A Political Process

The dominant popular and political narrative of European integration is a “progressive” one: it is what the British historian Herbert Butterfield called “Whig” history.Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: Bell, 1931; Pelican, 1973). The building / construction of Europe is seen in teleological terms as a story of the evolution of the European project from the dark excesses of nationalism, which culminated in Fascism, to the unique supranational institutional and political structure that exists today. It is admitted that the “process” (a word that conveys a certain inevitability) was not always smooth. It was obstructed, every step of the way, by the “Tories,” i.e. by the opponents of the project: nationalists, “Eurosceptics,” the Marxist left. Yet the “Whigs” prevailed in the end. The EEC became the EC in gradual steps and the EC gave way to the EU, which was the answer the European Project found to the great challenges posed by the end of the Cold War, the unification of Germany, and the demise of communism.This is a deliberate oversimplification to make a point. For more detail, see Mark Gilbert, “Narrating the Process: Questioning the Progressive Story of European Integration,” Journal of Common Market Studies 46, No. 3 (2008): 641–62 and, more recently, Mark Gilbert, “Historicizing European Integration History,” European Review of International Studies 8 (2021): 221–40.

In my general history of European integration, I tried to tell the story, by contrast, as a one of perfectly comprehensible and legitimate conflicts.Mark Gilbert, European Integration: A Political History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020, 2nd edition). Every stage of the European “construction” has been characterized by disputes and arguments over what to do. This was perfectly normal since the “process” has, at every point, created disruption for domestic political arrangements: to the policies, institutions, and political cultures of the member states. It was not a small matter for France to accept the end of industrial protectionism in the 1960s, or for Denmark to choose Europeanization, or for Britain, which possessed a rational agricultural policy until it joined, to accept the “producerist” logic of the CAP. It is entirely normal, not evidence of nationalism, or “Euroscepticism,” that such changes provoked dissent, disagreement, and even outright political turmoil. Indeed, dissent often led to worthwhile outcomes. De Gaulle’s hostility to the Hallstein Commission’s centralizing tendencies, for instance, led directly to the “Luxembourg Compromise” and, ultimately, to the creation of the European Council. I think it can be said with confidence that the “European Project” would never have survived the 1970s and early 1980s without this innovation.

Daniele Pasquinucci has argued in a thoughtful series of articles, and now an important book, that even ardent European federalists – professors in the Italian university, for instance – could rapidly become critical of Europeanization when it touched their privileges and institutional prerogatives.Daniele Pasquinucci, Il frutto avvelenato: il vincolo europeo e la critica all'Europa (Milan: Mondadori / Le Monnier, 2022). His scrupulous research on micro-historical case studies underlines the key point that I am making in this first paragraph: European integration is above all political, and politics is (among other things) dissent over what, in any given case, is the right course of action. European integration has from the first generated political controversy.It is for this reason that the concept of “soft Euroscepticism” is a misnomer. The only “Euroscepticism” worthy of the name is so-called “hard Euroscepticism,” i.e. the hostility on principle to the whole notion of supranational government in Europe displayed by romantic nationalists, illiberal democrats, fascists, and communist nostalgists. To argue that all those who criticize the EU’s policies are “Eurosceptic,” however limited and thoughtful their dissent may be, is deeply undemocratic. As a proud British patriot, I would hate to be called “Anglosceptic” because I do not sympathize with many of the policies that Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss have advanced (or, for that matter, that Prime Minister Keir Starmer will advance). To criticize a given EU policy, to doubt its utility, to argue against an extension of European competences, is not evidence of hostility to the project as a whole, or not necessarily. For “hard” and “soft” Euroscepticism, see the well-known work by Aleks Szczerbiak and Paul Taggart, especially “The Party Politics of Euroscepticism in EU member and Candidate States,” Sussex European Institute, 2003.

From EC to EU

In the case of the transition from the EC to the EU, which is what we are discussing in this conference, controversy was both inevitable and justified, or so I would contend. The decision to deepen European integration and to create the EU before widening membership to the former communist states was a bold one. I’m not an expert on the growing literature as to why this decision was taken, but I do know two things: (1) it would not have been taken had there not been a “shift in mood” in the 1980s towards great confidence in the future of the European Project; (2) some of the twelve member states were not remotely ready for it.

