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Institutionalising a Big Idea:
Identities, Interests and Moral Doubt Brought to Bear on
the EMU
The Politics of Economic and
Monetary Union, edited by Petri Minkkinen and Heikki
Patom�ki, Kluwer Academic Publishers 1997 (241 pages),
This paper is a review essay
forthcoming in Cooperation and Conflict
Bent Sofus Tranøy*
Department of Political
Science, University of Oslo
1. Introduction
EMU is a truly epoch-making project, an experiment on
a scale that almost defies comparison. Not just for the
peoples and politicians of Europe, but also very much so
for political science. Its re-emergence as an idea in the
circles around Jacques Delors, its manifestation as a
formal decision in the Maastricht treaty, and now its
actual birth, provides political science with a near
endless list of fundamental questions empirical and
theoretical, positive and normative. Petri Minkkinen and
Heikki Patom�ki's edited volume takes this challenge
seriously. It contributes to our understanding of how
interests, ideas and identities have clashed, coalesced
and been transformed by the process towards EMU and
beyond. This essay seeks to, within the confines of a
review article, to provide an in-depth report and
critical analysis of the many intriguing arguments made
in this volume.
In order to better see what this volume has to offer,
it can briefly be situated in its contemporary context.
The years of 1997 and 1998, the two last before EMU
became a reality, witnessed a plethora of books and
edited volumes on the EMU. In an extremely useful
overview Amy Verdun (1998), looks at 8 recent
publications on the EMU, 7 of which are of academic
interest and merit in her opinion. Three of these
publications, including what is probably the best known
and most widely used, the second edition of Gros and
Thygesen's (1998) textbook, are categorised by Verdun as
analysing the economics of EMU. This does not mean
that they are not useful for political scientists, but it
means that they do not really contribute to political
science. Further there is a concise history of
European monetary integration (Ungerer 1997). Thus we are
left with two books, excluding the one under review here,
that seek to contribute to a political science agenda.
Both have their distinctive features and particular
merits.
Kathleen MacNamara's (1998) Currency of Ideas,
takes an ideational approach in seeking to account for
the evolution of monetary politics and policy in Europe.
Substantively the book offers a coherent and well
informed history of its subject (including monetary
theory). In terms of political science theory, it speaks
most directly to the sub-discipline of International
Relations. This is evident in the choice of dependent
variable (monetary co-operation) and its emphasis on
state behaviour and the elites of the biggest and most
powerful states. But most tellingly, the International
Relations-framing shines through in the fact that the
book develops its ideational argument in contrast to the
Realism-Liberalism dichotomy that has dominated
mainstream IR debate for a very long time now. Jones,
Frieden and Torres' volume (1998) Joining Europe's
Monetary Club. The Challenge for Smaller Member States,
is, by contrast, more a contribution to comparative
political economy. It is a series of case studies of how
smaller member states have dealt with the EMU issue. Most
of the arguments are couched in terms of societal
interests and/or economic functionality.
Judged on their own terms, neither of these books are
necessarily less successful as intellectual projects than
Minkkinen and Patom�ki's effort. On the other hand, none
of them are as rich in theoretical and substantive
arguments, nor as forward looking as the present volume.
Trying to abstract from this richness, we can say that
two dominant common themes run through the politics of
Economic and Monetary Union. If for reasons I will
return to below, we overlook Paul Van Bempt's chapter,
the book contains six substantive chapters. Three of
these contributions (Risse et.al, Marcussen and Gill)
explore and utilise analytical tensions in the dichotomy
between cognitive perspectives (i.e. ideas and interests)
on the one hand versus (given) material interests and
power on the other. The other theme explored is that of
legitimacy. Teivainen, Patom�ki and Leander &
Guzzini are all interested in the democratic legitimacy
of institutions and policies of the EMU, although they
vary in the degree to which they use an empirical (public
opinion) and/or a theoretical (political theory)
yardstick. I will discuss cognitive perspectives versus
given interests and resources first, and then move on to
the legitimacy issues next.
