Integrating Left and Right: Studying EU Politics

This Forum first appeared in the Fall 1998 ECSA Review (Vol.XI, No.3), pp.2-6.

Kathleen R. McNamara

THE FOLLOWING THREE ESSAYS discuss various aspects of a welcome new trend in the study of the European Union: the explicit focus on partisanship in the politics of European integration. The papers they drawn on were recently presented together at the Conference of Europeanists and the American Political Science Association meetings. To me, they are examples of the "normalization" of the study of the EU in that they use existing and well developed theoretical perspectives from the study of comparative politics, namely the study of political parties, voting and political ideology, to bear on the dynamics of integration. Historically, the study of European integration has been dominated by two approaches: scholars who viewed the EU as a sui generis case requiring its own theoretical apparatus, and scholars trained in international relations who approached the EU as a highly institutionalized case of international cooperation among sovereign states. As real world developments have made it difficult to deny that the EU is developing as a political entity of its own, however understood, international relations scholars have moved beyond the billiard ball approach to the study of EU politics, while comparative politics scholars have begun to take seriously the phenomenon of regional governance.

The three essays that follow are indicative of this change, as they ask a very different set of questions from the field's traditional focus on the explaining the extent of integration, typified by the neofunctionalist/intergovernmentalist debate. Instead, these authors ask to what degree partisan politics explain variation in policy outcomes, political preferences, or institutional dynamics in the European Union. The papers that these short essays are drawn from each take on a different level of analysis, illuminating the versatility of the partisanal approach: Simon Hix's focus is on the domestic coalitional level; Liesbet Hooghe's on the EU institutional level; and Mark Pollack's on the international treaty level. The meaning and importance of partisanship differs as well: Hix investigates the left-right strategic dimensions of the electoral space within which European policy is formulated; Hooghe analyzes the contestation between neoliberal capitalism and regulated capitalism in the European Commission; while Pollack argues that the Hix and Hooghe use of relatively traditional categories from comparative politics may not capture the new "third way" between left and right typified by Tony Blair, and, Pollack argues, the Amsterdam Treaty.

It is notable that none of the authors denies the political importance of the independence versus integration dimension of EU policymaking, but rather each is engaged in an effort to move forward the research agenda beyond this aspect. Taken together, these analyses help define the initial contours of a coherent and productive research agenda, indicating that the linkages between partisan politics and EU integration can be theoretically specified and systematically studied. They also show how much more work lies ahead for those seeking a sophisticated political understanding of the EU. This research agenda, however, dovetails with broader and encouraging trends in political science towards the systematic study of the interpenetration of domestic and international political dynamics. For example, the study of foreign policy and inter-national conflict has been revived by a renewed emphasis on the causal impact of domestic institutions, ideology and partisanship, often incorporating insights from theories in American and comparative politics. Scholars working on the issue of globalization have been effectively bridging the international/comparative political economy divide by studying the interaction between partisanship, domestic institutions and international trade and capital mobility. That the integration of partisan politics into the study of the EU is occurring alongside these developments in other fields indi-cates that the normalization of EU studies is well advanced. It may in fact result in our scholarship producing theoretical innovations which illuminate important political dynamics in these other empirical settings, as well as moving us towards a better understanding of the puzzles of European integration.

Kathleen R. McNamara is assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University.

Simon Hix

TRADITIONALLY, THE EU POLITICAL space has been conceptualised as uni-dimensional. For example, neofunctionalists argue that actors have allegiances either to the supranational institutions or to domestic institutions and cultures. Similarly, intergovernmentalists argue that governments have vested interests either in promoting or preventing supranational integration. Consequently, despite rival secondary hypotheses about the integration process, these approaches share a core primary assumption: that actors align themselves on a continuum between 'more' or 'less' integration.

Also, several contemporary approaches to the EU have inherited this construct. For example, George Tsebelis ("Maastricht and the Democratic Deficit," Aussenwirtshaft 52) has argued that the European Parliament (EP) is always more 'pro-integration' than the median government in the Council, and that the median government is always more pro-integration than the status quo (since the status quo is no EU legislation, or 'no integration'). Consequently, the EP will always prefer any legislative proposal from the Council to the existing status quo.

