13
Hazel Smith
In this chapter I want to take the approach of historical materialism drawn from the work of Karl Marx, and argue for its cogency, pertinence and relevance in the explanation and understanding of the processes of European integration.1 I argue that this approach has much more to offer than it has been given credit for in the discipline of international relations or the sub-disciplines of European integration studies (see Smith 1994). I go on to argue that it is one of the few approaches that can illuminate the interrelated social, political and economic dynamics of European integration. In this chapter I specifically investigate the Amsterdam treaty as marking an institutionalisation of the latest ‘stage’ of European integration and I particularly focus on what I term the ‘rights’ agenda of Amsterdam. This is because a key objective of the Amsterdam treaty was to promote individual rights in the context of the Union’s increasing institutionalisation of commitments to uphold ‘the principles of liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law’ (Article 6).2 It is not immediately obvious why this would be so, given that the impetus behind further European integration remains overtly that of an elite-led politico-economic project designed to consolidate ‘Europe’ as a zone of increasing profitability and to ensure that relations between states remain anchored in a stable and predictable network of intergovernmental relationships.3 Amsterdam therefore presents us with a non-trivial intellectual (and political) problem. Why would the elites who control the European integration process bother? The argument is that capital is not giving up rights to workers but gaining them for itself. The seeming rights of workers in production are actually rights for capital in exchange. Likewise, potential political rights for workers are also actual economic rights for capital. I go on to argue that the liberal democratic project associated with the European integration should be conceived as the politics of regulated liberalism.
The rights agenda is likely, however, to be problematic for capital. There is an essential and often very apparent contradiction set up in practice by the ‘granting’ of rights in one sphere at the same time as the often systematic abrogation of what seem to be the same rights in other spheres. To take a current example, in the Amsterdam treaty the Council ‘may’ take action against racial discrimination in the context of Community law. This would essentially permit the Council to take action against racial discrimination in employment. Yet even these weak provisions against racial discrimination have a normative value and draw into sharp relief the actual discrimination against Black people in the EU. Rights not to be racially discriminated against at work in Britain can be set against for instance the widely disseminated revelations of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry of the deep-seated institutional racial discrimination in the British Metropolitan police force. Given that human individuals are much more than their capacity to work, the rights talk of Amsterdam could help to expose the contradictions of the project of European integration – and also provide a legitimating discourse for the pursuit of an emancipatory version of rights talk and practice outside the sphere of commodified labour exchange.
I conclude by arguing that historical materialism satisfies explanatory, normative and emancipatory criteria and that its use opens up a fruitful research agenda in terms of the theoretical study of European integration.
Historical materialism and liberal democracy
In many senses, Marx’s views on what we understand today as liberal democracy can be read off from his critique of liberal constitutionalism. These views are very straightforward. Political emancipation, which can be achieved with the installation of liberal constitutional regimes, ‘represents a great progress’ (Marx 1978a: 35). Indeed it represents the ultimate form of emancipation ‘within the framework of the prevailing social order’. But political emancipation does not of itself imply human emancipation. In many ways for Marx, political emancipation implies a diminution or alienation of individual emancipation. This is because human rights agendas, as evinced in the various declarations of the ‘Rights of Man’ associated with the American and the French revolutions, were understood by Marx as a recognition that ‘man’ in civil society had become shorn of political subjectivity. The rights agenda for Marx split off man in civil society, as an egoistic, individualised, passive object of political activity, from man as citizen whose exclusive sphere of activity was the state. Here, egoistic means to be:
an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accord with his private caprice. Man is far from being considered, in the rights of man, as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself – society – appears as a system which is external to the individual and as a limitation of his original independence. The only bond between men is natural necessity, need and private interest, the preservation of their property and their egoistic persons.
(Marx 1978a: 43)
This is partly because, Marx argues, within capitalist social relations civil society constitutes a separate sphere of activity from the state and, because the state is also constituted as the political sphere, activities within civil society are correspondingly constituted as ‘non-political’, even ‘natural’. Such a situation contrasts with feudal systems of social organisation where, although civil societies existed, they were directly political in that the individual’s location in civil society corresponded directly to his or her political status or, as Marx put it, ‘his separation and exclusion from other elements of society’. Again by contrast, the state, within feudal social organisation, is perceived as something separate from the political and civil affairs of the people, it appears as ‘the private affair of a ruler and his servants’ (Marx 1978a: 45).4
Within capitalist social relations, then, conscious political activity is concentrated in the sphere of the state while in civil society egoistic man is ‘passive’, an object of political activity, as opposed to a political subject. For Marx, political emancipation in many real senses reduces human freedoms. ‘Political emancipation is a reduction of man, on the one hand to a member of civil society, an independent and egoistic individual, and on the other hand, to a citizen, to a moral person’ (ibid.: 46).5 Liberty for Marx then as one of the ‘Rights of Man’ is ‘the right of self-interest. … It leads every man to see in other men, not the realization, but rather the limitation of his own liberty’ (ibid.: 42).6 The ‘equality’ aspects of the rights of man were simply dismissed as of ‘no political significance. It is only the equal right to liberty … namely that every man is equally regarded as a self-sufficient monad’ (ibid.: 42). As for Marx’s notion of democracy, this was something far from today’s notions of liberal, representative democracy. Democracy for Marx entailed human emancipation, not just political emancipation. In democracy the ‘political state is annihilated’ (Marx 1978b: 21).7 By this Marx means the state as something separate from the people disappears and ‘the constitution, the law, the state itself … is only the self-determination of the people, and a particular content of the people’ (ibid.). Democracy for Marx then closely corresponds with a system defined by the actualisation of human emancipation.
