Religious Culture and European Integration: Theory and Hypotheses
James L. Guth
Furman University
Greenville, South
Carolina
brent.nelsen@furman.edu
26 March 2003
Prepared for the Biennial Meeting of the European Union Studies Association, 27-29 March 2003, Nashville, Tennessee.
The study of European Union (EU) politics has already come to resemble the study of American politics: communities of scholars are focusing more and more on less and less. Specialty literatures today exist on a wide range of topics, including parliamentary parties, foreign policy, EU law, public opinion formation and many other topics. Such a simple development speaks to the success of the EU’s transition from a collection of states to a distinct polity.[1] The study of the EU, however, differs from the study of the US in one respect: the EU continues to attract scholars trying to develop a general theory of EU politics. As Hix points out, there are no general theories of American or British politics, but scholars insist on rummaging around for one explaining the EU.[2] Perhaps the EU remains fundamentally different from other polities in important respects. Member states still hold on to many of their sovereign powers. Federal institutions cannot directly tax European citizens or raise much of an army. Thus we still need to think about the process of European integration as well as the process of European governance.
This paper is about the process of European integration. Specifically we address the general neglect among integration theorists of the role played by culture in the integration process. Our purpose is to set out several propositions that constitute an explanation for the division in Europe between those who wish to integrate further and those who remain reluctant. We conclude by deriving a series of testable hypotheses.
Neofunctionalism and
Intergovernmentalism: Haas and Hoffman
Early integration theorists—those who did their work in the interwar years up to approximately 1950—were largely prescriptive in their approach. These early federalists and functionalists did not explain European integration so much as lay out political action plans for European (or world) government.[3] Their work, however, inspired a new breed of political scientists—more interested in explaining than prescribing political behavior—to search for reasons why nation states would end their traditional competition and begin cooperating. In our view, three scholars are most responsible for launching the scientific study of European integration: Ernst Haas, Stanley Hoffmann, and Karl Deutsch. Of the three, Ernst Haas receives the most credit for being the father of grand integration theory. Haas published his major work on European integration, The Uniting of Europe, in 1958 where he described what became known as “neofunctionalism,” the dominant theory in the field to the mid-1970s.[4] Stanley Hoffmann, who shared many sympathies with the neofunctionalists, came along in 1966 and somewhat reluctantly knocked the legs out from beneath the “Haasian” school in a long Daedelas article[5] that laid the foundation for “intergovernmentalism,” the most important theoretical challenge to neofunctionalism. Finally, Deutsch and his associates published their major work on integration, Political Community in the North Atlantic Area, in 1957, a year before The Uniting of Europe,[6] but the theory of “transactionalism” outlined in the book did not attract the kind of scholarly attention it deserved until the 1990s. Thus, we take up Deutsch after first examining Haas and Hoffmann.
Ernst Haas threw out his challenge to the field of international relations (integration was, after all, a form of international politics) by arguing that under certain conditions nation states could be persuaded to give up their sovereignty to a supranational authority. In his mind the creation of supranational institutions in Europe changed the way political and economic groups pursued their interests. As the new federal institutions made decisions that altered the material benefits accruing to these interests, more and more group attention focused on influencing policy at the supranational level. The effect of this shift in focus would eventually result in a shift in loyalties, of citizens and groups alike, away from the nation state to the new supranational entity. This was a radical argument from an international relations point of view because Haas had taken the spotlight off of states as the major actors and placed it on interest groups—particularly transnational groups—and new institutions above the nation state.[7] International society, in Haas’s view, was no longer solely comprised of nation states; non-state actors were now important challengers to the primacy of the state. New elements in the international system were, in fact, poised to take international politics “beyond the nation state.”[8]
Traditional international relations theorists who were committed to a state-centered view of the international system were bound to counter Haas’s challenge to the discipline. Stanley Hoffmann was hardly a “traditionalist,” [9] but he was just traditional enough to see major problems with the neofunctionalist perspective. Hoffmann assumed with other realists that under conditions of international anarchy states would adopt their own survival as their chief aim. Cooperation with other states might be helpful on occasion to address problems that spilled over national boundaries, but this cooperation would always be bounded by the state’s absolute need to preserve its sovereignty. In short, states would cooperate, but only so long as their ultimate political authority remained in tact. Stanley Hoffmann, for his part, went further than most students of international relations in conceding that fundamental changes had altered the international system: nation states were simply less able to control their own destinies in a world threatened by nuclear war and crowded with new states differing dramatically in capability.[10] But Hoffman was enough of a traditional realist to suggest that integration was likely to stall when it touched issues of ultimate authority—the question of who was really in charge. When he looked at the new European Community in the mid-1960s (just after De Gaulle put the brakes on rapid integration) he saw a failed attempt to transform the international system: “My own conclusion is sad and simple. The nation-state is still here, and the new Jerusalem has been postponed because the nations in Western Europe have not been able to stop time and to fragment space.”[11] States had reasserted their control; limited integration through intergovernmental bargaining was the best Europe could expect.
Curiously, neither Haas nor Hoffman offered an explanation for why European states began integrating. Haas was more interested in the process “once established”[12] than in how it started. He did, however, assume that a federal scheme was facilitated by socially and ideologically fragmented (pluralistic) states. Integration would proceed only if domestic interests could organize freely and compete for influence over the distribution of economic benefits. In other words, modern democratic welfare states were essential to the process of integration.[13] Beyond this minimal requirement, Haas assumed integration before dissecting it. Hoffman and other “intergovernmentalists” of the time also assumed integration attempts as given, although they were more interested in explaining why integration failed to proceed than how it advanced. To them Europe fit into their picture of a competitive international system.
For more than a decade, integration theory—particularly neofunctionalism—attracted some of the best young students of international relations whose labors resulted in an increasingly complex model of integrative behavior. But crisis beset the field in the 1970s. The European Community seemed to stagnate under the weight of chronic economic problems and diverging national interests. The inability of neofunctionalism to account persuasively for the lack of progress toward deeper integration along with other theoretical difficulties prompted Ernst Haas in 1975 to declare neofunctionalism “obsolete” in Western Europe.[14] In doing so he more or less capitulated to the intergovernmentalists:
Regional integration in Western Europe has disappointed everybody: there is no federation, the nation-state behaves as if it were both obstinate and obsolete, and what once appeared to be a distinctive “supranational” style now looks more like a huge regional bureaucratic appendage to an intergovernmental conference in permanent session.[15]
For Haas, the world had moved on leaving integration in Europe behind. What was needed were broader theories that described an increasingly turbulent but interdependent world and explained the strategies states adopted to cope with their new environment. Regional integration was just one of those strategies, and one that could be abandoned when conditions changed.
Most neofunctionalists—at least in the United States where most grand theorizing took place—abandoned the study of integration after Haas’s declaration. Many went on to study the global system of “complex interdependence” and the various forms of multilateral cooperation, now called “international regimes,”[16] which Haas had highlighted. The neofunctionalists had a new respect for the nation state; very few spoke of “integration” any longer. Integration theory largely went underground until the revival of the European Community in the late 1980s.
The passage of the Single European Act and the new focus in the Community on completing the single market by 1992 encouraged a new round of theorizing. What emerged, starting in 1989, was a debate that looked on the surface like the old neofunctional-intergovernmental fight all over again. In fact, it was not that at all.[17] One side, championed by young scholars such as Wayne Sandholtz, Maria Green Cowles, Gary Marks, and Anne-Marie Slaughter,[18] did assert, like earlier neofunctionalists, that supranational institutions, under certain conditions, exerted influence over Community policy, autonomous of member state interests. The other side, argued effectively and almost single handedly by Andrew Moravcsik,[19] did assert, like earlier intergovernmentalists, that member states still decided the important issues through intergovernmental bargaining and still controlled the supranational institutions they created. But no side (including the neofunctionalists) denied that states were central to the integration process, and all agreed that institutions—whether they be states or councils of ministers or trade unions—were actors to watch. Students of integration differed on their empirical findings and how to interpret them. But they were all using the same methodology: a rational choice approach that assumed that self-interested decision makers made choices based on calculations of material benefit.[20] This, however, takes us a step too far. Before moving on we need to backtrack for a moment and pick up a third integration theory, Karl Deutsch’s transactionalism.
