THE EFFECT OF DEPOLITICIZATION ON JUSTIFYING INTEGRATION

As a new form of polity, the EU is still struggling to vindicate its claims to legitimate political authority. In this supranational entity it is largely the member states' governments that choose the executive, determine broad policy choices and demand accountability.Footnote ² Hence the connection between political authority and individuals qua mobilized political actors is much more tenuous at the EU level than in the member states.Footnote ³ These structural weaknesses in linking European government with the will of its citizens are usually met by calls to democratize the EU through pan-European political representation and participation. However, Glyn Morgan has recently claimed that the priority for successful continued integration is to justify the EU polity vis-à-vis alternative forms of government in terms of the ‘point or purpose of a European polity’.Footnote ⁴ Concretely, this means resolving the ‘three-sided quarrel between eurosceptics, post-sovereignists and federalists’Footnote ⁵ to determine whether there will be a ‘Europe of many nation-states, a post-sovereign polity or a federal European state’Footnote ⁶ before worrying about current policies or institutional woes.

This article questions whether Morgan has identified the right priority in response to the absence of channels of viable representation able to politicize (i.e. contest) the project of constructing a supranational polity. To do so, the article revisits the 2005 French referendum debate on the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe (TCE) to analyse how political elites, in particular then-president Chirac, who led the Yes campaign, tried to justify this new integration project. Inspired by Morgan's own account of justification, the analysis considers the extent to which the justifications used in the course of the French referendum debate were articulated as competing arguments about the type of polity the EU should be or about the policies and institutions of the EU. The objective is to explore the appropriateness of Morgan's suggestion that above all political elites need to change their discursive repertoire about integration in order to articulate a winning vision of EU political finality. In doing so, the analysis places the case of the French referendum within a broader recent scholarly debate over depoliticization, that is, elites' unwillingness to subject the question of integration to meaningful political contestation in domestic politics.

Joseph Weiler catalogues the founding ideals of integration as peace, prosperity and supranationalism.Footnote ⁷ Initially, high levels of public trust in their political leaders meant that national electorates were willing to accept the outcome of European elites' common desire to pursue these ideals. Since Danish voters first rejected the Maastricht Treaty in a 1992 referendum it has become clear that the components of the previous consensual and permissive order have unravelled. Nonetheless, the permissive consensus coexisted with the absence of any explicit political finality that continues to this day. The reason for this continued uncertainty over finality – which Morgan believes is a fundamental obstacle to successful further integration – is the enduring legacy of functionalism, whereby policy proposals are couched as responses to objective problems and without much consequence for sovereignty or democracy. Functionalism was the principle of integration that European elites could agree to, but its increasingly significant institutional and policy effects spawned accusations of ‘integration by stealth’. Other labels for this phenomenon, ‘crypto-federalism’Footnote ⁸ or, less provocatively, ‘competence creep’Footnote ⁹ likewise imply an absence of explicit justification for the political transformations wrought by integration. Thus integration has proceeded as ‘an elite-led process which has been largely unexplained and certainly under-advocated to the average citizen’.Footnote ¹⁰

Elites' willingness to set aside disputes over what form the nascent polity should eventually take in favour of creating a new venue for pursuing policy goals that would be less fettered by domestic constituencies is only one element of depoliticization. The other component is the failure of those same national elites to contest the institutionalization of Europe in the appropriate forums of representation and contestation. These elites ‘prefer to talk about the institutionalization of Europe when competing in elections to the European parliament, where it's largely irrelevant, and they prefer not to raise these questions when competing in national elections, where it matters’.Footnote ¹¹ Hence the most sophisticated response to this depoliticization of integration has been to call for the introduction of a ‘constrained politics’ of left and right at the EU level, by improving the coordination of policy positions across the Council, Parliament and Commission.Footnote ¹² However, this proposed change only addresses what Walker calls the ‘performative legitimacy’ of the EU, that is, ‘whether the EU has the right policies and how well it pursues them’Footnote ¹³ and says nothing about the justification for the very existence of a European polity per se.

