The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

  Schmitter’s construction thus at once refutes and confirms Majone’s critique of the ‘Monnet method’. A radical iconoclasm of democratic ends is joined, for lack of anything credible that is better, with a sceptical reversion to traditional stealth in means. Yet in these reflections, a frontier common to all the theorizations so far considered starts to be crossed. The language of class does not belong to the discourse of Europe. Schmitter’s freedom with it reflects a working background in Latin America, where the vocabulary of rule has always been more robust, and a personal culture extending well beyond the triter Anglo-Saxon verities, as far as the exotic shores of pre-war corporatism or post-war socialism. He once authored a paper describing the EC as ‘a novel form of political domination’.88 What such intimations indicate is a gap. The reigning literature on Europe spreads across disciplines: politics, economics, sociology, history, philosophy, law are all represented. Missing, however, in the recent literature is any real political economy of integration, of the kind that Milward offered of the founding years of the Community. For that, one has to move outside the bounds of liberal discourse on Europe.

  Unsurprisingly, the best work on this—all too uncomfortably concrete—terrain, of class forces and social antagonisms, metamorphoses of capital and fissures of labour, alterations in contract and innovations in rent, has been done by Marxist scholars. Here what has been called the Amsterdam School, a group of mainly Dutch scholars inspired by the example of Kees van der Pijl, who pioneered the study of transnational class formations, has led the way. The result has been not only a great deal of detailed empirical research into the business metabolisms of integration, but a consideration of the wider array of forces sustaining the turn the EU has taken since the eighties. Putting Gramsci’s conceptual legacy to ingenious use, this is a line of interpretation that distinguishes between ‘disciplinary’ and ‘compensatory’ forms of neo-liberal hegemony (as it were: Thatcher’s and New Labour’s) within the Union, and—developing a hypothesis first suggested by Milward—seeks the social base of these pendular forms in a new rentier bloc with an over-riding interest in hard money, whose complex ramifications now extend into the better-off layers of the private-sector working class itself. Parallel with this work, a spirited revisionist history of both the ideological origins and the economic outcomes of integration, each contravening received opinions, is under way—it too proceeding from Marx rather than Ricardo or Polanyi. Even in this heterodox left field, it should be said, the US presence is visible. The leading collection of the Amsterdam School, A Ruined Fortress? (2003), is orchestrated by a chair-holder from upstate New York, Alan Cafruny; the editor and principal contributor to the revisions of Monetary Union in Crisis, Bernard Moss, is an American based in London.89

  What explains the strange pattern of expatriation—it would plainly be wrong to speak of expropriation—of European studies, understood as enquiry into the past and future of the Union? American dominance of the field in part, no doubt, reflects the famously greater resources, material and intellectual, of the US university system, which assures its lead in so many other areas. There is also the longer tradition and greater prominence in the US of political science, the discipline for which European integration is the most obvious hunting-ground. More generally, an imperial culture has to monitor major developments around the world: it could be argued that contemporary China or Latin America do not differ substantially from Europe, so far as the balance of scholarship is concerned. Still, the much greater density, not to speak of ancestry, of university research in today’s Union would not lead one to expect particularly similar outcomes.

  Yet it is difficult to avoid the feeling that a more specific factor is also at work. The United States remains the most unchanging of all political orders, its constitution petrified apparently forever in its eighteenth-century form. In the title of a recent study, it is the ‘Frozen Republic’. Europe, on the other hand, has now been the stage for a continuous political experiment for half a century, with no precedent and still no clear end in sight. The novelty and restlessness of this process seem to have made it a magnet of attraction for minds formed in a culture at once constitutionally saturated and paralyzed, offering an outlet for intellectual energy frustrated at home. That, at any rate, would be one reading of the situation. To this could be added the intellectual advantages often afforded, historically, by distance. In the nineteenth century, no native mind came near Tocqueville, perhaps even Bryce, as thinkers about America. Why should not America return the compliment to Europe today? That, at any rate, would be one reading of the situation.

