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Bickerton, C.J. and Hodson, Dermot and Puetter, U. (2015) The new
intergovernmentalism: European integration in the post-Maastricht era.
Journal of Common Market Studies 53 (4), pp. 703-722. ISSN 0021-9886.
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The New Intergovernmentalism: European Integration in the Post-
Maastricht Era
Christopher J. Bickerton, Dermot Hodson and Uwe Puetter
1
Abstract
The post-Maastricht period is marked by an integration paradox. While the basic
constitutional features of the European Union have remained stable, EU activity has
expanded to an unprecedented degree. This form of integration without
supranationalism is no exception or temporary deviation from traditional forms of
European integration. Rather, it is a distinct phase of European integration, what is
called ‘the new intergovernmentalism’ in this article. This approach to post-
Maastricht integration challenges theories that associate integration with transfers of
competences from national capitals to supranational institutions and those that reduce
integration to traditional socioeconomic or security-driven interests. This article
explains the integration paradox in terms of transformations in Europe's political
economy, changes in preference formation and the decline of the ‘permissive
consensus’. It presents a set of six hypotheses that develop further the main claims of
the new intergovernmentalism and that can be used as a basis for future research.
Introduction
The years since the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 have been characterized
by a seemingly unrelenting expansion in the scope of European Union activity. In this
post-Maastricht period, the EU has not only completed the transition from single
market to monetary union and expanded from 15 to 28 members, but it has also
increased its involvement in socioeconomic governance and justice and home affairs.
The EU now has a common foreign and security policy, its own foreign policy
representative and a European diplomatic service. From social policy to the
environment, virtually all aspects of government policy in Europe today are shaped by
the EU in some way.
And yet for all this integration, the basic constitutional features of the Union
have remained remarkably stable. At Maastricht it was decided that major new areas
of EU activity would be developed without conceding substantial powers to the
European Commission or the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU). Far from rejecting or
revising this principle, the Treaties of Amsterdam, Nice and Lisbon confirmed it.
Though the area of justice and home affairs was ‘communitarized’, it still departs
from the classic Community method in several key respects. In other new areas of EU
1
The authors would like to thank the participants of two workshops at the Central European University
in Budapest which were held in June 2012 and November 2013, during which the theoretical
framework of the new intergovernmentalism was first explored and debated. Collaborative work with
this group has led to the completion of an edited volume on the new intergovernmentalism (Bickerton
et al., 2015). The authors gratefully acknowledge feedback from participants at panel sessions at the
Passau UACES conference in September 2012, the Council for European Studies conference in
Amsterdam in June 2013 and the conference of the ECPR Standing Group on the European Union in
The Hague in June 2014. The authors would also like to thank Michelle Cini, co-editor of JCMS, and
the anonymous reviewers for their comments on the article. Any remaining errors are ours alone.
activity, such as the extension of employment and social policy co-ordination at
Amsterdam and Nice, supranational decision-making was studiously avoided.
Though it has gained much power in this period, the European Parliament has
contributed to these developments. Concerned with expanding its own institutional
reach, the EU legislature has shown a willingness to depart from the Community
method providing it is involved to some degree in new areas of EU activity. Many
had expected the global financial crisis to edge Europe towards further
supranationalism, but this has not yet happened. The two key intergovernmental
treaties following the crisis – the fiscal compact and the European Stability
Mechanism (ESM) Treaty – empower the Commission to a limited degree in one case
and not at all in the other. The same can be said of the EU's plans for banking union,
which have seen Member States transfer new powers for financial supervision to the
European Central Bank (ECB) while ensuring that the Commission's influence over
banking resolution is constrained.
With the constitutional framework unchanged, integration since Maastricht has
been pursued via an intensification of policy co-ordination between Member States.
This has occurred at all levels: from heads of state or government in the European
Council down to national experts in comitology committees. This co-ordination varies
in its range of formality and in its degree of institutionalization (compare the shadowy
existence of the ‘Frankfurt Group’ with the routinized actions of the political and
security committee), but it consistently avoids transferring more powers to traditional
supranational bodies – notably the Commission and the Court.
