Amandine Crespy

From Euroscepticism to Resistance to European Integration: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

Abstract This article aims at contributing to the ongoing academic debate about European integration. It stresses the need for an interdisciplinary approach rooted in history and political science. The argument is twofold. Most of the existing literature overlooks the historical dimension of contention over the making of Europe and implicitly makes it a contemporary phenomenon defined as Euroscepticism. This, it is argued, has led to some major analytical deadlocks. Consequently, it is necessary to reframe the debate through the notion of resistances to Europe. Resistances can be defined as manifestations of hostility towards one (or several) aspect(s) of European integration perceived as a threat with respect to ones values. This notion, this paper suggests, is particularly adequate to the study of past and present contention over European integration, which is highlighted with various empirical examples.

The clash of Titans: France, Germany and the discursive double game of EMU reform

ABSTRACT This paper investigates why and how French and German leaders converged on an agreement for reforming the European Monetary Union in response to the outbreak of the debt crisis in Europe. To answer these questions, we begin by revising Putnams two-level game in order to offer a constructivist account of the politics of ‘grand bargains’ in the European Union. The Eurozone negotiations, we argue, are better viewed as a simultaneous double game in which preferences are constructed and reconfigured as leaders address simultaneously the other European decision makers and their own constituencies. In a discursive institutionalist perspective, a frame analysis is conducted on the basis of press conference speeches and press interviews in 2011 and 2012. It is demonstrated that the Franco-German agreements on new policy and institutional arrangements were only possible because the respective leaders resorted to differing discourses in terms of paradigms, norms and values.

Deliberative Democracy and the Legitimacy of the European Union: A Reappraisal of Conflict

Connecting the relevant literature in sociology, political theory and European studies with original empirical research, this article calls for a reappraisal of conflict when addressing the issue of the democratic legitimacy of the European Union. It offers a critical account of rationalistic and consensus-based deliberative democracy both in the classical theories of deliberative democracy and in the practices institutionalised in the EU. Drawing on the model of ‘discursive democracy’ theorised by John Dryzek, it provides an account of the contentious debate over the EU Services Directive (also known as the Bolkestein Directive). It is argued that the EU can function as a polity where democratic legitimacy is granted by deliberation. However, this holds only under two conditions. First, deliberation must be conflict based; that is, it must allow for the voicing of dissent and its channelling into political institutions. Second, supranational institutions and decision making can only be responsive and engage in alleviating conflict through deliberation when conflict is structured along transnational — as opposed to national — lines.

New Parliament, New Cleavages after the Eastern Enlargement? The Conflict Over the Services Directive as an Opposition between the Liberals and the Regulators

This article analyses the parliamentary debates and decision-making related to the highly contentious EU directive on services. It is intended as a contribution to the academic debate on political conflict lines in the European Parliament. Our argument is that neither the left–right cleavage nor a territorial one (old versus new Member States) can fully explain conflict at stake on socio-economic issues. Rather, what we can observe is cross-cutting opposition between ‘regulators’ and ‘liberals’.

Introduction: The Pursuit of Social Europe in the Face of Crisis

Whatever happened to Social Europe? Does the concept still exist? And, if so, what does it entail? Though the 1957 Treaty of Rome establishing the European Economic Community was a document to a remarkable extent infused by economic liberalism, the market-building exercises in the early decades of the Community’s existence were to some extent balanced by the concomitant elaboration of market-correcting instruments, such as the European Social Fund and later the Common Agricultural Policy and its associated guidance funds. Generalizing broadly, the early years of European integration were thus characterized by the paradigm of ‘embedded liberalism’, combining the pursuit of gradual liberalization of trade with protective and redistributive measures associated with the more organized, coordinated, and thus ‘embedded’ model of Western European capitalism.