The high point of the notion of the inexorability of the European construction comes in the late 1980s. The 1992 Initiative, the Delors’ presidency, and the Franco-German accord following the failure of Mitterrand’s attempt to build socialism in one country, gave the “European Project” renewed vitality. Americans, especially, were struck from 1988 onwards by the emergence of a potential European superpower.This is the topic of my “A Shift in Mood: The 1992 Initiative and Changing U.S. Perceptions of the European Community, 1988–1989,” in European Integration and the Atlantic Community, eds. Kiran Klaus Patel and Ken Weisbrode (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 243–64. The late 1980s were a time of extraordinary confidence among European leaders about the prospects of European integration, and about its capacity to resolve problems. They believed, for instance that the crisis of disintegrating Yugoslavia could be resolved, or at any rate, softened by the adoption of the Community method.

They also reached for the tool of “more Europe” when the continent faced the unexpectedly swift collapse of communism and the reunification of Germany.

For precisely this reason, I don’t agree with Kiran Patel when he suggests, in his excellent book, Project Europe, that the TEU “is not the absolute watershed it is often said to be.”Kiran Klaus Patel, Project Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 270. Maastricht, I think, was a leap into the dark that had immense consequences. The treaty:

Formalized the European Council's role as a de facto cabinet unaccountable to either the EP, or national parliaments, or the Court of Justice, to make strategic decisions; Created the procedure by which monetary policy would be centralized in the hands of unelected officials and national monetary symbols would be abolished; Created European citizenship; Gave further institutional power to the European Parliament, while failing to make MEPS accountable; Guaranteed high (and expensive) levels of social and environmental protection via the “Social Chapter”; Made Justice and Home Affairs the “second pillar” of the new EU; Coordinated foreign policy decision-making;

Patel relativizes the TEU because he is thinking of it institutionally. Yet he himself also argues (rightly) that historians of contemporary Europe need to study the impact European integration has had on the member states a good deal more than we have so far. The TEU’s impacts were vast (and often positive). In the economic organization of the continent, on the candidate countries, on the domestic politics of the existing member states, the acceleration of the European Project represented by the TEU made a major difference. It was not only a leap in the dark, but a step on a climb that not everybody was ready to undertake, or physically fit enough to attempt.

The impact of the TEU on the political systems of some member states was immediate. The Danes rejected the treaty almost immediately, and France came within 1 percent of doing the same in September 1992. The two countries’ referendums are usually depicted as evidence of widespread “Euroscepticism” among the Danes and the French: actually, what they show is perfectly natural dissent when gigantic political changes are administered “top down” without democratic consultation.

In both Denmark and France, the TEU (and the follow-up treaties) acted as a catalyst for shifts in the party system. In Denmark, the Danish Peoples’ Party (DPP) was formed in the wake of the TEU and ever since opposition to the EU has been part of its “identitarian” platform. This party has been in eclipse since 2019, not least because more mainstream parties have stolen its anti-immigrant positions, but at its peak it was second party in the elections of June 2015 (21 percent).For the DPP, see Thorsten Borring Olesen, “Danish Euroscepticism and its Changing Faces / Phases, 1945–2018,” in Euroscepticisms: The Historical Roots of a Political Challenge, eds. Mark Gilbert and Daniele Pasquinucci (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2020), 140–63. In France, the Front National was given fresh vigour by its opposition to the TEU. In both countries, nationalism increased after the creation of the EU.

Of course, I would not claim that the acceleration of the European Project was the only cause of the emergence of political movements in Western Europe that are right-wing nationalist. It was, however, one reason, and a big one. In the 1990s, a line was crossed in the minds of many voters. Maastricht set in motion a dynamic that was bound to arouse long-term objections towards the European Project as a whole. West Europeans were more conscious of national identity (and the national interest) than Brussels (or academics) realized. When further deepening took place, above all at Lisbon, “hard” Euroscepticism was ignited in several West European countries.

I want to take this argument further by looking more in depth at two other countries: the United Kingdom and Italy. I would argue that, for different reasons, the democracies of both countries were unprepared for the innovations launched at Maastricht and, as a result, membership of the EU, while it may have been economically beneficial, has fomented nationalism in both countries.