In contrast to Haas and Hoffman, Deutsch’s central concern in 1957 was to identify the requirements for successful integration (which he defined as the creation of a security community where peaceful change was the norm). He determined the requirements by conducting a comparative survey of past integration attempts in the North Atlantic area.[21] He found that successful integration required a “sense of community” (what he also called a “we feeling”), a core political area around which an integrated community could coalesce, and a rise in administrative capacity that would enable the community to meet the challenge of governing an enlarged domain.[22] Integration among states was thus possible only when certain background conditions were met (he identified twelve), most of which involved the development and reinforcement of this sense of community.
What did Deutsch mean by a “sense of community,” and how did it arise? He first defined it simply as “a belief on the part of individuals in a group that they have come to agreement on at least this one point: that common social problems must and can be resolved by processes of ‘peaceful change.’”[23] But he goes on to broaden and deepen the definition in a later passage:
[A sense of community] appears to rest primarily on something other than verbal assent to some or many explicit propositions. The populations of different territories might easily profess verbal attachment to the same set of values without having a sense of community that leads to political integration. The kind of sense of community that is relevant for integration, and therefore for our study, turned out to be rather a matter of mutual sympathy and loyalties; of “we‑feeling,” trust, and mutual consideration; of partial identification in terms of self‑images and interests; of mutually successful predictions of behavior, and of cooperative action in accordance with it—in short, a matter of a perpetual dynamic process of mutual attention, communication, perception of needs, and responsiveness in the process of decision‑making.[24]
A sense of community was, therefore, a social phenomenon that began with shared values, but went beyond them to a sense of loyalty and trust built up through continuous contact and communication. Common values were important because when they were connected to political institutions and habits of political behavior they constituted a distinct “way of life” that was essential to integration.[25] When examining the North Atlantic area, Deutsch noted the importance to integration of a shared belief in democracy and capitalism and a common “Western” way of life characterized by high incomes, welfare services, and individual liberties.[26] He also maintained that the relative exclusion of religion from politics also contributed to the possibility of integration, but he wondered if the “Catholic-Protestant split might still hamper integration.”[27]
Deutsch recognized the significance of shared values, but his emphasis was on more measurable behaviors involving communication and transactions. Exchanges between peoples, if rewarded over a considerable period of time, would, in Deutsch’s view, lead to social trust, an increased sense of community, and a shift in loyalties similar to that spoken of by Haas. Deutsch put it this way in 1964:
The classic reinforcement or learning theory describes what happens when there are many rewarding transactions in a community. When there is a significantly high level of important transactions, many of which bring joint rewards, the people who have experienced these mutual transactions will like them. When these transactions are highly visible, easy to identify and differentiate, people may form images of the community or of the group involved in the transactions. If these transactions were rewarded, the image of a community may be strongly positive. Liking this kind of community, people may say: We belong together. In their favorable reaction to the community, they might then also say, I can see myself as a member of this community; I will call it “we” if I speak of a group. I will call it “home” if I speak of a territory. I will express and experience love of country (patriotism) or love of a group of people (nationalism), but in any case I identify with this symbol or this group.[28]
Deutsch relied on learning theory (learning through communication) to describe the mechanics of community formation. People learned to like the material and non-material benefits they received from their transactions with one another. But while he understood the sociological aspects of integration, Deutsch had no real interest in exploring the culture of political integration in Europe. He left open questions concerning the rise of integrative ideas, the regional differences in enthusiasm for integration, and the impact of the Catholic-Protestant split on the sense of community in Europe.
Deutsch’s view that a community of mutual reward could exist among nations was not new, but it constituted a direct challenge to traditional realism, although in a slightly different manner than neofunctionalism.[29] Deutsch and Haas could agree that a psychological shift in the minds of political elites—a growing sense of community for Deutsch, a redirection of loyalties for Haas—could alter state behavior. But while Haas’s primary challenge to realism was his insistence on breaking down the state into its component parts (politicians, bureaucrats, party leaders, interest group elites, etc.), Deutsch looked to the international context and saw, not a thin, atomized system, but rather a dense network of communication between political and non-political actors of all sorts, what Alder and Barnett call a “thick social environment.” [30] By exploring this environment, Deutsch was, in fact, proposing a theory of the origins of integration; a theory of what happens before integrating states create supranational institutions. What is less clear is how states get from integration “take off” to some end state, and where institutions fit into this process. But Deutsch’s lasting contribution to the study of integration is his insistence on considering relational factors in the rise and maintenance of the integration process.
Unfortunately Deutsch’s transactional theory did not generate much initial research and, therefore, languished in the shadow of neofunctionalism into the 1970s. Furthermore, it did not immediately come back into vogue with the relaunch of integration theory in the late 1980s. It was, in fact, the late 1990s before it began attracting new attention.[31] Much of this attention was due to the rise of an alternative to the rationalist assumptions of contemporary supranationalism and intergovernmentalism. The new perspective—or rather collection of perspectives—is usually called “constructivism,”[32] having its roots in the constructivist approaches to international relations pioneered by John Ruggie, Alexander Wendt and others. Constructivism as a group of theories remains frustratingly amorphous and fragmented, often better at critiquing rational choice methodology than proposing an equally elegant alternative.[33] Nevertheless, what unites these perspectives is a “concern with how world politics is ‘socially constructed.’”[34] Constructivism rejects the notion that states and other political actors perform like atoms in a mechanistic universe. Political interests are not derived solely from the system they operate in, nor are these interests the sole product of material forces. Constructivists want to know how actors formulate perceptions of themselves and others, and how they determine their interests. They are open to exploring the way cultures, norms and ideas—in addition to material factors—shape, and sometimes change, the identities and interests of actors.[35] They want to know how actors come to agreement on certain “facts” about the world, and how these “facts” are shaped by their social context. In short, constructivism, as Ruggie puts it, “concerns the issue of human consciousness” and the role it plays in international relations.[36]
Constructivist approaches to European integration began to appear in the mid-1990s.[37] The result was a reorientation of the field. What had previously been a debate between intergovernmentalism and some variation of supranationalism, now became a methodological debate between the rationalists (of all stripes) and constructivists.[38] Most constructivists studying integration remained committed to an epistemology that supported the scientific method; the debate was over what explanatory factors mattered and where they came from. Constructivists, for instance, asserted that ideas accounted for variations in actor preferences, especially in the formulation of foreign policy,[39] while rationalists countered by arguing that ideas, far from being independent determinants of policy, were, in fact, themselves determined by “more fundamental underlying influences on state behavior.”[40] Constructivists who still believed that knowledge of the “real” world was possible, were thus faced with the challenging task of demonstrating that the variables they favored—ideas, norms, culture, social facts—were truly independent of more fundamental material factors.
We accept this challenge. As social scientists who generally throw our lot with the scientific constructivists, we accept as our task the necessity of demonstrating that socially derived forces, in our case cultures, have an independent influence on the process of integration. We are exploring more closely what Deutsch uncovered but left for others to pick up and examine. We are not developing a comprehensive theory of European integration: our goals are more modest. Instead, we are attempting to demonstrate that culture—particularly religious culture—matters, sometimes more than material factors. And we wish to show that an understanding of religious culture also helps us unravel political puzzles in Europe that other approaches fail to solve.
We begin by exploring the concept of “culture” before applying it to European integration.
Culture is suspect. Some social scientists ignore it because the concept itself is hard to define and measure: like air, it is everywhere, but hard to pin down. Other scholars studiously avoid it because its employment is fraught with danger. Dealing with culture requires dealing with religion and most social scientists find their secular training and liberal sensibilities leave them unprepared or unwilling to take religion seriously. But leaving religion aside for a moment, culture itself has become an emotionally charged political issue. In an age of both tolerance and terrorism, cultural identity is simultaneously encouraged and feared. On the one hand all cultures are to be positively evaluated; on the other hand some cultures are suspected of encouraging the darker angels of human nature. Students of culture can find themselves caught in the middle—accused by some of promoting intolerance by casting one culture in an unfavorable light, accused by others of minimizing dangerous cultural elements or trends.[41] For most social scientists it is better to avoid the political minefield.[42] But not us. We are willing to risk professional life and limb because we are convinced that culture matters. If you miss culture, especially its religious components, you miss the deepest story.