The Vanishing Promise of a More ‘Social’ Europe: Public Services Before and After the Debt Crisis

The politics of public services regulation is one area where the dilemmas of a common European policy in the socio-economic realm have come to the fore. Since the mid-1990s, the promise of a more ‘social’ Europe — or of more positive integration — seems to be farther away than ever. The term ‘services of general interest’ (SGI) coined in EU law and policy debates covers the provision of all public utilities and services including network industries (telecommunications, energy, transport, etc.), social services (healthcare, child and elderly care, aid to families and people in need), and services in the field of education and culture. Today, the provision of SGI accounts for about 26 percent of European GDP and occupies 30 percent of the European workforce (CEEP, 2010). Through national and European liberalization policies, they have been increasingly shifted from historical, public owned providers to the private sector. There is a large consensus on the idea that SGI are a cornerstone of European competitiveness and social cohesion, and that they constitute a crucial element in the debate on the modernization of the European welfare states. However, the balance between competition and freedom within the internal market, on the one hand, and national regulation protecting the public interest in the provision of utilities and services, on the other, has triggered contentious debates as to how much autonomy member states should enjoy vis-a-vis the European level.

Eine „Infizierung durch die Linke“? Der Europadiskurs in Frankreich seit 2000 anhand des Beispiels der Bolkestein-Richtlinie

Als die Mitglieder der Europaischen Kommission am 14. Januar 2004 den EURichtlinienentwurf uber Dienstleistungen annahmen, rechnete niemand in Brussel oder den europaischen Hauptstadten mit dem politischen Sturm, der die Technokraten in Brussel im darauf folgenden Jahr erwartet – und noch weniger mit der anhaltenden, existentiellen Krise, in die die gesamte Europaische Union gesturzt wurde. Ein bis dahin unbekannter Name, Frits Bolkestein, niederlandischer EU-Binnenmarktkommissar und Initiator der Richtlinie, sollte zum Symbol der Spaltung Europas uber die Frage werden, welche soziookonomische Richtung angesichts der weltweiten Entwicklungen, die Europa an den Rand zu drangen drohen, einzuschlagen sei. In diesem Zusammenhang bildete die Stimulierung des innereuropaischen Dienstleistungsmarkts, welcher als zu zerstuckelt und von den Mitgliedstaaten uberreguliert galt, das Herzstuck der Lissabon- Strategie zur Forderung der Wettbewerbsfahigkeit und des Wachstums der EU. Aus diesem Grund sties ein Richtlinienentwurf, der die Hindernisse auf dem Weg zu einem freien Dienstleistungsverkehr beseitigte, auf relativ breite Zustimmung in der Kommission, den Mitgliedstaaten und im Europaischen Parlament. Dennoch wurde der Vorschlag des niederlandischen Kommissars als zu radikal angesehen und loste eine beispiellose Welle sozialer und politischer Proteste aus, was nach zwei Jahren eines langen und schwierigen Mitentscheidungsverfahrens zur Verabschiedung eines deutlich abgeanderten Textes fuhrte. Staatsprasident Jacques Chirac personlich machte Frankreichs gesamten Einfluss geltend, um eine deutliche Anderung des Textes zu bewirken. Die Besonderheit der Diskussion in Frankreich besteht in der engen Verbindung zwischen der Bolkestein-Richtlinie und der Referendumskampagne zum Europaischen Verfassungsvertrag. Die Heftigkeit, mit der die Offentlichkeit in Frankreich gegen die Dienstleistungsrichtlinie protestierte, wird im Ubrigen von allen Beobachtern als einer der Hauptgrunde fur das Scheitern des Referendums zur EU-Verfassung vom 29. Mai 2005 angesehen. Die Bolkestein-Episode fuhrte zur Herauskristallisierung eines europafeindlichen Diskurses angesichts eines als zu „liberal1“ empfundenen Europas. Dieser Diskurs wurde nicht nur mehrheitlich von der offentlichen Meinung ubernommen, sondern setzte sich auch bei der politischen Fuhrung durch, bis er in den europaischen Institutionen zur „Position Frankreichs“ wurde. So scheint es, auch wenn es korrekter ware, von franzosischen Diskursen im Plural zu sprechen, als sei die Kritik an einem „liberalen Europa“ in Frankreich ausergewohnlich stark legitimiert, was zweifellos eine franzosische Besonderheit darstellt. Um die Ursachen und die Tragweite der Position Frankreichs im Konflikt um die Bolkestein-Richtlinie sowohl theoretisch als auch empirisch zu erklaren, formulieren wir zwei Hypothesen: Aus einer dem diskursiven Institutionalismus nahen Sicht soll gezeigt werden, dass es bei der Referendumskampagne zum Verfassungsvertrag die Gleichsetzung der Bolkestein-Richtlinie mit einem „liberalen Europa“, dem Schreckgespenst der Linken, war, die den franzosischen Prasidenten gezwungen hat, sich gegen diese auszusprechen, obwohl er fur eine Liberalisierung der Dienstleistungen war. Daran anschliesend wird herausgearbeitet, dass die franzosische Position, die in der Folge von anderen sozialen und politischen Akteuren in Europa aufgegriffen wurde, einen wichtigen Einfluss auf den Entscheidungsprozess hatte, der zur Annahme des endgultigen Textes der Dienstleistungsrichtlinie gefuhrt hat. Dazu wird zunachst geklart, inwiefern die Debatte uber die Bolkestein-Richtlinie wichtig ist fur das Verstandnis des aktuellen Diskurses der Franzosen zum Thema Europa. Desweiteren werden die theoretischen und methodologischen Instrumente erlautert, die fur die Durchfuhrung der Analyse am geeignetsten erscheinen, bevor die eigentliche empirische Analyse beschrieben wird.