However, this uni-dimensional conception is no longer sustainable. What we are studying in the contemporary EU is not simply 'integration' but also 'politics.' This may at first seem a fatuous distinction. However, it captures the notion that the EU has moved beyond the initial period of institution-building and system-creation. The EU already possesses the three main characteristics of a 'political system:' government: executive, legislative and judicial authority; politics: contestation over which values should be promoted in outputs from the EU system; and policy: the power to influence the allocation of values in the EU.

On this last characteristic, outputs from the EU system do not simply relate to the pace of economic and political integration, but also to the two classic 'issue dimensions' of domestic politics (S.M. Lipset and S. Rokkan, Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-national Perspectives, 1967). The first dimension (from the French Revolution) is concerned with 'how far there should be public intervention in individual social and political freedom for the public good.' On this dimension, Liberals and Socialists favour 'freedom' whereas Christian Democrats and Conservatives favour 'authority.' In the EU, this dimension is salient on issues like EU citizenship, environmental policy, biotechnology/genetic engineering, women's equality, tobacco advertising, and justice and home affairs (e.g., free movement of persons, immigration and asylum policies, and policing).

The second dimension (from the Industrial Revolution) is concerned with 'how far there should be public intervention in individual economic freedom for the public good.' On this dimension, Socialists (and traditional Christian Democrats) favour 'intervention' whereas Conservatives and Liberals favour the 'free market.' In the EU, this dimension is salient in most areas relating to the regulation of the single market (e.g., health and safety at work, workers rights and worker consul-tation), competition and state aids policies, macro-economic issues under monetary union (e.g., tax harmonisation), social and economic cohesion, and how to combat unemployment.

These dimensions tend to be amalgamated into a single 'left-right' dimension. On the one hand, the left-right is a flexible concept, allowing a single concept to be used to summarise numerous positions and alignments. On the other hand, the left-right enables politics to be conceptualised as both a continuum ('from left to right') and a dichotomy ('left versus right').These features have consequently enabled the left-right to remain the dominant cognitive frame for ordering and aligning actors in all modern political systems (despite numerous attempts to write its obituary!).

The EU is no different than other systems. Once the EU moves beyond integration to politics, actors inherently become aligned on this left-right dimension in addition to the traditional integration-independence dimension. On left-right issues on the EU agenda, the electorate is aligned on socio-economic rather than national lines. For example, on the regulation of workers rights, a worker in France will share a common interest with a worker in Germany, rather than with an employer in France. National differences cross-cut these socio-economic interests: such as the different existing levels of worker protection in each member state. Nevertheless, such national differences within transnational social groups are still explained by different individual socio-economic interests rather than variations in national cultural identities (M. Gabel, Interests and Integration: Market Liberalization, Public Opinion, and European Union, 1998).

In the EU institutions, particularly in the post-Maastricht world, political actors must take account of electoral preferences. Politicians in the EU institutions are partisan actors who have come to office through political parties, surround themselves with partisan friends, and will return to partisan networks after their careers in Brussels. Political parties present themselves to the electorate primarily through references to their position on the left-right. This reduces transaction costs of campaigning, but creates a postieri constraints on partisan office-holders. Consequently, once left-right issues arise on the EU agenda, actors in the EU institutions will take up positions relating to their partisan affiliations.

In practical terms, the legislative rules of the EU require oversized-majorities to achieve policy outputs. However, on left-right issues, the EP will not be prepared to accept a take-it-or-leave-it offer from the Council if the status quo (either of no EU regulation or of the previous EU regulation) is closer to the left-right location of the EP majority than the left-right location of the qualified-majority in the Council. (In other words, this might help explain why Tsebelis' theoretical argument about the co-decision procedure is not supported empirically). Also, in the late 1990s, the Council has a simple majority of socialist governments, and the 1994 EP elections produced a centre-left majority and an agenda-setting power for the Socialist Group. Nevertheless, as in the US, the EU system will tend towards 'divided government.' EP elections are 'second order national elections' which tend to result in anti-government votes. As a result, whereas the Council represents governments, the EP will tend to represent opposi-tion parties. Hence, in the 1999 European elections, with Socialists in government in 12 (possibly 13) of the member states, there is likely to be a centre-right majority in the EP.

