . .’’ (99.1); and the Council would monitor the consistency of states’ policies with the guidelines, and would see if they risked ‘‘jeopardizing the proper functioning of economic and monetary union.’’ (99.4) Deficits: Articles101–3 required that public institutions should be prudent in their finances and that member states ‘‘shall avoid excessive government deficits.’’ The Commission is to monitor compliance in terms of the deficit as a ratio of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The Council decides whether a member state has such a deficit, can recommend remedies and, if these are not implemented, can notify the member about measures for deficit reduction. If the state still does not comply, then the Council can decide, with the concerned state excluded, on measures to be taken, which may include a fine. Monetary policy: the primary objective of the European System of Central Banks (ESCB) ‘‘shall be to maintain price stability.’’ Without prejudice to this aim, the ESCB was to support ‘‘the general economic policies of the Community.’’ The ESCB was to act like the controlling authority of a central bank. At its center was the European Central Bank (ECB), which would be created in the third stage of monetary union and which was to have a legal personality (see Box 3.2). Stage II was the transitional stage toward monetary union. States would have ended restrictions on capital movements between members and ensured that their economies were in convergence. They were also to avoid ‘‘excessive government deficits’’ (109e.4), and to lead their central banks toward independence.
On the road to Stage III reports were to be made to the Council on the progress of member states toward EMU during Stage II, including whether the states had advanced toward the four ‘‘convergence criteria’’ that had to be achieved before being accepted to Stage III. These were: obtaining a high degree of price stability with an inflation rate in the previous year no greater than 1.5 percentage points more than that of the three best performing states; public debt should be less than 60 percent of the GDP;
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the currency should not move outside the European Monetary System (EMS) margins with no unilateral devaluation during the previous two years; long-term interest rates should not be more than two percentage points above those of the three best performing states in the previous year. The Council would assess whether each state could fulfill the criteria of adopting the single currency, and whether a majority of states could do so. 1 January 1999 was the latest date by which the single currency would automatically be introduced for those states ready for it. States not adopting the currency — called ‘‘member states with a derogation’’ would not have voting rights in the ESCB or the ECB or in certain related Council decisions. On the first day of the single currency, the ECB and ESCB would become active and the conversion rates of the old currencies that were joining the system would be irrevocably fixed against the new currency named the euro. The Council could decide whether member states with a derogation could join the euro at a later stage and the rate at which their currency would be fixed against the euro.
On 1 January 1999, 11 of the 15 member states moved to Stage III and the European System of Central Banks (ESCB) took control of the interest and exchange rate policy for those countries. The euro took over from national currencies by 1 January 2002 in 12 states, Greece having joined the convoy from 1 January 2001. The Danish electorate rejected membership in a referendum in September 2000 and the Swedes did the same in a referendum in 2003. Wim Duisenberg became the first President of the ECB, and was later succeeded by Jean-Claude Trichet. It was soon realized that the member states would have to coordinate their economic policies more closely if the system was not to fall apart, and even before Stage III started, the ‘‘euroland’’ countries agreed on a Growth and Stability Pact in June 1997. Support would not be provided for states that borrowed too much, and deficits over 3 percent, except under special circumstances, would be met with sanctions. At the same time the need for higher employment and structural reforms of the capital and labor markets was confirmed.48
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Since its beginning, the euro has had a mixed history. It has become an international currency of some standing and by 2007 was the currency of 13 of the 27 EU member states.49 The countries that joined the EU in 2004 are expected to work toward membership of the euro and some—such as Cyprus, Malta, and Lithuania—have done this with greater assiduity than others. The main problem facing the euro is from within; economic union has still not followed monetary union. ‘‘Euroland’’ states can and do run deficits over the supposed Maastricht criteria, with little immediate response. In November 2003 the Eurozone finance ministers agreed not to impose sanctions on France and Germany for not reducing their budget deficits, a move declared illegal by the ECJ. However, the Court left it to member states to impose budgetary discipline.50 The remedies needed to curb deficits— tax increases or public expenditure cuts, let alone some of the structural changes involved—are unpopular and unlikely to be adopted by weak governments. There is one large question facing the euro: will the United Kingdom join? The Conservative government in the United Kingdom at the time of the drafting of the Maastricht Treaty wanted to stay out for a number of reasons. It was felt that the City of London’s important place in the financial world could be challenged, though many in the City saw membership as offering opportunities as well. The British economy was seen as being tied as much as to the United States as to Europe and therefore more difficult to bring into convergence with other EU economies. Also, for many the pound sterling represented a national symbol and an instrument of control not to be handed over to the EU. The Labour government elected in 1997 seemed to take a more practical approach, but even after a decade had not joined ‘‘euroland.’’ The tests as to whether membership might suit the UK involve the British and European business cycles converging and the effects on flexibility, investment opportunities, financial services, and on employment and growth. Also the main political parties have agreed on a referendum before the UK adopts the euro and, given the results in Denmark and Sweden, this seems unlikely to be won. The problems of the euro are mirrored in the UK’s economic success outside of ‘‘euroland.’’ The question is whether the euro can stand still or whether economic failure in key states such as France or Italy may lead even to drastic measures such as states leaving the euro and reverting to a national currency. If this happened, it would be a wounding blow for what has been one of the greatest advances for the EU.
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Social and environmental policies The above sections have dealt with the achievement of a SEM and a single currency throughout much of the EU. From the start, the EC/ EU were not just about freeing market mechanism across frontiers. Those negotiating the Treaty of Rome and most of the leaders of states that have joined the EC/EU thought that a move to a freer market should be matched with a concern for the social welfare of citizens and for the environment of the EU. There has been a minority view that social policy should not be an issue for the EC/EU and this was most succinctly expressed by Mrs Thatcher, then British prime minister, in her Bruges Speech: ‘‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them reimposed at a European level.’’51 For others, such as Jacques Delors, the social dimension of the EU was a necessary development parallel to that of the single market and was steeped in the tradition of the integration process. When the Treaty of Rome was being drafted, the French government was concerned that with the creation of a customs union, firms in other countries might be at a competitive advantage if they did not have to pay for the generous social provisions seen in France. However, social issues were secondary in the negotiations and this is reflected in the coverage of social policy in the treaty.52 Under the heading of Social Policy,53 it was agreed: To ‘‘promote improved working conditions and an improved standard of living for workers’’ to be achieved through the common market which ‘‘will favor the harmonization of social systems.’’ That cooperation in the social field related to employment, labor laws and work conditions, vocational training, social security, prevention of occupational accidents and diseases, hygiene at work, the right to form trade unions and of collective bargaining. That men and women should, in principle, receive equal pay for equal work. That social security for migrants was of common concern.
Furthermore a European Social Fund (ESF) was set up to ease the employment of workers and increase geographical and occupational mobility. Up to 1973, the ESF was used mainly to improve employment levels in southern Italy which had the highest unemployment levels in the EC and in the areas on the border of West and East Germany.
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With the first enlargement of the EC, a series of Social Action Programs were adopted, the first starting in 1974. These programs lasted for four years and, as well as encouraging employment, aimed to improve working and living conditions and at increasing the participation in EC decision-making by both sides of industry. The programs’ impact was weak as employment policy was still regarded as being primarily national and the funding of the ESF was very modest, especially in contrast to that of agriculture. Plans for the creation of a single market in the EC by the end of 1992 (see above, pp. 66–68) meant a revival of social issues as a concern for the EC. The 1986 Single European Act, in preparation for the SEM, strengthened those aspects of the Treaty of Rome dealing with social affairs. A new article, 138 TEC, reflected member states’ commitment to improvements in workers’ health and safety, whereby the Council would adopt ‘‘minimum requirements for gradual implementation.’’ These should not hold back small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Second, Article 139 asked the Commission to develop ‘‘the dialogue between management and labor’’ (the social partners), building on their existing ‘‘Val Duchesse’’ informal meetings, to assist in framing agreements in single market and technology legislation. The SEA’s new title on ‘‘Economic and Social Cohesion’’ reflected the widening of the EC to include the poorer states of Greece, Spain, and Portugal and included the following: The EC should strengthen ‘‘its economic and social cohesion,’’ especially to reduce ‘‘disparities between the various regions and the backwardness of the least-favoured regions.’’ (Article 158 TEC) Economic and social cohesion should be pursued by the member states’ economic policies, by common policies and by action through the structural funds (see below, p. 85) which would be reexamined after the SEA came into force. The European Regional Development Fund (ERDF, see below, p. 85) would help those regions lagging behind or where declining industries were being converted. As SEM legislation, that on health and safety and on structural funds were passed by the cooperation procedure, in which the EP was fully involved and a qualified majority was needed in the Council; the parliamentary groups that wanted a social aspect to the EC had a strong voice in this legislation and were able to tie progress toward the SEM to advances in the social and structural legislation.54
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In 1985, the new Commission president, Jacques Delors, asked representatives of the ‘‘social partners’’—UNICE, the employers’ confederation; ETUC, the European Trade Union Confederation; and the European Centre of Public Enterprises (CEEP), representing the public sector employees—to advance ideas on improving work conditions throughout the EC to match the creation of the single market. The resulting Social Charter was adopted, albeit in a milder form, at the 1989 Strasbourg European Council, but only by 11 of the then 12 members. The Charter was a ‘‘Solemn Declaration’’ of 30 general statements such as ‘‘all employment shall be fairly remunerated’’ and included topics such as health and safety at work, the rights of the disabled and elderly, the rights of workers, vocational training, and the improvement of living conditions.55 Subsequently, it was given flesh in more than 40 pieces of EC legislation. However, the UK refused to sign the Charter and was exempt from the consequent laws, unless it agreed to them. For Mrs Thatcher, the British prime minister, the Charter ‘‘was quite simply a socialist charter.’’56 An attempt to turn the Social Charter into a ‘‘Social Chapter’’ in the Maastricht Treaty was vetoed by the UK, and the other 11 members had to make do with an Agreement on Social Policy as a protocol. Though the new EU institutions would be used for legislation arising from this protocol, as before, the UK excluded itself. The aims of the protocol (or ‘‘Social Chapter’’ as it still became known) were: ‘‘promotion of employment, improved living and working conditions, proper social protection, dialogue between management and labor, the development of human resources with a view to lasting high employment and the combating of exclusion.’’57 To this end the EU would ‘‘support and complement’’ the activities of the member states. The protocol did not apply to pay, the right of association in trade unions, or the right to strike. It seemed to disappoint most sides. Those on the political left felt that it failed to cover the most important aspects such as pay conditions and the right to strike. Clearly the British Conservative government felt it had gone too far by covering topics that should be left to either national governments or the market. However, after the election of a Labour government in May 1997, the UK announced that it would subscribe to the Social Chapter. This allowed it to be included in the Treaty of Amsterdam with only a few changes. The UK also adopted the main legislation agreed under the Social Chapter, the 1994 Works Council Directive, which required workforce consultation in businesses, and the 1996 Parental Leave Directive.
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Over the decade since the Amsterdam Treaty, the EU has become active in a variety of social policy areas: labor and industrial relations, equal opportunities, health and safety, public health, protection of children, the disabled and the elderly, poverty, migrant workers, education, training, and youth. These are now part of the Social Policy Agenda, arising from the social element of the Lisbon strategy.58 Quite often involvement has been through programs such as those covering education (Socrates), the disabled (Helios), or women in business (NOW), and also through agencies such as the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work and the European Environment Agency (see also Box 3.2). The ECJ has also made a major contribution to entrenching the EU’s competence in social policies such as in the Barber case on pensionable age. The environment was an issue given little consideration by governments when the Treaty of Rome was signed and it was not mentioned in the treaty. The UN Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm in 1972, led to the issue being considered at a European Council later that year and to the EC’s first Environmental Action Program (EAP) for 1973 to 1976.59 The program’s principles included that of ‘‘the polluter pays,’’ individual governments being allowed to have stricter environmental standards than those adopted by the EC, and the need to involve all levels of government in the policy. The number of environmental directives and decisions coming from the Commission had risen from 10 in 1975 to 24 by 1985.60 The EC’s involvement in environmental questions was entrenched in the SEA. The policy’s objectives were the preservation, protection and improvement of the quality of the environment, the protection of human health, and the prudent and rational use of resources (Article 174 TEC). The Act accepted that there should be preventive action to protect the environment, that problems should be rectified at source, and the polluter should pay. Action would be taken by the EC to achieve objectives more effectively than could the member states. These aims were confirmed by the Maastricht Treaty, and the Amsterdam Treaty required under Article 6 TEC that environmental protection ‘‘must be integrated into the definitions and implementation of Community policies and activities . . . with a view to promoting sustainable development.’’ The Amsterdam Treaty (Article 95.5 TEC) also allowed states to have more stringent environmental measures than those of the EU, provided these were based on scientific evidence. The EU has continued the EAPs started by its predecessor, has stressed the need to cooperate with all levels of government and nongovernmental organizations and has required an environmental aspect
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to all its policies. The priorities of the sixth EAP are climate change, nature and biodiversity, environment and health and the quality of life, and natural resources and waste. The challenge of climate change has been twofold: to tackle the problem within the EU and to persuade other states to take action. Under the first heading, the EU can encourage member states, industry and individuals to act and can support research into fuels that have low ‘‘greenhouse gas’’ emissions. Under its European Climate Change Program (ECCP), set up in 2000, the EU has implemented about 30 policies and measures including its Emissions Trading Scheme, whereby greenhouse gas ‘‘permits’’ are traded on a market.61 However, this scheme has attracted criticism both for its form and detailed implementation.62 Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas has called for advanced and industrialized countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions ‘‘substantially,’’ meaning a reduction to 30 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and a cut by a half by 2050.63 A more difficult task is to persuade other states, especially the US Bush administration, to follow this lead, and this has mainly been the task of those EU leaders from France, Germany, Italy, the UK, and the President of the Commission that attend G8 summits of the leaders of the developed countries.64 Nature and biodiversity has been the target of the EU’s Biodiversity Strategy with its Habitats Directive, encouraging protected areas for plants and animals, and the Wild Birds Directive with its protected areas for threatened and migratory species. The emphasis in the EU’s work on a safe and healthy environment has been on traditional themes such as health and safety in the workplace and also on the use of chemicals. The REACH system (meaning ‘‘registration, evaluation and authorization of chemicals’’) requires producers and users to register some 30,000 widely used chemicals and provide information about their use. Managing natural resources and waste has tried to wean EU citizens and governments off throwing away waste, especially in landfill sites. Facilities had to be in place by 2007 to scrap all old cars at the manufacturers’ expense.65 In all this, the European Environmental Agency has provided information and prognoses and has tried to ensure that national and EU data coincides and is included in international programs. The 2001 Gothenburg Strategy pulled together existing EU work on the environment and launched a long-term ‘‘Strategy for sustainable development’’ that was to be the third dimension of the Lisbon strategy, the other two being economic and social. The aim was no less than changing society’s behavior on environmental matters. Cross-cutting
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proposals were advanced that meant the environment was included in a wide range of activities, with legislation considering environmental consequences as well as social and economic ones. Specific long-term measures were recommended in the areas of climate change, health, natural resources, and transport. On the formulation of policies and review of their progress, impact assessments were recommended. In 2005 the Commission published a framework of indicators needed to monitor the implementation of the Gothenburg strategy.66 The deepening of the European integration process has resulted in the EU’s social and environmental policies. What started as a common market and became a single European market had consequences for the social and environmental life of the continent. From the beginning there were always political groups—socialists and Christian Democrats, joined later by green parties and liberals—that considered the market should be matched by a social and then an environmental aspect. Also advances in one area such as the common external tariff pointed to the need to ‘‘level the playing field’’ of competition in all member states so that firms had at least approximately similar social and environmental costs to bear. This represented what Haas considered to be the expansive logic of integration (see Chapter 1, p. 10). However, that logic did not go unchallenged. While it was pressed by the Commission, as well as certain political parties, it had to vie with national decision-makers who have preferred to keep such vital policies in their hands and also, in the case of the Social Charter, met the formidable road-block of Mrs Thatcher. Progress in some areas has been substantial—equal pay for men and women and recycling targets being of note—but the overall pattern has been patchy.
Regional and structural policy As mentioned above (p. 80) the Treaty of Rome established an ESF to assist areas that remained in poverty. The Guidance element of the EAGGF was meant to address structural problems in agriculture, as was the Financial Instrument of Fisheries Guidance (FIFG) for the fishing industry. By 1975 the EC had adopted a regional policy and has created a European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). Since 1988 the ESF, EAGGF, and the ERDF have been known as the structural funds, and they were joined by FIFG in 1993. The SEA introduced a cohesion policy in the EC to reduce the social and economic differences between regions and the Maastricht Treaty created the Cohesion Fund. However, this is not regarded as a structural fund, though clearly it has structural implications for the economies of the EU. The notion behind
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all these funds is that the free market does not deal satisfactorily with social and geographic disparities, something that is recognized by most governments in their national structural policies. Freeing up the European market can create greater rifts and thus EU-wide action should be taken to help ameliorate serious differences. As seen, state aids were frowned on in the Treaty of Rome, but exceptions were made for promoting economic development in areas ‘‘where the standard of living is abnormally low or where there is serious underemployment’’ and to assist the development ‘‘of certain economic activities and of certain economic areas.’’67 To start with, this effectively meant southern Italy and the regions of West Germany on the border of communist East Germany. With Irish and UK membership in 1973, the EC was under pressure to have a more comprehensive regional policy. Ireland was then economically backward and far from the center of the EC, and the UK had its own strong regional policy and also wanted a return on the money it was paying as a net contributor to the EC. The ERDF was set up in March 1975 to match national regional aid, not to take its place. This principle of additionality was not always adhered to—UK governments were notorious for taking away with one hand what the EC had given with the other. Also the Commission had to accept national definitions of regions. Still, the major benefactors of the fund were, in its first decade, Italy with a quota of 40 percent of payments, the UK (28 percent), and France (15 percent). Ireland, though a small country, got 6 percent of disbursements.68 Originally the fund could be used only for infrastructure investment for industrial or remote areas and for maintaining employment in the industrial and service sectors. Cases had to be supported by national governments which had national quotas of ERDF payments. This left the Commission little leeway in molding the regional policy, though by 1979 they had managed to make 5 percent of the funding ‘‘non-quota’’ that they could distribute, subject to a unanimous vote of the Council. Reforms in 1984 meant that the fixed national quotas were changed for minimum and maximum shares for each member state and the Commission ‘‘non-quota’’ share was increased to 7.5 percent, though its allocation no longer needed Council unanimity. Furthermore, there was a greater emphasis on programs such as the Integrated Mediterranean Programs (IMPs), rather than one-off projects. The SEA entrenched and reformed the regional policy. The accession of Spain and Portugal in 1986 meant a doubling in the population of least-favored regions, and the single market meant that poorer areas
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would be more open to the vagaries of the market. Article 159 TEC stated that the structural funds, the European Investment Bank (EIB) and other financial instruments should be used to achieve the objectives of the overall harmonious development of the EC and the strengthening of its social and economic cohesion. The Commission was to submit a proposal for the reform of these funds. As a result of this 1988 proposal, the EC decided on major reforms of the structural funds (see Box 4.3).
Box 4.3 Reforms of the structural funds from 1988 to 2007 In the past, six uses or objectives were set out for the funds: Objective 1: for the ‘‘development and structural adjustment of regions . . . lagging behind’’ (Article 130c, 160 TEC) and whose Gross Domestic Products (GDPs) were at least 25 percent below the European Communities (EC) average. From 1999 included some sparsely populated areas from Finland and Sweden from Objective 6. Objective 2: for ‘‘converting regions’’ seriously afflicted by industrial decline, quite often with heavy industries such as coal and steel. The European Social Fund (ESF) and European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) were to be used. With the 1999 reforms, Objective 5b was included so that it included regions undergoing change in the industrial and service sectors, declining rural areas, urban areas in difficulty and depressed areas dependent on fisheries Objective 3: to be used to counter long-term unemployment. The ESF would help, originally, those over 25, unemployed for more than a year anywhere in the EC, but after 1993 was broadened to include ‘‘those threatened with exclusion from the labor market.’’69 In 1999, the aim was changed to combating long-term unemployment, including those excluded from the market, with education training and employment schemes. Objective 4: was to encourage the integration of people under the age of 25 into the economy, using the ESF. This element was merged into Objective 3 after 1993, and a new Objective 4
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sought to help workers adapt to industrial change. Dropped after the 1999 reforms, with elements merged into Objective 2. Objective 5a: aimed at reforming the structure of agriculture using the guidance part of the European Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund (EAGGF). The Financial Instrument of Fisheries Guidance (FIFG) was added after 1993 to help the fisheries sector. Dropped after the 1999 reforms, with elements merged into Objective 2. Objective 5b: promoted the development of rural areas using the guidance element of EAGGF, the ESF and ERDF. Structural adjustment of these areas was added in 1993. Dropped after the 1999 reforms, and merged into Objective 2. Objective 6: was added for the new members in 1995, helping their sparsely populated regions. Dropped after the 1999 reforms, with elements merged into Objective 1. Community Initiatives (CIs): the Commission had about 9 percent of the ERDF budget to spend on particular initiatives (see Concentration below). From 1999 the EU had only revised Objectives 1, 2, and 3. In 2006 the whole system was reformulated for the 2007–2013 period, with three new objectives: Convergence to help growth and jobs in the least developed states and regions, using Cohesion Fund, ESF and ERDF and is similar to former Objective 1. It takes E251 bn, representing 81.5 percent of the funding, in the period. The regional competitiveness and employment objective will strengthen the region’s ability to promote and anticipate change, promote innovation, protect the environment and develop an inclusive labor market, using the ERDF and ESF. It covers much of Objectives 2 and 3 and has a budget of E49 bn, some 16 percent of the total regional funding. Territorial cooperation promotes the balanced and harmonious development of the EU, by strengthening cross-border, transnational and inter-regional cooperation. It takes over from the inter-regional cooperation program (INTERREG) and is financed by the ERDF with a budget of almost E8 bn, about 2.5 percent of the total.
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The principles to guide the funds’ spending are: Additionality: EC funding should be extra to national funds, not instead of them. Implementation tightened up after 1993 reforms. Concentration: effort should be concentrated to meet regional and structural needs. Partnership: national governments should develop partnerships with local and regional government, business and commerce and other groups. Trade union and employers’ representatives specifically included in 1993 reforms. Programming: multi-annual programs, over three or five years, were to be the basis of funding, with the Commission providing the Community Support Framework (CSF) for each Objective and region. The CSF was then translated into Operational Programs (OPs) by member states, subject to Commission approval. Six-yearly programs were instituted after 1993 reforms, but the current one is covered by the seven years of the EU’s 2007–2013 financial framework. Environmental protection: added in 1993, this meant that any plans should have an environmental impact assessment and the steps to be taken to involve environmental authorities in the program. In the current program specific reference is made to the Gothenburg objectives.