This degree of policy co-ordination has been possible because of the
deliberative and consensual quality of EU decision-making. Deliberation and
consensus-seeking have long been taken to be the behavioural hallmarks of
supranationalism, but in the post-Maastricht period they have imposed themselves as
dominant norms regulating the relations between national actors.
2
We see this in the
pre-eminence of the European Council – a deliberative and consensus-building body
par excellence. It is confirmed in the problem-solving orientation of national experts –
a phenomenon captured in the burgeoning work on epistemic communities and
comitology (Brandsma, 2013, pp. 8–9). National parliamentarians now regularly
deliberate with one another in three interparliamentary conferences: the Conference of
Community and European Affairs Committees of Parliaments of the European Union
(COSAC), the Interparliamentary Conference for the Common Foreign and Security
Policy (CFSP) and Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), and the
Interparliamentary Conference on Economic and Financial Governance. Even in areas
as firmly tied to national sovereignty as security and defence policy, co-ordination is
driven by the strength of a shared professional ethos among national officials (Davis
Cross, 2011). Though conflict remains (for instance, in the falling out over Iraq or
disagreements over financial support for Greece), participants seek solutions from
within the process and less through vetoes or exits. Where individual Member States
have negotiated opt-outs to specific aspects of EU activity (for example, the UK in
justice and home affairs), the attachment to deliberation and consensus has prevented
2
For some, ‘deliberation’ refers to a ‘discussion mode’, whereas ‘consensus’ is a decision-making
procedure (Dehousse et al., 2014, p. 845; Novak, 2013; Urfalino, 2007). In fact, both terms can also be
framed as behavioural norms, which is the approach taken in this article. The concept of ‘behavioural
norm’ draws on Haas (2004, p. 59), who thought of European integration as being not only about the
creation of a specific decision-making regime, but also a certain style of politics regulated by particular
norms of behaviour.
their exclusion from negotiations in these areas (Adler Nissen, 2008; Holzinger and
Schimmelfennig, 2012, p. 301).
Delegation, where it has occurred in the post-Maastricht period, has been to de
novo bodies rather than traditional supranational institutions.
3
The category of de
novo bodies is broad, but points to a key development since 1992. It refers to newly
created institutions that often enjoy considerable autonomy by way of executive or
legislative power and have a degree of control over their own resources. However,
they fulfil functions that could have been delegated to the Commission and tend to
contain mechanisms for Member State representation as a part of their governance
structure. De novo bodies include the ECB, the European External Action Service
(EEAS), the ESM, and numerous regulatory and executive agencies.
This tendency towards deliberation and consensus-building, and the delegation
to de novo bodies, represents an important integration paradox: Member States pursue
more integration but stubbornly resist further supranationalism (Puetter, 2012, p.
168). This constitutes a challenge to EU studies given that more integration has so
often been taken to mean transfers of competences away from national capitals and
towards supranational EU institutions. For theories reducing integration to a series of
bargains between nation-states, the post-Maastricht period is equally paradoxical.
While the constitutional framework has remained stable, the degree of integration has
been extensive and unprecedented. National actors have consistently favoured
deliberative and consensual behaviour over national vetoes and threats of exit, and
their interactions have gone far beyond the narrow confines of intergovernmental
conferences (IGCs). States remain central to the European integration story, but they
are not the ‘obstinate’ nation-states of traditional intergovernmentalist theory
(Hoffmann, 1995).
Our starting point for this article is that this form of integration is not a
temporary deviation from a more longstanding supranational trend. Rather, it is a new
phase in European integration that has become entrenched and systematically
reproduced in the two decades since Maastricht. While recognizing that periodization
is difficult and that processes of sociopolitical change rarely respect the neat
boundaries of legal texts and treaties, we take the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 as our
starting point because it stands out as the moment where the acceleration in EU
activity was formally cast on a basis other than the traditional Community method. In
this article, we label this post-Maastricht phase in European integration ‘the new
intergovernmentalism’.
