Working
Paper Series 2012/1
The Politics of Differentiated
Integration in the European
Union: Origins, Decision Making
and Outcomes
Douglas Webber
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AUSTRALIA
Papers in this series:
The Politics of Differentiated Integration in
the European Union: Origins, Decision
Making and Outcomes, Douglas Webber,
Oct 2012 (2012/1)
MEEUC Working Papers 2012/1
The Politics of Differentiated Integration in the European
Union: Origins, Decision Making and Outcomes
Douglas Webber
INSEAD
ABSTRACT
Differentiated integration – the adoption and implementation of joint policies by fewer than
all the member states – has been debated and practised in the European Union for more than
three decades. This paper explores the origins, negotiation, adoption and outcomes of the
principal projects of differentiated integration that have been proposed or launched during
this period. It proposes an eclectic interpretation of the politics of differentiated integration,
explaining the origins of such projects in constructivist, their adoption in intergovernmentalist
and their outcomes in neo-functionalist terms. A necessary condition for the ‘success’ of
differentiated integration projects – defined by the accession to them of more and more
initially non-participating member states – is the support of two ‘big’ member states,
normally France and Germany. Whilst Germany has typically supported both ‘sectoral’
differentiated integration limited to specific issue-areas and more ambitious projects aimed at
reforming the institutional structure of the EU, France has supported the former, but in
practice opposed the latter. In the politics of differentiated integration, functionalism has thus
prevailed over federalism. Meanwhile, at the very moment when the UK’s self-isolation
seems set to propel the EU onto such a trajectory, the simultaneous triple crisis of the Euro
zone, the Schengen Accord and the ESDP (European Security and Defence Policy) casts a
dark cloud over the future of the showcase projects of differentiated integration, not to
mention over that of the EU itself.
Introduction
‘From now on there are clearly two Europes’, said the French president Nicholas Sarkozy,
commenting on the outcome of the December 2011 meeting of the European Council at
which, in response to the British government’s rejection of a new EU treaty, most of the 26
other member states decided to adopt an intergovernmental treaty to enable the European
Union to better manage the intensifying crisis of the Eurozone (Le Monde 2011). In fact,
however, the apparently momentous decisions taken at the Brussels summit were only the
latest manifestations of a trend that has marked the European integration process since the
first oil-price crisis in the early 1970s. Since the end of the Cold War in particular, most of
the biggest steps towards closer European integration have occurred in issue-areas – for
example, monetary, justice and home affairs and defence policy – where not all member
states initially participated in integration projects.
This – hitherto relatively under-researched – trend towards differentiated integration is the
topic of this paper. Its primary objective is to explain how some projects of differentiated
integration were launched, why some were adopted and others rejected and, why, of those
adopted, some failed, while others have succeeded, in the sense that more and more EU
member (plus, in some cases, some other) states have subsequently decided to participate in
them. By ‘integration’ I mean the adoption and implementation of joint or common policies
by more than one national government. The concept of ‘differentiation’ refers to a state of
affairs in which a given joint or common policy or project is adopted and implemented by
fewer than all the (currently 27) EU member states. Several different kinds of differentiated
integration may be distinguished. Multi-speed integration describes a state of affairs whereby
a subgroup of member states aim to realize a common policy or project faster than the other
members – who, however, will adhere to it at a later stage. Variable-geometry integration
refers to a situation in which, even at a later stage, one or more non-participating
governments do not intend to join a project launched by a subgroup of members. À la carte
integration, as the term implies, refers to a state of affairs in which member states can ‘pick
and choose’ which joint or common policies, or aspects thereof, they want to adopt.
Differentiation in the provisions and implementation of EU law has accompanied the
integration process from the start. Without it, Europe would very likely be a region much less
politically integrated today than it is, as otherwise domestic political resistance to integration
in some member states might not have been overcome. For example the tariff-free
4 importation of ‘dollar bananas’ from Latin America into Germany was such a sensitive
domestic political issue there that it threatened to hold up the approval of the Rome Treaty in
1957. Agreed shortly before the approval of the treaty, the ‘banana protocol’ prevented the
realization of a common banana market in the EU for the next 35 years (Cadot and Webber
2002: 24). Accession agreements with new member states have frequently authorized them –
at least temporarily – to retain policies that did not conform to the existing body of EU law.
The UK, for example, entered the EU in 1973 only after having negotiated special
arrangements for the important of New Zealand butter, and, before its entry in 1995, Sweden
had to be reassured that EU membership would not undermine its system of free collective
wage and salary bargaining. Differentiation was not always limited to specific policies or
issues. In the Benelux, for example, the EU contained from the outset a subgroup of three
more tightly integrated member states that were already linked by a customs union when the
Treaty of Rome was signed, dismantled border controls in 1960 and, in the case of Belgium
and Luxembourg, shared a common currency. In these respects, differentiation was used as
an instrument to facilitate the EU’s enlargement.
Although its roots go back to the very origins of the EU, differentiated integration has
become an almost perennial issue since the early 1970s, when, soon after each other, British
entry and the first oil-price crisis occurred. The first of these events brought into the EU a
country where attitudes to accession were more ambivalent and overall more critical than in
any of the six pioneer member states; the second led to a growing divergence between
member states in terms of economic performance – a trend which complicated and ultimately
defeated the first efforts to forge closer European monetary integration. It is not coincidental
that the first debate about ‘multi-speed’ integration was initiated in 1974, as the oil-price
crisis hit Europe and the British economy in particular was severely destabilized. From this
point, differentiated integration increasingly became a technique for resolving tensions
between enlarging (‘widening’) the EU and ‘deepening’ it, i.e. forging closer integration.
‘Pro-integrationist’ political forces and governments increasingly resorted to threats that they
would integrate more quickly among themselves if other governments tried to block closer
pan-EU integration. In some – but not all – cases where these threats did not achieve their
intended effects, pro-integrationist subgroups of member states proceeded to forge closer
integration among themselves, either inside or outside the EU.
Below I shall analyse the origins, negotiation, adoption and outcome of several attempts to
forge differentiated integration in the EU. In the next section, I shall briefly review the
5 principal existing literature on differentiated integration in the EU. I shall then sketch out an
‘eclectic’ explanation of the pattern of evolution of differentiated European integration. In the
following sections, I shall briefly describe the history of several differentiated integration
projects, showing that whilst ‘sectoral’ projects have mostly generated very powerful
centripetal effects that brought more and more originally non-participating states ‘on board’,
projects that aimed to generalize this practice by creating a separate institutional
infrastructure for a kind of ‘hard-core’ Europe have largely failed. The conclusion ties
together the various strands of the preceding analysis and updates the history of differentiated
integration in the EU to the current crisis.
Differentiated integration: The existing literature and an eclectic analytic framework
Differentiated integration has meanwhile given rise to a fairly substantial body of socialscientific literature (for just the most recent contribution, see Dyson and Sepos 2010).