Human emancipation will only be complete when the real, individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen; when as an individual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and in his relationships, he has become a species-being; and when he has recognized and organized his own powers (forces propres) as social powers so that he no longer separates this social power from himself as political power.8
(Marx 1978a: 46)
If the above gives an illustration of how Marx conceives liberalism and democracy, it does not, however, give us much of an indication about the theoretical framework which underpinned the analysis. It also does not allow for much of an insight into how human emancipation can be achieved. For these we have to turn to both The German Ideology and Capital, the latter the supposedly most economistic of Marx’s work but which clearly analyses the social relations of capitalist production in which actual unfreedoms are mutually constitutive of the formal freedoms we today associate with liberal democratic polities (Marx 1986; Marx and Engels 1989).
In The German Ideology Marx sketched his understanding of a historical materialist project which was historical in that it understood human individuals to be historically constituted and situated agents. It is materialist – not in the modern sense of the word as consumerist – but in the sense of taking the human individual and ‘sensuous’ human activity as the analytical focus for explaining human society. Such a materialist philosophy can be contrasted with an idealist philosophy which looks to the life of the mind – separated from material existence – as the primary analytical focus in understanding human beings and their interrelationship in society.
For Marx, in order to explain the fundamental dynamics of any historical epoch, it is necessary to understand the prevailing social relations of production. The production relations Marx analyses are not simply those found in the workplace but all those social activities that together contribute to the production and reproduction of human societies. Production describes the human being’s purposeful interrelationship with nature to sustain life and such intrinsically human activity is always for Marx a social activity. Relations of production is such a key concept for Marx because he argues that all human societies are transformed and defined by the introduction of changing instruments of production. Instruments of production include both tools created by human beings – everything from ancient flint axes to modern technology – and social organisation – and their function is to assist human beings create and recreate the environment in which they live. Although Marx defined the framework in which these specific and definite social relations were situated by the term ‘mode of production’, this did not refer to an economistic analysis of human society. For Marx a mode of production was another term for ‘a definite mode of life’ (Marx and Engels 1989: 42).
Marx is most well known, however, for his application of the historical materialist framework to analyse modern society which, he argued, could best be understood as constituted through antagonistic relations between major social groups who competed for a share in the wealth created within that historically specific society. This modern society was characterised by Marx as capitalist in its social relations in that its unique dynamics revolved around the creation or ‘accumulation’ of capital (Marx 1986).9 The social relations of the production of capital are such that workers are free in the sense that they are no longer tied or connected through rights and obligations to their means of production and subsistence. They must therefore sell their labour-power on the free market for wages in order to be able to physically survive. At the same time, within the production process, the worker creates what Marx calls surplus value. (What is surplus is the value created in the labour process or the process of production that is over and above what it costs to maintain the worker at socially defined subsistence levels.) Surplus value does not accrue to the worker, however, because it is alienated through its purchase in exchange for wages by those who own the means of production, the capitalists. Class conflict is therefore endemic to capitalist relations as workers struggle to claw back some of the surplus value claimed by capitalists who, forced by the ancillary laws of the market to engage in competition with other capitalists, try to cut costs and increase productivity by decreasing the share in surplus value available as a return to workers.
The capitalist therefore ‘exploits’ the worker through the mechanics of the system itself. Marx stresses that the notion of exploitation does not necessarily imply moral turpitude (which does not mean to say that Marx has many kind words to say about the capitalist). Marx argued that the way that capital is created and expropriated is systematically hidden from those who create value (the worker – who he called the direct producer) through the structures engendered by the mechanics of the capitalist system. This means that workers can conceive of themselves as free – which in fact in law they are as they are free to contract their labour – but that these relations of production hide actual relations of inequality between those who own wealth or the means of production, the bourgeoisie, and those who do not, who he terms the proletariat, between those who are formally free to sell their labour but in practice are compelled to do so in order to survive, and those who purchase that labour. In the realm of exchange (the market), therefore, where labour-power (the capacity to work) is bought and sold as any other commodity, both worker and owner of capital are equal to each other in law. For Marx, however, it is in the hidden dynamics of relations of production, in which workers are compelled to sell their labour-power, where inequality inheres.
The separation of formal political equality guaranteed by law and actual socio-economic inequality, combined with the tendencies of capitalist social relations to constitute such a relationship as natural and ethical, prompt Marx to sarcastically identify capitalist society as ‘a very Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham’ (Marx 1986: 280). Freedom is given because those who buy and sell commodities, including labour power, enter into agreements voluntarily. Equality is guaranteed because these relationships are formalised in contracts as exchange of equivalents usually money (itself a commodity in capitalist society) for other commodities. Property is part of the triad of rights in this ‘innate Eden’ because both the worker as owner of his or her labour-power and the owner of capital ‘disposes only of what is his own’. And, for Marx, ‘Bentham, because each looks only to his own advantage. The only force bringing them together, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interest of each. Each pays heed to himself only, and no one worries about the others’ (1986: 280).
Historical materialism implies therefore that increasing political liberalisation is likely to accompany expanding capitalist relations of production. Political liberalisation implies equality under the law (of the capitalist state) because the system of social relations is constituted by an actual equality of exchange of commodities. The worker is alienated under both the system and the law from rights other than those pertaining to the buying and selling of commodities on the market (he or she has no right to a home for instance or to land). The worker however does establish the right to buy and sell the commodity of their own labour-power and, by entering into social relations where those commodity relationships – built around freedom of exchange – prevail, the worker is constituted within the discourse of capitalist society as a free and equal human being (with other individuals). Liberalism with its ideas of the sovereign individual provides, therefore, the ideological cement for such a system.
