The New Old World. Perry Anderson

only defence for national government since 1945 we have offered’, Milward writes, ‘is that it has better represented popular will than in the past, even if still only partially and imperfectly. That is, for us, the historical reason why it has survived’—a survival, however, that he judges to have been ‘finely balanced’.²¹ Has reinforcement by European integration put it beyond danger? By no means. The rescue may prove only a temporary reprieve. After the promise of its title, Milward’s major book closes with what seems like a retraction: ‘the strength of the European Community’ lies after all ‘in the weakness of the nation-state’.²²

      If these contrary notes do not reach harmony, the historical richness of Milward’s work exceeding its theoretical scheme, this is also partly because his later work—unlike his earlier—proceeds by topical selection rather systematic narration. Without simultaneous tracking of the different forces which he in principle admits were at work, the relative contribution of each to the process of integration cannot be adjudicated on equal terms. Such a narrative waits on a fuller opening of the archives. In its absence, what provisional conclusions are reasonable?

      There were at least four principal forces behind the process of integration. Although these overlapped, their core concerns were quite distinct. The central aim of the federalist circle round Monnet was to create a European order that would be immune to the catastrophic nationalist wars that had twice devastated the continent, in 1914–18 and 1939–45. The basic objective of the United States was to create a strong West European bulwark against the Soviet Union, as a means to victory in the Cold War. The key French goal was to tie Germany down in a strategic compact leaving Paris primus inter pares west of the Elbe. The major German concern was to return to the rank of an established power and keep open the prospect of reunification. What held these different programmes together was—here Milward is, of course, entirely right—the common interest of all parties in securing the economic stability and prosperity of Western Europe, as a condition of achieving each of these goals.

      This constellation held good till the end of the sixties. In the course of the next decade, two significant shifts occurred. The first was an exchange of Anglo-Saxon roles. The belated entry of the UK brought another state into the Community of nominally comparable weight to France and West Germany; while on the other hand, the US withdrew to a more watchful stance as Nixon and Kissinger started to perceive the potential for a rival great power in Western Europe. The second change was more fundamental. The economic and social policies that had united the original Six during the post-war boom disintegrated with the onset of global recession. The result was a sea-change in official attitudes to public finance and levels of employment, social security and rules for competition, that set the barometer for the eighties.

      Thus the last effective step of integration to date, the Single European Act of 1986, exhibits a somewhat different pattern from its predecessors, although not a discontinuous one. The initiative behind the completion of the internal market came from Delors, a convinced federalist recently appointed as French head of the Commission. At governmental level the critical change was, as Milward rightly stresses, the conversion of the Mitterrand regime at Delors’s prompting to orthodox liberal discipline—soon after the turn to the right that brought Kohl to office in Germany. This time, however, a third power played a role of some significance—Thatcher collaborating in the interest of deregulating financial markets, in which British banks and insurance companies saw prospects of large gains; while Cockfield in Brussels gave the project its administrative thrust.

      The higher profile of the Commission in this episode was testimony of a certain change in the balance of institutional forces within the Community, which the Act itself modified by the introduction (more properly reinstatement) of qualified majority voting inside the Council of Ministers. On the other hand, the French stamp on the proto-federal machinery in Brussels was never more pronounced than during the Delors presidency, while Paris and Bonn retained their traditional dominance within the web of inter-governmental relations. The result of thirty years of such integration is the strange institutional congeries of today’s Union, composed of four disjointed parts.

      Most visible to the public eye, the European Commission in Brussels acts as—so to speak—the ‘executive’ of the Community. A body composed of functionaries designated by member-governments, it is headed by a president enjoying a salary considerably higher than that of the occupant of the White House, but commanding a bureaucracy smaller than that of many a municipality, and a budget of little more than 1 per cent of area GDP. These revenues, moreover, are collected not by the Commission, which has no direct powers of taxation itself, but by the member-governments. In a provision of which conservatives can still only dream in the US, the Treaty of Rome forbids the Commission to run any deficit. Its expenditures remain heavily concentrated on the Common Agricultural Policy, about which there is much cant both inside and outside Europe—US and Canadian farm support being not much lower than European, and Japanese much higher. A certain amount is also spent on ‘Structural Funds’ to aid poor or rust-belt regions. The Commission administers this budget; issues regulatory directives; and—possessing the sole right of initiating European legislation—proposes new enactments. Its proceedings are confidential.

      Secondly, there is the Council of Ministers—the utterly misleading name for what is in fact a parallel series of inter-governmental meetings between departmental ministers of each member-state, covering different policy areas (about thirty in all). The Council’s decisions are tantamount to the legislative function of the Community: a hydra-headed entity in virtually constant session at Brussels, whose deliberations are secret, most of whose decisions are sewn up at a bureaucratic level below the assembled ministers themselves, and whose outcomes are binding on national parliaments. Capping this structure, since 1974, has been the so-called European Council composed of the heads of government of each member-state, which meets at least two times a year and sets broad policy for the Council of Ministers.

      Thirdly, there is the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, composed of judges appointed by the member-states, who pronounce on the legality or otherwise of the directives of the Commission, and on conflict between Union and national law, and have over time come to treat the Treaty of Rome as if it were something like a European Constitution. Unlike the Supreme Court in the US, no votes are recorded in the European Court, and no dissent is ever set out in a judgement. The views of individual judges remain unfathomable.

      Finally there is the European Parliament, formally the ‘popular element’ in this institutional complex, as its only elective body. However, in defiance of the Treaty of Rome, it possesses no common electoral system: no permanent home—wandering like a vagabond between Strasbourg, Luxembourg and Brussels; no power of taxation; no control over the purse—being confined to simple yes/no votes on the Community budget as a whole; no say over executive appointments, other than a threat in extremis to reject the whole Commission; no right to initiate legislation, merely the ability to amend or veto it. In all these respects, it functions less like a legislative than a ceremonial apparatus of government, providing a symbolic facade not altogether unlike, say, the monarchy in Britain.

      The institutional upshot of European integration is thus a customs union with a quasi-executive of supranational cast, without any machinery to enforce its decisions; a quasi-legislature of inter-governmental ministerial sessions, shielded from any national oversight, operating as a kind of upper chamber; a quasi-supreme court that acts as it were the guardian of a constitution which does not exist; and a pseudo-legislative lower chamber, in the form of a largely impotent parliament that is nevertheless the only elective body, theoretically accountable to the peoples of Europe. All of this superimposed on a set of nation-states, determining their own fiscal, social, military and foreign policies. Up to the end of the eighties the sum of these arrangements, born under the sign of the interim and the makeshift, had nevertheless acquired a respectable aura of inertia.

      In the nineties, however, three momentous changes loom over the political landscape in which this complex is set. The disappearance of the Soviet bloc, the reunification of Germany and the Treaty of Maastricht have set processes in motion whose scale can only be compared to the end of the war. Together, they mean that the European Union is likely to be the theatre of an extraordinary conjunction of divergent processes in the coming years: the passage to a European monetary union;