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Journal of International Relations and Development
Constructing Threat, Constructing Political Order: On the Legitimisation of an Economic Community in Western Europe
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By Thomas Diez
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It gradually seemed to me that the starting point of any political theory is the problem of disorder and threat and the need to overcome them both. Thus it would be necessary to set against the classical theory of forms of government a typology of the forms of conceptualising threat, a conceptualisation that determines the variation of the theories of political order. [...] For without a threat of disorder, there simply would be no reason for imagining power or government (Pasquino 1993:82).
Threatening Order, Ordering Threat
When the Euro was launched at the beginning of 1999, its advent was celebrated as a major step in European integration history. However, its significance was contested. While to some it was an essentially political project, to others it was merely another step in consolidating the Single Market. Each of these interpretations builds upon a specific vision of what the future political order of Europe should look like. These visions resemble, as will be argued below, a federalist order on the one hand, situated more or less within modern conceptions of statehood, and a new form of order on the other hand, establishing within Europe an ‘Economic Community’. Since both orders imply practices of governance, they are both in need of legitimacy. This article reflects upon the differences and continuities between legitimising a federalist, state-based, and an Economic Community order, linking this discussion to the recent debate in International Relations (IR) theory about the mutual constitution of identity and difference. 1 My argument is that while the political order of the Economic Community, according to the conventional story, is legitimised by the production of a specific output (welfare) based in principle on a borderless market, and differs in this respect from the participation-based legitimisation of the state, it does at the same time rely on establishing borders through the construction of a threat, just as the modern territorial state does.
The point of departure in this endeavour is the quote from Pasquino, a collaborator of Foucault, that is used as an epitaph preceding this section. Through an investigation of the relationship between political order and threat, Pasquino’s conceptualisation of political theory makes IR a constitutive part of political theory. The traditional disciplinary map draws the picture of an internal order with which political theory and Comparative Politics are concerned and which is always threatened by external influences, the object of analysis in IR. Against this image, it is sought to establish a reading of ‘threat’ as the foundation of political order—an ordering threat both threatening order and making it possible. The argument relies on a reading of European politics transcending the border between IR and political theory and problematising traditional narratives of politics which continuously redraw borders that even our theorising of European integration has hardly yet overcome.
In the next section, a theory of the relationship between threat and political order will be developed. Central to this theory is the notion that threat and political order are interdependent constructions connected through the practice of legitimisation. This is followed by a first reading of the legitimisation of the Economic Community as a form of political order that is built upon the (positive) provision of specific goods as an output of that order. A second reading of this debate then suggests that the Economic Community is legitimised by the construction of threat. This negative practice of exclusion is the precondition on which the notion of output is based, but which is also closely linked to two other dimensions of legitimacy, participation and identity. Through this exclusionary practice, there is a line of continuity between modern conceptions of territorial statehood and the notion of the European Union (EU) as the first "truly post-modern international political form" establishing a "governance beyond statehood" (Ruggie 1993; Jachtenfuchs et al. 1998). In the last section, the double reading of legitimisation will lead to a critique of the Economic Community, focussing not on the changes towards modern statehood, but on the continuity of exclusionary practices.
Threat and Political Order
Threatened Order: Foreign Policy as Heroic Practice
In 1943, Lippmann entitled his critique of half a century of US foreign policy “U.S. Foreign Policy - Shield of the Republic” (Lippmann 1943). In doing so, he gave a short characterisation of what is commonly—in popular as well as academic discourse—understood to be the content and meaning of foreign policy: to protect the stable internal order against disturbing influences from the outside. Our traditional understanding of foreign policy relies on the idea of a pre-established inside which has to be protected against a hostile outside. Foreign policy originates in the subject of the nation-state with its well-known borders and characteristics. The international system, although more than just the sum of the foreign policies of the states belonging to it, is unthinkable without them. Even in Waltz’s version of neo-realism, states logically precede the international system as a non-intended consequence of states’ actions (Albert 1996:59). Within the framework of traditional IR, the political order of states is an issue of debate in only two respects. For one, it is an (outside) object of other states’ action. On the one hand, such actions comprise all classical cases of military intervention which are justified by reference to the need of (re)establishing political order to avoid the spill-over of disorder, or to pursue economic, strategic or normative interests. On the other hand, there are attempts to influence discursively the development of political cultures in order to bring them closer, or make them more compatible with one’s own, such as outright threat, or attempts to strengthen certain political viewpoints and groups over others.
Secondly, the political order of states appears in studies of international politics when specific foreign policy behaviour is explained by a state’s internal political constitution, i.e. by reference to the “second image” (Waltz 1959: Ch. 4). Classics in this tradition are studies that characterise liberal democracies as being more peaceful in their international actions than other states (Czempiel 1981). But here, too, domestic political order is preceding foreign policy. While the latter’s means are restricted, its function as “shield of the republic” is not questioned.
This protection of a pre-existent political order inside against an anarchic outside has been characterised by Ashley as a “heroic practice”, a “commitment to the hierarchical sovereignty/anarchy opposition”, in which one’s domestic society is saved from the dangers emerging from international anarchy (Ashley 1988:238-9). It is one of Ashley’s central contributions to the recent development of IR theory to have directed our attention to the possibility of conceptualising the relationship between threat and political order in a way that does not accept such heroic practices.
Ordering Threat: Foreign Policy as Identity Construction
Such an alternative reading conceptualises internal and external policies not as separate phenomena, but as interdependent discursive constructions. Ashley suggests that the predominant problematic of modern statecraft is not the government of a given inside that has to be defended against outside forces, but the constant reconstruction of such an inside. In this constant reconstruction, differences in time and space are, according to Ashley, attributed to the difference between “domestic society” and the “domain of anarchy”. Through such a move, the outside/international is constructed as a danger and threat, whereas order is attributed to the inside. This, in turn, allows for the repetition of such exclusionary and dividing practices in other locales. Thus, the international organisation of the world becomes the primary task for modern statesmen (Ashley 1988:256-7).
