Crises in European Integration: Challenges and Responses, 1945-2005 ed. by Ludger Kuhnhardt (review)

The theme of this short collection of essays is stated early and plainly: "In the end, crises have strengthened European integration" (p. 3), and "There has never been more European integration than in the context or aftermath of crisis" (p. 6). These statements are true but are hardly new. The same point has been made by many in the past. This is perhaps why the process "causes both fascination and frustration" (p. 79), resulting in too much crisis talk that, Jurgen Elvert notes, is "inspired by staunch euro-skeptics to back up their respective points of view" (p. 53). "Of all the international bodies I have known," Belgium's Paul-Henry Spaak once thundered, "I have never found any more timorous and more impotent." This was when the European project was small and rather modest, not yet even a Common Market. Even so, the theme is worth repeating, especially now when an existential crisis threatens Europe's capacity to sustain its past achievements, let alone proceed with new steps toward institutional finality.

The case studies presented by the authors of this volume, who are all Germans, paradoxically make of each crisis a compelling reason for hope in the future. They take the analyst away from fashionable predictions of an imminent collapse of European institutions, an outcome that has often been announced but has never actually materialized. No surprise that the relance européenne to which this pattern refers escapes translation: Europe, too, has a logic that is difficult to comprehend—even in French. What Mathias Jopp and Udo Diedrichs conclude from the Yugoslav crisis is meant specifically for the foreign, security, and defense policy of the European Union (EU), but it applies equally to the entire EU process: "It is more promising to analyze [Europe] in a long term perspective" and compare what the EU can do now to what it (in its earlier incarnations) was able to do many years or decades before (p. 105).

These essays were written at a time when two negative referenda on the European Constitutional Treaty, in France and the Netherlands, looked especially damaging and potentially fatal. To guide the "time of reflection" ahead, Ludger Kuhnhardt, an able scholar but also a past policy practitioner, helped organize a series of seminars at St Antony's College, Oxford. From the European Defense Community to the failed ratification of the Constitutional Treaty, we are reminded of past crossroads when Europe was seemingly about to go astray: the identity crises of the 1960s, the "empty chair" crisis and the Luxembourg Compromise, the Werner commission's feckless plans for economic and monetary union, the Danish "No to Maastricht" (and the near-no from the French), and the endless debate over a so-called constitution for the then-12 EU members—not to mention the "unexpected detours" of enlargement and economic and monetary union. We know now that these were not all "existential crises," though we must also remember they were "severe" in their days (p. 50). Even though the cases are well known, they still remind their readers of this odd reality about hard things: they are indeed hard. Bringing Europe back to life after the suicidal wars fought in the first half of the century, and recasting it as the European Union it is today, is "truly remarkable," insists Hans-Gert Pottering (at the time president of the European Parliament), and is "perhaps the most seriously underrated political achievement" of the past century (p. 132). On this score at least, there can be no doubt: the three phases of the integration process—implementation, reconstruction, and Europeanization—have produced an unfinished "region-state" (as Vivien Schmidt puts it) and, whatever happens next, the age of the Westphalian nation-states is finished.

Although this short volume delivers on its main theme, its individual case studies are often incomplete, certainly uneven, and regretfully dated. Given the caliber of the contributors, this is likely to be a matter of space: most of the cases...