The funds were reformed again in 1993, partly in preparation for Swedish and Finnish membership. Changes were also reflected in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty that introduced the Cohesion Fund, the Committee of the Regions and a title headed ‘‘Economic and Social Cohesion.’’ The Cohesion Fund was seen as a triumph for Spain. It was a new fund, separate from the structural funds that benefited those states with GDPs at less than 90 percent of the EU’s average, meaning Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Ireland. In contrast to the structural funds, it concentrated on projects rather than programs, and was thus more targeted. It provided up to 85 percent of project costs, compared with the structural funds’ normal 50 percent maximum (75 percent in Objective 1). Also the principles of additionality and partnership were relaxed as it was recognized that the Cohesion states would find it difficult both to increase their expenditure to match Cohesion Fund spending and to meet the ‘‘Maastricht criteria’’ for EMU (see Box 4.2).70 Of the ECU15.5 bn disbursed from the fund
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in the 1994 to 1999 period, 55 percent went to Spain, 18 percent each to Greece and Portugal, and 9 percent to Ireland.71 Changes in 1999 aimed at preparing regional and structural policy for the CEEC enlargement. In its ‘‘Agenda 2000’’ blueprint, the Commission introduced new instruments to help the accession states, such as Sapard and ISPA (Instrument for Structural Policies for PreAccession). In both the structural and cohesion funds, the amount being earmarked for the new member states mean that existing members would receive a smaller share. The 1993 and 1999 changes had three major effects. First, they entrenched the principles behind regional policy—additionality, concentration, partnership and programming—and introduced a new one of environmental protection. Second, they concentrated payments not only to more targeted regions and groups but they also reduced the number of objectives to three after 1999, thereby simplifying the system. Finally, the amount spent on regional policy has been increased so that by the 2000–2006 period, the amount allocated for structural funds was E213 bn.72 Changes for the 2007–2013 period were finally agreed in July 2006 and recognized the issues presented by enlargement, by the aging of the EU population and by faster economic restructuring. Again, there was a concentration on priorities that reflected the Lisbon strategy on growth, competitiveness and employment, and the Gothenburg environmental aims (see Box 4.3). With enlargement, the regional and structural policies of the EU have a massive task on their hands. A report on EU economic and social cohesion policies in 1996 showed very mixed achievements. The success stories seemed to be the Cohesion states of Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain which, from 1983 to 1993 had increased their average income per capita compared with the EU average from 66 to 74 percent. However, regional income disparities within all states, except the Netherlands, rose, and unemployment in the 25 regions with the highest unemployment rose from 17 to 22 percent.73 An equivalent report in 2006 showed that the new member states (EU-10, EU-12 from 2007) were growing faster than the economies of the old members (EU-15), but to meet the Lisbon strategy’s target of 70 percent employment rates by 2010, some 24 million new jobs would be needed in the EU of 27 member states, a 12 percent increase on present levels. In the 100 Convergence regions (see Box 4.3) the share of EU GDP was only 12.5 percent, though they had 35 percent of its population. These regions are poorest in terms of research and development and IT connections. Any further enlargement to Balkan states, let alone
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Turkey, will place an increased burden on the regional and structural policies.
Justice and home affairs At its beginning the EC was primarily concerned with the citizens of its member states as economic entities, mainly workers and consumers. However, as the opportunity of free movement of labor, and then of citizens, became a prospect, the EC/EU governments started to cooperate over the negative consequences of such flows and to protect themselves against adverse forces outside the EC/EU. This change has been reflected in treaty provisions. The Preamble of the Treaty of Rome set out the intention ‘‘to lay the foundations of an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe,’’ but the means in the rest of the treaty were mostly economic. The Maastricht Treaty, negotiated in the glare of public scrutiny and in the context of the wish of much of central and eastern Europe to join the democratic and free market states of the EC, considered the citizen more closely. Its Preamble confirmed the signatories’ ‘‘attachment to the principles of liberty, democracy and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms and the rule of law.’’ They were resolved to have ‘‘a citizenship common to nationals of their countries’’ and ‘‘to facilitate the free movement of persons, while ensuring the safety and security of their peoples, by including provisions on justice and home affairs’’ in the treaty. Article B of the TEU’s Common Provisions mentioned as objectives ‘‘to strengthen the protection of the rights and interests of the nationals’’ of the EU’s member states by introducing a Union citizenship and developing ‘‘close cooperation on justice and home affairs.’’ Article F stated what had been accepted but never included in EC treaties, that the systems of government of the member states ‘‘are founded on the principles of democracy’’ and that the Union would respect fundamental rights. The Treaty of Amsterdam replaced the TEU’s Article B with Article 2 TEU’s more ambitious aim of maintaining the EU as an area of freedom, security and justice, in which the free movement of persons is assured in conjunction with appropriate measures with respect to external border controls, asylum, immigration, and the prevention and combating of crime. Article 6.1 stated that the Union was founded on the principles of ‘‘liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law’’ and the European Council, unanimously but without the vote of the country concerned, could suspend certain treaty rights as they affected a particular state that had committed a
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‘‘serious and persistent breach’’ of the principles in Article 6.1.74 Even this brief overview shows how the EU has become more engaged in the relationship between the Union, and the Communities before it, and the citizens of the member states, and how those states have accepted cooperation outside the purely economic and social spheres of life. European Political Cooperation (EPC), developed in the 1970s, allowed the discussion of issues outside the Community framework by EC governments. Foreign affairs were covered (see Chapter 5, pp. 99– 133), but so were other issues of common interest such as the rise of international terrorism. In 1975 the informal Trevi Group was formed of ministers of justice and of the interior, at which they discussed possible responses to serious crime and terrorism. Another incentive was the move toward the single market agreed with the SEA in 1986. Earlier encouragement of immigration into Western Europe in the 1950s and 1960s had given way to tighter, though varied, immigration controls by most countries. However, the SEM would mean a freer movement of labor within the EC, which could cause problems if immigrants from outside Europe could gain entry to one EC state more easily than another. Intergovernmental ministerial and officials meetings discussed the issue after 1986 and at least agreed to the 1990 Dublin Asylum Convention.75 In 1984 the European Council decided in principle to sweep away the customs barriers within the EC. In 1985, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg signed the Schengen agreement, or accord, aimed at the abolition of border checks between them. The conditions for such open frontiers were set down in the 1990 Convention of Application. By the end of the 1990s, Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and the two Nordic EEA states of Norway and Iceland had joined the Schengen system. The two island countries of the United Kingdom and Ireland have not joined Schengen, relying instead on their national frontier controls. The Schengen system has aimed at ending frontier controls between members and, instead, transferring them to the external frontiers of the Schengen states; fighting crime and allowing for the right of pursuit by police; harmonizing legislation on drugs and arms; harmonizing visa policies and conditions of entry to national territories; and easing customs procedures.76 The 1990 Convention outlined the detail for this agreement and established the Schengen Information System which allowed authorities to exchange passport information. With Trevi, the Dublin Convention and Schengen, and with the prospect of an even freer internal market, the Maastricht Treaty
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had to deal with the justice and citizenship issues arising from these agreements and from the single market. However, most of the EC governments did not want these issues, sensitive and central to the security of the state, dealt with by Community institutions and legislation. The compromise was that the issues were included in the remit of the treaty but would form one of the two intergovernmental pillars of the three-pillar structure of the treaty. Thus ‘‘Justice and Home Affairs’’ (JHA), like the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), would not be subject to the same Community decision-making as the broadly economic and social pillar. JHA covered nine areas of common concern, ranging from asylum and immigration policies, through combating terrorism to judicial cooperation (see Box 4.4). The Schengen agreement was transferred to the EU, though the ‘‘opt-out’’ by the UK and Ireland and the involvement of Norway, Switzerland and Iceland can cause some difficulties at meetings with some issues being ‘‘Schengen,’’ with the UK and Irish representatives not participating but the Norwegian, Swiss, and Icelanders taking part with 25 of the 27 EU members, and some issues being non-Schengen, with the British and Irish involved but the Icelanders and Norwegians excluded.
Box 4.4 Justice and home affairs issues to freedom, security and justice Title VI of the Treaty of Maastricht, under the heading of ‘‘provisions on cooperation in the fields of justice and home affairs’’ listed nine issues of common concern under Article K.1: Asylum policy; Rules on the controls on people crossing external borders of member states; Immigration policy for nationals of third countries; Combating drug addiction; Combating fraud on an international scale; Judicial cooperation in civil matters; Judicial cooperation in criminal matters; Customs cooperation; Police cooperation to prevent and combat terrorism, drug trafficking, and serious international crime, with an EU-wide information exchange system within the European Police Office (Europol).
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Initiatives covering the first six of the above could come from either a member state or the Commission, but only from a member state for the more sensitive last three subjects. The issue of which third country nationals needed visas when entering the EU was placed under Pillar One. In the Treaty of Amsterdam, Pillar Three issues are re-named ‘‘police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters.’’ The first six issues of the Maastricht K.1 list are moved to the Community part of the treaty (Pillar One), with the last three remaining in the K.1 (Article 29 TEU) list. The aim, according to this article, is to provide citizens with ‘‘a level of safety within an area of freedom, security and justice’’ by developing common action in police matters and judicial cooperation, and by ‘‘combating racism and xenophobia.’’ The areas for police cooperation are (Article 30 TEU):
Detection and investigation of criminal offences; Exchange of information, subject to data protection; Initiatives in training, secondment and research; The common evaluation of techniques in investigating serious organized crime.
Judicial cooperation in criminal matters (Article 312 TEU) dealt with: Enforcement of decisions; Easing extradition between member states and adherence to such rules that help it; Preventing conflict of jurisdiction of member states; Establishment of minimum rules for penalties for organized crime, terrorism and drug trafficking. A new Title IIIa (Title 4 TEC) created in Pillar One, includes the first six issues on the Maastricht K.1 list, and outlines how to ‘‘establish progressively an area of freedom, security and justice.’’ Article 73j (62 TEC) aims at creating free movement of persons within the EU after a period of five years, with measures being brought into force on asylum, refugees and immigration (Article 63 TEC). However, all of Title IIIa did not apply to the UK, Ireland and Denmark which could however decide to accept directives from the title on an individual basis.
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Under the Treaty of the Constitution as originally agreed, the intergovernmental nature of police and judicial cooperation would mainly be changed into the more Community decision-making under Articles III-257 to 277, although member states could use the ‘‘emergency brake’’ to stop the adoption of measures it felt were against its national interest.
As can be seen from Box 4.4, the general trend has been for JHA matters gradually to become part of the Community pillar. This has been accepted by most member states as they have seen the opening up of the EU market and other elements of globalization, such as cheaper and easier travel and the greater use of the internet, bringing a further internationalization of crime and an increased turbulence of populations. The UK has insisted on keeping its own national controls on immigration, resting on the advantages of its island status. This has obliged Ireland—with its only frontier being with the UK—to follow suit. Attempts to move more JHA matters from Pillar Two to the Community pillar by the passarelle, whereby an agreement by all states allows such a movement of named clauses without any treaty change, have been blocked by a number of states.77 Since the Amsterdam Treaty came into force in 1999, further advances have been made in what is now called the area of freedom, security and justice (FSJ), though progress has slowed since enlargement. The 1999 Tampere European Council led to the first work program in the FSJ area, and cooperation was boosted after the events of ‘‘9/11’’ in 2001, when EU states wanted more activity against international terrorism. The Hague Program adopted by the November 2004 Council is a continuation of the Tampere Program. Among the various organizations used by the EU are: the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction, the European Monitoring Center for Racism and Xenophobia, the EU Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders (FRONTEX), the European Data Protection Supervisor and the EU Police College. There is also the Eurodac Convention covering the database of fingerprints of refugees, to be used to prevent them from applying more than once for asylum, and the European Arrest Warrant, valid throughout the EU from January 2004.78 The enlargement process has brought into the EU states with difficult social problems, populations eager to travel to better themselves, and with frontiers that have proved porous. Extension of the Schengen
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Box 4.5 Paying for the policies: the EU’s budget EU’s revenue This comes from three main sources: 1 ‘‘Traditional own resources’’: customs duties, levies etc. from trade into the EU and from particular activities: 15.1 percent in the 2007 budget. 2 A share of the Value Added Tax (VAT, sales tax) collected in each state: 15.6 percent in the 2007 budget. 3 A share based on each member state’s Gross National Income: 69.3 percent in the 2007 budget. Because it raises a high amount for ‘‘own resources’’ and gets back relatively little for agriculture, the UK is allowed a rebate (‘‘the UK abatement’’) on what it would otherwise pay into the EU. Taking this into account the major contributors to the EU budget (with percentages of total) are: Germany France Italy UK Spain
19.7 16.0 12.8 12.5 9.5
Expenditure The major headings for expenditure and their percentage of the 2007–2013 budget are: Growth and Employment 44.2 (Includes regional aid, structural, education, research.) Natural resources 43.0 (Includes CAP, CFP, environment.) Of which agricultural expenditure & direct payments (33.9) Freedom Security and Judicial, Citizenship 1.3 EU as a global player, including foreign aid 5.7 Administration 5.8 Compensation 0.1 (Ensuring new members are not net contributors.)
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The total bill is E864.3 bn per annum (at 2004 prices) or 1.05 percent of EU Gross National Income, 2007–2013. Source: HM Treasury European Community Finances May 2007, www.hmtreasury.gov.uk/media/2/8/ecbudget220507a.pdf
zone to the new members has been delayed, probably to 2009, and there has been increased pressure by the Mediterranean states to share some of the burden of dealing with an influx of illegal immigrants from North Africa.79 Many of these issues cannot be satisfactorily addressed within a single nation-state, but using the EU to tackle such difficult problems has provided very mixed results. As the pressure mounts, states will have to decide whether they want a truly EU-based system or one that is still partially open to national vetoes.
Conclusion At its heart the EU remains an economic entity, not surprising as the 1957 Treaty of Rome created the EEC. Its centerpiece is the SEM, now topped by the single currency, the euro. But it has never just been a trade and money organization. From the start, there were always social and regional concerns. As the market element has deepened and the membership expanded, so the panoply of policies has enlarged. The list of what social policies could be dealt with at Brussels grew and fresh structural policies were added at the behest of new members. With a greater movement of persons within the EU and increased pressure from those outside to come in and settle, judicial matters and policies addressing immigration and asylum have come to the fore within the EU. Despite some national reservations, the move has been towards EU-wide solutions. The EU has made its greatest advances in those areas that dominated the original Rome Treaty, the creation of a single market and certain common policies. The single market has come in stages and, despite some gaps, is comprehensive. Both the CAP and the Common Fisheries Policy have had their shortcomings but are now nearer than ever before the forms recommended by some critics. Social policy has had to deal with not just a shifting demography but also the lack of any one European social model. With at least the Rhineland, AngloSaxon and Nordic models to choose from,80 it is perhaps not surprising
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that EU social policy, even before enlargement, tended to be a compromise between all three. Regional and structural policies have been a means of helping raise living standards in the poorer nations and regions of the EC/EU, thereby showing an element of solidarity between EU member states and citizens. The environmental policy could become one of the most important areas for policy development of the EU as the attention given by the public to the environment increases and environmental issues becomes more demonstrably transnational. That trend is also seen with justice and home affairs, with issues cutting across frontiers. This chapter demonstrates the change in the nature of the EC/EU over the 50 years plus since the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957. It has moved from a rather limited, mainly economic organization to one stretching across much of Europe that deals with a variety of policy from monetary to defense and immigration. Because of this breadth of policy, the extent of membership and the variety of policy instruments, it is difficult to pin down the nature of the political animal described here (see Chapter 1). It may appear to be increasingly state-like; indeed that was the intention of the federalists who were active in the construction of the Communities and Union, especially in the early days. But in many areas, policy-making is by intense inter-state cooperation, together with an input from interest groups and institutions. The Lisbon strategy and the initial rejection of the Treaty on the Constitution suggest that Community-style policy-making may have reached a high-water level. In that case, for many of the ‘‘domestic’’ policy areas, there will be a tension between having the assumed result of the Community process—a more effective and efficient policy—or a less effective and untidy outcome as a result of member states having the last say. This tension can be seen in elements of social policy, in the running of the EMU and in freedom, security, and justice matters. It can also be viewed in the EU’s external policy that is covered in the next chapter.
5
The EU’s external activities
The European Union (EU) and the European Communities (EC) have been important actors on the world stage because they have dealt with the external trade policies of their member states. The EC/EU have negotiated in trade rounds and signed trade agreements and treaties. Since its creation in 1993 the EU has had an increasing presence in world affairs because of the political strength of its collective membership, and this has been demonstrated in its Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and its involvement in defense and security issues. Because the EU’s member states are sovereign states that still have their own foreign policies, the EU’s role in the world is not always clear. The EU can act of its own accord, perhaps with some of its members even disagreeing, or it can be a convenient front for its member states. The type of action taken by the EU has often been interpreted as being quite different from what has become expected from the United States in international affairs. The EU has been typified as exercising ‘‘soft power’’ internationally—basically meaning non-military—while the United States has been given to flexing its military muscles, ‘‘hard power.’’1 This characterization has also translated into the EU being a ‘‘civilian power’’ internationally, rather than one that has a place because of its military strength. That claim will be examined at the end of the chapter. Meanwhile, it should be noted that the EU’s external relations span three major aspects of its policy. In terms of ‘‘softness,’’ these are the common commercial policy and aid and assistance that cover the economic relations with the rest of the world; the CFSP, which covers the diplomatic relations with other states and entities, and, within the CFSP, the ‘‘hardest’’ aspect of external relations, the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP). This chapter will examine the EU in the world under those three headings, with a section on United States-EU relations at the end.
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First, the EU may be placed within the wider context of states and international organizations. The nature of the EU is contestable (see Chapter 1). It is more than just an intergovernmental organization such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). As shown in Chapter 3, its decision and law-making processes are complicated and involve not just the representatives of governments but also an input from the Commission—a more independent, although appointed, group—and from a directly elected parliament. On trade and commercial policies, the EU takes the lead and in many other policy areas of importance in relations with the rest of the world, such as the environment, agriculture and fisheries, transport and the movement of people, it shares responsibility with the member states. The Commission represents the member states and the EU as a whole in trade negotiations, though in some aspects of commerce, member states have reserved the right to have their own say. The High Representative of the EU’s Council of Ministers can often appear as a spokesman for the EU in crisis areas and can even act as an intermediary in a conflict. The EU signs agreements with individual states and with organizations such as NATO and the United Nations (UN). Yet the EU does not have a seat at the UN nor does it have embassies in foreign countries. It does not have any armed forces (those at its disposal are national forces), neither does it have a directly elected president, as does the United States or Russia. It does have a common currency, the euro, but this was legal tender in only 15 of the 27 member states by 1 January 2008. Though it may not be a state, the EU can punch at the weight of many powerful states in the world arena especially when it is working for its collective membership. In the World Trade Organization (WTO), the European Commission acts on behalf of the EU member states in areas where it has competence, although the member states also have individual membership.
The EU’s external trade and economic links From the beginning, the EC had a presence in the world by virtue of its involvement in trade matters. Its Common Commercial Policy aimed at ‘‘the harmonious development of world trade, the progressive abolition of restrictions on international trade and the lowering of customs barriers’’ (Treaty of Rome, Article 110). The EC participated in the Dillon and Kennedy Rounds, respectively, in 1962 and 1967, of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) that aimed at tariff
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reductions, and it also signed a number of trade agreements with Iran (1963), Israel (1964), and Lebanon (1965). As the capacity of the EC in the trade field enlarged, so did its global presence. By the 1970s, the EC was having trade disputes with the United States. The long-lasting GATT ‘‘Uruguay Round’’ negotiations from 1986 to 1994 ended with a deal between the United States and the EU that covered the growing trade in services as well as in goods. Importantly, an average cut in agricultural tariffs of 36 percent was agreed, as was a 20 percent decrease in trade-distorting farm subsidies.2 These were averages, and farm subsidies remained both in the EU and the United States. The Union appeared to be just as much of a trade bloc as the EC, protecting the interests of powerful groups such as the EU farmers. However, the EU, like the EC, has had to deal with trade partners across the world, and its relations with the most important (apart from the United States which is covered at the end of this chapter) will now be examined. Relations with ACP states The very nature of the founding member states meant that the EC would have a particular relationship with parts of the developing world. Three of the original EC members—Belgium, France, and the Netherlands—were colonial powers, and Italy administered Somalia. Part Four of the Treaty of Rome was on the Association of Overseas Countries and Territories (OCTs) and covered those non-European areas with which the six EC members had special relations. Such territories were allowed free access to the EC’s market, with the aim of altering their relationship with the EC from being dependent on their former colonial ruler to a non-discriminatory link with the EC as a group. The European Development Fund (EDF) helped to promote the social and economic development of the OCTs. Even in 1957 many of the OCTs were moving toward greater autonomy and in 1960 most of the sub-Saharan French colonies received independence. The Yaounde´ Convention was signed in 1963 between the EC and 18 African states and it broadly continued the trading arrangements of Part Four of the Treaty of Rome. The EC abolished customs duties on leading tropical products and the associates made sure that any tariffs were non-discriminatory, not treating, say, Luxembourg any less favorably than France. The EDF continued to grant aid and an Association Council was set up with its members being the EC’s Council and Commission and representatives from the associates. There were also consultative meetings of parliamentarians
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from both sides. Decisions of the Association Council, which supervised the Convention, were made by consensus. A second Yaounde´ Convention was agreed in 1967, and, when the United Kingdom joined the EC, the terms of Yaounde´ II were extended to Commonwealth states in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific by the 1972 Treaty of Accession. However, the new members added to the already existing dissatisfaction felt by the associates over the poor results of the Convention. After fresh negotiations, the Lome´ Convention was signed in 1975 between the EC and 46 African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) states. This agreement was followed by Lome´ II from 1980 to 1985, Lome´ III from 1985 to 1990, and Lome´ IV from 1990 to 2000. All the Conventions involved preferential access to the EC markets for the ACP countries (70 subscribed to Lome´ IV), though with some important exceptions, and funding through the EDF. Lome´ I had a separate sugar protocol that guaranteed the buying of a certain amount of ACP sugar at a price linked to that of EC sugar-beet. It also introduced an export earnings stabilization scheme, Stabex, whereby the EC guaranteed the ACP states against adverse fluctuations in the export earnings over a period of time for individual named products such as coffee, tea, and bananas. A similar scheme for minerals, Sysmin, was introduced in Lome´ II. Lome´ III supported regional economic agreements and aid was concentrated more on structural adjustments and debt relief. Issues such as the environment and human rights were also introduced in the later conventions. The 20-year Cotonou Agreement signed between 77 ACP states and the EU in June 2000 replaced the Lome´ conventions and provided a new framework for that relationship. However, the increasing concern with the plight of the developing economies, especially those in Africa, led to plans to complement, by the end of 2007, this preferential trade structure between the EU and the ACP states with bilateral Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs). For the first time, these will provide timetables for states to reduce their barriers to EU exports in exchange for trade-related assistance. The EU has conducted negotiations with six regions (West Africa, Central Africa, Eastern and Southern Africa, the Southern African Development Community, the Caribbean, and the Pacific) with the aim of integrating the countries in these regions into the world economy through EPAs.3 However, this has proved to be a long process—negotiations started in 2003—and one fraught with the usual problems of vastly differing expectations, dealing with some states suffering civil wars and little infrastructure, and having to negotiate with dictatorships and unstable governments.