Overall, if we are to develop better explanations of EU politics and policy-making, we need to use more sophisticated conceptualisations of the 'strategic space' within which actors align themselves in relation to each other. And, as the EU takes on many of the classic public policy responsibilities of domestic systems, a two-dimensional political space is beginning to emerge: where one dimension relates to the independence-integration dimension (of the classic EU scholars), and the other relates to the traditional left-right (of classic partisan politics).

Based on Hix, Simon (forthcoming) "Dimensions and Align-ments in EU Politics: Cognitive Constraints and Partisan Responses," European Journal of Political Research, 33. Simon Hix is a lecturer in EU politics and policy in the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Liesbet Hooghe

THE EUROPEAN UNION HAS become a polity. This is partly the outcome of a market-deepening process in which many non-tariff barriers have been eliminated. At the same time, authoritative decision making has been reallocated from national states to authoritative institutions at supranational and, in many cases, subnational levels of decision making. As more decisions affecting the lives of Europeans are taken at the level of the European Union, so the goals and decisional processes of European integration have become contested. A key question is what will drive EU politics in this new setting. What are the relevant dimensions of contestation? What coalitions will be formed?

Current EU literature furnishes four approaches that formulate sharply different expectations about who the key actors are in this emerging polity and what is the character of contestation. These are not all cleavage/contestation approaches, but they speak to these questions in relatively unambiguous fashion. Two approaches assume that contention in the European Union is primarily territorial, and two imply that EU decision making reflects not only territorial, but also non-territorial conflicts imported from domestic politics.

Neofunctionalism. Since Ernst Haas' work in the 1960s, neofunctionalist models of European integration have conceived of EU politics as structured by contention between pro-integration forces and defenders of national sovereignty. The key actors are supranational actors, particularly the Commission, which are assumed to want to shift authority to the European level because there are good functional reasons to do so. Neofunctionalism is not a theory of contestation, but more one of surreptitious consensus building. The strategy of supranational actors is to win over national actors by means of political and functional spillovers-by socializing them in transnational networks, by persuading them of the functional necessity of deeper integration, or by mobilizing sympathetic societal actors to put pressure on national governments.

Intergovernmentalism. For intergovernmentalists, divergent national interests structure territorial competition. National states are the ultimate decision makers; supranational institutions act as agents in achieving state-oriented collective goods. European policy making is an instrument for state executives to maximize national economic benefits in an interdependent world while minimizing the loss of state sovereignty.

The assumption in these two approaches is that the position one takes on the territorial cleavage predisposes one's position on EU issues. In contrast, a growing number of EU scholars posit that EU decision making reflects ideological, class, sectoral, or functional conflicts-alongside territorial cleavages. I extract from this literature two contrasting approaches.

Policy network approach. There are those who reject the notion of an overarching cleavage structure at the EU or the domestic level. According to this approach, which I label the policy network model, authority is increasingly compartmentalized in specialist public-private networks -often stretching across territorial levels. The European Union is an extension of this system of networks. The key actors here are functional specialists whose confinement in relatively insulated issue-specific networks discourages them from forming inclusive political coalitions.

Partisan approach. Like Simon Hix and-with some reservations-Mark Pollack, I argue that an overarching cleavage structure is taking shape in the European Union, which can be usefully conceptualized as a two-dimensional space: a territorial, national/European dimension, alongside a non-territorial, left/right dimension.

In this polity many actors play a role: national government leaders, interest groups, Commission officials and judges of the European Court of Justice, public opinion and political parties. Here I want to single out political parties- generally underestimated by other approaches-as key framers of contention. The fact that the European Union is a system of multilevel governance where actors participate in decision making across multiple levels gives parties opportunities to operate at the EU level as well as in national polities. Political parties are the most important aggregators of interests in Western European societies. The positions they take on European issues are, to a considerable extent, shaped by embedded cleavages: left/right, religion, center/periphery, postmaterialist libertarian/traditional cleavage. These cleavages constitute prisms through which parties respond to new European issues. The most widely present domestic cleavage is left/right, and it is this cleavage which has the greatest influence on European contention. It interacts there with the EU-induced supranational/national dimension.