2. Identities, Ideas and Interests
In an exemplary chapter, at least as far as design
goes, Engelmann, Knopf, Roscher & Risse, make
one positive and one negative argument. The positive
argument is that identities shared by political elites,
partly expressed in visions of Europe, explain major
European power's position on the EMU. They work from the
premise that identities as cognitive
constructs are lasting, and change only rarely.
Building on social psychology, cultural sociology and
historical institutionalism, they develop fairly specific
expectations for how these identities shape policy making
on Europe. These expectations are formulated as empirical
questions which they can put to their data, questions
such as: Which ideas about European Integration dominate
the national discourse? Who or what constitutes the
other to any given national identity? Do prevailing
ideas of Europe and their inherent concepts of political
order and identity, resonate with national institutions
and the ideas embedded in them?
The negative argument that paves the way for this
analysis, is the claim that explanations departing from
what they call traditional approaches are
inadequate for the task of accounting for variation in
attitudes towards the EMU among the political elites of
Germany, France and Great Britain. These
traditional approaches are sweepingly
described as departing from either economic interests or
balance of power considerations. This type of
analysis cannot - so the authors claim - explain why
Germany and France has supported the EMU all along: Why
have the socialist parties in these countries not taken a
stand against its austerity inducing consequences or why
has Great Britain opted out? In sum they argue that the
two types of interest based accounts at best gives rise
to indeterminacy in the cases of Great Britain and
France, while Germany should definitely not join
EMU on these grounds (p. 107).
Germany, they claim, has no reason to
substitute the Bundesbank which dominates the EMS, for a
supranational Central Bank. They also point out that
since German exporters and importers conduct most of
their business in Deutsche Marks anyway, there is little
to gain from EMU in terms of reduced transaction costs.
And finally, even with the Stability pact in place
Germany has reason to fear for its cherished tradition of
tight macro-economic policies. [1]
The positive, identity based argument for Germany is
equally easy to follow. The most important
other in German national identity is the
aggressive, nationalist Germany of the two world wars.
This has led Germans to take European integration as a
means to secure both wealth and peace. I read the authors
as saying that what we see here is more than just
European institutions resonating well with German ideas
of political governance; it is a case of European
Integration being part of the German vision of political
order. This is so much taken for granted by the German
political class, that even politicians that oppose the
EMU have to make do with insisting on strict appliance of
the convergence criteria, rather than coming out in
outright opposition.
Applying their version of economic interest reasoning
to Great Britain, the authors claim that London should
have supported the EMU. Firstly because of the neoliberal
orientation of British policy and secondly because Great
Britain wants to be a central location for non-European
multinationals that want access to the single market.
Here the authors might have added that London also wants
to remain an international financial centre, but they
don't. The counter argument that leaves the British case
indetermined, is, according to Risse et al., that by
retaining the pound Great Britain also preserve the
possibility of engaging in competitive devaluations
during recessions. When the Pound was blown out of the
ERM in September 1992, this did give the British economy
relief from the pressure of high interest rates, but this
was a politically unsolicited relief. Reactions to the
humiliation of Black Wednesday
testify to that. Given the widely held view that
devalutations provides an inflationary impulse and
imposes future risk premiums on interest rates because it
undermines the confidence of international investors, it
is debatable how attractive this option is to either
New Labour or the Conservatives. Since Smith
and then Blair took over the leadership of Labour, these
parties are not spectacularly different in their approach
to managing the economy. On the other hand, Britain did
not experience the predicted surge in inflation in the
aftermath of the 1992 debacle.
Also, there is a similar but more
subtle argument against British membership in the EMU.
This had not yet been developed for political purposes
when the chapter in question was written. This says that
the British business cycle is out of sync
with the major continental economies, so that when Great
Britain needs a relaxation of monetary policy the
continentals need a tougher stance and vice versa. [2] In operational
terms this does not translate into a British desire to
return to the role of a devaluing country, but it might
very well mean to continue steering their monetary policy
towards an inflation target, and let the exchange rate to
a large degree be determined in the market. On balance
then, I have suggested minor modifications to some of
their arguments, but I have not been able to rock Risse
et. al's conclusion that the British case is
indeterminate. There is no reason to pick a fight with
their interest-based analysis of the British case.
