Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T20:26:20.988Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The European Community and the state: assumptions, theories and propositions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Paul Taylor
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Students of the European Community in the early 1990s cannot but be struck by an apparent paradox. On the one hand, pressures towards an increasing centralization of arrangements under the heading of political and monetary union seem to have increased, and are frequently linked in public discussion with the concept of federalism. On the other hand, a number of members, most obviously Spain, Portugal and Greece, even the new Germany, are obviously using the Community to develop a sense of their own identity as separate states, and, although the British have been most prominent in opposing federalism, no member government has shown any inclination in speciic terms to abandon its sovereignty. This paradox is hard to understand and is perhaps too easily dismissed with the retort that the Community is sui generis, or that the supporters of further integration have simply not understood its constitutional implications, as the Bruges Group has argued.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , April 1991 , pp. 109 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 See the essays in Contemporary European Affairs, 1, 1/2 (1989), edited by Bell, David and Gaffney, John, under the title 1992 and After.Google Scholar

2 See Sked, Alan, A Proposal for European Union. The Bruges Group, Occasional Paper 9 (London, 1990).Google Scholar

3 This argument is developed in Taylor, Paul, ‘Regionalism and Functionalism Reconsidered’, in Groom, A. J. R. and Taylor, Paul (eds.), Frameworks for International Co-operation (London, 1990), pp. 234–54.Google Scholar

4 Lijphart, Arend, The Politics of Accommodation: Pluralism and Democracy in the Netherlands (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968)Google Scholar; see also Lijphart, Arend, ‘Consociational Democracy’, World Politics, 21 (1969), pp. 207–25.Google Scholar

5 Daalder, Hans, ‘The Consociational Democracy Theme’, World Politics 26 (1974), pp. 000–000.Google Scholar

6 See Lijphart, Arend, ‘Review Article: Northern Ireland Problem; Cases, Theories and Solutions’, British Journal of Political Science, 5 (1975), pp. 83–106Google Scholar, and O’Leary, Brendan, ‘The limits to Coercive Consociationalism in Northern Ireland’, Political Studies, 33 (1989), pp. 562–88. These both contain extensive bibliographies.Google Scholar

7 Lijphart, Arend, ‘Consociation and Federation: Conceptual and Empirical Links’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 22 (1979), pp. 499–515.Google Scholar

8 Dahrendorf, R., Society and Democracy in Germany (Garden City, 1967), p. 276.Google Scholar

9 McRae, K., Consociational Democracy: Political Accommodation in Segmented Societies (Toronto, 1974).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Lijphart, , ‘Consociational Democracy’, pp. 211—12.Google Scholar

11 Almond, Gabriel A., ‘Comparative Political Systems’, Journal of Politics, 18 (1956), pp. 398–9.Google Scholar

12 Lustick, Ian, ’Stability in Deeply Divided Societies: Consociationalism versus Control,’ World Politics, 31 (1973), pp. 325–44.Google Scholar

13 Lustick, , ‘Consociationalism versus Control’, pp. 330–32. The model presupposes that there are only two subgroups.Google Scholar

14 Lustick, , ‘Consociationalism versus Control’. 332.Google Scholar

15 Lustick, , ‘Consociationalism versus Control’. 332.Google Scholar

16 Lijphart, , ‘Consociationalism Democracy’. 216.Google Scholar

17 Seymour Martin Lipset, , Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Garden City, 1960), pp. 88–9.Google Scholar

18 For an excellent brief account of the theory and practice of Federalism in the European Community, see Harrison, R. J., Europe in Question (London, 1974).Google Scholar

19 See Holland, Stuart, UnCommon Market (London, 1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Kellner, Peter, The Independent, March 22, 1989.Google Scholar

21 For accounts of these various theories, see Groom, and Taylor, (eds.), Frameworks for International Cooperation, pp. 234–54.Google Scholar

22 For instance the British Government sought to protect its position as overseer of applications to the structural funds of the EC from local authorities and other organizations in Britain, and, indeed, appeared to be using EC disbursements not, as had been intended, to increase the size of available funds (the principle of Additionality) but rather as an alternative to what would otherwise have been available from the British Treasury.

23 The rhetoric of the Thatcher administration regarding the EC frequently implied that the motives of the partners were either foolish or dishonourable. Particularly noteworthy, however—indicative of an attitude though not directly about the EC—was the Prime Minister’s statement when a guest of President Mitterand at the bicentennial celebrations of the French Revolution in Paris in July 1989, that this was not much to celebrate and that in any case the English thought of it first. A distinguished English historian, Christopher Thome, commented in The Guardian, Saturday, 15 July that this had made him ashamed to be British: Thatcher’s comments had been impertinent and wrong in fact.

24 O’Leary, , ‘The Limits to Coercive Consociationalism’.Google Scholar

25 Taylor, Paul, ‘The New Dynamics of EC integration in the 1980s’ in Lodge, Juliet (ed.) The European Community and the Challenge of the Future (London, 1989), pp. 3–25.Google Scholar

26 This was a disease found in cattle in Britain in the 1980s which affected the nervous system and which it was feared could be transferred to humans. Some EC governments banned imports of beef from Britain until they were convinced that controls on the slaughter and transfer of meat had been sufficiently tightened, so that infected meat was not imported. A number of politicians and ‘popular’ newspapers in Britain described this sensible, and legal precaution as blatant, unscrupulous opportunism to improve national beef sales at the expense of the British farmer.

27 See Hayes-Renshaw, Fiona, ‘The Role of the Committee of Permanent Representatives in the Decision-Making Process of the European Community’, unpublished PhD Thesis, University of London, 1990.Google Scholar

28 See Financial Times, 27 June, 1990.

29 Lijphart, , ‘Consociational Democracy’.Google Scholar

30 The classic text on federalism is Wheare, K. C., Federal Government, second edition (London, 1951).Google Scholar

31 Birch, A. H., Nationalism and National Integration (London, 1989). Birch writes ‘A nation is best defined as a society which either governs itself today, or has done so in the past, or has a credible claim to do so in the not too distant future’ (p. 6).Google Scholar

32 In his Granada Lecture, ‘Europe: Our Sort of Community’ reported in The Independent, 8 November, 1989.Google Scholar

33 Exemplified in Mrs Thatcher’s keynote speech at the College of Europe in Bruges, 30 September, 1988.

34 See note 2 above.

35 As on 25 October, 1989. This was the lead front page story in The Guardian, 26 October, 1989.

36 See The Guardian’s lead story, ‘Cabinet rallies to Howe’s EMS Flag’, 2 November, 1989.

37 Note 32 above.

38 See Dagtoglu, P. D., (ed.), Basic Problems of the European Community (Oxford, 1975).Google Scholar

39 See Howe, Geoffrey, ‘The European Communities Act, 1971’, International Affairs, 49(1973), pp. 1–13.Google Scholar

40 See note 35 above.

41 Rosenstiel, J., ‘Some Reflections on the Notion of Supranationality’, Journal of Common Market Studies (1963).Google Scholar

42 Committee for the Study of Economic and Monetary Union, Report on Economic and Monetary union in the European Community, prepared for the European Council, 1988, Paragraph 33, pp. 21–2.Google Scholar

43 Taylor, Paul, ‘Supranationalism: The Power and Authority of International Institutions’, in Groom, and Taylor, (eds.) Frameworks for International Cooperation.Google Scholar