However, it has failed to generate as much sustained comparative analysis as its increased
importance in EU politics would merit. The most useful contributions to understanding this
phenomenon have been furnished by Gehring (1998) and in particular Kölliker (2001 and
2006). Both scholars develop an explanation of patterns of differentiated European
integration rooted in public goods theory. Thus, for Kölliker, the outcome of differentiated
integration projects – the degree to which originally non-participating member states adhere
to them – depends primarily on the character of the policy or issue-area, specifically on the
extent to which ‘outsider’ states can be excluded from the benefits of the envisaged public
good. Policies that provide excludable network or club goods are most likely to generate
strong centripetal effects that bring more and more originally non-participating states on
board, while, in contrast, those that provide non-excludable goods, such as in particular
common pool resources, either generate centrifugal effects or, given that states that otherwise
support them anticipate this outcome, are not even launched in the first place. Hence, the
Schengen Accord and the Euro proved to be very or fairly successful differentiated
integration projects because they provided or were expected to provide excludable network
goods to their participants – anticipated efficiency and growth effects in the case of the Euro
and crime-related information – on wanted persons and objects and political asylum-seekers –
in that of the Schengen Accord, whose core provision was the dismantlement of border
controls. In contrast, putative plans for tax harmonization among a subgroup of EU member
states were frozen because such a step would pose a common resource problem, in as far as
the potential benefits of the policy in the form of increased tax revenues for participating
6 governments could leak to non-participating states that impose lower taxes (Kölliker 2001:
143-44).
Kölliker’s public-goods-theoretical analysis provides a coherent and parsimonious
explanation of divergent outcomes of differentiated integration projects in the EU. However,
as Kölliker himself concedes, not all of these outcomes can be explained in terms of public
goods theory. He is consequently compelled to fall back on ad hoc explanations of some
outcomes, notably the Maastricht Social Protocol, from which the UK initially opted out
before adopting it in 1997, and the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) ESDP
launched in 1999 to develop an EU military crisis intervention capacity (Kölliker 2006: 12837, 180-86, 233-42). These anomalies are largely attributed to changes in the fundamental
preferences of governments, either through a change in their composition, as in the UK, when
it adopted the Social Protocol in 1997, or, in the case of the ESDP, as a consequence of an
external crisis, namely the wars in former Yugoslavia. Kölliker’s analysis also suffers from
other drawbacks. First, the sample of cases of differentiated integration projects, although
quite exhaustive, is not comprehensive. In particular, he does not discuss the fate of various
initiatives that aimed at recasting the overall institutional structure of the EU in the direction
of greater differentiation – that is at generalizing or constitutionalizing differentiated
integration. Two such initiatives – the Schäuble/Lamers paper produced by these two German
Christian Democratic politicians in 1994 and the Humboldt University speech delivered by
the then German foreign minister and Green politician, Fischer, in 2000 – will be discussed
below. These projects failed almost completely, despite the fact that their aim was to provide
willing member states with an excludable public good, namely an institutional structure of
their own to accelerate the pace of European integration. Second, his analysis addresses only
a ‘slice’ of the differentiated integration ‘action’ in the EU – to what extent and why, once a
project has been adopted, it generates centripetal or centrifugal effects. The initial willingness
of a subgroup of member states to launch such projects is taken as a given rather than
something itself to be described and explained, bar the contention that policies providing nonexcludable goods are unlikely to be adopted in the first place (Kölliker 2006: 46 and 87).
Public-goods-theoretical analysis of differentiated integration blends out both the genesis and
the processes of negotiation and adoption of such projects.
Addressing these lacunae, I propose a different, eclectic analytic framework that
distinguishes between three different stages of the ‘life’ of differentiated integration projects:
a conception stage, a negotiation or decision-making stage, and an outcomes stage. This
7 framework is analytically eclectic in the sense that the different passages in the life of such
projects are best explained by competing theoretical perspectives (cf. Sil and Katzenstein
2010). The conception and launching of differentiated integration projects, I argue, cannot be
attributed directly to the economic, domestic-political or security (geopolitical) – interests of
the political leaders or political parties and governments that proposed them. In this process,
political leaders’ ideas – notions, shaped by historical experiences and memories, as to why a
politically integrated Europe is important or necessary - play a key and independent role and
are not reducible to mere interests, however defined (cf. Parsons 2002 and 2003). Several
major differentiated integration projects have their origins in the interaction of the German
Chancellor Helmut Kohl (1982-1998) and the French president François Mitterrand (19811995). Most of them were launched and adopted against strong political and/or bureaucratic
opposition, and cannot be readily explained as corresponding to any kind of objective
interests. At the same time, these projects closely reflected the ‘pro-integrationist’ ideas of
the two leaders and their respective historical experiences and memories. Whilst Mitterrand
had fought in the Second World War and been wounded, captured and held in German
prisoner-of-war camps, Kohl had grown up in a part of the West German Rhineland that had
been regularly been contested in Franco-German warfare and lost a grandfather killed in the
First World War and an older brother killed in the Second. Both had been ‘militants’ of
European integration from the early post-Second World War, the older Mitterrand having
attended the Congress of The Hague in 1948 and the younger Kohl having participated in the
tearing down of border posts on the border between West Germany and France. As their own
memoirs testify (Mitterrand 1996a and 1996b and Kohl 1996), their personal experiences and
the turbulent history of modern Europe strongly shaped their pro-integrationist political
convictions and agendas (see also Paterson 1998 and, on the Euro, Dyson 1998 and Dyson
and Featherstone 1999: 779-82).1 Despite their different biographies, similar convictions
were subsequently to inform the differentiated integration projects launched by Schäuble and
Lamers and by Fischer, who, despite major other political differences with the ex-Chancellor,
actually styled himself as Kohl’s European policy successor (Le Monde 1998). In as far as
ideas are primary in explaining the conception of differentiated integration projects,
constructivist theory seems to provide a better explanation of this phase in the life of such
projects than competing, more ‘rationalist’ perspectives – albeit not participation in the EU as
1
The British Prime Minister John Major was known for his exasperation that in his meetings with Kohl and
Mitterrand, in the account of one of his confidants, they would ‘go on and on about history’.
8 such, but rather unmediated history ‘socialized’ Kohl and Mitterrand and moulded their prointegrationist European ideas.
The negotiation or decision-making process of differentiated integration projects has been
dominated by the EU’s three ‘big powers’: France, Germany and the UK. The support of a
coalition of two out of three of these states, typically France and Germany, appears to be a
necessary condition of their adoption. No other differentiated integration project was hitherto
adopted. Unilateral German initiatives, such as those of Schäuble and Lamers and Fischer,
always failed. Integration involving subgroups of member states beyond the Big Three failed
to attract other adherents. The Benelux states, for example, were more closely integrated in
some issue-areas than the EU as a whole – Belgium and Luxembourg introduced a common
currency in 1921 and the Benelux three established a single market as early as 1960 and
dismantled mutual border controls in 1970. However, none of these steps served as a motor
for the adoption of the Euro, the EU’s Single Market Programme or the Schengen Accord.