Thus, although the integration project constitutes a polity change involving the transformation of a Europe of nation-states into a new political system, well-articulated justifications of political finality have seldom played a preponderant role in integration politics. Glyn Morgan argues that tackling this paucity of justification is the best solution to the dilemma of political legitimacy created by the demise of the permissive consensus. His analysis suggests that the preoccupation with finding a mechanism for contesting EU policies and institutional decision-making rules ought to be replaced with a new concern for more explicit and sophisticated justifications of what form of polity the EU should take. This would entail a face-off between three competing and mutually incompatible visions: a Europe of nations, a post-sovereign polity that ‘distributes political authority among various levels depending on the policy issue in question’Footnote ¹⁴ or a sovereign Europe spelling ‘the disappearance of sovereign nation-states in Europe’.Footnote ¹⁵ In this way, finality would be politicized before policy issues or decision-making rules – the legitimacy of the latter two would derive from that of the former.

Admittedly, Morgan's eventual goal is to devise a justification for a sovereign EU polityFootnote ¹⁶ – a superstate – that meets a stringent ‘democratic standard of justification’.Footnote ¹⁷ Regardless of this controversial objective, his claim that the priority for EU elites is to justify a pellucid form of organizing political authority before trying to legitimize policy outcomes needs to be examined. If proved correct, Morgan's argument would recast conventional wisdom regarding how to address current EU stasis by emphasizing the resolution of profound constitutional issues above establishing a system of popular contestation and mobilization. In particular, his argument would vindicate the idea, which owes much to Joschka Fischer, that a final constitutional settlement is a symbolic precondition for a successful EU. Yet this prescription is exactly what EU elites have not done in response to the crisis engendered by the referendum rejection of the Constitutional Treaty. Instead, the strategy has been to remove the language of constitutionalism and repackage the document as an anodyne treaty that can deliver better policy results. Consequently, using the 2005 French referendum debate as a test case for Morgan's thesis about justifying integration will yield a better understanding of how elites should confront depoliticization after the unravelling of the permissive consensus.

There are already manifold explanations for the French electorate's refusal to ratify the TCE. The result has been explained by reference to a new centrist/extremist cleavage,Footnote ¹⁸ a new lower middle-class Euroscepticism based on economic uncertainty,Footnote ¹⁹ unrealistic expectations about integrationFootnote ²⁰ as well as a clash between an open vision of society and a national-centred notion of society.Footnote ²¹ However, these studies have not examined the extent to which the TCE was supported or opposed on the basis of competing justifications relating either to EU policies, decision-making rules or political finality. The following section analyses the French referendum debate, especially the Yes campaign led by President Chirac – who made three televised appearances to mobilize the Yes vote – from the perspective of these three competing justifications. The aim is to show the extent to which any one particular type of justification dominated the debate between opponents and supporters of the TCE. The analysis reveals the predominance of justificatory arguments couched in terms of EU social policy, current and future, among supporters and opponents of the TCE alike. For supporters of the TCE, this justificatory strategy was a deliberate response to their opponents' criticisms that the new treaty would undermine the French state's ability to shield citizens from the negative externalities of neoliberal capitalism. The second section then discusses not only why conducting a debate over the TCE in terms of EU social policy proved an especially unconvincing strategy when used by the Yes camp. It also shows how counter-claims about the TCE's negative impact on social policy were similarly deficient because estranged from the reality of the process of treaty reform. Ultimately, this decision by both sides to focus on social policy aggravated the problem of depoliticization.