Their positive argument for applying an identity based
analysis of the British case is also convincing. In
Britain, the dominant idea of Europe is that of a
Europe of nation-states (p. 111). Primarily
this entails a free-trade area that should be developed
and maintained by intergovernmental means. This sits well
with British notions of the other, which is
continental Europe. The authors claim that a remark
Churchill made in 1953 we are with Europe, but not
of it... (p. 113), is still valid for a majority of
the British. A famous Fleet street headline Storm
in the channel, the continent cut off, springs to
this readers mind. The authors also point out that
history has given the British an identity which means
supporting free-trade, but accepting neither market
intervention from, or a transfer of decision making
capacity to Brussels (or anywhere else that is not
Whitehall).
Turning to the interest based analysis of the French
case, it is less clear why this should be judged as
indeterminate before the identity analysis sets in. Risse
et al. do not, in my opinion, convince us that French
elite support for the EMU remain a puzzle after running
through their interest based analysis. What they say is
that motives such as containing German power, and sharing
Central Bank power rather than merely submitting to the
Bundesbank in Monetary matters, are factors that predict
French support for the EMU. The convergence criteria are
also useful in that they legitimise necessary
budget cuts. To rescue their indeterminacy conclusion,
Risse et al. say that 3 of these arguments can be turned
on their heads: Realists would say that supranational
institutions do not really contain super-powers. Further
it can be ventured that Germany will dominate decisions
in the EMU anyway, and that the loss of monetary
independence in the EMU will be greater than in the EMS.
To this reader these counter-arguments are not
convincing. If you really want to be able to dismiss a
cost-benefit type of argument from your analysis, it is
not sufficient to prove that all arguments can be
contested in one way or another. Of course they can. We
have no objective measuring rod, but some attempt at a
careful weighing up of the factors included in the
analysis must be made.
If we do this we see that the interest based arguments
against French support for the EMU do not hold:
First of all, if realism in its pragmatic French guise,
e.g. as practised by French politicians, was as
dismissive of supranational institutions as the American
academic methods-driven brand Risse et. al invoke, we
would have a problem explaining the existence of EEC/EU
itself, let alone the EMU. Further it is crucial to
realise (and the authors themselves argue this in the
section where they assemble interest based arguments that
predict French support) that seen from Paris the EMU is
the lesser of two evils. To fully appreciate this we must
differentiate between real and formal independence. On a
formal level membership in the EMU is obviously a more
dramatic step than remaining in the EMS. But if we ask
what level of real monetary independence the EMS has
offered France since Mitterand decided to stick with it
in 1983, even at the cost of his famous U-turn, the rank
order might be overturned. This seems even more probable
if we look at what the French achieved in the haggling
over the first governorship of the ECB. This last point
might not be entirely fair to bring in. Admittedly,
machinations over the position flourished after Riise et.
al wrote their chapter. Still, it is not my impression
that this political in-fighting surprised seasoned
observers of the EU.
The weakness of the authors' case in arguing for
interest based indeterminacy has its mirror image in
their positive, identity based argument. Risse et. al do
observe that the federalist vision of Europe underpinning
the EMU resonates well with ideas on Europe in two of
France's three major political parties, the UDF and the
PS respectively. So far so good. But then the authors run
into trouble. First of all they abandon part of their own
analytical scheme, in as much as they do not pursue the
issue of who or what constitutes the other in
the French case. This leaves the rest of the analysis
with less secure foundations. The next task they
undertake is to examine the fit between French notions of
monetary and macroeconomic policy in general on the one
hand and the notions of economic governance embedded in
the EMU on the other. To this reader the conclusion here
is a foregone affair. The French lost major battles
regarding institutional design at Maastricht, and thus
the identity based argument does not take the authors
very far in explaining French support. Risse et. al then
try to make amends by pointing to how some French EMU
supporters harbour visions of EMU as a vehicle for
reinforcing ideas stemming from the enlightenment and the
French revolution, France as the first nation
state, on a European level. But the link between
the EMU on the one hand and these ideas on the other is
too tenuous to carry an identity argument through.