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The relationship with the ACP countries, with its colonial past, has been overtaken by events. The United States, China and Japan have become more important to these states, as EU influence has been worn away. The ACP states have become very much less important in the eyes of the EU compared with its economic relations to the rest of the world. These will now be examined. The EU and Southeast Asia After the United States (see The EU and the United States, below) the region of the world with the greatest trade interest for the EU is East Asia. After all, China is the EU’s second largest trade partner. However, the organization in Asia with which the EU has had the longest connections is the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). ASEAN was set up in 1967 and its members represent a population of some 540 million people whose economies are resource-rich and have a high growth rate.4 In 1992 the countries decided to form the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA), and have also encouraged a great freedom of movement for services and capital. The ASEAN-EC Study Group was established in 1974 and the first ministerial meeting (ASEAN-EC Ministerial Meeting, AEMM) between the two sides was held in 1978. The ASEAN-EC Cooperation agreement was signed in 1980, aiming at closer cooperation on trade, industry, investment and technology transfer. This was replaced by a joint action plan in 1987. After 1995, the EU’s relations with ASEAN became part of the wider EU strategy on Asia that involved multilateral forums such as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meetings, with Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) summits being held every other year from 1996. By the early 2000s, it was clear that the EU’s relations with ASEAN had not advanced as expected. This was because bilateral relations with individual ASEAN states were still strong and the ASEAN structure did not have the same capacity as the EU’s. As a result, ‘‘A New Partnership with South East Asia’’ was agreed by the EU that set two tests in EU-ASEAN projects. Any project would have to add value compared with bilateral relations with individual ASEAN states with priority areas identified from an ASEAN perspective, and there would have to be an appropriate partner for the EU on the ASEAN side.5 A new framework for dialogue and regulatory cooperation is the Trans-Regional EUASEAN Trade Initiative (TREATI), launched in July 2003, and which has workshops on issues such as food safety and business priorities.6
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China The EU is China’s prime trading partner though its trade deficit with China—the gap between what the EU buys from China and what it sells there—is its largest bilateral deficit. The EU aims to bring China into the world trade system and to encourage economic and political reforms. The EC and China first signed a trade agreement in 1978, extended to a Trade and Cooperation Agreement in 1985. While trade grew from small beginnings in 1980, after China had been included in the EC’s Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) under which it has removed a wide range of trade tariffs against the imports of developing countries, economic sanctions by the EC were placed on China in 1989 as a response to Beijing’s crack-down on human rights and the shooting of protesters in Tiananmen Square. Most of the sanctions were repealed in 1990. In 1994 the Commission adopted its New Asia Strategy and in 1995 it released a plan for a long-term policy for China, showing that the economic and political potential of this part of the world was being taken seriously by the EU. The call was for a constructive engagement with China to help bring it further into the world economic community.7 The EU was a strong supporter of China’s accession to the WTO in December 2001. The Commission adopted a multi-annual planning and strategy document the following year that covered EU policies aimed at integrating China fully into the WTO, providing the country with expertise on the environment and sustainable development and helping it to strengthen good governance and the rule of law.8 As a result, a major EU-China Cooperation Program was launched in February 2004 and, at the Eighth EU-China Summit in September 2005, both sides agreed to establish a strategic dialogue to discuss regional and global issues. At the Ninth Summit, held in Helsinki in September 2006, it was agreed to start talks on a new Partnership and Cooperation Agreement that would encompass all matters including trade and political issues. Clearly it is the EU’s intention to be a major player on the East Asian scene. It may not have the military might there that the United States has, but this, and its trade strength, may be an advantage when dealing with partners such as China. Japan The EC’s relations with Japan were decidedly prickly in the 1970s. Japan has always had a strong trade surplus with the EC/EU. Japanese restrictions on imports and financial help for exports combined with
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the EC’s demands for a safeguard clause against the rapid expansion of Japanese exports led to the breakdown of trade negotiations in 1971. Relations improved during the 1980s and in 1991 there was an ECJapanese Joint Declaration and agreement on the export of motor vehicles from Japan to Europe and a series of annual summits between the two sides. By the mid-1990s the Japanese economy was stagnating, with an adverse effect for EU exports to its fifth largest export market and only came out of recession in 2005. Subsequent Japanese attempts to open up its markets, especially the investment market, have met with positive EU responses.9 The two sides have agreed to cooperate on trade issues, especially in the WTO trade talks (see below). Clearly, Japan is a major economic world player, but structural problems with its economy have held it back in recent years and, in the eyes of European business and commerce, China is overshadowing it and is becoming a more important partner in East Asia for the EU. India India is another country whose trade and commercial importance is growing for the EU. Early dealings with India by the EC covered topics such as textiles and intellectual property, with the pirating of books being a particular issue. Agreements in 1973 and 1982 were supplemented with a political dialogue started in 1994 and the first EU-India summit was held in June 2000 in Lisbon. The EU as a bloc is India’s largest trading partner, and India, as a still-developing country, is the largest state to benefit from the EU’s Generalized System of Preferences. The two sides are looking to expand their trade and investment links based on their September 2005 Joint Action Plan. The main trading problem for the EU is India’s system of non-tariff barriers to trade, such as taxes and duties, licenses, and bureaucratic customs procedures.10 Being the world’s most populous democracy, India is a natural strategic partner for the EU in Asia. As jobs move from EU industry and commerce to India, there will be an increased concern about the fairness of the relationship, but the subsequent growth in the earning power of Indian citizens will make that market an attractive one for the EU. Latin America Latin America became a region of particular importance for the EC once Spain and Portugal joined in 1986, mainly because of their cultural trade and linguistic links with South and Central America. Early trade
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agreements with individual countries gave way to economic cooperation agreements signed with Chile, Mexico, Uruguay, and Paraguay in 1990, and Brazil in 1992. In 2000 the Commission agreed the results of freetrade negotiations with Mexico that would lead to a free-trade zone. A major aim of EU policy has been closer links with the regional trade groups in the continent. A Joint Declaration was signed with the Andean Community in 1980 and an agreement struck in 1993 allowing its members duty-free access for their exports to the EU.11 A dialogue with the Rio Group was started in 1990 on matters such as trade, debt, and drug trafficking.12 A trade and cooperation agreement was signed with the central American states in 1985 but a further arrangement in 1993 made benefits conditional on human rights and democracy. The EU gave the region support in its moves toward democracy in the 1990s. Since 1995 the EU has had an agreement with the customs union that deals with trade, cooperation and political dialogue, known as the Mercosur customs union.13 However, attempts since 2005 to create a ‘‘balanced and comprehensive Association Agreement’’ have not brought the results hoped for by the Commission14 with the Mercosur states preoccupied with internal problems and their relations with the United States. The EU’s relations with the Latin American region have developed substantially, but have always been somewhat in the shadow of the troubled relationship between the region and the United States. External trade and aid relations The EU is a giant in world trade. By 2005 the 25 members of the EU represented the world’s largest trade bloc, taking 17.5 percent of world merchandise trade, compared with 16.2 percent taken by the United States. In 2004 the EU of the 25 provided 26.4 percent of the world’s service trade, ahead of the 18.9 percent of the United States. In the same year almost 58 percent of the EU’s agricultural imports came from the Least Developing Countries (LDCs), the world’s poorest nations, compared with 19.3 percent for China, 12.1 percent for the United States, and 10.1 percent for Japan.15 Since 1971 the EC, and then the EU, has had the GSP although, the exceptions to GSP were precisely the industries, such as textiles, where the developing states wished access but where the EC wanted to protect home producers. However, under its 2001 ‘‘Everything But Arms’’ initiative, the EU has given free access to its markets for all the products, except armaments, of the developing countries.16
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As big a trader as the EU is, it cannot determine the rules of the world trade game. The creation of the WTO in 1995 increased the stakes in trade negotiations, and multiplied the big players. The emerging economies of Brazil, Russia and India and China (the BRICs) have an interest in protecting aspects of their economies while pushing hard for concessions from the EU. Indeed, in the much-stalled Doha Round of WTO trade negotiations, the EU has promised to end more than 70 percent of its agricultural farm subsidies and cut farm tariffs by 50 percent.17 The EU is not just a trading partner—it has also been a large donor of economic aid to the poorer parts of the world. Under the ACP, it established the EDF to provide financial aid for the development of ACP states. The Cotonou agreement includes a provision for E13.5 billion in EU aid for development projects in the first five years. The EU has also been active in providing humanitarian aid to trouble spots and crisis areas. Since its creation in 1992, the EU’s European Community humanitarian aid office (ECHO), has provided assistance to victims of disasters around the world. It has a budget of some E500 m a year and works closely with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as UN-specialized agencies and the Red Cross and Red Crescent societies. It has been especially active in the Balkans, Middle East, and Africa.18
The EC’s foreign policy involvement European political cooperation From its beginning, the EC was bound to have an influence in the rest of the world beyond its economic clout. While it was often typified as an ‘‘economic giant but a political pygmy,’’ its mere presence was destined to have political consequences and these would increase as the EC became more integrated internally. The efforts by the six European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) states to create Defense and Political Communities had failed in the mid-1950s. The Fouchet Plan to create a more intergovernmental form of foreign policy cooperation made no headway in the early 1960s, but by 1970 the foreign ministers of the six EC countries informed their heads of state and government that the EC should exercise responsibilities in the world which was ‘‘both its duty and a necessity’’ because of the EC’s ‘‘greater cohesion and its increasingly important role.’’19 With the entry of the UK into the EC in 1973, it contained the three most powerful West European states, two of which (France and the UK) had nuclear weapons.
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Eventually, the nine states of the enlarged EC established a structure for European Political Cooperation (EPC) on foreign policy matters. At the top of this structure was the Conference of Heads of State or of Government, aided by quarterly meetings of the ministers of foreign affairs. The Political Directors of the foreign ministries—top civil servants in those ministries—prepared for the ministerial meetings, implemented tasks given to them and met together as the Political Committee of the Member States of the European Communities. The work of the Political Committee was assisted by the Group of ‘‘Correspondents,’’ more junior civil servants who kept in touch with each other. Also Working Groups, consisting of senior officials, could be established on particular problems common to all member states. It was the role of the Presidency of the EC to coordinate this structure, take initiatives and to ensure that conclusions were implemented. A secure telegraphic system, Coreu, assisted communications.20 After the EC states had made a weak response to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, the institutional framework was streamlined by the creation of what became known as the troika, the Presidency working together with its immediate predecessor and its successor, which allowed greater continuity. Officials from these two countries would also be seconded to the foreign ministry of the Presidency, thus forming the kernel of a secretariat. The Commission was to be associated with the work of the EPC which could discuss at least the ‘‘political aspects’’ of security, a recognition that EPC had been active in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), where the political aspects of security were central, since 1972.21 The EPC was established amongst governments and did not make use of the institutions or processes associated with the EC. This intergovernmental nature did not change when it was linked to the EC by the Single European Act in 1986. Title III of the Act was headed ‘‘Treaty Provisions on European Cooperation in the Sphere of Foreign Policy’’ and contained expressions such as ‘‘inform and consult’’; ‘‘convergence’’; ‘‘Take full account of the positions of the other partners’’; and ‘‘point of reference’’ and carried on the structures already established in EPC. The innovations were the establishment of an EPC secretariat in Brussels, and the statement that the member states should coordinate their positions ‘‘more closely on the political and economic aspects of security’’ and should ‘‘maintain the technological and industrial conditions for their security.’’22 Even before the Single European Act, the EPC members had started to flex their diplomatic muscles. Their most notable statement was
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the Venice Declaration on the situation in the Middle East made in June 1980. It called for a settlement of the conflict between Israel and the Arab countries and for a solution to the Palestinian problem that allowed the Palestinians to exercise self-determination and the right of existence of the state of Israel.23 By the early 1990s, the weakness of EPC was apparent. The Venice Declaration had seemed a worthy and balanced document, but it was rejected by both sides and the EPC made little contribution to any Middle East settlement during the 1980s. Worse was to follow. Although the original EPC and EC reaction to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990 had been swift, by January 1991 France was proposing its own peace plan and the British, French, and Italian forces that participated in the February 1991 military operations against Iraq were, in effect, under American operational control. The outbreak of a war between the constituent republics of the Yugoslav Federation in June 1991 led to an even greater schism between EPC/ EC members. By the end of that year, Germany had broken ranks on the recognition of the independence of those republics, especially of Croatia; Greece refused to recognize Macedonia under that name (which was the same as part of Greece); the European Community Monitoring Mission had failed to stop the conflict from spreading; and a peace conference in the Hague, sponsored by the EPC/EC, had failed to bring even a cease-fire in hostilities. This year of failure led Jacques Delors, President of the Commission, to judge that it had all been ‘‘an object lesson . . . on the limitations of the European Communities.’’24 The construction of the CFSP The Maastricht negotiations that led to the creation of the EU seemed the perfect opportunity to remedy the failings of EPC. The Single European Act introduced the concept of cooperation between the member states of the EC based on two pillars, one communautaire and dealing with trade and economics, and one intergovernmental, dealing with foreign and security policies. This structure was embedded in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, with CFSP forming the second of what became three pillars in all.25 The main points in Title V of the Maastricht Treaty are set out in Box 5.1, but there were three major consequences of the treaty for the EU in the area of foreign and security policy. First, the Union aimed at a common foreign and security policy, not only closer coordination of the various policies of the member states, as seen in EPC. Second, the CFSP was to be a section of the Union’s external
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policies, with institutions different from those of the common commercial policy which was part of the Community structure. The CFSP was to be basically intergovernmental. Finally, both security and defense were included. By 1997 it was clear from experience in former-Yugoslavia, where the EU was still not making a contribution proportionate to its size and closeness to the region, that the Union needed to develop some defense muscle to match its trade weight. Two of the non-NATO states—Sweden and Finland—that had joined the EU in 1995 were quick to spot this need. At the negotiations for the Amsterdam Treaty, arranged to tidy up the Maastricht Treaty, they proposed the transfer to the EU of undertakings adopted by the Western European Union (WEU) at its 1992 Petersberg meeting. These ‘‘Petersberg tasks’’ were primarily humanitarian and rescue; peacekeeping; and using combat forces in crisis management, including peacemaking.
Box 5.1 The Treaty of Maastricht and the CFSP The main points of Article J of the treaty covered the nature of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and the making of such policy: The objectives of the policy were ‘‘motherhood and apple pie’’ aims, to use Cameron’s expression,26 and included safeguarding common values, fundamental interests and independence of the Union, as well as support for ‘‘democracy, the rule of law, and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms’’ (Article J.1.2). Member states were to support the EU’s external and security policy ‘‘actively and unreservedly in a spirit of loyalty and solidarity’’ (Article J.1.4), thus sharpening up the weaker words in the Single European Act. The Council would define a common position, and member states ‘‘shall ensure that their national policies conform’’ to this (Article J.2.2). The procedures for joint actions were established in Article J.3. The CFSP was to include ‘‘all questions related to the security of the Union’’ and aspects of this were detailed in Article J.4 (see section on ESDP on pp. 119–128).
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The role of the Presidency in CFSP matters was bolstered in Article J.5. It was to represent the EU in CFSP issues and be responsible for implementing common measures. Member states’ diplomatic and consular missions and the Commission delegations in third countries and international organizations and conferences were to cooperate in the implementation of the EU’s common positions and measures (Article J.6). The Presidency was to consult and inform the European Parliament over ‘‘the main aspects and basic choices’’ of the CFSP and to take its views into consideration (Article J.7). The European Council was to define ‘‘the principles of and guidelines for’’ the CFSP, and these would be the basis for Council decisions. A Council meeting could be convened within 48 hours in an emergency (Article J.8). The Commission was to be ‘‘fully associated’’ with the work of the CFSP (Article J.9).
With the support of the other member states, the Amsterdam Treaty thus developed the CFSP generally and provided the treaty basis for an active ESDP. Maastricht had cautiously introduced security and defense by saying that the CFSP included ‘‘all questions related to the security of the Union, including the eventual framing of a common defence policy, which might in time lead to a common defence’’ (then Article J.4.1). The WEU—NATO’s intergovernmentalist European wing—was required ‘‘to elaborate and implement’’ decisions with defense implications, so that policy might be compatible with NATO obligations and not interfere with closer NATO and WEU cooperation. The Amsterdam Treaty changed J.4.1 to: ‘‘the progressive framing of a common defense policy . . . which might lead to a common defence, should the European Council so decide’’ (Article 17.1, TEU). So the European Council could decide to move to a common defense, and could meanwhile integrate the WEU into the Union. Few changes to the CFSP structure were made in the 2001 Treaty of Nice. Enhanced cooperation was allowed for a joint action or a common position, except for anything with a defense or military implication.27 However, the changes made at Amsterdam had to be tested. The ethnic cleansing of Kosovo started by the Serb government in 1999 galvanized the EU states into action but it needed a United States-led NATO operation to wrest that province from Serbia’s grip, leading to
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the downfall of President Milosovic of Serbia. Al Qaeda’s attack on New York and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001—‘‘9/11’’—also brought a united EU diplomatic response, but there was less unity about the US-led attack on Afghanistan in 2002 to rid it of the Taliban regime and an even greater divide over supporting the United Statesled invasion of Iraq in early 2003. The UK, Denmark, Italy, and Spain backed the United States with troops, while France and Germany led the opposition in the UN Security Council to the use of force. Almost parallel with these divisive forces, there was an integrative stream that led to the development of the ESDP (see below). While this has put the ‘‘S’’ for security in the CFSP, the main part of the EU’s influence abroad is still commercial (as outlined above) and diplomatic. How does the EU act in the latter area and what does it do? The instruments and institutions What instruments does the EU use in implementing its foreign policy? First, most of the EU’s ‘‘foreign affairs’’ are still conducted by the member states either in their bilateral relations with other states or within international organizations such as NATO and the UN. While these actions may contribute to the EU process, they are decided in nation capitals. Second, it is worth reiterating that most of the EU’s external relations are economic, involving trade, aid and development, and the instruments for those are Community-based ones. Also security and defense issues, though within CFSP, have special institutions that will be covered in the following main section. The instruments of the CFSP can be seen in Box 5.2. The four main Commissioners dealing with external relations are those for External Relations (called ‘‘Relex’’), for Development and Humanitarian Aid, for Enlargement, and for Trade. The Council Presidency represents the EU in CFSP matters, as does the High Representative. These two and the Commissioner for External Relations make up the ‘‘Troika.’’ While this arrangement allows the major foreign policy actors to coordinate, institutional competition and bureaucratic rivalry can lead to confusion over what EU policy is on any one issue. The CFSP instruments are not based on the Community pillar (Pillar One) and decision-making for CFSP does not thus follow the Community method. It is much more intergovernmental, so that the Commission does not have the virtual monopoly of initiation and the intergovernmental European Council sets both the ‘‘principles and general guide-
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lines’’ and the CFSP’s common strategies (Article 13 TEU). Unanimity for Council voting is the main form of CFSP decision-making, though the Amsterdam Treaty did increase the opportunities for qualified majority voting (QMV) and introduced the possibility of a ‘‘constructive abstention’’ in Article 23.1 TEU. Under this, a member state is not obliged to apply a CFSP decision but then must not stop the consequent EU action. The role of the European Parliament is that of consultation and information (Article 21 TEU), but it does have an important voice in financing the CFSP by means of its control over budgetary procedures.
Box 5.2 CFSP instruments European Council defines the principles of and general guidelines for CFSP. European Council adopts common strategies for areas where members have important common interest and it can also cover Pillars One and Three policies. The Council takes common positions detailing the EU’s stand; these are legally binding acts. The Council also decides on joint actions which are legally binding operational actions having financial means attached. On Council authorization in CFSP matters, the Presidency, assisted by the Commission, can negotiate international agreements. EU Declarations express a position, request or expectation about an international issue or a third country. Contacts with third countries can take the form a ‘‘political dialogue’’ by the EU with a group of countries on an issue. A de´marche is usually a diplomatic complaint by the EU to a third country. Systematic cooperation includes information exchange, and coordination and convergence of national action. (Source: ec.europa.eu/external_relations/cfsp/intro/index.htm)
CFSP policies: the neighbors During the 1990s much of the EU’s non-trade external policy was directed at the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) that had just emerged from communism and the grip of the Soviet Union. Another ex-communist state, but not one that had been controlled from Moscow—Yugoslavia—was a further source of EU concern. The
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EU has thus always given priority to its neighbors in its external policy, not least because they may one day be EU members themselves. The first enlargement after the Maastricht Treaty was that which included the three EFTA states of Austria, Finland, and Sweden.28 EFTA had been established in 1960 as a free-trade alternative to the customs union of the EC but after the enlargement of 1 January 1995, it was left with only four members—Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland. The first three had already signed the European Economic Area (EEA) agreement with the EU and Switzerland had signed seven agreements by 1999.29 In effect, these exported the legislation of the EU’s Single European Market (see Chapter 4) to these states. They benefit from being part of that market but are not able to change the legislation which is presented to them on a ‘‘take it or leave it’’ basis. Indeed, should any of these states decide not to accept the relevant piece of EU legislation, then it is open to EU retaliation if the Commission thinks that EU members may have been disadvantaged. This sanction is to prevent the remaining EFTA states from ‘‘cherrypicking’’ from the EU legislation. Norway and Iceland are also members of the Schengen agreement on borders (see Chapter 4), and have associated themselves with the CFSP, even contributing to ESDP operations. In many ways these countries can scarcely be regarded as being ‘‘external’’ to the EU; they are more ‘‘country members’’ of the EU ‘‘club.’’ It was by no means certain that the CEECs would become EU members. At the start of the 1990s they had unstable governments and their economies were undergoing reconstruction. With the Federal Republic of Germany including East Germany into its territory in 1990 and with the EFTA enlargement, the EU had enough on its plate without inviting early membership from the CEECs. However both their leadership and most of the people from the CEECs saw ‘‘returning to Europe’’ as including membership of the EU and NATO, the two main Western institutions. In response, the EU set out a process for the CEECs. At first it involved mainly trade and aid, but it gradually became more about membership. Already in 1989 the Poland-Hungary Action for Economic Reconstruction (PHARE) had been agreed by the EC and by the end of 1991 ‘‘Europe Agreements,’’ allowing industrial free trade with the EC, were signed with Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. Both PHARE and the Europe Agreements were extended to the other CEECs by the mid-1990s. Already the EU states had set out their own criteria for membership at the 1993 Copenhagen Council. These scrutinized new members on a number of criteria:
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A political test: they should have stable institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for minorities; An economic requirement: the existence of a functioning market economy and a capacity to cope with market forces within the EU; An administrative capacity: the ability to take on the obligations of membership; A fourth criterion referred to the EU itself: there would be a consideration of the EU’s capacity to absorb the new members.30 These Copenhagen Criteria, as they are known, have become touchstones for all new applicants for EU membership and they formed the basis for the long process by which the EU assessed and assisted the CEECs, and Cyprus and Malta, on their way to membership.31 By May 2004 10 states were new members of the EU (EU-10)—Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia—and two others—Bulgaria and Romania—joined on 1 January 2007. Together, the 15 pre-2004 EU member states (EU15), the EU institutions and the CEECs, plus Cyprus and Malta, had undertaken a massive transformation project which came close to achieving the political, economic, and administrative goals of the Copenhagen Criteria. The 2004/2007 enlargement meant that the EU had new frontiers. Some of its neighbors—Turkey, Croatia, and Macedonia—have already applied for EU membership and are candidate countries. In 2004 the EU launched the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) to address some of the problems of their neighbors, but without offering them the prospect of membership. The states to the south and east of the shores of the Mediterranean Sea (see Euro-Med below) were included in this but Russia—a too close neighbor for some—was eventually excluded because of its special status. In the end, the ENP amounted to Euro-Med plus relations with Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus. The ENP involves political dialogue, free trade, streamlined assistance programs and cooperation in justice and home affairs. Some E8.5 billion has been made available through the European Neighborhood Policy Instrument (ENPI) for the 2000–2006 period and E14.9 billion for 2007–2013.32 During the period of turbulence in the Balkans in the 1990s, the EU became more involved in South Eastern Europe—Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, the Yugoslav Republic (now the two republics of Serbia and Montenegro), and Macedonia. The EU Balkans Stability Pact included Stabilization and Association Agreements for states in the region, preparing them for future EU membership.33 The EU is
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also involved with both its military and police presence in BosniaHerzegovina and Kosovo (see The EU in the security world below). The aim of the EU is to promote regional cooperation in the area, bring greater economic prosperity to its people, address questions such as return of refugees, and encourage states in the region to move towards EU membership.34 One neighbor of strategic importance for the EU is Russia. Russia is the EU’s third largest trade partner and the EU is by far the largest partner for Russian trade, taking more than 52 percent of it. Almost two-thirds of Russian exports to the EU are in the form of energy and mineral fuels. The EU signed a Partnership and Co-operation Agreement (PCA) with Russia in 1994 but implementation was delayed until December 1997 by the EU in response to Russian military action in Chechnya, a Russian province troubled by a brutal civil war.35 The European Council’s first common strategy was on Russia, in 1999, and it aimed at a stronger political dialogue on foreign and security matters and the encouragement of economic reform. Further Russian action in Chechnya placed relations with Russia under scrutiny by the EU, but these seemed to return to normal after the election of President Putin in 2000. After ‘‘9/11,’’ Russian behavior in Chechnya was interpreted more in the light of the war against terrorism, and was thus seen more sympathetically. In May 2003 the two sides agreed to reinforce cooperation by aiming at the creation of four ‘‘common spaces’’ within the framework of the PCA. The Common Economic Space aimed at creating ‘‘an open and integrated market between the EU and Russia’’ and would involve 16 sector-based dialogues on issues such as fisheries and space technology.36 The EU-Russia Common Space on Freedom, Security and Justice aims at creating a Europe without dividing lines but at the same time fighting illegal immigration, a difficult balance at the best of times. A visa agreement was signed between the two parties. Fighting terrorism and organized crime were key priorities, and judicial cooperation on civil matters with Russia was to be examined.37 The Common Space of External Security was an attempt to engage Russia in a political dialogue over a wide range of international issues such as the fight against terrorism, non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and regional issues.38 The Common Space on Research and Development, Education and Culture aimed at enhancing RussiaEU activities in these areas with a special emphasis on scientific cooperation.39 The Moscow Summit of May 2005 adopted a package of ‘‘Road Maps’’ aimed at helping with the creation of these four spaces by taking particular short- and medium-term action.40
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However, Russia’s newly-found foreign policy confidence under President Putin has often divided the EU in its response. This happened when Russia supported the Franco-German line on Iraq in early 2003 and when Moscow used its near monopoly of gas supplies to some CEECs to place pressure on their governments. Germany, ready to sign its own agreement for gas supplies with Russia, was less willing to condemn Moscow than other states. By the time of the 2007 RussiaEU summit, it seemed that the response of the EU states to Russia ran along the old members–new members fault-line, with the CEECs taking the most intransigent view of their former master.41 The summit ended in disharmony, an indication that both the authoritarian nature of President Putin’s government and a range of bilateral issues between Russia and individual EU states was standing in the way of improved EU-Russian relations.42 The EU’s Mediterranean initiative (‘‘Euro-Med’’) has been of particular importance for its southern members. Since 1990 EU relations with countries on the southern shores of the Mediterranean have been based on its New Mediterranean Policy which aims at increasing trade links with and supporting economic and social reform to the south of the sea. The 1995 Barcelona Declaration dealt with: the political and security aspects of the relationship; economic and financial matters—a free-trade area is scheduled for 2010; and social, cultural, and human issues.43 Given the insuperable problems faced by mainly the North African states, ranging from desertification to the rise of fundamentalist groups, and from corruption to unemployment, the EU’s efforts seem but drops of water in the sand. The Middle East is another region now close to the enlarged EU. The EC started a Euro-Arab dialogue in 1974 but the Venice Declaration in 1980 failed to bring either side in the Arab-Israeli conflict to the peace table (see European Political Cooperation above p. 109). Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, the EU has contributed finance to help build the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority but this has alienated it from Israel which sees the United States as being of over-riding importance in the area. The question of Turkish membership of the EU is one that has divided the membership for some time. Though most of Turkey’s territory is in Asia, it does have a foothold in Europe. Its population is Muslim, but since the 1920s it has westernized many aspects of its public life according to the policy of Kemal Ataturk, president of the country from 1922 to 1938. Post-war moves toward a more democratic polity were not always successful and in 1960, 1971, and 1980, the army took over government in order to protect what they saw as
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the ‘‘Kemalist’’ secular state. Greece and Turkey have had unfriendly and often hostile relations since each state expelled the other’s population in the inter-war period, but any aggression was muted by NATO membership of the two states. The island of Cyprus, close to the Turkish coast and with a Greek majority and Turkish minority, was another flashpoint between the two. Originally, the EC offered Turkey associate status in 1963, the same as Greece, with the notion of a 22-year transitional phase from December 1964 in the move toward membership. However, the Turkish invasion and subsequent occupation of the northern part of Cyprus in 1974 led to unstable relations with the EC, especially as Greece moved toward full EC membership in 1981. With a military take-over in Turkey in 1980, relations with the EC were put on hold until after the partial restoration of democracy in 1983. Turkey applied for membership in June 1987, seeing this as a way of entrenching its Western identity. The Commission opinion in 1989 was not favorable for Turkey. It anyhow stated that the EC would have to wait until the completion of the Single European Market in 1993 before any further enlargement could be considered, but also stated that Turkey would find it difficult to ‘‘cope with the adjustment constraints’’ of membership in the medium term; there was a continuing dispute with Greece; political pluralism and human rights were problematic and there was ‘‘the lack of solution of the Cyprus problem.’’44 However, plans for the modernization of the Turkish economy were set out with the prospect of an EC-Turkish customs union by 1996. In the event, implementation of the customs union was delayed by arguments between Turkey and Greece until 1999 when earthquakes in both countries seemed to bring together the two peoples. Greece lifted its veto on Turkish membership and the Helsinki European Council stated that Turkey was ‘‘destined to join the Union on the basis of the same criteria as applied to other candidate States’’ but that progress still had to be made on the issues of disputes with Greece, Cyprus, and human rights.45 In 2003 and in 2007 a party with Islamic roots, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), was voted into office in Turkey and has had an uneasy relationship with the ‘‘Kemalist’’ forces in the country, especially the military. However, the AKP government has pursued Turkish membership, in many ways more vigorously than some of its secular predecessors, as this allows it to press for domestic reforms and show a more moderate face. Since May 2004, Cyprus, as a member, has had a veto on Turkey joining the EU, but politicians in other member states, especially in France and Germany, and even
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Commission members showed an ambiguity towards Turkey’s application. Turkish membership would bring not just political, social and economic problems to the EU, but would mean that the Union would have borders with the states of Syria, Iraq, and Iran in the Middle East. On the one hand this presents almost imponderable security concerns, but it also offers the opportunity to help stabilize a modern, Islamic democracy, one of the few in the world.
