sheer bulk and self-confidence of The Choice for Europe has made of it, notwithstanding many an objection from historians, the central reference in a field dominated by political scientists of not dissimilar outlook. Its inadequacy to its object is, however, quite clear. For what Moravcsik’s construction is ab initio unable to explain is why the standard objectives of inter-capitalist state cooperation, as codified in regime theory, could not have been achieved after the war in Western Europe by free-trade agreements of a conventional kind, without creation of any complex of supranational institutions or derogations of national sovereignty. Why shouldn’t the EC have looked more like NAFTA? From a ‘liberal intergovernmentalist’ perspective, the European Commission, the Parliament and the Court of Justice enshrined in the Treaty of Rome can only appear gratuitous: unnecessary headaches down the road on which the six governments of the mid-fifties were so prudently and soberly steering.
What such a conception ignores, of course, is the critical fact that the institutional origins of the European Community were deliberately framed in dynamic, open-ended terms—that is, unlike other forms of international agreement, they were declared to be stepping-stones in view of an ultimate objective whose exact shape was left unspecified. In the famous formula which has haunted Eurosceptics ever since, the first words of the Treaty of Rome spoke of an ‘ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’. It is this teleological aspiration that set European integration categorically apart from the normal world of international agreements. No stable equilibrium was aimed at by the first Coal and Steel Community, or the Common Market that followed it. On the contrary, what they set in motion was an unstable process, potentially concatenating towards a long-term end. This structure was inconceivable without the shaping role of the federalist—not inter-governmentalist—vision of Jean Monnet and his contemporaries. The history of the EC is inexplicable without the impetus to instability genetically engineered into it from the start.
What then of the rationality of the subsequent process? The rhetoric of rational choice is often empty, since any decision—no matter how seemingly aberrant: let us say, at the limit, Jonestown itself—can be read off from some putative preference structure. In The Choice for Europe, the relevant parameters of choice are specific enough: commercial gains. The question is whether the model they imply can be got to match the real world. The nervous tics of the text itself suggest the answer. For its relentless insistence that every important agreement in the history of the Community was determined above all by—mostly sectoral—economic interests is counterpointed by continual saving clauses noting evidence to the contrary, the better to dispatch it off-stage again, as so many residuals.
Such admissions-denegations are scattered throughout the book in a compulsive refrain. They recur at every juncture: the Treaty of Rome, the EMS, British entry, the SEA, Maastricht. Treaty of Rome: ‘geopolitical ideas and security externalities were not entirely unimportant’. Macmillan’s bid for membership: ‘we cannot definitively exclude geopolitical prestige as a motivation’. German reactions to De Gaulle’s veto of the bid: ‘I do not rule out geopolitical motivations altogether’. Creation of EMS: ‘this is not to relegate European symbolism and geopolitical arguments to complete insignificance’. The Single European Act: ‘we should not exclude ideological considerations entirely’. German support for monetary union: ‘domestic deliberations and cleavages prevent us from dismissing federalist ideology entirely’. French quest for Maastricht: ‘we cannot dismiss the ideological explanation entirely’. Forty years of integration: ‘we should not neglect geopolitical interests and ideas altogether’. Typicality of EC for relations among industrial nations in general: ‘although we can reject objective geopolitical circumstances as the source of preferences, we cannot entirely dismiss the role of ideas. Yet until ideas are clearly measured [sic] and more precisely theorized, claims for the importance of ideology cannot be more than speculative’.14 In no case does any serious exploration of, or reflection on, what is gestured at follow. Invariably, the factors momentarily conceded and effectively deleted are either geo-political or ideological. What their repetition indicates is simply the extent to which the evidence cannot be stretched to garb the theoretical framework. Tears and holes start to appear as soon as the fabric is pulled.
Of all these, the most gaping is Moravcsik’s treatment of the role of De Gaulle in Community affairs. ‘Grain, not grandeur’, he declares, lay behind the General’s refusal to admit Britain to the EC in the sixties—essentially, nothing to do with shutting the gates against a Trojan horse from Washington, just a desire to bolster the price of French wheat. Historians have left little standing of the selective use of documents, loose quotation, and forcing of evidence employed to generate this result.15 Beyond such flexing of the record to bend the intentions of a particular, famously obdurate actor to a preconceived schema, however, is the general premise on which The Choice for Europe is built: the belief that political miscalculations and unintended consequences are typically confined—as Moravcsik puts it—to ‘the margins of social life’.
A less eccentric view would be that most of history is a web of unintended effects. The defining events of the past century, the two World Wars, are probably the most spectacular cases on record. Much of the inspiration for the building of the European Community, by contrast, came from the goal of avoiding their repetition in the Old World. But the edifice was entirely unprecedented, the architects never at one, the design ever more complex, the process extended far beyond the span of any government. How could it be otherwise than a minefield of misreckonings?
Among the most recent of these were the hopes invested in the SEA by Thatcher and Delors—opposite, but equally disappointed: the one furious that it paved the way towards a single currency, the other mortified that it proved a dead-end for a more social market. Or the beliefs of Kohl and Mitterrand that monetary union would quicken growth and lessen tensions between Germany and France. Once he reaches Maastricht, even Moravcsik forgets himself to the point of writing that ‘it is unclear whether the economic benefits truly outweighed the costs for any single country, or whether the expectations of the various governments were fully compatible’.16 So much for the unfailing rationality and foresight of the interested parties. As for the Stability Pact imposed by Germany to discipline laxer neighbours, it rebounded so quickly against the Federal Republic that Berlin was among the first to violate it. Such counter-finalities have punctuated integration ever since the Schuman Plan was announced in 1950.
Blindness to these is due not just to the dogmatics of rational choice, but to the curiously apolitical cast of The Choice for Europe, much of which reads like a swollen theoretical side-bar to the technocratic discourse of committees and functionaries in Brussels itself. Not, of course, that Moravcsik himself is in any way unpolitical—it would difficult to suspect a more mainstream New Democrat. His manifest aversion to De Gaulle is not simply as a figure too unmistakably resistant to the postulates of his theory, but also as a ruler whose ‘incoherent’ foreign policy, pursuing French independence in defiance of Atlantic solidarity, was fortunately doomed to failure. But such conventional American dislike of a threat to Washington is no spur to any serious analysis of the balance of different forces in France, or any other country, at the time. In Moravcsik’s optic, the domestic interests informing government policies boil down to little more than various producer lobbies, with virtually no attempt to reconstruct or even refer very much to the party systems and ideological landscapes of the period. Just how drained of politics the result becomes can be judged from—one example among many—his description of Thatcher’s regime as a ‘centrist coalition’,17 a notion she would have regarded as slanderous, and her opponents as risible.
The best antidote to such dehydration comes from another, younger American scholar, Craig Parsons at the University of Oregon. In a brilliantly executed study of France’s part in the history of integration, A Certain Idea of Europe, Parsons shows how far the political realities of the French role in the building of Europe were from the utility functions of assorted economic interest groups. After the Second World War French elites, confronted with the problem of avoiding a re-run of their failures after the First, had—Parsons argues—three options: traditional realist diplomacy, pragmatic inter-state cooperation led by France and Britain, and direct Franco-German integration within a supranational community. Each was informed by a distinct set of ideas that cross-cut Right/Left attachments along the non-Communist