Understanding ‘Europessimism’

Andrew Glencross - Lecturer in Politics, University of Sterling

How, then, has Europessimism fared in the wake of the worst economic crisis the EU has ever experienced? The concern of federalist scholars today is less the worry that we will experience a rolling back of integration and a return to nationalism, but rather that Europeans continue to miss out on the benefits federalism can uniquely offer. Traditionally, supporters of federalism made the case that the efficiency of treaty reform and decision-making would be improved by removing national vetoes. With the advent of the Eurozone debt crisis, this confidence in federalism has in fact been reinforced, precisely because the current model has again shown its limitations as compared with a federal fiscal union. Federalist Europessimism thus retains its inherently optimistic side: it might criticise the current EU system, but it still proposes a better alternative.

Such optimism seems absent from the social-democratic tradition today. The German-brokered solution for preventing the disintegration of the Eurozone involved granting emergency funding to governments frozen out of the financial markets in return for dramatic domestic economic and fiscal reforms. The kind of (neoliberal) economic conditionality imposed on Greece and others constitutes an historic turning-point as never before has the EU been so implicated in deciding national tax and spending policies. In this context, social-democratic scholars also worry that integration prevents the development of transnational mobilisation around a Keynesian demand-management response as a cleavage has emerged between creditor countries and those on the periphery that require bail-outs.

Equally worryingly for social democrats, the social market economies that are the main creditors in this case (Austria, Germany, Finland, Netherlands) remain at risk from the current mode of integration. As Scharpf puts it, the legal establishment of a pan-European single market without corresponding social policy competences to counteract inequalities ‘systematically weakens established socio-economic regimes at the national level, and it also generates a liberalising bias in European legislation’.

So, what does the future hold? Both the flaws in Economic and Monetary Union – the creation of a currency union without even a banking union, let alone a fiscal one – and the convoluted EU attempt to find a remedy can, in fact, be read as a vindication of both federalist and social-democratic Europessimism. On the one hand, federalists have long advocated political union in order to pool the macroeconomic policy competences necessary to stabilise a currency zone. On the other hand, pessimistic social democrats were concerned from the outet about a monetary arrangement that could not resolve current account imbalances except through internal devaluation.

Yet these pessimistic accounts of integration do not share similar conclusions about where integration is headed. Federalist pessimism remains closely associated with a Euro-optimistic vision that federalism will in the end solve the efficiency and legitimacy problems bedevilling the EU. This vision mirrors what Joseph Weiler has termed the ‘political messianism’ prevalent in the EU’s political culture with a view to fulfilling some form of supranational destiny. By contrast, social-democratic analyses are increasingly pessimistic about the ability to implement an alternative model of integration, which would necessarily involve more supranational policy coordination. Interestingly, this disjuncture mirrors the difficulties centre-left parties face today in mobilising voters both anxious about the impact of integration and unconvinced by promises that more can be achieved at the EU level.

What remains to be seen, though, is whether these varieties of Europessimism manifest themselves in political debate and come to influence voting behaviour. Given the pervasiveness of national austerity policies, the 2014 election campaign for the European Parliament will likely be a test of how far Eurosceptic parties now draw upon Europessimism, especially of a social-democratic kind.

Dr Andrew Glencross is a Politics lecturer at the University of Stirling. His main research focus is on the interplay of law and politics in the European Union and the development of European integration more generally, including EU foreign policy. He is the author of What Makes the EU Viable? (Palgrave 2009), co-editor of EU Federalism and Constitutionalism: The Legacy of Altiero Spinelli (Lexington 2010).