In Liberal polities, politics is constituted as a separate sphere from economics in the process of which the state (the political authority) is reified as something separate from the society in which it is embedded. The state is, however, an instance of the overall ‘capital relation’, that is ‘class domination in capitalist society’.10 The state is not an autonomous entity but neither is it subordinate to the ‘needs’ or ‘requirements’ of some abstract process of deterministic economistic or technological development. At its most abstract the state is the political embodiment of a whole complex of fluid class relations of power as defined through the nature of the essential struggle within capitalist social relations between labour and capital and for that matter between capitalist and capitalist. The institutionalisation of the form of the state within and as an apparatus captures to a greater or lesser extent these class conflicts. The state is also the political arena which guarantees as far as it is able the equality of exchange of commodities, including labour-power. In addition, all operational systems of capitalist social relations, whether at the state or the international level, are partially dependent on systems of formal law which institutionalise individual rights. As well as providing an enabling framework for commodity-exchange, legal systems provide sanctions against those members of society who abrogate property rights. The state is not, however, an immutable, transhistorical form – either logically or historically. The capitalist state has thus far provided the most important political appurtenance of capitalist social relations but there is no logical or historical reason why this should continue to be so. (The increasing salience of the European Union, for instance, at least gives cause for rethinking a perhaps hitherto automaticity of state/capital complexes as the way to understand capitalist social relations.)
We should not be surprised to see the promotion of liberal democratising projects as the essential accompanying project of the global spread of capital and its accompanying social relations (see Parekh 1993).11 Democratisation – in its late twentieth-century liberalist version – is the other side of the coin of globalisation.12 Democratisation emphasises individual rights and downplays any notion of democracy as equality except in the way Marx understood equality within bourgeois societies – as the equality of self-sufficient ‘monads’. Liberal democracy is a real relation of class struggle that, among other things, has played out such as to inscribe democracy as the ability for commodities, including labour-power, to be equally exchanged in the market. Liberal democracy can also be conceived of as more liberal than democratic simply because the dominant understanding of democracy has been transformed in the late twentieth century through the acceptance of the practice of an intensely mediated representative function (see, for example, Huntington 1993).13 It is representatives who make decisions and it is the role of the citizenry to be accepting of a subordinate role in the decision-making process. The major participatory function is as an individual voter in elections. Voting is an individual ‘right’ that should be exercised to validate the liberal democratic system. Even this most basic of political rights is, however, differentially, that is unequally, beneficial in modern societies. Some voters will have better access to decision-making (through pressure groups, business influence, wealth, access to media) than others. In this way actual equality in political decision-making is denied while formal political equality is retained.
There are clearly strains in the project of liberal democracy, however, and it is these tensions that allow a space for emancipatory politics. These strains are arguably much more visible in the discourse of democracy as equality than the discourse of liberalism as individual rights. This is because the prevailing inequality of liberal democracy is borne out by the evidence of everyday experience, which is that individuals in liberal democracies are not equal in many meaningful ways. This is reflected in, for instance, the pervasive fear of unemployment and the visible evidence of homelessness, rundown council estates and decrepit hospitals. On the other hand, class struggles for liberal rights which also have the effect to a certain extent of deepening human emancipation have been relatively successful as the rights talk of liberal capitalism has provided the possibility of an uneasy cross-class political convergence around both emancipatory struggle and questions of economic ‘efficiency’. For instance, equal pay struggles have provided the focus of both socialist platforms and managerial ‘good practice’. This does not, of course, mean that equal pay struggles have been successful to the extent of achieving the emancipation of all women, in that for instance women might be formally receiving equal pay with men but, on the other hand, restructuring of industry has meant that women are often incorporated into workforces on the basis of low paid, part-time, insecure employment with Black women overrepresented in this type of employment.
The point is that the rhetoric of liberal democracy allows the envisioning of an alternative emancipatory project where political rights would be matched by socioeconomic equality. It also permits and legitimises the sorts of politics which take the rights rhetoric as their base but which envisage a broader and deeper vision of an emancipated society Some have argued that capitalist social relations compel emancipatory projects. One does not have to endorse the idea that capitalist social relations inevitability lead to human emancipation to accept the logic of such a connection. John Hoffman, for instance, argues very strongly that the fundamental pressures for capital accumulation encourage abrogations of workers’ rights to allow short-term benefits for individual capitalists. This means that
If propertyless producers are to enjoy their individual rights, they must seek to exercise collective power in order to do so. The market themselves compels them to invoke what Marx calls ‘standards entirely foreign to commodity production’.
In other words, equal rights inevitably generates a demand for equal power. … For the demand for democracy (and thus for socialism) is a product of capitalism. It can only emerge as workers are compelled to turn the weapons of the bourgeoisie (their abstract rights) against this or that aspect of the capitalist system.14
(Hoffman 1991:40–1)
In all, then, historical materialist analysis intends to cover the hidden dynamics of capitalist society where actual relations of socio-economic inequality are constituted through and by the same process that constitutes formal equality between politically free individuals as the sine qua non of that same society Successful capitalism relies on the contract rather than on coercion for efficient operation. Rights, based on the right of the individual to trade his or her labour-power (capacity to work) on the market, are prioritised while democracy as any form of human emancipation is severely circumscribed by the logic of capitalist production relations. Put another way, freedom in production gives way to freedom (of a sort) in exchange (Smith 1996).15 Even these limited freedoms, however, provide some space and rhetorical legitimacy for socialist politics which might seek to transcend capitalist-socialist relations which can be, in practice and in lived experience, relations of unfreedom and alienation.
Historical materialist explanations of European integration
Mainstream European integration studies have remained virtually untouched by historical materialist theorising. Peter Cocks made a valiant attempt way back in 1980 which hit the pages of the very respectable International Organization. Marxists such as Ernest Mandel (1970) have, however, commented on integration. A very useful, readable and systematic historical materialist analysis of European integration by John Holloway and Sol Picciotto (1980) has been ignored by European integration theorists. One recent noteworthy attempt to offer ‘class analysis’ of European integration is by Bruno Carchedi and Guglielmo Carchedi (1999: 120) who argue for the EU to be understood as an imperialist actor. European integration is ‘a process moved by the interests of (inter)national capital in which, not by chance, popular participation (not to speak of real democratic decision-making power) has been remarkably absent’. Such ‘green shoots’ of historical materialist analysis appear to be bearing fruit in one aspect of the study of European integration – the study of European monetary integration. Here the work of Bonefeld and Burnham (1996), and Carchedi (1997), offers theoretical analysis utilising the labour theory of value with this work being complemented by empirical work assessing the role and interests of the labour movement in monetary integration (Strange 1997).