Maybe the identity argument could have been rescued if
the authors had taken on the issue of the
other. This would have meant declaring that
France's most significant other is Germany and that fear
of this other is fundamental to French identity. Further,
that the now taken-for-granted way this fear has been
dealt with since the inception of the EEC has been to
seek an institutional lock-in, stopping short of only of
institutional fusion? But then again, identifying
the other most constitutive to French
identity is no simple task. An argument could be made
that historically its Great Britain, and since DeGaulle
the French have been known to harbour serious grievances
over the existence and exercise of American hegemonic
power too. So perhaps the line of argument I suggested
above should be supplemented by an extra French motive.
Not only to they want tie up Germany, they also want to
pool resources with the enemy they fear most, in order to
be more independent of a friend (the USA) that irritate
them even more?
Leaving aside this amateur's attempt at identity based
analysis, the main point is that as the identity argument
now stands, the conclusion presented in the introduction
- that all three major powers' position can be accounted
for by means of an identity based analysis - does not
flow from the premises introduced in the study of France.
In my opinion they argue much more successfully for their
approach in the German and British cases. Still, as
Meatloaf reminds us, two out of three aint
bad.
Martin Marcussen's contribution is also
developed within the cognitive perspectives -material
interest dichotomy. In contrast to Risse et. al he is
more interested in ideas in the shape of economic
orthodoxy and not in ideas of national identity.
Historically he takes a further step backwards and looks
at pre-Maastricht developments that helped facilitate and
shape this agreement. He raises three questions that
speak to different stages of the policy cycle of ideas.
These stages cover what he calls ideational shifts,
transfer or dissemination of new ideas and finally,
institutionalisation of them. The main part of the
contribution is focused on the second issue, and I will
restrict my comments to this part of his discussion. What
Marcussen sets out to do is to explain why relevantly
similar countries such as The Netherlands, Denmark and
Sweden differed in the speed and intensity with which
they adapted to the reigning economic orthodoxy of sound
money, sound (public) finances and sound inflation. His
argument is that this hinges on the degree of convergence
between what he interchangeably calls domestic
institutions or transfer mechanisms on
the one hand and the before mentioned economic orthodoxy
on the other. These underlying domestic institutions are
operationalised in four empirical dimensions: a) The
financial sector's degree of involvement in the
industrial sector, b) the strength of social contracts,
c) the central bank's degree of independence and d) the
degree to which the country is exposed to the
international (read German) economy.
His initial finding is that the
Netherlands went fastest and least reluctantly along the
road prescribed by the new orthodoxy, with Sweden at the
other end of the spectrum and Denmark somewhere
in-between. This is then explained by pointing to the
score of the three cases along the dimensions given by
his theory (which is based on a contribution from Epstein
and Schor 1995). A methodological purist would say that
his analysis suffers from an overdetermination problem. A
more case oriented scholar might say that he does not
explore the theoretical potential for conjunctural
causation which his design and the configuration of
values on the variables invites. But on a superficial
level at least, the analysis seems to hold water. He
knows his cases and marshals the evidence in such a way
that the general pattern supports the theoretical
propositions. Still, there are weaknesses. The first is
that in spite of all he himself says about the importance
of studying the impact of ideas, his analysis does not
really engage the cognitive level. What Marcussen looks
at are structural preconditions for receptivity towards a
certain idea (and this argument is in turn founded on a
logic of economic interests and imperatives). He does not
conceptualise transfer mechanisms as processes, even
though he repeatedly speaks of his interest in the
dissemination of ideas. And there is more than semantics
involved here: There is nothing about the learning
process that might lead to a demand for new ideas, on the
struggle to establish hegemony over agendas or on the
agents that develop new economic ideas. He speaks of the
importance of professional economists in the introductory
section, but the activities of this profession on
international arenas and in domestic institutions is not
followed up in the empirical section. In reality then, he
ends up with a fairly traditional political economy
exercise based on a logic of economic interests and
imperatives, driven forward by a crude correlational
logic without any attention paid to the political
processes that transform interests or ideas into
political action. The ideas element is an add-on, rather
than an integrated part of the analysis.