Rather, all three were primarily the product of Franco-German cooperation (on the Single
Market Programme, see Moravcsik 1991). This striking pattern points to the superior –
especially structural, but also other - power resources commanded by these governments in
the European Council (cf. Tallberg 2008) as well as to the indispensability of the French and
German participation in such projects for them to be able to generate the centripetal effects
that gradually draw more and more initially non-participating states on board. All but one of
the projects, the ESDP (European Security and Defence Policy), was opposed at least initially
by the UK. Even in security and defence, in which an Anglo-French coalition exceptionally
replaced the Franco-German tandem as the EU’s vanguard, France and Germany made the
first steps towards closer EU cooperation. The role of the EU’s supranational organs in the
negotiation and adoption of differentiated integration projects was in the most cases very
limited. Either the Commission was handicapped by the fact that there was no legal basis in
the treaties for it to act in certain issue-areas, such as defence policy, or by the resistance of
blocking minorities of member states to initiatives it launched on the same issues within the
EU, as with the dismantlement of border controls (Schengen Accord) or exchange of police
data (Prüm Accord). The history of differentiated integration negotiation and decisionmaking processes thus decisively corroborates classical intergovernmentalist versus other
explanations of European integration. These differ from ‘conventional’ EU decision-making
processes because (and primarily in as far as) they are characterized by higher levels of
polarization or preference-divergence so that the conflicts they generate can no longer be
9 mediated by the devices of side-payments, issue-linkage and threats of exclusion typically
deployed to build winning coalitions in the EU. The spectre of a two- or multi-speed Europe
has frequently been conjured up to soften up ‘anti-integrationist’ governments in
controversial EU debates in the EU. It was used adroitly by the French and German
governments before the 1984 Fontainebleau summit to facilitate a settlement of the British
budgetary contribution conflict (Dumas 2007: 214-23; Attali 1993: 658; Moravcsik 1991).
Prior to the Euro zone crisis, it had most recently re-emerged in 2008-9 between the two
referenda staged in Ireland on the Lisbon Treaty. Indeed differentiated integration projects
have usually been launched only when threats of exclusion have proved ineffective or when
their initiators calculated that, if used, they would fail.
The pattern of outcomes of differentiated integration projects, once adopted, is, as noted
above, largely compatible with public-goods-theoretical analysis. However, the latter cannot
account for all outcomes. Moreover, to attribute the degree of success of such projects to the
pattern of benefits and costs they generated is to neglect the extent to which their sponsors
explicitly conceived and designed them with the objectives of maximizing their centripetal or
gravitational effects. These, they anticipated, would lock these projects sooner or later into
EU law so that, given EU decision-making rules, it would be politically virtually impossible
to reverse them, and, especially in respect of the Euro, as Kohl constantly reiterated, would
make the overall European integration process irreversible. The launching of some
differentiated integration projects outside the EU was seen as a temporary deviation, taken to
circumvent opposition that could not be surmounted inside the EU. Participants in
differentiated integration projects repeatedly stressed that these were open to accession by
initially unwilling states. Once the envisaged centripetal effects had materialized, almost all
such projects were (re-)integrated into the EU. Not only did such projects thus unleash strong
geographical or horizontal spill-over processes à la Haas, the original theorist of neofunctionalism, but they also – in some cases at least – produced significant functional spillover effects. The Schengen Accord to dismantle border controls, for example, put pressure on
participating governments to exchange police information and to harmonize their external
border controls and visa, immigration and political asylum and refugee policies. As, most
recently the post-2009 financial and Euro crises illustrated, the creation of the Euro
heightened pressures on the Euro zone member states also to harmonize their financial sector
regulations and fiscal policies. The dynamics unleashed by these differentiated integration
projects correspond closely to the processes that neo-functionalist theory predict will lead to
10 ever closer European integration. Given, however, that the initiators of differentiated
integration projects anticipated these effects and processes and instrumentalized them to
promote their European agendas, it would be more accurate to say that the successful
outcomes of those differentiated integration projects that were adopted are attributable to neofunctionalist strategies rather than to the processes identified by neo-functionalists as
conducive to greater European integration. The geographical and functional spill-over effects
generated by differentiated integration projects did not just happen. They were not the
unintended, but rather the anticipated and calculated consequences of their initiators’
decisions.
Differentiated ‘sectoral’ integration
Monetary policy: From the ‘snake’ to the Euro
The German Chancellor Willy Brandt made the first serious proposal to create a European
monetary union in 1969, intending thereby to show that his policy of improving relations
with Communist-governed Eastern Europe (Ostpolitik) did not mean that Germany was any
less wedded to the cause of West European integration. Although the Werner Plan that
stemmed from Brandt’s initiative collapsed in the midst of the oil-price crisis in the early
1970s, the EU nonetheless managed to create a currency ‘snake’ aimed at minimizing
exchange-rate fluctuations between the member states. However, as the crisis intensified and
the EU economies’ performance began rapidly to diverge, the governments of several of the
weaker EU economies – first the UK, Italy and Ireland, then later France as well – were
forced to leave the ‘snake’, which shrank to a DM (Deutsche Mark) zone comprising
Germany, Denmark and the Benelux states (Tsoukalis 1997: 141-142). The German
Chancellor Schmidt and the French president Giscard d’Estaing launched a second attempt to
create a fixed European exchange-rate regime, the EMS (European Monetary System), in
1977. The EMS enjoyed a longer and healthier life than the ‘snake’, for which it provided the
foundation. Although membership of the EMS gradually expanded as the EU enlarged, it
never comprised all the member states. EMS entry proved an especially divisive political
issue in the UK, where the issue contributed to the demise of Margaret Thatcher as Prime
Minister and which was humiliated by having to withdraw from the system in the midst of a
major currency crisis in 1992. The third milestone in the evolution of differentiated monetary
integration in the EU was, of course, the single currency project adopted at Maastricht in
1991/92. Particularly at Germany’s insistence and to ensure the currency’s future stability,
11 member states wanting to adopt the Euro were supposed to fulfil a set of economic and
financial convergence criteria laid down in the Maastricht Treaty. Nonetheless, owing to a
generous interpretation of these criteria, the Euro was launched in 1999 with 11 of the then
15 member states. Three of the four non-members preferred not to adopt the Euro, the UK
having negotiated an opt-out at Maastricht, Denmark having been forced to negotiate one
after a negative referendum outcome on the treaty in 1992, and Sweden having decided
negatively at a referendum in 2003. The remaining member state, Greece, adopted the Euro
in 2001. Of the 10 states that joined the EU in 2004, five – Slovenia, Malta, Cyprus, Slovakia
and Estonia – have meanwhile joined the Euro zone. Despite the current crisis, the remaining
five profess intentions to join the Euro.
France and Germany were at the heart of the monetary integration process in Europe from the
beginning, launching – and exercising a preponderant influence on the provisions of – both
the EMS in the late 1970s and the single currency project in the late 1980s (Ludlow 1982: 7993 and 290-291; Sandholtz 1993; Dyson 1999; Dyson and Featherstone 1999: 749-769;
Quatremer and Klau 1999). Whereas the German Chancellor Schmidt was the motor of EMS,
the single currency was sponsored primarily by the French government as a means of
breaking what Paris perceived to be German domination of European monetary policy under
the EMS. ‘France will have a stronger influence on the European [Central] Bank than it has
today on the Mark’, Mitterrand is quoted as saying to his advisers. As it did not sit in the UN
Security Council, the Mark was its ‘only diplomatic weapon’ (Aeschimann and Riche 1996:
91). When the issue of German unification exploded on to the political agenda in 1989-90,
the single currency became more important for France as a means of binding a unified
Germany more tightly into (Western) Europe (see Genscher 1995: 374-375; 386-391). In
terms of domestic politics, the German government’s acquiescence in the abandonment of the
DM in favour of a single currency was extremely risky. Chancellor Kohl’s decision to
support the French initiative was dictated primarily by his concern to stabilize the FrancoGerman relationship and emphasize his government’s commitment to closer European
integration. Even before German unification became topical, in 1988, Kohl told the (hostile)
Bundesbank Council that Germany had to accept the single currency for France as it had to
‘accept the weather’ (Balkhausen 1992: 70). He signed up to the project just before the
Strasbourg European Council meeting in December 1989, three weeks after the fall of the
Berlin Wall, a few days after having made his famous ‘10-Point’ speech in the German
Parliament on German unity, and just after French president Mitterrand had warned German
12 Foreign Minister Genscher that if Germany turned its back on the integration process because
of unification, this would provoke a return of traditional balance-of-power politics in Europe
(see, for example, Genscher 1995: 676-680; Attali 1995: 349-354; Kohl 1996: 184-185; Wall
2008: 117-122). Kohl subsequently told the US foreign secretary Baker that the single
currency was ‘against German interests’, but it was a politically important step he supported
because ‘Germany needs friends’ (Marsh 2010: 138-39).
