Harvard Law School

Jean Monnet Chair
Professor J.H.H. Weiler

Harvard Jean Monnet Working Paper (Symposium)

This paper is a part of contributions to the Jean Monnet Working Paper 
No.7/00, Symposium: Responses to Joschka Fischer

Helen Wallace

Possible Futures for the European Union: A British Reaction

Harvard Law School    Cambridge, MA 02138

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Without permission of the author.

© Helen Wallace 2000
Harvard Law School
Cambridge, MA 02138 
USA

helen wallace
Possible Futures for the European Union: A British Reaction*
In his speech in Berlin in May 2000, Joschka Fischer commented that he had ‘an eye on our friends in the United Kingdom, because I know that the term ‘federation’ irritates many Britons’. He might have added that his focus on the finalité of the European Union (EU) also baffles most Britons. This short essay tries to set the new debate that Fischer provoked on possible futures for the EU in the context of developing thinking in the UK about European policy. In particular, it looks at two related issues: the discussion about the ultimate shape of European integration, and the debate within the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) 2000 on proposals for ‘closer co-operation’. Both issues have to be seen against the back-drop of the continuing enlargement of the EU.

The British come to this with two contradictory starting points, and with a still tense debate in domestic politics on core issues of European integration. The two contradictory starting points are: first, a pragmatic (and quite commonsensical) notion that European ventures should match horses to courses; and, second, a fear of exclusion from the inner circle of the European governments which count.

On the one hand, it has been a consistent thread of British policy to encourage co-operation in Europe by and with the countries that were relevant to any given task. Thus, in particular, the British have consistently been key players in European defence co-operation since the Second World War, actively and extensively engaged in the NATO alliance and in other circles of defence collaboration, including willingly engaged-in active military deployment. In a plethora of other settings, successive British governments have been engaged in co-operation when this made sense in pragmatic terms or in terms of critical British interests, and—crucially—when it was judged that co-operation with other European partners would lead to value-added outcomes in terms of public policy.

On the other hand, British governments have been repeatedly concerned that other European governments would run ahead with co-operative and integrationist adventures that would leave the UK on the margins. Their fears have repeatedly been well-founded. On many issues and at many moments over the past fifty years or so, the British have discovered that, whatever the British reservations might be, others have been willing to proceed with intensified integration. The net result of these two starting points is that on the courses where the British horse was able to run, the British have been important players, while on other courses there has been no British runner—economic and monetary union (EMU) is the obvious case in point.
1.	Domestic Politics
Many of the reasons for this contradiction lie deep in British politics. ‘Europe’ has been a contested domain for British politicians as both process and substance. To summarise very briefly, typically governments in office have sought to develop a more engaged European policy, while the alternating lead party of opposition has found ‘Europe’ a persuasive and useful subject on to which to differentiate itself from the governing party. There has been a damaging cycle of acrimony, which, hardly surprisingly, has been reflected in ambivalent public opinion on European issues and an image of Britain as an unpredictable partner.

We might note here, since it is relevant to new suggestions being currently mooted for institutional reform, that the EU institutional process leaves little scope for out-of-office politicians from the Member States to be either informed about or involved in the development of EU policies. Opposition politicians have the freedom of ignorance from which to launch their criticisms of the EU and ‘Brussels’. The particularly adversarial character of the British political process reinforces this.

British reservations about engagement in the EU and its further development have related to both substance and process. Differences on substance have, over time, become increasingly less pronounced, which, in part, explains why British governments have, as they became more informed and more involved, engaged in the development of many EU policy regimes with more and more enthusiasm. Indeed, on a number of critically important EU issues British governments have been not only ‘regime-takers’, but have also sought to be ‘regime-makers’. The British government at that time was among the earliest and keenest advocates of the single European market, just as the current government is of the ‘new European economy’ paradigm outlined in the strategy agreed at the Lisbon European Council of March 2000. British governments have been keen participants in the development of European foreign policy co-operation (remember the London Report of 1981), and have latterly become one of the prime movers in the push towards increasing European defence autonomy. And there are other examples. 

The image of the UK is, however, much coloured (both at home and abroad) by the focus on the issues on which the British remain disengaged—the EMU is the obvious current case in point. Hence, the assumption can easily—but perhaps wrongly—be made that British governments are likely to be followers rather than leaders on new integration issues.

