The Uniting of Europe: From Consolidation to Enlargement (review)

The Uniting of Europeis a short introduction to European integration. Stanley Henig stresses the importance of the international context and then reviews the history of European integration against the background of changes in world politics. He sees this background in three periods: the coming of the Cold War, the "ossification" of the Cold War after the mid-1960s, and finally the period following the demise of Communism. This felicitous way of organizing things makes Uniting of European excellent book whose point of departure provides readers with useful analytical distance from the discussions of institutional design that predominate in the specialist literature.

Surveying the first period, Henig emphasizes that in the absence of the international political changes of the early Cold War years, European integration would never have moved ahead. Jean Monnet's "functionalist" promotion of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) through the Schuman Plan in 1950 was an innovative approach to confronting the Franco-German problem that was the key to Europe's future, but Henig convincingly argues that the ECSC could not have materialized without American pressure to rehabilitate West Germany for broader Cold War purposes. During this phase of the Cold War, as Alan Milward has argued, the "rescue" of European nation-states within a broader Western alliance had top priority. In practice this ruled out ambitious Euro-federalist approaches, as the failure of Monnet's subsequent proposal for a European Defense Community illustrated. A narrower "functionalist" strategy, which anticipated that "spillover" would promote further integration "by stealth," was the only real alternative.

The six-member European Economic Community (EEC) that came from the 1957 Rome Treaty was a compromise between inter-governmentalism and federalism, structured around a "functionalist" customs union and common policies, particularly in agriculture. "Common Market" institutions were modeled on the ECSC. The "community method" of governance (often called the "Monnet method") meant that integration could move ahead only when the member-states agreed about their general goals, hence the importance of reading the history of the European Union (EU) in part as a sequence of "grand bargains." But even when general agreement was reached, the European institutions, particularly the European Commission, generated detailed projects to achieve new goals. Integration thus often moved forward by stealth. Electorates in the individual countries were rarely consulted about this endeavor and in fact were largely unaware of it. The murkiness of the integration process generated what came to be called the "democratic deficit."

The multiple initiatives that made the EU what it is today occurred against the background of Henig's second international phase, the "ossification" of the Cold War in the 1960s, when threats of actual war in Europe receded. These momentous years—which brought enlargement of the EEC to include former members of the European Free Trade Association (including the reluctant United Kingdom) and ex-authoritarian and underdeveloped Mediterranean countries, the European Monetary System (EMS), the 1986 Single European Act providing for a unified market by 1992, and vigorous efforts to "deepen" integration—culminated in the Maastricht Treaty negotiations and the commitment to economic and monetary union in 1991. Parallel to the new grand bargains were incremental but important institutional changes, including summits of the European Council, the invigoration of the European Parliament, and the emergence of the European Court of Justice as a powerful force through its establishment of the supremacy of European law. When describing these and other innovations, Henig concisely touches on all the high points.

At this stage of the book, however, Henig's "central thesis . . . that external events have always been a critical determinant of the process of integration" (p. 85) runs into problems. Henig thinks of "external events" in terms of the traditional interstate balance of power, resulting in misconceptions. In particular, relationships between an "ossified" Cold War and events in the 1970s and 1980s are much more tenuous than he implies. Change in the Cold War balance of power was much less significant for European integration than was international economicupheaval...