Research Papers

Why does European integration take place? Neo-functionalists and intergovernmentalists contested the sources of European integration in what could be termed the ‘original question’ of European Union studies. The neo-functionalists Lindberg and Scheingold noticed a ‘permissive consensus’ for European integration. While this claim was true(r) for the early stages of European integration, this general integration-enabling popular environment has eroded since. A case in point is the increasing difficulty of ratifying EU treaty changes through popular referenda. Taking this erosion as my starting point, I turn around the question and ask: why does European integration not take place as easily as it used to? Previous research has tried to generate answers mainly by following the quantitative paradigm and looking for patterns in integration preferences across policy fields and the gap in elite and popular opinion. I choose a qualitative approach to move up the ‘ladder of abstraction’ and infer complementary insights into the complex mechanics driving European integration. I argue that the process of European integration can be fully represented along three alternative integration dimensions: economic integration, political integration, and social integration, whereas social integration refers to the creation of a common identity among citizens. Before European integration started all three dimensions were fully represented on the member state level. As the speed of uploading areas to the European level differed across these dimensions, the result is a state of ‘asymmetric integration’. Drawing from late neo-functionalist thought (Schmitter) I argue that this asymmetry exerts non-automatic endogenous pressures on European integration. I claim that deeper economic and political integration are effectively blocked by the lack of social integration. After applying this framework to the history of European integration from a macro-perspective, I demonstrate its usefulness by showing how it outperforms two established hypotheses in an analytical narrative on the current sovereign debt crisis.