Publications by Author: Andrew Moravcsik

Sept. 29 issue—The Swedes reject the euro by the resounding margin of 56 percent to 42 percent. Politicians and pundits proclaim the European Union has reached a crisis. Well, yes and no. The Swedish vote was no isolated bout of Nordic crankiness. To the contrary, it was sign of the deep disillusionment sweeping Europe. Yes, Estonia just voted overwhelmingly to join the Union, and Latvia probably will do the same this week. But note how, in a recent referenda, a slew of existing members have either voted down a variety of proposed community reforms or approved them by only slender margins. In Sweden’s case, a broad coalition of female, working-class, poor and rural voters rose to defend the welfare state against what they perceived as collusion between neo-liberal business and government elites in Stockholm and distant and unaccountable technocrats in Brussels.

It's hard to interpret this as anything but a resounding sign of the times. Over the coming year the leaders of at least five countries have promised to submit the landmark new European constitution, currently in the final stages of negotiation, to national votes. Even a single no could consign the whole lofty enterprise to failure. It will be a rough ride, underscoring the EU’s accelerating fragmentation. In Britain last week, Tory euroskeptics watched gleefully as government officials admitted that adopting the euro is “completely off the radar screen” until 2007. In Brussels, the president of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, warned that the EU might split, relegating Sweden (along with fellow Eurozone holdouts Britain, Denmark and some East European members-in-waiting) to a sort of second tier of financially less-influential countries. Acrimonious splits between “old” and “new” Europeans over the Iraq war have undermined any semblance of unified foreign and security policies. And when it comes to common economic policy, budget-busting fiscal “unilateralists”—France, Italy and Germany—have all but killed the EU stability pact.

This is not the end (or even the beginning of the end) for European integration. But it is the end of the cherished Euro-federalist dream (and Euro-skeptic nightmare) of a single European state, centralized in Brussels. To be sure, every member accepts certain core commitments—the single market, the European Parliament and the supremacy of European law in most economic matters. In a plethora of regulatory areas—from anti-monopoly policy to cellular-phone design to food-safety standards—EU rules are the rules. Still, the EU has crossed the Rubicon. Once a relatively small and homogeneous organization, cherishing “ever closer union” above all else, it has become a large and far more diverse, flexible and pragmatic one. “Multispeed” arrangements, whereby countries advance toward integration at their own pace, have become the norm. Eurocrats have even invented a positive term for it: “enhanced cooperation."

Many West Europeans from the old core of the European Community are still ambivalent about the swathe of 10 eastern and southern European countries about to join their club. Their reservations, albeit to a lesser degree, are shared by the new entrants. Yet for all the bumps encountered along the way, enlargement is an admirable achievement. Over the next decade the EU will likely become a zone of enviable peace and democracy from the Arctic Circle to the border of Iraq. The lesson of the Swedish referendum is that the success of the EU cannot be measured by polls. Public opinion may swing back and forth, but the thousands of small decisions taken in common cannot be reversed. The EU remains the most ambitious and the most successful example of peaceful international cooperation in world history.

Here’s how to think about the EU’s new constitution

Alas, to be born into the world without friends. That seems to be the fate of the draft constitution of the new European Union, to be presented at the summit in Thessaloniki on Friday. To a contemptuous Romano Prodi, the head of the European Commission who dreamed of building a stronger "federal" union, the document "lacks vision and ambition." By contrast, British Tories and tabloids are positively twitching with Europhobia. The proposed constitution will "sweep away 1,000 years of history," proclaims the Sun.

DON’T BE FOOLED. Prodi and his federalists are right. The Convention on the Future of Europe has deliberated—and delivered a mouse. When they began their work 18 months ago, Prodi and other Euro-insiders were convinced that they would dominate. They intended to exploit the bold rhetoric of constitutionalism to craft an idealistic document that centralized ever more power and democratic control in Brussels. There was heady talk of a new name, "United Europe." There were proposals for introducing majority voting on sensitive issues of foreign and defense policy. Brussels’s influence would be extended over national fiscal and social policies. National vetoes would be eliminated. A new EU president would be directly elected, by and for the people. Farewell, faceless Eurocracy. Welcome, democracy.