Also relevant to the current debate is precisely Joschka Fischer’s observation that the British find federalism an indigestible concept. It would, indeed, have been helpful for the British domestic debate if he and his advisers had succeeded in finding an alternative label for his recent propositions. In Britain, a country with a very different experience of state-building from that of Germany, many feel that federalism is perceived (however wrongly) as a mode of organising power hierarchically and top-down. The British experience is one of organic evolution in the relationships between the different levels and locations of governance. It is, thus, also one in which constitutional behaviour has been defined by evolving practice and acts of parliament, rather than by formal constitutional documents.

However, two new points are relevant here. One is that the current government, at least, is more inclined than its predecessors to accept that federalism is a normal, if sometimes puzzling, part of the rhetoric and discourse of many continental European politicians. Thus, there were no anguished rebuttals of Joschka Fischer’s proposals. The other point is that the organisation of the UK as a polity is undergoing fundamental change, with the implementation of forms of devolution in Scotland, Wales and, perhaps, Northern Ireland. Thus, British politicians are being forced to think differently—and in more explicitly constitutional terms—about the ways in which policy powers are assigned to different levels of government—and also about the ways in which political responsibilities are, as a consequence, diffused between different political office-holders. In August 2000, for example, the UK government was able to maintain a grateful silence while the new Scottish executive grappled with an extraordinary catalogue of errors in administering final school examinations.

It follows from these new developments that the British government is able to contemplate the revived EU discussion about the assignment of powers to different levels of government (EU, Member State, sub-state) with fresher eyes. In contrast to the defensive British positions on subsidiarity of a decade ago, the current British government can now engage much more constructively with their EU partners on this subject. Thus, we might expect to see more nuanced British contributions on the cases for and against codifying the assignment of policy powers. Some in Britain will be in favour of lists in order to achieve a kind of clarity, while others will continue to argue for the merits of a more organic approach.

We might also note here that the British discussion on the proposed EU Charter of Fundamental Rights has precisely this quality. Voices (from) close to the government which are resistant to an over-codified, or overly binding, EU Charter are making their arguments not out of fundamental opposition to continental constitutionalism, but rather on the basis of how they think a Charter might work in practice.

What, then, can we conclude from this overview of British domestic politics? First, there continues to be a troublesome contrast of perspectives about the future development of the EU between governing and opposition politicians. Second, on the substance of further EU integration, we can expect the British government to contribute ideas and proposals for closer integration in some policy areas, whatever the continuing nervousness about the EMU. Third, on the forms and methods of integration, the British now have more open minds, although with a continuing instinct to prefer organic development to ‘constitution-led’ blueprints.
2.	Future Goals of Integration
It as much the talk of the finalité of the EU as that of a European federation that disturbs British politicians. The notion that, on some distant horizon, an ‘end-state’ of perfect integration exists simply carries little cogency in the British discussion. It seems too abstract, too speculative, and, hence, not a productive area of debate. This reluctance to engage with a debate that is much more popular in continental Europe is, of course, partly a result of the difficult history of British policy towards the EU. However, it also crucially reflects deep patterns of British political culture. Ask a British politician what they think the finalité of the devolution process now under way within the UK is and they will be similarly puzzled and reluctant to answer, unless they come from one of the parties seeking outright independence for Scotland or (less commonly) Wales. The more usual answer is ‘let’s see how things develop.’

It is increasingly recognised among British policy-makers that this ‘wait-and-see’ attitude is a disadvantage in European circles, since it is so quickly elided with a preference for disengagement. Hence, one can now hear voices calling for the British to enter this EU debate more energetically and positively. Evolving British policy is, however, likely to be strongly influenced by an organic approach to institutional reforms and by a preference for substance to determine form. Thus, the British are still more inclined to focus on the questions of ‘what is the EU really for?’ or ‘where does EU solidarity really helps us towards better policy outcomes?.’

On these more substantive questions current British thinking has become rather strongly supportive of EU policy extension in a significant number of significant policy domains. These can be grouped under a number of headings.

a) Market regulation and ‘flanking policies’. The British government is likely to hold to the single market as a cornerstone of the EU edifice, for both the current and the future enlarged membership. It will be reluctant to envisage any weakening of the single market (i.e., no support here for ‘closer co-operation’), but, where possible, it will tend to favour regulation with a lighter touch. British policy-makers tend to take a ‘narrowish’ view of the flanking policies that are a necessary corollary of the single market. Hence, the British preference in this area is likely to favour consolidation.