How do these dimensions combine to structure contention in the European Union? I argue that contestation takes the form of competition between two broad projects that encompass major issues of political architecture alongside more mundane issues of political economic policy. At one end of the ideological spectrum stands the neoliberal project. It seeks to insulate the market from political interference by combining European market integration with minimal European regulation (e.g., competition policy). This project attracts those who want minimal political interference in economic decision making, market-liberals seeking selective European and national regulation of market forces, and, in part, nationalists intent on sustaining national sovereignty. The neoliberal project rejects democratic institutions at the European level capable of regulating the market, but seeks instead to generate competition among national governments in providing regulatory climates attracting mobile factors of production. Opposing them is a loose, fluctuating, coalition supporting European regulated capitalism. This project attempts to increase the EU's capacity for regulation by upgrading the European Parliament, promoting the mobilization of social groups, and reforming institutions to make legislation easier. The project for European regulated capitalism attracts social christian-democrats and market-oriented social-democrats. They promote various versions of social democracy: many concede that markets, not governments, should allocate investment, but many also insist that markets work more efficiently if the state helps to provide collective goods, including transport infrastructure, workforce skills, and cooperative industrial relations. The coalitions behind these projects are neither fixed nor monolithic. They have varied through time and across territory. Yet each project has a crystal-clear bottom line: neoliberals seek to constrain European authoritative decision making; proponents of European regulated capitalism want to deepen it.

Several scholars have begun to collect evidence and test hypotheses derived from the partisan model by examining public opinion, policy decisions (e.g. cohesion policy), treaty bargaining, and political parties at national and European levels. I have sought to explain how top Commission officials stand in relation to these projects. Asking the question to top Commission officials sets a high hurdle for this model. It requires (a) that this contention reaches into the institution with a caste-iron reputation for one-sided supranationalism, and (b) that partisanship frames contention even in a bureaucratic setting where expertise and functional links constrain partisanship. Nevertheless, I am discovering that the Commission is not above or beyond structured political contention. Commission officials take sides in struggles between "Euro-Marketeers" and "Euro-Socialists." Like many other actors, they are divided about the pursuit of "good common life" in the European Union.

This piece is based on Hooghe, Liesbet, "Euro-Socialists or Euro-Marketeers? Orientations to European Capitalism Among Top Officials in the European Commission," paper presented at APSA, Boston, 1998. Liesbet Hooghe is assistant professor in comparative politics at the University of Toronto.

Mark A. Pollack

INTEGRATING A LEFT-RIGHT DIMENSION into the study of European integration has not been at the center of my research agenda, nor that of the field of EU studies generally. As Kathleen McNamara points out, many EU scholars working today were trained in the field of international relations, and approach the EU as an extraordinarily well developed and institutionalized case of international cooperation. Indeed, it seems to me that an international or intergovernmental approach remains a useful starting point for scholars attempting to understand the development of EU institutions, including the ways in which those institutions subsequently constrain EU member governments.

Still, Hix's challenge to incorporate elements from the comparative politics literature in general, and the left-right dimension of political contestation in particular, is a compelling one. At the very least, such an approach forces us to look beyond the single dimension of national vs. supranational control, to focus on the political stakes of the integration process for business, labor, and other interests in European societies. At its most developed and disciplined, such a two-dimensional approach to EU politics allows scholars like Hix, Hooghe and Marks to develop new theories and new testable hypotheses about the preferences and partisan strategies of political actors in the European arena.

In the context of Hix's challenge, I set out rather modestly to examine the familiar history of the EU's intergovernmental conferences through the unfamiliar lens of Hooghe's and Marks' ideal types of neoliberalism and regulated capitalism. For the Treaty of Rome, the Single European Act, and the Maastricht Treaty, the argument was, and remains, straightforward: from Rome to Maastricht, the fundamental thrust of the treaties has been neoliberal, in the sense that each of the Community's constitutive treaties facilitated the creation of a unified European market, while setting considerable institutional barriers to the regulation of that same market. The Treaty of Rome featured important powers for the EEC in the areas of free movement, competition policy, and external trade policy, while granting the Community few powers of positive regulation and only a modestly redistributive Common Agricultural Policy. The Single European Act picked up this basic theme, focusing primarily on the completion of the internal market by 1992. And the Maastricht Treaty focused primarily on the project for Economic and Monetary Union, which has turned out to be a neoliberal project in effect if not in its original conception. (These treaties were not, of course, uniformly neoliberal documents. In order to secure unanimous agreement among the member states, each IGC also adopted some elements of the regulated capitalism project, including some regulatory competences and a European cohesion policy for the poorest regions and member states. Nevertheless, the overall thrust of the treaties remains clearly neoliberal.)