Without joint Franco-German backing, the single currency would certainly never have seen
the light of day. Given the central position of the German economy and the strong influence
exercised by the Bundesbank over monetary policies in Europe, no European monetary union
would have been feasible without German participation. Most other member states had a
strong incentive to support the creation of a single currency. Like France, they too could
expect to exercise stronger influence on a European central bank than on the German
Bundesbank, to whose monetary policies they felt forced to adjust. By participating in the
single currency, they hoped to reap benefits in terms of interest rates, economic growth and
price stability from the creation of European monetary institutions based on the model that
had worked so well in Germany. Still, several then poorer member states insisted, as a
condition of their acquiescence in the Maastricht Treaty, that the EU’s regional policy budget
(‘cohesion funds’) be increased substantially to enable them to modernize their economies to
cope better with competition in the single market once they could no longer offset typically
higher inflation rates by allowing their currencies to depreciate vis-à-vis those of other,
economically stronger members (see Lange 1992).
Justice and home affairs policy: From Schengen to Prüm
Differentiated integration in justice and home affairs was launched by France, Germany and
the three Benelux states in 1985. In the Schengen Accord, an intergovernmental agreement
outside the EU, these five EU members agreed to dismantle border controls, to harmonize
visa and political asylum policies and to cooperate more closely on police and justice matters.
It was a decade before the agreement could enter into force, but by this time Portugal and
Spain had joined the Schengen group. Italy and Austria (1997), Greece (fully in 2000),
Denmark, Finland and Sweden (2001) and nine of the 10 states that joined the EU in 2004
(2007) have subsequently followed suit, leaving five of 27 member states – the two most
recent entrants, Romania and Bulgaria, as well as the UK, Ireland and Cyprus – still outside
the Schengen zone. Denmark initially decided against joining the Schengen area, as this
13 would have made it impossible for it at the time to maintain open borders with other members
of pre-existing Nordic Union with its Scandinavian neighbours, but this obstacle was solved
when Sweden and Finland acceded to the EU and non-members Norway and Iceland
negotiated special agreements enabling them also to join the Schengen area. By contrast,
Ireland has not done so, because this would disrupt the Common Travel Area with the nonmember UK, which would then impose controls on the Irish-British borders, as well as
empower British police to pursue suspected law-breakers across the border between Northern
Ireland and the Republic (Nanz 1995: 45-46; Cullen 1995: 83-88). Paralleling the course
taken by monetary integration, which began outside the EU treaties, the Schengen acquis was
brought into EU law by the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty, with the UK and Ireland securing optouts from its provisions. A similar process has occurred with the Prüm Convention, which
deals with related issues of data exchange and cooperation between justice and police
authorities in combating cross-border crime (cf. Bossong 2007: 13-15). Launched outside the
EU in 2005 by France, Germany, the Benelux states, Austria and Spain, this agreement was
taken over into EU law for the Schengen member states in 2007.
As with the Euro, the integrative dynamic that these projects generated was entirely
contingent upon French and German participation. The process leading to the Schengen
Accord was initiated at a summit meeting of Kohl and Mitterrand in Rambouillet in May
1984. Kohl was the main protagonist of the project. He pursued it against the strong
opposition of German Interior Ministry and security bureaucracy, using his constitutional
authority to determine the guidelines of government policy to shift the competence for
negotiating it to the Chancellor’s Office. Although his initiative occurred not long after there
had been truckers’ protests against border delays and was supported by business
organizations as well as the opposition Social Democrats, non-governmental organizations or
interests were not influential actors in this process, which was ‘overwhelmingly an intragovernmental matter’ (Eisel 2009). One important motive for Kohl’s initiative seems to have
been his conviction that something had to be done to make the benefits of European
integration more ‘tangible’ for ‘ordinary citizens’ in their daily lives (Hreblay 1998: 15; Nanz
1995: 30). On the French side, there was a similar alignment. Public opinion was ‘passive’
and played no role in the issue (Lalumière 2006). The relevant French bureaucratic agencies
were very hostile to dismantling border controls. Mitterrand’s ‘political will’ was determining
for French participation (Lalumière 2006). Less than two months after the Rambouillet
summit, the two governments agreed at a meeting in Saarbrücken in July 1984 to dismantle
14 mutual border controls. The Schengen accord was negotiated the following year after a
Commission initiative to dismantle border controls based on the Franco-German agreement
had been blocked in the Council by the UK, Ireland and Denmark (Epiney 1995: 24).
Of all differentiated integration projects, the Schengen and Prüm accords have generated the
most powerful centripetal effects, judged by the subsequent growth in the number of
participating states. As Kölliker argues regarding Schengen, this may be attributable to the
fact that both provided significant public goods the consumption of which was limited to their
participants – access to an international information system providing data on wanted persons
and objects and – an important incentive following the collapse of Cold War borders after
1989 – strengthened capacities to limit the number of political asylum-seekers. The
participation of France and Germany in these projects obviously strengthened the incentives
for initial non-members to participate in them because it greatly increased the volume of such
goods that could be consumed, compared with the volume that would have been available if
such a project had been launched by smaller states, such as the Benelux three.
Maastricht Social Protocol
The Maastricht Social Protocol was the product of irreconcilable conflicts between the British
Conservative government and the other 11 member states over proposed social policy
provisions in the Maastricht Treaty. Its contents related to employment and labour relations
issues. Inter alia it provided for the consultation of trade union and employers’ organizations
in the making of EU social policy and for more extensive use of qualified majority voting as
opposed to unanimity on such issues. The British Prime Minister Major was under extreme
pressure from his party not to betray the ‘Thatcherite revolution’ at the Maastricht summit
(Mazzucelli 1997: 184). Given its relatively liberal, unregulated labour relations system, the
UK had no material incentive to accept or later accede to the social protocol, whose
provisions could indirectly provoke a disproportionately big increase in British employers’
costs. Indeed, in case of doubt, it could anticipate positive economic effects through its nonparticipation in a European social policy, which, to the extent that it led, as was expected, to
an upward harmonization of labour law, would raise employers’ costs in the participating
member states and thus make British exports to other member states more price-competitive
and the UK more attractive as a business location in the single market.
The most ardent proponent of a social chapter in the treaty was France, followed by Belgium
and Germany (Lange 1992: 6-7). For the Socialist President Mitterrand, social policy, along
15 with monetary union, was one of two ‘essential dossiers’ for the treaty negotiations – he
threatened not to agree to any treaty that excluded it (Mazzucelli 1997: 44, 188 and 194).