Little of this has come to pass. The convention’s canny chieftain, former French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing, knows where real power in the EU lies. Any radical draft would be picked apart by national governments when they begin reviewing the document this autumn. To encourage them to accept his draft intact, Giscard faced down the federalists and struck backroom deals with the member states. Case in point: last week’s wrangling over whether to allow EU foreign policy to be determined via qualified majority voting. Bottom line? It won’t be.

Most of the reforms that remain are simply good public management. With enlargement and a union of 25 member states, many of them tiny, it was high time to replace the revolving six-month council presidency, responsible for organizing the overall agenda. Thus there will be a new EU president, appointed by the states for a five-year term. Both "old" and "new" Europeans agree that crises like Iraq require greater integration. Thus the two top EU foreign-policy posts—currently held by Javier Solana and Chris Patten—will be consolidated into the new position of EU foreign minister. For most European countries the management of asylum, crime and defense procurement justifies a minimum set of intergovernmental standards. Thus a smattering of consensual policies will be newly governed by qualified majority voting and European Parliament oversight.

Otherwise, the new constitution merely consolidates current practice—a fact that should be welcomed rather than scorned. For too long, the debate over union has been divided between radical federalists who would move forward toward a centralized Europe and excessively cautious skeptics who would roll it back. What has emerged from the constitutional convention is a Europe in equilibrium. Henceforth, policies of greatest concern to citizens—social welfare, taxation, pensions, health care, education, culture, infrastructure—will remain essentially national and local. Those of less interest—trade, banking, industrial standardization, technical harmonization—will be European. In the middle, a few policies—immigration, policing and defense—will be shared. This is a heartening outcome. In coming to terms with its strengths as well as its limitations, the European Union has at long last entered its maturity.

For many transatlantic pundits, the Iraq crisis is further proof that Europe needs an autonomous military force. This view was forcefully expressed last week by Laurent Fabius, the former French prime minister, who said in the Financial Times that Europe "was unable to make its voice heard in the US because it was divided and lacked a unified defence force".

For some years now politicians have found European defence irresistible. European public opinion strongly favours it. European federalists want the European Union to have greater powers. French Gaullists, long convinced that military might means great power prestige, trumpet the idea. Tony Blair, Britain's prime minister, has exploited it to become more "European"; Joschka Fischer, Germany's foreign minister, has exploited it to become more military.

The logic is seductive: if the US respects only military power, a European army will surely command respect. Yet European defence is a dangerous pipe dream. And the Iraq crisis demonstrates why.

A co-ordinated military force with the global capabilities to fight a high-technology, low-casualty war would require Europeans to increase military spending, currently 2 per cent of gross domestic product, to more than the US rate of 4 per cent if it is to overcome a decades-long US lead. No European public would accept this.

However heavily they were deployed, European transport aircraft, satellites and multilingual soldiers would not add up to an effective policy response to US unilateralism. Do Europeans propose to use military force against the US? Launch "pre-preventive" interventions?

Or is the goal to reduce European dependency on Nato? If so, the result would be to encourage precisely the withdrawal from Europe advocated by US hawks. A European rapid reaction force might be useful for peacekeeping but neither it nor a larger force would reverse determined US unilateralism.

The entire notion is in fact incoherent. Europeans have claimed from the start of the Iraq crisis that non-military means should be used more intensively. Yet when Washington sends in the marines, Europeans call for a stronger defence.

The real problem is that European defence schemes distract Europe from its true comparative advantage in world politics: the cultivation of civilian and quasi-military power. Europe is the "quiet superpower". There are at least five ways in which Europe can wield influence over peace and war as great as that of the US.