THE REFERENDUM CAMPAIGN IN FRANCE: COMPETING JUSTIFICATIONS OF THE TCE BASED ON ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR SOCIAL POLICY

Post-referendum analysis has revealed the paucity of attention that the campaign devoted to the question of institutional reformFootnote ²² despite the near-unanimous opinion by legal experts and political scientists that expansion to 25 members and more required a recalibration of the institutional rules of European decision-making.Footnote ²³ Some commentators have interpreted this missing aspect of the debate as proof that the ‘Fischer method’ of finding ‘an abstract model of what a good European government should be like’Footnote ²⁴ is flawed because it asks too much of citizens. Other issues tangential to the document itself also infiltrated the debate: immigration, Turkey, abortion rights and the ham-fisted abolition of the Whitsun bank holiday.Footnote ²⁵ Nevertheless, the campaign was above all striking for its focus on policy questions, chiefly in social matters, instead of proposed amendments to the EU institutional architecture. In this way, justifications for building an EU polity as an alternative to the nation-state and the need to change decision-making rules in the wake of enlargement both lost out to arguments about the policy priorities of the EU.

The problem of devising a justification for the TCE based on a common vision of political finality was first illustrated by the difficulties the Yes camp encountered in reconciling support from both sides of the mainstream political spectrum. It soon became apparent that the terms of the debate could not be reduced to a simple cleavage between supporters and opponents of the idea of integration per se. This was precisely because of the need to convince voters concerned about the content of EU public policies, present and future.

Mainstream French political parties experienced varying degrees of agonizing over whether or not to support the constitution. The centre-right party of government (UMP) was far more united than its RPR predecessor, then in opposition, had been during the debate on the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. The house divided was the socialist party (PS), whose leadership has historically been at odds over the pursuit of European integration.Footnote ²⁶ Whereas in 1992 the party largely rallied round its president – as did PS voters, four-fifths of whom voted yes – this time an internal ballot was held on the question of supporting the TCE, with nearly 59 per cent advocating a party line supporting the document. Nevertheless, this initiative failed to quell intra-party strife, leading to former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius's now infamous decision to campaign for a ‘socialist no’ under the banner ‘another Europe is possible’. Thus the largest opposition party was fundamentally split. On voting day it therefore came as no surprise that PS voters were torn between the two camps, with various polls showing that a majority of socialist voters rejected the TCE.Footnote ²⁷ Extremist parties of both left and right had far fewer qualms in opposing the treaty. This confirmed the traditional ideological hostility to European integration amongst the right of the right (FN, MPF and MNR) and left of the left (PCF, LCR, LO and PT) as well as their recent ability to mobilize protest voting.Footnote ²⁸ The two remaining mainstream parties, the centre-right UDF and the Green Party, both campaigned officially for the TCE, although in the case of the latter this followed a narrowly won internal ballot (53 per cent).

Given this state of play, one of the major themes of the early campaign was the compatibility of left and right support for the TCE and, similarly, the coherence of hostility towards the TCE expressed by extremes of both the right and left. Indeed, the solidity of the centre-right's support for the TCE was used by Fabius to prove that the document bore the ideological imprint of neoliberal policies.Footnote ²⁹ PS leaders toeing the party line on supporting the TCE were also presented with a tougher challenge than their UMP counterparts: they had to persuade voters not to transform the referendum into a sanction vote on Chirac's presidency.

Asking socialist voters to forbear from punishing the incumbent government was a tall order in the face of record levels of unpopularity for both Chirac and his prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin.Footnote ³⁰ Perhaps this was why the task fell to Lionel Jospin, who withdrew from the political spotlight following his defeat as presidential candidate in 2002, but remained widely respected as a skilful and thoughtful politician. In his first television appearance for three years, Jospin took great care to explain that voting on the TCE was a separate affair from judging Chirac's record or the government's current policies. Jospin's intervention, therefore, was designed to shift the debate away from a government/opposition cleavage in favour of a general yes or no to continuing with the project of integration.