b) The ‘new European economy’. There is likely to be strong British support for a vigorous development of the Lisbon strategy. Indeed, one can already observe a sense of ownership of this new strategy on the part of the British policy-makers involved—here, indeed, they believe themselves to be in the vanguard (sic.) of a new development in the EU, one which can be described as marking ‘a new paradigm’ in EU policy-making around the ‘benchmarking’ and ‘best practice’ approaches. The British also believe that this offers a more promising approach to the European ‘social’ agenda. What the Lisbon strategy will add up to in practice is another matter—views on this are divided across the EU. But three particular points about it should be noted. First, it is explicitly permissive in encouraging national or local experimentation rather than imposing a single blueprint. Second, it is an elastic formula which could rather easily admit candidate countries into the circle of comparisons sooner rather than later. Third, it depends on an institutional mode of ‘seminar-style’ governance, rather than on explicit decision-rules or assignments of policy competences.

c) EMU. For the moment, this remains the Achilles’ heel of the current government’s European policy. Although most members of the Cabinet favour entry into the single currency regime, subject to various conditions, politically the government remains reluctant to put the issue to the electorate. As long as this remains so, there is not much scope for British speculation about how to reinforce EMU, a key subject for many of those who are fearful about how to maintain the momentum of integration in EMU countries.

d) Foreign and defence policy. In contrast, in this policy field, the British are among the strongest and most engaged advocates of developing a ‘grown-up’ collective policy. The sense of ownership is very strong, and there is a formidable list of specific goals to be achieved, as indicated by the Helsinki European Council of December 1999. The worry on the British side is about which of the other EU members—or candidates—will, in practice, be able to deliver the commitments required of them (troops, equipment, and resources) for the Helsinki goals to be achieved. Moreover, there is British concern about how easy it will prove in practice to deploy the intended European autonomous capability in specific situations. In this field, the concern is much less with institutional procedures than with hard evidence of commitments, although the British are more willing than many other EU governments to acknowledge that they are already accustomed to a form of ‘supranationalism’ (herewithin the NATO context).

e) Justice and home affairs. This is an area of EU policy which reveals a sea-change in British involvement. For various reasons, the British Conservative government got into tangle over JHA. On the one hand, there was strong resistance to some of the ‘rules-led’ efforts at policy integration, especially as regards the operation of border controls. On the other hand, for functional reasons, British policy-makers and agencies were keenly interested in practical co-operation. When the JHA issues were being discussed in the Amsterdam IGC, a then very new and still nervous British Labour government took what it believed to be the prudent—and available—opt-out via the special protocol on Schengen. Earlier this year, this opt-out was almost entirely reversed, as the British were admitted to most of the Schengen regime (after some difficulties with the Spanish arising from a bi-lateral dispute over Gibraltar). Thus, British energies have been released to join actively in the development of JHA, including in areas where the British can lay some claim to having benchmarks worth emulating by other EU partners. There is likely to be strong British support for a further intensification of collective EU measures, for example, to handle the problems of transnational crime, a subject repeatedly cited as a priority for further integration by EU maximalists.

f) Other policy areas. On other issues, the British are likely to take a ‘case-by-case’ approach. On environmental policy, for example, the current government is open to an intensification of EU measures and targets, where the EU level seems appropriate, i.e., subject to subsidiarity criteria. In many of the other additional policy areas currently being cited as ones for EU action—the mixed bag of education, culture, tourism, public health and so forth, British thinking is likely to be subsidiarity defined. Thus, few of these areas are likely to emerge as strongly favoured by the British for EU regime-building.

g) The EU budget. As Börzel and Risse point out, a ‘real’ federation usually has a ‘real’ budget. Given the history of British controversy over the Community budget, this is not an obvious object of British enthusiasm. If, however, one thinks about an EU budget oriented at supporting collective EU responsibilities, then an area in which there would be a strong case for an expanded EU financial role is in relation to external responsibilities. This is a subject that has had less attention than it deserves, and one in which the British might consider more engagement. However, this would be thinkable only if, and when, the EU institutions can radically improve their poor record of programme management. 

All in all, therefore, the current British government is much more open than its predecessors to the vigorous development of the EU and, in particular, to strengthening EU policy regimes in important areas. These include several articulated as targets by those who seek to reinvigorate the momentum of integration in the current debate. Foreign, security and defence policy is of special importance because the British are necessary partners in this domain. The development of JHA is becoming another such priority area for the British, a policy area which some British policy-makers liken in scale and scope to the 1992 project. As for the core issues of economic integration, the British are firmly engaged in the consolidation of the single market and in the search for European responses to the new economy. The EMU is a singular exception. Beyond these core issues the British tend to be less persuaded of the case for intensified policy integration.

