Abstract
War is unthinkable between France and Germany. This is probably the commonest expression of the consequences of European integration, not only among lay theorists, but also among professionals in the academic and policymaking arena. As an affirmation of fact, it is seen as the effect and the cause of integration, not just between the two central states, but between the members of the wider Community in which France and Germany form the core relationship.1 The transformation of their old conflictual association, in which war was chronically triggered as the outcome of their competitive relations, into a security community, is viewed as the cause and the consequence of their solidarity, and of the solidarity of the Community as a whole. As war becomes unthinkable, so the participants are motivated to integrate their interests and institutions even further, and thus to strengthen the new relationship between them.
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Notes
I use the term ‘Community’ as a general expression of the European Union (EU) throughout its history, employing strictly accurate labels only when the context necessitates it.
Both cited in Harold Macmillan, Tides of Fortune, 1945–1955 (London: Macmillan, 1969), p. 151 and Appendix 1.
Alan Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe 1945–1951 (London: Methuen, 1984), pp. 492/3.
See also his The European Rescue of the Nation-State (London: Routledge, 1992), Ch. 6.
Desmond Dinan, in his otherwise excellent historical analysis, Ever Closer Union? An Introduction to the European Community (London: Macmillan Press, 1994), p. 10, similarly opposes ‘narrowly defined national interest’ to ‘international altruism’.
Deutsch Karl et al., Political Community and the North Atlantic Area (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1955), p. 5.
The Treaty of Paris, which established the European Coal and Steel Community, was signed on 18 April 1951.
It has since become an aphorism of realpolitik that states do not have friends, they only have interests.
Alan Milward, (1984), op. cit.
Ernst Hass, ‘The study of regional integration: reflections on the joy and anguish of pretheorizing’ in L. Lindberg and S. Scheingold (eds) Regional Integration: Theory and Research (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 4
For discussion of the Northern Ireland case, see Bill McSweeney, ‘Security, identity and the peace process in Northern Ireland’, Security Dialogue, 27/2, 1996, pp. 167–78.
The principal texts of the neofunctionalist school include Ernst Hass, The Uniting of Europe: Political, Social, and Economic Forces (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958);
L.N. Lindberg, The Political Dynamics of European Economic Integration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963).
Ernst Haas, ‘International integration: the European and the universal process’, in International Organization, XV, 1961, p. 368.
Lindberg, (1963), op. cit., p. 10.
Ernst Haas, (1958), p. 16.
P.C. Schmitter, ‘Three neofunctionalist hypotheses about international integration’, International Organization, 23, 1969, p. 162ff.
Haas, (1958), op. cit.; Lindberg, (1963), op. cit.
Ernst Haas, ‘The uniting of Europe and the uniting of Latin America’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 5/4, 1967, p. 324/5.
Stanley Hoffman ‘Obstinate or obsolete? The fate of the nation-state and the case of Western Europe’, Daedelus, No. 95,1966, pp. 862–915.
Hass, (1967), op. cit., p. 325.
Hass, (1967), op cit., p. 328.
Hass, (1967), op. cit, p. 331.
Hass, (1967), op. cit, p. 315.
Carole Webb ‘Theoretical perspectives & problems’ in Wallace H., Wallace W. and Webb C. (eds), Policy-making in the European Community, 2nd edition (Chichester: Wiley, 1983), pp. 1–42.
Stanley Hoffman ‘The European process at Atlantic crosspurposes’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 3, 1964/5 pp. 87–91, and Hoffman, (1966), op. cit.
Robert O. Keohane and Stanley Hoffman ‘Conclusions: community politics and institutional change’ in William Wallace (ed.), The Dynamics of European Integration (London: Pinter, 1990), p. 284.
Ernst Hass, ‘Turbulent fields and the theory of regional integration’ in International Organization, 30, 1976, p. 203/4.
William Wallace, ‘Less than a federation, more than a regime: the Community and the nation-state’, in Wallace, Wallace and Webb, (1983), op. cit.; Donald Puchala ‘Domestic politics and regional harmonization in the European Communities’, World Politics, 1975, pp. 496–520.
Wayne Sandholtz and John Zysman, ‘1992: Recasting the European bargain’, World Politics, 42/1,1989, pp. 1–30.
Sandholtz and Zysman, (1989), op. cit., p. 100.
Sandholtz and Zysman, (1989), op. cit, p. 108.
Stanley Hoffman, ‘The European Community and 1992’, Foreign Affairs, 68, 1989, pp. 27–47.
Robert O. Keohane and Stanley Hoffman ‘Conclusions: community politics and institutional change’ in Wallace (1990), op. cit., p. 289.
