European Disintegration: A Search for Explanations by Vollaard Hans (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 593 into the chapter ‘Central and Eastern Europe’, but its Moscow-based authors refer to refer to a ‘civil war’ in Ukraine which in fact is primarily a conflict with Russian proxies. Further, they blame the West for discouraging President Viktor Ianukovych from using violence against the demonstrators on the Maidan in 2013–14. Nevertheless, the great majority of the chapters will be indispensable to researchers in many aspects of Russian foreign policy. While the price of £175 will mean that most academics, let alone postgraduates, will be unable to afford it, they should ensure that their library purchases a copy. UCL SSEES Peter J. S. Duncan Vollaard, Hans. European Disintegration: A Search for Explanations. Palgrave Studies in European Union Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2018. vii + 265 pp. Figures. Tables. References. Index. £101.00. The EU’s multiple crises are hard to miss. Mainstream EU politicians have struggled to manage the strains in the Eurozone; Brexit; the European refugee crisis; the rise of illiberal populisms, and democratic backsliding in East European member states. However, while some see the EU buckling under the strain, others have viewed the crises as survivable stress tests or even cathartic moments which will allow a renewed, rebalanced European Union to emerge. Nevertheless, while there are vast literatures on integration and Europeanization, there is scant theorizing on European disintegration or deEuropeanization . It is this gap that Hans Vollaard’s new book seeks to fill. The obvious objection is that academic work cannot explain something that has not (yet) happened and that foresight exercises are best left to think-tanks. However, counters Vollaard, the reverse is true: the current absence of theory leaves us so ill-equipped to understand EU disintegration processes that they may easily already be taking hold without us realizing. Vollaard’s first move is to ask whether theories of European integration could, in certain circumstances, run in reverse, predicting disintegration and, if so, what forms of disintegration they would imply. Neo-functional theories contain implicit ideas of disintegration and ‘spillback’ and, in their later revisions, the importance of elite perceptions of functional imperative and spillover. Functional pressures need not point (only) to regional (European) integration. Globalization might exert functional pressures for broader transnational integration and the unravelling of regional blocs like the EU. Intergovernmentalist theories, which see national states’ preferences and the extent to which they change and converge as driving integration, run less well in reverse. Intergovernmentalist understanding of EU institutions as co- SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 594 ordination devices for interstate bargaining suggests several potential routes to disintegration, such as the renationalization of EU powers. However, Vollaard argues, its assumptions about the nature of intergovernmental bargaining suggest that it would be far more difficult for EU member states to agree less, rather than more integration. He then broadens the search to other literature, including comparative regionalism, federalism and the historical collapse of empires. Literatures on federalism and regionalism, Vollaard finds, suffer like intergovernmentalism, from a state-centric bias. Accounts of the ends of empires usefully highlight that patterns of cyclical growth and failed expansion should not be mistaken for the collapse. However, the plethora of internal and external challenges that have undermined empires and federations make their experience unhelpful for theorizing possible EU disintegration. Vollaard opts instead in the second half of the book to fashion a multifaceted theory of European disintegration from the work of Stefano Bartolini on the EU as a state-building project, who in turn builds on Stein Rokkan’s classic insights into nation-state formation and the emergence of mass politics and Albert Hirschman’s famous trilemma of loyalty, voice and exit. In establishing boundaries and borders (‘external consolidation’), the Rokkanian argument runs, national states reduced or raised the price of exit, pushing actors towards voice and loyalty and thus laying the basis for structured, competitive politics, further reinforcing themselves in an ‘integrative spiral’. Similar mechanisms, Bartolini suggests, were at work in the EU. Vollaard extends this insight further by considering if and how everpresent disintegrative pressures in the EU might combine into a ‘disintegrative spiral’. He does this through re-telling the history of European integration since the 1950s in terms of this...