The British have become more relaxed on many of the issues of institutional and constitutional debate in the EU. Indeed, some thought is being given to specific ideas for institutional enhancement. The British are, in principle, keen supporters of non-treaty reform, a task which, as far as the Commission is concerned, has fallen to Neil Kinnock to pursue. In terms of the proposals made by Joschka Fischer and others, however, the British might wonder whether the constitutional blueprint approach is the most appropriate one (for taking forward the big policy issues currently on the EU agenda). It is not obvious that grand designs make for best institutional practice across the particular core policy areas that seem to be in most urgent need of development. On the contrary, there may be a case for constructive experimentation with different features across the three domains of economic integration, foreign and defence policy, and JHA. Similarly, given the scale of the endeavour required in each of these areas, now might not be the best moment to include other policy areas for the sake of it, especially since these might well provoke resistance from more locally rooted politicians across the Member States.

But does the prospect of further enlargement make such an approach seem complacent, or too dismissive of the alleged dysfunctions in the current EU of Fifteen? The EMU is, in a sense, well protected by the Maastricht rules of eligibility for inclusion in the single currency regime, and we already have working experience of late-comers undergoing technical appraisal and peer review. As commented above, the Lisbon strategy is more open to wide and diverse participation than orthodox EU policies and thus does not seem to pose great problems. As for foreign and defence policy, given that there are EU candidate countries which are already full members of NATO, while some EU members are not, the bigger problem seems instead to be about how to manage the relationship between NATO and the EU. Meanwhile, as a number of commentators and practitioners are beginning to observe, and as was cogently argued by the EUI group chaired by Giuliano Amato, the JHA field is one in which bridges urgently need to be built to associate candidate countries with the regime being developed by the EU. Policy reinforcement may be less vulnerable to enlargement than is often argued, and a constitution-driven reform process may bring disappointing rewards in terms of policy reinforcement.

The underlying issue facing the EU is whether or not organic development, often marked by ambiguities and lack of clarity, is preferable to a tidier constitutional design which would sort out the ambiguities and assert a political finalité, but leave less room for policy experimentation.
3.	Closer Co-operation
For the British, ‘closer co-operation’ or ‘flexibility’—the confusions of language do not aid clear discussion—has, in the past, been seen as a ‘poisoned chalice’. On the one hand, it might provide the elasticity of engagement which British politicians have often demanded and continue to practise as regards the EMU. On the other hand, it appears to give other governments the opportunity and the legitimacy to disregard objections from reluctant governments, even when the objections may be based on political or economic substance. Indeed, the now much criticised provisions in the Treaty of Amsterdam to permit closer co-operation were, in essence, designed to address the then British problem of strident exceptionalism. Moreover, in the British case, any mention of flexibility seems to give grounds to opposition politicians to advocate the self-exclusion of Britain from inconvenient or unpopular EU commitments.

The more that British policy approaches something like the mainstream of EU policy development, the less likely it will be that the British will welcome proposals to loosen the conditions under which closer co-operation could be made to operate. Indeed, one might observe that it is precisely because Britain has become so much more willing to participate in EU policy development that the Amsterdam provisions have not needed to be brought into play. If, after all, the British are spearheading a move towards establishing a form of European defence autonomy, why fall back on arguments about closer co-operation being a necessary tool? A similar point can be made as regards the development of JHA, given that the British have signed up to so much of the Schengen Agreement. One might also comment that those who bemoan the failure to operate the Amsterdam provisions are short of hard examples of missed opportunities to deploy them. Maybe the provisions should be understood as an insurance policy, which events did not make it necessary to activate.

But if not Britain, then maybe other awkward partners, and especially among the candidate countries? Maybe yes, maybe no—we are here in the realm of assertion rather than evidence. Clearly, new members may not be quickly able to be full participants in all EU policy regimes. The record suggests that political exceptionalism is a harder problem to resolve than economic lack of readiness, where precedents seem to show that a combination of hard work by the adjusting new members and sensible elasticity on the part of the EU can overcome a great many of the difficulties. Political exceptionalism of the kind that beset France in the mid-1960s or Britain during the 1980s is harder to legislate against.

If not an insurance policy, then perhaps a management tool? It is commonly argued that it is the sheer weight of the increasing numbers of Member States that makes the case for having an inner group of governments as a kind of executive board for the collectivity of the EU. Again, at first sight, this is a persuasive argument, in that a proliferation of heterogeneous members may well militate against effective management of the EU. But then the question is whether that which is needed is an inner group of countries or—for certain purposes—some tasks to be carried out by fewer than the full membership on behalf of the total membership. Here, the European Central Bank sets an interesting precedent with its board of six rotating members. There is certainly room for brainstorming and experimentation along these lines.

