Las baterías en sistemas híbridos

Brexit and the future(s) of Europe: five fault lines

Let us return, then, to the key question animating this volume, namely, the effects of Brexit on Europe and the EU, and how we are to concep-tualise the future(s) of Europe after this seismic event. An adequate understanding of Brexit, of course, requires attention to a myriad of different questions and debates, not all of which can be addressed in a single volume. Nevertheless, to set the stage for the subsequent discussion, we suggest that five questions in particular loom large in debates over the future of Europe  – in the popular imagination, in academic discourse, and in the contributions to this book. In what fol-lows below, we discuss these five claims in greater detail, positioning each of the chapters in relation to these broader debates to which the authors all speak.

1. How representative is Brexit?

Whether Brexit is idiosyncratically British or representative of a broader regional tendency towards populism represents one timely question.

Is the vote best understood as the consequence of Britain’s historically awkward ‘with but not of’ stance, its rabidly Eurosceptic press, or the vicissitudes of its majoritarian democratic system? Or is it better concep-tualised as the product of a broader, Europe- wide discontent associated with the fallout from the eurozone crisis, the perceived deficiencies of the EU institutions, and the rise of populism across the continent? In other words, did the Brexit vote represent the ‘perfect storm’ of contingent fac-tors, or were there deeper, more structural factors at play? The question is an important one since it influences our assessment of the likelihood that we will witness further attempts by Member States to leave the EU in the near future, and thus touches at the viability of the EU itself.

For some contributors to this book, Brexit is best understood as the cumulative outcome of dynamics that are particular to the UK.

Britain’s imperial history, its (laissez-faire) economic preferences, and the distinctiveness of its legal and political systems, have  – accord-ing to this view  – shaped the ‘awkward’ role the country has played in European integration to date. De Búrca argues, for instance, that the UK’s decision to join the EEC in 1973 represented a pragmatic economic choice rather than a political commitment to the European project, and that deep resistance to the ‘federalist’ ideal has been a near constant in British attitudes to Europe. Correspondingly, she

notes, it ‘seems plausible to assume that if a popular referendum on UK withdrawal from the EU had been held on any number of occasions over the four decades of EU membership, the outcome of the vote may well have been the same as in June 2016’ (De Búrca, Chapter 4). Hill also discusses the pragmatism of this relationship in his chapter, argu-ing that Britain’s European engagement has been always and above all strategic in nature, and weighed against other commitments, nota-bly the Anglo- American ‘special relationship’ and the Commonwealth (Hill, Chapter 20). Patel similarly notes the role played by Britain’s imperial history in animating the discourse around Britain’s post- EU future, predicting trouble ahead as this history becomes more politi-cally salient (Patel, Chapter 12).

Other contributors regard Brexit as representative of more general dissatisfaction with politics on the continent. Bickerton sees Brexit as the

‘tip of the iceberg’, reflective of a much broader popular disenchantment with the EU’s policies which is rooted in the negative effects of economic and monetary integration on national growth models, which have exac-erbated the differences between these models whilst simultaneously making reform more difficult (Bickerton, Chapter 14). Van Middelaar, too, attacks the tendency to view Brexit as ‘insular British doggedness’, pointing instead to the Union’s failure to achieve an adequate balance between (economic) freedom and protection as the real driver behind the persistent sense of malaise on the continent (van Middelaar, Chapter 8).

Moreover, the effects of a broader discontent is also evident in the contri-bution by Glencross, who regards the vote as symptomatic of a wider gulf in Europe between elite views on integration and the rejection by voters of the status quo, citing the examples of the French and Dutch opposi-tion to the Constituopposi-tional Treaty, the Irish rejecopposi-tion of the Lisbon Treaty, the Greek bailout, and the Dutch rejection of the Association Agreement with Ukraine (Glencross, Chapter 1).

2. How should we understand European integration?

The ‘what’ of European integration is another key area of contemporary debate. Why do states decide to pool sovereignty, and how does integra-tion proceed over time? What, in other words, does the Union represent?

These questions are important for an assessment of where Europe will go next: how we define integration tells us much about where we might look for an assessment of the EU’s future. Whether we believe the EU is at base a collection of sovereign states, an international organisation, or a sui generis political system, our expectations of its future course are

bound to differ. Furthermore, it also matters how we conceive of the pol-itics of Europe. Are the EU’s aims of cross- border market liberalisation and the protection of pan- European social standards compatible? Do the institutions entrench certain ideological principles – or are they designed specifically to de- politicise conflicts? And what should the EU become if it wishes to maintain, or gain, legitimacy? On these questions the authors in this volume represent a significant heterogeneity of opinion.