The EU in the security world During the Cold War period up to 1989, there seemed to be little need for the EC to involve itself in security matters, let alone defense ones. As noted, the EPC did cover the need for diplomatic coordination by EC member states in international negotiations such as the CSCE when some aspects of security were discussed. Defense and security issues in Europe were otherwise handled by the Atlantic Alliance, NATO, and to a much lesser extent by the WEU. After its formation in the mid1950s, the WEU had in effect remained a low-key organization until the 1980s when the French, in particular, tried to breathe some life into it as a European defense forum. While the British only agreed reluctantly to any re-invigoration of the WEU, they accepted its mention in the Maastricht Treaty as ‘‘an integral part of the development of the Union’’ in order for it to ‘‘elaborate and implement’’ decisions of the Council with defense implications (Article J.4.2). As the EU did not have its own defense forces, nor access to those organized by NATO, it had to make do with this very imperfect implement, the WEU. That this was insufficient was shown in former-Yugoslavia, where the military muscle was provided in the early 1990s by the United States and NATO. Despite these lessons, the Amsterdam Treaty only inched the EU toward having a military capability. The WEU had identified members’ armed forces answerable to the WEU (FAWEU) and most of the WEU tasks were absorbed by the EU after the enactment of the Amsterdam Treaty. The WEU was left with the Article 5 duty of collective defense of its membership. It is true that the Petersberg tasks of the WEU were included in the treaty, but they needed to be given life.46 The main advance was made after the crucial December 1998 Franco-British St Malo summit which recognized that the Union needed to have ‘‘the capacity for autonomous action, backed up by credible military forces, the means to decide to use them, and a readiness to do so, in order to respond to international crises.’’47 This development was partly a result of a feeling of European impotence in the face of events mentioned above and partly because the then new
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British prime minister, Tony Blair, felt that the EU should have the wherewithal to deal with crises, especially in its back yard. This sentiment was encouraged by the Kosovo crisis in spring 1999 when, again, US armed forces were needed to sort out a European political problem. Even with the call for the EU to have the capacity for ‘‘autonomous action,’’ there was the realization that any response should be in conformity with NATO and that at least US tacit consent was needed for such EU military action. The British-French agreement was taken forward at the EU level when the Cologne European Council in June 1999 expressed the wish ‘‘to give the European Union the necessary means and capabilities to assume its responsibilities regarding a common European policy on security and defense . . .’’48 The institutions of ESDP were planned: the Political and Security Committee (PSC); the EU Military Committee (EUMC), which provides the PSC and the European Council with advice and recommendations; and EU Military Staff (EUMS). With the coming into force of the Amsterdam Treaty, the Cologne European Council in June 1999 identified the need to ‘‘develop more effective European military capabilities’’ and ‘‘the maintenance of a sustained defense effort.’’49 In December 1999, the Helsinki European Council adopted the Headline Goals which dealt with the military muscle that might cover the very skeletal ESDP institutions. The aim was to have at the EU’s disposal up to 60,000 troops that could be deployed within 60 days, and be sustainable for a year. Though the Washington NATO summit in 1999 allowed the EU to have access to NATO resources and capabilities, there were clearly substantial gaps in any list of EU military capabilities drawn up after Helsinki. Nineteen Working Groups were set up to try to remedy the shortcomings listed by the Headline Goal Task Force. The Laeken Council in December 2001 launched the European Capabilities Action Plan (ECAP), explicitly to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of military capability efforts on a voluntary basis, with a report in March 2003.50 Laeken also agreed that the EU could take on ‘‘progressively more demanding operations’’ as the ESDP was declared operational, and claimed that ‘‘the Union is now able to conduct some crisis management operations.’’51 The EU increased its potential capabilities in the civilian sphere, with police forces, support for the rule of law, civil protection and civil administration. It approved procedures for crisis management and first exercised these in May 2002. By November 2002 an EU Civilian Crisis Management Capability Conference advanced the civilian aspects of crisis management.52 Plans were added for the availability from member states of
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up to 5,000 police officers for international missions by 2003 with up to 1,000 deployable within 30 days.53 In June 2004 the Brussels European Council considered that the European Security Strategy indicated the ESDP ‘‘might also include joint disarmament operations, support for third countries in combating terrorism and security sector reform,’’ thereby expanding the Petersberg tasks.54
Box 5.3 The CFSP and the Constitutional Treaty Article I-16 of the unratified treaty dealt with the CFSP: 1 The Union’s competence in matters of common foreign and security policy shall cover all areas of foreign policy and all questions relating to the Union’s security, including the progressive framing of a common defense policy that might lead to a common defense. 2 Member States shall actively and unreservedly support the Union’s common foreign and security policy in a spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity and shall comply with the Union’s action in this area. They shall refrain from action contrary to the Union’s interests or likely to impair its effectiveness. Under article I-22, the European Council was to elect a European Council President, among whose tasks were to ‘‘ensure the external representation of the Union on issues concerning its common foreign and security policy, without prejudice to the powers of the Union Minister for Foreign Affairs.’’ Under Article I-28, the Union Minister for Foreign Affairs (renamed the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policies under the Lisbon Treaty) will be appointed by the European Council, with the agreement of the President of the Commission. Article I-28 continues: 2 The Union Minister for Foreign Affairs shall conduct the Union’s common foreign and security policy. He or she shall contribute by his or her proposals to the development of that policy, which he or she shall carry out as mandated by the Council. The same shall apply to the common security and defense policy.
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3 The Union Minister for Foreign Affairs shall preside over the Foreign Affairs Council. 4 The Union Minister for Foreign Affairs shall be one of the VicePresidents of the Commission. He or she shall ensure the consistency of the Union’s external action. He or she shall be responsible within the Commission for responsibilities incumbent on it in external relations and for coordinating other aspects of the Union’s external action. In exercising these responsibilities within the Commission, and only for these responsibilities, the Union Minister for Foreign Affairs shall be bound by Commission procedures to the extent that this is consistent with paragraphs 2 and 3. This minister was thus to be a hybrid between the Council and the Commission and there is the potential for clashing with the President of the European Council, as well as members of the European Commission dealing with external affairs. Specifically on the CFSP, Article I-40 says: 1 The European Union shall conduct a common foreign and security policy, based on the development of mutual political solidarity among Member States, the identification of questions of general interest and the achievement of an ever-increasing degree of convergence of Member States’ actions. ... 4 The common foreign and security policy shall be put into effect by the Union Minister for Foreign Affairs and by the Member States, using national and Union resources. The treaty’s Article I-41 covers the ESDP: 1 The common security and defense policy shall be an integral part of the common foreign and security policy. It shall provide the Union with an operational capacity drawing on civil and military assets. The Union may use them on missions outside the Union for peace-keeping, conflict prevention and strengthening international security in accordance with the principles of the United Nations Charter. The performance of
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these tasks shall be undertaken using capabilities provided by the Member States. 2 The common security and defense policy shall include the progressive framing of a common Union defense policy. This will lead to a common defense, when the European Council, acting unanimously, so decides. It shall in that case recommend to the Member States the adoption of such a decision in accordance with their respective constitutional requirements. So any move to a common defense is subject to a national veto in the Council but also has to be ratified by member states’ constitutional processes, which would involve referendums in a number of states. Article I-41 also has a clause dealing with an attack on a member, but it is carefully worded not to require automatic collective defense: 7 If a Member State is the victim of armed aggression on its territory, the other Member States shall have towards it an obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power, in accordance with Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. This shall not prejudice the specific character of the security and defence policy of certain Member States. Commitments and cooperation in this area shall be consistent with commitments under the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, which, for those States which are members of it, remains the foundation of their collective defence and the forum for its implementation. Article I-43, the Solidarity clause, covers terrorist attacks and natural disasters: 1 The Union and its Member States shall act jointly in a spirit of solidarity if a Member State is the object of a terrorist attack or the victim of a natural or man-made disaster. The Union shall mobilise all the instruments at its disposal, including the military resources made available by the Member States, to: (a) – prevent the terrorist threat in the territory of the Member States; – protect democratic institutions and the civilian population from any terrorist attack;
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– assist a Member State in its territory, at the request of its political authorities, in the event of a terrorist attack; (b) assist a Member State in its territory, at the request of its political authorities, in the event of a natural or man-made disaster. Source: European Communities, Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 2005).
All these operations and forces were on paper. The first actual ESDP operation was the EU Police Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina (EUPM), launched on 1 January 2003 to take over from a similar UN operation. A range of activities followed, some military, others civilian, some from a standing start, others taking over previous missions. Operation Artemis in the Democratic Republic of Congo from June to September 2003, was the first autonomous EU military operation, and the first outside Europe (see Box 5.4).
Box 5.4 ESDP operations Active ESDP operations in mid-2007 EU Military Operation in Bosnia and Herzegovina (EUFOR-Althea): launched in December 2004 and part of the EU plan to maintain this otherwise weak state. Took over from NATO Stabilization force, SFOR. EU Police Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina (EUPM): launched in January 2003 and was the first ESDP operation. EU Planning team in Kosovo: preparing for a smooth transition from the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) to a possible future EU presence. European Police Mission in the Palestinian Territories (EUPOL COPPS): hoping to train the police force there. EU Border Assistance Mission at Rafeh Crossing Point in the Palestinian Territories (EU BAM Rafeh): established in November 2005 after the Israeli-Palestinian agreement to play a Third Party
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role on movement and access at a key crossing point into and from the Palestinian territories. EU Integrated Rule of Law Mission for Iraq (Eujust Lex): from February 2005, assisting with the introduction of the rule of law by assistance to the Iraqi judiciary. EU Police Mission in Kinshasa (DRC) (EUPOL Kinshasa): advising the International Police Unit since April 2005 with the training of the police for the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). EU security sector reform mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (EUSEC DR Congo): from June 2005, trying to help with the difficult transformation of armed forces from civil war to peace. EU Support to AMIS II (Darfur): established in July 2005 at the request of the African Union to support the AU Mission in the Darfur region of Sudan (AMIS II). The EU also provides the AMIS II with airlift and money. EU Border Assistance Mission to Moldova and Ukraine set up in December 2005 to support border management between the two states.
Completed ESDP operations EU Police Advisory Team in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (EUPAT): followed Proxima in December 2005. EU Military Operation in former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (Concordia): helped to implement the Ohrid Framework Agreement on Macedonia, March 2003 to December 2003. The first ESDP military operation. EU Police Mission in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (Proxima): the police support element following on from Concordia, December 2003 to December 2005. EU Rule of Law Mission in Georgia (Themis): the EU’s first rule of law mission, July 2004 to July 2005, aimed at addressing challenges to the justice system and to support the reform process. Aceh Monitoring Mission (AMM): the EU, ASEAN, Norway and Switzerland established a monitoring mission to oversee the peace agreement between the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh
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Movement, which was operational from September 2005 to December 2006. European Military Operation in Democratic Republic of Congo (EUFOR RD Congo): a force operational from November to December 2006 to support the UN Mission to the DRC during the elections process. European Military Operation in Democratic Republic of Congo (Artemis): active from June to September 2003 in stabilizing security and improving the humanitarian situation in Bunia, DRC. It did not rely on NATO and was the first ESDP operation outside Europe.
Meanwhile, the attacks on New York and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 and subsequent bombings in Madrid and in London, emphasized the ever-present threat of terrorism to Western countries, especially in the form of Al Qaeda and its associates. The ‘‘9/11’’ assault on the United States led to the invasion in October 2001 on Taliban-run Afghanistan, the replacement of the Taliban government and a large NATO involvement in the country. More controversially, the United States also led forces that invaded Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in March 2003 and toppled him from power. The Iraq operation divided the EU, especially the UK from France and Germany, but France and the UK met bilaterally and pressed ahead with the ESDP. They decided that the EU, instead of having a large paper armed force theoretically at its disposal, should build up a smaller-sized rapid response force consisting of a number of battle groups. These would be led by individual EU states and would be ‘‘the minimum militarily effective, credible, rapidly deployable, coherent force package capable of stand-alone operations, or for the initial phase of larger operations.’’55 The adoption in May 2004 of the Headline Goal 2010, largely based on the battle group concept, continued the move to qualitative as well as quantitative ambitions with an emphasis on effective forces being seen in the EU Capability Action Plan ‘‘road map,’’ progress reports and Capability Improvement Chart 2004.56 By December 2003, the EU had adopted a European Security Strategy which stressed that the threats to Europe were ‘‘more diverse, less visible and less predictable’’ than previous.57 The key threats were terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, regional conflicts and organized crime. The answer seemed to lie beyond using
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purely military means, encompassing all three pillars of the EU, those of the European Communities and the single market, CFSP and justice and home affairs. It was recognized that this meant the EU, in this area, would have to be ‘‘more active, more coherent and more capable. And we need to work with others.’’58 The EU was certainly more active in the ESDP. By the middle of 2007 it had accomplished seven operations and was engaged in 10 others (see Box 5.3). This allowed Javier Solana to claim that ‘‘ESDP is the quiet success story of the EU.’’59 Another development has been in that of European armaments cooperation. Most of the previous cooperation had been between European defense companies and had often involved US defense contractors. Official arrangements had been complex and included Organisation Conjointe de Coope´ration en matie`re d’Armement (OCCAR), the Letter of Intent Framework Agreement, and the Western European Armaments Group/Western European Armaments Organization (WEAG/WEAO). The new European Defense Agency (EDA) would ‘‘assimilate their principles and practices in due course, as appropriate.’’60 The Agency was to develop defense capabilities in the field of crisis management, promote and enhance European armaments cooperation and help strengthen the European defense industrial and technological base, including research activities.61 Gnesotto points out that with the EU’s 2004 enlargement, more of the member states regarded Russia ‘‘as a priority issue for the Union’s security policy,’’ while ‘‘the new security agenda is shifting the whole of the world security equation from the East to the South.’’62 While most of the Central and East European member states look to NATO when they feel threatened by Russia, they also want support from the EU. However, that is mainly provided in the area of trade and commerce (in the 2007 dispute about Polish exports to Russia, for example). The concern of the ESDP has been with southeast Europe and with Africa, the Caucasus, Palestine and Aceh, with only the Caucasus bordering Russia. Nevertheless, one area of operation in the Balkans, Kosovo, does impinge on Russian interests as they regard themselves as the protectors of the Serb minority in that region. A restarting of a civil war in Kosovo, between Kosovars and the Serb minority could draw in Russia either working together with the EU or, in a worst case, opposing the EU. A range of other challenges face the ESDP: How does the ESDP balance between legitimacy and effectiveness? The former may require decision-making involving all EU members, while the latter would call for quick action by the few.
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Will coherence lead to a fragmentation of resources? Coherence in the ESDP points to covering many global issues, but this could dissipate ESDP resources among a number of unsustainable activities. To what extent will internal security issues, connected to defeating terrorism determine the ESDP’s involvement in external security questions, for example in the Middle East or Africa? How can the member states improve the effectiveness of the means of ESDP and how might they sharpen its ends? The former requires both more and a better use of resources; the latter needs greater clarity in policy. Improvements may help to bridge the gap between expectations raised by the ESDP and the capabilities available to fulfill them.63 If Europe and the United States need each other’s power, how will this relationship develop?64 Just because the above questions are difficult to answer, it does not mean that the ESDP will make little progress. Indeed, its record so far shows that it has made its greatest strides when it has faced serious challenges such as Kosovo and the Iraq War. As Solana implied, the rise of the ESDP has been one of the unexpected successes of the EU. Nevertheless, one aspect, that of the relationship with the United States over security matters, is part of the wider picture of the Atlantic partnership which will now be addressed.