First, EU accession—perhaps the single most powerful policy instrument for peace and security in the world today. In 10-15 potential member states, authoritarian, intolerant or corrupt governments have recently lost elections to democratic, market-oriented coalitions held together by the promise of eventual EU membership.

Second, Europeans provide more than 70 per cent of all civilian development assistance. This is four times more than the US and is far more equitably disbursed, often by multilateral organisations. When the shooting stopped in Kosovo and Afghanistan, it was the Europeans who were called on to rebuild, reconstruct and reform.

Third, European troops, generally under multilateral auspices, help keep the peace in trouble spots as disparate as Guatemala and Eritrea. EU members and applicants contribute 10 times as many peacekeeping troops as the US. No one outside Washington believes US troops will be able to do the job after the Iraq war.

Fourth, monitoring by international institutions, supported by Europe, builds the global trust that is needed to manage crises. The Iraq crisis might have developed very differently if the Europeans had been able to offer the option of sending, say, 10 times as many weapons inspectors in, 10 months earlier.

Last, the Iraq crisis demonstrates the extraordinary effect of multilateral institutions on global opinion. In country after country, polls have shown that a second United Nations Security Council resolution would have given public opinion a 30-40 per cent swing towards military action. With the US stance apparently lacking international legitimacy, American troops have been unable to open a second front from Turkish territory; and the bill for the war is likely to fall largely to the US.

Americans are not just unwilling but also—for complex domestic, cultural and institutional reasons—apparently unable to deploy civilian power effectively. That is the true weakness of US strategy today, for without trade, aid, peacekeeping, monitoring and legitimacy, no amount of unilateral military might can stabilise an unruly world.

Rather than criticising US military power, or hankering after it, Europe would do better to invest its political and budgetary capital in a distinctive complement to it. European civilian power, if wielded shrewdly and more coherently, could be an effective and credible instrument of modern European statecraft, not just to compel compliance by smaller countries but perhaps even to induce greater American understanding. Europe might get its way more often—and without a bigger army.

There would be something charming—quaintly reminiscent of Trollope perhaps—in the image of Britons "from pub landlords to vicars" forming a queue to vote in the Daily Mail "referendum" on the proposed EU constitution. Charming, that is, if it were not so corrosive of proper democratic debate.

The current campaign for a referendum shows just what is wrong with plebiscitary democracy. It is a clever campaign because it uses and abuses two of the highest political values in the west: limited government and democracy. Limiting government by blocking activities of "foreign" institutions may seem prudent, yet it is impractical in an interdependent world. Plebiscitary democracy—politics by referendum—seems unimpeachably "democratic" on the surface, yet in fact it empowers the rich, the ignorant, the negative, and the ideological. Voters lack the time, commitment or expertise to engage fully in complex issues—particularly when, as in the case of the EU, their main concerns are not on the agenda. Referendums in the US have shown that under such circumstances, huge amounts of money, slick consultants and access to the media are required to win...

Some fifteen years after the collapse of communism, the uniting of Western and Eastern Europe through a substantial enlargement of the EU is perhaps the most important single policy instrument available to further a more stable and prosperous continent. As many as eight post–communist states are poised to conclude negotiations with the EU for full membership by the end of 2002. In this essay we seek to outline in the very broadest strokes the most important structural forces of national interest and influence underlying the dynamics of enlargement itself and its future consequences for EU governance. We do not claim our analysis is comprehensive, only that it seeks to capture the most significant of the underlying forces in play.

Theory synthesis is not only possible and desirable but is constitutive of any coherent understanding of international relations as a progressive and empirical social science. Numerous interesting proposals exist for formulating and empirically testing multitheoretical propositions about concrete problems in world politics. Below the reader will find a set of basic principles that should underlie testable theory syntheses. Yet other contributors to this forum—Friedrich Kratochwil, Yosef Lapid, Iver Neumann, and Steve Smith—do not share this openness to theory synthesis; their views range from deep skepticism to outright rejection. The real issue between us is whether pluralism among existing theories ought to be preserved for its own sake, as these colleagues believe, or whether theories ought to be treated as instruments to be subjected to empirical testing and theory synthesis, as this author maintains.