This should surprise no one. People have assumed the impact of culture on politics and society for millennia. Take, for instance, Samuel, the great judge and prophet of Israel. In his day Israel had no king. The Hebrew tribes were ruled by Yahweh, the maker of heaven and earth, the god who had rescued them from Egyptian slavery, adopted them as his covenant people, and delivered them to the Promised Land. But, alas, the Israelites had lived in Canaan a long time. They had adopted Canaanite gods—the “Baals and Ashtoreths”—and in a thinly veiled coup attempt they demanded that Samuel “now appoint a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have” (I Sam. 8:5). It had come to this. Israel had abandoned its unique political system and adopted a foreign norm. Samuel warned them that kings would prove an even greater threat to their security than the loose rule of the Yahweh-appointed judges they were accustom to. But the Israelites would have none of it; they wanted a king like the nations they lived among: when in Canaan, do as the Canaanites.[43] They, of course, got their king, but the long line of Israelite prophets that succeeded Samuel remained convinced that good politics remained linked to good theology and religious practice. In their minds, religious culture determined politics.
Less ancient figures have also taken culture seriously as a determinant of social relations. As we shall see shortly, Alex de Tocqueville and Max Weber, two “gods” in the social scientific pantheon, based their deepest insights on the notion that religious culture shaped the modern world. Their insights, however, were largely ignored during the social scientific revolution of the post-World War Two period.[44] Behaviorists marginalized culture during the explosion of social scientific research in the second half of the twentieth century,[45] but that changed as the century came to an end.
The fall of the Berlin Wall freed intellectual elites from the stultifying ideological struggle between Liberals and Marxists. Important old questions—and some new—could now be addressed in ways that did not require a Cold War ideological label. Why does underdevelopment persist? Why does authoritarianism live on? What will drive international politics in a post-bipolar world? Why do nations cooperate after the Cold War? The questions received many answers, but one prominent theme among a number of scholars was a renewed emphasis on cultural explanations. Lawrence Harrison, for instance, argued that Latin American countries remained poor because Latin American societies lacked the values necessary to cultivate economic and political success. What values they did have were shaped by a “basic world view” that differed from the world views found in Europe, North America, and parts of Asia.[46] This same notion was applied by David Landes to the history of global economic development in his monumental study, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, where he states flatly: “If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes all the difference.”[47] In seminal books, Ronald Inglehart in Culture Shift and Robert Putnam in Making Democracy Work marshaled enormous bodies of empirical evidence to establish the link between culture and both economic development and effective democratic government.[48] Inglehart’s work emphasized an intergenerational culture shift toward postmaterialism in economically advanced democracies that dampened growth while increasing pressure on governments to maximize the quality of life for individuals. Putnam, for his part, argued that the presence of a civic culture of trust in northern Italy, with its roots deep in the Middle Ages, accounted for the region’s robust economic growth and responsive democracy, while the absence of such a culture in the south accounted for its economic stagnation and corrupt politics.
The study of world politics has also been influenced by this new emphasis on culture. Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations placed culture at the very center of international politics: “culture and cultural identities, which at the broadest level are civilization identities, are shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post-Cold War world.”[49] In a world no longer dominated by the clash of Cold War titans, Huntington argued that nations were grouping around their cultural cores, partly as a reaction to the unsettling effects of rapid modernization, partly in response to the West’s insistence that its civilization is universal. The Al-Qaida attacks of 11 September 2001 on New York and Washington, and the resulting military actions by the United States and its allies, naturally focused attention on the clash of civilizations thesis. President George W. Bush, and even Samuel Huntington himself, denied that the new War on Terror was a civilizational war,[50] but few could deny that culture was an important factor in global politics.
Thus a great cloud of witnesses attests to the importance of taking culture seriously when explaining political outcomes. Developing a useful cultural approach to politics, however, requires addressing several questions:
· What is culture?
· What role does religion play in the shaping of culture?
· How does culture affect political behavior?
· How strong an explanatory factor is culture?
When these questions are addressed, we can then proceed to the question that most interests us in this study:
· How does culture shape the integration process?
Like “power,” “politics,” “class,” and so many other terms essential to social science, “culture,” defies concrete definition. The anthropologists, who have some right to claim they think most about these things, popularized the term in the mid-twentieth century. The anthropological pioneer, E. G. Tylor, defined culture as the “most complex whole” that included “knowledge, belief, law, morals, custom.”[51] Ruth Benedict, in her influential 1934 book, Patterns of Culture, referred to culture as “custom,” by which she meant “those physical characteristics and industrial techniques, those conventions and values, which distinguish one community from all others that belong to a different tradition.”[52] Margaret Mead later defined it more generally as “the systematic body of learned behavior which is transmitted from parents to children,”[53] while Clifford Geertz, saw culture as “webs of significance” that humans themselves have spun.[54] More recently anthropologist Richard Shweder defined culture as
community-specific ideas about what is true, good, beautiful, and efficient. To be “cultural,” those ideas about truth, goodness, beauty, and efficiency must be socially inherited and customary; and they must actually be constitutive of different ways of life.[55]
But here we run into a problem. Benedict and Mead seem to define culture more in terms of observable behavior than Shweder (and perhaps Geertz) who defines it wholly in terms of ideas that precede behaviors (that constitute “ways of life”). So which is it, actions or ideas?
Non-anthropologists have added to the confusion. John Duffield surveyed cultural approaches to foreign and security policy and concluded—consistent with Shweder’s view—that all of them, in some manner, referred to culture as “the recurring patterns of mental activity, or the habits of thought, perception, and feeling, that are common to members of a particular group.” In short, culture is an “ideational phenomenon.”[56] The sociologist Robert Bellah, drawing on Alexis de Tocqueville’s notion of “mores” or “habits of the heart,” also saw culture as primarily ideational. He defined “cultural traditions” as “symbols, ideals, and ways of feeling.” [57] But others disagreed. Some Protestant theologians take a much broader Tylorian view labeling as “culture” all that humans do. For instance, Richard Niebuhr, in Christ and Culture, saw culture as “that total process of human activity and that total result of such activity.”[58]
Scholars can reasonably argue that ideas precede all behaviors thus reducing culture to ideas. But others can also reasonably argue that actions speak louder than “mental activities” (which are hard to measure anyway) and should therefore be the sole objects of inquiry. Given the difficulties involved in adopting either an ideational or behavioral definition of culture, however, it seems most reasonable and useful to follow Huntington and define culture very simply as “the overall way of life of a people,”[59] which he makes clear includes both ideas (values, norms, modes of thinking) and behaviors (customs). Culture quite rightly includes ways of looking at the world, but these perceptions shape and, through socialization, are shaped by, a society’s artifacts (pots and paintings, monuments and flags, speeches and everyday language), customs (ceremonies, celebrations, and the rhythms and rituals of everyday life), institutions (bureaucracies and oligarchies, churches and chess clubs) and values (law and liberty, God and country, family and wealth). In short, a culture is an interactive mix of ideas and behaviors. To understand its impact on political behavior, we will have to look for both.
Few would deny that culture contains religious ideas and practices.[60] The real question is to what extent is culture shaped by religion? Or more starkly, how much of culture is religion? Lipset and Lenz do not equate religion with culture, but identify religion as “an important determinant of variation in larger secular cultures.”[61] Huntington places even greater emphasis on religion as the defining component of civilization, which he defines as “culture writ large”:[62]
Of all the objective elements which define civilizations . . . the most important usually is religion. . . . To a very large degree, the major civilizations in human history have been closely identified with the world’s great religions. . . .[63]
Why is religion so central to human culture? The question is too large for a full treatment here, but the answer seems grounded in human nature. Van Til argues that human beings are religious by nature and, therefore, their cultures must be “religiously oriented.”[64] Geertz sees religion shaping behavior and experience as it “tunes human actions to an envisaged cosmic order and projects images of cosmic order onto the plane of human experience.”[65] Tocqueville, more boldly and more eloquently, fixes the source of nearly all behavior in notions of God:
There is hardly any human action, however private it may be, which does not result from some very general conception men have of God, of His relations with the human race, of the nature of their soul, and of their duties to their fellows. Nothing can prevent such ideas from being the common spring from which all else originates.[66]
We agree. To speak of culture is—in some deep, primal sense—to speak of religion. Often it is appropriate to employ “religion” and “culture” as interchangeable terms. But sometimes such usage lacks necessary precision, especially when attempting to explore causal connections. Huntington, for all his emphasis on religion, still identifies important non-religious elements in Western civilization, including its European languages, classical legacy, separation of church and state, rule of law, social pluralism, representative bodies, and individualism.[67] One could argue that all of these elements were kneaded into shape by Roman Catholicism, and later Protestantism, but there is great value in disentangling them from one another when, for instance, addressing the role of Western culture in the rise of international institutions (e.g., the United Nations) or the spreading practice of multi-party elections.