Belgium in Search of a Stance on Today’s EU Integration Dilemmas

Despite the multiple crises Europe currently faces, the salience of EU affairs in Belgium remains low and popular support for the EU above average. However, since the main party in the governing coalition, the Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie (N-VA), decided to exit the long-standing Belgian pro-EU consensus by labelling itself Eurorealist, Belgium’s voice in EU affairs seems to be fading. The latent tensions between the governing parties lead to a crucial lack of ambition and impact on the debates on Brexit and on the future of European integration.

Protesting Culture and Economics in Western Europe: New Cleavages in Left and Right Politics

better represented. In the end, the most regrettable thing about the book is that it lacks a concluding chapter. The editor’s two-page concluding thoughts at the end of the introduction offer a hint at this, and it is from these two pages that the quotes above about the limited of institutional engineering are taken. On second thoughts, however, it is perhaps rather wise that a book so clearly targeted at readers well versed in this debate leaves it up to the readers to draw their own conclusions.

Welfare Services in Times of Austerity

This book started with the—somewhat gloomy—observations on the effects of the recent financial crisis on welfare services (or SGI) to suggest that, in order to understand how we got there, we need to look at the trends towards the recommodification of welfare services which have been ongoing over the past two decades. This chapter reiterates the idea that, indeed, marketization and austerity are two sides of the same coin: as public resources have become increasingly scarce, marketization is seen as an alternative in order to curtail public expenditure by shifting costs from the government to users recast as consumers. It is also widely believed that marketization results in more efficient management of such services hence allowing for cost containment. A consensus among European decision makers on austerity—that is, fundamentally, the ‘reduction of public spending’ (Blyth 2013)—prevailed long before the financial crisis hit USA and unfolded as a crisis of sovereign debt in Europe. This is because a central principle of the EMU as it was conceived in 1992 is that ‘sound’ public finance is the cornerstone of monetary integration. The so-called Maastricht convergence criteria enshrined in the Stability and Growth Pact of 1997 limits government deficit to 3 % of GDP and public debt to 60 % of GDP. Hence, the ‘Brussels–Washington’ consensus existed long before it became the ‘Berlin–Washington’ consensus on the need for austerity policies (Fitoussi and Saraceno 2013). More or less explicitly, and along with labour market reforms, cuts in welfare services have been understood as part of ‘structural reforms’. In a study from 2002 on public sector reforms in ten European countries, Hemerijk and Huiskamp (2002) found that the road to EMU put public finance under pressure for future member countries (as well as for those which had not yet decided). This translated into the stabilization or slow, but steady, decrease of expenditure for the public sector in a context characterized by increased needs in numerous sectors, not least education and healthcare. While decentralization allowed for change in employment regimes and industrial relations, internal and external privatizations were meant to raise efficiency (for the former) and generate state revenue rapidly (for the latter) in a context where capital mobility has increasingly brought about fiscal competition and the decline of tax revenue. The crisis which has affected the EU as a result of the global financial crisis originating in the USA in 2008 has only reinforced the ideational and institutional strength of austerity, thus putting welfare services in the eye of the storm.