Despite the opposition of German business organizations, the Christian Democrat Kohl also
supported the inclusion of a social policy chapter in the treaty – for him, given that the
overwhelming majority of EU citizens were wage- and salary-earners, Europe had also to be
a ‘social union’ (Kohl 2007: 389; Attali 1995: 330). According to one source, he in fact
traded his support for Mitterrand on this issue for Mitterrand’s support for the inclusion of
justice and home affairs in the EU’s competences (Mazzucelli 1997: 139). After Major had
rejected the idea of the UK opting out of a treaty social chapter, Commission president Delors
mediated a compromise whereby, with Major’s acquiescence, the 11 other member states
adopted the proposed chapter as a protocol to the Maastricht Treaty (Mazzucelli 1997: 19394). Some of the poorer member states whose economies could have been negatively affected
by the higher labour costs that a more expansive EU social policy implied were persuaded to
sign up to the protocol by the promise of an increased regional policy budget (see above;
Lange 1992).
Differentiated integration in EU social policy was superseded when the Labour Party came to
power in the 1997 British elections. To accede to the Social Protocol was one of its first
European policy decisions (Wall 2008: 163-165). On this issue, domestic political variables
in the only non-participating state – a change in the political complexion of the governing
majority and the new majority’s ideological predisposition and electoral-political interests –
trumped policy character as a determinant of the outcome (Kölliker 2006: 185-86). Neither
the decision of the 11 other members to attach a social protocol to the treaty nor that of the
British Labour government to sign up to it in 1997 is explicable in terms of public-goods
theory.
Defence cooperation: From the Franco-German Brigade to ESDP
Security and defence is an area in which European cooperation independent of the US has
historically proven to be politically very difficult. Divergences between the West European
states in this field led, of course, to the collapse of the European Defence Community project
in 1954. West European security was subsequently assured by the US-dominated NATO
(North Atlantic Treaty Organization), from whose military command France withdrew in
1966. Franco-German military cooperation was hindered by major divergences over relations
with the US, over nuclear weapons – which France possessed, but Germany, of course, did
16 not – and in terms of security or strategic cultures, which legitimized the use of military force
as an instrument of foreign policy in France, but not in Germany (Gordon 1995). Aided not
least by Mitterrand’s support for Kohl’s decision to approve the stationing of medium-range
US nuclear weapons in Germany in 1983, Franco-German defence relations began to
improve in the 1980s. Kohl’s interest in forging closer links with France in this area related to
his fear that, in time, US commitment to Western European security would diminish (Attali
1993: 713). Sceptical as to how much progress could be achieved among the 12 EU member
states ‘or even six’ in the late 1980s, he argued that France and Germany had to launch a
bilateral initiative. This led in 1987 to Mitterrand’s and his decision – with minimal
involvement of their respective defence establishments – to create a joint Franco-German
brigade as the ‘core of a future European army’ (Gordon 1995: 41; Mazzucelli 1997: 142).
As the Cold War ended and Germany unified in 1989-91, Kohl and Mitterrand also
functioned as the main sponsors of the development of a common EU foreign and security
policy, towards which numerous other member states, including the UK, Ireland, Denmark,
Portugal, Holland and Italy, were either reserved or hostile. At Maastricht British Prime
Minister Major finally agreed to a compromise on defence under which the long dormant
WEU (Western European Union)2 would be transformed into a component of the EU to
‘reinforce the European pillar of the Atlantic Alliance’ – a formulation which reflected the
UK’s and its closest allies concern that the Maastricht Treaty contain no provisions that might
weaken NATO and US involvement in the provision of European security.
Even prior to the Maastricht negotiations, Kohl and Mitterrand had resolved to upgrade and
transform the small Franco-German brigade (4200 soldiers) into a 45,000-strong ‘Eurocorps’,
open to other member states, to engage in peace-making, peacekeeping and humanitarian
missions and to contribute to the defence of Western Europe under the terms of the NATO
and WEU treaties (Gordon 1995: 43). Although other member states were invited to
contribute to the Eurocorps, only three, however, did so: Belgium (1993), Spain (1994) and
Luxembourg (1996).3 The Eurocorps has since been deployed in various UN, NATO and EU
missions, but its creation did not generate centripetal effects comparable to those that
emanated from joint Franco-German initiatives in other issue-areas. The founding moment of
2
In 1991, the WEU had nine members: the original five (France, the UK and the Benelux states), Germany and
Italy, which joined in 1955, and Portugal and Spain, both of which had joined only in 1990. Having been
founded by the Brussels Treaty in 1948, the WEU effectively became redundant with the creation of NATO the
following year.
3
Several other EU member states, including Greece, Italy, Poland, Austria and Romania, are meanwhile
represented among the headquarters staff of the Eurocorps, along with Turkey and the US.
17 the ESDP – the Saint Malo Declaration from December 1998 – was not a Franco-German,
but rather Anglo-French initiative, launched in the wake and midst of the wars in Yugoslavia,
which had dramatically revealed the EU member states’ incapacity to wield military power
independently of the US (Howorth 2007). Given that Germany’s armed forces are smaller
than those of the EU’s other two ‘big powers’ and less capable of being deployed overseas, a
European military intervention capacity built around an Anglo-French nucleus is more
credible than a Franco-German-based force. Moreover, the UK’s role at the core of EDSP
reassured the US and the most strongly US-oriented European members of NATO that the
EU would do nothing to antagonize the US and undermine the NATO.
The on-going difficulties of the EU member states to agree a common foreign and security
policy even after the adoption of the ESDP by all member states except Denmark were
underlined by the divisions among them over the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the military
intervention in Libya in 2011. The weak centripetal effects of Franco-German defence
cooperation were particularly evident at the time of the Iraq War, when only two other EU
governments – Belgium and Luxembourg – rallied to a fresh bilateral initiative undertaken by
the two governments to establish a stronger independent European defence capacity.4 The
EU’s Anglo-French-led efforts to develop a substantial rapid reaction force to intervene in
military crises abroad have regularly fallen short of their targets, leaving the US by default as
still the dominant supplier of military security in Europe.
Military security is an excludable public good such that those states that can credibly pledge
to provide or organize it could expect such an offer to generate significant centripetal effects,
at least if there are common perceived security threats. If Franco-German-led and, to a lesser
extent, Anglo-French-led initiatives in the EU have not produced such effects, this indicates
that numerous other EU member states do not regard France and Germany as credible or
perhaps even as dependable alternative suppliers of their security to the US. Many of them
clearly share the sentiment expressed by the then Danish Prime Minister during the Iraq War
controversy that their security is better guaranteed by ‘the American superpower’ than by the
‘fragile balance of power amongst Germany, France and England’ (Anders Fogh Rasmussen,
as quoted in Keel 2005: 81). The EU remains far away from having a single army to match its
single currency.
4
The meeting of the four governments in Brussels in spring 2003 was rather derogatorily labelled the
‘Chocolate Summit’.
18 Differentiated ‘institutional’ integration
The relative success of differentiated sectoral integration projects contrasts strongly with the
relative failure of initiatives to create an overall institutional structure for a differentiated EU,
to set up, either within or outside of the existing European treaties, a formal legal-political
framework through which a subset of EU member states can adopt decisions to forge closer
political integration than is feasible among all members. The sum result of several such
initiatives has been the adoption of various articles in the Amsterdam and Nice treaties that
define the scope for ‘enhanced cooperation’ between subgroups of member states, but, in
well over a decade, have been used only twice (Stubb 2002).5 In this section I will explore the
origins and contents of two such initiatives that provoked controversial debates since the end
of the Cold War and try to identify the main reasons for their relative failure.