The EU and the United States The EU’s relationship with the United States is key for both partners for three main reasons. The first relates to the nature of the countries themselves. All these states are democracies and have free-market economies. They thus form the bastion of what has become known as ‘‘the free world.’’ They have other close links with membership of the OECD, and most are members of NATO.65 If these states cannot coexist, then what hope is there for multilateral agreements more generally? Second, the two sides are major trade partners and leading world traders. In 2005, the United States provided 13.9 percent of the EU’s import value of manufactured products and 23.7 percent of the EU’s export value of manufactures, being the main partner for the EU in both cases.66 The United States and the EU were, respectively, numbers one and two in the list of the world’s major trade partners in merchandise trade in 2005, if intra-EU trade is excluded.67 Third, the United States and the EU are two of the key architects and upholders of the world trade system, currently in the form of the WTO and previously in the form of GATT.68 Though
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agreement between the two is not sufficient to lead to a deal within the WTO, it is necessary. Thus the relationship between the United States and the EC/EU has been a crucial one for both sides. As well as being important trade partners, the United States and the EU have been in competition. Trade rules that suit Brussels are not always to Washington’s liking. From the beginning, the EC had disputes with the United States and disagreements have continued to upset the trans-Atlantic relationship. Though EU-US relations were ‘‘originally founded on security rather than economic concerns,’’69 trade disputes were beginning to make their mark by the 1960s when the EC was developing its common commercial policy. Efforts were made through the various rounds of GATT negotiations to bring down the tariffs and other trade barriers between industrialized countries such as the United States and the EC states, and some success was seen in the Dillon Round, which reduced the EC’s external tariff by 10 percent, and the Kennedy Round, both in the 1960s. In 1960, the United States provided 16 percent of EC member states’ agricultural imports, but this figure fell after the development of the Common Agricultural Policy. It meant that the EC members became more self-sufficient in agriculture. So in 1963 the ‘‘Chicken War’’ started between the EC and the United States after Brussels imposed duties on imported US frozen chickens and the United States retaliated with equivalent punishing duties on some EC imports. The United States tended to take these cases to GATT for settlement, but by the 1980s decided to subsidize its own agricultural exports to third markets where these were often in competition with EC exports.70 Relations between the EC and the United States during the 1970s and 1980s became more complicated as the EC developed. On the trade side, the United States had moved from being a major exporter after the Second World War to becoming a net importer by the 1980s and the American share of world monetary reserves had dropped from about half in 1948 to under 10 percent in 1988.71 Though the dollar was still the world’s leading currency, the convertibility between the currency and gold—the basis for the international monetary system since 1945—was ended in 1973, and in 1971 the United States started to import rather than export petroleum. At a time when the EC was increasing its economic weight by including the UK as a member, the United States no longer had the economically dominant position that it had enjoyed in the 25 years after the Second World War. The EC was scarcely in a state to take the place of what was seen as the declining Western superpower. In the 1970s, the EC staggered from one crisis to another (see
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Chapter 2, pp. 26–27), with members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and Japan on the ascendant. Nevertheless, the Reagan administration (1981–1989) signaled a bouncing back of the United States, at least in diplomatic terms, if not always accompanied by improved economic health. US spending on defense increased vastly and President Reagan first faced up to the might of the Soviet Union and then tried to cut deals with its new leader, President Gorbachev, over the heads of the onlooking Europeans. On the political side, the EC member states did not support the United States in its actions against what it regarded as communist forces in Latin America and Africa; on the economic side the Reagan administration was more protectionist than its post-war predecessors.72 While United States-EC relations during this period undoubtedly had their chilly side, the basic solidity of the link between North America and Western Europe should not be forgotten. NATO not only survived various crises but emerged triumphant against its Soviet adversaries by the end of the 1980s. The United States and the EC member states were united on the necessity not to compromise with the Soviet Union on the central issues of security, even though they did not always agree on the best means to use for their defense. By the late 1980s, as the economies of the advanced industrialized countries were becoming inter-connected, it was also clear that the economic interests of the United States and the EC were intertwined. The end of the Cold War offered both an opportunity, with the freeing up of the former Soviet empire, and a challenge to Europe and America to be as united as they had been against their former common adversary. The framework for US-European relations was changed in the 1990s, and not just by the fall of the Soviet Union and its consequences in Europe. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 was followed by the United States bringing together and leading a wide coalition of countries, including many European states, that liberated Kuwait and defeated the Iraqi forces in early 1991. With the failure of the EC member states to act effectively when Yugoslavia broke apart in 1991, it became clear that the Europeans could not manage a serious crisis on their continent without US assistance. However, the agreement in Maastricht in December 1991 created an EU (even if its implementation was delayed until November 1993) that could oversee the Single European Market established by the start of 1992. This faced the United States with a growing core Europe with real powers, not just in the economic field. Although in the Uruguay Round of GATT, which ended in 1992, the EC member states were still arguing with the Commission about who could sign up to what aspects of a
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trade agreement, it was becoming increasingly clear that the United States would have to approach the new EU as an interlocutor on trade matters. By 1995 the EU had expanded to 15 members and was attracting the attention of the governments of the new CEECs. However, it was US power that brought about the Dayton settlement to the former-Yugoslav crisis in 1995 and it was US aircraft that led the attack on Serbia in 1999 after the Kosovo crisis. Despite their close relations on political issues in the 1990s, such as former-Yugoslavia, and even after the conclusion of the GATT Uruguay Round and the establishment of the WTO, trade disagreements remained between the United States and the EU. Complicated European-American commercial relations have continued to cloud trans-Atlantic relations. One was over bananas whereby the EU’s deal with the ACP states gave West Indian bananas privileged access to the European market. The United States backed complaints to the WTO by American multinationals such as Dole, which ended this privilege. Other areas of concern during the 1990s and 2000s were: the issues of hormone-free and genetically modified-free food; the United States wanting to enforce its sanctions on states such as Cuba, Libya and Iran on European firms; and the support by EU states and the United States of their respective aerospace industries.73 The 2003 Iraq War divided the loyalties of states waiting to join the EU. The EU-15 themselves split between the UK, Spain, Italy, Denmark, and Portugal, all of which gave the US policy support, and France, Germany, and Belgium, which criticized US action. Most of the new members that joined in 2004 favored the United States, allowing the Bush administration to contrast the attitude of ‘‘Old Europe’’ (France and Germany) with that of ‘‘New Europe.’’ It was not a division between the United States and Europe because the EU failed to speak with one voice. The meeting between the EU and the US administration in April 2007 showed that relations were returning to normal. The two sides resolved to reduce barriers to transatlantic commerce and agreed to work on five ‘‘lighthouse projects’’ of intellectual property rights, secure trade, financial markets, innovation and technology, and obstacles to investment. A Transatlantic Economic Council was set up, co-chaired by a US cabinet-level official and a member of the Commission.74 The summit of United States and EU leaders, held in Washington, reaffirmed the strategic partnership between the two sides, adopting declarations on security, energy security, climate change, and liberalizing transatlantic air traffic, all issues that had divided the United States, especially the Bush administration, and the EU.75
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The EU’s common commercial policy and the CFSP have meant that the United States has increasingly had to deal with the EU, not just the important European states such as the UK, France, and Germany. The world seen from Washington is certainly different from that seen from Brussels, but the unity of the two sides of the Atlantic over the basic elements of democracy and the market economy mean that, in the long run, the political similarities eclipse any differences.
Conclusion: acting and being there How can the CFSP, and its predecessor in the EPC, be understood? Does the existence of the CFSP mean that the EU has become, in all but name, a state with a foreign policy, as Jean Monnet would have wished, or is it a matter of the EU being the servant of the member states, as Margaret Thatcher would prefer? Or is the CFSP something between these two poles? Is the EU, like the UN, an actor on the international scene, or does it at least exercise its presence? The notion of the EC having international ‘‘actorness’’ has been around for some time.76 Sjo¨stedt considered that the EC had the necessary minimum ‘‘internal cohesion’’ and that it was ‘‘discernible from its environment,’’ meaning it had autonomy. Concerning capability, he claimed that the EC had:
the ability to identify policy priorities and create coherent policies, the ability to negotiate with others in the international system, the use of policy instruments and domestic legitimization of the external policy-making process.77
These capabilities have been developed by the Maastricht and Amsterdam Treaties and with the growth of CFSP institutions, but have not been as advanced as those exercised by many modern sovereign states. Allen and Smith’s view of EU foreign policy implies less of a comparison with a sovereign state; they claim that the EC/EU had and has ‘‘presence,’’ defined by factors such as ‘‘credentials and legitimacy, the capacity to act and mobilize resources, the place it occupies in the perceptions and expectations of policy makers.’’78 Bretherton and Vogler prefer a concept of presence that is a function of ‘‘being rather than action’’ which brings a response just by being there, as did the Single European Market.79 Others have protested that this typifies the EU as a single actor, failing to represent the ‘‘multiple realities’’ that constitute the EU.80
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Bretherton and Vogler view the CFSP from a social constructivist perspective (see Chapter 1, p. 16–17). Interests and identities are not seen as being given from outside, for example by geographic position or the balance of power, but more as constructed social phenomena. Tied up with this approach, is a concern about the identity that may be created by policies such as the CFSP: ‘‘EU foreign policy might also be seen not to be about rationalist calculation at all but be understood as being all about identity creation.’’81 A discourse analysis can show that this identity is created by reference to both internal and external dangers, as well as reflecting certain liberal values thought to be common to European societies.82 Mather supports the notion of identity-building: ‘‘The EU also has its diplomatic side, and it is here, as with its state-building amongst its near neighbours, and with the ACP countries, that there are increasing signs of the EU developing an international identity.’’83 Sjursen and Smith have claimed that the EU’s foreign policy, which reflects the individual state and collective EU interests, also has two other justifications, those that refer to common values and to universal principles. They found that the ‘‘logic of moral justification is overarching’’ in the case of the EU’s policy to the CEECs leading to their membership in 2004 and 2007. They also considered that values played an important influence on who was admitted as a member and who was not.84 Whatever the CFSP is, what does it stand for? The two questions are inter-related. If the CFSP is merely the lowest common denominator of the national policies of 27 states, then it will not be able to stand for much. Clearly it is something more than that, but how much more is a matter for contention and one where the elements at issue are constantly changing. At an early stage some writers thought that the EC represented something of importance in its external policy. Ducheˆne saw the EC as a ‘‘civilian power,’’ not one that relied on military might, and that could nevertheless play ‘‘a very important and potentially constructive role’’ in the world.85 Both Bull and Hill rejected this idea of ‘‘civilian power Europe,’’ partly because of the weakness of the EC/EU as an actor, and partly because military capability was regarded as essential for effective action.86 The adoption of an ESDP has provided the EU with at least the option of becoming more than a civilian power. However, as well as the means, the EU must have the will. The member states would have to accept the need to have more than a presence across the world but also an external policy with the economic, diplomatic and military aspects in accord and acting in pursuit of a common policy of the EU rather than a policy that is common to its member states.
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In March 2007 the European Union (EU) celebrated 50 years since the Treaty of Rome which established the European Economic Community (EEC), with the self-congratulatory Berlin Declaration.1 Despite a number of failings, it had enough with which to be content. Whether the EU will be able to boast about its achievements in 2017 or whether it will find itself pensioned off at the age of 60 is a more open question. This chapter will provide an overview of some of the main aspects of the EU, with a view to the future.
Membership: what is Europe? An immediate issue being faced by the EU is that of its membership. In its first 50 years it grew from six to 27 members and does not look like ending the process of enlargement (see Box 6.1). While new members have not always meant a watering down of integration, they have encouraged new forms of this process and pressed for action in new policy areas. Nevertheless, enlargement beyond 20 states was felt inevitably to affect the good functioning of the EU’s institutions, thus the Treaty on the Constitution. The Berlin Declaration provided a reminder that the EU is, at its core, a peace project. The aim of the Schuman Plan in 1950 was to make war between France and Germany ‘‘not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.’’2 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) membership, a common adversary in the Soviet Union and the European integration process has cemented France and Germany together so that war between the two seems both unthinkable and impossible. The presence of the ‘‘Soviet threat,’’ reflected in their membership of NATO, made conflict between the two states unthinkable, in the sense that leaders, and most citizens in the two states, considered the Soviet Union a greater threat than each other. However, it was the European
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Box 6.1 The expansion of the EC/EU 1957: Original members—Belgium, Federal Republic of Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands. 1973: First enlargement to nine members—Denmark, Ireland, and the United Kingdom join. The EC is cut down to size—Greenland leaves. Greenland is part of the Danish kingdom and entered the EC as such on 1 January 1973. It got home rule in 1979 and then negotiated Overseas Country and Territory status in 1985, thereby no longer being part of the EC. The two-step Mediterranean enlargement—Greece joined in 1981, Spain and Portugal in 1986. The EC has 12 members. Germany grows—East Germany was included into the Federal Republic of Germany, and thus the EC in 1990. Three former EFTA states join—Austria, Finland and Sweden became members in 1995. Membership was then at 15. The post-Cold War enlargement first to 25 as 10 states join— Cyprus and Malta from the Mediterranean, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia from Central and Eastern Europe—with two more, Bulgaria and Romania, acceding as members on 1 January 2007, making the total number of member states 27. Next in line—as of 2007, there are three candidate states: Croatia, Macedonia, and Turkey. Other possibilities for membership are Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and, if it becomes independent, Kosovo. If they wished, Norway, Iceland, and Switzerland could all join without too much trouble, though the EFTA mini-state of Liechtenstein might face some opposition. More unlikely candidates in the near future are the ex-Soviet states of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine.
integration process that helped to make conflict ‘‘materially impossible’’ by linking together the economies of the two states so intimately that building the sinews of war to use against each other was scarcely achievable. If this is the case, then European integration may be an
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important part of the treatment that could heal the scars of conflicts in the Balkans during the 1990s. The case of Turkey offers a harsher challenge to the EU’s ability to build peace. NATO and the United States have managed to prevent border clashes between Turkey and Greece from developing into more serious conflict, but could not stop the incursion of Turkey into northern Cyprus in 1974. Over the last few years, relations between Turkey and Greece have improved, making the prospect of Turkish membership closer to a reality (see Chapter 5, pp. 117–119). The challenge of having a mainly Asian, Muslim country with a large, young and relatively poor population as an EU member is one that eclipses the problems brought by Central and East European Country (CEEC) membership. The EU could decide that having Turkey inside is a step into an unknown abyss and pull back from the promise of eventual membership. Or they might bank on the EU working again as a peace process, invest heavily in the economy and infrastructure of Turkey and, if over a period of time, embrace it as a full member and participant in the EU institutions. This would demonstrate that democratic, free market predominantly Christian-populated Europe could include a sizeable democratic, free market predominantly Muslim-populated state. This would be a visionary Union that would need constant strong action by the leading politicians of Europe, and, so far, few of these, wary of voter response, have proselytized for Turkish membership. An extreme test for the EU method of creating peace through integration would be to include Israel and the Palestinian territories into an already expanding EU, but only after the two had concluded a peace between themselves. This would present a series of gradated incentives for all sides in Israel-Palestine to work together within a wider context. However, this prospect currently seems almost impossible, even if all the states of the EU, and most of their citizens, wished to take a further leap in the dark.
External relations: another BRIC in the wall? The EU has always had an ambiguous relationship with the United States and this will continue. Both sides have democracy and the free market in common, though they may differ on how these ideas are implemented. The United States, through NATO, provided the major defense force for Western Europe in the Cold War period, though how that was done was sometimes a matter of controversy. After ‘‘9/11,’’ a number of EU governments were skeptical about the US government’s
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preference to pursue the ‘‘war on terror’’ through the invasion of Iraq. As the prime motor for that policy, the Bush administration, comes to the end of its term of office and new leaders arise in Europe, even that debacle is cleared away and an effort made to mend the ties that bind. New strains will arise over the WTO negotiations and possibly over the treatment of Iraq. Whatever the outcome of trade negotiations, the EU and the United States may decide that they have enough in common on economic and security matters to express in treaty form between the two pillars of the Atlantic alliance. This idea was expressed by President Kennedy in 1961, but the European side has never been strong or united enough to form a pillar to match that of the United States. Even more problematic are EU relations with Russia. Forms of cooperation between the two exist and content has been agreed, but the relationship has become more troubled during the presidency of Vladimir Putin. This has only partly resulted from difficult issues arising such as Western action in Kosovo, NATO membership by most of the CEECs, and European reliance on Russian energy supplies. It is more connected with a Russian feeling of pride after the perceived humiliations of the 1990s, and also the more Kremlin-centered political system introduced by President Putin. A continued troubled relationship with Russia will bring the EU and the United States closer, but could also split the Union between those who wish to resist signs of Russian imposing its will in Europe and those who would prefer compromise with Moscow. The EU’s relations with others in the group of developing economies—the BRIC states of Brazil, Russia, India, and China—will be vital for the economic survival of Europe. Somehow the EU has to agree, most likely through the World Trading Organization (WTO), trading arrangements that benefit these states yet manage Europe’s move away from not just heavy industry but also from elements of the service economy. These states will compete more with Europe for custom and, as their consumer power increases, for raw materials and energy supplies. The unsteady relationship that Europe (and the United States) with the economy of Japan as it boomed from the 1950s onwards may give some indication of what to expect—negotiations will be about managing the results of a process over which the EU will have little control. One of the recent successes for the EU has been the construction of the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP). Since the late 1990s, the EU has created an operative system that attempts to deal with difficult security problems around the world. It has had a number of successes and has shown that the Union can act fairly quickly in a
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crisis, despite a number of shortcomings (see Chapter 5, pp. 124–126). The EU may find that itself becoming more involved in the Middle East and Africa in crisis prevention, peacekeeping and construction. This will not just be to help these regions avoid conflict but will also be seen as in the EU interest. The problems that fighting in these parts of the world bring for Europe—loss of markets, flows of immigrants and asylum-seekers, piracy—can be partially ameliorated by successful interventions, especially those conducted in tandem with regional organizations such as the African Union or ASEAN. Another area that may bring a good return on a modest EU investment is in the sort of radical peace-building that has taken place in Burundi after its civil war and in inter-communal bridge-building seen in some areas of Northern Ireland. Such initiatives are often poorly financed, but less expensive than the conflict they try to prevent, and are often longer lasting than negotiations with the political leaders of groupings.
Institutions: neither fish nor fowl? The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), when conceived by Monnet in 1950, was an attempt to manage functional areas of policy across European frontiers in a new way. Already by the time of the signing of the treaties for the Economic Community and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) in 1957, this process had become watered down with the intergovernmental element strengthened. In the EEC, the EC and then the EU, there has been a constant tension between the pressure to have Community-based policies with the communautaire institutions such as the Commission, the European Parliament (EP) and the European Court of Justice (ECJ) playing a dominant role, and the pull by the states to retain policy-making and implementation in their own hands. Sometimes, as in the Single European Act (SEA, 1986) and the Treaty of Maastricht (1992), the Community element seems to have the upper hand, and at other times such as in the 1966 Luxembourg Compromise (see Chapter 2, p. 25) and during the mid-1970s, the national element was stronger. In the Introduction and Chapter 2, this tension has been typified in the persons of Monnet and Delors as integrationists and President de Gaulle and Mrs Thatcher as those wanting a Europe of strong nationstates. Actually neither ‘‘side’’ rejected the assumptions of the other ‘‘side,’’ nor were their views totally incompatible. Both Monnet and Delors were good Frenchmen who do not wish to see a weak France, and de Gaulle backed a communautaire agricultural policy and Thatcher pressed for the EU’s single market. The institutions and
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working methods of the EU have evolved as a synthesis of the intergovernmental and the community-based and will continue to do so. Alan Milward has made the point that the original EC helped rescue the West European nation-state after the Second World War, and it seems that the EU is undertaking the same task for the Central and East European countries after the end of the Cold War. The leaders of Poland, Estonia and Slovakia have not seen a return of their countries from Soviet control just to hand in their flags and national anthems in Brussels. However, what these states can do on their own is recognized as being limited with integration, even of currencies, being seen as an effective way to bring their citizens safely to a reasonable standard of living. As the numbers of member states has grown and continues to increase, then the form of acceptable and manageable integration changes. ‘‘One size fits all’’ was just about suitable for a Community of six states in close geographic proximity but was seriously challenged already in 1973 with membership by the more Atlanticist, island state of the United Kingdom. A Union of 27 members just has to be more flexible and that has been recognized in its treaties and practice, especially in the Lisbon strategy. The long-running involvement with the Treaty on the Constitution, changed in 2007 to an amending treaty, demonstrated a degree on introspection by those most involved in the EU, that left wide sections of the citizenry either apathetic or antipathetic. The EU has the potential as a meeting ground for those concerned with the issues that engage the public—such as the environment, immigration, jobs, and crime—but it has yet to find a way to attract the public voice separate from those used by the member states. Clearly the EP, CoR, and EESC have failed to do this. As the Union relishes its synthesis of the intergovernmentalist and the communautaire, so the academic study will continue to be varied. The emphasis is already shifting away from the battle between the Union and the member states to questions about EU governance and the inter-actions between domestic and EU politics, especially in Europeanization and fusion studies.3 Whether the EU is building a new European identity and the relationship between the EU and social trends in the member states, not least those seen in post-modern societies with their churning of jobs, knowledge and people, will increasingly bring in sociological and constructivist approaches (see Chapter 1, pp. 16–17). The EU’s interaction with the outside world will become of increasing interest. As it continues to act on the world stage, it will attract academic attention, and not just in Europe and the United
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States. Whether WTO trade talks are successful or not, the EU will have to deal directly with the consequences, and its relations with the United States and the BRIC states will be crucial. The rise, and even possible fall, of the euro as a European and world currency will attract the attention of economists as well as political scientists: is it possible to have a single currency without a more integrated polity? Increased EU’s activities under the ESDP flag will sharpen the debate over whether the EU is acting like an alliance (and indeed may take over some of NATO’s duties) or whether it is becoming more state-like (see Chapter 5, pp. 127–128).
EU policy: saving or saved by the environment? Chapter 4 demonstrates how the European integration process has moved into more policy areas. The EU may be primarily concerned with economics, but that is not the end of its remit. Social, regional and environmental policies are now key elements for the Union, and there is an engagement in a number of other areas such as education, transport, civil protection, and healthcare. The EU set itself an ambitious program in the Lisbon strategy. Becoming one of the most competitive economies in the world certainly requires action in the fields of education and research and development. So far, the EU has only made modest forays into both of these. It is more likely to leave them to national and local governments and to business and commerce, and to act as a catalyst for change. The environment is the one policy area where the EU may take a lead and where it can have an advantage over national policy-makers because of the trans-border nature of threats to the environment and the need both to include an environmental element into other policies, especially the CAP, and to negotiate international agreements. This could be an area where the EU starts to reconnect with the general public, though there is a danger that the Commission will be blamed for the tougher, unpopular elements of green policies, while governments take credit for any successes. It will require the Commission to explain problems to the European publics and to build coalitions with transnational pressure groups and those dealing with the issue locally. This will test the nature of the Union. If indeed it is little more than a coalition of states, the EU will find the task of direct involvement with a European public difficult, if not impossible. If, as some writers suggest (see Chapter 1), the EU has managed to build both an identity for itself and the beginnings of a European identity, the task will be easier, and any successes will just reinforce such trends.
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Will the EU survive? The road to the EU 50 years after the signing of the Treaty of Rome has been rock-strewn. The next decade could be even harsher for the EU. Part of this will be because of various crises within the Union, with its institutions, policies, and financing. By far the greatest challenges are those that face the Union from outside, and would probably face European states whether they were EU members or not. They are ones of relations with the rest of the world, of environmental change, of international forces such as terrorism and migration, and of an increasingly globalized economy. In many ways, despite the seeming turmoil of the Cold War and its aftermath, European integration has been a fair-weather process. It has evolved in a period—from the 1950s onwards—when most people in Europe have seen improvements in their standard of living and when outside threats, though worrying like the Soviet presence, have been collectively managed. The reaction of the EC to the ‘‘oil shock’’ of 1974 was not promising. Could the EU cope with a sustained period of economic decline in Europe? Would it sink with the coastlines of Europe after global warming has had its effects? Would it be seen relevant if international terrorism increased substantially or a more militarized Russia started probing Europe’s weaknesses? The reaction may be to intensify the collective spirit and stand together in the face of adversity, or it could be to fracture, deal separately with outside threats and even to revert to tribalism. The civil war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s presents Europe with a case study of how easily, and quickly, everyday civility can descend into mayhem and butchery. Whether any lessons for wider Europe are taken from this Balkan tragedy by the citizens of Europe, remains an open question with integration as one possible answer.