When faced with the question of whether a yes to the TCE also implied a positive judgment on Chirac, Jospin wielded a simple metaphor to point out that a contract was signed between two parties and not with the solicitor who brought them together.Footnote ³¹ Moreover, he argued that it was a mistake to believe that a no vote could be used as a lever either to evict Chirac from the Elysée or to force the government to change its domestic policy choices.Footnote ³² Chirac had gone on record to say that a negative outcome would in no way force him to step down and the most a sanction vote could achieve was the replacement of the premier but not the course of policy action. By signalling Chirac's stance, Jospin cautioned voters not to confuse the nature of the vote by blurring the TCE with domestic political considerations: ‘they are not the object, it is not the moment to decide such questions.’Footnote ³³

However, Jospin did not rest all his hopes on the fact that the referendum would be contested as a yes/no verdict on the integration project per se; he also addressed concerns about substantive policy issues and how these related to left/right politics. His argument was that the ‘no’ positions advocated from both extremes of the political spectrum were incompatible with each other, whereas ‘there is a compatibility between the left's “yes”, which I support, and the right's “yes”.’Footnote ³⁴ This line of reasoning concluded with an explicit yet typically nuanced reference to what the TCE entailed for possible future EU social policy. Jospin pointed out that although the TCE marked concrete progress in institutional reform and even certain limited aspects of social policy, it could not be opposed for its failure to deliver fully-fledged social rights as ‘it is a neutral framework, like any constitution.’Footnote ³⁵

The Jospin primetime interview came at a time when polls indicated a narrow lead for the No camp with only one month's campaigning remaining. It also came on the back of President Chirac's first television appearance a fortnight earlier. On that occasion, Chirac had deliberately chosen to field questions from an audience of young people (aged 18–30) rather than opponents from the No camp – as Mitterrand had done in 1992 – precisely because those hostile to the TCE held such divergent reasons. As he explained during the programme, ‘there is no similarity between the “no” of the FN and the communist party “no”.’Footnote ³⁶

This gambit was indicative of Chirac's initial desire to focus on institutional reforms, the same tactic that Jospin had deployed to woo PS voters. However, Chirac found out first hand just how difficult it was to justify the TCE as a neutral framework of improved institutional and decision-making rules, compatible with a variety of different future policy preferences, especially on socio-economic matters. The televised question-and-answer session failed to turn into a straightforward, binary pro- and anti-integration debate. Instead, the young audience members preferred to focus on whether the TCE could be justified for its ability to regulate the free market and uphold social rights. Eventually, this would become the central theme of the campaign. The justification of the TCE as either a necessary step in the continuation of the integration project towards an unknown political finality or as a better document by virtue of institutional reform and enhanced policy effectiveness that did not bind the EU to specific policies thus gave way to another message about social policy.

The great peculiarity of the French referendum debate was the fixation on ‘liberalism’, a pejorative and often scare-mongering term conjuring up an image of unfettered capitalism. In a period of continuing economic and social malaise, characterized by low consumer confidenceFootnote ³⁷ and anti-government demonstrations,Footnote ³⁸ it was probably inevitable that social issues would play a part in the TCE vote. Nevertheless, the marginalization of other aspects of the debate (political finality, institutional reform, the Charter of Fundamental Rights or international competition with other regional powers) was a surprise, especially for those observing the debate from beyond France.Footnote ³⁹

In the course of his first television campaign interview, Chirac was placed on the defensive by a series of questions illustrating young people's anxiety about their future socio-economic status. These fears ranged from the suspicion of a hidden EU neoliberal economic agenda, the problem of chronic youth unemployment, the maintenance of public services and social rights (acquis sociaux) and the consequences on employment of ‘social dumping’ as firms relocate to countries with lower employment costs. Confronted with such wide-ranging worries, Chirac bemoaned on no fewer than four occasions this pessimism and twice exhorted his audience to set aside their fears –‘n'ayons pas peur’.Footnote ⁴⁰

