Recent crises have dimmed the post-Westphalian glow around the European Union and depreciated its self-image as bearer of prosperity, economic dynamism, and peace. The books discussed here were both written as dark clouds over the EU were thickest, but they are very different. Richard Rose is a widely admired political science elder, and his book presents a broad vision critical of the EU. Espen Olsen’s book is a narrower monograph about the evolution of legal EU citizenship. Their subjects may diverge, but both books say important things about European integration.

In Representing Europeans, Rose’s first contention is that EU institutions promote engrenage—roughly, “gearing”—toward “ever closer union ” (words from the preamble to the Rome Treaty), and encourage integration by stealth. This is a traditional argument, but not without substance. Jean Monnet’s design for the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) included a bureaucratic “High Authority” to propose and administer legal policies because he believed that “Europe” was a vague notion that could have no interests, a weak identity, and few purposes without institutional nourishing from above from experts who understood things better than ordinary citizens. In the European Economic Community (EEC) that succeeded the ECSC in 1957, a European Commission appointed by governments (really a renamed High Authority) was given a monopoly over proposing legislation and administering the implementation of European treaties. Its counterpart for much of the EU’s history was an intergovernmental Council of Ministers that decided whether Commission proposals should become law. The European Parliament (EP), originally an “assembly” appointed by governments, has since 1979 been directly elected, and over the last two decades has “codecided” with member states. Early on, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) decreed that EU legislation had precedence over national law, accelerating the pace of change decided at Euro level. The notion of an acquis communautaire, developed as the EU enlarged, obliged all new members to accept the totality of the EU’s accumulated treaties, laws, institutions, and procedures, making retreat from earlier decisions extremely difficult. Rose claims that this system has created powerful incentives for greater integration over time, whatever citizens desired.

Rose’s second contention is that the EU’s “vertical” relations with citizens are unusually weak. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are elected by a system of “disproportional representation” in which voting power is distributed unequally between smaller and larger member countries, with votes counting more for the “smalls.” EP elections are also understood by parties and voters to be about national rather than European matters, contributing to low participation and low citizen knowledge of European issues. Once elected, MEPs join EU-level party alliances whose partisan identities are muddied by national differences and the need for consensus between alliances. Finally, the EP cannot propose legislation and can codecide only Commission proposals. If Brussels institutions are determined to promote “ever greater union,” the European Parliament can rarely challenge this predisposition. The result, to Rose, is “citizenship lite” for Europeans on EU matters.

Rose then argues that the thickness of European-level horizontal institutional dealings, full of strong checks and balances, combined with the thinness of vertical ties to citizens, creates problems. National governments are pulled in two different directions on European matters. At the European level, they make deals that necessitate explanation to their national electorates. This creates incentives to engage in blame avoidance when EU decisions are likely to be costly. But the same governments will also lose domestic credibility if and when new costs hit home. Scholars agree that during the first few decades, the EU, aided by economic growth and the low public salience of European integration, benefited from “permissive consent.” Economic conditions became less rosy after the 1970s, however, just as the EU began to enlarge and assume greater policy roles, leading many to conclude that the costs of integration were rising and its benefits declining. Consent then became grudging and EU legitimacy more precarious, with both processes powerfully reinforced by recent economic crises.

Rose’s suggestions for what the EU should now do are summarized by the title of his last chapter, “The Future of Europe: An Ever Looser Europe” (p. 143). First, the EU should retreat from its pursuit of “ever larger union.” Interdependence in a globalizing world is real, he notes, but the EU should cease pushing new “Europeanization” each time new problems appear. Cultures of social solidarity are deeply national, for example, and the EU should avoid policies that perturb them. Grounds for any unified EU foreign and security policies and energy polices are also largely absent, while immigration and the EU’s “free movement” commitments have become explosive issues. Next, “citizenship lite” and the political and cultural differences among member states mean that treaty changes toward greater integration, when truly needed, could more effectively be submitted to pan-European referendums, rather than divisive national ones. Finally, large policy decisions in which certain member states impose their national preferences on others, as have occurred repeatedly in the Euro-zone crisis, should be avoided. If forward movement is desired, “enhanced cooperation” by coalitions of the willing would be a better method, even if it leads to a multispeed EU.