In sum, we see culture shot through with religion, but we also see little worth in treating all cultural artifacts, customs, institutions and values as “religious.” While all human culture may have its roots in religion, not all of its elements are directly tied to religious beliefs, practices and organizations. This is particularly important when studying Europe where formal religious practice is waning and where many aspects of culture, particularly pop culture, are distant or disconnected from anything recognizably religious (unless you equate rock concerts with cultic rituals!). We will treat those elements as essentially non-religious. To say Europe is increasingly secular, however, is not to say that it is unaffected by traditional religion. The long arm of religion, even when it seems to carry a dead hand, is still very powerful. It continues to govern the perceptions and life rhythms of people who have long ceased to believe. It also continues to shape politics in the West. To explore just how, we turn for guidance to Tocqueville and Weber.
Alexis de Tocqueville and Max Weber were never men to pick narrow subjects of inquiry. As social scientists they were fascinated by the modern world that from their high vantage point of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, looked so different from the receding medieval world below. Tocqueville turned his penetrating gaze on the new political form, democracy, and traveled to America in 1831 to observe it in its infancy. The result was Democracy in America, a favorable, though sometimes pessimistic account of how democracy was formed and is sustained in the United States. Weber, too, traveled to America—so early in the twentieth century that it still felt like the nineteenth—but observed not an infant nation, but a frenetic adolescent. He turned his gaze on capitalism and published the first part of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in 1904.[68] Each man took as his task to unlock the mysteries of modernity by finding a simple key somewhere in the attic of the past. Tocqueville found Puritan equality; Weber a Protestant work ethic. As our task is to unlock the mystery of integration, we are not so much interested in the specific content of Tocqueville’s and Weber’s explanations—although we cannot ignore it—as in their similar methods. We see five common features in their methodologies that seem most applicable to our study of the European Union.
First, both Tocqueville and Weber are sure that origins make all the difference. Something like DNA gets imprinted on nations or social structures that never quite disappears until an upheaval of revolutionary proportions sweeps it away. Tocqueville is perhaps clearest on this point when he describes the equality stamped on America at its conception:
I have said before that I regarded the origin of the Americans, what I have called their point of departure, as the first and most effective of all the elements leading to their present prosperity. The chances of birth favored the Americans; their fathers of old brought to the land in which they live that equality both of conditions and of mental endowments from which, as from its natural source, a democratic republic was one day to arise. But that is not all; with a republican social state they bequeathed to their descendants the habits, ideas, and mores best fitted to make a republic flourish. When I consider all that has resulted from this first fact, I think I can see the whole destiny of America contained in the first Puritan who landed on those shores, as that of the whole human race in the first man.[69]
Weber is less sure that an individual can contain the destiny of a people, but he is convinced that modern capitalism rose to dominance because it originated “as a way of life common to whole groups of men.”[70] That new way of life was rational, disciplined, efficient, ascetic, and ethical—and it transformed the world. New men built a system that forced all who wished to be modern into a world of impersonal bureaucracies and emotionless markets. [71] The causes of modernity were thus to be found in the culture of new social groups.
The second striking feature of the methodology employed by Tocqueville and Weber is its reliance on ideas and practices—what we have defined as culture—to explain macro social phenomena. Just as importantly, these ideas and practices are religious.
Tocqueville, who at times seems to think of America as religion all the way down, actually does not start with religion to explain American politics. He instead begins with something he calls “social state.” Unfortunately Tocqueville never gives us a precise definition of social state in Democracy in America, but by it he seems to mean the general principle organizing social relations in a country. In the United States the social state is “eminently democratic” with its preeminent characteristic being that of equality.[72] Once you understand this, everything else falls into place, for according to Tocqueville, an established social state becomes the “prime cause of most of the laws, customs, and ideas which control the nation’s behavior.”[73] But what brings about the social state? For Tocqueville, Christianity is the fountainhead of the new democratic social state because the Christian religion put in “grand evidence the equality, the unity, the fraternity of all men.”[74] Christianity, more than the secular Enlightenment, taught the Europeans who turned up in America that feudal hierarchies had no place in a Christian society. But it was a particular kind of Christianity that fueled the democratic social state in the New World. America was dominated by Protestants who, as Tocqueville noted, had “shaken off the pope’s authority” thus bringing to the New World a Christianity that was “democratic and republican.” The religious spirit of America thus favored the establishment and maintenance of a democratic republic in the United States. Religion begat democratic politics.
Religion established the ideological conditions for democracy, but it played an additional function for Tocqueville in a democratic America. For the young French aristocrat, the great danger inherent in democracy was instability that could result in chaos or tyranny. The great bulwark against instability in America, as he saw it, was not the quality of her laws, as remarkable as they were, but rather the severe mores of her people. These habits of the heart—which he had no doubt originated in religious beliefs[75]—most affected politics by (ironically) regulating domestic life and contributing to the tranquility of the home. For Tocqueville, as goes the home, so goes the state: “Whereas the European tries to escape his sorrows at home by troubling society, the American derives from his home that love of order which he carries over into affairs of state.”[76] So order is preserved; but Tocqueville delves deeper. The very notion of liberty, he noticed, was never in conflict with Christianity in America as it was in Europe. Americans intertwined their democratic style of Christianity and their political freedom so closely as to make one without the other virtually unthinkable.[77] Far from undermining liberty and democracy, Christianity was in fact the protector of both.
Much of Tocqueville’s analysis is specific to the United States. But, again, it is his method we are after. He explains American politics by looking for religious beliefs that shape a way of life. That way of life, that culture, in turn governs the conduct of politics. When we turn to Weber’s theory of the origins of capitalism, in similar fashion we have to look beyond his immediate subject—an economic system—to his argument about the role of culture in shaping society. Once again we see religion at the center of his social theory.
In the Protestant Ethic, Weber explains the rise to dominance of a new style of capitalism that seeks profit “rationally and systematically” rather than haphazardly or half-heartedly.[78] The creation of such a system required a sizable community of new people who no longer worked for survival or material pleasures or the thrill of the chase or for profit. Rather, this system required restless people who were motivated to work for the sake of work, or, better yet, the pure joy of work—who found no pleasure in the material comforts of this world, but who accumulated them nonetheless. Weber could not explain the rise of such a community—which to his mind was a clear empirical fact—in purely material terms. Nor could the necessary ideas motivating the new capitalists be explained by material circumstances, à la Karl Marx. The new sense that working for profit was a calling to be fulfilled as an ethical obligation was simply beyond the power of materialism to explain.[79] Religion was the only logical place to look for ideas that could so radically reshape individuals.
The Reformation provided Weber with the religious ideas that shaped a new economic system. In Luther, Weber found the “moral justification of worldly activity”[80] in the concept of the “call.”[81] More importantly, he found in Calvinism and its various offshoots a rigorous theological system that, he claims, had the ironic effect of producing the “worldly asceticism”—that is, the sober inner discipline—necessary to produce dynamic capitalism. The effect was “ironic” because at the center of Calvin’s theology was a majestic God who predestined the chosen to heaven and the damned to hell.[82] With salvation entirely removed from human hands, individuals might be expected to eat and drink till eternity comes. But not the Calvinist. Weber argues that the doctrine of predestination created a “religious anxiety” in the believer that was only relieved by a constant striving, as a “tool of the divine will,” for the glory of God. Such disciplined action was a good sign that the believer was in fact living in a “state of grace,” although that could never be concretely determined.[83] The practical result of individuals working out their salvation in a call was to create an entrepreneurial class so productive and efficient that it drove the relaxed merchants and artisans of traditional Europe out of business. As a result Protestant families accumulated enormous wealth, which only confirmed them in their belief that God blessed those who obeyed His commands.