For some, it is national interests and intergovernmental bargain-ing that shape, or should shape, the EU’s priorities. Gillbargain-ingham, scath-ing about the direction integration has taken in the past two decades, argues that the only alternative to ‘more Europe’ is consensus among and leadership of the 27 Member States, to whom authority should be devolved, effectively doing away with the ‘EU policy machinery’

and preserving only the Single Market (Gillingham, Chapter 21).

Emphasis on the Member States as the driving force is especially strong in discussions of foreign policy, which, as Hadfield reminds us, ‘overall remains traditionally intergovernmental’, even as other policy domains have become increasingly communitised (Hadfield, Chapter 19). Indeed, while different in outlook, and emphasising the importance of geo- strategic factors in drawing the European states together, the chapters by Hill, Paterson and Drake serve to highlight the context- dependent and historically specific importance of Member States in shaping the direction of EU policy – be they British, German or French, respectively.

Other contributors regard the EU as a far ‘denser’ institution, one in which sovereignty and national interests are significantly curtailed by the competences afforded the community institutions, which have overtaken the Member States in shaping the EU’s agenda. In his chap-ter, Hix  – whom, it should be noted, first argued that the EU consti-tuted a ‘political system’ in its own right (Hix 1997) – contends the EU has become increasingly centralised with the advent of supranational forms of decision- making, offering Member States little discretion over policy once decisions have been made (Hix, Chapter 7). Bickerton also sees the EU as having moved beyond a mere assemblage of Member States, emphasising the growing centralisation of the EU, the significant differences between ‘nation statehood’ and ‘Member Statehood’, and the endurance of the latter through the deep Europeanisation of the British state (Bickerton, Chapter 14).

And what of the politics of the Union? Some contributors see the EU as an essentially social democratic project, driven by a desire to regionalise the European social model and regulate globalisation, and as such these

authors deplore recent moves in the direction of neoliberalism (since the 1980s) and austerity (since the recession of 2007/ 8). Van Parijs, for example, argues that the push to create the Single Market in the 1980s represented a Hayekian ‘trap’ since it entailed the loss of the monopolis-tic position held by cartels, unions and professional associations at the national level without any corresponding transfer of regulatory compe-tences to the transnational level (Van Parijs, Chapter 27). Van Middelaar offers a similar assessment, arguing the EU has historically been based on a balance between economic freedom and social protection that has, in recent years, become skewed towards economic freedom, at the expense of protection (van Middelaar, Chapter 8). Innes agrees, noting that the EU has itself increasingly become associated with a (damaging) supply- side philosophy in recent years, although she also contends that the EU has unfairly become a scapegoat for the social polarisation that resulted from the UK’s supply- side reforms in the 1980s (Innes, Chapter 15). By contrast, others regard the Union as a historically liberalising (and there-fore liberating) project. Gillingham, for instance, disagrees with both the diagnosis (of a social democratic Europe) and the prescription (of lessen-ing its free- market credentials), blamlessen-ing the ‘sad story of EU decline’ on its move away from the removal of economic barriers (‘negative integra-tion’) towards the attempt to construct a more comprehensive political community (‘positive integration’) (Gillingham, Chapter 21).

3. what is wrong with the EU?

Something is rotten in Europe  – this much almost all the contributors seem to agree on. Where they disagree is on the principal drivers of Europe’s predicament. A  number of different diagnoses are offered in the volume, each of which leads to a divergent prescription for solving the problem. Together the contributions highlight three areas where the EU’s problems are most evidently manifest: (1) Euroscepticism and the legitimacy crisis, (2)  structural problems with the eurozone, and (3) the migration and refugee crises. In practice, these different problems blend into one another to contribute to the present ‘omni- crisis’ in Europe, although some contributors ascribe greater significance to cer-tain factors over others.