The United Kingdom

From the outset, Britain had been bitterly divided over the question of membership of the EC. The three biggest parliamentary battles, in terms of hours of debate, breakdown of party loyalties among MPs, and public spillover, in contemporary British history are: (1) the Brexit Withdrawal Bill in 2019; (2) the ratification of the TEU; (3) the debate over the European Communities legislation 1971—72.

The principal cause of the division in the UK has always been loss of national sovereignty. This objection on principle to European integration in the 1970s crossed party lines: the original opposition to membership of the EC was carried on by Conservative MPs and intellectuals such as Enoch Powell, but also by many left-wing intellectuals, notably Michael Foot, Tony Benn, and Douglas Jay.On Powell and Jay, see my chapter in Euroscepticisms: The Historical Roots of a Political Challenge, 121–39. For background: Paul Corthorn, Enoch Powell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). Kevin Hicks and Jasper Miles, “Social Democratic Euroscepticism: Britain’s Neglected Tradition,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 20, No. 4 (2018).

These men of principle (there was one prominent woman, Barbara Castle) failed to convince public opinion of depression-hit, declinist Britain that EC membership was a bad thing. In the 1975 referendum, 67 percent voted to stay in, though few were enthusiasts, and even fewer understood the political dimension of the EC Project. It was regarded as a “Common Market.”

After Maastricht the EU became a fundamental issue for a considerable part of the Conservative Party. Prime minister John Major only narrowly managed to ratify the TEU in the face of a rebellion by his own backbenchers. In his biography Major asks, plaintively:

How had so much bad blood welled up so fast? How had members of what had so recently been a winning team turned against each other, plotted against each other, betrayed each other, careless of the opportunity this was offering to the common enemy?John Major, John Major: The Autobiography (London: HarperCollins, 1999), 384. Chapter 15, “The Bastards,” is the best account of the internecine war in the Conservative Party over ratification of the TEU.

The TEU ruined Major’s premiership, and after he was defeated by Tony Blair in the 1997 elections, the Conservative Party became partisans in the cause of securing a “better deal” from the EU. All the subsequent leaders of the Conservative Party post-Major: Hague, Duncan-Smith, Howard, Cameron, and May were “Reluctant Europeans,” as, incidentally, was Labour’s Gordon Brown. They supported British membership, but only if Britain’s opt-outs and exemptions remained and were extended. [Johnson, Truss and Sunak are post-Brexit leaders]

Why did this happen? (1) The Press. Most of Britain’s leading newspapers were hard Eurosceptic. The Daily Telegraph provided the most intellectual ballast, but its identification with a white, upper middle-class, cricket-playing English Britain is absolute. Boris Johnson was a star columnist for the Daily Telegraph. The Daily Mail, one of Europe’s best-selling newspapers, reached “middle England” and openly described the EU as a “Fourth Reich.” The Daily Express and Sun reached working class audiences. Hard Euroscepticism accordingly became “mainstream” in public discourse.Nicholas Startin, “Have We Reached a Tipping Point? The Mainstreaming of Euroscepticism in the UK,” International Political Science Review 36, No. 3 (2015). Also, Oliver Daddow, “The UK Media and ‘Europe’: From permissive consensus to destructive dissent,” International Affairs 88, No. 6 (2012): 1219–36. (2) The EU was regarded as being anti-Thatcherite. Indeed, the lady herself became an open critic of the EU after long being a supporter of the European Community. (3) The anti-marketeers of the 1970s had been proven right. It is important to recognize this point. The EU had leeched away parliamentary sovereignty, Germany had become primus inter pares, many policies that had once been the prerogatives of nation-states were now being decided collectively in Brussels.

The enormous rise in EU migration to the UK after 2005 plus the Lisbon Treaty 2005—9, upon which the Labour government refused to allow a referendum, were the last straws. Reluctant Europeanism morphed into populist nationalism for many British voters and able demagogues like Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson mobilized voters with other legitimate grievances. Together with the authentic hardcore Eurosceptics there was suddenly a majority against membership in 2016.Justin Frosini and Mark Gilbert, “The Brexit Car-crash: Using E.H. Carr to Explain Britain’s Choice to Leave the European Union in 2016,” Journal of European Public Policy 27 (2020): 761–78.

