State-society interaction and European integration: a political economy approach to the dynamics and policy-making of the European Union

Abstract

Research output on European integration was once likened by Puchala to the story of the blind men and the elephant. Explanations tend to be similar to a ‘blind man’s account’ of the colossal creature, i.e., fragmentary and impressionistic.For the original analogy, see D. Puchala, ‘Of Blind Men, Elephants and International Integration’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 3 (1972), pp. 267–84. We agree with arguments that this analogy is still valid today.In a recent paper, Haaland-Matlary suggests that the current state of research on European integration can still be described with reference to Puchala’s metaphor. See J. Haaland-Matlary, ‘Integration Theory and International Relations Theory: What Does the Elephant Look Like Today and How Should It Be Studied?’, paper submitted to the 2nd ECSA World Conference on ‘Federalism, Subsidiarity and Democracy in the European Union’, Brussels, 5–6 May 1994. In this context, not only have conventional state-centric approaches failed to come to terms with the dynamics and policy-making of a regional integration scheme that has proved dynamic and cumulative; but society-centric approaches such as functionalism/neofunctionalism have also been frustrated by the resilience of the European state within an ongoing process of integration. A recent attempt to transcend these shortcomings, the policy networks approach, has attracted significant interest.For a discussion on the origins and relevance of the policy networks approach, see R. A. W. Rhodes and D. Marsh, ‘Policy Networks in British Politics: A Critique of Existing Approaches’, in D. Marsh and R. A. W. Rhodes (eds.), Policy Networks in British Government (Oxford, 1992), pp. 1–26. For the application of the model to EU policy-making, see J. Peterson, ‘The European Technology Community: Policy Networks in a Supranational Setting’, in Marsh and Rhodes (eds.), Policy Networks, pp. 226–48; and V. Schneider et al., ‘Corporate Actor Networks in European Policy Making: Harmonising Telecommunications Policy’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 4 (1994), pp. 473–98. Although it attempts to examine the integration process and EU policy-making on the basis of a proxy to state–society relations (i.e., policy networks consisting of public and private agents), this strength is overshadowed by two weaknesses. First, its findings are inevitably partial/sectoral and therefore sacrifice the wood for the trees. Second, it tends to provide an essentially descriptive account of how societal actors influence the dynamics of integration and EU policy-making.