Majone’s Cathedral
Claudio M. Radaelli
University of Exeter, UK
14 September 2013
Forthcoming, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, 2014
At the outset, I want to say how grateful I am to Philippe Zittoun for having invited me to
discuss the keynote speech by GianDomenico Majone in Grenoble and to Iris Geva May for
having organised this Discourse Section of the JCPA. Like the other 900-plus participants to
the conference in Grenoble, I am extremely grateful to Professor Majone for his thoughtprovoking paper. His paper takes issue both with the empirical analysis and the normative
outlook that are, according to Majone, dominant in the field of European Studies. As such,
this is not simply a paper shedding light on this or that aspect of the European Union
politics. It is a massive intellectual construction, in turn built over the years – see Majone
(2005). In Grenoble, I called this intellectual construction ‘Majone’s Cathedral’ – hence I start
this written response with a reference to a well-known article on the subject of cathedrals.
Claude Monnet painted several times the Cathedral in Rouen with different light and
colours, at different times. In short, different perspectives on the same cathedral. Recalling
this, a distinguished lawyer and US federal judge, Guido Calabresi, once wrote an article with
another lawyer (now in the private sector) on property rights and liability called 'one view of
the Cathedral' (Calabresi and Melamed, 1972). The intention of the two lawyers in this
memorable piece was to show that there are different ways to characterise a given social
phenomenon – theirs was a new one, but not the only possible one.
Professor Majone gave us a great view of the Cathedral. The Cathedral in our case is
European integration - a telling example of how a set of countries can choose a particular
road to harmonisation. Its institutional manifestation is the European Union (EU). Majone's
is not a fuzzy picture, but a proper, rigorous, mostly compelling coherent view of the EU
cathedral. At the outset, he recalls that harmonisation comes in different types - a set of
countries can harmonise principles, procedures, goals, or rules and policies. Harmonisation
across a group of countries can be either ex-ante or ex-post. Historically, the EU has
preferred the former. Yet the latter has several advantages: competition among
governments sends the right signals because it operates via the free choice of individuals
and firms. And convergence is reached ex-post, there is no need to guess and pre-determine
the level and substance of convergence ex-ante.
Majone argues that the EU, for political reasons (note: NOT because of an economic
rationale), has un-necessarily preferred ex-ante harmonisation to ex-post, competitiontriggered harmonisation, thus creating a bias for centralisation. It has also favoured
territorial integration over functional integration. Yet – he carries on - the experience of
Nafta and Australia-New Zealand Closer Economic Relations Trade Agreement (ANZCERTA)
reminds us that deep economic integration via functional integration respects sovereignty
and can be efficient. If (like in Nafta and ANZCERTA) domestic policy autonomy and
sovereignty are preserved, arguably even the ailing EU economies could exploit their
comparative advantage - as Porter argued in his Competitive Advantage of Nations (Porter,
1990).
For Majone, then, the state is not in crisis – it’s the EU to be in trouble, instead. This is the
consequence of a centralising bias and the preference for ex-ante harmonisation. A
preference that has peaked with Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) – the quintessential
centralisation strategy of the last twenty years. Its predecessor, the single market, was
developed around mutual recognition and more nuanced harmonisation approaches.
Does this mean that European integration has to turn into disintegration, then? Not quite.
But – this is the prescription – European scholars should assist the EU leaders by showing
how integration should be radically re-defined by first accepting that the state (via national
advantage) has a role to play in an integrated world economy and, second, by pressing on
functional integration rather than territorial integration. It is unfortunate that the EU is
clinging to territorial integration. It should change tracks: it should re-assess the advantages
of functional integration, play down territorial integration, and evolve towards a club good
(like ANZCERTA?) - or otherwise, be predestined to economic misfortune and political
contestation.
This is, in short, Majone's intellectual proposition - a proposition where the EU is only a case
of a larger set of arguments about ex-ante and ex-post harmonisation. For this reason,
Majone's intellectual Cathedral is both important for the EU and for wider analyses of
harmonisation in an interdependent world economy.
This Cathedral provides healthy challenges to our community of policy scholars. It also
challenges scholars of European integration – for Majone often reluctant to think boldly and
challenge the conventional wisdom dominating in the EU institutions. Cathedrals have
foundations. Thus, the first healthy challenge for policy scholars is to add explanation and
micro-foundations to the Cathedral.
Recall that Majone provides a diagnosis of 'excessive harmonisation'. Hence, we have to
explain this undesirable outcome by addressing three questions:
(i)
(ii)
(iii)
How did it historically come about? As a process of dysfunctional learning, in
leaps and bounds, in response to shocks or institutional memories? Was the
process efficient for some years and then turned to the worse?
What are the micro-foundations that explain the outcome?