This basic line of thought has been taken up by many contributions to the so-called ‘post-modern’ debate in IR, most prominently in Campbell’s work on US Foreign Policy as identity construction. He claims that nation-states do not possess any pre-discursive, stable identity. The central means of their constant (re)creation of identity is foreign policy: “The constant articulation of danger through foreign policy is thus not a threat to a state’s identity; it is its condition of possibility” (Campbell 1992:12). It should be noted that Campbell’s use of the term foreign policy is much wider than the common conceptualisation of foreign policy as inter-state action. It includes all attempts to characterise specific ways of action and specific incidents on a state’s ‘own’ territory as foreign (Campbell 1992:92-101). Foreign Policy, as the institutionalised state practice that this term usually connotes, is merely a particular instance of the general practice of foreign policy. The latter creates, according to Campbell (1992:77), “the very dangers to which we are supposed to accommodate ourselves.” Such a construction of danger/threat is not to be understood as negating ‘real’ dangers. But it is always bound up with the specific discursive context in which it emerges (Laclau and Mouffe 1985:108; Campbell 1992:6).
Constructions of threat and political orders and identities are thus mutually constitutive. The existence of one presupposes the other. While this may be intuitively convincing, it is not entirely satisfying. First, to some extent it is just a restatement of the general relationship between identity and difference. But political order carries with it the imposition of hierarchies and institutionalised Herrschaft. State identity, for instance, is set apart from other identities by the pervasiveness of its consequences for people’s daily lives. The first question thus is whether there are any specific rules regulating the threat/political order nexus that makes it a special case of identity/difference relationships. Secondly, within these rules, is there any difference between articulations of threat and state political order on the one hand, and other political orders on the other?
It is proposed that beyond general commonalities, there are several ways of constructing difference and thus of identity and political order. How else could Campbell express his hope “that the emergence of new and less violent forms of identity and difference may be observed” (Campbell 1990:282)? This hope rests upon the assumption that difference does not necessarily have to be conceptualised as threat. Although Pasquino shares the idea of an ordering threat, and sees order and threat as interdependently constructed, he suggests differentiating between different constructions of threat, and accordingly different kinds of political order. Otherwise, a typology of threat and theories of political order as called for in the epitaph makes no sense. Central to such a typology is a reflection on and analysis of what practice links threat and order, and which rules it follows.
Order through Legitimisation, Legitimisation through Threat
It is in this respect that the practice of legitimisation becomes crucial. Legitimisation is defined as the discursive process of attributing rightfulness to the exercise of political power, i.e. the attribution of legitimacy through discourse. Traditionally, legitimacy referred to an external truth outside discourse. However, Locke already noted that political power not only rests on a Treatise between the governing and governed, but also on “opinion or reputation”. The latter would decide on what counts as “vice” and what as “virtue” in a particular society, and thus determine what the partners of the societal treatise think to be rightful and just, thereby laying the foundation on which the treaty rests (Locke 1959/1894:476-9 2 ).
Such an approach does not define legitimacy in an essentialist way. It is not based upon the idea of an absolute truth as the foundation of legitimacy. Instead, it implies an open notion of legitimacy arguing that political power is legitimate if a reference to such a general truth is successfully established within a society, i.e. if legitimisation as a discursive practice is successful. Such a discursive definition of legitimacy does not mean that we cannot criticise or challenge specific notions of political power. It does, however, mean that such a critique is always dependent on prevailing rules of “opinion or reputation”, and thus cannot simply claim to represent a pre-original truth. It is in this sense that such an understanding of legitimacy also deviates from Habermas’ notion of discursive legitimacy. Although Habermas does accept the assumption of a discursive production of legitimacy, his treatment of the latter is nonetheless essentialist in that he introduces a strict formal criterion of how discourse should ideally be organised if the political power legitimised by it is indeed legitimate and does not only (falsely) claim so (Habermas 1973; 1992:50-1, 332-3 et passim; cf. Warren 1995:171). Such a formal criterion, however, does not remain at the level of pure formality, but establishes an essential condition, a claim about what truth is (Hindess 1996:91-4).
If the meaning of legitimacy is not fixed, it becomes possible to use it as an analytical category to study political order, i.e. the institutional system in which decisions are made that are binding for a certain group of people constituting the general public, however defined. The set of decision-making practices within a political order may in turn be called ‘governance’. 3 A specific form of political order, it will be argued, is intimately connected to a specific discursive construction of legitimacy. Within Europe, claims of legitimacy usually refer to elements belonging to one or a combination of the following dimensions: participation, output, and identity (Jachtenfuchs et al. 1998:417). 4 Participation includes all elements of legitimisation referring to the involvement of those governed, be it individuals or groups, in governance itself. The category of ‘output’ relies on the notion that a political order is legitimate if it offers those who are subordinated to political power a benefit that they could otherwise not obtain. Finally, references to identity argue in a more fundamental sense that a political order can only be legitimate if the governing and governed belong to the same community, whether this community is defined by reference to ethnic, lingual, functional, territorial or other criteria. The category of identity is ‘more fundamental’ in the sense that it defines the group of those who are allowed to participate and for whom a certain output is generated.
How, then, can threat be understood to be central to legitimisation? Threat is related to all three categories outlined above. In the case of identity, this relation is readily observable after what has been said above: without differentiation, there is no identity, and a common practice of differentiation is the attribution of something that is constructed as dangerous for one’s identity to something/someone foreign. The relation between output and threat is harder to grasp. But guaranteeing both external and internal security is one essential output of governance, and is—as the “shield of the republic”—aimed against threat. More generally, any promise of output, including that of welfare, implicitly posits the failure of providing the good in question as a threat. Finally, the participation dimension consists of references to the possibilities and duties of citizens to contribute to society’s further development. These possibilities and duties, in turn, again depend on the previous construction of a specific threat. To combat terrorism, the citizen has to comply strictly to constitutional principles and to fight for the constitution wherever possible; to fight back against possible military attacks, it is necessary to participate in the national army; and most generally, to combat totalitarian movements, democracy relies on a citizen’s active participation through elections and other votes.