The crucial transition point was immediately after the TEU. Between 1992 and 1999 the Conservative Party was transformed from being a broadly pro-Europe party into a party that regarded Brussels at best with suspicion and at worst as an enemy of the British people. Since the Conservative Party is the principal party of government in the UK and is the party that took the UK into Europe, this mattered enormously.

Italy

The case of Italy is in some ways even more interesting. The TEU required Italy’s political class to do something that it was incapable of doing. Namely, if it wanted to be a member of the euro, be like the Germans, or the Dutch. Keep public spending under strict control, implement efficiency improvements to make the economy more competitive, go down to the gym and get on the treadmill. Numerous Italian scholars and policy analysts argued passionately that the “vincolo europeo” would compel Italy’s leaders to reverse the fiscal incontinence of the 1980s and early 1990s when the Italian state ran annual deficits of 10—12 percent of GDP and interest rates on medium-term government debt reached 15 percent. They were wrong.

Except from a strenuous effort under Romano Prodi to meet the Maastricht criteria by 1999, an effort that was rewarded by his defenestration from government by the left-wing parties of his coalition, no elected Italian government has addressed the need for a better-run state. Every now and then, when crisis looms, technocrats (Dini, Prodi-Ciampi, Monti, most recently Draghi) replace political leaders, convince Brussels and Berlin that positive things are being done, and then have the rug pulled from under them by the coalitions supporting them in parliament.Mark Gilbert, “Kampf um Rom,” Internationale Politik 75 (September 2020): 102–07.

The biggest problem has been debt reduction. All the governments of the Second Republic, caught between their obligations to Europe, and their chronic political instability, compromised on ending fiscal incontinence, by not taking the painful measures necessary to eliminate its “slag heap” of debt.For the metaphor of a debt slag heap, see my “Italy Enjoys a Political Lull, but Storm Clouds are Gathering,” World Politics Review, 14 July 2016, http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/19354/italy-enjoys-a-political-lull-but-storm-clouds-are-gathering. The national debt inched downwards from 120 percent of GDP at the time of the Maastricht Treaty to just over 100 percent in 2008. Italy never seemed likely to reach the 60 percent figure mandated by the Stability and Growth Pact. The subsequent Euro crisis, which led to higher bond yields on Italian debt, and the need to cope with the costs of Covid, propelled the figure to almost 160 percent. Servicing the debt has obliged high taxes, low public investment, and stagnating demand.

Italy could only have eliminated or reduced the debt mountain bequeathed by the 1980s and early 90s by some combination of higher inflation to reduce the debt’s value (impossible with the BCE in the early 2000s), by more rapid growth (this required sweeping measures of liberalization that no government was strong enough to implement), by higher and more equitably distributed taxes (politically impossible for all the elected governments since 1992) and by the efforts of innovative, hardworking exporters (who fortunately exist in large numbers and have kept the country afloat). The option of devaluation plus temporary austerity to boost competitiveness was taken off the table by euro membership.

The political system was the root cause of Italy’s ability to fulfill its euro membership pledges. The TEU was signed by foreign minister Gianni De Michelis (PSI: Socialist) literally the same week that an obscure PSI functionary in Milan was arrested for taking bribes. It was the event that triggered the collapse of the Italian First Republic during the tangentopoli scandal (1992—94). The Italy that ratified the TEU and negotiated the subsequent Amsterdam Treaty was one engaged in rebuilding its political system: one where an entrepreneur like Silvio Berlusconi could invent a party and see it reach 30 percent in the polls in a few days. In 1996, the Lega Nord even promised to invent a new country (“Padania”) and was rewarded with 10 percent of the national vote.

The party system that had to meet the “Maastricht criteria” was hyper-fragmented. Romano Prodi’s winning Ulivo Coalition (1996—98) contained Social Democrats, Liberal Progressives, Conservatives, Christian Democrats and depended on the external support of Communist Refoundation. His 2006—2008 coalition was even more variegated. Berlusconi’s right-wing coalition, the “People of Freedoms,” at various times between 1994 and 2011 contained Liberals, the Lega Nord, the “ex-Fascists,” Christian Democrats of at least three different kinds, and, for a while, the Radicals. Moreover, the Italian constitution, with its strong bicameral parliament, makes passing contentious legislation very difficult.