What is the theory predicting excessive harmonisation and ill-thought
centralisation? Could this be a theory of runaway bureaucracy, and institutional
theory, or something else? If we identify the correct theoretical framework, we
can of course apply it to the EU as well as to other cases, and understand why
we have the EU, NAFTA and ANZCERTA.
One obvious option is to think about the kind of preferences that political and bureaucratic
actors have - in short, their utility function. Majone's Cathedral was built by political and
bureaucratic elites. My reading of Majone leads me to think that their preferences should be
modelled like this:
(a) The elites do not pursue the goal of preserving sovereignty and compete (except,
perhaps, the British elites);
(b) The lexicographic preferences are such that they put "centralization" before
"sovereignty" - the elites prefer the former to the latter;
(c) They prefer ex ante harmonisation to competition. It is not clear if they prefer
harmonisation all the times, sometimes, often and with what intensity – see
question (i) above. But they like it more than competition.
The problem is that it is impossible to model a utility function like this, given what we know
about the political economy of elected politicians and bureaucratic elites - domestic and
European. Our theories may allow us to model (b) and (c) for the European Commission,
perhaps, and for certain historical periods – the Delors years seem to have a higher fit than
the Barroso years. But our models of international relations, public policy, and public
management do not seem to contain claims in support of this type of utility functions.
My personal preference would be to start from question (iii), that is, to identify a theoretical
framework and then model preferences and explain (ii). As mentioned, a theoretical
framework (varieties of delegation theories, institutional theories, learning theories – there
is plenty of choice) would be useful also to situate the EU case in a proper comparative
setting.
Back to question (i) and focusing on beliefs, how did something like the dominant position of
centralised, top-down harmonisation come to materialise in European integration? Is this
the product of an external shock or shall we look at coalitions across governments and
between bureaucrats, intellectuals and elected leaders? When and how did this coalition get
its power then? Is 'excessive harmonisation' the result of multi-level bargaining or
unforeseen historical contingencies? Thinking of scholarly work in the field of history and
politics of ideas, discourse and policy paradigms (Béland and Cox, 2010; Zittoun, 2009),
where did ideas about ex-ante harmonisation come from – French dirigisme, a community of
Socialist and Christian Democrats politicians and intellectuals, the bureaucratic culture of
planning? Here we may useful connect with a theme prominent in Majone’s scholarship:
there was little liberalism or neo-liberalism in the origin and development of integration in
the 20th century.
Apart from the three issues raised above, Majone also invites us to reflect on the nature of
multi-level governance. The Cathedral has, at least, two levels, the EU and the member
states (that is, the domestic level). We have seen how EU-level decision-making works
according to Majone. Let us move one floor down. We can infer something about the
political economy of the state from the presentation of Porter's ideas. Majone writes, using
Porter's theory of competition, that "given sufficient freedom of action, even small countries
can achieve extraordinary results". He then argues that economic development is possible
"only by preserving and even strengthening the policy making autonomy of the national
governments".
Yet one can twist the sentence (thinking of Iceland, Greece, Italy, Ireland and Portugal
among others) and write that .... given sufficient freedom of action, even small
(and also large, i.e. Italy) countries can achieve extraordinary economic and
political... disasters! If the EU is in crisis, the state (or at least the political class of certain
countries) is in crisis too. The markets have more faith in the Euro as a currency representing
a whole than in the political and economic capability of certain European political systems.
Indeed the Euro is relatively stable against the other major currencies, but the political
economies of some countries in the Eurozone are not. There is limited confidence in
European institutions, but confidence in political parties and other domestic institutions has
now reached all-time lows in countries like Greece and Italy.
I would encourage a fair, realistic comparison of the political and economic capabilities of
the EU and its individual components, the member states. Even better, we should have a
single argument to explain the policy paradigms of elites. Why do political and
administrative elites go for excessive harmonisation when they sit in Brussels, but can wisely
unleash competitive advantage when they work at home?
It is a bit of a mystery. Unless- Majone helps us here - we have to go back
to Weingast's argument, used in the first part of the speech. According to Weingast (1985),
the key conditions for economic development are a common market, national responsibility
for the economy, and monitoring by a supranational level, especially in relation to a tight
budgetary constraint. My impression is that the EU is trying to get exactly this: a common
market and national responsibility for the economy, provided that public expenditure and
debts levels are under certain parameters.
A country can stay below 3% of the deficit by spending 57% of GDP and collecting 55% in
revenue; or by embracing a radically different economic policy, with a tiny public
expenditure programme of 27% GDP and 25% of revenue. No fiscal compact or monetary
provision of the last five years has yet challenged this - actually the recent innovations in the
Eurozone have strengthened national responsibility within a tight(er) constraint and
increased levels of supranational monitoring. The EU Cathedral, therefore, may be closer to
Weingast's conditions than Majone concedes.