The second weakness is typical of the kind of
interest-based approach this actually is. As Risse et
al.'s contribution reminds us, these perspectives often
yield contradictory expectations. It is inherently
difficult to predict interests from structure. The
clearest example in Marcussen's contribution concerns the
interest of industrial versus financial capital. He
claims that financial institutions want a low inflation
environment. Industry on the other hand is more concerned
with domestic demand. Hence he predicts that financial
institutions will be advocates for the new orthodoxy
unless they are closely linked to industry through share
ownership and/or long term lending. This might hold true
for a large, relatively closed economy with a well
developed market for securities and arms-length corporate
governance traditions like those of the USA. In a small
export oriented economy organised like Sweden's one could
argue that post-war history tells us otherwise. Until the
mid-eighties Swedish industry was deeply immersed in a
system of wage-determination which had minimising
wage-inflation as its main goal. To remain competitive
Swedish industry took a direct interest in domestic
inflation levels. Swedish banks on the other hand were
regulated in such a manner that it could be argued that
they gained from inflation. Periods of high inflation
secured low real post tax interest rates directly and
indirectly through bracket-creep which in turn made tax
breaks on interest rates more valuable. Thus it could be
said that an inflationary environment contributed to the
a high demand for credit, and it raised the value of the
state-subsidy of their product, and as such stimulated
the business of the banks.
In fact, it could be argued that internal
contradictions in this mode of credit regulation directed
the attention of central bankers towards the promises of
neo-liberalism. The Swedish Central bank's lack of
independence was probably a spur for its leadership to
explore neo-liberal ideas which promised greater - if not
German style - independence. Thus another of Marcussens
propositions can be turned on its head. If he had
explored processes of learning within central banks he
might have found that the most aggressive advocates of
neo-liberalism were to be found amongst the more unhappy
dependent central banks, not among the more independent
banks (which is what he expected), who in my view,
perhaps had more reason to be content. This perspective
might help us understand why (West)Germany even under
Kohl, or German economists for that matter, never
converted to neo-liberalism with the fervour of, say,
their Swedish counterparts.
Stephen Gill's contribution is more of an essay
and less of a traditional attempt to answer a limited
number of questions by systematically confronting
historical data with his expectations. It contains one
part that deals with the coming and support of the EMU
and another part that analyses the components of an
emerging (but not yet coherent) ideology that he terms
the new constitutionalism. In a style that
sometimes borders on what one might term declaratory
neo-Marxism, he argues that the EMU is part of a wider
transformation away from embedded liberalism towards a
more pure form of market economy. This process, he
claims, is being driven forward by the twin
pressures of persistent fiscal crisis and new global
patterns of capital accumulation - production and
consumption patterns (p. 210). The political
transformation is further held to be backed up by a shift
in societal interests
...a larger rentier block of interests that includes
both affluent workers as well as broader segments of the
middle classes, as well as the interests of haute
finance and internationally mobile capital...(p. 210)
This argument is not pure historical materialism.
Rather than assuming that such a constellation of
interests automatically produces the EMU, it is argued
that this state of affairs makes it possible for the
political elites behind the EMU to appeal to (a tacit?)
cross class alliance (or in Gill's Gramscian language; a
historical block). Gill wraps up his essay by laying out
some elements of what he holds to be viable social
democratic/progressive counter strategy to the spread of
the new constitutionalism.
