As with the common European project to which these books speak they are united in their diversity. In their diversity they each tackle distinct aspects of the ongoing process of European integration: democracy, enlargement, and citizenship. However, in spite of their diverse points of departure, these books are united in their endeavor to comprehend the contested nature of the emerging European Union polity and in bringing the distinctly political dimension of the integration process to the fore.
The central argument of Vivien Schmidt's Democracy in Europe is that students of the EU's democratic deficit have fixed their gaze in the wrong place. For Schmidt, “the real problem of democracy in the EU” lies not at the European level but at the national level (p. 1). There has, in her view, been a sustained failure by national politicians to explain to their citizens the new realities posed by this supranational layer of government for their national democracies. Viewed in these terms, the democratic deficit is not primarily about any shortcomings in the European institutions, although these are acknowledged. Rather, it is a failure of political communication. As a consequence, the only solution is to engage national citizens with the political realities of a European order in which power is increasingly diffused above and below the state among a variety of institutions and actors. Institutions do continue to matter because they shape the interaction between the national polities and the EU. Thus, distinguishing between two basic institutional designs—“compound” and “simple” polities—Schmidt argues that compound polities like Germany and Italy, which already have relatively fragmented political systems, are better placed for coping with the challenges of further fragmentation. In contrast, for unitary states like the UK and France, in which power and authority have been concentrated historically within the national tier of government, the challenges posed by fragmented governance are far greater. Things are not this straightforward, however. While the challenge of adjusting their national polities to the challenges of Europeanization from above might be greater for simple polities, the fact that governance is concentrated at the national level probably means that they are better placed to direct the process of integration from below. Moreover, the tendency for national government elites to dominate policy formulation means that they are in a much better position to communicate with their public about the challenges of integration with a single coherent voice—“were they so to choose” (p. 265).
Schmidt carries this multifaceted argument across five main chapters, beginning with understanding the EU as a regional state and the implications raised by such an understanding for national democracy. The following three chapters focus sequentially on different aspects of “institutional fit” between the EU and national polities. These arguments about institutional structures, policy processes, and political representation are brought together in Chapter 5 and enriched with arguments about the role of ideas and discourse in institutional change.
Democracy in Europe is an impressive and timely contribution to the debate on Europe's future. Schmidt's argument is provocative: Stripped of its finesse, it suggests that a great deal of advanced analysis about the EU's legitimacy dilemma simply misses the point. These arguments are presented with great skill, however, and are buttressed with careful attention to theoretical and methodological issues and an almost overwhelming amount of empirical detail. All this said, the author might be accused of leaving the best to last. Despite devoting a full three chapters to mapping the complex institutional fit between national polities and the EU, she readily admits that this is not really the problem: “the essence of democracy is not here” (p. 248). The real problem concerns the continued reticence displayed by Europe's national political leaders to communicate with their citizens about the EU-related changes in national democratic practices (p. 40). This conviction infuses the narrative: Although the institutional analysis is certainly interesting, it is only when turning to discourse that the argument becomes fully compelling. For this reader, at least, this is because Schmidt finally nails her colors firmly to the mast, admitting that for her argument, “ideas and discourse are at the very foundations of democracy” (p. 248). The analysis remains rich and complex—interests and institutions remain integral to the narrative—but the discursive dimension is prioritized. This sense of direction is missing in the earlier stages of the book where a commitment to methodological eclecticism and an understanding of “the complexity of reality” (p. 7) contributes toward an impression that everything matters equally.
Jan Zielonka's Europe as Empire similarly grapples with the complex reality of the emerging European polity. Like Schmidt, he jettisons the Westphalian state as providing an inappropriate model for comprehending the complex patterns of governance, multiple overlapping jurisdictions of authority, cultural and economic heterogeneity, soft fluctuating borders, and divided sovereignty presented by the EU. However, instead of envisaging the EU as a “regional state,” Zielonka adopts a “neo-medieval paradigm,” looking back to the messy patchwork of the European Middle Ages to help elucidate the emerging contemporary reality. Moreover, this neo-medieval entity is an empire rather than a state, bringing power to the fore of his analysis, particularly with respect to the exercise of “soft power” across the EU's external borders. The tone of the book is explicitly polemical (p. 2), and the sustained contrast between the opposite types of Westphalia and neo-medievalism propels the argument forward, albeit at the risk of oversimplification.
The contrast between this approach and Schmidt's efforts to capture complexity in its entirety is striking, reflecting what Zielonka readily admits is a “difficult balancing act” (p. 18). His geographical horizon is also very different from that of Schmidt's. While Schmidt's narrative explores the experiences of France, Britain, Germany, and Italy, Zielonka's focuses on the Central and Eastern European countries that have joined the Union since 2004. Asserting that the recent wave of enlargements has profoundly transformed “the nature of the union” (p. 2), Zielonka proceeds to argue that “it is the European integration project that needs to be adjusted to enlargement and not the other way around” (p. 89). The level of diversity ushered forth by these waves of enlargement further unsettles the “discrepancy between its functional and territorial boundaries” (p. 3), giving rise to the messy neo-medieval patterns of governance across economic, democratic, and international domains.
