The Grand Bargain: A New Book Demystifies European Integration

From the first decades of European integration, Moravcsik sees nothing really exceptional about the EC. The main forces guiding events were the same social-scientific principles that mold most state behavior. Strength, stability, the ability to attract allies, and good tactics give a state victory. The apparent exoticism of integration turns out to be banal in Moravcsik's account, which portrays Europe's historic pooling of sovereignty as simply a way of locking in a good future bargain. True, national policy was sometimes driven by geopolitical considerations, as Britain's postwar attempt to maintain its world influence showed. But political economy counted for even more, which is not surprising since the voter likes to eat. Moravcsik goes further, however, to argue that political economy -- namely, the appeasing of commercial interest groups, from farmers to industrialists -- counted even more than abstract economic principles; free trade tends to produce more food than any agricultural policy but brings with it many angry farmers. Free trade also contains a certain risk that the state often finds difficult to cope with.

On the French side, writes Moravcsik, the need to find a trustworthy partner for the growing agricultural surplus was the paramount consideration from the start. De Gaulle's overriding concern was to fix a price level and ally with a group of countries eager to buy meat and milk. French grandeur, the Madonna of the Frescos, the defeat at Sedan, and the victory at Bir-Hakeim were nothing by contrast. Moravcsik is determined to use this pragmatic portrayal of de Gaulle throughout the statesman's career, and, to his credit, he correctly sticks close to his sources throughout this book. Some readers might object that official French documents would inevitably contain more about the price of milk than national identity. To hear about "a certain idea of France," they might argue, one must look to the more personal pages of de Gaulle's Memoires de guerre or Andre Malraux's romantic portrait of the general, Les chenes qu'on abat. Moravcsik opts for a better solution and tries to reconcile the romantic nationalism of de Gaulle with his pragmatism. The general's nationalist legacy partly resulted from the mythmaking of his admirers, but as the French leader himself knew, and as Moravcsik correctly points out, economic problems were never far from his attention. For de Gaulle, the idea of the nation was precisely what gave form and structure to what would otherwise be a collection of tribes. Only a Europe of the fatherlands could stand up to the United States. Similarly, only a French diplomat steeped in the history of the French peasantry could negotiate competently over agricultural policy with a British diplomat well informed about the benefits of British agricultural liberalization in the nineteenth century. Knowledge of history leads people to drive hard bargains in the present; that was certainly history's effect on de Gaulle.

By contrast, Moravcsik is too kind to British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and does not fully explain his antifederalist stance. He notes that when Macmillan was taking a hard line against the EC in the 1950s, British trade had still not shifted decisively away from the Commonwealth. Not yet, but Britain was just encountering its first real postwar challenges: the overlapping crises of the Suez Canal, a spate of protest fiction like The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, and the resignation of three government ministers over a very soft budget. For Macmillan, more than economics was at stake; there was the sovereignty of the Westminster Parliament. Even as British trade began to shift more toward Europe, Macmillan remained wary of embracing Brussels. On the horizon was the 1962 Anglo-American Nassau agreement, in which Macmillan agreed to deploy American Polaris missiles and helped repatch the special relationship with the United States, which was always driven more by sentimental geopolitics than clear-sighted economics. Indeed, this partnership has proven devastatingly durable and continues to confound Tony Blair's current dealings with the EU.

LIVING IN A MATERIAL WORLD

For Moravcsik, defense issues barely count in European integration. (He is too scrupulous to say they do not count at all.) The long, slow movement toward monetary union starting in the 1970s was governed not by a French drive to contain German monetary hegemony but by the German determination to avoid an inflationary rise in the deutsche mark and by the desire of other countries to control their economies. Going over Francois Mitterrand's critical 1983 decision to adopt austerity and force the franc back into the European Monetary System (EMS), the euro's precursor, Moravcsik dismisses the idea that the French president wanted to play a geopolitical role as a great European leader. Rather, his aim was to reduce the trade deficit and the outward flow of capital. To achieve this, he was even prepared to tolerate the unwelcome authority of the German Bundesbank to ensure monetary discipline.