Euroscepticism and the legitimacy crisis:  In the years since the Maastricht Treaty, Euroscepticism has moved from the political mar-gins to the centre of political attention. In his chapter, Hix attributes the EU’s unpopularity to its becoming involved in redistributive debates over national tax and spending in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007/ 8

and the ensuing eurozone crisis, since these actions served to politicise the activities of the community institutions and undermine the EU’s credentials as an apolitical regulatory state (Hix, Chapter 7). In a simi-lar vein, Isiksel regards the EU’s legitimacy crisis as the inevitable con-sequence of the substitution of principled support for integration with economic pay- offs, since little in the way of long- term public engage-ment and identification could ever be expected to emerge from the claim that ‘you’re better off thanks to the EU’. For this reason, she argues, the EU’s institutions ‘experience every crisis of competence, every economic slump, as an existential crisis’ (Isiksel, Chapter 26). Staiger similarly identifies the sources of the EU’s legitimacy crisis in the failure of its insti-tutions to establish the trust of the electorate and to purposively chan-nel debate and dissent in constructive ways; this being the only way, she argues, to avoid the ‘destructive excess’ that has characterised populist movements across Europe and which was a significant contributor to the Brexit vote (Staiger, Chapter 25). Nugent agrees with this assessment, noting the popularity of Eurosceptic parties in Austria, France, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland and the UK in 2015– 16, and the concomitant decline in the EU’s ‘output legitimacy’. In an era of public distrust, he suggests, calls for ‘more Europe’ are no longer feasible (Nugent, Chapter 5). This concern, finally, is also echoed by Shackleton, who argues that the EU struggles to obtain legitimacy either through fostering a common identity or delivering for its citizens, since there is widespread distrust of Brussels at the national level and significant diversity in the policy priorities held by the Member States (Shackleton, Chapter 22).

Structural problems with the eurozone: Deeply entwined with con-cerns about the EU’s legitimacy is its most serious problem to date: the ambitious and flawed project of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), which, Gillingham argues, has ‘plunged the continent into a decade of depression; cheated a generation of young people out of jobs … impover-ished southern Europe; driven a thick emotional wedge between creditor and debtor nations … and embittered the public from north to south and east to west’ (Gillingham, Chapter 21). For Isiksel, the problem is that EMU has amplified  – rather than cushioned  – the effects of the global financial crisis, whilst at the same time succeeded in imposing rigid con-straints on domestic fiscal policies which have ‘deprived national legisla-tures of key levers of social policy [and] further attenuated democratic control of policymaking at the domestic level’ (Isiksel, Chapter 26). In his chapter, Nugent suggests that the problems with the eurozone lie in its incomplete nature, since a currency union must be accompanied by

both fiscal and banking union, as well as political union strong enough to make authoritative decisions. The absence of each of these, he argues, meant the euro was ‘not built on solid foundations’ (Nugent, Chapter 5).

Somewhat more optimistically, however, Schelkle notes that the EU has been able to overcome some of the more fundamental problems of the eurozone through post- crisis reforms in banking supervision and fiscal coordination, and thus predicts that the euro will continue to strengthen against the pound after Brexit (Schelkle, Chapter 13).

Migration and refugee crises: Many of the contributors also empha-sise the role played by the mismanagement of migration across Europe.

For some the problems arise with regard to internal migration  – that is, the movement of persons from one Member State to another. Hill regards the downward pressure on wages in the UK resulting from high levels of immigration after the 2004  ‘big bang’ accession, com-bined with the emergence of the so- called ‘gig economy’, as a significant contributory factor in the rising tide of populism and Euroscepticism that culminated in the Brexit vote (Hill, Chapter 20). Others consider the EU’s mismanagement of the refugee crisis to be the greater problem.

Morgan, for instance, regards the risk of ‘large- scale domestic terrorism as a consequence of the implosion of Middle Eastern and North African states and the failure to integrate existing Islamic minority populations’

as a significant risk, although he contends the problem would be exac-erbated, not solved, by Brexit (Morgan, Chapter 3). Nugent locates the problem in the interaction between the internal and external faces of EU migration, since Schengen, which was designed to allow for free move-ment within the Union, was not able to deal – justly or administratively – with the influx of thousands of external migrants into the zone (Nugent, Chapter 5).

4. can sovereignty and democracy function in a globalised world?