Samir Amin (1997) has commented on the EU from a historical materialist perspective but in a parenthetical manner as it refers to his concerns with international inequality. Stephen George (1991) has marshalled the neo-Marxist framework provided by Immanuel Wallerstein to comment on European Political Cooperation. Another group of neo-Marxist international relations scholars, the ‘critical theorists’ influenced by Robert Cox’s innovative interpretation of historical materialism – have seen European integration as a fruitful locus for empirical and theoretical inquiry,16 reflecting Cox’s view that the new Europe could be ‘a proving ground for a new form of world order’.17 The Amsterdam school with its work on capitalist class fractions in the context of its research programme on ‘Social Forces in Western European Integration’ has also generated some neo-Gramscian inquiries into elite projects within the context of European integration.18 The focus here has been on the efforts of transatlantic elites (not just west European elites) to combine development of integrated economies of scale as a basis for increased and improved profitability with attempts to establish political integration in Europe, or at least in western Europe. Here we have a very visible potential empirical locus for Marxist theorising that argues for immanent and constitutive relationships between social, economic and political relations of production.
That historical materialism has not made inroads into mainstream EU studies is perhaps surprising. First, the standard introductory textbook in the field of European integration notes that ‘many have suggested that … the Treaty is guided by a clear philosophy or ideology: that of free market, liberal, non-interventionist capitalism’ (Nugent 1993: 45). Secondly, the evolution of European integration seems to offer prima-facie support for historical materialist approaches – at least for vulgar versions of them.19 Thirdly, although even vulgar Marxists have not latched on to a deterministic or functionalist rendering of the relationship between politics and economics in the evolution of the European Union, this has not prevented other schools of theorising from doing so. Both functionalists and neo-functionalists are explicit in their allegiance to models which contain elements of technological tautology (Hodges 1985; Taylor 1996).20 Neoliberal institutionalists have found European integration a fertile ground for the application of theories which attempt a marriage (sometimes of convenience) between explanations that separate economics from politics as if their analytical abstraction somehow represented real separations of spheres of social activity (Wood 1996: 19–48).
One explanation for the impermeability of European integration studies to historical materialist theories is to point at their general absence in the discipline of international relations in general.21 Carchedi and Carchedi argue that class analysis has been ‘expelled, for obvious ideological reasons, from official and academic discourse [on European integration]’ (1999: 120). These obvious reasons include the closeness of the discipline to United States foreign policy theory and practice which perhaps explains the difficulties of publishing during the Cold War. In addition Marxian theorising was associated by many with a discredited political project; Marxian scholarship was not very well distinguished from Marxist-Leninist ideology.22
More specifically, what I have termed as the ‘institutionalist bias’ of the subdiscipline of European integration studies has mitigated against those approaches that do not share the same theoretical prism.23 I have argued elsewhere that the institutionalist bias, based on two institutionalist fallacies, sets the tone for writing about the EU.24 Institutionalist fallacy number one is the tendency to narrow down the subject of inquiry in respect of European integration to the study of how the institution makes its decisions. Institutionalist fallacy number two is the conflation of the study of European integration with the institutional practices defined by policy-makers. We can also note a tendency in the institutionalist literature to combine these two biases. In the first category we see the concern with the institutional development of EU policy-making. The study of European integration becomes the historical study of how the internal decision-making procedures have changed over time and why and how these decision-making procedures have been formalised (institutionalised) or not. In the study of EU foreign policy, for instance, the second tendency is manifested in the delimitation of the study of EU foreign policy to the study of either European political cooperation (EPC) or the common foreign and security policy (CFSP). The institutionalist bias is powerful and influential. Those who do not share the bias have had difficulties in being heard.
An explanation of European integration utilising historical materialism, however, would start by locating both outcome and process in the context of the social relations of production in which integration evolves. This chapter attempts more specifically to investigate one specific aspect of European integration, the ‘rights agenda’ of Amsterdam, and does this within the Marxian framework examined above. If the relationships which Marx argues are constitutive of capitalist social relations hold in our explanation of Amsterdam, then we may also be able to draw some tentative conclusions about the nature of the broader project of European integration. The chapter therefore locates the discussion in the context of two relationships. The first is that of the dynamic relationship of European integration – as a process that involves the progressive opening of markets – to the institutionalisation of political rights. The second contextual framework is that of the contradictory normative project inherent to a capitalist logic which limits individual rights to a politics which is about facilitating capitalist exchange and, at the same time, provides ‘the conditions of possibility’ for emancipation through the collective exercise of those rights (necessarily, in opposition to the prevailing capitalist social relations).
European integration and the promotion of liberal democracy
The project of European integration has overtly concentrated on market integration since its inception. Many hoped that the processes of economic integration would facilitate problem-solving in more controversial ‘political’ areas – derived from the famous functionalist ‘spill-over’ thesis’ – but the Community project was, at least overtly, designed to function in ‘economic’ issue-areas. It is only with the 1987 Single European Act that we first see treaty references to democracy which, since the Maastricht treaty, is considered as an essential characteristic of the Union (Church and Phinnemore 1994: 53). The Maastricht treaty established a very thin form of EU citizenship, granted to EU citizens by virtue of their prior citizenship status within member-states. EU commitments to liberal democracy have been mainly operationalised through the granting of individual rights – with the rights agenda of Maastricht and Amsterdam building on the legacy of social policy rights already established as part of the processes of encouraging market integration.
