Domestic Interests, Ideas and Integration: Lessons from the French Case

Abstract

Both the major approaches to European integration, ‘intergovernmentalism’ and ‘neofunctionalism’, model integration as reflecting the demands of domestic interest groups. Where scholars qualify this basic model, they typically see integration diverging gradually and unintentionally from its expectations. This article tests the interest‐group model against research into French policy‐making across the history of integration, and argues that French policies never clearly reflected this interest‐group baseline. Instead, French choices for today's European Union (as opposed to widely different historical alternatives) can only be explained with reference to French elites' ideas about Europe. Additionally, national leaders' ideas have set the main conditions for the success or failure of supranational entrepreneurship in Europe's ‘grand bargains’.