Future historians may someday look back on the 1990s as the decade when Europeans began to view the European Union without illusions. Although the core of European integration has always been pragmatic, functional cooperation of a largely economic nature — trade liberalization, regulatory harmonization, financial openness — the project was assisted by the existence of a "permissive consensus" of favorable public opinion, which permitted centrist political parties to satisfy the economic demands of powerful producer groups while justifying their actions with arguments about the role of the EU in promoting regional democracy and peace. As a result, European political elites only rarely criticized the EU. In recent years more open skepticism has been voiced. The first part of this essay evaluates the views of five leading European statesmen and thinkers, found in their Spaak lectures at Harvard University, on this issue: Ralf Dahrendorf, Uffe Ellemann–Jensen, Roy Jenkins, George Papandreou and Renato Ruggiero. The second part evaluates the most serious of recent criticisms of the EU, namely that it is democratically illegitimate. Concern about the EU's 'democratic deficit' is in fact misplaced. Judged against the practices of existing advanced industrial democracies, rather than an ideal plebiscitary or parliamentary democracy, the EU is legitimate. Its institutions are tightly constrained by constitutional checks and balances: narrow mandates, fiscal limits, super–majoritarian and concurrent voting requirements and separation of powers. The EU's appearance of exceptional insulation reflects the subset of functions it performs — central banking, constitutional adjudication, civil prosecution, economic diplomacy and technical administration. These are matters of low electoral salience commonly delegated in national systems, for normatively justifiable reasons. On balance, the EU redresses rather than creates biases in political representation, deliberation and output.

Future historians may someday look back on the 1990s as the decade when Europeans began to view the European Union without illusions. Although the core of European integration has always been pragmatic, functional cooperation of a largely economic nature—trade liberalization, regulatory harmonization, financial openness—the project was assisted by the existence of a “permissive consensus” of favorable public opinion, which permitted centrist political parties to satisfy the economic demands of powerful producer groups while justifying their actions with arguments about the role of the EU in promoting regional democracy and peace. As a result, European political elites only rarely criticized the EU. In recent years more open skepticism has been voiced. The first part of this essay evaluates the views of five leading European statesmen and thinkers, found in their Spaak lectures at Harvard University, on this issue: Ralf Dahrendorf, Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, Roy Jenkins, George Papandreou and Renato Ruggiero. The second part evaluates the most serious of recent criticisms of the EU, namely that it is democratically illegitimate. Concern about the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’ is in fact misplaced. Judged against the practices of existing advanced industrial democracies, rather than an ideal plebiscitary or parliamentary democracy, the EU is legitimate. Its institutions are tightly constrained by constitutional checks and balances: narrow mandates, fiscal limits, super-majoritarian and concurrent voting requirements and separation of powers. The EU's appearance of exceptional insulation reflects the subset of functions it performs – central banking, constitutional adjudication, civil prosecution, economic diplomacy and technical administration. These are matters of low electoral salience commonly delegated in national systems, for normatively justifiable reasons. On balance, the EU redresses rather than creates biases in political representation, deliberation and output.