Weber’s theory focuses on profit seeking, but could his basic thesis be applied to politics? Here we must bring in a third theorist to assist us. Michael Walzer, in Revolution of the Saints, argues that the Weberian thesis is actually better applied to development of rational politics than rational economics.[84] To Walzer’s mind the rigor and reason of Calvinism provided a sense of order and a program of disciplined action for people left lonely and afraid by the dissolution of traditional feudal societies. Those who freely adopted the Reformed faith first embraced an inner transformation, wrought by the Holy Spirit, that disciplined the individual by proscribing a program of personal piety. This inner reformation quite naturally led to attempts to reform society: politics became a calling and men took responsibility for transforming the world around them. Thus for Walzer, Calvinism did not make people capitalists so much as it trained political activists. Once again, there is irony here: the Calvinist community that Walzer describes was politically conservative and morally repressive, yet it ultimately fomented a revolution that freed individuals. The saints began by respecting the given political order as a mandate from God, but in their zeal to see their own lives and the lives of those around them conform to God’s laws, they ended up creating a class of politically trained citizens capable of self-government. And, of course, this is where Tocqueville picks up the story, for that Puritan on the shores of New England was just such a citizen.
At this point, we must address the question that pressed us at the end of the last section, which becomes our third methodological observation. Some variant of Christianity (so far Calvinism is the only one in the game) seems crucial to the origins of democracy and capitalism, but how relevant is a religious explanation in today’s modern secular culture? Each of our theorists notes the dissipation of religious sentiment: Tocqueville observes a decline in American religious fervor in the generations succeeding the founders;[85] Weber’s Calvinist entrepreneur, fired by a desire to glorify God in the minutest details of his life, gives way to the “colorless deist” Ben Franklin who spouts utilitarian platitudes;[86] and Walzer’s Puritan activist, working for the transformation of the whole of society into a holy commonwealth, becomes the complacent gentleman, judge, or parliamentarian.[87] But religion, by this point has already had its say. The ideas may have lost their grip on people’s hearts but they have been transformed into mores, customs, symbols, and institutions through a long and complex process by individuals “working upon”—as Walzer puts it—their religious heritage.[88] Culture carries the religious effects forward, but perhaps at a loss as the cultural forms flow away from their religious headwaters. That, however, is an empirical question. Suffice it to say at this point that the decline of traditional Christian religion in Europe should not stop our inquiry into the religious sources of European integration. European culture still displays its Christian heritage in its languages and symbols, its buildings, its holidays, its constitutions and laws, and in its schools. Call it cultural inertia. But like the cosmic background radiation that echoes the Big Bang, religion is ever-present for those who can tune it in.
This brings us to our fourth methodological point: culture is a variable. Tocqueville and Weber never saw culture as a static force—it varied over time and between places. A perception of cultural change in Europe inspired Tocqueville to write Democracy in America.[89] And Weber observed the very different cultures the Puritan Richard Baxter and the Yankee Benjamin Franklin represented. Of course, Weber also went on from the Protestant Ethic to explore the impact on economic development of Jewish, Chinese, and Indian religions. So for both Tocqueville and Weber, culture varied and thus could be used to explain varying social outcomes.
Finally, Tocqueville and Weber (and his intellectual heir, Walzer) teach us to look for religion as a causal variable. But—and here is their fifth common methodological feature—they never intended for religion to carry the full weight of explanation. Their theories were not mono-causal. Tocqueville, for instance, when explaining the maintenance of democracy in America places great weight on the geographical position of the United States (its lack of neighbors and vast emptiness), its federal constitution, communal institutions and organized judicial power in addition to the all-important religiously inspired mores.[90] Weber, who is commonly misunderstood on this point, was even more adamant that his thesis be placed in a broader context:
. . . we only wish to ascertain whether and to what extent religious forces have taken part in the qualitative formation and the quantitative expansion of that [capitalist] spirit over the world. . . . In view of the tremendous confusion of interdependent influences between the material basis, the forms of social and political organization, and the ideas current in the time of the Reformation, we can only proceed by investigating whether and at what points certain correlations between forms of religious belief and practical ethics can be worked out. At the same time we shall as far as possible clarify the manner and the general direction [author’s emphasis] in which, by virtue of those relationships, the religious movements have influenced the development of material culture. Only when this has been determined with reasonable accuracy can the attempt be made to estimate to what extent the historical development of modern culture can be attributed to those religious forces and to what extent to others.[91]
Weber’s intent in the Protestant Ethic was to highlight one important factor. Other studies—which he unfortunately never completed—would unravel the complex influences that shaped modern capitalism, thus placing religion in its broader causal context.[92]
We stand squarely with Tocqueville and Weber on this point. To highlight the role of culture and its religious component in shaping the European Union does not imply that material factors such as commercial interests or the distribution of military power are irrelevant. On the contrary, we intend only to bring culture into the explanatory mix and, to the extent that our data and methods allow, determine the strength of culture as an explanatory variable vis-à-vis other factors. Our focus will be culture, but our intent will be to understand the balance of causes.
In summary, what do we take from this extended discussion of the Tocquevillian and Weberian methods? First, we look for keys to understanding the present in the sometimes distant past. We are in search of DNA markers that were embedded in the European way of life long ago, but which still govern politics in the present. To locate these markers, we interrogate history. Second, we look for clues to understanding the present in powerful religious ideas that perhaps in unintended or ironic ways shaped a way of thinking and doing that is eminently visible today. Thus we must rummage through Christian theology for important scraps. Third, we remember that religious ideas get embedded in cultures that carry on with an inertia of their own long after the religious zeal that shaped that culture dissipates. We are not put off by secularization in Europe. Religion still matters to millions of believing Europeans; and it still governs the mores of millions who do not believe. Moreover, the absence of religious belief may have its own consequences. Fourth, we pay close attention to the variability of culture—over time, between countries, and within countries. This last clause bears emphasizing.[93] Cultures in Europe are almost always plural: Croats live next to Serbs; Catholics live next to Calvinists; Seculars live next to Muslims. The interactive effects of these cultures also affect politics, making cultural analysis just that much more complex. Finally, we recognize that culture alone cannot explain the great confusion we call human behavior. Culture explains part of this confusion, but it is the role of the social scientist to try to tease out just which part. This is our challenge.
Both Karl Deutsch and the constructivists point to relational explanations of European integration. They encourage us to search for a sense of community as one of the driving forces in the integration process. Tocqueville, Weber and Walzer outline for us a method of cultural analysis that, while not a theory of European integration, does suggest that religious culture may explain a macro social phenomenon like integration. Thus, we are encouraged to develop a cultural theory of integration that can generate testable hypotheses. Such is the purpose of this section.
Our point of departure in this study is the persistent division in Europe between the “integrators” and the “reluctants.” This division cuts through every level of analysis. We see it most prominently at the nation-state level where the integrators of the European continent face the Anglo-Nordic reluctants. But we also see it at the level of political groupings where political parties and interest groups divide over the issue of deeper integration, and, again, at the individual level where citizen’s attitudes toward integration diverge. We can also stretch to a level of analysis above the nation state and observe that some geographical regions have been more inclined than others to increase cooperation.
While each level of analysis must be treated separately, we believe that a common explanatory factor runs like a red thread through them all. At every level actors supporting integration draw on and are shaped by a Roman Catholic cultural tradition that encourages cooperation among peoples, discourages reliance on the nation state as the final governing authority, and creates an essential sense of community among integrating parties. In short, integration is primarily a Catholic phenomenon.
Such a bald thesis needs a full explanation.[94] In this paper, however, a series of propositions will suffice to explain and add some nuance to our main assertion.
Proposition 1: The idea of European integration has its roots in Christian universalism. From the moment Jesus of Nazareth said “go and make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19) Christianity was a universalistic religion. Paul the Apostle put feet to this command and took the kingdom of God to non-Jews to whom he preached, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). Despite historical failings, Christian teaching has always stressed the spiritual unity of all believers—they are “one in Christ.” Christian peoples, however, have been haunted by a sometimes concrete, sometimes vague sense that this spiritual unity should in some way translate visibly to the temporal world. The notion that European Christian peoples should unite is grounded in this more political sense of Christian unity.
