European Governance: Is the glass half full or half empty?

Abstract

To anyone of the generation of the dedicatee of this Festschrift, and particularly someone like Heinrich Neisser whose professional life as a politician has in part been dedicated to the 'European project,' the current mood of scepticism, both popular and academic, towards the EU must he puzzling. They remember a time when Europe was in the grip of, or seeking to recover from, war and crazed beliefs. That the EU and its precursors created an institutional framework in which trade and the pursuit of profit could work its magic of translating dangerous passions into rational interests (Hirschman 1977) must have seemed little short of miraculous. European countries under military dictatorship into the mid 1970s - Greece, Portugal, Spain - have, in part thanks to the European integration process, been transformed into stable democracies, and something similar has been happening to the former satellite states of the USSR. Politically, much of the heritage of the Second World War - the Iron Curtain and the divisions of Germany being the most obvious cases - has been overcome. Economically, those countries that were early members of the Common Market benefited enormously in terms of stability and growth, while those who remained (or chose to remain) outside (e.g. the United Kingdom) suffered accordingly (see Milward 1992). The gap between Europe's poorer periphery (the south, but also the Celtic fringe) and the rest has diminished or, as in the Irish case, disappeared altogether. And yet. And yet opinion poll data show persistent (though uneven) and, with some national exceptions, growing levels of scepticism towards the European Union across its territory and a battery of academic and political criticisms has been ranged against the manner ill which the EU is governed.