These examples refer to the liberal-democratic state. According to the above argument, we should expect other kinds of political order to be bound up with different constructions of threat, which are in turn connected to specific conceptualisations of participation, output, and identity. In the following, it will be shown that in the debate about the future political order of the EU, a prominent construction of this order as an Economic Community follows a mode of legitimisation that differs from the modern state discourse. After this first reading, it will then be shown to what extent it also relies on a construction of threat. On the one hand, we should expect the construction of threat connected to the legitimisation of the Economic Community to be different from the one connected to a Federal State conceptualisation of European governance. The latter is chosen as a point of comparison because it is still the most widespread alternative in the political debates within the EU (Jachtenfuchs et al. 1998). Its basic rules of legitimisation, however, do not diverge that much from those of intergovernmentalist conceptions, with the difference that they refer to the individual member-state governments in the latter, and to governance at the European level in the former case. On the other hand, then, it will be demonstrated that there is also an overlap between legitimisation rules both in the case of the state and the Economic Community to the extent that they transfer difference to an outside, foreign entity. This will then provide the basis for a critique of the Economic Community’s conceptualisation.
Legitimisation of the Economic Community—First Reading
Images of Legitimate European Governance
The following are reflections on the results of a research project in which the images of a legitimate European political order in three EU member-states (Britain, France, Germany) were analysed. The project and its results are documented more extensively elsewhere, so that we may concentrate in the following on those issues that are of particular importance for the present context. 5
Images can be defined as ideas of medium-range abstraction (Jachtenfuchs 1995:434). They occupy a position between general notions of what the world is and how it functions, and ideas that prescribe concrete action. Conceptions of how governance in the EU can be organised in a legitimate way are examples for such images. On the one hand, they do not operate on the most general level of ‘the world’, but refer to a specific context. On the other hand, being as general as “Federal State” or “Economic Community”, they do not present any specific directions for immediate action, although they may imply them. Actors articulating such images do not necessarily have to be fully aware of them (Jachtenfuchs 1993:11). Images are discursively produced, and we can suppose that actors who are embedded in specific discursive contexts do not constantly problematise these contexts (and, because of their embeddedness, they could do so only to a limited extent). But even if actors are not always aware of their images, the latter nonetheless serve as a background against which the current stage of integration is read, and according to which their vision of future European governance is constructed (Diez 1996:258).
If we accept the notion that the reality of the EU is not an objective, undisputed fact but that our readings of the EU are always bound up with these discursively (re)produced images; if it is therefore impossible to simply represent the reality of the EU, then we expect the EU to be constructed very differently in various contexts (Diez 1995; 1999b). Ideally, there are four such constructions: the EU as a Federal State, as Intergovernmental Co-operation, as an Economic Community, and as a Network (Jachtenfuchs et al. 1998:418-22). As already indicated, Intergovernmental Co-operation will not be discussed in any detail in this paper, neither will Network. 6 Rather, my primary interest is with the Economic Community, since the relation between threat and political order as presented above opens up a critical perspective particularly on this image. The empirical material on which this analysis builds is taken from the German and British debates on European integration. In Germany, the image of the Federal State has been predominant since the very beginning of European integration, whereas in Britain since the 1970s the dominant image has been that of an Economic Community. 7 Given my focus on the latter, references to the German debate will be rather cursory, while the British Economic Community’s conceptualisations are presented in more detail. 8 Furthermore, it is assumed that the legitimising practices of state constructions to be well known. The interesting case in our context is the Economic Community that can no longer be captured by our state-centred frameworks, and thus deserves closer inspection.
One Country, One People, One Power: Federal State
The fundamental principle of legitimisation in the case of the (liberal-democratic) Federal State is unity. On a territory which ideally is congruent with the geographical extension of a national culture as identity, citizens defined through reference to this territory participate through elections and other voting procedures in the exercise of political power and receive as output the guarantee of physical (‘internal’ and ‘external’) and material security (welfare). Federalism does soften the criterion of unity to some extent (compared to a unitary state), but this qualification is limited in that its purpose is to make the very unity of the state possible and stabilise it (Evers 1994).
A (territorially defined) identity seems to be a fundamental prerequisite for the functioning of such a democratic state. This is undoubtedly the case in ‘ethnic’ conceptions of citizenship; but it is also true for all conceptions that assume as a necessary condition for democracy a minimum of communication. The latter would have to be built upon, but also continuously reproduce, a shared ‘life-world’, possibly created through a common constitution which citizens may relate to (Habermas 1992b; Kielmansegg 1996). Of central importance for the legitimacy of the modern state is the citizens’ participation through elections and other polls. Even in the 1970s, when welfare moved to the centre of the legitimacy debate, this basic legitimisation through participation remained untouched.
It is no surprise, then, that calls for the strengthening of European identity and an extension of the European Parliament’s competences are central to the Federal State as an image of legitimate European political order. While various working groups and committees at the EU level have been concerned with the question of European identity, 9 the Federal State image is closely linked to the criticism of a ‘democratic deficit’ in Brussels. Its advocates argue in favour of giving the European Parliament a greater say in the EU’s decision-making process and thereby bringing it closer to the status that national parliaments in Western Europe normally have. 10 At the same time, the substantial development of Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and Justice and Home Affairs (JHA), so far organised in the two intergovernmental pillars of the EU, towards supranational organisation is a request that often appears in this debate. The arguments given in favour of such a development are the need to be more powerful, efficient and reliable on the international scene for CFSP, and the possibilities of improving the security of citizens for JHA. From such a perspective, the conception of CFSP remaining outside the EC Treaty is just the beginning of a truly common foreign policy in the future, and co-operation in JHA is dissatisfying as long as it does not extend beyond an intense, but nonetheless merely intergovernmental, co-ordination. 11
Welfare without the State: Economic Community
While the European Federal State follows the requirement of territorial unity as the basic principle of statehood, the Economic Community image differs from the latter to a considerable extent. It is based on the concept of separating the governance of economic issues from the realm of political governance. This separation relies on the construction of a strict distinction between a sphere of economics with a quasi-natural development, and a sphere of politics that is dependent upon human decisions. The natural order of the economic sphere is conceptualised as a market. In other words, the Economic Community draws a distinction between market and state, in which the market ideally operates on a world-wide basis, whereas the state, which has been deprived of the governance of ‘pure economics’, is responsible for political decisions within the old territorial borders (Jachtenfuchs 1997).
