AVRUPA ENTEGRASYONU

One of the leading scholars on the European integration, Ernst B. Haas defined integration as a process “whereby political actors in several, distinct national settings are persuaded to shift their loyalties, expectations and political activities toward a new centre”. The end result of a process of political integration is a “new political community, superimposed over the pre-existing ones”. Political integration is usually identified with the emergence of a political community based on trust, loyalty and shared values. On the basis of Haas’ definition, it is both useful and necessary to differentiate between the sub-dimensions of political integration below:

Attitudinal integration is concerned with the sources of support or opposition to regional integration among the public at large and among the political and economic elites. Attitudes affect the development of policy and institutional integration. For instance, European public support for a more effective, credible and coherent EU foreign policy as well as external demands and expectations are one of the key factors shaping the actorness of the Union. It is also important to recognize the transformative nature of the European integration: transformation of the nation-state by the EU and transformation of the EU by the member states and the contradictory and differential impact of globalization on the EU.

While the Commission was far from acting as a policy entrepreneur, the meetings of the European Council were often paralyzed by distributional conflicts, notably the British budgetary rebate. The member states were not only challenged by the internal problems of an enlarged Community but also by the international economic system unconducive to further integration. Three factors were particularly important: the collapse of the international monetary order in 1971; two oil crises of 1973 and 1979; and the concurrence of low growth and high inflation (stagflation) producing economic divergence in Western Europe.

The European Council has emerged over the last four decades as the most powerful among/in the traditional Community institutions. It exercised several functions without any legal treaty basis for them, ranging from providing strategic guidelines, decisionmaking capacity in economic governance, foreign and security policy and amending the treaties. The Lisbon Treaty has put an end to the paradoxical status of the European Council by identifying it as one of the seven EU institutions.

Even though, EU institution-building, from the outset, followed the logic of market integration, it had a political purpose too, often associated with two alternative ideas and ideologies: the functionalist approach and the federalist approach.

For Nicole Scicluna, the demise of the Constitutional Treaty as a result of the French and Dutch “no” votes demonstrate an unsuccessful attempt at “democratization via politicization”. The Constitutional Treaty was drafted with the interrelated aims of filling the symbolic gaps of Europe, facilitating the growth of European demos, and bringing the Union closer to citizens. Its defeat in 2005 triggered a process of de-constitutionalization that culminated in the Lisbon Treaty of December 2009.

Post-Maastricht European integration which is mostly regarded as the new intergovernmentalism is a contentious issue.

Uwe Puetter associates the new intergovernmentalism with three arguments: the integration paradox, deliberative intergovernmentalism as a new form of EU governance in highly prominent areas of EU activity such as economic governance and foreign and security policy and that prevails over the classic Community method, and a new phase in the European integration.

The new intergovernmentalism is also characterized by member states’ preference to delegate authority to “de novo” bodies which are located at the interface of supranational and intergovernmental governance mechanisms and numerous regulatory and executive agencies. These bodies often enjoy considerable autonomy by way of executive or legislative power and have a degree of control over their own resources.

The post-Maastricht phase of European integration has become associated with the new research agenda of post-functionalism. This theory postulates that functional pressures no longer continue to play a major role in the European integration. Instead, integration has become vulnerable to changes and developments in domestic political contexts and notably to greater political and cultural (identity-based) political party and public contestation around the issues of the European integration.

Political integration can be subdivided into level (vertical), scope (sectoral) and territorial (horizontal) dimensions and multi-level (based on the interaction between the national and the European level and also entailing other levels below and beyond the state and thus situating the EU in an international and globalizing context).

On the basis of Haas’ definition, it is both useful and necessary to differentiate between the sub-dimensions of political integration below:

• policy integration;
• institutional integration;
• civilizing/security dimension and
• attitudinal dimension.

Sectoral Integration is a conception of or strategy for regional integration that follows sector-by-sector logic.

The European Council

The Maastricht Treaty, 1992

Institutional balance in the EU

Constitutionalization is the formalization of the rules of the game, which in an EU context, might involve a process whereby the treaties become over time.

Communitarization:  The shift of policy activity from the intergovernmental pillars to the Community pillar.

Regulatory state:  It is the expansion in the use of rule-making, monitoring, and enforcement techniques and institutions by the state, and a parallel change in the way in which its positive functions in society are being carried out.

From the perspective of functionalism and the new intergovernmentalism, the EU can be identified with a particular form of Union, namely, the EU as a regulatory state.