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