Market integration was pursued by member-states’ governments, supported by United States’ governments, who attempted to facilitate harmonisation of both the conditions of exchange (among themselves and in relations with the outside world) and the conditions of production (for exchange). Both together formed the base of the move to the ‘common market’ predicted by the 1957 Rome treaty. In terms of the conditions of exchange, the common external tariff was the major achievement of the late 1960s, enabling the Community to act as one in international trade terms. Competition rules and the harmonisation of taxation particularly in respect of VAT have been further moves in harmonising conditions of exchange. The moves to implement the single European market – the once famous 1992 project – is another. The introduction of the Euro, which follows a long chain of monetary co-ordination and integration projects since the 1971 Werner report, will also facilitate the integration of capitalist exchange (of goods and money) (Archer and Butler 1996: chap. 4).25 Harmonisation of the conditions of production has sometimes been more controversial because of the perceived ‘legitimate’ right of business to operate without ‘political interference’. Moves to impose common standards, for instance, including those relating to health and safety and sanitation rules, have sometimes been opposed as an unwarranted interference in what should be the prerogative of ‘the market’ to decide.
The distinction drawn here between ‘production’ and ‘exchange’ does not imply that the two never overlap in practice. In terms of the former, for instance, the production-led Common Agricultural Policy has significant effects on exchange in the shape of world agricultural market prices and conversely, for example, efforts to control imports of third country textiles (exchange) have a significant impact on, among other things, the continued maintenance of uneconomic sweatshop industries within the EU (production). The distinction does, however, allow us to inquire into the other conditions of production that might accompany a project of European integration. Of the three common policies outlined in the 1957 Rome treaty, commercial policy relates to integrating conditions of exchange. The other two – agriculture and transport – relate to production with agriculture, as we have seen, having significant overlaps between the two.26 Transport policy has not ever been as extensive as the other common policies but the rationale of an integrated transport policy is to provide infrastructural support for industry.
Another factor of production given some thought in the Rome treaty was that of labour. The 1957 Rome treaty spelt out the need for the Community to promote workers’ rights including equal pay for equal work by men and women. The 1987 Single European Act introduced provisions designed to improve health and safety at work. The Union’s famous Social Charter is specifically designated the ‘Charter of Fundamental Social Rights of Workers’, and was first introduced in 1989 before being institutionalised in the ‘Social Chapter’ at Maastricht (Archer and Butler 1996: chap. 5). Social Charter provisions included health and safety at work, working conditions, information and consultation of workers, protection of workers made redundant, equality at work between men and women, the integration of persons excluded from the labour market, social security and social protection of workers, representation and the collective defence of the interests of workers and employers, conditions of employment of third country nationals, financial contributions for promotion of employment and job creation.
Any measures undertaken within the framework of the social policy had to take into account, according to a standard textbook on European integration, ‘the need to maintain the competitiveness of the Community economy’ (Nugent 1993: 407).27 The Union emphasised the promotion of individual rights based on workplace and market calculations. Clive Archer and Fiona Butler (1996: 105) note that the EU has a ‘conventional leaning of social policy toward market and employment issues’. This does not mean to say that all member-state governments were convinced that intervention to promote workers’ rights would increase economic efficiency or were convinced to the same degree. There was some general agreement however that social policy was functional for economic integration, and, specifically in the context of the EU project, was judged as necessary for the success of the ‘1992’ project – the completion of the Single European Market (SEM). This should not be taken as a structural-functionalist or teleological argument. This policy was contested within west European elites but eventually prevailed as the philosophy set out most famously by Commission president Jacques Delors in 1985.’The European social dimension is what allows competition to flourish between undertakings and individuals on a reasonable and fair basis. … Any attempt to give new depth to the Common Market which neglected this social dimension would be doomed to failure’ (Delors quoted in Hantrais 1995: 6).
Abroad, the Union progressively institutionalised its promotion of democracy, human rights and the rule of law within the context of its support for market economies. The first treaty reference to these commitments was in the preamble to the 1987 Single European Act (SEA). The 1993 Maastricht treaty provisions on the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and the development policy provisions of the Maastricht treaty spelt out the Union’s growing commitments in these areas.28 In 1995 the Commission adopted a further obligation when it issued a communication which stated that an essential element of future contractual relations with third countries would be a reference to respect for democratic principles and human rights.29 This move to political conditionally is a new feature of EU foreign policy.30
There was some contrast in emphasis with the Union’s support of democracy and human rights at home and abroad. Domestically the ‘rights agenda’ placed the accent on liberalism and less on the deepening of democracy (whether defined as more equality or more effective participation in decision-making or both). The ‘democratic’ deepening that has taken place has been limited to the establishment of Union citizenship in the Maastricht treaty of 1993. The democratic ‘right’ associated with EU citizenship was limited to the right to vote and stand as a candidate in local and European Parliament elections. Abroad, however, the EU, at least in rhetoric, has supported more emancipatory versions of rights talk. There has been some emphasis on the promotion of human rights in the context of support for liberal democracy. In practice however support for liberal democracy has tended towards support for elections – based on the individual’s right to vote. There have been some attempts to encourage the creation of the conditions for ‘free and fair’ elections which have gone beyond the promotion of elections but much of this work has been overtly geared around the promotion of market economies and the liberalisation of economies.