Appendix 1 The Barroso Commission 2004–2009
President of the European Commission: Jose´ Manuel Barroso (Portugal) Vice Presidents (their nationality) and their portfolios: Margot Wallstro¨m (Sweden) Institutional Relations and Communications Strategy Gu¨nter Verheugen (Germany) Enterprise and Industry Jacques Barrot (France) Transport Siim Kallas (Estonia) Administrative Affairs, Audit and Anti-Fraud Franco Frattini (Italy) Justice, Freedom and Security
Other Commissioners: Viviane Reding (Luxembourg) Information Society and Media Stavros Dimas (Greece) Environment Joaquin Almunia (Spain) Economic and Monetary Affairs Danuta Hu¨bner (Poland) Regional Policy Joe Borg (Malta) Fisheries and Maritime Affairs Dalia Grybauskaite (Lithuania) Financial Programming and Budget Janez Potocnik (Slovenia) Science and Research Jan Figel (Slovakia) Education, Training and Culture Markos Kyprianou (Cyprus) Health Olli Rehn (Finland) Enlargement Louis Michel (Belgium) Development and Humanitarian Aid Laszlo Kovacs (Hungary) Taxation and Customs Union Neelie Kroes (Netherlands) Competition Mariann Fischer Boel (Denmark) Agriculture and Rural Development Benita Ferrero-Waldner (Austria) External Relations and European Neighborhood Policy
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Vladimir Spidla (Czech Republic) Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities Peter Mandelson (United Kingdom) Trade Andris Piebalgs (Latvia) Energy Meglena Kuneva (Bulgaria) from 1 January 2007 Consumer Affairs Leonard Orban (Romania) from 1 January 2007 Multilingualism
Appendix 2 Political groupings in the 2004–2009 EP, post-June 2007
Number of seats Group of the European People’s Party and European Democrats (EPP-ED, Christian Democrats and Conservatives) Socialist Group Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Union for Europe of the Nations Group (right-wing and nationalists) Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance (Ecologists and representatives of stateless nations) Confederal group of the European United Left/Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL) Independence/Democracy Group (mainly EU-skeptics) Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty Group (far-right and ultra-nationalists) Disbanded November 2007 Non-attached (independents or those who do not wish to belong to other groups—or whom those groups do not want) Total number of seats in the EP
278 217 103 44 42 41 24 23 13 785
Appendix 3 Main headings of the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe (2004) and of the Reform Treaty 2007
The Constitutional Treaty 2004 (unratified) Preamble Part I I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX
Definition and objectives Fundamental rights and citizenship Union competences Union institutions and bodies Exercise of Union competence The democratic life of the Union Union finances The Union and its neighbours Union membership
Part II
The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the Union
Part III The Policies and Functioning of the Union I Provisions of general application II Non-discrimination and citizenship III Internal policies and action Chapter 1 Internal market Chapter 2 Economic and monetary policy Chapter 3 Policy in other areas Chapter 4 Area of freedom, security and justice Chapter 5 Area where the Union may take coordinating, complementary or supporting action IV Association of the Overseas Countries and Territories V The Union’s external action Chapter 1 General provision Chapter 2 Common foreign and security policy Chapter 3 Common commercial policy
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Appendix 3 Chapter 4
VI
VII
Cooperation with third countries and humanitarian aid Chapter 5 Restrictive measures Chapter 6 International agreements Chapter 7 The Union’s relations with international organizations and third countries, and Union delegations Chapter 8 Implementation of the solidarity clause The functioning of the Union Chapter 1 Provisions governing the institutions Chapter 2 Financial provisions Chapter 3 Enhanced cooperation Common provisions
Part IV General and Final Provisions Protocols (36) and Annexes (2) Final Act Declarations concerning Provisions of the Constitution (30) Declarations concerning Protocols annexed to the Constitution (20) Source: ‘‘Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe,’’ Official Journal of the European Union 47 (16 December 2004), http://eur-lex.europa.eu/ JOHtml.do?uri=OJ:C:2004:310:SOM:EN:HTML
The Lisbon Treaty 2007 Article 1
Treaty amending the Treaty on European Union Preamble, General Provisions Democratic principles Institutions Enhanced Cooperation General Provisions on the Union’s external action, the common foreign and security policy, the common security and defense policy Final provisions
Article 2
Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union General and specific amendments to the Treaty establishing the European Community, most of which reflect the contents of Parts III to V of the Constitutional Treaty
Source: www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cmsUpload/cg00001re01en.pdf
Notes
Foreword 1 Ernst B. Haas, Beyond the Nation-State: Functionalism and International Organization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964). 2 ‘‘European Parliament’s ‘Travelling Circus’ Slammed for Waste,’’ Daily Mail, 25 April 2007. 3 ‘‘Germans and their Complex Relationship with the Banana,’’ Daily Telegraph, 29 June 2002. 4 ‘‘Luxury Bike Shacks and other Follies,’’ Der Spiegel, 22 March 2007. 5 See Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 6 Ellen Frey-Wouters, The European Community and the Third World (New York: Praeger, 1980), 13–14. 7 Clive Archer, International Organizations, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2001). 8 Clive Archer, Organizing Europe: The Institutions of Integration, 2nd ed. (London: Edward Arnold, 1994); and Clive Archer and Fiona Butler, The European Union: Structure and Process, 2nd ed. (Houndsmill, Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1996). 1 The debate on the nature of the EU 1 Clive Archer, International Organizations (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 33. 2 ‘‘Title I, Definition and Objectives of the Union, Article I-1, Establishment Of The Union’’ in Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe, European Communities (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 2005), 17. 3 John Pinder, The Building of a Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), chapter 1. 4 The term ‘‘supranational’’ means above the nation-state, but does not imply the existence of, for example, a federal government. Indeed, it leaves open the question of the relationship between supranational institutions (such as the High Authority, Commission and European Court of Justice) and national governments.
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5 Gary Marks, Liesbet Hooghe and Kermit Blank, ‘‘European integration from the 1980s: state-centric v. multi-level governance,’’ Journal of Common Market Studies 34, no. 3 (1996): 346–347. 6 Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi, For a Free and United Europe. A Draft Manifesto, in Debates on European Integration. A Reader, ed. Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 37–42. 7 Walter Hallstein, United Europe. Challenge & Opportunity (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press; Oxford University Press, 1962), 10. 8 George Ross, Jacques Delors and European Integration (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 146. 9 David Mitrany, The Functional Theory of Politics (London: Martin Robertson, 1975), 99. 10 David Mitrany, A Working Peace System (Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Books, 1966), 125. 11 Mitrany, A Working Peace System, 143. 12 Ernst Haas, The Uniting of Europe: Political, Social and Economic Forces, 1950-57 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), 55. 13 Haas, The Uniting of Europe, 16. 14 Ernst Haas, ‘‘International integration: the European and the Universal Process,’’ International Organization 15, no. 3 (1961): 336–392. 15 Leon Lindberg and Stuart Scheingold, Europe’s Would-be Polity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 306. 16 Joseph Nye, ‘‘Comparing Common Markets: A Revised Neo-Functionalist Model,’’ International Organization 24, no. 4 (1970): 797. 17 Ernst Haas, The Obsolescence of Regional Integration Theory (Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies, 1975), 1. 18 Ernst Haas, ‘‘Turbulent Fields and Theory of Regional Integration,’’ International Organization 30, no. 2 (1976): 179. 19 Robert Keohane and Stanley Hoffmann, ‘‘Conclusions, Community Politics and Institutional Change,’’ in The Dynamics of European Integration, ed. William Wallace (London: Pinter, 1990), 289–290. 20 See Jeppe Tranholm-Mikkelsen, ‘‘Neofunctionalism: Obsolete or Obstinate? A Reappraisal in the Light of the New Dynamism of the EC,’’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies 20, no. 1 (1991): 1–22; Martin Holland, European Community Integration (London: Pinter, 1993). 21 Lauren McLaren, Identity, Interests and Attitudes to European Integration (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 21–30. 22 Stanley Hoffmann, ‘‘Obstinate or Obsolete? The Fate of the Nation-State and the Case of Western Europe,’’ in International Regionalism: Readings, ed. Joseph Nye (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1968), 110–163. 23 Alan S. Milward, assisted by George Brennan and Federico Romero, The European Rescue of the Nation-State (London: Routledge, 1992), 4. 24 Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State, 5. 25 Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State, 8. 26 Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State, 438. 27 Andrew Moravcsik, ‘‘Preferences and Power in the European Community: A Liberal Intergovernmentalist Approach,’’ in Economic and Political Integration in Europe, eds. Simon Bulmer and Andrew Scott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 29–80.
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28 Andrew Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe. Social Purpose & State Power from Messina to Maastricht (London: UCL Press, 1998), 22–23. 29 Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe, 477. 30 Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe, 479–484. 31 Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe, 486. 32 Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe, 491. 33 Alec Stone Sweet and Wayne Sandholtz, ‘‘European Integration and Supranational Governance,’’ Journal of European Public Policy 4, no. 3 (September 1997): 297–317. 34 James March and Johan Olsen, ‘‘The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life,’’ American Political Science Review 78, no. 3 (September 1984): 734–749. 35 James March and Johan Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics (New York and London: Free Press, 1989). 36 Peter Hall and Rosemary Taylor, ‘‘Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms,’’ Political Studies 44, no. 5 (1996): 936–957. 37 Mark Pollack, ‘‘The Commission as an Agent,’’ in At the Heart of the Union: Studies of the European Commission, ed. Neill Nugent (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 109–128. 38 Hall and Taylor, ‘‘Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms,’’ 948. 39 Paul Pierson, ‘‘The Path to European Integration: A Historical Institutionalist Analysis,’’ Comparative Political Studies 29, no. 2 (April 1996): 123–163. 40 Hall and Taylor, ‘‘Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms,’’ 941. 41 Simon Bulmer and Claudio Radaelli, ‘‘The Europeanisation of National Policy,’’ Europeanisation Online Papers No.1/2004, Queen’s University Belfast. www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofPoliticsInternationalStudies?Research/ PaperSeries?EuropeanisationPapers/PublishedPapers 42 Johan Olsen, ‘‘The Many Faces of Europeanization,’’ Journal of Common Market Studies 40, no. 5 (December 2002): 921–952. 43 Christoph Knill, The Europeanisation of National Administrations. Patterns of Institutional Change and Persistence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1. 44 Knill, The Europeanisation of National Administrations, 2. 45 Knill, The Europeanisation of National Administrations, 213. 46 Maarten Vink and Paolo Graziano, ‘‘Challenges of a New Research Agenda,’’ in Europeanization: New Research Agendas, eds Paolo Graziano and Maarten Vink (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 7, authors’ emphasis. 47 Wolfgang Wessels, ‘‘An Ever Closer Fusion? A Dynamic Macro-political View on Integration Processes,’’ Journal of Common Market Studies 35, no. 2 (1997): 267–299. 48 Thomas Risse, ‘‘Social Constructivism and European Integration,’’ in European Integration Theory, eds Antje Wiener and Thomas Dietz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 162. Both Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman talked about ‘‘building Europe.’’ 49 Alec Sweet Stone, Neil Fligstein, and Wayne Sandholz, ‘‘The Institutionalization of European Space,’’ in The Institutionalization of Europe, eds Alec Sweet Stone, Neil Fligstein, and Wayne Sandholz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 9.
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50 Risse, ‘‘Social Constructivism and European Integration,’’ 165–166. 51 Colin Hay and Ben Rosamond, ‘‘Globalization, European Integration and the Discursive Construction of Economic Imperatives,’’ Journal of European Public Policy 9, no. 2 (2002): 147–167. 52 Ben Tonra, ‘‘Conceptualizing the European Union’s Global Role,’’ in European Union Studies, eds Michelle Cini and Angela Bourne (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 126. 53 Johan Galtung, The European Community: A Superpower in the Making (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1973). 54 Morten Kelstrup, ed., European Integration and Denmark’s Participation (Copenhagen: Copenhagen Political Studies Press, 1992); Roland Axtmann, ‘‘Globalization, Europe and the State: Introductory Reflections,’’ in Globalization and Europe: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, ed. Roland Axtmann (London: Pinter, 1998), 1–22. 55 Paul Cammack, ‘‘The Politics of Global Competitiveness,’’ Papers in the Politics of Global Competitiveness, no. 1 (November 2006), 12, www.e-space. mmu.ac.uk/e-space/bitstream/2173/6190/3/The%20Politics%20of%20Global %20Competitiveness.pdf 2 A brief history of European integration 1 See Bernard Hoekman and Petros Mavroidis, The World Trade Organization: Law, Economics and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 7–8. 2 Franc¸ois Ducheˆne, Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence (New York, London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1994), 200–206. 3 These words are cited in a number of British books by academics and diplomats, see Michael Maclay, ‘‘Historical Note: Mr Bretherton’s Retreat from Europe,’’ The Independent (London), 30 August 1999. Maclay cites the French politician Jean-Franc¸ois Deniau as the source for Bretherton’s supposed parting words, but adds ‘‘it didn’t quite happen that way.’’ It seems that Bretherton just left, rather silently, but Maclay considers that ‘‘the quality of the myth is that there is some profound truth attaching to it.’’ A case of ‘‘print the myth.’’ 4 The ECSC, Euratom and the EEC had their major institutions merged to form the European Communities (EC) in 1965. The term EC will be used when referring generally to EEC and the European Communities. 5 Austria, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. 6 Walter Hallstein, United Europe: Challenge and Opportunity (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press; Oxford University Press, 1962), 64. 7 This was first decided in the case of Costa v ENEL, cited in Peter Stirk and David Weigall, eds, The Origins and Development of European Integration: A Reader and a Commentary (London and New York: Pinter, 1999), 175–176. 8 The case here was van Gend en Loos (ECR 1 (1963) Case 26/62), cited in Stirk and Weigall, eds, The Origins and Development of European Integration, 174. 9 Sir Edward Heath, ‘‘European Unity over the Next Ten Years: from Community to Union,’’ International Affairs 65, no. 2 (Spring 1988): 200.
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10 Cited in Charles Grant, Delors: Inside the House that Jacques Built (London: Nicholas Brealey, 1994), 135. 11 Reproduced in Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London: HarperCollins, 1993), 744–745. 12 TEU (The Treaty on European Union) Title I: Common Provisions, Article 1. A consolidated version of the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty Establishing the European Community (TEC) can be found at The Official Journal of the European Union, C321 E/123. 29.12.2006 and at http:// eur-lex.europa.eu/en/treaties/index.htm#founding 3 Institutions and processes 1 Clive Archer, International Organizations (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 56–62. 2 In the Protocol concerning the conditions and arrangements for admission of the Republic of Bulgaria and Romania to the European Union, April 2005, see Article 2, at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/site/en/oj/2005/ l.157/l_15720050621en00290045.pdf 3 See Pascal Fontaine, Europe – a Fresh Start: The Schuman Plan Declaration 1950-90 (Luxembourg: European Commission, 1990), 44–46. 4 Franc¸ois Ducheˆne, Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence (New York, London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1994), 207–215. 5 Ducheˆne, Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence, 205. 6 Cited in Peter Stirk and David Weigall, eds, The Origins and Development of European Integration. A Reader and Commentary (London and New York: Pinter, 1999), 87–88. 7 Stirk and Weigall, eds, The Origins and Development of European Integration: A Reader and Commentary, 66. 8 ‘‘A French Assessment of the EEC Treaty, 5 December 1956,’’ cited in Stirk and Weigall, eds, The Origins and Development of European Integration: A Reader and Commentary, 142. 9 Stirk and Weigall, eds, The Origins and Development of European Integration: A Reader and Commentary, 176. 10 The European Council should be distinguished from the Council of Europe. The Council of Europe is an international organization founded in May 1949 by 10 West European countries with the aim of promoting social progress, parliamentary democracy, human rights and the rule of law. Its European Convention on Human Rights was open for signature in 1950. Judgments are given on the Convention by the European Court of Human Rights sitting in Strasbourg, which is different from the EU’s European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. The Council of Europe also has a Parliamentary Assembly that sits in Strasbourg but this should not be confused with the European Parliament. As the remit of the EU has grown, so has the overlap in areas covered by the two sets of institutions and the confusion in the press about their separate nature. See www.coe.int 11 Christopher Hill and Karen Smith, eds, European Foreign Policy. Key Documents (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 83. 12 Article 30.1, Single European Act, http://eur-lex.europa.eu/en/treaties/ index.htm
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13 The heading ‘‘Cooperation in the fields of Justice and Home Affairs’’ was changed in the Treaty of Amsterdam to ‘‘Police and Judicial Cooperation in Criminal Matters’’ once asylum and immigration matters were transposed to Pillar One. See Andrew Duff, ed., The Treaty of Amsterdam: Text and Commentary (London: Federal Trust, 1997), 42. 14 Title I, Common Provisions, Article 1, TEU. The Treaty on European Union (TEU, the Maastricht Treaty) introduced the three-pillar structure and has been amended by the treaties of Amsterdam and Nice. See http:// eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/site/en/oj/2006/ce321/ce32120061229en 00010331.pdf 15 Duff, The Treaty of Amsterdam, xxxv. 16 David Galloway, The Treaty of Nice and Beyond (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 27. 17 Article 213.1, TEC. The Treaty establishing the European Community (TEC) is the original treaty establishing the European Economic Community (Treaty of Rome 1957) as amended by the Single European Act, and the treaties of Maastricht, Amsterdam, and Nice. It was referred to by the Treaty on European Union (see note 13 above), but is still the basis for the Community side of the Union. For an on-line consolidated version of the two treaties produced by the EU at the end of 2006, see http://eur-lex.europa.eu/ LexUriServ/site/en/oj/2006/ce321/ce32120061229en00010331.pdf 18 Galloway, The Treaty of Nice and Beyond, 47. 19 Galloway, The Treaty of Nice and Beyond, 90, italics in original. 20 Though the applicant states’ representatives did not have voting rights. 21 See notes 14 and 17 above for references to the TEU and TEC. 22 Council of the European Union 2007, Extract of the European Council Presidency Conclusions of 21/22 June 2007, point 40 at http://www.consilium. europa.eu/ueDocs/cms_Data/docs/pressData/en/ec/94932.pdf 23 Wayne Sandholz and John Zysman, ‘‘Recasting the European Bargain,’’ World Politics 42, no. 1 (October 1989): 95–128. 24 Andrew Moravcsik, ‘‘Negotiating the Single European Act,’’ International Organization 45, no. 1 (Winter 1991): 19–56. 25 ‘‘Decision-making in the European Union’’ 2005, http://europa/eu/institutions/ decision-making/index_en.htm 26 See ‘‘The Codecison procedure’’ 2004, http://europa/eu/institutions/decisionmaking/index_en.htm 27 ‘‘The Codecison procedure’’ 2004, http://europa/eu/institutions/decisionmaking/index_en.htm 28 See Process and Players 2007, www.eur-lex.europa.eu/en/droit_communautaire/ droit_communautaire.htm#1.1.4 29 See ‘‘Social Charter’’ at http://europa.eu/scadplus/leg/en/cha/c10107.htm 30 Alex Warleigh, Flexible Integration. Which Model for the European Union? (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press), 49–53. Galloway in The Treaty of Nice and Beyond, 130, differentiates between ‘‘pre-defined’’ enhanced cooperation which are singled out in the treaty, such as those concerning EMU and Schengen issues, ‘‘enabling clause’’ enhanced cooperation such as those in the Treaty of Amsterdam for First and Third Pillar matters, where the arrangements for cooperation and defined areas in which it would apply are set out, and enhanced cooperation by default where it is created by certain members opting out of individual decisions,
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such as abstention under the CFSP and conventions on police and criminal justice matters entering into force for a limited number of states. 31 See Open method of coordination 2007, http://europa.eu./scadplus/glossary/ open_method_coordination_en.htm 32 The Danes, often seen as Euroskeptics, are the most efficient in turning European Community single market directives into national law, while Luxembourg—a supporter of a federal Europe—has one of the poorest records. See Internal Market Scoreboard No. 15, July 2006, at http:// ec.europa.eu/internal_market/score/docs/score15/score15_en.pdf, p.13. 33 Commission Proposal for a Council Decision amending Decision 1999/ 468/EC laying down the procedures for the exercise of implementing powers conferred on the Commission, p. 2 at http://ec.europa.eu/governance/ docs/comm_commito_en.pdf 4 The EU’s domestic policies 1 Stephen George, Politics and Policy in the European Union (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, 3rd ed), 176–82. 2 Robert Ackrill, The Common Agricultural Policy (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 85–92. Ackrill claims on p. 88 that ‘‘under the balanced budget rule, the EC had been technically bankrupt from 1983 to 1985.’’ 3 Ackrill, The Common Agricultural Policy, 103–105. The reductions were to take place between 1995 and 2000 and were compared with a base of 1986–88. 4 Ackrill, The Common Agricultural Policy, 118–127. He shows how France, in a minority of one, managed to ‘‘capture’’ the Berlin negotiations, mainly by getting the support of a reluctant Germany. 5 Berlin European Council 24 and 25 March 1999. Presidency Conclusions II.D Heading 1 (Agriculture) 1999, http://ue.eu.int/ueDocs/cms_Data/docs/ pressData/en/ec/ACFB2.html 6 European Commission, The Common Agricultural Policy Explained (Brussels: European Communities, 2004), 7. 7 European Commission 2006, Simplifying the Common Agricultural Policy, http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/06/1824&formatHTML&aged=08language=EN&guiLanguage=en 8 European Commission 2005, Single Legal Framework for Financing the CAP, http://europa.eu/scadplus/leg/en/lvb/l11096.htm 9 European Commission 2006, Eurobarometer: what Europeans Think of the CAP, http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/survey/index_en.htm 10 European Commission, The Common Agricultural Policy Explained (Brussels: European Communities, 2004), 10. 11 European Commission 2006 The Common Agricultural Policy and the Lisbon Strategy, http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/lisbon/index_en.htm 12 Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London: HarperCollins, 1993), 728–737. 13 Mark Wise, The Common Fisheries Policy of the European Community (London: Methuen, 1984), 87–88. 14 Wise, The Common Fisheries Policy of the European Community, 102–105. 15 Clive Archer, The European Union. Structure and Process (London and New York: Continuum, 2000, 3rd ed), 124.