  But there is, all too plainly, a further and final strand in the tangle of reasons why Americans have captured the narratives of Europe. The drift of the Union has been towards their presuppositions. The result is something like a new ideological affinity between subject and object. Another way of putting this would be to say that Europe has, to a striking extent, become the theoretical proving-ground of contemporary liberalism. Nowhere are the varieties of that liberalism on such vivid display as in the deliberations on the Union. Even within the span of neo-liberal interpretations, the contrasts are notable. Moravcsik offers a technocratic, Gillingham a classical economic, Eichengreen a post-social, Majone a non-majoritarian version. Set apart from these, and differing again, are Siedentop’s classical political, Weiler’s communitarian, Schmitter’s radical-democratic versions. At one extreme, democracy as understood in a traditional liberal conception is all but extinguished; at the other, all but transfigured. Keohane, Hayek, Polanyi, Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Paine are among the variegated inspirations of this array. Do they exhaust the possibilities of describing the Union? Tocqueville’s words come back: ‘One stops there, and the new word that ought to express the new thing still does not exist’.

  1. See his comments on ‘the lessons taught us all by General De Gaulle’ in the preface to the second edition of The Uniting of Europe, Stanford 1968, p. xiv: ‘The original theory, implicitly if not explicitly, assumed the existence of the condition we have come to label “the end of ideology”. Therefore, the conditioning impact of nationalism was defined out of existence but not empirically examined. I do not regret having done this, because an important point was made in the process: the mutability of the concept of “nation” and of the intensity of national feeling was underlined. But the point was made too strongly, because a new kind of national consciousness has since become discernible, particularly in France’.

  2. Hoffmann on Haas: The European Sisyphus, 1995, pp. 34, 84–9, dating from 1964 and 1966 respectively. Lindberg: The Political Dynamics of European Economic Integration, Stanford 1963, and with Stuart Scheingold, Europe’s Would-be Polity, Englewood Cliffs 1970.

  3. For Milward’s Rescue, published in 1992, see Chapter 1 passim. above. A second edition came out in 2000. His view of neo-functionalism is to be found in The Frontier of National Sovereignty, pp. 2–5, and in his subsequent Politics and Economics in the History of the European Union, London 2005, pp. 33–5, Schumpeter Lectures given in Graz, which continued to show his unrivalled mastery of the historical record, across the whole range of EU states, with a bravura linkage of Ireland and Denmark.

  4. After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Economy, Princeton 1984, p. 7.

  5. Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 31, No. 4, December 1993, pp. 472–523.

  6. Andrew Moravcsik, ‘Preferences and Power’, pp. 483, 485.

  7. ‘Preferences and Power’, p. 508.

  8. ‘Preferences and Power’ p. 509.

  9. ‘Liberal Intergovernmentalism and Integration: A Rejoinder’, Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 33, No. 4, December 1995, p. 626.

  10. Review of Milward’s European Rescue of the Nation-State in Journal of Modern History, March 1995, p. 127.

  11. Andrew Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe, Ithaca 1998, p. 176.

  12. The Choice for Europe, p. 131.

  13. The Choice for Europe, p. 491.

 
; 14. The Choice for Europe, pp. 90, 175, 205, 268, 403, 405, 477, 488, 496.

  15. See, in particular, Jeffrey Vanke, ‘Reconstructing De Gaulle’, and Marc Trachtenberg, ‘De Gaulle, Moravcsik, and Europe’, in Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 2, No. 3, Fall 2000, pp. 87–100 and 101–16.

  16. The Choice for Europe, p. 470.

  17. Andrew Moravcsik, ‘Negotiating the Single European Act: National Interests and Conventional Statecraft in the European Community’, International Organization, Vol. 45, No. 1, Winter 1991, p. 52.

  18. Craig Parsons, A Certain Idea of Europe, Ithaca 2003, p. 235.

  19. A Certain Idea of Europe, pp. 27, 235.

  20. European Integration 1950–2003: Superstate or New Market Economy?, Cambridge 2003, p. xvi.

  21. Gillingham takes the term from John Ruggie, ‘International regimes, transactions, and change: embedded liberalism in the post-war economic order’, in Stephen Krasner (ed.), International Regimes, Ithaca 1983, pp. 195–231. The most notable contribution to this canonical collection of early US regime theory is the blistering attack on the whole notion of international regimes by the late Susan Strange which, in effect, concludes the volume: ‘Cave, Hic Dragones’, pp. 337–54. Strange not only pointed out the vacuity of the idea that American hegemony was over, but also noted the extent to which the future of Europe was—already—being more debated by US scholars than by their counterparts in Europe.