3. Legitimacy
As indicated in the introduction, we can distinguish
between works that approach issues of legitimacy
empirically (do people find this kind of institution and
policy legitimate or does it undermine the authority of
the polity) and those who apply principles derived from
political theory as their measuring rod. Teivo
Teivainen's chapter falls mostly into the latter
category. In his essay The Independence of The
European Central Bank: Implications for Democratic
Governance, he develops his critical appraisal from
three angles. Firstly he argues that even if we share the
neo-liberal desire of giving price stability primacy as a
political goal, and given that we accept the underlying
theory that posits a strong positive relationship between
insulated central banks and an economy's inflation
performance, it may still be desirable to limit the
constitutionalisation of this insulation. Economic
circumstances and economic doctrines change. As Teivainen
quips, not to take into account that there may one
day be a solid majority that wants to change the
arrangements of the ECB, is to put ...a rather firm
faith in the end-of-history argument. He accepts
that the point of providing constitutional protection for
certain values is to make change difficult and time
consuming. Still, as he points out, constitutional
reasoning normally builds on a notion of qualified
majorities and ratios like two-thirds and three-quarters
are in common usage. In the case of the ECB the decision
rule for performing significant surgery on its set-up is
unanimity. Every member state has veto power. This
increases the chances of a future change being achieved
through realpolitik, rather than through
constitutional procedures. In turn this would serve to
undermine, not strengthen, rule of law at the European
level.
Teivonen's second angle is to suggest seeing the
opposed insulation of European Monetary policy from
democratic politics as part of a wider trend. He applies
a metaphor that he admits is speculative, but nonetheless
suggestive. He speaks of a monarchization of
democracy. This means that in the same way that European
monarchies over the last centuries have been gradually
emptied of real decision making authority, democracy
could be on its way towards performing only decorative
functions. His third main argument is that there is a
trade-off between independence and accountability. To
appreciate this point one needs to operate a distinction
between goal- and instrument- independence respectively.
The point is that it is easier to achieve accountability
if the inflation target is made explicit after
negotiations between politicians and central bankers
(lower level of goal independence) and if provisions for
removing the bank's leadership in case of performance
failure is in place. None of these provisions are made in
the TEU, while New Zealand's often lauded
institutionalisation of Central Bank independence
features both.
Teivonen pursues all his points in a clear style. His
arguments are well informed, they are nuanced and
convincing. In short, he provides an excellent
illustration of his own point that it is important to
at least partially transgress the
intellectual division of labour between matters
political and matters economic.
His lines of attack do not, however, exhaust the
potential for a democratic discourse on central bank
independence. At least two important tasks that to my
knowledge, have not received serious academic attention
remain. The first is to probe deeper into the
economic-theoretical underpinnings of the idea of central
bank independence. The second is to explore further how
central bank independence can be defended by political
theory.
The point of probing the economic-theoretical
fundament would be that the idea's claim to make
legitimate prescriptions for institutional reform
diminishes if there are serious doubts about the
plausibility of its causal underpinnings. An example of
issues that should be examined more closely is whether
the mono-causal logic inherent in the argument is
sufficient. Arguments of the kind suggested by Hall
(1994), and developed most recently by Hall and Franzese
(1998) and Iversen (1998) indicate that the effect of
central bank independence on inflation performance is
better understood as an interaction effect with
the system of wage determination, and not as an effect
that can be expected to occur independently of
institutional context. A second point of entry here could
be the critique which has been raised towards the theory
that there is such a thing as a given, natural rate of
unemployment. If on the other hand, this rate is
influenced by historical employment performance (through
people dropping permanently out of the labour market)
this could and should dampen toleration for using
(increases in) unemployment (brought on by monetary
policy) as a mechanism for controlling inflation. The
motive for exploring political theory further is to ask
the following type of question: Do the arguments that
secure a broad consensus for constitutonalising other
demands and rights in a society (i.e. freedom of speech,
of congress and so on) really apply to the demand for a
low inflation environment? Or if they (as I suspect)
don't, what other type of normative defence might be
erected?