This basic characteristic of the Economic Community has some important implications for the construction of political order. However, it first has to be established that the Economic Community can indeed be regarded to be a form of political order. After all, this is what advocates of such an image would contest and what seems to contradict their basic assumption about the natural quality of the market order. To counter their arguments, we can first note that the Economic Community needs governance to the extent that the functioning of the market in its natural way has to be guaranteed. Thus, there have to be binding rules that make impossible the development of monopolies, the payment of large subsidies (which would be an illegal crossing of the boundary between state and market), or other behaviour that is not compatible with a market economy. The competence to set up such binding rules is a decisive factor that sets the Economic Community apart from traditional international organisations that are always dependent (at least theoretically) on their member-states’ consent. This implies secondly that the distinction between market and state promulgated by Economic Community advocates is not a ‘natural’ one but is indeed constructed. It is the result of a decision in favour of a specific reading of ‘the world’ that has to be defended against competing conceptualisations of the economy and politics. The imposition and enforcement of the division between market and state thus is the imposition and enforcement of a specific political order.
Being a form of political order, the Economic Community needs to be legitimised. In its particular mode of legitimisation, it is of central importance that the Economic Community is a specific kind of a functional community, i.e. that its existence is based on a particular purpose (Jachtenfuchs et al. 1998:420-1). The purpose in this case is obvious: it is the provision of economic welfare, which is, according to neo-liberal thought, best accomplished through a free-market economy, for the latter is the most natural way of producing welfare (Jachtenfuchs 1997). If one follows this line of thought, the political order of an Economic Community must be legitimised first and foremost through the provision of that particular purpose, of material welfare. Participation of individual ‘market citizens’ or particular groups of persons (such as firms) is limited to their unrestricted access to the market (Mestmäcker 1978). Decision-making can be left to experts who are most familiar with how the free market naturally works and are thus able to protect it against any disturbances through effective regulatory ‘politics’ (Majone 1996).
The image of an Economic Community is particularly prominent in Britain. Ridley’s vision for Europe, for instance, is very close to the ideal-type developed above. In his reflections on his time within the Thatcher government, Ridley, the former Secretary for Transport and close advisor of Margaret Thatcher, clearly draws the distinction between state and market. “We want,” he wrote, “a Europe that practices genuine free trade, both within its boundaries and in relation to the rest of the world. We do not want to submerge our identity, nor our freedom to manage our own affairs in some European federal structure which has ultimate control of our destiny” (Ridley 1991:136). Such statements have often led to characterisations of ‘the British’ as ‘anti-European’ by those of a more federalist persuasion. This characterisation, however, rests upon the equation of a specific image of European political order (that of a Federal State) with European governance per se. Against this view, it is suggested that the image of an Economic Community is merely another conception of a legitimate political order in Europe. In a similar way, George argued that Thatcher’s speech at the European College in Bruges in 1988 cannot simply be dismissed as a speech against European integration, which has been its predominant interpretation (George 1996; Thatcher 1988). Seen from such a perspective, it comes as no surprise that Ridley welcomes the Single Market in which he sees “fair competition [...] enforced by the Commission with welcome vigour” (Ridley 1991:137). Ridley does indeed approve of the setting up of binding rules at the EU level and thus of the existence of a political order which is, of course, strictly limited: “[t]he areas of substance where decisions are imposed on member-states by majority voting are, in the main, those where it is necessary for the financing of the Community and for the enforcement of fair trading in all its manifestations” (ibid.).
Ridley was introduced first here because his image of European governance is not only very close to the ideal image of an Economic Community, but it is so in a very explicit way. But other actors in British politics have been arguing along very similar lines. A former director of the Centre for Policy Studies and also one of Thatcher’s close advisors, put the aim of erecting a “genuine internal market” with “limited government” into the centre of a “modern conservatism” (Willetts 1992:178). In the House of Commons, John Major noted during the debate on the Second European Amendment Bill in May 1992, which introduced the regulations of the Maastricht Treaty into British Law, that the future of Europe does not lie with a federal order. Rather, it would be “based on free trade and competition, on openness to our neighbours, on a proper definition of the limits of the power of the Commission” (Hansard 1992:270). In other words, it would be based on the construction of a boundary between politics and the economy, between state and market. The Conservative Party’s manifestos for the national election in 1992 and the European election in 1994 both stressed that it was Great Britain that had initiated the process leading to the Single Market. Even beyond that, it had pushed forward the allocation of new areas of competence aimed at safeguarding the implementation of the Single Market regulations to the European Court of Justice (Conservative Central Office 1992:3; 1994:9; Ridley 1991:143; Major 1994:2). Looking back at the debate over British accession to the European Community in the early 1970s, one can see that even then most of the supporters of accession were advocates of the Economic Community image. Sir Alec Douglas-Home for instance, foreign minister in Edward Heath’s government, focused his speech in favour of accession at his party’s convention in October 1971 on his assessment that Britain would subdue its own regulations only to a very limited extent, namely to achieve economic gains (Conservative Party 1971:43).