A different version of this argument is that—depending on the policy area—some Member States have more to bring to regime-development than others. This would lead to an approach based on the relevance and degree of the engagement of particular Member States. There is already a core single currency group, which, so the approach goes, ought to be given the opportunity to take the regime further. Indeed, the EMU provides the most convincing case for this kind of approach.

Foreign, security and defence policy appears to be a similar case, and, indeed, the experiences of the Contact Groups for Bosnia and Kosovo seem to bear this out. Some of the current discussion seems to be driven by the fact that the Contact Groups were established informally outside the EU structures, and, of course, included non-EU governments. We should also note that, in this field, smaller groups of relevant EU Member States may also emerge more organically or as a function of geography and degree of stake-holding in any given context. What seems harder to argue convincingly is that there could be a permanent inner circle of EU governments in this field, or that it would be effective to legislate against the adhocery of circumstance, which is more likely to generate self-constituted coalitions of the willing (as in the Albanian case). In this field, the British are likely to be practitioners of forms of closer co-operation, but reluctant to predefine the relevant memberships.

There is also an undeveloped discussion of a variety of other policy subjects on which closer co-operation might be extended. The examples of policies quoted are quite puzzling—environment, education, culture and so forth—subjects where there is already scope for smaller circles of countries to co-operate more closely. Many of these cross the boundaries of the EU—the Nordic Council, the Rhine Commission and so forth. On the face of it, it is not evident why all of these local bi-lateralisms and multi-lateralisms need to be drawn within the EU architecture.

It is quite a different argument to propose the creation of a permanent inner group, with both its own institutional underpinnings and a hierarchically superior role in relation to the rest of the extended EU family. Versions of this proposal generally define the inner group as naturally comprising the original founder six members of the European Community. They also most frequently emanate from French or German advocates, usually with the added component of a privileged Franco-German relationship nested within the vanguard group. Hardly surprisingly, proposals with these contours find little support from the British, partly because they seem to be an effort to turn the political clock backwards not forwards, and partly because they neglect the contributions that other governments, such as the British, bring to important policy areas such as foreign, security and defence policy. Nor are such proposals welcome to those other governments of countries that have, although later recruits to the EU, become keen integrationists. The notion of a viable permanent inner directorate stems from an odd mixture of nostalgia for apparent past intimacy and nervousness about the dilution of the integration model through serial enlargement.

Hence, on these issues, we should expect British policy to resist formal procedures to facilitate closer co-operation, especially any which would elevate the founder members to a privileged status vis-à-vis other Member States. On the other hand, following the ‘horses for courses’ argument, the British may well be at ease with the emergence of special circles of the more involved or the especially relevant or the really serious in particular policy areas. Here, as on the question about the finalité of the EU process, the British contributions are likely to be driven by their underlying preference for organic evolution. Whether or not this can be articulated as a convincing strategy to reassure the doubters and the nervous, especially in the face of enlargement, remains to be seen. The organic view is much harder to express in ringing phrases than the constitutional blueprint view.
4.	In Conclusion
British policy has changed a great deal in ways that bring it much more into the EU mainstream on the substance of EU policy development. It accepts policy integration in areas widely identified as those that federalists have long advocated as the high ground of integration. Hence, there ought to be more opportunities for this to generate a more willing engagement in the debate about the longer term evolution of the EU. The constraints of domestic politics and the continuing self-exclusion from the EMU leave the British with a larger handicap than many other EU governments. The inwardness of the British media accentuate this.

Yet, there are also lessons to be learned from British experience in the context of further enlargement. National political cultures do not easily yield to the pressures of ‘Europeanisation’, and the EU project has to live with this. The debate about possible futures for the EU has to work with the grain of the real politics of the different Member States. Keeping awkward or reluctant countries outside an EU regime seems attractive, but can be counterproductive. The EMU may be the exception rather than the rule here, in that a way was found—of a quasi-objective character—to separate out the willing and able from the unwilling or unable. In many other policy areas, the inclusion of more members has, by and large, added strength to the EU regime. The numbers of countries involved may be less relevant than whether or not there is a set of congruent policy preferences, a factor that seems to have been critical in launching the new defence initiative. Thus, nervousness about the increased size of the membership of the EU may exaggerate the risks. It would be a pity if this nervousness led to too much discussion of countermeasures rather than greater efforts to ‘mainstream’ as many European countries as possible. Moreover, there are grounds for encouragement from the diversity of modes of integration currently being developed to generate new joint-policy ventures in difficult and sensitive areas of policy.