Vivien Schmidt is a specialist on the European Union (EU) who, like most, believes that it has taken over most of the functions of the member-states, that it is a pluralist democracy superior to theirs, that it is necessary and beneficial and the wave of the future. The only problem remaining to complete the subordination of the member-states posed in her book is that their politicians have not yet found the language or discourse to convince the public of these self-evident and unavoidable truths.
Like most specialists, too, she is less interested in the history, politics and policies of the EU, surely the best way to judge it, than in its convoluted and ever shifting policy-making procedures, its so-called governance and in their congruity with those of various member-states. Reviewing the governance of four member-states, Germany, Italy, France and Britain, she finds that the systems of governance of the first two, which she deems federalist and regionalist, are more compatible with that of the EU than those of the last two, more centralized and statist. From this rather formal analysis she concludes that the latter have been changed more by the EU than the former, which however have a harder time changing discourse because of their decentralization.
Schmidt may be a knowledgeable realist about the member-states whose governance she analyzes but she is certainly an idealist, not so much in fact as in interpretation, about the operation and beneficence of EU. She assumes as given without any argument at all that the EU has subsumed the nation-state in its important functions. This is a premise, shared by self-interested specialists in the field, which is more than doubtful. She may concede that the member-states are the only democracies with a people or demos who share a common heritage and destiny and who are willing to sacrifice lives and treasure for the good of their community, but this is thought to lie in the past.
She does not discuss all the policy areas for which the member-states still have sole or only minimally shared responsibility with the EU, defence, law enforcement and foreign affairs, which are the hallmarks of sovereignty, and budgets and taxation, which reflect the balance of national political forces as do health, education and welfare, which do not yet fall into the EU's remit and yet are often the most salient issues in national politics. It is true that these policies are somewhat constrained by the EU's control of commercial and monetary and fiscal policy, but these can still be contested by member-states.
If anti-EU forces came to power in a member-state reckoning that its costs exceeded its benefits they could block integration and conceivably withdraw from the EU or the euro. Noises about withdrawal from the euro have been heard from several states, including Italy, once the most Europhilic. One may also argue that the nation-state can no longer go it alone in the face of globalized markets and that the EU is the best instrument for dealing with them, but this may be an effect rather than the cause of the triumph of neo-liberalism in the member-states and their supposed congruity with the EU.
The most questionable conclusion is that the decision making of the EU, characterized as pluralist and federalist, is superior to that of the member-states, especially to that of the so-called statist ones. EU decision making is so complex, opaque and unique to each decision that it has been called a “trash can” procedure. It involves so many constituents, the Commission and its committees and the European Parliament and Court, institutions that almost always concur with each other as opposed to the Council of Ministers and European Council, which often dissent, and so many different procedures that even the specialist has trouble following the state of play. In short, the EU is the opposite of a transparent, representative and responsible democracy.
Second, it is hardly pluralist in the way she claims, as if the US and other countries she cites have ever been so. The EU is a polity of and with the people, she says, because it invites participation from all interest groups, business, labour and NGOs. At the same time she admits that most of the representation, resources, and participation belong to big business. Despite their Europhilia the trade unions have only sporadic and marginal influence. The presence of women's groups, which were subsidized by the Commission and felt mainly in the 1980s, was due to an off-hand article in the original Treaty of Rome on equal pay for equal work. The EU took up the environment as one of its primary issues in the 1980s because of its trans-national dimension and consensual nature, but little constraining legislation has emerged since.
The main remit and work of the EU has been the creation of a single competitive market, allowing the free flow of goods, capital and services without any state or indeed social interference. This is not the result of a pluralist or truly federalist system but of a largely monolithic one dominated by big business—initially more American than European. So the reason the Germans and Italians have had an easier time working with the EU than France or Britain is not so much, as Schmidt claims, that they have similar systems of governance as that they have both been more Europhilic and neo-liberal than the others.