Another key strand of debate concerns the democratic implications of globalisation and supranational governance. The status of sovereignty and democracy under conditions of transnational interdependence, such as those characterising the relations between the EU Member States, has been brought to the fore by Brexit, not least given the Leave campaign’s emphasis on ‘taking back control’. Arguments over the meaning of ‘control’

touch at the very heart of what democracy and sovereignty mean, and – as is always the case with essentially contested concepts – open up a host of important questions about how these terms should be understood and applied. Within Europe – home to the world’s most significant experiment

in post- sovereign governance  – questions relating to the legitimacy of transnational governance and the compatibility between national and supranational models of democracy are of paramount importance. Again, the contributors to this volume represent a number of diverse perspectives on the crucial questions of the EU’s democratic credentials and the extent to which British membership of the Union, and its impending withdrawal, will affect democracy in the UK.

The authors hold different views on the question of whether there exists a ‘democratic deficit’ in the EU. Shackleton regards the issue prin-cipally as a conceptual one, outlining three models of legitimacy in his chapter – drawn from van Middelaar (2013) – to help frame the debate. He distinguishes between a German model of democratic legitimacy based on a common identity, a Roman model based on the provision of tangible benefits to citizens, and a Greek model based on citizen participation in decision- making (Shackleton, Chapter 22). Nicolaïdis accepts that the Union is ‘democratically challenged, in spite of all its mechanisms for rep-resentation, delegation and checks on power’, arguing the solution lies in grounding the EU’s activities in the demands of its citizens – and the emerging European demos – whilst capitalising on the Union’s ability to remain partially shielded from the short- termism of electoral democracy (Nicolaïdis, Chapter 23). Bellamy, in contrast, regards the extension of national models of democracy to the supranational level as a non- starter, since the trade- off between democracy, sovereignty and economic glo-balisation makes this ideal unfeasible. Rather than attempt to replicate domestic democracy on a European level, he argues that the EU should offer space for countries to collectively regulate transnational processes, such that they are able to control the externalities of their democratic decisions (Bellamy, Chapter 24). Van Parijs makes a similar argument, noting that all states stand to lose their democratic legitimacy if they fail to regulate their actions under conditions of interdependence, since ‘the democratically made decisions of one state [can] undercut those of other states’ (Van Parijs, Chapter 27).

The contributors disagree over the effects of Brexit on British democracy and the UK’s (uncodified) constitution. Some do not regard Brexit as a particular threat to the UK’s democratic credentials. De Búrca, for instance, argues that the vote did not represent an attempt either

‘to remove domestic constitutional checks and balances within the UK, or to promote popular rule over constitutional government’ (De Búrca, Chapter 4). Others are more sceptical, including Weale, who argues that the referendum has strengthened the British executive at the expense of Parliament and the other representational elements of the British

constitution, since the government has come to regard itself as holding a mandate from ‘the people’ which can override both Parliament and the judiciary if need be (Weale, Chapter 2). Eeckhout agrees that Brexit has not removed constitutional checks and balances in the UK, but argues that the process of Brexit – and in particular the Miller case – highlights the threadbare nature of the British constitution, since parliamentary sov-ereignty is the only principle that stands, regardless of how its exercise infringes established rights and legislation (Eeckhout, Chapter 18). From a broader constitutional perspective, Wright identifies Brexit as a poten-tial threat to the asymmetric form of devolution that has come to char-acterise British politics since the 1990s, with the risk of a ‘hard border’

between the EU and the UK across the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic challenging an important foundation of the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement and exposing Westminster’s overall control of the Brexit process (Wright, Chapter 11).

Others, including Glencross, Bellamy and Innes, argue that certain aspects of the Brexit vote may prove problematic for British democracy in other respects. Glencross, for instance, notes that the Brexit vote rep-resents a broader (and problematic) trend for politicians to legitimise their policies through referendums, since they can, by doing so, delegate decisions back to the sovereign peoples and therefore avoid taking politi-cally risky decisions (Glencross, Chapter 1). Bellamy argues that British democracy will be harmed as a result of the diminished capacity of the

Others, including Glencross, Bellamy and Innes, argue that certain aspects of the Brexit vote may prove problematic for British democracy in other respects. Glencross, for instance, notes that the Brexit vote rep-resents a broader (and problematic) trend for politicians to legitimise their policies through referendums, since they can, by doing so, delegate decisions back to the sovereign peoples and therefore avoid taking politi-cally risky decisions (Glencross, Chapter 1). Bellamy argues that British democracy will be harmed as a result of the diminished capacity of the