process of integration. Contrary to a widespread belief, the EU is still far from a truly common market. Here lies one of the reasons for the sluggishness of growth within it.
Yet current uncertainties go deeper. They are rooted in the nature of European integration itself, which has always been an elitist project, enjoying no more than a passive consent of the population. That licence is now running out, as the huge gap between voters and parliament in even such an exemplary land of liberal outlook as the Netherlands has made clear—the Dutch referendum, naturally, striking Majone much more than that of the French. ‘Most key ideas of modern history, from popular sovereignty to the idea of the nation and the principle of nationality, were originally advanced by intellectual and political elites’, Majone remarks. ‘But these ideas proved their vitality by their capacity to mobilize people and push them to political action. This is not the case of European integration’. Over half a century, there has been ‘a certain europeanization of intellectual, economic and political elites’, but ‘no “europeanization of the masses” has taken place even remotely comparable to that “nationalization of the masses” . . . which occurred in all countries of West Europe at the end of the Napoleonic wars’.67
The gulf between those above and those below remains irreparable. It is dictated by the way unification was originally designed, and has always proceeded. ‘No realistic assessment of the EU . . . is possible without keeping constantly in mind the elitist nature of the project’—since ‘the functionalist (or Monnet) approach to European integration taken in the 1950s entails a fundamental trade-off between integration and democracy. The logic of the approach is such that any time a choice between integration and democracy has to be made, the decision is, and must be, always in favour of integration’. To see this, one need only look at the Commission’s monopoly of legislative initiative—‘a flagrant violation of both the constitutional principle of the separation of powers and the very idea of parliamentary democracy’.68 So long as there is a sufficient material pay-off for this voiding of familiar constitutional norms, the masses will go along with it. But if the elites fail to deliver adequate levels of employment and job security, or increases in purchasing power, the Union could start to pitch.
In this diagnosis the tension, already visible in Gillingham’s work, becomes tauter and more extreme, between what in Majone takes the form, in effect, of an apology for oligarchy and an afterthought for democracy. On the one hand, the EU is approved as a system of confederal power of distinguished intellectual lineage, rightly shielded from decision by popular majorities, where ‘the growing importance of nonmajoritarian institutions’ is proof that ‘reliance upon qualities such as expertise, professional discretion, policy consistency, fairness, or independence of judgement is considered to be more important than reliance upon direct democratic accountability’.69 On the other hand, the Union is a regrettably hierarchical project, whose anti-democratic design was the outcome of a deliberate choice, for which Monnet bears responsibility, capable of alienating a passive citizenry as soon as GDP falters.
But is the EU a confederation in the first place? Not in any sense to be found, certainly, in L’esprit des lois. There Montesquieu’s république fédérative was a union of city-states, provinces or cantons—such entities being necessarily small in size—for mutual defence against aggression from larger monarchies. He did not use the word ‘confederation’, and his description of a federated republic is incompatible with what the term has come to mean or the way in which it is employed by Majone, since it not only includes armed intervention from without to quell any popular rising in a constituent unit, but specifies that such units must renounce the right to treaties with other powers, since they ‘give themselves up entirely, with nothing more to resign’ in such a union once formed70—as if forces from Brussels were entitled to crush riots in Budapest, and the UK to be forbidden membership in NATO. Nor can Montesquieu, of all thinkers, be enlisted without paradox as a champion of mixed government, as opposed to the separation of powers. Though his idealized portrait of England as ‘the one nation that has for the direct end of its constitution political liberty’ reproduces the standard local formula of a mixed monarchy—the trinity of king, lords and commons—Montesquieu’s innovation was to overlay this with a vision of the executive, legislature and judiciary as three independent powers, which never corresponded to island realities but transformed the expectations of the world.
For the credentials of a conception of mixed government as a hodgepodge of overlapping corporate bodies, Majone would have done better—as his invocation of mediaeval and preabsolutist models implies—to go back 150 years, to Althusius as the appropriate ancestor. Where this can lead is to be seen in the work of Jan Zielonka, as noted above.71 In his Europe as Empire (2006), the Union is extolled as a post-modern version of the Holy Roman Empire, superseding statist conceptions of political order for a complex realm of governance in which crude majoritarian rule is becoming a thing of the past. Enlargement, seen by Majone as—at any rate so far—a shadow threatening progress towards the realization of a single market, is here greeted with Anglo-Polish elation as the coup de grâce to delusions of a European super-state.
Stretched to the Dnieper and the Bug, the EU according to Zielonka is now irrevocably a neo-mediaeval maze of variegated jurisdictions, whose unity will not rest on bureaucratic directives of any kind but on spontaneous market adjustments. True, the Middle Ages saw a good deal of predatory conduct—but also precocious welfare systems and the valuable doctrine of just wars. There is still much to be learnt from these. Democracy? ‘Whether the evolving European governance system can still be called ‘‘democratic’’ is a matter of debate’.72 In any case we are moving beyond traditional notions of rule by the people. Elections are a crude means of controlling officials. More effective can be ‘policy networks’ lobbying for specific decisions. Individual citizens should be able to contest these—but not, it is to be hoped, by populist referenda or unruly demonstrations. Private litigation and appeals to the ombudsman are a better path.
If Zielonka’s notion of a luxuriant neo-mediaeval empire can be regarded as no more than an elaborate conceit, its upshot is still instructive—protestation after the event, not representation before it, as the future political norm. In effect, a return to petitions submitted to the prince. Majone is more realistic. The denial of democracy in the Union can be neither avoided nor stabilized. Integration has left little room for decisions from below. But once legitimacy is shifted from the will of voters to the fortune of markets, it becomes captive to their vagaries. Continuous high growth is a promise harder to keep than representative government. Maybe the will of the people cannot be circumvented so easily after all? In holding Monnet responsible for ‘sacrificing democracy on the altar of integration’, Majone implies an alternative was possible. But his premises preclude one. Monnet and his colleagues should not have proceeded by stealth, he explains in Dilemmas, but put the federal state they had in mind to the electorates of Europe. The reproach is a bluff, however, since for Majone such a prospect has never been acceptable to voters, yet the integration that has occurred—even if it has not so far acquired its true name—is just what he thinks it should be: a confederation exempt from the demands of popular sovereignty.
The charge against Monnet is a sign of unease. For viewed historically, the boot is on the other foot. Monnet’s federalism envisaged just what Majone’s confederalism rules out, namely the creation of a United States of Europe answerable to its population through the ballot. Hence the parliamentary structures built into the ECSC and EEC from the start, and the importance for Monnet of the European Defence Community, whose significance for the history of integration Parsons rightly stresses. That the EDC was aborted, and the European Parliament proved ineffective, have been not fulfilments but frustrations of Monnet’s vision, which even now is not quite banished from the scene, as the oscillations of his critic suggest. In 2005, Majone could open Dilemmas of European Integration by hailing the architecture of the EU as ‘the successful prototype of postmodern confederation’.73 Two years later, surveying the wreckage of the Constitution, it had become a precarious edifice swaying on all too cramped foundations.
The location along the ideological spectrum of the four leading accounts of the Union thus far considered is clear enough. Spanning the significant differences between Moravcsik, Gillingham, Eichengreen and Majone