Yet Chirac began the interview precisely by justifying the TCE in the context of economic globalization ‘supported by an ultraliberal mindset’,Footnote ⁴¹ a situation that called for one of only two possible solutions. Chirac contrasted a ‘laisser-aller’ response, ‘Anglo-Saxon and Atlanticist’, with a ‘humanist Europe’. The TCE, he argued, was exactly the set of rules and values constituting a humanist ensemble that would prevent ‘the drift that leads us to a liberal and unregulated Europe’.Footnote ⁴² Thus he contrasted the TCE positively with the current treaty system, ‘whose weaknesses and flaws are obvious to everyone’,Footnote ⁴³ without pausing to explain explicitly the demerits of the Nice arrangements. By neglecting to specify the benefits of the institutional reforms proposed by the new document, he revealed his determination to justify the TCE on the grounds of what it meant for social policy, i.e. how it related to future EU and French attempts to regulate the negative consequences of market capitalism. At the same time, this justification of the TCE was never associated with any particular vision of the finality of the integration project either.

Although sometimes maintaining that ratification was ‘beyond traditional political cleavages’Footnote ⁴⁴ or that ‘the constitution is, by definition, neither of the left nor of the right,’ Chirac's central justification was consistently based on the criterion of social justice. This was a startling move because social policy did not figure in the list of objectives that Chirac had set the Constitutional Convention, the body tasked with an open-ended mandate to revise the existing treaty system, in a major speech in 2002.Footnote ⁴⁵ This new electoral message harked back to 1995, when Chirac had made ‘social fracture’ the main theme of his first successful presidential campaign. Ten years later, this choice of strategy played directly into the hands of Fabius and other proponents of the socialist ‘no’ by leading supporters of the TCE to ‘rival partisans of the “no” in their professions of antiliberal faith’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Consequently, the referendum debate became polarized between the Yes camp's insistence on the TCE's ability to promote EU social policy and the claim by its opponents that this was an ill-conceived document that threatened social justice by constitutionalizing neoliberal economic policies.

Hence the pro-TCE camp focused on meeting opponents' criticisms of unchecked globalization and the effects this would have on employment and social justice. In other words, the socialist opponents of the TEC set the agenda of the campaign, to which supporters of the new treaty had to respond with a counter-argument of what the TCE truly entailed for social policy.Footnote ⁴⁷ Instead of focusing, therefore, on policy domains that are part and parcel of EU shared competences such as regional aid, anti-discrimination legislation or environmental protection, supporters of the TCE came to justify it on the grounds of social justice. First among equals in this endeavour was Chirac, whose strategy rested on an ambiguous twofold approach. On the one hand, he presented the constitution as a way of exporting the French ‘social model’ to the rest of the EU, thereby establishing a common European social model; on the other hand, he stressed the existence of certain clauses that would also allow the separate preservation of the French model. No vision of political finality would prove amenable to this mixed message.

Calling the TCE ‘the daughter of 1789’, Chirac made a special case for how the constitution was inspired by historic French values including ‘solidarity, human rights, peace and democracy’.Footnote ⁴⁸ This theme was reiterated later in the campaign, when he announced that the wording of the TCE's section outlining the EU's internal policies and functioning (Part III) now meant that ‘all policies would formally have to include social and environmental considerations’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Chirac referred to the presence in this part of the TCE of a clause recognizing the importance of ‘services of general economic interest’ (Art. III-123) as ‘a decisive step in guaranteeing a European social model’ as well as a ‘French victory in the treaty negotiations’.Footnote ⁵⁰

To bolster this claim and despite the hostility of a majority of French unions towards the TCE,Footnote ⁵¹ he made repeated mention of the fact that the European Trade Union Congress, representing 60 million union members, supported the new document.Footnote ⁵² Additional, indirect proof of the social side of the TCE was offered by claiming that ‘our Anglo-Saxon partners, whether inside Europe or beyond, criticize the constitution for being too interventionist, too humanist, too regulatory.’Footnote ⁵³ The TCE, Chirac promised, was a way of reconciling a vast free market with the upwards harmonization of social rights throughout the EU. On this subject, the president was able to point to his recent March success in having the so-called Bolkestein Directive on the liberalization of trade in services greatly watered down. Nevertheless, the spectre of the ‘Polish plumber’ taking away French jobs remained an enduring presence in the campaign. Thus the Bolkestein episode was remembered less as a policy success for Chirac than as proof of the neoliberal EU agenda.Footnote ⁵⁴