Rose’s prescriptive arguments read like a sophisticated version of positions recently taken by the Tory British government. Rose’s is but one, albeit elegant, contribution to an urgent discussion whose time has come, however. Events have muted advocacy of European federalism, but many avid “Europeans” argue that cutting back on the EU’s propensity for ever-greater union could unravel European integration altogether, with untold costs. Others, particularly after the 2014 elections for the European Parliament, counter that the EP should turn “citizenship lite” toward Westminster-like parliamentarism by making EP elections more transnational, promoting EP rights to propose legislation, and creating a new government and opposition system based on a politicized Commission and an EP majority and minority. The institutions that Rose criticizes are certain to resist most of these proposals, as will many member states. His well-argued case is nonetheless a significant contribution.

Olsen’s Transnational Citizenship in the European Union is an exercise in process-tracing the development of legal EU citizenship, reviewing key moments by scrutinizing debates, reports, and their contexts and conclusions. To Olsen, legal citizenship involves the precise rights and duties of belonging to a polity. Among his hopes, based on his data, is to deflate the arguments of those who include time-bound and political matters such as identity and social rights and invent loaded terms like “postnational,” claiming that Europeanizing citizenship will “lead to … “erosion” of its national and statist modality” (p. 156).

Olsen’s tracing is easily summarized. Monnet’s ECSC, the EU’s starting point, included commitments to the mobility of factors of production, including labor, and granted to national citizens of the “original six” members the rights to travel and work in coal and steel in other ECSC countries. The Rome Treaty’s “common market” for industrial goods expanded “free movement,” while forbidding discrimination among different nationalities. Confronted by new economic challenges in the 1970s, leaders then debated citizenship extensively in ambitious reports about European identity, European rights (including a European passport), and the implications of the first direct elections to the European Parliament in 1979, but reached few conclusions. After the first direct EP elections, the newly energized parliament debated an EEC constitution and a draft treaty on European Union, but again there were few legal consequences. These debates stuck in elite minds, however, and after the 1985 single-market program had reenergized the EEC, there came broadened commitment to free movement and agreement by the Schengen group (originally a non-EEC bargain among a “coalition of the willing”) to open internal borders.

It was the 1991 Maastricht Treaty, following a Spanish suggestion, that formalized “Union citizenship,” premised on prior national citizenship, that included expanded freedom-of-movement rights, plus voting rights in local and European elections (inevitable once the European Parliament obtained “codecision” powers), rights to diplomatic protection in third countries, and the right to petition a European Ombudsman. After Maastricht, debates over adapting EU institutions to a union enlarged to Eastern European nations again brought ambitious discussions of European identity, plus advocacy for a charter of fundamental rights that, during the brief “European Convention” after 2002, were on the table. After member states carefully pruned the Convention’s musings and a proposed European Constitutional Treaty was refused by French and Dutch referendums, the status quo ante was reestablished. “Path dependency” again had its way over “postnational” advocacy and European citizenship remained defined in post-Maastricht “transnational” ways. In light of present EU crises, Olsen predicts that “postnational … citizenship and identity are more distant than ever before” (p. 144).

Olsen’s process tracing, which carefully analyzes key moments when European citizenship might have been broadened, shows how new ambitions were then cut back close to what already existed. As the author himself recognizes, this approach does not fully explain path dependency because it does not explore multilateral bargaining between EU member states where the hardest issues were fought out. Yet by circling this black box, Olsen confirms something fundamental about European integration. In the last analysis, member states decided on the transnational, and limited, definition of today’s EU citizenship. Here at least, we see little of the quasi-automatic momentum to ever greater union that concerns Rose. The member states did not want post-national European citizenship because it would undercut their national citizens’ sense of national belonging and allegiance, and at every moment in the story, they refused to allow it. On citizenship, the EU has thus had strong brakes and member-state drivers ready to use them.

Whether these brakes are used on other matters, economic governance in particular, is another question, but a good argument can be made that in recent years, intergovernmental bargaining has been more central to EU decision-making than before, and this has made it difficult to make great leaps forward. Arguably, the largest concern is less integration by stealth than suboptimal, sometimes painful, choices imposed by more powerful member states on weaker ones. Olsen thus indirectly provides important data and arguments for those who will disagree with Rose’s argument and prescriptions.