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16 European Commission 2005, About the Common Fisheries Policy, http:// ec.europa.eu/fisheries/cfp_en.htm 17 European Commission, About the Common Fisheries Policy; Archer, The European Union, 124–125. 18 European Commission 2006, 2002 Reform of the CFP, http://ec.europa.eu/ fisheries/cfp/2002_reform_en.htm 19 European Commission, About the Common Fisheries Policy. 20 Commission of the European Communities, Research on the ‘‘Cost of NonEurope.’’ Volume 1 Basic Studies: Executive Summaries (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 1988). 21 Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, 547. 22 Wayne Sandholz and John Zysman, ‘‘1992: Recasting the European Bargain,’’ World Politics 42, no. 1 (October 1989): 95–128. 23 Commission of the European Communities, Research on the ‘‘Cost of NonEurope,’’ 8–9. 24 Philip Lowe, ‘‘Commission’s Enforcement Record in 2006,’’ Competition Policy Newsletter 1 (Spring 2007): 1. 25 Lowe, ‘‘Commission’s enforcement record in 2006,’’ 1. 26 European Commission 2007, State Aid Control, http://ec.europa.eu/comm/ competition/state_aid/overview/index_en.htm 27 Lowe, ‘‘Commission’s enforcement record in 2006,’’ 2. 28 European Commission 2007, Liberalisation, http://ec.europa.eu/comm/competition/liberalisation/overview/index_en.htm 29 The EFTA states at that time were Austria, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland. The first three became members of the EU from 1 January 1995. Switzerland has a series of agreements with the EU, while Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein remain members of the EEA. 30 Commission of the European Communities, ‘‘White Paper on Growth, Competitiveness, Employment, COM (93) 700,’’ Bulletin of the EC, Supplement 6/93 (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 1993). 31 European Commission 2006, How the Single Market Benefits You, http:// ec.europa.eu/internal_market/top_layer/benefits_en.htm 32 European Commission 2006, How the Single Market Benefits You. The ECU (European Currency Unit) was the basket of EU currencies that was used for EU accounts and calculations, and, in that sense, was the forerunner of the euro. 33 European Commission 2006, How the Single Market Benefits You. 34 European Commission 2006, Bilateral Trade Relations, http://ec.europa.eu/ trade/issues/bilateral/countries/index_en.htm 35 Lisbon European Council 23 and 24 March 2000. Presidency Conclusions 2000, www.europarl.europa.eu/summits/lis1_en.htm 36 Susana Borras and Kerstin Jacobsson, ‘‘The Open Method of Coordination and New Governance Patterns in the EC,’’ Journal of European Public Policy 11, no. 2 (2004): 187–188. 37 European Commission, Facing the Challenge: The Lisbon Strategy for Growth and Employment (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 2004). 38 This is a process whereby firms in established markets export their factories and jobs to countries where they can hire cheap labor, and have fewer welfare
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40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51
52 53 54 55 56 57 58
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and environmental constraints. The social problems are thus dumped on the doorstep of the less-developed state. The fear with cheap labor coming to the EU-15 was that the social problems would be imported with that labor. See Joseph Rowntree Foundation 2007, ‘‘The Experiences of Central and East European Migrants in the UK,’’ www.compas.ox.ac.uk/publications/ Findings/2007-05-Eeur-experiences-findings.pdf. A more negative account is that cited by MigrationWatch UK, ‘‘East European Migrants ‘Not a major boom to our economy,’’’ www.migrationwatchuk.org/pressreleases/ pressreleases.asp?d=01-October-2006 Council of the European Union 2006, Services in the Internal Market: The Council Proceeds to its Final Adoption, http://www.consilium.europa.eu/ ueDocs/cms_Data/docs/pressData/en/misc/92108.pdf Council of the European Union 2006, Services in the Internal Market; Lucia Kubosova 2006, ‘‘EU Embarks on Three Year-Long Road to Liberalise Services,’’ http://euoberver.com/851/22877/?print=1 The original Treaty of Rome is available at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/en/ treaties/index.htm#founding Stirk and Weigall, The Origins and Development of European Integration, 229–230. Peter Ludlow, The Making of the European Monetary System: A Case Study of the Politics of the European Community (London: Butterworth, 1982). George Ross, Jacques Delors and European Integration (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 81. Franc¸ois Lamoureux, cited in Ross, Delors and European Integration, 39. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, 708. John Redmond, ‘‘Internal Policy Developments,’’ in Geoffrey Edwards and Georg Wiessala, The European Union: Annual Review 1998-1999 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 72. Slovenia adopted the euro as their currency on 1 January 2007. The membership of Cyprus and Malta on 1 January 2008 will take the number of ‘‘euroland’’ states to 15. Financial Times, 14 July 2004. Quoted in Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, 744–745. The Bruges Speech was her address to the College of Europe in which she outlined her vision of Europe as ‘‘a family of nations,’’ a view remarkably similar to President de Gaulle’s ‘‘Europe des patries.’’ (See Chapter 2, p. 25). Alan Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State (London: Routledge, 1992), 210–215. Articles 136-144 TEC. Charles Grant, Delors: Inside the House that Jacques Built (London: Nicholas Brealy, 1994), 85. Commission of the European Communities, ‘‘President’s Conclusions: 1.1.10,’’ Bulletin of the EC, Supplement (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 1989). Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, 750. Article 1 of the Protocol on Social Policy, Treaty on European Union 1992, http://eur-lex.europa.eu/en/treaties/dat/11992M/htm/11992M.html# 0090000015 European Commission 2007, Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities, ec.europa.eu/employment_social/firsttime_en.html
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59 The EU is now on its sixth EAP, which spans from 2002 to 2012. 60 Giandomenico Majone, ‘‘The European Community between Social Policy and Social Regulation,’’ Journal of Common Market Studies 31, no. 2 (1993): 153–171. 61 European Commission 2007, Climate Change: IPCC Report Confirms EU Call for Deep Cuts in Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions, http://europa.eu/ rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/07/610 62 See, for example, Ruth Lea, The 2006 Essential Guide to the European Union 2005, www.cps.org.uk/cpsfile.asp?id=245 63 European Commission, Climate Change, 1. 64 See Hugh Dobson, The Group of 7/8 (London and New York, Routledge, 2007), 76. For the discussions at the Gleneagles G8 summit in 2005 see Chair’s Summary, Gleneagles Summit 8 July 2005, www.g8.gov.uk 65 European Commission 2007, A Quality Environment. How the EU is Contributing, Brussels: European Commission. 66 Europa 2005, Strategy for Sustainable Development, http://europa.eu/scadplus/ leg/en/lvb/128117.htm 67 Article 87.3a and c TEC. 68 Ian Bache, The Politics of the European Union Regional Policy: Multi-Level Governance or Flexible Gatekeeping (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998) 56 and 226. 69 Commission of the European Communities, Community Structural Funds 1994-99: Revised Regulations and Comments (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 1993), 11. 70 Bache, The Politics of the European Union Regional Policy, 90. 71 Commission of the European Communities, First Report of Economic and Social Cohesion (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 1996), 147. 72 David Galloway, ‘‘Agenda 2000: Packaging the Deal,’’ in The European Union: Annual Review 1998–1999 eds Geoffrey Edwards and Georg Wiessala (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 26–27. 73 Commission of the European Communities, First Report of Economic and Social Cohesion (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 1996). 74 European Commission, The Amsterdam Treaty: A Comprehensive Guide (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 1999), 13–14. Also available at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/en/treaties/dat/ 11997D/htm/11997D.html 75 This came into force in 1996 but was superseded by the relevant part of Schengen agreement. 76 European Parliament, Fact Sheets. Police and Customs Cooperation 2001, www.europarl.europa.eu/factsheets/4_11_3_en.htm 77 Honor Mahony, ‘‘European Leaders Shy Away From Easier DecisionMaking,’’ EUobserver, http://eu.observer.com/22/23116/?print=1 78 European Commission 2007, Strengthening the European Union as an Area of Freedom, Security and Justice, http://ec.europa.eu/justice_home/fsj/intro/ fsj_intro_en.htm 79 Council of the European Union 2006, Press Release 2768th Council Meeting Justice and Home Affairs. Brussels, 4-5 December 2006, www.consilium. europa.eu/ueDocs/cms_data/docs/pressData/en/jha/91997.pdf
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80 The Rhineland social welfare model is that dominant in France and Germany where the social partners—trade unions and management—play an active role; the Anglo-Saxon model is dominant in the UK and Ireland and places an emphasis on fewer restrictions on business and on welfare through economic growth; while the Nordic model is one where the state plays an active role in social welfare. All three are just ideal types and have increasingly overlapped. The UK has a strong national health service, and the Nordic states engage the social partners in the running of welfare. 5 The EU s external activities 1 See Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations. Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century (London: Atlantic Books, 2004). 2 Peter Mandelson, EU Trade Commissioner 2006, Providing Leadership in the Doha Round, http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference= SPEECH/06/714&format=HTML8aged=08language=En8guilanguage=en 3 European Commission 2006, Africa, Caribbean, Pacific, http://ec.europa.eu/ trade/issues/bilateral/regions/acp/index_en.htm 4 The members of ASEAN are: Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar (Burma), the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. 5 European Commission 2006, Regional Indicative Programme 2005-2006 ASEAN, http://ec.europa.eu/comm/external_relations/asean/csp/rip_05-06_en. pdf, 4–5. 6 European Commission 2004, Bilateral Trade Relations – Asia, http:// ec.europa.eu/trade/issues/bilateral/regions/asem/index_en.htm 7 Nicola Casarini, The Evolution of the EU-China Relationship: from Constructive Engagement to Strategic Partnership (Paris: Institute for Security Studies European Union, Occasional Paper no. 64, 2006), 9–10. 8 Casarini, The Evolution of the EU-China Relationship, 21–22. 9 European Commission 2006, Bilateral Trade Relations – Japan, http:// ec.europa.eu/trade/issues/bilateral/countries/japan/index_en.htm 10 European Commission 2006, Bilateral Trade Relations – India, http:// ec.europa.eu/trade/issues/bilateral/countries/india/index_en.htm 11 The Andean Community consists of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. 12 The Rio Group consists of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. 13 Mercosur was created in 1991 between Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay with the aim of creating a customs union. Chile and Bolivia have been associated with Mercosur since 1996, and political consultations have been added since 1998. European Commission 2005, The EU’s Relations with Mercosur, http://ec.europa.eu/comm/external_relations/mercosur/intro/index.htm 14 European Commission 2006, EU-Mercosur Ministerial Meeting, Vienna, Austria, 13 May 2006, http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference= PRES/06/142&format=HTML&aged=08language=EN8guiLanguage=02 15 European Commission 2006, Bilateral Trade Relations, http://trade.ec.europa. eu/doclib/docs/2006/september/tradoc_122531.pdf 16 European Commission, Trade and Development, http://ec.europa.eu/trade/ issues/global/development/index_en.htm
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17 Peter Mandelson, Providing Leadership in the Doha Round, http://europa.eu/ rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=SPEECH/06/714&format=HTML &aged=08language=EN8guiLanguage=en 18 Europa, Humanitarian Aid, http://europa.eu/pol/hum/print_overview_en.htm 19 First report of the Foreign Ministers to the Heads of States and Government of the European Community of 27 October 1970, point 9 (Luxembourg or Davignon Report), cited in Christopher Hill and Karen Smith, eds, European Foreign Policy. Key Documents (London and New York, 2000), 76. 20 Hill and Smith, European Foreign Policy, 85–88; Fraser Cameron, The Foreign and Security Policy of the European Union. Past, Present and Future (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999, Contemporary European Studies, 7), 17. 21 Hill and Smith, European Foreign Policy, 114. 22 Paragraphs 6 (a) and 6 (b) of Title III of The Single European Act, see Hill and Smith, European Foreign Policy, 144. Also available at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/en/treaties/index.htm 23 Hill and Smith, European Foreign Policy, 302–303. 24 Jacques Delors, ‘‘European integration and security,’’ Survival 33, No. 2 (1991): 99. 25 See Cameron, The Foreign and Security Policy of the European Union, 23– 32 and Hill and Smith, European Foreign Policy, 151–161. 26 Cameron, The Foreign and Security Policy of the European Union, 25. 27 David Galloway, The Treaty of Nice and Beyond. Realities and Illusions of Power in the EU (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001, Contemporary European Studies, 10), 135. 28 Norway also negotiated a membership treaty but this was rejected in a referendum. 29 See Sieglinde Gsto¨hl, Reluctant Europeans. Norway, Sweden and Switzerland in the Process of Integration (Boulder, CO and London: Lynne Rienner, 2002), chapter 7. 30 European Commission, 2007 Accession criteria (Copenhagen criteria), 1993, http://europa.eu/scadplus/glossary/accession_criteria_copenhague_en.htm 31 Graham Avery and Fraser Cameron, The Enlargement of the European Union (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998, Contemporary European Studies, 1). 32 Commission of the European Communities, Communication from the Commission to the Council and the European Parliament on Strengthening the European Neighbourhood Policy. Brussels, 4 December 2006, COM (2006) 726 final, http://ec.europa.eu/world/enp/pdf/com06_726_en.pdf 33 Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe 2007, www.stabilitypact.org 34 European Commission 2006, Regional Cooperation in the Western Balkans (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 2006). 35 European Commission 2006, Bilateral Trade Issues – Russia, http://ec.europa. eu/trade/issues/bilateral/countries/russia/index_en.htm 36 European Commission 2006, Factsheet. EU-Russia Common Economic Space, http://ec.europa.eu/external_relations/russia/summit_11_06/com_eco_ space.pdf 37 European Commission 2006, Factsheet. EU-Russia Common Economic Space, ec.europa.eu/external_relations/russia/summit_11_06/freedom.pdf
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38 European Commission 2006, Factsheet. EU-Russia Common Space of External Security, http://ec.europa.eu/external_relations/russia/summit_11_ 06/ext_security.pdf 39 European Commission 2006, Factsheet. EU-Russia Common Economic Space, http://ec.europa.eu/external_relations/russia/summit_11_06/research.pdf 40 European Commission 2006, The EU’s relations with Russia, http://ec.europa. eu/external_relations/russia/intro/index.htm 41 Ian Traynor and Luke Harding, ‘‘Old-new Europe Divide Opens up Over Policy Towards Moscow,’’ The Guardian, 15 May 2007, 14. 42 BBC News, ‘‘EU-Russian Talks End in Acrimony,’’ 2007, http://news.bbc.co. uk/1/hi/europe/6668111.stm 43 European Commission 2007, The EU’s Mediterranean and Middle East Policy, http://europa.eu.int/comm/external_relations/med-mideast/intro/index.htm. The non-EU members of EuroMed are Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey. 44 Commission of the European Communities, Bulletin of the European Communities 10/89 (Brussels: European Communities’ Commission, 1989), 88. 45 Helsinki European Council 10 and 11 December 1999, Presidency Conclusions, point 12 1999, http://www.consilium.europa.eu/ueDocs/cms_Data/docs/press Data/en/ec/ACFA4C.htm 46 Article 17.2 of the Treaty of Amsterdam enshrined the Petersberg tasks as being ‘‘humanitarian and rescue tasks, peacekeeping tasks and tasks of combat forces in crisis management, including peace-making.’’ These tasks had been adopted by the WEU at its meeting in Petersberg, Germany in 1992. See Hill and Smith, European Foreign Policy, 242. Article 5 of the treaty setting up the WEU, reflected Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty insofar as it made an attack on one member a matter for all member states. 47 ‘‘Franco-British Declaration on European Defence, 4 December 1998,’’ in Hill and Smith, European Foreign Policy, 243. 48 European Union 1999, Presidency Conclusions, Cologne Council Meeting, 3 & 4 June 1999, Annex III: European Council Declaration on Strengthening the Common European Policy on Security and Defence, http://ue.eu.int/ ueDocs/cms_Data/docs/pressData/en/ec/57886.pdf 49 Hill and Smith, European Foreign Policy, 250. 50 ‘‘Presidency Report on Common European Security and Defence Policy. Annex I Statement on Improving European Military Capabilities, European Capability Action Plan,’’ in From Nice to Laeken. European Defence: Core Documents. Volume II, ed. Maartje Rutten (Paris: Institute for Security Studies European Union, Chaillot Paper no 51, 2002), 130–135. 51 ‘‘Presidency Conclusions European Council, Laeken, 14-15 December 2001. Annex II Declaration on the operational capability of the Common European Security and Defence Policy,’’ in From Nice to Laeken, ed. Rutten, 120. 52 ‘‘General Affairs and External Relations Council. Brussels, 19 November 2002. Council Conclusions. Annex Ministerial declaration adopted by the Civilian Crisis Management Capability Conference on 19 November 2002,’’ in From Laeken to Copenhagen. European Defence: Core Docu-
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55 56
57 58 59 60
61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69
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ments. Volume III, ed. Jean-Yves Haine (Paris: Institute for Security Studies European Union, Chaillot Paper no 57, 2003), 145–146. ‘‘Police Capabilities Commitment Conference, Brussels, 19 November 2001,’’ in From Nice to Laeken, ed. Rutten, 92. ‘‘European Council. Brussels, 17 and 18 June 2004. Presidency Report on ESDP,’’ in EU Security and Defence: Core Documents 2004. Volume V (Paris: Institute for Security Studies European Union, Chaillot Paper no 75, 2005), 104. ‘‘EU Council Secretariat Factsheet, ‘‘EU Battlegroups,’’ EU BG 02, November 2006,’’ cited in Gustav Lindstrom, Enter the Battlegroups (Paris: Institute for Security Studies European Union, Chaillot Paper no 97, 2007), 13–14. ‘‘European Council. Brussels, 17 and 18 June 2004. Presidency Report on ESDP. Annexe 1 Headline Goal 2010,’’ in EU Security and Defence: Core Documents 2004. Volume V (Paris: Institute for Security Studies European Union, Chaillot Paper no 75, 2005), 111–116. European Union 2003, ‘‘A Secure Europe in a Better World,’’ European Security Strategy, http://ue.eu.int/uedocs/cms_data/docs/2004/4/29/European %20Security%20Strategy.pdf European Union, ‘‘A Secure Europe in a Better World.’’ Javier Solana, ‘‘The Quiet Success of European Defence,’’ Schlossplatz Spring 4 (Spring 2007): 9–11. ‘‘General Affairs and External Affairs Relations Council. Brussels, 17 November 2003. Report of the Agency in the field of defence capabilities development, research, acquisition and armaments,’’ From Copenhagen to Brussels. European Defence: Core Documents. Volume IV, ed. Antonio Missiroli (Paris: Institute for Security Studies European Union, Chaillot Paper no 67, 2003), 265. Missiroli, ed., From Copenhagen to Brussels, 264–265. Nicole Gnesotto, ‘‘Introduction. ESDP: Results and Prospects,’’ in EU Security and Defence Policy, ed. N. Gnesotto (Paris: European Union Institute for Security Studies, 2004), 29. Christopher Hill, ‘‘The Capability-Expectations Gap, or Conceptualizing Europe’s International Role,’’ Journal of Common Market Studies 31, no. 3 (1992): 305–328. These issues are based on those suggested in Gnesotto, ‘‘Introduction. ESDP: Results and Prospects,’’ 27–31. The OECD membership embraces 30 ‘‘Western’’ advanced economies and includes much of Europe, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. See www.oecd.org European Commission 2006, Bilateral Trade Relations, http://trade.ec.europa. eu/doclib/docs/2006/september/tradoc_122531.pdf European Commission 2006, Leading Exporters and Importers of Merchandise Trade in the World (2005), http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/ 2006/september/tradoc_122529.pdf Bernard Hoekman and Petros Mavroidis, The World Trade Organization. Law, Economics, and Politics (London and New York: Routledge), chapters 2 and 3. Terrence Guay, The United States and the European Union. The Political Economy of a Relationship (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), 16.
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70 Guay, The United States and the European Union, 37–39. 71 Stephen Krasner, ‘‘Power, Polarity, and the Challenge of Disintegration,’’ in America and Europe in an Era of Change, ed. Helga Haftendorn and Christian Tuschhoff (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), 27. 72 John Peterson, Europe and America: The Prospects for Partnership (New York: Routledge, 1996). 73 Guay, The United States and the European Union, 77–81. 74 Framework for Advancing Transatlantic Economic Integration between the European Union and the United States of America, http://trade.ec.europa.eu/ doclib/docs/2007/may/tradoc_134654.pdf 75 2007 EU-US Summit, http://www.eu2007.de/en/News/download_docs/April/ 0430-RAA/010Einleitungstext.pdf 76 The idea was introduced by Carol Cosgrove and Ken Twitchett, eds, The New International Actors: the UN and the EEC (London: Macmillan, 1970). It was then developed by Sjo¨stedt, who thought that an international actor should possess autonomy and actor capability. See Gunnar Sjo¨stedt, The External Role of the European Community (Farnborough: Gower, 1977). 77 Sjo¨stedt, The External Role of the European Community, 15–16. 78 David Allen and Michael Smith, ‘‘Western Europe’s Presence in the Contemporary International Arena,’’ Review of International Studies 16, no. 1 (1990): 21. 79 Charlotte Bretherton and John Vogler, The European Union as a Global Actor (London: Routledge, 1999), 33, italics in original. 80 Knud Erik Jørgensen, ‘‘Modern European Diplomacy: A Research Agenda,’’ Journal of International Relations and Development 2, no. 1 (1999): 12. 81 Ben Tonra and Thomas Christiansen, ‘‘The Study of EU Foreign Policy: between International Relations and European Studies,’’ in Rethinking European Union Foreign Policy, eds Ben Tonra and Thomas Christiansen (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004), 8. 82 Henrik Larsen, ‘‘Discourse Analysis in the Study of European Foreign Policy,’’ in Rethinking European Union Foreign Policy, eds Ben Tonra and Thomas Christiansen (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004), 74. 83 Janet Mather, Legitimating the European Union: Aspirations, Inputs, Performance (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 163. 84 Helene Sjursen and Karen Smith, ‘‘Justifying EU Foreign Policy: the Logics Underpinning EU Enlargement,’’ in Rethinking European Union Foreign Policy, eds Ben Tonra and Thomas Christiansen (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004), 139–140. 85 Franc¸ois Duˆchene, ‘‘Europe’s Role in World Peace,’’ in Europe Tomorrow: Sixteen Europeans Look Ahead, ed. Richard Mayne (London: Fontana, 1972), 43–44. 86 Hedley Bull, ‘‘Civilian Power Europe: a Contradiction in Terms?’’ in The European Community: Past, Present and Future, ed. R. Tsoukalis (London: Blackwell, 1983), 149–70. Christopher Hill, ‘‘The Capability-Expectations Gap, or Conceptualizing Europe’s International Role,’’ Journal of Common Market Studies 31, no. 3 (1993): 305–28.
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6 Where to now? 1 ‘‘Declaration on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Signature of the Treaties of Rome,’’ at www.eu2007.de/de/News/download_docs/ Maerz/0324-RAA/English.pdf 2 Robert Schuman, ‘‘Declaration of 9 May 1950,’’ in The Origins and Development of European Integration: A Reader and a Commentary, eds Peter Stirk and David Weigall (London and New York: Pinter, 1999), 76. 3 See Wolfgang Wessels, ‘‘Cleavages, Controversies and Convergence in European Union Studies,’’ in European Union Studies, eds Michelle Cini and Angela Bourne (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 233–246.
Select bibliography
Introduction
There is a number of large textbooks that provide an extensive coverage of most aspects of European integration and the European Union. Two of the ‘‘classics’’ are Neill Nugent, The Government and Politics of the European Union (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 6th edn) which gives a comprehensive view of the workings of the EU, and Desmond Dinan, Ever Closer Union: An Introduction to European Integration (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 3rd edn) which provides an American perspective on the process. One of the most comprehensive textbooks is Ian Bache and Stephen George, Politics in the European Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 2nd edn) which is also linked to an Online Resource Center. 1 Debate
Of the large textbooks on the European Union, Bache and George, Politics in the European Union has one of the best coverages of the theoretical aspects of European integration, devoting Part One to ‘‘Theory’’ (3–77) with four chapters on ‘‘Theories of European Integration,’’ ‘‘Theories of EU Governance,’’ ‘‘Critical Perspectives,’’ and ‘‘Theorizing Consequences’’ which looks at Europeanization and democracy in the EU. Michelle Cini and Angela Bourne, eds, European Union Studies (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) look at the ‘‘state of the art’’ of the study of European integration in the mid-2000s. They bring together a number of current contributors to review the subject from a variety of perspectives, placing some emphasis on what Wessels in a chapter headed ‘‘Cleavages, Controversies and Convergence in European Union Studies’’ (pp. 233–246) describes as the ‘‘‘pull’ from the EU,’’ meaning the influence of events in Europe, and ‘‘the ‘push’ from the discipline,’’ referring to developments in political
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science. Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, ed., Debates on European Integration (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) outlines the main debates about integration after the Second World War, illustrating each of the trends in the discussion with extracts from key texts. Public attitudes towards European integration are dealt with in a theoretical framework in Lauren McLaren, Identity, Interests and Attitudes to European Integration (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 2 History
Perhaps the best source of information and viewpoints about Europe from the start of its history until the end of the twentieth century is Norman Davies, Europe. A History (London: Pimlico, 1997). It has an amazing coverage of all aspects of European life from myth to culture, politics and war, and has side-references to a range of events, battles, persons and ideas. A more mundane but good commentary on the history of European integration together with appropriate extracts from the relevant documents can be found in Peter Stirk and David Weigall, eds, The Origins and Development of European Integration. A Reader and Commentary (Pinter: London and New York, 1999). Part Two of Bache and George, Politics in the European Union is entitled ‘‘History’’ and follows the rise of European integration after the Second World War. 3 Institutions
The most careful account of the institutions is given by Nugent, The Government and Politics of the European Union, whilst Bache and George, Politics in the European Union, is comprehensive. Simon Hix, The Political System of the European Union (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 2nd edn), as the title suggests, treats the EU more as a state-like political system. The best introduction to the Commission is again by Neill Nugent, The European Commission (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), while David Spence with Geoffrey Edwards, eds, The European Commission (London: John Harper Publishing, 2006, 3rd edn) and Martin Westlake, The Council of the European Union (London: John Harper Publishing, 2004, 3rd edn) both provide insights into those institutions. The main institutional web sites can be accessed through the EU’s portal http://europa.eu/index_en.htm 4 Policies
The European Union’s own web site (http://europa.eu/index_en.htm) provides a mine of up-to-date information on the main policy areas.
