The aim of this article is to compare the respective domestic backgrounds for British and Danish policies towards Europe and to examine how these have shaped the European policies of the two countries in the 1990s. The article aims to cast light on the role of states' understanding of European integration through empirical application of a theoretical approach, discourse analysis. The main argument is that the patterns of understanding of `Europe' show important linguistic similarities in that the base of the dominant discourse is instrumental and the primary political conflict is between sub-discourses of this instrumental discourse. In the 1990s, the difference between the two countries is in relation to which salient social and political actors adhere to what sub-discourses on Europe. The article argues that the differences between the two countries' European policy lines are shaped by the different understandings of the state/nation. The different understandings of the state/nation have influenced the...

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What price independence? Sovereignty and interdependence in British politics

British and Danish European Policies in the 1990s:: A Discourse Approach

Scholars examining British-European relations typically ascribe UK governmental positions firstly to a combination of distinct and incompatible values, attitudes, and beliefs stemming from historical experience; secondly to a distinct and incompatible set of functional imperatives – namely less interaction with European partners than is the case for other EU member states; and third a distinct and incompatible set of domestic interests. This article challenges these views. It presents evidence to suggest that British governments have failed to assimilate social demands, and that the reason is an under-recognized and untheorized intervening variable – namely the structure of decisionmaking institutions in Parliament. It models the influence of this variable, and suggests that historical institutionalist theory captures key elements of the variable in a manner superior to extant approaches.

Additional excerpts

Structuring Europe: Powersharing Institutions and British Preferences on European Integration

Britain has had difficulties adapting to European integration. The problems result not so much from the EU-related changes in national policies, which have actually been rather moderate, or from the EU-related changes in governance practices, although these have been significant, affecting national institutional structures, policy-making processes and representative politics. They do not even follow from the serious challenges that the EU-related changes in governance practices pose for traditional ideas about democracy. Rather, they come from the lack of a discourse capable of legitimating such changes. To demonstrate this, the article considers Britain's problems in comparative perspective with those of France, which has had greater changes in policies and practices, greater challenges to national ideas, but a more legitimating discourse, and Germany and Italy, where changes in the practices and challenges to ideas have not been as significant.

Adapting to Europe: Is it Harder for Britain?

Defence cooperation between Western European countries has increased considerably since the end of the Cold War. An analytical distinction can be made between political and economic cooperation, the latter having been neglected by political scientists. This study advances the debate on economic cooperation by identifying sources of variation in the European Union (EU)-15 countries’ membership rate in cooperative armaments fora aimed at restructuring the demand side of European defence from 1996 to 2006. By combining six models from three different schools of thought, the risk of confirmation bias through intra-paradigmatic reasoning is reduced. At the same time, fuzzy-set analysis opens up the space for data-driven combination effects. Two distinct combinations form sufficient paths leading to high rates of membership. Most importantly, intentions to create collective defence technological and industrial benefits combine with trust in partners’ ability and integrity to form an essential combination of conditions for governments to pursue cooperation on armaments.

/pdf/conditions-of-intergovernmental-armaments-cooperation-in-1hdc9297a5.pdf

What price independence? Sovereignty and interdependence in British politics

Citations

British and Danish European Policies in the 1990s:: A Discourse Approach

Structuring Europe: Powersharing Institutions and British Preferences on European Integration

Adapting to Europe: Is it Harder for Britain?

Conditions of intergovernmental armaments cooperation in Western Europe, 1996–2006

Enlargement and Legitimacy: A passage from Europe of the Elites to Europe of the Electorates

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