Proposition 2: The three major Christian traditions—Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestantism[95]—each give a different form to Christian universalism. Each Christian community has developed, over a number of centuries, a “traditional” view of the temporal manifestation of Christian universalism. To simplify almost to the point of caricature, we can say that Roman Catholics have supported a political unity of all Christian peoples as guided by a supreme spiritual authority (the pope); Eastern Orthodox Christians have supported a political unity of all Christian peoples as guided by a supreme political authority (the emperor); and Protestant believers have rejected the visible unity of all Christians in favor of a spiritual unity that leaves open the possibility of limited cooperation across national or ethnic lines. With this general typology in mind, we can now identify the traditions most supportive of integration efforts.
Proposition 4: Catholics are more likely to consider both supra-national and sub-national (subsidiarity) solutions to problems of governance than are Eastern Orthodox or Protestant believers. Roman Catholicism came to terms with the nation state only in the last century, and only reluctantly. Embedded deeply within Catholic consciousness is a sense that a reified, all-powerful nation state has undermined the natural political order. The state has usurped the authority of more organic units of government, most tragically that of the family. States have also prevented decision-making from rising to a level above the nation state where national interests could be weighed against the good of the international community. These notions, of course, are rooted in Europe’s medieval past before nation states were strong enough to challenge the authority of emperors and popes. As for the Eastern Orthodox and Protestant traditions, they tend to value the nation state more highly than does the Catholic tradition. Protestants virtually invented the nation state in the seventeenth century to protect their hard-fought separation from Rome. Ceding sovereignty to a new supranational authority, especially if it looks Catholic, seems drastic—a true last resort, and not one Protestants would propose. Eastern Orthodoxy, as tied as it is to national politics, is hardly in a position to criticize the nation state or credibly push for supranational solutions. Orthodox believers, like Protestants, will also consider other options long before resorting to supranational solutions to problems of governance.
Proposition 5: A sense of community—a “we-feeling”—exists among political actors (nation states, interest groups and social movements, social and political elites, and individual citizens) from the same religious traditions, but is felt most powerfully among Catholics. Again, as with the previous proposition, organizational structure plays a significant role. The boundaries of Eastern Orthodox and Protestant churches generally correspond closely with national borders. These borders define the churches; the churches do not transcend them. A feeling of oneness with those within your tradition is still possible, but less likely to lead to sustained international or interethnic action. In contrast, Catholic churches, although divided nationally for pastoral purposes, are united in more than theory under one supranational head. The Catholic church, in symbol and action, is genuinely international. This makes possible (though not inevitable) the development of true community feeling across ethnic and national lines. Moreover, if we take Deutsch seriously, true community between Catholic peoples is reinforced by the quality of their “transactions.”
Proposition 6: Political actors, united in spirit by religious tradition, will reflect in their attitudes and actions the form of Christian internationalism dominant within their tradition. Thus a nation, political party, labor union, or group of individuals who identify themselves as “Catholic” will reflect Catholic internationalism in their political attitudes and actions. Nations or groups of mixed tradition will either reflect the dominant tradition or—if no tradition is capable of control—a compromise between the religious communities.
Proposition 7: The more “religious” the political actor, the more faithfully the actor will follow the religious community’s version of Christian internationalism. Our assumption here is that the more people order their thoughts and actions in light of the churches’ teachings and expectations, the more they will reflect the particular version of Christian universalism characteristic of their tradition. Some of this alignment surely reflects a socialization process, but it may also reflect the power of ideas. Moreover, some non-practicing religious people may still reflect their tradition’s positions due to the cultural inertia we mentioned above. Their embrace of the traditional view is likely, however, to be less consistent and less closely held than that of a devout believer. Implicit in this proposition is that strategically placed or critical masses of devout people can affect government behavior.
Proposition 8: The influence of religious tradition is persistent, but can be overwhelmed by material interests. As Tocqueville and Weber warned us, complex social formations are not caused by single factors. We assume that strong material interests will often trump cultural influences on specific issues. Culture, however, even in times when its influence is most suppressed, will continue to keep viable some policy options while closing off others.[96]
These eight general propositions allow us now to derive a set of expectations, or hypotheses, about European integration. Our aim here is to identify rather sweeping expectations, leaving more detailed specification for a later study.
Hypothesis 1: Europe, particularly Western Europe, the heart of Roman Catholic culture, is likely to integrate more deeply than most other regions of the world. This is not a study of comparative integration, but our first three propositions lead us to expect Christian parts of the world to exhibit some tendencies to integration, with Catholic countries showing more significant trends. Latin America would, in addition to Europe, be another strong candidate for deep integration, but other factors associated with development and democracy may overwhelm internationalist tendencies.[97]
Hypothesis 2: Catholic countries in Europe have been and will continue to be the engines of economic and political integration. France and Germany have led integration efforts in Europe since 1950. France is historically a Catholic country. The real question is how to treat religiously mixed Germany and the Netherlands (another integration leader). Germany and the Netherlands become test cases of this hypothesis.
Hypothesis 3: As Protestant countries, Britain and the Nordics, will resist integration led by predominantly Catholic countries. We expect Protestant nations, reflecting a different tradition of Christian internationalism, to remain outside the integration process or work to slow the process if caught up in it. They will generally resist all major integration initiatives on ideological grounds.
Hypothesis 4: The Protestant countries will develop a distinct approach to European policy making that relies on representative institutions and electorates to control the government’s European policy. We expect the Anglo-Nordic countries to rely on national institutions and democratic electorates (i.e., parliaments and referenda) to exert as much control as possible over the integration process as a safeguard against encroachments on sovereignty.
Hypothesis 5: Orthodox countries will not join Catholic Europe with great enthusiasm, but will be less ideologically resistant than Protestant countries. Greece and several Balkan countries will resist integration, not because they disagree with the goals, but because they do not care to be pushed around by Catholics. Ideas are not as important to Orthodox countries as historical experience.
Hypothesis 6: Catholic groups will support integration, Protestant groups will resist, Orthodox groups will remain ambivalent. Religious organizations, labor unions, political parties, and other groups, if they are confessional in nature or comprised of large numbers of individuals from a particular tradition, will exhibit the same tendencies as nations identified in hypotheses 2, 3 and 5.
Hypothesis 7: Individual European elites and ordinary citizens, if they identify with a religious tradition, will demonstrate the same tendencies as nations and groups. In other words, public opinion data should demonstrate that Catholics are more supportive of integration than are Protestants and seculars. The Orthodox will, again, remain ambivalent about an integration process dominated by Catholic notions of European unity.
Hypothesis 8: Secularization in Europe will dampen enthusiasm for integration in Catholic and Orthodox countries and among Catholic and Orthodox groups and individuals. Secularization should hit hard the ideological basis for integration in the churches that favor some form of visible Christian unity. The expected effects on enthusiasm among Protestants are more difficult to determine. Secularization may actually boost support for integration among some Protestants as the ideological impetus to resist wanes. In all cases, secularization should elevate the importance of material interests in determining positions on integration.
Hypothesis 9: Attitudes toward enlargement in both EU applicant and member states will be highly influenced by the religious make up of the countries involved. Catholic applicant states will be most enthusiastic, non-Catholic or mixed countries will be much less enthusiastic. Some may refuse to enter. Turkey’s membership will be resisted by the more devout elements in all of the Christian traditions.
Hypothesis 10: Turkish membership in the EU will open up a new cultural divide between Christian and Muslim countries. Such a divide may force the EU to abandon its political goals and settle for broad economic cooperation.
The persistent divide between the integrators and the reluctants in the European Union is rooted in culture, particularly religious culture. Students of integration typically discount the effects of culture on decision makers and citizens. Karl Deutsch, however, was an early exception. He understood that integration depended on a sense of community, a set of shared values reinforced by successful cross-border transactions. To our minds, following the promptings of Tocqueville, Weber and Waltz, this sense of community suggests a common culture rooted in universalistic religious traditions that mold perceptions long after religious zeal—or even belief—fades. The great religions of Western Europe—Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Protestantism, and now secularism—have all influenced the sense of community among Europeans and have influenced attitudes toward the EU and even EU politics itself. We have expounded this notion in a series of propositions that have yielded hypotheses.