Since the 1970s, the British debate on legitimate European governance has been dominated by the economic output that was expected from membership. This is not to say that there have been no voices regarding the decision about accession and membership as fundamentally political. In their majority, however, most arguments used in favour of accession and afterwards of remaining in the EU, thereby legitimising European governance, have concentrated on the provision of material welfare. Leon Brittan who introduced the proposal on European policy at the Conservative party convention in Blackpool 1970, responded to questions about his reasons for arguing in favour of membership: “The straightforward answer is that the standard of living of the people of this country will go up much faster if we are in the Common Market than if we are outside” (Conservative Party 1970:54). In other speeches, this line of argument differs only in depth and length. One of the founding fathers of the British European Movement, Duncan Sandys, argued this way (Conservative Party 1971:36), and so did the British chief negotiator in Brussels, Geoffrey Rippon (Conservative Party 1970:60; 1971:33).
Even after Maastricht, when the debate seems to have been conducted in an increasingly rough fashion, the predominant mode of legitimisation has not substantially changed. Free trade in a European single market is seen as the “route to prosperity and job creation” (Conservative Research Department 1994:10). In the House of Commons, the positive economic developments that are attributed to EC membership become central reference points (Hansard 1992:298-9, 325). Along with this continuity, legitimisation through the guarantee of market citizens’ rights are gaining in importance. The so-called ‘Four Freedoms’ (freedom of goods and services, of persons and capital) guaranteed in Article 3c of the Treaty on the European Community (TEC) are explicitly welcomed, and the introduction of EU citizenship that builds upon such a conceptualisation of being a citizen is not seen as being in conflict with British citizenship (Conservative Central Office 1994:20; Willetts 1992:171; Conservative Research Department 1994:12). Although there are other strategies of legitimisation stressing other output factors, they do not hold such a prominent position.
The most controversial aspect of this legitimisation practice is how to draw the border between economics and politics. This is hardly surprising since it has already been pointed out that, contrary to the view of Economic Community advocates, the drawing of this boundary is a political act. Thus, whereas it seems reasonable to regard monetary union as necessary for the stability of the Economic Community in the sense that a common currency is a precondition of a real internal market, neither Ridley nor Thatcher share that understanding. “More political co-operation [intergovernmentally conceived; author’s note] was also acceptable” to Ridley because “there was no coercion involved. But the restatement of European and Monetary Union as an eventual goal” was opposed by Thatcher and her advisor (Ridley 1991:142-3). The reason for this is given a few pages later, ironically through a reference to John Maynard Keynes: “Whoever controls the currency, controls the Government” - and would have crossed the boundary between pure economics and politics (ibid. 149). Consequently, Ridley accused the Delors Report on Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) of moving beyond the target of economic integration, for “its purpose was to create a supranational authority governing a political union.” The British proposal of a ‘hard currency’, the Ecu, which conceptualised the Ecu as an alternative currency co-existing with national currencies, Ridley claimed, had been given no chance exactly because it relied on market principles and would have contradicted Delors’ central idea behind EMU (ibid. 151).
The problematic of the precarious definition of the economy/politics boundary is also present in debates on European policy within the Labour Party. Many governments within the EU had great hopes of a change of government in Britain, sometimes grounded in the assessment that a cabinet led by Tony Blair would turn out to be more federalist than its predecessor. In contrast, the present analysis suggests that the Labour government is instead articulating a variation of the Economic Community, encapsulated in the more general vision of a “Third Way” that supplements, but does not discard, the basic market conception of the economy (Blair 1998a). On the one hand, the Labour government reversed the opt-out from the Social Chapter of the Maastricht Treaty. On the other hand, while Labour’s election manifestos had stressed that to them, the EU was “more than a market” (Labour Party 1994:11), their legitimisation of European governance nonetheless centred on the single market (Labour Party 1992:2). The call for European regulations of social and environmental issues is to be understood as rather following a different construction of the boundary between economics and politics. In this conceptualisation, the market not only produces welfare, but also has negative effects on the welfare of some people, and on the environment. These consequences cannot be separated from the market and have thus to be dealt with at the European level, thereby moving some areas of politics onto the European level.
Such a reconceptualisation of the boundary between economics and politics still leaves a wide range of issues within the core realm of politics, which then have to be dealt with at the national level. Thus, CFSP and JHA should, according to Labour’s programme, remain outside of the EU’s first supranational pillar, and intergovernmentally organised (Labour Party 1995:9ff., 14ff.). Accordingly, the proposed extension of qualified majority voting is restricted to issues of social and environmental policy, and should not include “areas such as fiscal and budgetary policy, foreign and security issues, changes to the Treaty of Rome, and other areas of key national interest” (Labour Party 1994:22).
Does the recent British initiative to strengthen common European defence, which resulted in the British-French joint declaration of St. Malo in December 1998, signal a fundamental change in this respect, in light of the debates surrounding European engagement in former Yugoslavia? The exact significance of that initiative is not yet entirely clear. On the one hand, representatives of the Blair government, including the Prime Minister himself, insist on a new role for the EU in the international scene, that it “must be able to take decisions and approve military action where the NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] alliance as a whole is not engaged in order to make its voice heard in international affairs” (Quin 1999). The usage of “its voice” and also of “we” in many places of the same document suggests that ‘Europe’ is now more often conceptualised as having an identity beyond the market than previously. On the other hand, it is not quite clear just how far Europe’s defence identity would go. It is, for instance, immediately added that NATO as such would not be weakened but rather strengthened (Blair 1998b). Even in the summit declaration itself, the intergovernmental set-up of CFSP is stressed, and it is made clear that the “reinforcement of European solidarity must take into account the various positions of European states”. 12 As such, the Labour government’s defence offensive may well just continue a rather traditional policy stance to encourage increased defence co-operation, but within intergovernmental boundaries. If this is the basic line of argument, then we are not witnessing an entirely novel development. The argument was already explicit in earlier policy statements by the Blair government (Cook 1997). It is only in the economic field that governance in Europe as a force of its own is not only acknowledged but also encouraged to “improve Europe’s quality of life,” as Blair put it in a speech at The Hague (Blair 1998b). Given that New Labour sees a common European currency less as an identity and politics issue than as a technical instrument to strengthen economic performance, it has also made it repeatedly clear, following the guidelines set out by Chancellor Gordon Brown in October 1997, that it would like to see Britain becoming a member of ‘Euroland’ “if the economic benefits are clear and unambiguous” (Quin 1999; Brown 1997).
