Paper Titles & Abstracts

To those who applaud it, differentiated integration is a welcome departure from the dogma of a uniform acquis communautaire that assumes that the same policies should apply in the same way, at the same time in all member states. By allowing for flexibility in timing, patterns of participation, and governance arrangements, differentiated integration seems to allow for a better fit between individual preferences, plural values, and a pressing need to solve some collective action problems at the European level. For its critics, however, differentiated integration creates co-ordination problems between 'ins' and 'outs'. It also increases risks of a) negative externalities, b) free riding and c) moral hazard. It can harm countries that are left out (negative externalities); or it can, in contrast, leave just a few countries with the costs of providing international public goods (free riding); and, in so far as it does either of those things, it can encourage dangerous forms of risk taking (moral hazard).This paper will briefly clarify the 'social choice' assumptions that lie behind conflicting claims about differentiated integration. It will then show those claims not only rest on contrasting empirical assumptions about the very nature of social, economic and political reality. They also have profoundly different implications for democracy and justice. Hence, the depth of the disagreement between those who regard differentiated integration as a destructive form of 'cherry picking' and those who regard it as a creative form of 'diversity in unity'.