The ‘rights' agenda of Amsterdam
A theme of the Amsterdam treaty was the promotion of citizens’ and people’s individual rights. Amsterdam builds on the 1993 Maastricht treaty in this respect. Article 2 states that the ‘rights and interests of nationals’ should be protected through the consolidation of Union citizenship. The same article supports the free movement of persons with the exception of asylum seekers, immigrants and criminals. Article 6 states that the Union shall respect ‘fundamental rights’ as outlined in the 1950 European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. What makes this different from the similar Maastricht provision is the agreement in Article 7 that permits the Union to take disciplinary action against those member-states in breach of Article 6(1) which reiterates respect for democracy, liberty and human rights. Article 11(1) on the Common Foreign and Security Policy commits the Union to promote democracy, the rule of law, human rights and ‘fundamental freedoms’. As part of the provisions on police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters, Article 29 specifies that racism and xenophobia is to be prevented and combated. The treaty also takes a position against discrimination on the grounds of sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age and sexual orientation.31 These provisions would have to be implemented by secondary legislation. In Britain, for example, it is still legal to discriminate on the grounds of age. Another Amsterdam declaration points to the fact that the death penalty is not carried out anywhere in the Union. Another states that the Union will respect religious and non-confessional communities.32 There are no proposals to improve democracy in the Union either in the institutional sense or in the sense of increasing the ability of European citizens to participate in decision-making. The commitment made in terms of the former was to call a new Inter-Governmental Conference (IGC) to discuss the workings of the institutions one year before the Union achieves a membership of twenty.33
Of the initial areas identified by the Westendorp report for action, first, the citizen and the union and, second, democracy and efficiency, action on the former is unproblematically inscribed in the treaty.34 The Union is consolidated and EU citizenship is maintained. More problematically, because less universally accepted as ‘common sense’, we could argue that the second agenda item of the Westendorp group was also systematically inscribed into the treaty. This would be so if we found that the treaty institutionalises the prevailing theory and practice of the capitalist social relation and if this relation in some way represents, within the specific historical and social context of early twenty-first century capitalist relations, ‘democratic’ capitalist relations. This would be so even if liberalism had been conflated with democracy at Amsterdam to the extent that the rights provisions predominate and democratic provisions, in the sense that we conventionally understand them, are absent. It would simply imply a ‘new’ understanding of what constitutes liberal democracy (and democracy). I understand this idea of liberal democracy as the politics of regulated liberalism.
Explaining Amsterdam
The Amsterdam treaty, signed in October 1997, is characterised by Clive Church and David Phinnemore as the disappearing treaty – partly because of the lack of press attention it has received and partly because their argument is that the enduring legacy of the treaty is likely to be in its codification and simplification of the EC and EU treaties (Church and Phinnemore 1994). Amsterdam, for them, is little more than a pragmatic, tidying-up exercise. For Michel Petite, the judgement is somewhat similar. Amsterdam ‘is by no means the last word on European integration [representing] the most that Member States were prepared to agree among themselves at a given moment’.35 Petite bases his assessment on a comparative analysis of the outcomes of Amsterdam with the ambitions of the Commission as set down in its opinion on the IGC of February 1996.36 At one level there is not much more to add to the conclusions advanced by Church and Phinnemore and Petite. The Amsterdam treaty was clearly a tidying-up job, it did only achieve modest outcomes and much more work is going to be necessary to cope with the institutional consequences of enlargement.
If all we demand from a theory is a logical cumulation of verifiable and/or falsifiable facts – what we might call in technical language an empirico-analytic approach – then the analysis outlined above provides well-founded and sufficient knowledge. If, on the other hand, we demand to know more, about things that are not immediately accessible from observation, we might want to turn elsewhere. Instead of accepting what Robert Cox (1986) has called a ‘problem-solving’ approach to theory – that which takes the world as it finds it – we can turn to a critical approach – that which challenges the parameters of the social world it finds. This does not obviate the need for detailed empirical work matched by a process of logical reasoning. On the contrary it demands that this process be undertaken but within the context of a specifically historical and material context. The treaty, in other words, should be assessed in the context of the particular historical and social circumstances out of which it emerges and in terms of its significance for the material life of real ‘sensuous’ (to use the Marxian term) human beings. The original question set for this chapter was why do elites bother? Why would any fraction of capital accept restrictions on its powers in production? The short answer is as follows. First of all, capital is not giving up rights to workers but gaining them for itself. The seeming rights of workers in production are actually rights for capital in exchange. Likewise, potential political rights for workers are also actual economic rights for capital.
How then is capital gaining power through the formal granting of ‘social policy’ rights for workers? First of all exchange between equivalents – and therefore predictability in the labour process – is facilitated by the eradication of extraneous handicaps to the maximisation of surplus value from labour-power (obstacles based on discriminatory practices). Second, the pursuit of homogeneity – of moves to incorporate the real ‘sensuous’ labourer into a commodity or labour as a ‘thing’ – as a more predictable unit within global accounting processes, are facilitated by the promotion of the worker as an unindividuated individual. Third, the intra-elite conflicts within the EU have explicitly focused their attentions on social policy as a remedy for what has been termed ‘social dumping’ which is the possibility of individual states within the EU being ‘unfairly’ competitive (vis-à-vis other member states) in attracting global business because they were able to offer cheaper, more easily exploitable labour. Thus social policy was a way of providing the oft-quoted ‘level playing field’ for European capital (Hantrais 1995: 10).
As we also have already noted, social policy in terms of an explicit reference to the individual as worker was incorporated in the Maastricht treaty in 1993. This common policy was an effort to harmonise one condition of production, which was not the individual themselves but the individual’s labour-power (the capacity to work). To remind ourselves, within capitalist relations labour-power is a commodity like anything else which can be bought or sold (exchanged) on the market. It is a commodity which the individual owns and sells (should they obtain employment) in an exchange with those who are in a position to pay wages for it. Arguably, if it makes sense to harmonise the conditions of production, in terms of improving the standards and efficiency of the components in the production process either by direct improvement of those inputs or by environmental support (more efficient transport and telecommunications infrastructure for instance) in order to optimise productivity and competitivity, then it makes just as much sense to maximise the efficiency of that other component of the production process – the labour-power (capacity to work) of the worker. For instance, it is clearly inefficient to permit discrimination on the basis of race if that discrimination results in a person not being employed who is the most able to maximise value in the labour process. Social policy can thereby be seen as explained and produced by and subordinated to the priority of creating the market (production and exchange) conditions for competitive European business. It is part of the process of providing optimum conditions of production for the expenditure of labour-power. This perhaps is not a very controversial conclusion. It does not imply that Commission officials or other decision-makers never act for altruistic motives or that there are not divisions within political elites about the efficacy of intervening in the labour-market as part of a strategy of improving competitivity.