The EU imposed technocratic government of Mario Monti on Italy in 2011 to prevent the financial markets from turning Italy into Greece. His emergency government was followed by three PD (Partito Democratico)-led governments (Letta—Renzi—Gentiloni, 2013—16) and then in March 2018, there was a huge popular rebellion that brought Matteo Salvini’s Lega and the Five Stars Movement (M5S) to power: two populist, vocally anti-EU parties obtained over 50 percent of the vote between them. Salvini salvaged the former Lega Nord from irrelevance and scandal by reinventing it as a nationalist party representing the whole of Italy in a crusade against the euro.Marco Brunazzo and Mark Gilbert, “Insurgents against Brussels: Euroscepticism and the right-wing populist turn of the Lega Nord since 2013,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 22 (2017): 624─41. The truth is that Italy’s failure to prosper inside the EU has awoken nationalism, as the election of Giorgia Meloni has demonstrated.

Italian nationalism is much stronger than people realized back in the 1990s, with the important caveat that Italian populists are more pragmatic than non-Italians have generally recognized. Populists in Italy have waved the flag, and condemned the EU’s meddling in Italian affairs, as a way of mobilizing the support of the discontented but have also been much more cautious than British Conservatives once they were in power. The M5S, the most openly anti-EU party in Italy for many years, has reinvented itself as a critical supporter of the EU since 2018; in power, the Lega has become a “reluctant European” party, while Giorgia Meloni regards guarded support for the EU as a way of bringing “Brothers of Italy” into the European mainstream and to earn greater respectability. Italian Euroscepticism may have peaked in 2018. The lure of political power, plus the fact that Italy has become the largest beneficiary of the funds distributed by the EU’s “next generation” recovery plan for Europe, able to spend more than €200 billion by 2026, has softened the Italian parties’ hard Eurosceptic rhetoric. For a description of the domestic politics of the adoption of the Recovery Plan, see Erik Jones, ‘Italy and Europe: From Competence to Solidarity to Competence,’ Contemporary Italian Politics 13, No. 2 (2021): 196–209. There is a rapidly growing literature in Italian on this topic. Whether by accident or design, the EU has bought itself back into Italian hearts.

Despite this caveat, it cannot be disputed that Italy in 1999 was manifestly unfit, politically and institutionally even more than economically, for the huge tasks mandated by membership of the euro. It was not as unfit as Greece, but that is not saying much. To live by the Euro’s rules, one needed to have stable governments capable of making unpopular decisions and getting them through parliament. Since 1992, certainly, but in reality at least since the 1970s, Italy has not had such a system.

There may have been no alternative. Failure to join the euro in 1999 might have led to a crash of the lira and the implosion of the political system. Europe might have had an Argentina on its doorstep. Sometimes, there are no good choices.

What the cases of Italy and the UK suggest, however, is that European integration is not an inevitable one and certainly not one that inevitably brings good results. It requires complex national realities to adapt themselves to norms decided collectively at elite level. In hindsight (but not only in hindsight), the UK’s political culture, and Italy’s political-institutional system, were radically unprepared for the shock of accelerating integration in the 1990s and 2000s.

Conclusions

So what am I saying here? Three things. In first place, that European integration has immense potential disruptive effect on political systems and this potential has grown as its ambitions have grown. In second place, dissent and political opposition to the EU is not necessarily Euroscepticism, but may be fear of unknown consequences, or even a rational preference for not fixing something that isn’t broken. In third place, the ambitious deepening of European integration was one of the principal causes of the growth in “hard” Euroscepticism. Nobody should be shocked by this bald statement of fact.

A further consideration follows, I think, from these conclusions, although there is no space here to do more than state it. This is the importance of writing the negative impacts of “more Europe” into the story of European integration. Euroscepticism, Brexit, and the revival of Italian nationalism, like Gaullism, are an intrinsic part of the history of European integration, not obstacles to its realization. One of the major problems of the historiography of European integration is that too many of its proponents consider the process of constructing Europe to be both inexorable and invariably benign in its effects. This is not true. It is (and always will be) a contested process, and one whose evolutions have substantial impacts on the democracies of its member states.