This paper, part of a multi–author project evaluating the evolution of theoretical paradigms in international relations (IR), evaluates the Liberal paradigm form a Lakatosian perspective. There is a distinct "Liberal" Scientific Research Program (SRP) in the study of international relations, based on three core assumptions. These Assumptions are shared by Ideational, Commercial and Republican variants of Liberal theory. The Liberal SRP is clearly progressive in the Lakatosian sense, that is, it explains a broad and expanding domain of empirical phenomena more accurately than competing research programs – and does so in such a way as to meet the specific Lakatosian criteria of "heuristic", "temporal" and "background theory" novelty. Liberal theory is thus among the most promising, perhaps the most fruitful and promising, of contemporary paradigms in IR theory. Yet legitimate doubts can be raised about the utility of Lakatosian theory as a means to evaluate research in IR. In particular, one might question its view that theories from competing paradigms are mutually excusive, which encourages one–on–one testing of unicausal theories, rather than estimation of the proper (and sometimes overlapping) scope of paradigms, or the construction of multi–paradigmatic syntheses. Given the current stage of IR theory, these two tasks may offer greater explanatory insight into world politics than unicausal theory testing. This conclusion does not undermine, however, the positive assessment of Liberal theory, which both supports clear empirical scope conditions and can play a foundational role in fruitful multi-theory syntheses.

Studies of international regimes, law, and negotiation, as well as regional integration, near universally conclude that political entrepreneurship by high officials of international organizations—"supranational entrepreneurship"— decisively influences the outcomes of multilateral negotiations. Studies of the European Community (EC) have long stressed their informal agenda-setting, mediation, and mobilization. Yet the studies underlying this interdisciplinary consensus tend to be anecdotal, atheoretical, and uncontrolled. The study reported here derives and tests explicit hypotheses from general theories of political entrepreneurship and tests them across multiple cases (the five most important EC negotiations) while controlling for the actions of national governments. Two findings emerge: First, supranational entrepreneurship is generally redundant or futile; governments can almost always efficiently act as their own entrepreneurs. Second, rare cases of entrepreneurial success arise not when officials intervene to help overcome interstate collective action problems, as current theories presume, but when they help overcome domestic(or transnational) collective action problems. This suggests fundamental refinements in the core assumptions about transaction costs underlying general theories of international regimes, law, and negotiation.

Realism, the oldest and most prominent theoretical approach in international relations, is in trouble. Its theoretical core is being undermined by its own defenders, who have addressed anomalies by recasting realism in less determinate and distinctive forms. Realists now advance the very assumptions and causal claims in opposition to which they traditionally—and still—have claimed to define themselves. This expansion would be unproblematic if it occurred through the further elaboration of an unchanging set of core realist premises. Yet contemporary realists increasingly defend propositions that manifestly and fundamentally contradict core realist assumptions by permitting other exogenous causes of state behavior—specifically, varying domestic interests, collective beliefs, and international institutions and norms—to trump the effects of material power. Contemporary realism has thus become little more than a generic commitment of rational state behavior in anarchy—a view shared by all major strands of liberal and institutionalist theory, as well as some strands of constructivism. It has thereby compromised its distinctiveness and thereby its analytical utility as a guide to theoretical debate and empirical research. Unlike many other critics, we propose not a rejection but a reformulation of realism in the form of three assumptions: (1) unitary, rational actors in anarchy; (2) underlying conflict of preferences; and (3) resolution of conflict on the basis of relative control over material resources. This formulation, we argue, is the broadest possible one that maintains a clear distinction between realism and other rationalist IR theories. It also promises to clarify the empirical domain of realism, to generate more powerful empirical explanations, and to permit realism to take its rightful part in rigorous multicausal syntheses with other rationalist theories.

Formal international human rights regimes differ from most other forms of international cooperation in that their primary purpose is to hold governments accountable to their own citizens for purely domestic activities. Why would governments establish an arrangement that invades domestic sovereignty in this way? Current scholarship suggests two explanations. A realist view asserts that the most powerful democracies seek to externalize their values, coercing or enticing weaker and less democratic governments to accept human rights regimes. A ideational view argues that the most established democracies externalize their values, setting in motion a transnational process of diffusion and persuasion that socializes less democratic governments to accept such regimes. I propose a third, institutional liberal view. Drawing on theories of administration and adjudication developed to explain rational delegation in domestic politics, I maintain that governments delegate for a self–interested reason, namely to combat future domestic political uncertainty.