number 1 - Centre d'études et de recherches européennes Robert ...

8
Alan S. Milward
There is even less left of the economic theories of the same period that linked market
expansion in the form of trade liberalisation to economic growth as a permanent
characteristic of the modern state, the interest is far more in explaining the
continuation of mercantilism and the 'new' protectionism. 2 Having demonstrated in
its adolescence that the ideas of its parents were inapplicable to the modern world,
the history of European integration is now faced in adult life with the task of
replacing them with something better. As it sets about this task what themes could
it pursue?
Functionalism and neo-functionalism have all retreated to the periphery of the
territory of political science. In economics the so-called 'new growth theory' puts
more weight on the microeconomics of market adjustment and trade regulation
than on the assertion that market expansion improves productivity rates and incomes
and that European integration was a classic example of this process. The
serious historical issues of how far the common market of the European Economic
Community did contribute to higher growth rates of national income for its member
states than, for example, in the United Kingdom before 1973, and how far the
relatively faster growth rate of the United Kingdom than the original member states
after that date was due to entry into that common market, are only now beginning
to be tackled by historians. Their answers will surely be much more complicated
than the simplistic assumptions of early growth theory. 3
For many political scientists the process of European integration is now seen,
rather as traditional historians of diplomacy tend to see it, a process directed by the
interplay of the foreign policy of great and medium-sized powers in search of the
traditional objectives of influence and security. There is a solid core of historiography
of the period in which long-run cultural, economic, and social trends do not
appear, presumably because they are not thought to explain much. Casting aside its
former theoretical dependence on these long-run trends, political science seems
increasingly to accept that any theoretical explanation of European integration
1. An important stage in this retreat was marked by the publication of R.O. KEOHANE and S. HOFF-
MANN, «Conclusions: Community Politics and Institutional Change» in W. WALLACE (ed.), The
Dynamics of European Integration, London, 1990, and ibid., "Institutional Change in Europe in the
1980s" in R.O. KEOHANE and S. HOFFMANN (eds.), The New European Community. Decision
Making and Institutional Change, Boulder, 1991. The enthusiastic reception given to A. MORAVC-
SIK, "Preferences and Power in the European Community: A Liberal Intergovernmentalist
Approach", Journal of Common Market Studies, vol. 31, no. 4, December 1993, which dispenses
entirely with the theory of supranational institutions in offering a model of present integration shows
how far the retreat has gone.
2. A.J. BOEKESTIJN, "Economic Integration and the Preservation of Post-War Consensus in the Benelux
Countries", Economic and Social History in the Netherlands, vol. V, 1993.
3. For an interesting attempt to measure the difference made by institutional arrangements to rates of
national income growth and a discussion of the possible influence of European cooperative and integrationist
arrangements on economic growth, B. EICHENGREEN, "Institutions and Economic
Growth: Europe after World War II", paper presented to the Centre for Economic Policy Research
Conference on the Economic Performance of Europe after the Second World War, 17/19 December
1993, Oxford.