On its own, however, the above explanation can perhaps offer some post-hoc insight but we still need to know why this particular strategy is adopted at this time. This is because capital has historically often found it just as useful to utilise an opposite approach in its battle with labour – which is to exploit differences based on gender, race, age, disability etc. as part of a policy to ‘divide and rule’, to prevent effective class action. One particular pernicious legacy of this can be found in the current institutional and actual discrimination faced by Black people in all advanced capitalist states today. An explanation can be found, however, in the context of the changing dynamics of social relations, which both inhibit certain options and encourage others.
Historically, the initial stages of capitalist accumulation were characterised by the production of absolute surplus value through the mechanism of outright coercion or force (Holloway and Picciotto 1980: 137). Domestically, the laws of capitalist states either permitted coercion or, except when accompanied by political struggles to enforce extant legislation, were ignored by nascent capitalists. Abroad capitalist states also used force in colonisation projects which also had as their object the maximisation of the production of (absolute) surplus value. Modern capitalist social relations are, however, constituted through and by the production of relative surplus value. This means that profitability relies on ‘improvements’ (for the capitalist) which are generated through advanced technology and changes in methods of work organisation. Production of relative surplus value is globally organised (hence globalisation) and force is much more difficult to employ for the dominant states. This is partly because force does not always provide an efficacious underpinning for social systems designed to maximise relative surplus value. (This is not always the case – for instance, South Korea, now an OECD member and an advanced capitalist state, relied heavily on military coercion in its capital/state building operations.)
Military force is also not so readily available, partly because of the successful struggle by exploited groups in the ‘advanced’ capitalist states against conscription and war itself, the campaign against the Vietnam War being one but by no means the only example of such activity. Even policing activities have become more circumscribed and subject to public accountability, again within certain limits, in EU states. For all sorts of reasons then, the guarantee of the capitalist exchange relation has come to be more overtly resident in the legal systems, structures and norms as distinct from within the directly coercive arm of the state. I do not want to suggest here of course that the state has either lost its coercive capacities or that these would never be wielded in times of crisis – only that legal strategies to support the wage/commodity relation predominate in the era of globalisation. The rule of law has always underpinned capitalist relations of production in that contract rights of the free worker to buy and sell their labour on the free market are fundamental rights in capitalist relations. Legal systems in states are kept in place by sanctions but, as importantly, legislation provides powerful norms by which individuals order their lives. I want to suggest here, then, that because of the general weakening of the sanction of force to underpin the process of capitalist exchange, reinforced legal norms which protect the capitalist right to exchange labour-power as a commodity on the market can contribute to the stability sought by capital within the precarious world of globalising capital. Given the strong normative intent and power of globalised systems of law to promote liberal market morality as ‘natural, neutral, efficient and just’ – and given that the EU has already acted as an institutional model for regional integration schemes internationally – the potential impact of such legal norms and ideology is considerable.37
The rights as outlined in Amsterdam such as the provisions designed to eradicate discrimination on the grounds of sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age and sexual orientation are potentially political, not merely economic, rights of workers. Given however that the whole thrust of the integration project is to strengthen the competitivity of European business we might want to ask why it is that capital would have to concede such apparently enormous inroads into its ability to squeeze surplus value out of recalcitrant labour. One answer is to point out that such political rights as legal ‘norms’ have the effect of stripping workers of extraneous identities to produce the commodity for which capital craves – unfettered labour-power. The legal norms which institutionalise these ostensible rights for workers have then the result of securing actual improved conditions of exchange for capital as well as seeming political advances for workers.
There is a further more practical, more empirical and more mundane argument as to why these ostensible rights for workers in production turn out to be in fact rights for capital in exchange and why political rights for workers turn out to be economic rights for capital. First, the social rights which were institutionalised in the Social Chapter in Maastricht are almost unenforceable. This is partly because they are broadly worded and hugely general and partly because they are meant to be implemented by ‘management and workers’ together.38 The emphasis is on implementation through consultation in the context of dialogue (Hantrais 1995: 11). It goes without saying that the deep structural and resource inequalities between these two ‘sides’ means that the activity of implementing specific rights will hardly be an equitable process.
Second, although the Amsterdam treaty suggests that sanctions can be imposed upon states that offend against ‘democracy, rule of law and human rights’, given the notion of democracy is as some form of regulated liberalism, and given the prevailing social relations of power are skewed in the direction of capital and not labour, such sanctions are unlikely to be forthcoming in the areas of preserving and extending radical versions of rights. These provisions were in fact designed to provide possible sanctions against ex-Communist states which could become members in any enlargement process. Given the EU’s historically specific view of what constitutes rights, it remains likely that such provisions would not be used to maintain the once taken-for-granted collective social provisions in east European societies in, for instance, education and pensions or trade union rights over and against management but instead to insist on further moves to institutionalise the rights of self-interested competitive monads in the war of all against all which constitutes turn-of-the-century western Europe.
Obstacles to even something which could be considered a basic right within the EU, the free movement of workers, are considerable. This is directly the case for refugees, asylum seekers and criminals but is also so in a less obvious way for those who may have the formal right of free movement but who may be prevented from doing so by lack of money or knowledge (languages, unfamiliarity with different national bureaucratic practices) or simply because given the insecurity of capitalist social relations it is easier to stay within a known community than to move out of it. And third, and perhaps most obviously, the rights mentioned at Amsterdam are not really rights at all. Citizenship is a thin version of a right to vote in some elections (although not general elections) and is entirely dependent anyway on the national states deciding who should be granted national citizenship. The rights not to be discriminated against are not actualised – just mentioned as ‘future possibilities’.