Anna Leander and Stefano Guzzini, as
befits former students of the late Susan Strange, take a
Polanyi inspired perspective. They investigate how
present European market building co-causes welfare state
retrenchment which in turn create a politics of
resentment that endangers the legitimacy of both nation
states and the European project. Their work is both
historically informed and forward looking and it balances
Teivonen's effort nicely in that it is more concerned
with causal than normative theory. More specifically they
argue that that the EMU is exacerbating a trend towards
welfare state retrenchment because it represents the
completion of the internal market and thus facilitates
fiscal and social dumping. The authors take on board that
a main finding in recent research on the European welfare
state is that it has so far held up surprisingly well. In
light of the multiple pressures of ageing populations,
accumulated public debts, legitimacy problems related to
abuse, and perverse incentive structures as well as the
globalisation of capital, welfare state cut backs have
been smaller than many social scientists
initially expected. Thus one can interpret
their argument as seeing the EMU as the last
straw that might finally break the back of the
welfare state.
Leander and Guzzini note that scant
progress has been made in efforts to offset the negative
impact the EMU already has had - through the convergence
criteria - and will have, on social contracts in the
member states through the creation of Europe wide social
and tax policy. There are many reasons for this, but a
central one is the institutional structure built up
around these issue areas. In the case of social policy
for instance, the Social Protocol divides up issues of
possible EU-legislation in such a manner that it opens
the door for legal disputes over which category any given
issue falls into. In spite of their negative diagnosis
Leander and Guzzini manage to come out at the other end
with a tempered optimism. Looking at the prospects for
social policy to be developed at the European level, they
note several factors that point in this direction.
Firstly, the hegemony of neo-liberal thought appears to
be waning. [3] It
has now been dominant for 20 years without delivering the
goods (of which lower unemployment must be considered the
most important delivery failure). Secondly, as welfare
state cutbacks now move towards provisions closer to the
core, and thus hurt larger social groups in tougher ways,
the old strategy of the political class of blaming the EU
for necessary adjustments, but still saving core rights
at the national level, is less viable. What the authors
call a revision of social contracts becomes more urgent,
also for the political class in a context of increasing
social unrest and the rise of right-wing populism.
Finally the progress of EMU itself has also contributed
to shifting the thinking of national (social)policy
makers towards the European level. If we
leave aside the problems associated with identifying
exactly where tolerance for cut backs is likely to be
exhausted - breaking points in history are notoriously
difficult to recognise in advance - Leander and Guzzini's
analysis comes across as a thoughtful and learned piece
of qualified optimism. [4]
Heikki Patom�ki's effort on legitimation
problems in the European Union starts out by
exploring the limitations of what we might call
aggregation models of public opinion based legitimacy -
that is, the measurement of individual, pre-existing
opinions aggregated through polling, referendums or
elections. Drawing on a range of theories from basic
methodology to post-structural theories of meaning
making, he finds that such models can be attacked on all
their constituent parts: Measurement is vulnerable to
variation in the phrasing of questions and context,
aggregation opens up questions of representativity and
how to stratify the respondents. Further operating with
assumptions of public opinion as pre-existing and
reducible to individual opinions take no account of
meaning making as a fundamentally time-dependent and
social process.
Taking account of all these insights when trying to
better evaluate the legitimacy of the EMU in particular
and the EU in general, the complexity Patom�ki confronts
is overwhelming:
...trying to scrutinize the multiple layerings of
historical, complex, contradictory and complementary
determinations which give rise to actors' attitudes and
opinions, we have to remember that there are always the
possibilities of overlapping, intersecting, condensing,
elongated, divergent, convergent and also contradictory
causal processes and spatio-temporalities. (p.200).
