Political Theory Meets European Integration Studies

Abstract

At the opening of this chapter, it is worth emphasizing that the prevalent mood nowadays surrounding European integration is one of gloom and doom, and instead of grandiloquent proclamations and calls for further political, economic, and social integration from European elites, the general consensus is for the desirability of settling for the ‘consolidation’ of ‘historical achievements.’ But if the EU’s failed Constitutional Treaty in 2005 contributed to such sentiments among European elites, and at the present time of writing, the debt crisis and its political effects have led to the rise of the extreme right opposing European integration in several member states, the crisis of European integration is nothing new. Already, at the beginning of the 1990s, a tension between two major tendencies in the project of European integration was becoming increasingly evident. At the same time as the EU’s competences were extended and the EU moved from intergovernmental to supranational modes of decisionmaking in a number of policy areas, ‘Euroskepticism’ was seemingly on the rise across virtually all of its member states. The so-called ‘permissive consensus,’ i.e. the utilitarian belief that as long as European integration was understood to be correlated to increasing economic prosperity it was broadly supported at the mass level, which was thought to have enabled European integration ever since the creation of the ECSC in the early 1950s, could no longer be taken for granted in the 1990s and into the 2000s.1