Zielonka's narrative is engaging, and while it might be polemical it remains tightly argued. Europe as Empire achieves its principal objectives very effectively, bringing the political dimension of the integration process—particularly enlargement—to the fore of analysis and presenting neo-medievalism as a paradigm with which mainstream scholarship needs to engage. Nevertheless, because the scope of analysis is so broad, inevitably the interested reader is left with as many tantalizing questions as answers. For instance, while his argument that enlargement represents “the best quality of power politics in contemporary Europe” (p. 63) is convincing, little critical attention is given to its continued vitality in the context of an expanding Europe. At some point, the diminishing returns from enlargement is likely to mean that it is a less attractive prospect for both current and future members.
Similarly, there remains some ambiguity about the meaning of neo-medievalism. Over the course of the book, neo-medievalism is presented as a “reality” (p. 191), an emerging reality (p. 4) an “analytical paradigm” (p. 15), and the basis for a new normative order based on the principles of “plurilateralism” (p. 181). This shifting among a present reality, future possibility, analytical category, and normative impulse contributes to an impression of analytical imprecision. It also raises some perplexing questions. If Zielonka is right and the emerging order requires that “some basic choices ought to be made” and that “it is time to agree on this and try to make this ‘plurilateral’ system work” (p. 181), the questions before us are about who is going to make these choices and how any agreement is going to be coordinated. While these might be answered relatively easily within a Westphalian state in which territory, authority, and community are coterminous, they would seem to be anything but straightforward in the context of the neo-medieval polity of overlapping authorities and fragmented identities imagined by Zielonka.
Elucidating the political nature of European integration and the ideas that have informed this project, Willem Maas's Creating European Citizens continues with similar themes to those explored by Schmidt and Zielonka. While he accepts that creating a single market with its attendant economic benefits has been a crucial aspect of European integration and a platform on which to establish and extend a set of supranational rights for individuals, Maas is adamant that creating European citizens has informed the project since its inception. According to this argument, citizenship is not simply an instrumental means to a set of materially inspired ends, which could have been secured by a series of intergovernmental bargains (p. 6). Instead, it is an explicitly political project, motivated by a European idea stemming from the sense of shared guilt and political failure arising from bloody internecine wars. Skillfully guiding the reader through a complex history, the author illustrates how the EU has multiplied the sources of rights and political identity available to individuals, thereby challenging orthodox notions of citizenship based on a mutually exclusive set of relations between state and citizen. Thus for Maas, too, the emerging reality challenges Westphalian imagery, leading him to employ phrases reminiscent of those used by Schmidt and Zielonka when describing the “multilevel, highly fragmented system where policy develops beyond the firm control of any single political authority” (p. 8). Nevertheless, unlike Zielonka, and even more so than Schmidt, he seems more willing to entertain the idea, albeit speculatively, that the EU is in the process of becoming a state and might even develop a corresponding supranational citizenship one day (pp. 3, 109, 116–19). None of this is inevitable, however; it remains contingent on political commitment by a wide range of actors and a process that Maas admits is at times “arbitrary” (p. 116).
Maas's analysis of an emerging European citizenship conveys a similar tension to that exhibited by both Schmidt's and Zielonka's contributions, that is, the immense difficulties of offering a coherent narrative while acknowledging the endless caveats to the story presented. As with these other works, it is largely a creative tension and a necessary part of engaging with a contested and ongoing process. Both the high politics of creating European citizens and the low politics of judicial activism among citizens themselves are attended to with equal care. What remains elusive within this nuanced analysis, however, is any clear sense of whether, and if so, how, the European idea articulated at an elite level, and central to Maas's analysis, will inform popular consciousness. The EU-coordinated efforts to educate European citizens that are assessed by Maas (pp. 109–13) are clearly insufficient to generate the necessary sense of shared identity and civic engagement. In the absence of a salient, relevant, and widely diffused “communicate discourse”—to borrow Schmidt's phrasing—it is unclear how European citizenship will become entrenched in the minds of European citizens as well as its political leaders. Under such circumstances, individually justiciable rights might remain simply that, rather than the basis for a distinctly European project. To be fair, Mass acknowledges this ambivalence by asking, in the concluding pages, whether EU rights are more like human rights or citizenship rights (p. 120), and he credits the possibility that rights might arouse opposition as well support for integration (pp. 96–100). Nevertheless, in view of the centrality of a European idea within his argument, greater attention to the problems and possibilities of popularizing the idea among EU citizens themselves would have been interesting.
Each of these books makes an important contribution towards understanding the contemporary condition of, and future challenges to, the European polity. The authors deliver thoroughly engaging narratives, combining provocative conceptual imagination with careful, robust analyses. However, alongside their undoubted individual merits, read together they offer even greater inspiration for students of the European Union: reminding us that for better or worse, the nature of, and future for, the emerging polity remains as uncertain and contested as ever.