Given the size of the French public sectorFootnote ⁵⁵ and recent highly controversial attempts to privatize state monopolies in the energy sector – coinciding with European legislation for introducing greater competition in this sector – Chirac was somewhat on the back foot when seeking to reassure the electorate that integration did not threaten the special status of public services in the French social model. Taking the specific example of the state railways (SNCF), he explained that ‘if the SNCF wants to continue maintaining a line out of social utility but for which it loses money and thus receives public subsidies, there will be no change.’Footnote ⁵⁶ The TCE notwithstanding, voters were assured that the funding of public services would remain a question of domestic politics.Footnote ⁵⁷

To highlight the specificity of this supposed French social model and how it represents a national policy consensus, a stark contrast was made with the United Kingdom. In the latter, Chirac explained, an unemployment rate half that of France's ‘comes at a social cost that would not be accepted in France; this is not a judgement but a fact’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Thus for voters still unconvinced by the message of a more social Europe, the Yes camp tried to show that national prerogatives were sufficiently robust to uphold the traditional French model of social justice. Yet this justification in terms of ring-fenced areas of sovereignty was hampered by the difficulty of establishing separate policy jurisdictions. For instance, certain opponents of the TCE made an issue of secularism – highly controversial in the light of the recent banning of headscarves in state schools – and abortion rights, by reading the ‘right to manifest religion’ (Art. II-70.1) and the ‘right to life’ (Art. II-62.1), both contained in the Charter of Fundamental Rights, as incompatible with French legislation. When challenged directly regarding the congruence between the TCE and the secular principles of the republic, Chirac had to defend this supposed ‘daughter of 1789’ by saying that France's Constitutional Court had already affirmed there would be no clash, a decision also confirmed by the European Court of Justice.Footnote ⁵⁹

This sketch of the French referendum debate thus provides three crucial insights into how it was conducted. First, the campaign did not consist of competing justifications regarding different visions of the endpoint of integration based on Eurosceptic, federalist or post-sovereign arguments. Second, as the No campaign gained ground by highlighting the supposedly negative impact of the treaty on the French social model, justifications relating to the beneficial aspects of the TCE's institutional reforms were largely abandoned, at least by Chirac in his television appearances, in favour of justifications about what the TCE promised in the domain of social policy. Third, the result was that the campaign became a polarized debate over what the TCE would entail for social policy at both the EU and national level but with neither camp relating their arguments to EU political finality. Hence the French referendum campaign certainly did not conform to Morgan's prescription for a full-blooded debate over EU political finality as the way to legitimize this new supranational polity. However, upon closer inspection, it appears that the real problem of justification in this debate is not the absence of arguments about political finality. Rather the flaws relate to the way in which politicization of the TCE over the question of social policy failed to do justice both to the contents of the treaty and the prospects for re-negotiation. Consequently, the whole debate can be interpreted as another instance of depoliticization that bedevils elite attempts to legitimize the EU polity.

THE FRENCH REFERENDUM AND THE DEBATE OVER SOCIAL JUSTICE: CONSEQUENCES OF DEPOLITICIZATION

The argument wielded by the socialist No camp was limpid: the product of integration has to be compatible with the defence and even extension of the so-called ‘French social model’, something the TCE would not accomplish. The argument was coupled with the claim that a successful defenestration of the TCE would result in a Plan B: a newly drawn treaty incorporating the requirements of social justice. The latter claim has subsequently proved false as the successor 2007 Lisbon Treaty reprised much of the content of the TCE. Only the constitutional garb, notably the anthem, hymn and title, has been dropped. The new treaty abandons the constitutional ‘repertoire’Footnote ⁶⁰ and retains reform of decision-making procedures but without incorporating new policy objectives for achieving greater social justice in the EU. The inconsequence of the French referendum upon the Lisbon Treaty thus suggests that, by politicizing the question of EU social policy at the domestic level, French elites chose an inappropriate venue for contesting this aspect of integration.