By contrast with the three earlier treaties, the Treaty of Amsterdam represents an outlier. At its center we find no central neoliberal project comparable to the common market, the internal market, or EMU, all of which are left essentially unchanged. Rather, the Treaty of Amsterdam, which was negotiated by governments controlled overwhelmingly by the left and center-left, addresses many of the central issue-areas of the regulated capitalism project, including employment, social policy, the environment, and the powers of the European Parliament. One might thus be tempted-as I was early in my research-to argue that the Amsterdam Treaty represents a left turn in EU history toward the model of regulated capitalism.

Yet, as I examined the negotiation and the text of the Amsterdam Treaty more closely, it became clear that the Treaty does not represent the victory of the regulated capitalism model. Indeed, the negotiating record of the 1996 IGC demonstrates that the European project of the center-left is far less self-evident than the ideal type of regulated capitalism might suggest, and was itself the object of political contestation during the negotiation of the Treaty. More specifically, in the weeks prior to the Amsterdam European Council, a traditional socialist agenda for an interventionist, regulatory Europe championed by French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin collided with a new center-left project promoted by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who accepted the traditional socialist goals of employment and social welfare but was more skeptical of binding regulation and intervention at the European Union level.

After his election in May 1997, Blair immediately reversed a number of long-standing Conservative positions in the 1996 IGC, agreeing to strengthen the powers of the European Parliament, strengthen EU competences in employment and environmental policy, and incorporate the Maastricht Social Protocol into the EC Treaty. Yet, when it came to employment and social policy, Blair went out of his way to distinguish his approach from the traditional socialist or social-democratic approach. At his first PES conference in Malmo, Sweden, Blair told the delegates that they must "modernise or die ... Our task," he argued, "is not to go on fighting old battles but to show that there is a third way, a way of marrying together an open, competitive and successful economy with a just, decent and humane society" (quoted in The Daily Telegraph, 7 June 1997). On the specific provisions of the Treaty, Blair indicated that he would accept an Employment Chapter and a Social Chapter in the Treaty, but only if these emphasized labor market flexibility and avoided over-regulation of the market.

The final provisions in the Treaty of Amsterdam clearly reflect Blair's views. Thus, for example, the Social Chapter was incorporated into the EC Treaty, but no major changes were made to the rather restrictive voting rules for adopting legislation in sensitive areas. With regard to employment, Blair, together with German Chancellor Kohl, rejected any possibility of EU harmonization or any significant EU spending, opting instead for a voluntaristic system of coordinating national employment policies, with an emphasis on flexible labor markets and "employability." Blair's own assessment of Amsterdam is telling in this regard: "The summit as a whole focused in a very, very important way on the issue of jobs and economic reform, the focus being on education, skills, flexible labor markets "rather than old-style state intervention and regulation" (quoted in The European, 19 June 1997, emphasis added).

What, then, are we to make of this Blairite Treaty? I see two possible interpretations. In the first interpretation, Blair- and by extension the Amsterdam Treaty, which reflects his views-represents the capitulation of the European left, which has swallowed the neoliberal prescription of free trade and monetarist economics, and offers only weak, symbolic Treaty provisions to address questions of employment and social policy without actually providing the Union with the institutional means to act in these areas. The second interpretation, most prominently offered by sociologist Anthony Giddens, is that Blair is in the process of defining a third way, a new radical politics "beyond left and right," based not on state intervention and regulation but rather on preparing individuals to survive and prosper in the new global economy. It is, as yet, too early to judge whether Giddens' interpretation holds water: Blair's third way is as yet poorly defined, especially at the European level, and the Amsterdam Treaty has yet to enter into force. Yet, it remains an intriguing irony that, just as scholars like Hix, Hooghe and Marks are exploring the left-right implications of European integration, centrists like Blair and Giddens claim to be transcending a left-right distinction that is too blunt, and too outdated, to serve as a guide to policy in the new global economy.

This piece is based on Pollack, Mark A., "A Blairite Treaty: Neoliberalism and Regulated Capitalism in the Treaty of Amsterdam," paper presented at APSA, Boston, 1998. Mark A. Pollack is assistant professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.