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165
Bache and George, Politics in the European Union, covers the main policy areas in Part Four and is particularly good on Regional and Structural Policies. Neill Nugent, The Government and Politics of the European Union covers policies in Part 3 and is especially informative on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). A more specialist book on the CAP is Robert Ackrill, The Common Agricultural Policy (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000). 5 External affairs
A good starting point for understanding the growth and workings of the Common Foreign and Security Policy in its first decade was written by a then Commission insider: Fraser Cameron, The Foreign and Security Policy of the European Union (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999). Three more contemporary overviews of the EU’s external relations are provided by Michael E. Smith, Europe’s Foreign and Security Policy. The Institutionalization of Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Charlotte Bretherton and John Vogler, The European Union as a Global Actor (London and New York: Routledge, 2005) and in chapters 29 (external economic relations) and 30 (CFSP) of Bache and George, Politics in the European Union. The best discussion of the nature of the EU’s foreign policy is Ben Tonra and Thomas Christensen, eds, Rethinking European Union Foreign Policy (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004), which tackles the issue from a number of perspectives. An American perspective on the role of the EU in the world is seen in John McCormick, The European Superpower (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Two valuable sources of documentation are Christopher Hill and Karen Smith, eds, European Foreign Policy. Key Documents (London and New York: Routledge, 2000) and the Chaillot Papers that re-print, with commentary key documents on the European Security and Defense Policy (see the web site of the European Union Institute for Security Studies, www.iss-eu.org). 6 The future
Those wishing to examine some of the current debates about the state of the EU and where it is going could look at some of the leading academic journals such as JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies (blackwell-synergy.com), Journal of European Public Policy (www.informa world.com), Journal of European Integration (www.tandf.co.uk/journals/ titles/07036337.html) and European Union Politics (http://online.sagepub .com). They could also look at the web sites of the European policy
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institutes such as the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS, at www.ceps.eu), the ‘‘pro-European but not uncritical’’ Centre for European Reform (www.cer.org.uk) or the more Euroskeptic Centre for Policy Studies (www.cps.org.uk). The web sites of two academic organizations are worth examining for information about meetings, studies, and links: the European Union Studies Association (EUSA) in the United States (www.eustudies.org) and the University Association for Contemporary European Studies (UACES) in the United Kingdom (www.UACES.org).
Index
Aceh 125, 127 Afghanistan 112, 126 African-Caribbean-Pacific States (ACP) 30, 46, 101–3, 133; Association Council 101–2; Cotonou 102, 107; Economic Partnership Agreements 102; Lome´ 102; Yaounde´ 101–2 African Union 125, 138 ‘‘Agenda 2000’’ 63, 90 agriculture policy see Common Agricultural Policy aid 99, 106–7 Albania 115, 135 Al Qaeda 112, 126 Andean Community 106 Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (FSJ) 50, 91, 94–5, 96 see also Justice and Home Affairs Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) 103 Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) 103 Association of the Overseas Countries and Territories 101 Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) 3, 103, 138; ASEAN-EC Ministerial Meeting (AEMM)103; Free Trade Area (AFTA) 103; Trans-regional EU-ASEAN Trade Initiative (TREATI) 103 asylum 91, 93, 94, 97 Austria 29, 38, 76, 92, 114, 135 Balkans 3, 115, 127 Baltic States see Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania
Balkans Stability Pact see Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe Barcelona Declaration (1995) 117 Barroso, J.M. 37, 142 Belarus 115, 135 Belgium 21, 23, 31, 92, 101, 131, 135 Benelux states 8, 74, 92 Berlin Declaration (2007) 134 Berlin Wall 2, 28 Biodiversity Strategy 84 Bosnia-Herzegovina 115, 116, 124, 135 Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRICs) 107, 137, 140 budget of the EU 30, 38, 40, 42, 62–64, 66, 99, 96–97, 113 Bulgaria 2, 20, 30, 38, 115, 135 Canada 21–2 CAP see Common Agricultural Policy Cassis de Dijon case 67 Cecchini Report (1988) 67 Cenelec see European Standardization Committee for Electrical Products Central and East European Countries (CEECs) 2, 29–30, 63, 70–2, 90, 113, 114–15, 117, 127, 131, 133, 136, 137, 139 Charter of Fundamental Rights (EU) 49, 50, 51, 154 China 70, 71, 103, 104, 137; EU Cooperation Program and 104 Christian Democrats 71, 85, 144 citizenship 53, 55, 91, 93
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climate change 84 closer cooperation see enhanced cooperation co-decision see procedure: co-decision Cohesion Fund 85, 88, 89 Cold War 119, 130, 137, 139, 141 Committee of the Regions (COR) 33, 43, 44, 52–3, 89, 139 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 24, 25, 30, 40, 59, 60–4, 96, 97, 129, 140 common commercial policy 99, 110, 129, 132 Common External Tariff (CET) 59, 64, 85 Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) 64–6, 96, 97 Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) 34, 35, 43, 47–8, 54, 55–6, 99, 109–114, 121–4, 132–3; High Representative 48, 51–2, 100, 112, 122 common position 54, 111, 113 common strategies 112, 113 Community Support Framework (CSF) 89 Community method 27, 41, 42, 54, 57, 58, 71, 112 see also ‘‘Monnet method’’ competition policy 57, 68–69 Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) 107, 119 see also Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe constructive abstention 55, 113 Convention on the Future of Europe 30, 50 Copenhagen criteria (1993) 114–15 Council of Europe 8, 22 Council of Ministers 14, 25, 26, 35–6, 40–2, 70, 73, 76–8, 86; CFSP and 100, 112–13; Secretary-General 48; voting system 35–36, 49, 50, 51, 57 see also Economic and Financial Affairs Council; General Affairs and External Relations Council
Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER) 35, 42, 52 Court of Auditors 39–40, 42 Court of Justice of the European Communities see European Court of Justice (ECJ) Court of First Instance see under European Court of Justice (ECJ) crime 91, 92, 93, 94, 116, 126, 139 crisis management 110, 120, 127 Croatia 109, 115, 135 customs union 23, 24, 25, 53, 57, 59–60, 66, 80, 106, 114, 118 Cyprus 30, 115, 118, 135, 136 Czech Republic 115, 135 Czechoslovakia 20, 114 Darfur 125 Dayton agreements 29 defense policy 111, 119, 122–4 see also Common Foreign and Security Policy de Gaulle, C. 10, 24–6, 27, 42, 58, 59, 138 Delors, J. 3, 8, 27, 75, 80, 82, 109 see also European Commission Delors Report 75 Democratic Republic of Congo 125–6 Denmark 21, 26, 29, 34, 47, 64–5, 94, 112, 131, 135; euro and 55, 75–6, 78, 79; Schengen 92 drugs trafficking 92, 93, 94,106 Dublin Asylum Convention (1999) 92 Eastern Europe see Central and East European States (CEECs) East Germany 20–21 see also Germany Economic and Financial Affairs Council (ECOFIN) 35, 76 Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) 26, 43, 45, 55, 60, 73–79; convergence criteria 77–78, 79, 89 EFTA see European Free Trade Association Emissions Trading Scheme 84 EMU see European and Monetary Union
Index enhanced cooperation 49, 53, 54–56, 111 enlargement 26, 27, 29, 47, 53, 63, 95, 98, 112, 134, 135; (1973) 42, 81, 135; (1995) 76, 114–15, 135; (2004) 2, 30, 35, 36, 37, 48–49, 71, 90, 115, 127, 135; Mediterranean 10, 135; Turkey 118, 135 environment 51, 63 Environmental Action Program (EAP) 83 environmental policy 83–5, 89, 96, 98 Estonia 20, 115, 135, 139 EURATOM see European Atomic Energy Community euro 55, 69, 75–9, 97, 100 ‘‘Euroland’’ 78–9 ‘‘Euro-Med’’ 46, 115, 117 Europe Agreements 29, 70, 114 European Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund (EAGGF or FEOGA) 60–1, 63, 85, 88 European Arrest Warrant 95 European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM) 10, 24, 41 European Central Bank (ECB) 43, 45, 77, 78 European Climate Change Program (ECCP) 84 European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) 5, 8–10, 40, 107; Council of Ministers 40–41; European Assembly 37, 40; High Authority 9, 22–23, 24, 26, 33, 40, 57 European Commission 13, 14, 33–37, 70, 72, 81, 82–83, 84–85, 141; Barroso Commission 37, 142–43; cabinet 36; CAP and 61–66; College of Commissioners 36, 37, 41, 48, 52; Delegations 37; Delors Commission 62, 67; DirectoratesGeneral (DGs) 36, 41, 52; external policy 104, 106, 108, 111–14, 118–19, 121–22, 130–31; legislation 33–34, 36–37, 38, 41–43, 52–57; powers 3, 37, 38, 41–43, 46, 57, 77, 86–90, 94, 121–22,
169
130–31; Presidency 31, 36–37, 42–43, 107; Prodi Commission 37; resignation 30, 37; Santer Commission 37; SecretariatGeneral 36; SEM 67–9; size 47, 48, 50 European Communities 1, 7, 26, 28, 33–4, 42, 57, 87, 108–9, 127; Commission 26, Council of Ministers 25, 26, 34, 41–2, 73 see also European Economic Community European Community Humanitarian Office (ECHO) 107 European Community Monitoring Mission 109 European Congress (The Hague 1948) 8 European Council 34, 42, 43, 50, 52, 55, 57, 91–2, 111, 112, 113, 123; Berlin (1999) 63; Edinburgh (1992) 29; Hanover (1988) 75; Helsinki (1999) 30; Laeken (2001) 50, 120; Lisbon (2000) 30; Madrid (1989) 75; Presidency 34, 35, 43, 48, 108, 111, 112, 113, 121–22; Secretary-General 48; Strasbourg (1989) 82; Tampere (1999) 95; voting system 35–36, 49, 50, 51 European Court of Justice: The Court of Justice of the European Communities (ECJ) 31, 33, 38, 39, 40, 49, 56, 67, 79, 83, 138; Advocates-General 39; Court of First Instance 39, 49; Grand Chamber 39; powers 25–6, 36, 39, 54, 71 European Currency Unit (ECU) 61, 74 European Defense Agency (EDA) 127 European Defense Community (EDC) 23 European Development Fund (EDF) 101–2 European Economic Area (EEA) 69, 92, 114 European Economic Community (EEC) 10, 17, 24–26, 37, 46, 59, 97, 134, 138; Commission 24,
170
Index
25–26, 27, 41–42 see also European Communities European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) 33, 43, 44, 49, 52–3 European Environmental Agency (EEA) 83, 84 European Free Trade Association (EFTA) 24, 29, 69, 114, 135 European Fund for Rural Development 63 European Investment Bank (EIB) 87 European Investment Fund 46 European Monetary Co-operation Fund (EMCF) 74 European Monetary Institute (EMI) 43, 45 European Monetary System (EMS) 74–6, 78 European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) 115 European Ombudsman 38, 43, 44, 45 European Parliament 27, 33–4, 36, 41, 42–4, 47, 50, 52–7, 59, 72, 81, 111, 113; budgetary powers 38, 42; College of Quaestors 38; political groups 38, 144; President 38 European People’s Party/European Democrats (EPP/ED) 38, 144 European Police Office (Europol) 93, 155, European Political Co-operation (EPC) 42–3, 47, 92, 108–9 European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) 81, 85, 87–88 European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) 30, 55, 99, 112, 114, 120–28, 133; Civilian Crisis Management Capability Conference 120; Constitutional Treaty and 122–24; European Capabilities Action Plan (ECAP) 120, 126; EU Military Committee (EUMC) 120; EU Military Staff (EUMS) 120; EU Police Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina (EUPM) 124; Headline Goals 120, 126; operations 124–26;
Policy Planning and Early Warning Unit (PPEWU) 48; Political & Security Committee (PSC) 120 European Security Strategy 121, 126–27 European Social Fund (ESF) 80, 85, 87–9 European Standardization Committee (CEN) 67 European Standardization Committee for Electrical Products (Cenelec) 67 European System of Central Banks (ESCB) 43, 45, 77, 78 Europeanization 15–16 Europol see European Police Force Euroskeptic 12, 58, 166 ‘‘Eurosklerosis’’ 26 eurozone 45 Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) 29, 74–5, 76 federal state 6, 98 federalism 6–8, 9 Financial Instrument of Fisheries Guidance (FIFG) 85, 88 Finland 21, 29, 74, 76, 87, 89, 92, 110, 114, 135 fisheries zones 65 former-Yugoslavia 110, 113, 115 Fouchet Plan (1961) 107 ‘‘four freedoms of movement’’ 67, 70–72 framework decision 54–55 France 8, 20, 23, 24–7, 29, 30, 37, 38, 60, 64, 79, 80, 84, 86, 92, 101, 107, 109, 117, 119–20, 126, 132, 135; agriculture 59, 138; Germany and 2, 22, 31, 74, 79, 112, 118, 131, 132, 134; referendum 31 Functionalism 8–9 Galtung, J. 17 General Affairs and External Relations Council 35 see also Council of Ministers General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 21, 100–1, 128–9; Dillon round (1962) 100, 129;
Index Kennedy round (1962–7) 100, 129; Uruguay round (1986–94) 62–3, 101, 130 Generalized System of Preferences 104, 105, 106 Georgia 125, 135 Germany 23, 30, 31, 37, 38, 59, 60, 64, 80, 84, 86, 92, 109, 117, 126, 132; federalism 6–8; France and 2, 22, 31, 74, 79, 112, 118, 131, 134; unification 20, 28, 114, 135 Giscard d’Estaing, V. 50 globalization 7, 17, 32, 95 Gorbachev, M. 130 Gothenburg Strategy (2001) 84–5, 89, 90 Greece 27, 76, 78, 81, 89–90, 92, 109, 118, 135, 136 Greenland 135 Growth and Stability Pact 78 Haas, E. 9–10, 85 Habitats Directive 84 Hallstein, W. 25, 58 health 9, 35, 44, 84, 85; care 140; public 28, 29, 72, 83; safety and 35, 67, 81, 82, 83, 84 High Representative see under Common Foreign and Security Policy Hoffmann, S. 10, 11 human rights 91, 102, 104, 106, 110, 115, 118 humanitarian: action 110; aid 107 Hungary 20, 115, 135 Iceland 21, 65, 70, 92, 93, 114, 135 immigration 69, 91–7 see also migrant workers India 70, 71, 105, 137 industrial and competition policy 69 inflation 74, 75, 77 institutionalism: historical 14; new 13; rational choice 14; sociological 14 Instrument for Structural Policies for Pre-Accession (ISPA) 89 Integrated Mediterranean Programmes (IMPs) 86
171
intergovernmental conferences (IGCs) 49–50, 51, 75 intergovernmentalism 6–7, 9, 11–12 internal market 53, 66, 72, 92 international organizations 5, 11, 33, 100 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 3, 21 Inter-regional cooperation program (INTERREG) 88 investment 46, 69, 70, 79, 86, 103, 105, 131 Iran 26, 31, 101, 119, 131 Iraq 28, 31, 109, 112, 117, 119, 125, 126, 128, 130, 131, 136–7 Ireland 26, 64–5, 86, 89–90, 92–5, 135 Islam 19, 118–9 see also Muslim Israel 101, 109, 117, 136 Italy 8, 21, 23, 29, 30, 37, 38, 80, 84, 86, 92, 101, 109, 112, 131, 135; EMU and 74, 75, 79 Japan 2, 103, 104–5, 130, 137 joint action 54, 111, 113 judicial co-operation see Police and Judicial Cooperation in Criminal Matters Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) 34, 35, 43, 54, 55, 91–3, 95, 115 Kennedy, J. F. 24, 137 Kok Report (2004) 71 Kosovo 111, 116, 120, 124, 127, 128, 131, 135, 137 Kuwait 28, 109, 130 Latin America 105–6 Latvia 20, 38, 115, 135 legislation 25–26, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 44, 45, 52–58, 85, 92–93; single market 52, 56, 71, 81–82, 114 liberal intergovernmentalism 6, 12–13 Liechtenstein 114, 135 Lisbon strategy (process) 56, 70–2, 83, 84, 90, 98, 139, 140 Lithuania 20, 115, 135 Luxembourg 21, 23, 49, 92, 135
172
Index
Luxembourg Compromise/Accords (1966) 25, 42, 138 Maastricht Treaty see Treaty on European Union Macedonia 109, 115, 125, 135 Malta 30, 38, 49, 115, 135 March, J. 13–14 Marshall Aid 21, 22 Mediterranean initiative see Euro-Med membership see enlargement Mercosur Customs Union 106 Mexico 106 Microsoft 68 Middle East 109, 117, 119, 138 see also wars: Arab-Israeli; Gulf migrant workers 70, 83 see also immigration Milward, A. 11–12, 139 Mitrany, D. 8–9 Moldova 115, 125, 135 Monetary Compensation Amounts (MCAs) 61 Monnet, J. 3, 8, 22, 25–6, 31, 40, 57, 132, 138 ‘‘Monnet method’’ 3, 64 see also Community method Montenegro 115, 135 Moravcsik, A. 12–13, 52 multi-level governance 7 Muslims 136 see also Islam NATO see North Atlantic Treaty Organization neofunctionalism 6–7, 8, 9–11 Netherlands 21, 23, 31, 92, 101, 135 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 3, 21–2, 33, 111, 114, 118, 119–20, 123, 124, 126, 127–8, 130, 134, 136–7, 40; agreement with EU 100, 112 Norway 21, 29, 64, 74, 70, 92, 93, 114, 125–6, 135 Olsen, J. 13–15 ombudsman see European Ombudsman open method of coordination (OMC) 56, 71
‘‘opt outs’’ 29, 31, 51, 55, 93 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 17, 37, 128 Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) 22, 23 Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) 37 see also Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) 130 Palestinian Authority 109, 117, 124–25, 127; Territories 136 Partnership and Co-operation Agreement (PCA) 104, 116 passarelle 95 peacekeeping 110, 122, 138 Petersberg Tasks 110, 119, 121 pillar structure of the EU 34–35, 39, 43, 47–48, 50, 52, 54–56, 58, 93–95, 109, 112–13, 127 Poland 20, 38, 115, 135, 139 Poland-Hungary Aid for Reconstruction of the Economy (PHARE) 114 Police and Judicial Cooperation in Criminal Matters 35, 51, 54–6, 93–5 Portugal 21, 27, 65, 81, 86, 89–90, 92, 105, 131, 135 pound sterling (UK) 73, 76, 79 poverty 83, 85 power: ‘‘civilian’’ 99, 133; ‘‘hard’’ 99; ‘‘soft’’ 99 procedure: assent 47, 52; co-decision 38, 47–8, 50, 52–53, 54, 57; consultation 52–53; cooperation 47, 52, 81 Putin, V. 116–17, 137 Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) 14, 35, 49, 54, 55, 113 quantitative restrictions (QRs) 59 racism and xenophobia 94 Reagan, R. 3, 130
Index REACH system 84 Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies 107 regional and structural policy 85–91, 96, 98 Romania 2, 20, 30, 38, 115, 135 rural development 30, 63–4, 87–8 Russia 2, 19, 20, 28, 31, 100, 115, 127, 137, 141; EU and 116–7 see also Soviet Union sanctions 54, 78, 79, 104, 131 Sandholz, W. 13, 52 Schengen accords (agreements) 48, 70, 92, 93, 95–7, 114 Schengen Information System (SIS) 92 Schuman Declaration and Plan (1950) 8, 23, 31, 40, 52 Schuman, R. 3, 22–3 security policy see Common European Security and Defence Policy; Common Foreign and Security Policy; Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe SEM see Single European Market September 11 2001 (‘‘9/11’’) 30, 95, 112, 115, 126, 136 Serbia 111–12, 115, 127, 131, 135 Services Directive 72 Single European Act (SEA) (1986) 10, 13, 27, 60, 67, 69, 75, 81, 83, 86, 92, 107, 109, 138 Single European Market (SEM) (1992) 10–11, 27, 31, 35, 54, 43, 60, 66–72, 80, 81, 92, 97, 114, 118, 130, 132 see also ‘‘four freedoms of movement’’ Slovakia 115, 135, 139 Slovenia 115, 135 Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) 46, 81 Smithsonian Agreement (1971) 73 smuggling 69 Social Action Programs 81 Social Charter (Chapter) 82, 85 social constructivism 16–17, 133, 139 social partners 81–2
173
social policy 80–3, 85 Social Policy Agenda 83 Solana, J. 48, 127, 128 see also CFSP High Representative sovereignty 11, 13, 144 Soviet Union 20–21, 28, 113, 130 Spain 27, 31, 37, 38, 65–6, 81, 86, 89–90, 92, 105, 112, 131, 135 spillover 10–11 Stabex (export revenue stabilization) 102 Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe 30, 115 structural funds 85–91 subsidiarity 47 Summits: ASEM 103; G8 84; Hague (1969) 26, 73; St Malo (1998) 119 supranational institutions 7, 13, 40 Sweden 29, 55, 65, 74, 76, 78, 79, 87, 89, 92, 110, 114, 135 Switzerland 93, 114, 125–6, 135 Sysmin (minerals export capacity maintenance) 102 terrorism 30, 69, 71, 92–3, 123–4, 126, 141 see also wars: ‘‘war on terror’’ Thatcher, M. 58, 62, 64, 67, 75, 80, 82, 85, 132, 138; Bruges Speech 27 Total Allowable Catches (TACs) 65–6 traditional own resources 96 training 44, 70, 80, 82, 83, 87, 94 Transatlantic Economic Council 131 trans-European networks (TENs) 28 Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe (Constitutional Treaty 2004) 5–6, 30, 50, 95, 98, 134, 139, 145–46; CFSP and 121–24 Treaty of Amsterdam (1997) 30, 47–48, 53–54, 55, 71, 83, 91; ESDP and110–11, 113, 119–20, 132; Justice and Home Affairs and 94, 95 Treaty of Brussels (1972) 21 Treaty of Lisbon (The Reform Treaty 2007) 49–50, 51–52, 121, 146 Treaty of Nice (2001) 30, 36–37, 48–49, 50, 111
174
Index
Treaty of Paris (1981) 5, 23, 40 Treaty of Rome (1957) 3, 36, 41, 73, 80–1, 83, 85–6, 91, 97, 98, 100, 134, 141; CAP and 59, 60, 64; Overseas Countries and Territories 101 Treaty on European Union (TEU) (Maastricht 1992) 8, 10, 28, 29–30, 34, 41, 44, 47, 53, 55, 69, 70, 82, 83, 85, 114, 119, 138; CFSP and 109–11, 132; EMU and 43, 60, 75–79, 89; Justice and Home Affairs and 50, 91–94 Trevi Group 92 Truman Doctrine (1947) 21 Turkey 2, 30, 31, 91, 115, 117–19, 135, 136 Ukraine 31, 115, 125, 135 unemployment 1, 29, 30, 80, 87, 90, 117 United Kingdom (UK) 20–21, 29, 31, 37, 38, 55, 58, 64–5, 71, 82, 84, 86, 92–5, 102, 109, 130, 132, 135, 139; abatement 96; CFSP and 107, 112, 119–20, 126, 131; Conservative government 24, 29, 79, 82; EMU and 75–6, 79; Labour government 23, 25, 79, 82; Western Europe 8, 12, 21, 23–6, 73–4 United Nations (UN) 6, 21, 100, 112, 122–4, 132 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (1972) 83 United States (US) 2, 6, 17, 27, 79, 84, 99, 100–1, 103, 106, 109, 117,
126, 139–40; Bush administration 84, 131, 136; Iraq and 28, 31, 126; US-European relations 4, 20–2, 24–6, 29, 62, 111–12, 119, 120, 127, 128–32, 136–7 Value Added Tax (VAT) 62, 67–8, 96 Venice Declaration (1980) 109, 117 Ventotene Manifesto 7, 8 wars: Arab-Israeli (1973) 74; Gulf (1991) 43; Iraq (2003) 31; Thirty Years 20; ‘‘war on terror’’ 136–37; World War I (1914–18) 20; World War II (1939–45) 20, 129 see also Cold War Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO) Western European Union (WEU) 23, 110, 111, 119 Western Union 22 White Paper on growth, competitiveness and employment (1993) 69–70 Wild Birds Directive (1979) 84 World Bank 21 World Trade Organisation (WTO) 3, 17, 63, 100, 104, 105, 107, 128–9, 131, 137, 140; Doha Round 107 Yaounde Conventions see under African-Caribbean-Pacific States Yom Kippur War (1973) see wars: Arab-Israeli (1973) Yugoslavia 2, 28, 29, 30, 43, 109, 130–1, 141 see also former Yugoslavia