We are aware that the terms ‘intergovernmental’ and ‘supranational’ are often
given different meanings in the scholarly literature. Following Haas (2004), in his
discussion of the meaning of ‘supranationality’, we note that these terms refer both to
separate decision-making logics (integration through formal acts versus voluntary
policy co-ordination) and to certain behavioural norms that the ‘grand’ theories of EU
integration have associated with one or another level of decision-making and political
authority. In a purely institutional sense, the new intergovernmentalism points
towards an absence of supranational decision-making as typically framed by the
3
We think of the Commission and CJEU as traditional supranational institutions insofar as they are
founded on a formal mandate, which grants them enough autonomy from Member States that they can
take independent decisions and build up their own bureaucratic resources. Traditional
intergovernmental institutions, by contrast, are founded on the representation of Member States and
deal with collective decision-making through forms of voluntary policy co-ordination. They include the
European Council, the Council, the Eurogroup and high-level policy committees such as the political
and security committee.
Community method – that is, the transfer of lawmaking power to the European level,
an expansion in the initiating powers of the Commission and the enforcement powers
of the CJEU, and the resort to majority voting to pass legislation binding on Member
States (Dehousse, 2011, p. 3). More broadly, the new intergovernmentalism also
highlights the way in which certain behavioural norms associated with
supranationalism – namely deliberation and consensus-seeking – have become
uncoupled from their traditional supranational settings and function as the operative
norms for EU Member States. Our point here is not to deny the role of supranational
actors, but rather to acknowledge the fact that their relative importance in determining
the character and direction of the integration process has been in question ever since
Maastricht.
We begin this article by situating our approach within existing theories of
European integration, placing the emphasis on where we think our contribution lies.
We then provide a contextualized explanation of the new intergovernmentalism by
focusing on transformations in Europe's political economy and on the changing
dynamics of preference formation in Europe. The final part presents a set of
hypotheses associated with the new intergovernmentalism, which we hope can serve
as catalysts for further research.
The Politics of the Post-Maastricht Period
In early theorizing about European integration, neofunctionalists stressed the
importance of Community bodies (Haas, 2004) while intergovernmentalists pointed to
the continuing relevance of nation-states (Hoffmann, 1995, pp. 71–106). Though they
differed in their beliefs about the causes of integration, both converged in their
assumption that integration entailed the empowerment of supranational actors. This
assumption also underpins Schmitter's (2004) neo-neofunctionalism and is central to
the ‘supranationalist school’, who define ‘institutionalization’ as ‘a process through
which supranational governance – the competence of the European Community to
make binding rules in any given policy domain – has developed’ (Sandholtz and
Stone Sweet, 1998). As a result of this, Haas's heirs have struggled to explain the
tendency towards integration without supranationalization in the post-Maastricht
period. Liberal intergovernmentalism has seen itself as a voice of reason, but it too
has downplayed the significance of integration in new areas of activity since
Maastricht (Moravcsik, 2002; 2010).
The same limitation is apparent in more recent rationalist theories of European
integration that rely on incomplete contracts. With a similar methodology to liberal
intergovernmentalism, these theories see the EU as subject to ongoing institutional
change (Héritier, 2007). On its own, the concept of ‘incomplete contracts’ is agnostic
about the future direction of integration. However, these authors assume that
integration is driven by supranational actors who use the openness of incomplete
contracts to expand their powers (Karagiannis and Héritier, 2013, p. 98; Cooley and
Spruyt, 2009).
Other contemporary scholarship on the EU distances itself from these
concerns. In place of abstract writing on the ‘nature’ of the EU ‘beast’, much of
today's scholarship is focused on individual policy areas or specific institutions. This
development owes its debt to Wallace et al. (1977), who began the shift in EU studies
from polity-building to policy-making. Such empiricism has led to many novel
insights and generated a wealth of new knowledge in individual policy areas. The new
governance literature, for instance, has been extremely useful in directing attention