The political map of the post world-war Europe has undergone profound changes, the biggest of them being unification of two German states. Certain other developments affected the geographical as well as political situation where most of the European governments worked in cooperation with an aim of creating a common economic space; not forgetting the incidents like dissolution of Soviet Union that strongly benefited the attempts. After formation of European Union in 1991, revision of the treaty in 1997 and afterwards, the social as well as economic lives of the Europeans are now negotiated in a center or two (Kelstrup,Michael 2000). This is imperative that European nations, regardless of public support, have benefited from integration to mentionable extent. Europe stands today where it would not have been otherwise 60 years after the war. But how much does this integration process engage nations rather than governments; needs to be answered. Most of the criticism entailing EU regards political and cultural integration as a by product of social and economic unification. In the words of Cris Shore (2000: 41), “The idiosyncratic behavior of real people was largely ignored by architects of European unification and appeared to have little connection with the integration process.”
Before analyzing the public support for European integration, we must look into the areas of cooperation, along with the new agenda of European governance. This new idea treats the European nations with single European identity. Disrespecting multicultural aspects and over generalizing the cultural bounds of these nations are open to criticism on methodological and theoretical grounds. The decisions regarding common currency, common laws and regulations, common identity etc which jeopardize the support from individuals makes EU more problematic. A recent example is the French resistance against European Union’s free market drive on energy. This opposition not only confined to the free-market, but few other EU policies as well; can be explained on cultural grounds as well apart from political. Apart from issue of common support, a debate about sovereignty and autonomy of states as result of growing limits of European Union’s powers has been revived. Multi-layered governance had been prominent since formation of EC in 1950s but with European Union the transformation from national to regional level decision-making is significant (Stone 1998).
The political characters on national level may seem at ease with it, but the division of authority is problematic to some extent. They need to maintain an equilibrium; satisfying the domestic political demands and European community at large. In the backdrop, people are not supportive of many of the EU’s policies lately. Concerns about EU being superfluous and interfering have been common. Intelligent and strong political stand can best tackle the threats of weakened autonomy and sovereignty. One of the widely accepted models for European Integration is ‘state-centric governance’, which has an inherent assumption that European Integration does not challenge the autonomy of national states. State-centrists argue strongly that integration helps to achieve the policy outcomes, with enhanced state control (Marks 2001). The centralized decision making is for better economic and social information sharing and the states are not compelled to swallow the decisions on European level. But critics say “multilevel governance” is active with little application of above presumptions. Although member states possess complete sovereignty over populations and territories, veto power and resistance to accept a central decision by weaker states is only treated with little tolerance.
Bibliography
- Morten Kelstrup, Michael C. Williams International Relations Theory and the Politics of European Integration. 2000. Routledge.
- Cris Shore. Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration. 2000 Routledge.
- W Sandholtz, AS Sweet. European Integration and Supranational Governance. 1998. Taylor and Francis.
- By Liesbet Hooghe, Gary Marks Multi-level Governance and European Integration. 2001 Rowman & Littlefield.