La Gouvernance Supranationale dans la Construction Européenne (review)

This book deals with the evolution of the executive and legislative supranational organs of the European Communities—the High Authority, the Commission, the Parliament, and the Council of Ministers when it decides by majority vote—during the construction of Europe and pays special attention to the effects of the lack of democratic control and transparency in supranational decision-making on the development of the European integration process.

Three major themes may be distinguished. The first is how the founding fathers of the European Communities handled the problem of the democratic deficit. In chapters on Jean Monnet and Sicco Mansholt respectively, the historians Bernd Bühlbäcker and Guido Thiemeyer show that both men were “technocrats” not much concerned with gaining democratic legitimacy. Indeed, Mansholt believed that the “detrimental influence of pressure groups and electoral strategies would be abolished by transferring the political decisions from the national governments which were dependent on parliaments, to a supranational institution acting only in the common interest” (p. 43). By contrast, Walter Hallstein, the first president of the European Commission, believed that the powers of the Commission could be strengthened only by strengthening the powers of the European Parliament. But Hallstein’s attempt, as Gerhard Mollin shows, ended in failure with the Luxembourg Declaration of January 1966. Too much of a technocrat, Hallstein had badly misjudged the true balance of forces in the European Communities. Gérard Bossuat relates that Hallstein had the full support of Emile Noël, the executive secretary of the Commission, who during the “empty chair” crisis did his utmost to keep good relations with France.

The second theme in the book is that the limited powers of the Parliament and unanimous decision-making in the Council of Ministers seriously weakened Europe’s capacity to act, but that this was partly remedied through initiatives developed by the Franco-German axis. Claudia Hiepel deals with the “couple” of Willy Brandt and Georges Pompidou. Their major achievement was the relance européenne of 1969, which led to the first enlargement of the European Communities, but they did not make progress on economic and monetary integration to supplement the increased political cooperation. Michèle Weinachter discusses the couple of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Helmut Schmidt, showing how they managed to launch the intergovernmental European Monetary System. Although Giscard had little room for maneuver in France, he and Schmidt were able to succeed because Schmidt was less federalist than his predecessors. George Saunier’s chapter on François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, the architects of the European Central Bank—the one supranational addition to the European construction since the Rome treaties—emphasizes the pedagogic discourse the two men developed with respect to Europe, a discourse that helped in some way to overcome the democratic deficit. In Helen Drake’s view, this leadership by ideas was also Jacques Delors’s major contribution to the integration process during his two terms as president of the Commission.

The book’s third theme concerns the various attempts to increase Europe’s capacity for action and to reduce the democratic deficit. Vincent Dujardin’s chapter on Belgian Foreign Minister Pierre Harmel concentrates on the attempts by a small member-state to strengthen supranationality in the years after the Luxembourg Declaration. Danliela Preda discusses Altiero Spinelli’s failed initiative to provide Europe with a constitution by way of the Parliament, and Muriel Rambour considers why the member-states at their meetings in Maastricht, Amsterdam, and Nice failed to make real progress on key questions, including majority voting in the Council, the maximum number of Commissioners, and the extension of the powers of the Parliament. Time and again, the member-states sought to protect their own short-term interests over the European common interest. Achim Hurrelmann subsequently analyzes the different German, French, and British conceptions of how to establish a constitutional framework for the European Union, drawing on the debate initiated by German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer in 2000 and the subsequent debates in the European [End Page...