All this, however, benefits from the support of significant supranational institutions,
unless we are happy with EU economies and their budgets managed uniquely by
International Monetary Fund (IMF) inspectors - like failed states around the world are.
Majone may be right to say that we do not necessarily require supranational institutions, but
they have a role to play in market-preserving federalism beyond the level of the state –
hence the evolution of the EU towards a light federation may not be necessary but it is not
necessarily a bad idea. There are also normative arguments about legitimacy: the
democratic control that European citizens have on EU policy is limited, but greater than in a
situation where the conditions posed by Weingast apply, but there is no EU supranational
institution – or there is the IMF alone. It depends.
Among other things, it depends on the type of integration. Historically, the EU has preferred
negative integration to positive integration. For the EU, it has always been simpler and more
efficient to strike down barriers to markets and competition that to intervene directly with a
single policy for the ‘social’ dimension(s) of markets. This is still the case today, as shown by
the vicissitudes of the liberalisation of intra-EU services and the problems encountered by all
forms of positive integration in the EU. Put differently, Majone’s arguments would be
stronger if the overall evidence of fifty years of integration pointed towards positive
integration rather than negative integration. What does the evidence say, then?
The evidence on whether the EU has reached the threshold of excessive harmonisation or
not is controversial. But a vast literature has documented episodes of resistance to the
harmonising forces of Europeanisation. The infringement files are always rich. Scholars of
implementation have told us a lot about creative compliance and resistance both to ECJ
jurisprudence and EU soft law. Think about the institutions now. The institutions that
supposedly have pushed the most for 'excessive harmonisation' are the Commission and
the European Parliament: since 1999 they have been humiliated and marginalised,
sometimes even bullied, by the European Council and inter-governmental decision-making within and, regrettably, outside the framework of the Treaties. Supranationalism may have
contributed to a phase of EU politics, but who is responsible for the Cathedral as we know it
today? Who is in the driving seat?
And to conclude with democracy. The evidence - Majone follows the conventional
interpretation of opinion polls - is that the citizens of the EU do not want more
integration and distrust further steps towards a more political union. However, the EU
citizens can only judge the EU they see, not the federalist vision. This is the EU of intergovernmentalism, ministers, diplomacy, and statehood. It is not the democratic polity
envisaged by federalists like Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi when they wrote
their Ventotene Manifesto, in solitary confinement during the period 1941-43 (Nelsen and
Stubb, 2003). Citizens are not judging the federalist vision, they are judging the current EU.
They do not like it. They do not demand 'more' integration of this type - they want 'less' of
this stuff and perhaps 'something else'. It is not a unique feature of the EU. The Catholics
judge the Vatican they see, not the spiritual vision of the early decades - a fact that has
suggested the new course of Pope Francis. Even Spinelli was extremely critical of the
European institutions he saw - he called on the Radical Party of Emma Bonino and Marco
Pannella to mobilise the "new missionaries" for the United States of Europe, in his 1985
speech to the Annual Congress of the Radical Party
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gcXj-NJmMo).
To conclude: yes, this is a view of the Cathedral. But we have to uncover the theoretical
foundations that informed its design and handle the EU comparatively – with a coherent
political science theoretical framework covering other examples of integration as well as
domestic politics. Club goods theory is an interesting proposition for the design of
integration, but first we have to understand what we have and why actors do what they do
and produce certain outcomes in our models. And we should accept that other views of the
Cathedral exist, are theoretically possible, and may be corroborated by empirical evidence.
References
Béland, Daniel, and Robert Henry Cox (2010, eds.) Ideas and politics in social science research. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Calabresi, Guido, and A. Douglas Melamed. "Property rules, liability rules, and inalienability: one view
of the cathedral." Harvard Law Review (1972): 1089-1128.
Majone, GianDomenico (2005) Dilemmas of European Integration, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nelsen, Brent F. and Alexander Stubb (2003, eds.) The European Union. Readings on the Theory and
Practice of European Integration, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. 3rd Edition.
Weingast, Barry R. (1995) “The economic role of political institutions: Market-preserving federalism
and economic development”, Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, 11(1): 1-31.
Zittoun, Philippe (2009) "Understanding policy change as a discursive problem", Journal of
Comparative Policy Analysis 11(1): 65-82.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the European Research Council, Grant on Analysis of Learning in Regulatory Governance
(http://centres.exeter.ac.uk/ceg/research/ALREG/index.php). The following friends provided helpful suggestions
before the plenary session in Grenoble: Colin Provost, Alessia Damonte, Nikos Zahariadis and Tony Zito. The usual
disclaimer applies.