  22. Douglas Forsyth and Ton Notermans, ‘Macreconomic Policy Regimes and Financial Regulation in Europe, 1931–1994’, in Forsyth and Notermans (eds), Regime Changes, Providence 1997, pp. 17–68. Here ‘regimes’ signifies macro-policy packages of monetary and financial regulation, held to set parameters for labour-market, industrial and social policies.

  23. Gillingham, European Integration, p. 231.

  24. European Integration, p. 152.

  25. European Integration, p. 230.

  26. European Integration, p. 412.

  27. European Integration, pp. 150, 498.

  28. European Integration, p. 498.

  29. The same is true of Forsyth and Notermans’ account of the regime changes of the thirties and seventies, as they admit: ‘A more significant limitation of our argument is that it does not explain fully the timing and causes of the deflationary and inflationary nominal price movements that triggered the policy changes we explore. We do not claim to have developed a comprehensive explanation for why the containment of inflation through microeconomic instruments failed during the 1970s and 1980s. Nor have we explained why the pre-1914 gold standard did not produce deflationary pressures as severe as those that developed beginning in the late 1920’s . . . We have proposed neither a comprehensive explanation for the Great Depression, nor for the long postwar economic expansion, nor for the downturn since 1973’: Regime Changes, p. 68.

  30. Barry Eichengreen, The European Economy Since 1945: Coordinated Capitalism and Beyond, Princeton 2006, p. 333.

  31. The European Economy Since 1945, pp. 415–16.

  32. Euroclash: The EU, European Identity and the Future of Europe, New York 2008.

  33. Respectively, European Modernity and Beyond: The Trajectory of European Societies 1945–2000, London 1995, and Sozialgeschichte Europas: 1945 bis zur Gegenwart, Munich 2007.

  34. Fligstein, Euroclash, p. 54.

  35. Euroclash, pp. vii, 6, 15–18, 139, 251, 253.

  36. Euroclash, p. 178.

  37. Euroclash, pp. vii, 10, 33, 34, 69, 123, 187, 191, 192, 244, 251.

  38. Compare Euroclash pp. 4, 138, 14, 250. Oscillation between these emphases recurs throughout the book. For example, ‘one must be circumspect about how far the process of creating a European society has gone. A very small number of people in Europe are interacting with people from other European countries on a daily basis’—followed a hundred pages later by ‘the likelihood of social interaction between people who live in different countries in Europe has expanded dramatically over the past twenty-five years’: pp. 29, 165.

  39. Andrew Moravcsik, ‘The EU ain’t broke’, Prospect, March 2003, p. 38. Although it is not a major part of his case, Fligistein largely concurs with Moravcsik’s arguments for dismissing concern with a democratic deficit, while allowing that he may over-estimate the stability of present arrangements: Euroclash, pp. 228ff, 240, 216ff.

  40. ‘What Can We Learn from the Collapse of the European Constitutional Project?’, Politische Vierteljahresschrift, 47, 2006, Heft 2, p. 227.

  41. ‘What Can We Learn from the Collapse?’, p. 221.

  42. ‘What Can We Learn from the Collapse?’, p. 221.

  43. ‘What Can We Learn from the Collapse?’, p. 238.

  44. ‘Conservative Idealism and International Institutions’, Chicago Journal of International Law, Fall 2000, p. 310.

  45. ‘Conservative Idealism and International Institutions’, p. 310.

  46. Andrew Moravcsik, ‘In Defence of the “Democratic Deficit”: Reassessing Legitimacy in the European Union’, Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 40. No. 4, 2002, p. 618.

  47. John Gillingham, Design for a New Europe, Cambridge 2006, p. 153.

  48. Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 3, London 1979, p. 40.

  49. ‘Introduction’, in Giandomenico Majone (ed.), Deregulation or Re-regulation? Regulatory Reform in Europe and the United States, London 1990, p. 1.

  50. Majone, Deregulation or Re-Regulation?, p. 2; see also Regulating Europe, London 1996, p. 10.

  51. Majone, ‘From the Positive to the Regulatory State’, Journal of Public Policy, Vol. 17, No. 2, May–August 1997, p. 162.

  52. See Majone, ‘The Politics of Regulation and European Regulatory Institutions’, in Jack Hayward and Anan Menon (eds), Governing Europe, Oxford 2003, pp. 300–305. The property rights school, descending from the ideas of Ronald Coase of the University of Chicago, is associated principally with the work of Harold Demsetz and Armen Alchian of UCLA in the seventies.