In general, the current majority within Labour deviates from the ideal version of the Economic Community as outlined above in that it does not unconditionally accept neo-liberal thought. Nonetheless, their image of Europe can be characterised as an Economic Community. The dominant mode of legitimisation stresses the importance of economic welfare as an output of European governance. The first three targets of further European integration given in the report of the Labour Party’s position towards the Intergovernmental Conference leading to the Treaty of Amsterdam are concerned with economic issues (Labour Party 1995:3-4). The qualification on this picture that other elements of legitimisation also play a role applies to Labour, too, and to a greater extent than to the Conservatives. But it also implies that these elements (e.g. better possibilities of participation by strengthening the European Parliament as well as giving national parliaments a say in EU matters) are secondary to economic output.
Legitimisation of the Economic Community, Second Reading
The Shield Creating a Collective Self
The comprehensive legitimisation of the Federal State through participation, output and identity is intertwined with a comprehensive construction of threat. Difference is constructed as threat and as something foreign. Threats to the political order are the migration of asylum-seekers and people searching for employment (Kohl 1993:19); the fundamentalism of ‘religious fanatics’ in the South East of Europe as part of the “clash of civilisations” (Huntington 1993); the economic competition with the USA, Japan and to an increasing extent countries from South and East which are able to produce goods less expensively; international crime which is often seen as having its roots in the East (a priority issue in the election campaign in Germany for the European Elections in 1994); the cultural dominance of Hollywood and Billboard (see the continuous proposals of quotas for European music on European radio programmes); etc. 13
This list could easily be extended. Through such discursive practices, a European identity is constantly being reproduced by setting it against an Other which is constructed as a threat to European identity. The output of governance is security as a defence against such threats by intensifying external border controls (such as post-Schengen), setting up a European Army (by bringing the Western European Union into the EU structure), or introducing quotas for TV and radio stations (or founding a “truly European TV channel”, as the Adonnino committee suggested 14 ). The citizens of such a Federal State are then expected to fulfil their duty by voting in European elections, employing European workers instead of ‘foreigners’, serving in the military, not protecting asylum-seekers who have been denied asylum, etc. Through such citizen behaviour, in turn, the constructions of threat are reified, and the political order is strengthened and legitimised by people’s day-to-day practices.
The Ordering Threat of the Economic Community
At first sight, the ordering threat of the Economic Community is constructed quite differently. The predominant threat seems to be located inside. Focus of the debate is the Brussels bureaucracy that is said to act in a state-like manner. Excessive spending of money in the Community’s budget is one issue to be fought against (Major 1994:6), another is the contradiction between internal freedom of trade and external protectionism (Thatcher 1993:536, 548). This danger is different from the construction of danger in the image of the Federal State in quite an obvious way. In a similar argument, it is claimed that the aim of European politics cannot be to protect European companies with a wall of tariffs, but to open up possibilities to build alliances with US or Japanese firms (Tugendhat 1986:294-5).
Following the neo-liberal logic of a retreating state, John Major in his programmatic speech in Leiden in September 1994, suggested that European integration is threatened by a “futuristic grand design” and should pay more attention to a flexible and programmatic way of organising politics (Major 1994:2). In the same way, Willetts called it a “terrible mistake for the European Community to embark upon grandiose schemes of political, economic or monetary integration. [...] Instead of the mutually beneficial and integrative experience of the market, there would be the corrosive and destructive zero-sum game of big government” (Willetts 1992:179). The flexibilisation suggested by Major might well be read as a limited form of variable geometry defined as the enduring and supranationally organised coexistence of various functional communities with diverging membership. 15
Such a construction of threat has to be distinguished from what Campbell in the case of the United States has called “ridding America of ‘Confucianism’”, which is a classic example of the attribution of danger to an outside foreign influence (Campbell 1994:155). Rather, our case could be summarised as ‘ridding Europe of Europeanism’. 16 Behind such a construction of threat, one can easily detect the construction of a British, as opposed to (continental) European, identity. Whenever the image of an Economic Community appears in the British debate on European integration, it goes along with a reference to the typical British conception of politics as pragmatic, in stark contrast to the idealised, institutionalist and utopian style of Continental Europeans. Furthermore, British state identity is not abandoned in the Economic Community image. It is constantly reconstructed, since the state remains part of the overall political order, being responsible for governing the political aspects. Thus, the threats of terrorism, drug traffic, and international crime remain threats to the political order of the nation-state. Contrary to the construction of threat in the case of the Federal State, these threats are no danger for Europe as such, but for Britain. It is only because they are organised on an international scale that national services have to co-operate with each other to fight them (Conservative Central Office 1992:3-4; 1994:41-2). The constant stress of retaining national border controls fits well into this image of repelling outside threats to rescue not a European, but a British, self. Having said that, the following quote from Willetts is hardly surprising: “The real conservative fear,” writes he, “must be that our sense of Britishness, even, dare one say it, our Englishness, is eroded by the EC” (Willetts 1992:169). This is ammunition for those who continue to see the British debate dominated by Euroskeptic voices putting “Englishness” at the centre of their image of Europe (Risse 1999).
Such an assessment neglects that the Economic Community’s political order is an ambivalent order which sustains elements of traditional modern statehood, while at the same time organising a particular, functionally-defined realm in a supranational way. Thus, we find ambiguities in the construction of threat that has to legitimise both the traditional state and the functional community in a strict sense. Besides the threat to Britain that needs to be tackled on a co-operative basis at best, there is also a threat to Europe articulated in the image of the Economic Community. This latter construction of threat is visible whenever there are references to the competitiveness not of Britain but of Europe as a whole. In Major’s Leiden speech, for instance, the former Prime Minister emphasised: “I have argued continually that the European Union must improve its competitiveness” (Major 1994:2). And the Conservative election manifesto for the European Elections 1994 stated: “Conservatives want a competitive Europe.” Otherwise, Europe would be “outstripped by our trading rivals” (Conservative Central Office 1994:15).