One reading of Patom�ki is that this state of affairs
leaves us with no other option than relying on our
practical-political judgement, as a method,
although this judgement should no doubt in his opinion be
informed and refined by sensitivity to the sources of
complexity listed above. It is hard to do justice to an
argument like Patom�ki's, but one way of summarising his
practical-political judgement is this: He notes that the
EU at present is nearly exclusively sought legitimated
through functionalist and Hobbesian arguments. Drawing on
Weber and Habermas he claims that the legitimacy of a
given political order is also a question of whether and
why this order deserves the allegiance of its members. It
is a question of normative validity. The old
political order of post world war II nation states drew
normative validity by presenting itself as based upon
values such as self-determination, democracy,
peoples sovereignty and redistributive justice or welfare
performance (p.201). I believe that what Patom�ki
is saying is that in this perspective, the EU has a long
way to go.
Paul Van den Bempt's chapter does not sit
easily with the rest of the book. The author has a long
career in the Commission behind him and we are informed
that he is now an honorary Director General of the
Commission (whatever that means), in addition to being a
senior research fellow with a think tank in Brussels. His
contribution is very aptly titled The view from
Brussels, and as such it can be said to perform two
functions. Firstly, on a rhetorical level, it seems to
represent the official line so well that it could be
considered primary data for textually oriented social
scientists. Secondly, on a factual level, it serves as a
very useful introduction to the topic. But social science
in the sense of providing a critical analysis of the
causes behind a phenomenon this is not.
4. Parting thoughts
In sum this book is different enough from what is
otherwise available on the market to be interesting and
good enough to be worth buying. Some of the chapters are
more original and convincing than the others. Teivonen's
chapter on legitimacy and the ECB is most difficult to
disagree with because it presents a wise and moderate
moral doubt which resonates well with widely held
democratic values. Teivonen's achievement lies in
demonstrating that the values he appeals to apply to this
case, thus he succeeds in transferring his lingering
normative scepticism to the reader. A complex causal
argument like the one Risse et. al commits themselves to
is always easier to disagree with, but no less
stimulating. Patom�kis own contribution is most
difficult to understand because it is so complex in both
logical structure and style. Still, if one has the time,
it is well worth spending it trying to penetrate his
chapter.
In his preface, Heikki Patom�ki, states that this is
an up-to-date and compact,
yet extensive book. Is he right on all counts
when making such an immodest claim? To the degree that a
book published within the procedures of academic
publishing can be up-to-date, it seems to me that this
book is. I have found neither factual errors nor obvious
omissions as regards events and facts. It is also
compactly edited, in the sense that each piece does not
waste space unduly, and as should be clear by now, the
book lives up to its self description of being extensive.
This quality deserves one last reflection:
I began this review by pointing out that the EMU
coming into being raises a near endless list of
analytical challenges for political science. Letting this
influence one's editorship is at the same time an
obstacle to parsimony. One could even say it makes
parsimony less desirable since many important questions
are easily sidelined if one pursues this academic value
too single-mindedly. On a meta level however, it is
easier to find commonalties between the chapters of this
book. One such characteristic common to all the
contributions (except for Van den Bempt), is that of a
more or less tempered scepticism to the EMU. These
authors are not writing in the quasi-deterministic
fashion sometimes favoured by Americans seeking
methodological stringency, or politicians seeking to
justify their choices through concealing the element of
choice. This book is instead marked by a willingness to
raise the fundamental questions as if we had
a choice. It follows from their constructivist agenda
that they even harbour ambitions of contributing to this
choice by reflecting on problems and options.
Footnotes
* The author
wishes to thank Sjur Kasa, Ulf Sverdrup, Dag Harald Claes
and two anonymous referees for their constructive
comments.
[1] On
the other hand interdependence came with a price in the
EMS too. With the Deutsche Mark, Germany alone has to
shoulder the burden of carrying an international
currency.
[2] This
is the argument Tony Blair's Labour government actually
used (hid behind some would say), when it decided to
postpone a decision on joining until after the next
general election.
[3] The
reader should be reminded that this observation was made
at a time when none of the major states of the EU had
social democratic prime ministers.
[4] The
authors hint at this problem. As self professed
institutionalists working from a notion of
path-dependency, they admit they least of all posses a
crystal ball.
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[Date of publication in the ARENA
Working Paper series: 15.01.1999]
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