At the same time, the un-reflexive use of the ideal-type French social model, invoked by both camps during the campaign, also needs to be scrutinized. As one commentator has noted, this claim about the inherent superiority of the French model – assumed by both sides in the contest over the TCE – is highly debatable. In Dehousse's words, ‘those most concerned with social justice would hesitate to qualify France as a social model,’Footnote ⁶¹ given persistently high unemployment, especially for the young and over-55s. In particular, the defence of the French social model that formed an essential part of the justification for the No campaign seems dubious. For, as Dehousse points out, this interpretation of the TCE as a neoliberal project bound toundermine French levels of social protection also erroneously assumes that other European countries have no systems of social justice to protect.Footnote ⁶² The French social model was thus presented against a void of alternative forms of social justice existing in other member states. The ‘self-centredness’Footnote ⁶³ of this argument, that the TCE ought to be opposed for its threat to the French social model, reveals, therefore, serious shortcomings in the portrayal and understanding of social policy in other EU countries and its compatibility with the current system of pooled sovereignty. Seen in this light, it is perhaps unsurprising that the French debate had few repercussions on the content of the negotiations that produced the Lisbon Treaty.

Yet when the referendum debate is studied through a French lens it becomes clear that the ‘social’ justification of the TCE articulated by Chirac was especially unconvincing for the domestic audience. His claim that the TCE was a framework for the upwards harmonization of social rights was a very bold assertion, given how European integration had previously been justified – especially to the socialist electorate – in French politics. Already French voters had been told at the time of the 1992 referendum on the Maastricht Treaty that integration was a means of providing ‘a space for the protection of workers' social rights and the insertion of those excluded from economic growth’.Footnote ⁶⁴

In 1992 further economic and political integration was justified as ‘a solution to France's economic recession and intractable problem of unemployment’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Moreover, this linkage between integration and prosperity was not unique to socialist President Mitterrand. For instance, Giscard D'Estaing, like Mitterrand after him, had ‘connected French problems to the supranational solution of a common currency and Central European Bank’.Footnote ⁶⁶ It was thus a serious gamble, especially in a country where the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty was wafer thin (51 per cent), to resort to cognate arguments to justify the TCE in the face of the enduring economic malaise. Many voters on the left remembered these earlier promises and decided not to trust the recycling of such arguments by a centre-right government and president. In addition, as shown by Chirac's clumsy references to the clauses mentioning services of general economic interest, this justification of the TCE was hampered by the difficulty of defining beyond reasonable doubt how the document changed EU policy in socio-economic matters.

The French debate thus reveals the dearth of convincing justifications for current EU institutions and policies. The No argument, which envisaged the replacement of the TCE with a new treaty better equipped to promote social rights, in effect justified an alternative EU project that was not even on the agenda of the other member states, who by and large adhered to Jospin's interpretation of the TCE as a largely neutral institutional framework for future policy-making.Footnote ⁶⁷ By contrast, Chirac's justification for the TCE was unconvincing because it forsook discussing institutional reform or existing EU policy successes in favour of a mixed message about its simultaneous ability both to expand social justice and to protect the French social model.

These shortcomings, however, are not merely the result of peculiarities of French elite discourse about integration, although the problem of legitimizing integration in the context of globalization is especially vexing for the French political class.Footnote ⁶⁸ Rather, these justificatory flaws are an integral part of the cost of depoliticization, that is, the construction of a polity largely without politics. Depoliticization, as Peter Mair has explained, is the product of a non-majoritarian system of governance that minimizes the opportunity for meaningful manifestations of political opposition.Footnote ⁶⁹ In majoritarian regimes, this task is accomplished primarily through electoral mechanisms for designating representatives. Yet the EU depends primarily on an indirect mechanism for legitimizing EU policies via member state governments, leading to a diminished opportunity for voicing opposition and thus controlling the system of governance. This is especially the case as national parties have sought to defuse particularly acute intra-party cleavages on questions of integration by using ad hoc referendums as palliatives for internal disagreement. Consequently, party systems in the EU cling to the left/right divide rather than reflect new fault lines over integration.