Similarly, the central European policy document of the Thatcher government in the 1980s, presented at the European Council in Fontainebleau at the end of June 1984, explained the requirement of establishing a “genuine common market in goods and services” with the need to revitalise European industry for competition “with the United States, Japan, and the newly industrialised countries” (British Government 1984:75). The “European firms”, according to the government’s argument, should profit from competition within the Single Market, which would make them “compete and co-operate in a way which will enhance their ability to match the performance of their competitors” outside Europe (ibid.). The US, a partner in military alliances, becomes a threat in the sphere of the economy: “Europe must impress on the US that unilateral American action, e.g. on technology transfers, extra-territoriality, unitary taxation and, above all, protection for US industries will put the success of Alliance consultation and co-ordination at risk” (British Government 1984:77). This line of argument is still present in today’s governmental speeches. To Blair, for instance, the major issue facing the EU besides enlargement is “how we build an economically competitive and prosperous Europe for the future” (Blair 1998a), and Foreign Secretary Robin Cook praised the results of the June 1998 European Council in Cardiff as “a practical programme for economic reform which will help to keep Europe competitive” (Cook 1998).
The loss of competitiveness against international competitors is a threat that is constructed as a danger for the whole of Europe. It is a threat that orders Europe. There are clear connections to the three dimensions of legitimacy that were the focus of my first reading of the legitimisation of the Economic Community. The establishment of a single, free internal market for the generation of welfare is a response to the impending material decline. The individual’s participation necessary for the functioning of such a market is the participation of a market citizen, a homo oeconomicus acting efficiently and productively according to the principle of economic rationality. Identity is hardly mentioned, since this citizen is first and foremost an individual. My second reading has shown, however that, contrary to all rhetoric moves, the market is not conceptualised as being without any borders. Rather, due to the construction of a threat through international competition, the market citizen is established as a European market society citizen co-existing with his or her identity as a British citizen.
The Returning Ghost: A Critique of the Economic Community
At least up to Maastricht, but to some extent still today, the current stage of European integration is widely described in terms close to the Economic Community. The evaluation of this stage of integration, however, is contested. Is the Single Market, and more recently EMU, already the fulfilment and final stage of European integration that only needs the correction of faults within the Market’s construction? Or are they only one step further towards a United States of Europe? The latter assessment criticises the stage of integration in at least three respects: the democratic deficit, the insufficient capabilities of action in international matters, and a fundamental critique of the neo-liberal model of the economy which was accused of painting a uni-dimensional, market-based picture of humanity, caring too little about social injustice. To some extent, New Labour’s image of Europe is nothing other than an Economic Community combined with reactions to this latter criticism. In any case, this critique in its overall direction claims that the Economic Community is moving too far away from the state. Against, or rather in addition to such a reading, I would like to argue that the Economic Community is staying too close to modern statehood.
There is an obvious and relatively less obvious claim present in such an argument. The obvious claim is that the state is still responsible within the Economic Community for organising the ‘political’. Furthermore, and less obviously, this image is bound up with a construction of threat that, despite all its differences to the construction of threat in the case of the Federal State, shows important similarities with the latter. The political organisation of the economy builds on the construction of threat, of ‘us’ vs. ‘them’, of ‘inside’ vs. ‘outside’. Thus, the Economic Community discourse departs from the state-oriented principle of unity, but at the same time it does not discard it, and still employs a practice of inclusion and exclusion. Furthermore, difference inside is conceptualised as threat (and not as mere otherness), since despite the aim of abandoning all ‘grand designs’, the envisaged political order leaves little space for alternative modes of living. It can only be upheld by homines oeconomici, although this is somewhat watered-down in New Labour’s version.
The basic underlying problem of the Economic Community image results from an ambiguity within liberal thought. On the one hand, liberals have always argued for open markets. On the other hand, few of them have discarded territorial borders and the conceptualisation of politics in terms of a territorially circumscribed subjectivity. Exceptions such as the liberal anarchist de Jasay end up in a conception of politics “against the state” putting the rational market individual into an even more central place than the Economic Community discourse (de Jasay 1997). Those following a less radical line follow a double-track argument, such as the one outlined above. While in theory, a global market would be the ideal solution, it has to be compromised by the economic interest of one’s own society. The market order thus needs borders, and these borders are constantly recreated by references to competitiveness against other societies.
Thus, this reflection upon the relationship between threat and political order allows us to draw the conclusion that although the EU as an Economic Community might be called a ‘post-modern polity’ in Ruggie’s sense, with the co-existence, mutual constitution, and interdependence of various centres of power and decision-making (Ruggie 1993), it is not a ‘post-modern polity’ in the sense that it would fulfil Campbell’s hope for radically new ways of constructing identity and difference. The transformation of geographical borders would be bound by the boundaries in our thinking. The ghost that seemed to have been chased away (if not on purpose), returns again. One might argue that it has lost some teeth. The inside/outside struggles within the territory of today’s EU, for instance, which used to lead to seemingly perennial wars, have been transformed in a process of Europeanisation in which ‘Europe’ has become an essential part of national identities, thereby creating a zone of peace (Wæver 1998; Thody 1998:91-2). Against this, trade wars with the United States or other entities seem to be of much less relevance, particularly since it seems unlikely for them to be transformed into ‘hot’ wars.