Keohane and Hoffman (1990), op. cit., p. 284. The view that ‘what we observe leading directly’ to an act of integration lends it priority over non-observable factors comes strange from authors who complain of the theoretical poverty of other accounts of integration in the same volume.
Andrew Moravcsik, ‘Negotiating the Single European Act’, in Robert O. Keohane and Stanley Hoffman (eds), The New European Community (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), p. 75.
Moravcsik, (1991), op. cit., p. 75.
Andrew Moravcsik, ‘Preferences and power in the European Community: a liberal intergovernmentalist approach’, Journal of Common Market Studies; 31/4, 1993, p. 483.
Moravcsik, (1991), op. cit., pp. 75, 67.
Moravcsic, (1993), op. cit., pp. 480/481, emphasis added.
Moravcsic, (1993), op. cit., p. 507ff.
Moravcsic, (1993), op. cit., p. 507.
Moravcsic, (1993), op. cit. — see text to note 34.
Wayne Sandholtz, ‘Choosing Union: monetary politics and Maastricht’, International Organization, 47, 1993, pp. 1–39.
Sandholtz, (1993), op. cit., p. 3.
Keohane and Hoffman, (1990), op. cit., p. 284.
Moravcsik (1993), op. cit., p. 496.
Moravcsik (1993), op. cit., p. 483.
Haas, (1958), op. cit., p. 17.
Moravcsik, (1993), op. cit., pp. 507ff; and (1991) op. cit., p. 75.
The attribution of agency to collective entities is problematic. Agency properly belongs only to individuals. Collective actors may be treated as ‘agents’, however, in respect of the properties of individual actors representing them.
For more detailed discussion of agency, identity and security see Bill McSweeney, Security and Identity in International Relations Theory, forthcoming, n.d., Chs 6 and 7.
See Paul Taylor, ‘Supranationalism’ in A.J.R. Groom and Paul Taylor (eds), Frameworks for International Cooperation (London: Pinter, 1990). In the same volume, Harrison speaks of integration by stealth — ‘incremental, concrete, economic achievements which build up de facto “engrenage” or enmeshment of one national political and economic system with another.’
Haas, (1958), op. cit., p. 16.
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell 1983);
E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations & Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993);
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Press, 1989).
Are concepts to be understood in terms of their operational definition alone? Is time simply what a watch keeps? Is human nature what we observe in human behaviour? For well-known statements of the behaviourist philosophy see Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949)
and J.B. Watson, Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviourist (London: Pinter, 1983).
Robert Gilpin, ‘The richness of the tradition of political realism’, in Robert O. Keohane (ed), Neo-realism and its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 304
For a contemporary Waltzian expression of such realism, see John Mearsheimer, ‘The false promise of international institutions’, International Security, 19/3, 1995, pp. 5–49
and his earlier ‘Back to the future: instability in Europe after the Cold War’, International Security, 15/1, 1990, pp. 5–56.
The problem of judging a change of identity in collective actors is only a more complex variant of the same problem in regard to individuals. The weight we give to time and the weight we give to indicators of the structuring, or institutionalization, of interests in the cooperative behaviour of collective actors are a problem no different from that of weighing the indicators of change of identity in interpersonal and family relationships.
On German self-containment, see Wolfram Hanrieder, Germany, America, Europe: 40 Years of German Foreign Policy (Newhaven: Yale University Press, 1989);
Alfred Grosser, The Western Alliance: European-American Relations Since 1945 (London: Macmillan, 1980);
Anne Deighton, The Impossible Peace: Britain, the Division of Germany & the Origins of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Robert Tombs (ed.), Nationhood & Nationalism in France: from Boulangism to the Great War 1889–1918 (London: HarperCollins, 1991);
Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship & Nationhood in France & Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
See Milward, (1984), op. cit.; Deighton, (1993), op. cit.;
Stephen George, An Awkward Partner: Britain in the European Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990);
Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain 1945–1951 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992).
David Cameron, ‘British exit, German voice, and French loyalty: defection, domination and cooperation in the 1992–93 ERM crisis’, European Community Studies Association paper, Washington, May 1993.
Cameron, (1993), op. cit., p. 61.
Cited in The Economist, 11 May 1996.
There were other factors involved in the decline of support for the EU in 1992, not least the collapse of communism, which had provided a significant cement to the solidarity of the Community throughout its history.
Leader, The Guardian, 20 February 1997.
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McSweeney, B. (1998). Moral Choice and European Integration. In: McSweeney, B. (eds) Moral Issues in International Affairs. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26464-3_5
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