Our job now is to establish the empirical validity of our propositions and test the hypotheses.
[1] For an excellent overview of the debate concerning the nature of the EU—otherwise known as the “N of 1” debate—see James A. Caporaso, Gary Marks, Andrew Moravcsik, and Mark A. Pollack, “Does the European Union Represent an n of 1?” ECSA Review, 10(3)(Fall 1997): pp. 1-5.
[2] Hix, in fact, is calling for a normalization of EU studies where the EU is seen as just another polity to be compared with others (Simon Hix, “The Study of the European Union II: The ‘New Governance’ Agenda,” Journal of European Public Policy, 5(1)(March 1998): pp. 38-65.
[3] Federalists and functionalists of this period had similar goals: they all sought to eliminate war and manage economic activity through coordinated state action. For European federalists this meant writing a constitution for a united, federal Europe that might serve as a basis for further constitution making leading to World Government. Functionalists were less optimistic that a federal constitution was both possible and workable. They believed that coordinated government action was necessary in functional areas (e.g., energy, transport, fisheries, etc.) before any kind of centralized state was possible in either Europe or the World. See Ben Rosamond, Theories of European Integration (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 20-49; Brent F. Nelsen and Alexander C-G. Stubb (eds.), The European Union: Readings on the Theory and Practice of European Integration, 2nd edition (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998), pp. 85-113.
[4] Ernst B. Haas, The Uniting of Europe: Political, Social, and Economic Forces, 1950-1957 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1958).
[5] Stanley Hoffmann, “Obstinate or Obsolete? The Fate of the Nation-State and the Case of Western Europe,” Daedalus, 93(3)(1966): pp. 862-915.
[6] Karl
W. Deutsch, et al., Political Community and the North Atlantic Area: International Organization
in the Light of Historical Experience (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1957).
[7] See Ernst B. Haas, “Does Constructivism Subsume Neo-functionalism?” in Thomas Christiansen, Knud Erik Jørgensen, and Antje Wiener (eds.) The Social Construction of Europe (London: Sage, 2001), p. 23.
[8] Ernst B. Haas, Beyond the Nation State: Functionalism and International Organization (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1968).
[9] Stanley Hoffmann, “A Retrospective,” in Journeys through World Politics: Autobiographical Reflections of Thirty-four Academic Travelers, ed. Joseph J. Kruzel and James N. Rosenau (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1989), pp. 263-278.
[10] Hoffmann, “Obstinate or Obsolete?” pp. 910-911.
[11] Hoffmann, “Obstinate or Obsolete?” p. 863.
[12] Haas, The Uniting of Europe, p. xiii.
[13] John Gerard Ruggie underlines this element in Haas in Constructing the World Polity: Essays on International Institutionalization (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 1-2.
[14] Ernst B. Haas, The Obsolescence of Regional Integration Theory (Berkeley, California: Institute of International Studies, 1975).
[15] Haas, Obsolescence, p. 4.
[16] Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (Little Brown, 1977); Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984).
[17] The debate began with the publication of Wayne Sandholtz and John Zysman, “1992: Recasting the European Bargain,” World Politics 41(1)(1998): pp. 95-128.
[18] A small but representative sample includes: Wayne Sandholtz, “Choosing Union: Monetary Politics and Maastricht,” International Organization 47(1)(1993): pp. 1-39; Maria Green Cowles, “Setting the Agenda for a New Europe: The ERT and EC 1992,” Journal of Common Market Studies 33(4)(1995): pp. 501-526; Gary Marks, Liesbet Hooghe, and Kermit Blank, “European Integration from the 1980s: State-Centric v. Multi-Level Governance,” Journal of Common Market Studies 34(3)(1996): pp. 341-378; Anne-Marie Burley (Slaughter) and Walter Mattli, “Europe Before the Court: A Political Theory of Legal Integration,” International Organization 47(1)(1993): pp. 41-76.
[19] A representative sample of Moravcsik’s writing includes: “Negotiating the Single European Act: National Interests and Conventional Statecraft in the European Community,” International Organization 45(1)(1991): pp. 651-688; “Preferences and Power in the European Community: A Liberal Intergovernmentalist Approach,” in Simon Bulmer and Andrew Scott (eds.) Economic and Political Integration in Europe: Internal Dynamics and Global Context (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1998).
[20] Haas, in a recent reflection on neofunctionalism states quite revealingly:
The ontology [of neofunctionalism] is “soft” rational choice: societal actors, in seeking to realize their value-derived interests, will choose whatever means are made available by the prevailing democratic order (“Does Constructivism Subsume Neo-functionalism?” p. 23).
But Haas does stress that his theory is “not materialistic: values shape interests and values include many non-material elements” (p. 23).
[21] By “integration” Deutsch meant “the attainment, within a territory, of a ‘sense of community’ and of institutions and practices strong enough and widespread enough to assure, for a ‘long’ time, dependable expectations of ‘peaceful change’ among its population” (North Atlantic, p. 5).
[22] Nelsen and Stubb, pp. 115-116; see Deutsch, North Atlantic, pp. 36-43.
[23] Deutsch, North Atlantic, p. 5.
[24] Deutsch, North Atlantic, p. 36.
[25] Deutsch, North Atlantic, pp. 47-48.
[26] Deutsch, North Atlantic, pp. 123-129, 133-137.
[27] Deutsch, North Atlantic, p. 125.
[28] Karl W. Deutsch, “Communication Theory and Political Integration,” in Philip E. Jacob and James V. Toscano (eds.), The Integration of Political Communities (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1964), p. 54.
[29] Hedley Bull, Martin Wight and the rest of the English School of international relations were working at the same time on the concept of a “society of states.” See for instance, Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds.) Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1966). See also Arend Liphart, “Karl W. Deutsch and the New Paradigm in International Relations,” in Richard L. Merritt and Bruce M. Russett (eds.) From NationalDevelopment to Global Community: Essays in Honor of Karl W. Deutsch (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981).
[30] Emanuel Alder and Michael Barnett, “Security Communities in Theoretical Perspective,” in Emanuel Alder and Michael Barnett (eds.) Security Communities (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 8.
[31] See Alder and Barnett, Security Communities; Emanuel Alder, “Imagined (Security) Communities: Cognitive Regions in International Relations,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 26(2)(1997): pp. 249-277; and Alec Stone Sweet and Wayne Sandholtz, “Integration, Supranational Governance, and the Institutionalization of the European Polity,” in Wayne Sandholtz and Alec Stone Sweet (eds.) European Integration and Supranational Governance (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1998).
[32] Confusingly, constructivism can also be called “reflectivism.” To our minds, however, reflectivism refers to a more critical approach to international relations that reflects a post-modern or deconstructivist ontology and epistemology. For a different view, see Knud Erik Jørgensen, “Introduction: Approaching European Governance,” in Knud Erik Jørgensen (ed.) Reflective Approaches to European Governance (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), p. 3.
[33] For critiques of rationalism, see Ruggie; Alexander Wendt, “Constructing International Politics,” International Security, 20(1)(1995): pp. 71-81; Marlene Wind, “Rediscovering Institutions: A Reflectivist Critique of Rational Institutionalism,” in Jørgensen, Reflective Approaches, pp. 15-35; Janne Haaland Matlary, “Epilogue: New Bottles for New Wine,” in Jørgensen, Reflective Approaches, pp. 201-213; and Emanuel Adler, “Seizing the Middle Ground: Constructivism in World Politics,” European Journal of International Relations 3(3)(1997): pp. 319-363.
[34] Wendt, Constructing, p. 71.
[35] Ruggie, p. 4.
[36] Ruggie, p. 33.
