EUROPEAN POLITICAL INTEGRATION

European Political Integration

European Political Integration

Introduction

The relationship between economic and political integration is central to much of the deliberation in theoretical work on the EU. Theories of economic integration had predicted a stage-by-stage deepening of the integration process that would follow from the decision of two or more countries to create a free trade area. This logic would culminate in a monetary union and de facto total economic integration. In such circumstances, common policies would emerge from supranational authorities as a matter of the playing out of this practical logic. In other words, economic integration would produce political integration. As a partial, but significant, aside, it is worth speculating on the extent to which the governments that created the free trade area actually envisaged political integration. In part, this argument suggests that governments are driven by economic logic to solutions that imply political integration. Thus a free trade area cannot become effective without the existence of a common external tariff, otherwise its members could defect from the regime by levying differential tariffs.

A working free trade area creates pressures for the wider application of market efficiency to be achieved through the free movement of other factors of production - a single market (Dinan 2004, pp. 6-70). The efficiency of a single market, in turn, is best attained through the use of a common unit of account, thereby suggesting logic towards monetary union, which in turn requires the establishment of common policies administered at the level of the new, de facto, single integrated economy.

What motivated political initiatives for European integration following World War II, and how did the objectives of the main actors differ?

Plans for European integration go back as far as the history of Europe. They flourished in the interwar period, in utopian schemes like that of the Hungarian Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, founder of the pan-European movement in the early 1920s, and in the minds of more pragmatic politicians like French Prime Minister Aristide Briand. After World War I French politicians realistically sought ways to integrate the French and German steel industries, but such plans only became possible, paradoxically, thanks to World War II and to the Cold War. World War II divided Germany, reducing its western part to a size commensurate with the other European powers, England, France, and Italy, while the Cold War created the geopolitical imperative for West Germany to be fully integrated with the West, lest it seek unity through neutrality or worse, as part of the Soviet block (Milward 2000,pp. 1-20).

The Americans tried to force unity upon the Europeans through the Marshall Plan and its associated Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), but the British resisted American urges to give the OEEC any supranational quality, preferring to bank on the Commonwealth and their “special relationship” with the U.S. The French, for their part, wanted to control the German industrial heartland, the Ruhr, as a source of badly needed coal for their rich iron ore deposits, and to ensure industrial supremacy for themselves in case of any ...