  53. ‘The Rise of the Regulatory State in Europe’, West European Politics, No. 17, 1994, p. 81.

  54. Governing Europe, p. 311.

  55. Renaud Dehousse and Giandomenico Majone, ‘The Institutional Dynamics of European Integration: From the Single Act to the Maastricht Treaty’, in Stephen Martin (ed.), The Construction of Europe: Essays in Honour of Emile Noel, Dordercht 1994, pp. 92–93; Majone, Regulating Europe, p. 62.

  56. ‘The EU could increase its competences only by developing as an almost pure type of regulatory state’: Majone, ‘From the Positive to the Regulatory State’, p. 150.

  57. ‘Understanding regulatory growth in the European Community’, in David Hine and Hussein Kassim (eds), Beyond the Market: The EU and National Social Policy, London 1998, p. 16.

  58. Majone, Dilemmas of European Integration: The Ambiguities and Pitfalls of Integration by Stealth, Oxford 2005, p. 46.

  59. Dilemmas of European Integration, p. 50.

  60. Dilemmas of European Integration, p. 40.

  61. Majone, ‘From the Positive to the Regulatory State’, p. 165.

  62. Majone, Regulating Europe, p. 299.

  63. ‘International Economic Integration, National Autonomy, Traditional Democracy: An Impossible Trinity?’, EUI Working Papers, pp. 23ff.

  64. Majone, Regulating Europe, p. 285.

  65. Regulating Europe, pp. 295–8.

  66. ‘Is the European Constitutional Settlement Really Successful and Stable?’, Notre Europe, October 2006, p. 5—an intervention that is a direct response to Moravcsik.

  67. Majone, Regulating Europe, p. 7.

  68. Regulating Europe, p. 7.

  69. Majone, Dilemmas of European Integration, p. 37.

  70. Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, Book IX, 1–3.

  71. Chapter 2, pp. 68–69.

  72. Jan Zielonka, Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European Union, Oxford 2006, p. 117.

  73. Majone, Dilemmas of European Integration, p. v.

  74. ‘Despotism in Brussels? Misreading the
European Union’, Foreign Affairs, May–June 2001, p. 117.

  75. Larry Siedentop, Democracy in Europe, London 2000, p. 1.

  76. Democracy in Europe, p. 101.

  77. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (eds), Chicago 2000, pp. 157, 160.

  78. Democracy in America, p. 149.

  79. Joseph Weiler, The Constitution of Europe, Cambridge 1999, p. 269.

  80. The Constitution of Europe, p. xi.

  81. The Constitution of Europe, p. 258.

  82. The Constitution of Europe, p. 89.

  83. The Constitution of Europe, p. 264.

  84. The Constitution of Europe, p. 256.

  85. Philippe Schmitter, How to Democratize the European Union . . . and Why Bother?, Lanham 2000, p. 75.

  86. See Philippe Schmitter and Alexander Trechsel, The Future of Democracy in Europe: Trends, Analyses and Reforms, Council of Europe 2004.

  87. Schmitter, How to Democratize the European Union, pp. 128–9.

  88. Whose ‘class bias is so severe that one wonders whether EC doesn’t really stand for “Executive Committee for managing the general affairs of the Bourgeoisie!” This is hardly surprising (and not even scandalous) in this epoch of renewed faith in markets and entrepreneurial virtue’: see ‘The European Community as an Emergent and Novel Form of Political Domination’, Working Paper 1991/26, Centro de Estudios Avanzados en Ciencias Sociales, Madrid 1991, p. 26.

  89. See, respectively, Alan Cafruny and Magnus Ryder (eds), A Ruined Fortress? Neo-Liberal Hegemony and Transformation in Europe, Lanham 2003, in which Stephen Gill’s keynote essay ‘A Neo-Gramscian Approach to European Integration’ is particularly striking; and Bernard Moss (ed.), Monetary Union in Crisis: The European Union as a Neo-Liberal Construction, Basingstoke 2005, whose leading essay, alongside Moss’s own contributions, is by another American scholar, Gerald Friedman of Amherst, whose ‘Has European Economic Integration Failed?’, shows how limited the efficiency gains from trade across member-state borders have been, given the similarity of national factor endowments in the Union.