Diminished opportunities for voicing opposition explain the odd bedfellows seen not only in the French No campaign but also in the 2008 Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty: socialists and greens (defying the party line) alongside the extreme right in the former; pacifists, nationalists and partly foreign-funded economic and political libertarians in the latter. In Ireland opponents of the Lisbon Treaty had two principal arguments: objection to the weakening of Irish power (the result of the loss of a permanent commissioner and fewer national vetoes) and prevention of ‘the militarization of the EU’. The latter targeted the treaty's provisions for beefing up cooperation on foreign and security policy, seen as the death knell for neutrality by requiring Irish contingents for supposedly dubious EU humanitarian interventions. As in France, therefore, the successful Irish coalition against ratification of the Lisbon Treaty shared mutual antagonism towards the treaty but the arguments deployed against this common enemy were vastly different. Treaty ratification in both cases was thus defeated through an alliance of opponents of EU policies – those preferring greater or lesser intervention in the market – and nationalist opponents of the principle of further integration.

Within this context, therefore, the French referendum debate demonstrates the inherent problems political elites face in attempting to justify integration given the legacy of depoliticization. When the TCE was subjected to referendum ratification, French elites had a limited range of arguments available for justifying this new development in integration. Once supporters of the treaty abandoned arguments extolling the virtues of institutional reform as too abstruse and insufficiently reassuring to fearful voters, the choice to justify the TCE based on its positive effects for social justice proved compelling. At the same time, opponents of the treaty from both sides of the spectrum could strongly contest the social interpretation put forward by proponents of the TCE without this referendum reverse having an impact on subsequent inter-governmental re-negotiation.

CONCLUSION: ELITE JUSTIFICATIONS DURING REFERENDUM CAMPAIGNS

This article has analysed the nature of the French referendum debate on the TCE, especially Chirac's television interventions to garner support for the Yes camp. It did so by drawing on Glyn Morgan's suggestion that further successful integration is best served by articulating a winning vision of EU political finality that, once established, will secure the legitimacy of future EU policy choices. Hence the analysis examined the extent to which the French debate conformed to Morgan's prescribed method of justifying integration. The use of this framework demonstrated that the referendum campaign in France was conducted according to competing justifications of what the TCE entailed for the French social model without touching upon the question of political finality. Thus the referendum debate did not perform the justificatory role Morgan believes is the current priority for the EU system. However, when compared with the deficiencies of the ‘social’ justifications deployed on both sides of the French campaign, the absence of a debate on political finality appears to be of minor import. The justifications of both camps were deficient either because they articulated, as did the socialist No campaign, a French vision of an EU polity that did not match the agenda of other EU member states, or because, as Chirac argued, the TCE was unconvincingly presented as a cure for various economic woes and fears.

The challenge for national elites, therefore, is less – as some have argued – to shelve the referendum option than to take up the mantle of nurturing constructive political opposition in the appropriate venue. Chiefly, this entails finding a way of channelling the cleavage over EU policies away from the cleavage over EU integration per se. Although it is not at all clear that such a feat is manageable,Footnote ⁷⁰ the justificatory strategy adopted during future referendums is likely to be a crucial device in any such endeavour. In particular, elites supporting treaty reform will have to spend more time explaining what level of integration has currently been reached as well as what substantive policy objectives can only be pursued through further institutional reform. Above all, this means resisting the temptation to expound justificatory arguments that barely correspond with the content of treaty reform or that take the form of hackneyed promises – mixed with thinly veiled threats – about securing prosperity.