European Integration, 1950-2003: Superstate or New Market Economy? (review)

Although economic and political integration has been a fundamental force in postwar Europe, it remains a source of confusion and controversy. For example, as Gillingham notes in his introduction to this ambitious and impressive study, integration most frequently describes an essentially political or economic phenomenon, depending on the academic background of the investigator. However, for Gillingham, a historian with a strong commitment to interdisciplinary inquiry, a breakthrough in understanding integration requires a fresh combination of tools from both disciplines. Specifically, his research agenda joins the neoliberal institutionalist perspective of political science, which focuses on interstate relations and the development of global regulatory mechanisms, with the classical liberalism of Friedrich Hayek and his descendants and their framework of free markets interacting with institutions and creating "spontaneous order" in free societies. Gillingham's original and provocative thesis is that "negative" European integration, based on markets and self-generating coordination, has succeeded. Conversely, positive integration, based on the action of central institutions in Brussels, did not, and cannot, work as long as there is no common democratic foundation—no sense of European nationhood.

Blessed with an energetic style and a prodigious appetite for research, Gillingham presents a wide-ranging four-stage reinterpretation of European integration, held together by his thesis and methodology. Thus, in the early years, the all-important customs union of 1956 owed an enormous debt to Hayekian liberalism and postwar West Germany's embrace of competitive markets; Monnet and like-minded federalists aredemoted from visionary founding fathers to welfare-state planners responsible for the subsequent deadlock of 1966.¹

The second stage, marked by the twenty-year failure of positive integration through bureaucratic regulation and the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, also brought "regime change" in the late 1970s. Defined as a fundamental shift in values and methods and part of neoliberal globalization, regime change was personified by Margaret Thatcher and the Single European Act (SEA) of 1986 that she championed. "A quantum leap forward," SEA restarted negative integration with a growing network of market-enhancing regulations. Much less successful in Gillingham's view, the creation of the European Monetary Union in 1992 was misguided superstate building, which put member states in a fiscal straightjacket and opened a fourth stage of ongoing crisis and botched Enlargement.

Gillingham has written the first comprehensive history of European integration and produced a profoundly original reinterpretation of thisenormously complex process. His provocative pro-market, anti- interventionist thesis will certainly be debated and challenged, but his dazzling combination of methodological sophistication, vast knowledge, lively storytelling, and sparkling wit means that every student of postwar Europe will need to take him seriously. Of no small import, this historian's skillful championing of social science insight in a profession often mesmerized by linguistic analysis is most encouraging.