The Schäuble-Lamers paper
The Schäuble-Lamers paper (CDU-CSU/Bundestagsfraktion 1994) was written by the
chairman of the German Christian Democrats’ Parliamentary Group and the group’s foreign
policy spokesman. They timed it to influence the IGC (Intergovernmental Conference) called
to negotiate reforms of the EU’s organs so that the EU could cope with prospective future
enlargements. Schäuble and Lamers argued that, owing to the ‘over-extension’ of the EU’s
existing organs, which had been created for just six members, to the increasing differentiation
of interests within the EU, and to the rise of ‘retrogressive nationalism’ in almost all member
states, there was a danger, if nothing were done soon, that the EU would develop into a ‘loose
association with different sub-groupings and limited to a few economic aspects’. In view of
its geographic location, its size and its history, Germany had a ‘special interest’ in preventing
Europe ‘drifting apart’. Such a trend, if it materialized, would put Germany back in the same
location in the centre of Europe (Mittellage) that historically had made it difficult for
Germany to ‘find a clear direction in terms of its internal constitution and a stable, durable
balance in terms of its foreign policy’. Germany had a fundamental interest in both
‘widening’ and ‘deepening’ the EU. Eastern enlargement was imperative to stabilize the postCommunist Eastern European region on its borders. ‘Deepening’ was no less important for
Germany because the ‘loose association’ that would otherwise develop would not be able to
cope with the ‘enormous tasks’ of the Eastern enlargement nor guarantee European stability.
5
The two occasions on which these provisions have been used relate to a divorce law concerning couples with
different nationalities and to the adoption of a single European patent, which, on linguistic grounds, the Italian
and Spanish governments had opposed.
19 As the barriers to institutional reform in the EU were already ‘extraordinarily high’ and likely
to grow, member states ‘willing and able to go further in their cooperation and integration
than others’ had to do so. This ‘hard core’ had to ‘set a strong centre against the centrifugal
forces in an ever larger union’, in particular to prevent the EU dividing into a south-western,
protectionist-inclined bloc of states close to France and an economically liberal north-western
group aligned with Germany. As the ‘core of the hard core’, France and Germany had to raise
their relationship to a ‘qualitatively new level’ (all citations from CDU/CSU
Bundestagsfraktion 1994).
The paper did not make detailed proposals as to how the EU treaties could be changed to
create a ‘hard core’ Europe. Most controversially it identified France, Germany and the three
Benelux states among the ‘five to six countries’ that currently formed the EU’s core,
excluding the sixth founder member, Italy, as well as the other existing members. The paper
stressed, however, that the core should not be ‘closed off, but rather be open for every
country that is willing and able to live up to its requirements’. Hence, not only Italy, but also
Spain and the UK, for example, should join the core ‘as soon as they have solved certain
present problems and so long as they are prepared to commit themselves’ to deeper
integration.
The Schäuble-Lamers paper was not a German government document, although it came from
the major governing party. Other German parties criticized the paper, but mainly for its
diplomatic tactlessness in presuming to determine which member states qualified for
membership of the ‘hard core’ rather than its substantive thrust. The most important
European policy actor in Germany, whose reaction therefore mattered most, was Chancellor
Kohl. His office called the paper a ‘discussion paper’ whose impact could not immediately be
foreseen, but refused to reject it (Süddeutsche Zeitung 1994a). Kohl had actually seen the
paper in advance and said it was ‘certainly not wrong’ (Lamers 2007). However, he did not
want to identify himself with it publicly, but instead preferred to wait and see what reactions
it provoked, especially abroad.
Reactions to the paper in other EU member states were predominantly negative. The ‘cries of
indignation’ in Italy, including from the new government of Silvio Berlusconi, were
especially loud (Lamers 2007). But for the most part the paper’s authors had anticipated
these. Their most important target audience was in France, which was enduring a period of
political cohabitation involving the Socialist President Mitterrand and a Parliamentary
20 majority and government led by the Conservative politician, Edouard Balladur. Balladur
himself had set out a vision of Europe’s future comprising three tiers and an ‘inner core
committed to full-blooded monetary, military and social union’ just two days before the
publication of the Schäuble-Lamers paper (The European 1994). The Prime Minister
distanced himself, however, from the notion that there could be ‘a central core of the same
countries pursuing faster integration in all fields’ (Financial Times 1994). Rather, in his
vision of a ‘variable-geometry’ Europe, different groups of EU states would pursue faster
integration in varying fields. President Mitterrand dismissed the paper more unequivocally,
saying he was not favourable in favour of either to Balladur’s conception of a ‘variablegeometry’ Europe or to reducing the 12 existing member states to a core of five or six: ‘I
think that Portugal or Ireland deserve just as much to be part of this Europe as France and
Germany’ (Mitterrand 1994a and 1994b). The Gaullist party leader, Jacques Chirac, who was
to succeed Miterrand as president in 1995, strictly rejected the paper (Süddeutsche Zeitung
1994d), as did, still more vehemently, the parties of the extreme Left and Right. The most
supportive responses to the Schäuble-Lamers paper came from the centrist – Social or
Christian Democratic – politicians, such as Delors.
Overall, French political circles were, in Lamers’ words, ‘torn’ in their attitudes to the paper.
For Lamers, President Mitterrand himself encapsulated ‘all the contradictions’ of French
European policy. He could have supported their initiative, but didn’t because there was still ‘a
residual fear and mistrust of Germany’ in France (Lamers 2007). Most French political
leaders did not want to become entrapped in a small monetary union that Germany would
dominate, but wanted a larger one in which, with the aid of allies such as Italy, it could
balance German power (McCarthy 1999: 49).
In the subsequent IGC negotiations, the governments of the countries that Schäuble and
Lamers identified as belonging to an initial hard-core of member states, plus those of the
three new members, started out basically favourable to the notion that a subset of member
states should be able to integrate more quickly than the others, while the others were opposed
(Stubb 2002: 65, 69 and 72-73). In 1996, the French and German governments managed to
agree a common position, according to which no single member would be empowered to veto
differentiated integration projects. Their underlying conceptions on this issue nonetheless
remained divergent as well as shifting, reflecting the more general fact that ‘throughout the
IGC and indeed at Amsterdam, Chirac and Kohl were never on the same bicycle’ (Stubb
2002: 84 and 152). Almost all controversial questions concerning differentiated integration
21 were nonetheless settled before the Amsterdam summit in June 1997, enabling heads of
government to spend no more than seven minutes discussing the flexibility provisions of the
draft treaty (Stubb 2002: 100). According to one analysis, ‘there was no need to push
flexibility to the extreme’, as the conflicts that had put this issue on the EU agenda – over
which member states would qualify for the Euro, over enlargement and over the recalcitrant
British Conservative government, which had been defeated at elections just before the
summit – had meanwhile been resolved (Stubbs 2002: 105).
The new treaty provisions on ‘enhanced cooperation’ bore little relation to the SchäubleLamers paper. They actually set the obstacles to promoting differentiated integration so high
that no attempt was ever made to use them. They approximated the kind of lowest-commondenominator outcome characteristic of decision-making processes such as EU treaty reform
where unanimity is the decision rule, unless a coalition of at least two ‘big’ member states
threatens to ‘go it alone’ if necessary outside the EU. The lack of support for the SchäubleLamers paper in France was particularly damaging. If French support for it had been much
stronger, it is probable that Kohl would have backed it more strongly both publicly and in the
IGC negotiations. Not only in Lamers’ view, but also in that of various French observers, the
paper’s impact would have been much more powerful if French reactions to it had been more
decisive and positive (Lamers 2007; Gougeon 2006: 393; Goulard 2007: 101).