However, the need to define the borders of a society, and be it the individualist market society of an Economic Community, has consequences for those struggling to become part of it, and in particular for those located at its borders. In his speech at The Hague, Tony Blair emphasised that “a Europe of two halves—haves and have-nots—is both morally unacceptable and economically and politically dangerous” (Blair 1998a). This is not a statement to disagree with but it does raise one major question: Who actually belongs to this Europe and is thus allowed into the market? Europe is not a self-defined area. It is constructed in our discourse. This is decisive for policy-making. Some Eastern European states have been able to make a pretty good case for their belonging to ‘Europe’. After all, this was what the EU members had always claimed during the Cold War, promising eventual membership (Fierke and Wiener 1999). But even so, the markers are contested. The strategy for potential membership candidates has thus been to present themselves as being ‘European’, whereas their neighbours to the east were at least less so (Neumann 1998). This struggle to be inside is even harder for states adjacent to the current EU with a more contested lineage of being constructed as ‘European’. Turkey is a clear example of this. Although there are good grounds why full membership of Turkey is not necessarily desirable both for Turkey and the EU, the pains at which Turkish politicians are to construct their country as belonging to Europe is in part the effect of old inside/outside distinctions at work (Buzan and Diez 1999). While Turkey is an associate-member with a free-trade area agreement, this is not the same as being part of the system of market governance within the political order of the EU, as those remembering the debate about the erection of a Free Trade Area as an alternative to EEC (European Economic Community) membership in Britain and elsewhere will testify (Holt 1983:45-6).
The issue, then, is why it would be “morally unacceptable and economically and politically dangerous” to leave states whose construction as being ‘European’ is successful, outside the EU, while it would be acceptable and not as dangerous to do the same with states less successful in that respect, but nonetheless on the border of the EU. The ambiguity of liberalism in the context of the Economic Community’s political order makes the construction of the ‘other’ stick. Arguing on the basis of open markets on the one hand, and competitiveness and Europeaness on the other, the Economic Community discourse has to draw a border between Europeans and non-Europeans. This border excludes “have-nots” from European governance, and will always fall into two halves.
This critique cannot be countered by the introduction of state-oriented means. The latter would only strengthen the construction of difference as threat. Rather, such a perspective would call for reconceptualising difference and identity, threat and political order in still novel ways, ways that are neither captured by the Federal State nor by the Economic Community image. They might seem as yet unthinkable, but traits can be detected in the development of more flexible institutional arrangements, of new transnational identities, and of what one may call “Network” governance (Diez 1997). To develop such an alternative is a task going beyond the scope of this article. But questioning the established borders of our discourse on the future of Europe’s political order does not have to lead to a “yawning vacuum” (Kothari 1993). Instead, it may well serve to clear the ground for new alternatives.
January 1999
Endotes
*: An earlier version of this article was presented at the International Studies Association Annual Convention in Toronto, March 1997, and at a workshop organised by the German Political Science Association’s International Relations Section in Arnoldshein, February 1997. Research was funded by the German Science Foundation, DFG, and through a Chevening Scholarship from the British Council, the support of both of which is gratefully acknowledged. The author would also like to thank Irena Brinar and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their comments on the earlier draft. Back.
**: Thomas Diez is Research Fellow at the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute (COPRI) and currently external lecturer at the Universities of Århus and Copenhagen, Denmark. Back.
Note 1: Central works in this debate are Connolly (1991), Campbell (1992), and Walker (1993). For an introductory overview, see George (1994: Ch. 8). Back.
Note 2: IInd Book, Ch. XXVIII, §§ 10-12; cf. Hindess (1996:58-63). Back.
Note 3: See, for instance, the definition in Jachtenfuchs and Kohler-Koch (1996). Back.
Note 4: For participation (which Scharpf labels input) and output, see in particular Scharpf (1970). Back.
Note 5: The project was carried out at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) by Markus Jachtenfuchs, Sabine Jung, and myself, and was supervised by Beate Kohler-Koch. It was financed by the German Science Foundation (DFG). Its results are summarised in Jachtenfuchs et al. (1998), Diez (1999a), and Jung (1999). Back.
Note 6: For the Network, see, however, Diez (1996; 1997). Back.
Note 7: It has to be noted, however, that the Federal States’ position in Germany is, or at least used to be, much more dominant than the position of the Economic Community in Britain, where the debate is characterised by a much bigger multitude of images. Back.
Note 8: For more extensive references to the German debate, see Diez (1995). Back.
Note 9: See, for instance, the Document on European Identity, agreed upon by the Heads of Government of EC member-states during their summit in Copenhagen 1973 (reprinted in Gasteyger 1994:302-5), and the suggestions made by the Adonnino-Committee (reprinted in Europa-Archiv 40(1985)22, D 606-621). In Germany, too, there are constant calls for a strengthening of the European identity (Diez 1996:269). Back.
Note 10: See the enormous number of references made in this respect during the German Bundestag’s second reading of the Maastricht Treaty Bill on 7 February 1992, Stenographische Berichte des Deutschen Bundestages, XII. Wahlperiode, 10811-10890. Back.
Note 11: See, for CFSP, the resolution of the German Bundestag on the Maastricht Treaty, reprinted in Läufer (1993:285-8), and for JHA, Kohl (1993). Back.
Note 12: Franco-British Summit—Joint Declaration on European Defence, 4 December 1998, available at http://www.ambafrance.org.uk/db.phtml?id=1950. Back.
Note 13: To the extent that the construction of a European identity appears in Campbell’s work, he is largely concerned with this identity creation referring to a Federal State (Campbell 1992:250-1). Back.
Note 14: See the reference to the Adonnino Committee in Note 9. Back.
Note 15: My interpretation in this respect differs from that of Stubb who sees Major’s policy not as advocating a Europe of variable geometry, but a “Europe à la carte” which would be organised in a very traditional intergovernmental way (Stubb 1996:292). Back.
Note 16: There is, in fact, another discursive strand along these lines running through both Federal State and Economic Community discourses, but with different consequences. This argument constructs Europe’s war-ridden past as a threat to Europe’s peaceful present and future (Wæver 1996). The practice of legitimisation is crucial in translating this threat construction into requirements for political order—intergovernmental in the case of the Economic Community, supranational in the case of the Federal State image. Back.