[37] Perhaps the best-known collections of constructivist works are Jørgensen, Reflective Approaches and Christiansen, The Social Construction of Europe. See also Markus Jachtenfuchs, Thomas Diez and Sabine Jung, “Which Europe? Conflicting Models of a Legitimate European Political Order,” European Journal of International Relations 4(4)(1998): pp. 409-445; Jeffrey T. Checkel, “Social Construction and European Integration,” Journal of European Public Policy 6(4)(1999): pp. 545-560; Thomas Risse, Daniela Engelmann-Martin, Hans-Joachim Knopf and Klaus Roscher, “To Euro or Not to Euro? The EMU and Identity Politics in the European Union,” European Journal of International Relations 5(2)(1999): pp. 147-187; Kenneth Dyson, “EMU as Europeanization: Convergence, Diversity and Contingency,” Journal of Common Market Studies 38(4)(2000): pp. 645-666; Mark Aspinwall, “Preferring Europe: Ideology and National Preferences on European Integration,” European Union Politics 3(1)(2002): pp. 81-111; and Craig Parsons, “Showing Ideas as Causes: The Origins of the European Union,” International Organization 56(1)(2002): pp. 47-84.
[38] Jeffrey T. Checkel and Andrew Moravcsik, “A Constructivist Research Program in EU Studies?” European Union Politics 2(2)(2001): pp. 219-249;
[39] Knud Erik Jørgensen, “PoCo: The Diplomatic Republic of Europe,” in Jørgensen, Reflective Approaches, pp. 167-180; Michael Merlingen, “Identity, Politics and Germany’s Post-TEU Policy on EMU,” Journal of Common Market Studies, 39(3)(2001): pp. 463-483.
[40] Checkel and Moravcsik, p. 229.
[41] For a defense of studying culture in the current intellectual atmosphere, see Clifford Geertz’s chapter titled “Cultures” in After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 42-63.
[42] As Landes put it, the study of culture has “the sulfuric odor of race and inheritance” about it. David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), p. 516.
[43] The story is taken from I Samuel 7-8.
[44] International Relations was dominated by Realists who looked to the anarchical structure of the international system, the distribution of national power and the self-interested behavior of nation states to explain international political outcomes. No culture there. Scholars specializing in comparative politics, however, could not help but notice that culture had to play some role in explaining political variation. “Political culture” found a place in their political systems, but they found it difficult to explain exactly where it came from or how it influenced politics. Most comparativists were not particularly interested in cultural questions. Marxists of the same post-War period were often critical of behaviorist methodology, but their treatment of culture as epiphenomenal—wholly dependent on the relations of production—made culture and its religious elements irrelevant to the understanding of capitalist society.
[45] Major exceptions included Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1965); Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1977).
[46] Lawrence E. Harrison, Underdevelopment is a State of Mind: The Latin American Case, Updated Edition (Lanham, Maryland: Madison Books, 2000).
[47] Landes, p. 516.
[48] Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990; Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993). See also Jim Granato, Ronald Inglehart, and David Leblang, “The Effect Of Cultural Values On Economic Development: Theory, Hypotheses, and Some Empirical Tests,” American Journal of Political Science, 40(3) August 1996: 607-631; Jan W. Van Deth and Elinor Scarbrough (eds.), Beliefs in Government, Volume Four: The Impact of Values (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). For a critique of the Inglehart and Putnam positions from a rational choice institutionalist perspective, see Robert W. Jackman and Ross A. Miller, “A Renaissance of Political Culture?” American Journal of Political Science, 40(3) August 1996: 632-659.
[49] Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 20.
[50] Samuel P. Huntington, “The Age of Muslim Wars,” Newsweek, 17 December 2001.
[51] Quoted by Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 4, 47.
[52] Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture, Sentry Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), p. 1.
[53] Margaret Mead, “Preface,” in Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture, Sentry Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), p. vii.
[54] Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, p. 5.
[55] Richard A. Shweder, “Moral Maps, ‘First World’ Conceits, and the New Evangelists,” in Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington (eds.) Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 163.
[56] John S. Duffield, “Political Culture and State Behavior: Why Germany Confounds Neorealism,” International Organization 53(4)(1999), p. 769. The ideational view characterizes most quantitative studies of culture. Most of these studies measure “culture” by surveying populations to determine their “values” (see Almond and Verba, Granato, et. al.; Inglehart, Culture Shift).
[57] Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), p. 27.
[58] H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1951), p. 32. In similar fashion, theologian Henry R. Van Til stated that culture was “any and all human effort and labor expended upon the cosmos, to unearth its treasures and its riches and bring them into the service of man for the enrichment of human existence. . . .” (The Calvinistic Concept of Culture (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 1972, pp. 29-30).
[59] Huntington, Clash, p. 41.
[60] Van Til does. At one point he states: “Culture, however, does not include religion” (p. 27). He does argue that human beings are religious by nature and, therefore, their cultures must be “religiously oriented” (p. 27). What he seems to mean by this is that religion precedes culture; culture emerges from theological understandings of God, humanity, and the relationship between the two. In this sense, religion gives “culture its foundation, and serves as the presupposition of every culture” (p. 39).
[61] Seymour Martin Lipset and Gabriel Salman Lenz, “Corruption, Culture, and Markets,” in Culture Matters, p. 120.
[62] Huntington, Clash, p. 41.
[63] Huntington, Clash, p. 42.
[64] Van Til, p. 27.
[65] Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, p. 90.
[66] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New York: HarperCollins, 1966), pp. 442-443.
[67] Huntington, Clash, pp. 68-72.
[68] “One could say that Tocqueville told us what America was and Weber what America became” [John Patrick Diggins, Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy (New York: BasicBooks, 1996), p. 2]. I am indebted to Diggins for much of this section on Tocqueville and Weber.
[69] Tocqueville, p. 279. See also Diggins, p. 2.
[70] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (Los Angeles, California: Roxbury Publishing, 1996), p. 55.
[71] “The capitalistic economy of the present day is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live. It forces the individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market relationships, to conform to capitalistic rules of action” (Weber, p. 54).
[72] Tocqueville, p. 50.
[73] Tocqueville, p. 50.
[74]
Gobineau, quoted by
Aristide Tessitore, “Tocqueville and Gobineau on the Nature of Modern
Politics,” mimeo, 24 March 2003.
[75] Tocqueville, p. 291; see also p. 287.
[76] Tocqueville, p. 292.
[77] Tocqueville, p. 293.
[78] Weber, p. 64.
[79] Weber, p. 75.
[80] Weber, p. 81.
[81] Weber (p. 80) defines a call as:
The valuation of the fulfillment of duty in worldly affairs as the highest form which the moral activity of the individual could assume. . . . The only way of living acceptably to God was not to surpass worldly morality in monastic asceticism, but solely through the fulfillment of the obligations imposed upon the individual by his position in the world. That was his calling.
[82] See Diggin’s, Chapter 4, “Calvinism and Capitalism: The Irony of Unintended Consequences,” esp. pp. 96-103.
[83] Weber, pp. 112-114.
[84] Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (New York: Atheneum, 1970), p. 306.
[85] “The result is a paradoxical combination of pervasive exactitude in the practical observance of religion and simultaneous, if hidden, doubt about its truth. Preoccupation with dogma has given way to teachings on morality, and the dynamism of faith has been replaced by tolerance” (Aristide Tessitore, “Alexis de Tocqueville on the Incommensurability of America’s Founding Principles,” paper delivered at the 2001 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, 29 August-2 September, pp. 18-19).
[86] Weber, pp. 48-54.
[87] Walzer, p. 319.
[88] See Walzer, p. 300.
[89] In Tocqueville’s own words (p. 9):
I saw [in Europe] an equality of conditions which, though it had not reached the extreme limits found in the United States, was daily drawing closer thereto; and that same democracy which prevailed over the societies of America seemed to me to be advancing rapidly toward power in Europe. It was at that moment that I conceived the idea of this book.
[90] Tocqueville, pp. 277-287.
[91] Weber, pp. 91-92.
[92] See Paul Münch, “The Thesis before Weber: An Archaeology,” in Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth (eds.) Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 53.
[93] See Duffield, p. 778.
[94] We are currently conducting a larger study that will better explain this thesis.
[95] We speak of Protestantism here—as we do the other traditions—as though it were monolithic. We are well aware that Protestantism (and to a lesser extent the other traditions) is far from monolithic.
[96] Duffield.
[97] Ernst B. Haas and Philippe C. Schmitter, “Economics and Differential Patterns of Political Integration: Projections about Unity in Latin America,” International Organization 18(4)(1964): pp. 705-737. See also Roberto Papini, The Christian Democrat International, trans. Robert Royal (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997) for evidence of Catholic integration tendencies in Latin America.