The Fischer Humboldt Speech
Germany’s Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer’s Humboldt University speech (Fischer
2000) was based on a similar analysis of post-Cold War Europe and Germany’s place and
role in it to that of Schäuble and Lamers. Like them, Fischer viewed the EU’s Eastern
enlargement and its deepening as equally indispensable, the former to ensure continental
peace and stability and the latter to preserve the EU’s cohesion and capacity for action and to
prevent it sliding into a ‘serious crisis’ (Fischer 2007: 277). After German concessions at the
Berlin summit in 1999 had created the financial pre-conditions for enlargement, Fischer was
looking for reciprocal concessions from France in the new treaty that the member states were
scheduled to negotiate during the French EU presidency in the second half of the year 2000
so that the institutional pre-conditions of enlargement would be created (Fischer 2007: 302).
Fischer’s institutional reform strategy rested heavily on closer cooperation with France. This
was in any case the best way, Fischer thought, to allay French worries about a prospective
decline in French influence and the greater power of a bigger post-unification Germany in an
22 enlarged EU (Fischer 2007: 301). There was a series of informal meetings between Fischer
and his French Socialist counterpart, Hubert Védrine, about the EU’s future starting in late
1998 (Fischer 2007: 298). But, as the French presidency approached, it became increasingly
clear to Fischer that a joint Franco-German initiative to reform the EU institutions would not
be feasible, owing to the cohabitation in France between Chirac and a Socialist government
led by Lionel Jospin, who was likely to be Chirac’s principal opponent at the next
presidential elections in 2002 (Fischer 2007: 302). Neither Chirac nor Jospin wanted to
antagonize Euro-sceptical currents in their respective political camps by adopting too ‘prointegrationist’ positions. Hence Fischer decided to ‘go it alone’ and informed Védrine
(Fischer 2007: 302).
Fischer pleaded in his speech for a transition from the ‘confederation’ that currently existed
to a ‘European federation’ with both a European Parliament and a European government. He
proposed a bicameral European Parliament, comprising a directly-elected chamber and one
chosen along the lines of the US Senate or German Bundesrat, and a European government
that could be based either on the existing Council or on the Commission or headed by a
directly-elected president (Fischer 2000: 7). If it proved impossible under the existing treaties
to negotiate the requisite institutional reforms before enlargement, then at some stage during
the next decade either a majority of member states should negotiate a new ‘constitutional
treaty’ establishing a European federation or, if this proved not to be feasible, a smaller group
of member states should form a ‘vanguard’ (Avantgarde) to forge closer political integration
– inside or outside the existing treaties (Fischer 2000: 8-9). Members of the vanguard could
initially strengthen their cooperation in the same way that this had already occurred in
monetary and justice and home affairs (Schengen). They could form a ‘gravitation centre’
based on a new European ‘basic treaty’ (Grundvertrag) and possessing its own organs,
including a government that would speak with one voice for its members in the larger EU, a
‘strong Parliament’ and a directly-elected president.
Unlike Schäuble and Lamers, Fischer did not identify which current or future member states
he thought should participate in such a vanguard, but reiterated that the vanguard could
‘never be exclusive but must always be open to all – present and future - member states’
(Fischer 2000: 9-10). Fischer emphasized like them, however, that in the future as in the past
no European integration project would get off the ground without the ‘closest Franco-German
cooperation’ (Fischer 2000: 9).
23 In Germany, Fischer’s speech attracted wide political support. Fischer stressed that he had
made it in an unofficial capacity and it was not therefore government policy. Nonetheless, the
SPD backed the speech. Despite the ‘unofficial’ character of the speech, Fischer had
informed the SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of his intentions and showed him the text in
advance. Schröder told Fischer that the speech would cause a ‘big bang … But do it’ (Fischer
2007: 304). Having come to office as a self-confessed relative ‘Euro-sceptic’, Schröder had
fast become convinced of the necessity of close European political integration and of a close
Franco-German relationship (Schröder 2006). The Christian Democrats were equally
approving, claiming, not without a certain amount of justification, that the foreign minister
had basically stolen the ideas contained in the Schäuble-Lamers paper (Fischer 2007: 310).
Among the other EU member states, the pattern of reactions conformed fairly closely to that
which the Schäuble-Lamers Paper had produced. It was basically negative in the UK and
Scandinavia, with both the British and Danish governments seeking to avoid a public debate
about the ‘political finality’ of Europe at a time when their countries’ accession to the Euro
was a controversial issue, but basically positive in the Benelux states. As, unlike Schäuble
and Lamers, Fischer had not been so imprudent as to threaten to marginalize Italy in the EU,
reactions in Italy were less hostile. They were most positive among Centrist politicians and
on the Left, on the condition that, if there should be a differentiated Europe, the fastest ships
‘must not lose sight of the slowest’ (Le Monde 2000b).
Initial French reactions to Fischer’s initiative were characterized by one newspaper as
‘significantly more favourable’ than they had been to the Schäuble-Lamers Paper (Le Monde
2000a). Fischer himself describes French responses to his speech as having been for the most
part ‘hesitant, but basically positive’. Publicly, however, Fischer’s speech was severely
criticized not only by the Euro-sceptical Socialist Interior Minister, Jean-Pierre Chevènement
(Le Monde 2000b), but also by his own French counterpart, Védrine. Referring to France’s
upcoming EU presidency, the latter pointed out that there was a difference between launching
proposals for Europe’s long-term future and making a good job of being the Council
president (Védrine 2000). Unless the French presidency could pilot the IGC to a successful
conclusion at the Nice summit, no longer-term objective could be achieved. For Védrine,
Fischer proposed a much too radical shift in the distribution of power from the member states
to the European level. The French foreign minister was in favour, however, of making it
much easier to mount differentiated integration projects than was possible under the
Amsterdam Treaty. President Chirac himself responded – less critically – to Fischer’s
24 initiative in a speech to the German Parliament. ‘New ways’ had to be opened to ensure that,
after enlargement, the countries that wanted to integrate more rapidly could do so (Chirac
2000). These member states could gather around France and Germany, forming what the
French president described as a ‘pioneer group’. This group could base its cooperation on the
‘reinforced cooperation’ provisions likely to be adopted in the revised treaty and cooperate if
necessary outside of the treaties, ‘without ever jeopardizing the union’s coherence and
acquis’. In contrast to Fischer, though, Chirac did not think that a new treaty or ‘sophisticated
institutions’ were required for this purpose, for which a secretariat, a ‘supple coordination
mechanism’ would suffice.
Some observers criticized Chirac’s project as a new incarnation of France’s traditional
preference for an intergovernmental as opposed to a supranational or federal Europe (Goulard
2007: 103). Fischer himself found Chirac’s pioneer group proposals ‘pretty thin’ and much
too timid to have any chance of being translated into a practical success (Fischer 2007: 312).
The two governments nonetheless found it easier to reach a compromise on differentiated
integration than on other issues on the IGC agenda (Chirac 2011: 304). They clashed fiercely
at the Nice IGC summit, which is generally regarded as having been a fiasco. The French and
German governments reportedly did not push as hard to expand the scope for differentiated
integration under the EU treaty as they had three years earlier at Amsterdam (Stubb 2002:
152). The outcome fairly well replicated the kind of lowest-common-denominator solution
reached at Amsterdam: the new treaty made the conditions for ‘reinforced cooperation’ less,
but only slightly less, restrictive. One analysis forecast that the treaty spelled the ‘end of a
pre-determined and unitary core which would determine the pace of integration’, that the new
provisions would not be used very often and that, when they were, their role would be to
facilitate agreement in the Council in the same way as the threat of a qualified majority vote
(Stubb 2002: 122). Fischer ‘deeply regretted’ that it had been impossible to agree a joint
paper on the Europe’s future with Védrine in lieu of his Humboldt speech. The effect and
impact of a joint Franco-German initiative would, in his view, have been ‘considerably
bigger’ (Fischer 2007: 310).
Conclusions: The crisis of differentiated integration
This analysis shows that the political history of differentiated integration in the EU has been
shaped primarily by Franco-German relations. With one exception, differentiated integration
projects that both France and Germany supported have always been adopted and have
25 generated centripetal effects that persuaded more and more initially unwilling states to
participate in them. In the case of defence, of which in Europe the US and the UK are both
bigger providers than Germany, Franco-German projects did not exercise as big an impact as
in other issue-areas. Instead, progress in this sphere depended more heavily on the AngloFrench initiative launched in 1998 at St Malo. Projects on which no Franco-German
agreement was reached invariably failed. No project was launched by other subgroups of
member states, let alone adopted or successful. The history of differentiated integration thus
confirms the venerable – intergovernmentalist - maxim in the EU that when France and
Germany agree, closer integration is generally possible and that when they do not, it is not.
In practice, Franco-German disagreements were strongest mainly on projects of differentiated
institutional integration, which originated and were fairly broadly supported in Germany, but
were to different degrees opposed in France. The fact that successive French governments
either proposed or were willing to participate in differentiated sectoral integration projects
indicates that French opposition was not directed against differentiated integration as such.
For both Schäuble-Lamers and Fischer, differentiated integration was a vehicle to circumvent
the opposition to closer political integration among other states, first and foremost the UK,
and create a much more ‘federal’ EU in which the national governments would have less and
EU organs more power than under the existing treaties. This is indicated by their concern to
keep any ‘hard-core Europe’ open to accession by initial ‘outsiders’ and to ensure that the
provisions or decisions of any project initially launched outside the EU should subsequently
be (re-)integrated as far as possible in the acquis communautaire. In essence, the pattern of
outcomes of conflicts over differentiated integration in the EU represents the victory of the
‘functionalist’ over the ‘federalist’ programmes of European integration. A decade and a half
after the failure of the project he launched with Lamers, Schäuble (2008) concluded that a
large proportion of the proposals they had made had meanwhile been implemented. However,
this is a more accurate judgment in respect of sectoral integration than in respect of the EU’s
institutional structure, where the ‘big bang’ that both Schäuble-Lamers and, even more,
Fischer envisaged was still-born. In France, compared with Germany, numerous factors - the
higher level of political polarization over European integration, the higher pressures to
legitimize major treaty changes by popular referendum (not foreseen by the German Basic
Law), the weaker political position of the Christian Democratic, Social Democratic, Liberal
and Green currents that in other countries are the principal bastions of support for the EU, the
stronger representation of Euro-sceptical factions in all the main political movements, and the
26 greater role of the state in the shaping of national identity – together to make it politically
much less feasible for key political actors to support radical reforms of the EU’s institutional
structure.
It is impossible to be certain what would have happened if the Schäuble-Lamers and Fischer
projects had mobilized much wider and stronger support than they did in France. It seems
likely, however, that in this scenario the German government would have rallied to them
more publicly and openly and a Franco-German coalition would have emerged to back them.
The experience of differentiated sectoral integration projects suggests that numerous other
member states would likely have joined them. True, one notable older Franco-German project
whose adoption would have established a differentiated institutional structure for Europe –
the Fouchet Plan (see above) -failed for lack of support among the other four member states.
However, this was because it was an intergovernmental project designed to forestall closer
political integration. ‘Integrationist’ members such as the Benelux states would have been far
more likely to rally to the Schäuble-Lamers and Fischer projects, as they aimed at
intensifying rather than rolling back existing levels of integration.
After the demise of Fischer’s project, the door closed on the prospects for major
differentiated institutional integration in the EU for the next decade. After the 9/11 terrorist
attacks in the US in 2001, Fischer (2004) himself declared ‘hard-core’ Europe projects to be
outmoded. The EU had now to assume a much more important strategic role, embrace Turkey
and be able to act on a genuinely ‘continental scale’. When, in 2005, French voters threw out
the EU’s draft Constitutional Treaty in a referendum, ‘ideas of a core Europe or a FrancoGerman union’ seemed finally to be ‘all but dead’, all the more so as in Germany too, support
for closer European integration declined significantly (The Economist 2005; Bulmer and
Paterson 2010 and 2011; Paterson 2011).
What put differentiated integration squarely back on to the EU’s agenda in the new decade
was neither shifting popular sentiment about the integration process nor visionary ‘proEuropean’ politicians, but rather, from 2009 onwards, the burgeoning Euro zone crisis.
Whilst the outcome of the December 2011 EU summit may presage the development of a
more differentiated Europe, based on membership or non-membership of the Euro zone, this
scenario could not disguise the fact that not only the Euro zone, but also the very practice of
differentiated integration, was in crisis. Simultaneously, the three principal differentiated
integration projects – the Euro, the Schengen Accord and the ESDP – all seemed increasingly
27 fragile. The Euro zone looked perilously close to disintegration, the Schengen Accord was
being challenged by some member states’ re-imposition of border controls, and the ESDP
was in disarray following the divergent stances taken by Germany, on the one hand, and
France and the UK, on the other, over military intervention in Libya and owing to the EU’s
increasingly manifest failure to develop a credible independent military intervention capacity.
This triple crisis of differentiated integration did not threaten the practice of differentiated
integration as such. It threatened instead to increase differentiation by putting into reverse the
process whereby more and more member states gradually acceded to projects launched by a
Franco-German-led ‘vanguard’ group. Such a process, were it to gather momentum, could
lead not only to a more differentiated, but also to a more divided EU and from there, in the
worst-case scenario, to the very disintegration of the EU.
28 DIFFERENTIATED POLITICAL INTEGRATION IN THE EUROPEAN UNION
SECTORAL DI
INSTITUTIONAL DI
Euro
Scheng.
Social
protocol
ESDP/
Defence
SchäubleLamers
Paper
Fischer
speech
FrancoGerman
German
-French
FrancoGerman
German
-French
German
German
German
position
For
For
For
For*
For
For
French
position
For
For
For
For
Ambivalent/
against
Ambivalent/
against
UK
position
Against
Against
Against
For
Against
Against
Yes/No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
No
Success:
11→17
states
Success:
2→5→
22 EU &
other
states
Success:
11→15
→
27 EU
states
Success:
2→
WEU →
26 states
Failure
Failure
Participation
STAGE
ISSUE
Conception
Adoption
Outcome:
Success/
Failure
*Although EU defence cooperation was launched by France and Germany, the ESDP was adopted in
1999 on the basis of an Anglo-French initiative (Saint Malo Declaration).
29 Bibliography
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33 twitter.com/MonashUni
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