Politics: from freedoms for capital to emancipation for individuals
At first glance, the politics of the rights agenda seems to set in place a pretty firm structure of capitalist domination. I want to suggest here why this might not be so but first need to consider what the potential political effects of such a structure might be. Holloway and Picciotto have suggested that state intervention within capitalist social relations is designed ‘to subject to the law of value, albeit indirectly, activities which for some reason cannot be directly subjected to its operations by individual capitals’ (1980: 133). If this is so we might want to consider what activities the European Union undertakes which either the state does not or does less efficiently. One of the differences between the EU and actual, historically developed member-states, is that the EU has not been directly implicated in historic class struggles. In this way it is ‘divorced’ from class politics. In addition, as we have seen, the system of legal and political norms developed in the EU specifically formalises an abstract conception of the individual as self-interested monad who relates to the European Union in a way which is seemingly separate from any class location with capitalist social relations.39 In this particular location, then, the European Union, not only is the ‘economic’ function of the worker separated from ‘political’ existence, but the worker is at the same time potentially separated from any notion of class solidarity. The undifferentiated, alienated, advanced capitalist individual comes more and more to resemble the ‘potato’ made famous by Marx in his description of the relations of peasants thrown together by circumstances but without social bonds that could create the possibilities for collective action.40
In addition the political project of the European Union rights agenda can only be associated with the promotion of democracy if that notion is no longer equated with any form of political (or human) emancipatory project but simply seen as regulated liberalism. Rights based on the idea of the unindividuated individual are incorporated into legal frameworks and ideologies so that even liberal democracy, not in itself ever a concept or practice which has leant itself to hugely emancipatory projects, becomes further truncated as a synonym for a social and political system whose organising principle is solely that of liberal individualism.
I want to insist, however, on an understanding that being given rights within the European integration process is not for the workers themselves but their labour-power (their capacity to work) as a commodity in the production process. The worker in real life, however (as opposed to his or her existence within the project of the capitalist relations of European integration), is much more than the sum of their labour-capacity. The possibilities of a counter-offensive against the alienating tendencies of the European integration project are therefore buried within that self-same project. For instance, given that ideologies of anti-discrimination – even though these are founded in narrow workplace rights – are established within the project of European integration, these are unlikely to remain located in the workplace arena. A worker, for instance, who is protected from discrimination at work on the basis of race is very likely to carry over the ‘rightness’ of that anti-discrimination ideology into civic, social and political life. Rights talk generated or sustained through market relations can then provide legitimacy for wider projects of social emancipation. Whether they will do so or not will depend on a number of issues – not least the collective agency of those caught up in the contradictions of these capitalist relations.
There are other implications that flow from an historical materialist interpretation of the Amsterdam treaty in the context of a discussion of European integration and I can only point to some of them here. Peter Burnham (1999) has argued that EMU should be understood as primarily an anti-inflationary strategy designed to maintain European competitivity at the expense of working people (Burnham 1999: 37–54). The ‘rights agenda’ of Amsterdam should be seen in this context. It does not reduce personal and economic insecurity at work or in the wider society precisely because the prevailing unequal social relations of production do not permit extensive democracy to operate so that the majority (who do not own the means of production) would be able to ensure their interests were represented across Europe.
Conversely the rights provisions of the Amsterdam treaty and of previous treaties, particularly Maastricht, do not represent the actions of a confident capitalist class. It must be the first time in history that for instance citizenship – even in such a truncated form as is on offer in the EU – was given without an immense political battle to achieve it. This is partly a reaction to the ‘democratic deficit’ problem for the elites who shape the European integration project. Within states, liberal democratic provisions help to obscure real dynamics of inequality. They usually also allow for an element of redistribution of wealth. Within the EU, the rights provisions have failed to provide both political legitimacy for European integration and to supply any redistributive effect to individuals. This may well be problematic for capital given the intensification of the European integration process through the establishment of the Euro. Capital risks fronting an EU-focused economic project very visibly based upon actual inequality (especially given a European recession) with only a threadbare and unconvincing legitimation project unable to absorb the fall-out from working-class reaction to any crisis.
The EU's pursuit of liberal democracy internationally
Historical materialism might also help us explain the puzzle of why the EU insists on introducing human rights and democracy clauses into its agreements with third countries. These clauses have sometimes caused difficulties for the EU in terms of its ability to pursue primary objectives such as the expansion of open free-trade markets. Australia objected to such clauses as did Mexico and it is certain that the United States would do so in any agreement between the two. The rationale becomes clearer if we can understand the rights clauses as being integral to a European integration project which wants to optimise efficiency for all aspects of the processes of production and exchange. This does not mean to say that human rights clauses, if implemented, would not have a significant effect on the lives of many suffering from the abrogation of much more than their rights at work. Two things follow. If the first priority is to maintain open exchange – as with Mexico and China for instance – trade provisions are likely to achieve priority. But in the world of globalisation that implies the spread of the optimum conditions for the expansion of capital, the European Union will continue to promote liberal democracy world-wide as what is being promoted is the politics of regulated liberalism. Globalising capital does not need liberal democracy in any structural-functional sense. As we have seen, the political system of regulated liberalism, in an ontological sense, is constituted by globalising capital.
Why use historical materialist explanations?
Historical materialism, like any other theory, can be judged by how well it satisfies certain criteria which include explanatory power, normative acceptability and, perhaps more controversially, emancipatory potential. By explanatory power, I mean the ability to illuminate aspects of human society that are not immediately available to us through observation. A satisfactory explanatory theory is governed by rules of logic and consistency with an appeal to verification (or the possibility of falsification) by reference to empirical research. Normative acceptability means that due consideration is given to the ethical implications of the theory. Emancipatory theory links the empirical and normative aspects of theorising to social practice whose intention is to bring about the emancipation of the human individual through political change. These criteria are of course contestable but it is nevertheless probably uncontroversial to state that, irrespective of the disagreements as to their respective legitimacy (particularly the last), all three are located within recognisable epistemological traditions.41
Historical materialism is both explanatory and normative. It can help us understand the obscure, opaque and contradictory processes of European integration but at the same time it takes a point of view, a perspective. At one level of abstraction, we could say that the theory is judged as against its ethical relationship with the individual in society. The priority is to explain European integration as it affects human lives. These are first-order concerns. But the normative concern is more specific than just with the individual per se. The capitalist mode of production is about social relations between men and women who are constituted in classes and who are incorporated within that mode of production in an unequal manner. This is a dynamic system and it is not ‘natural’ in that all societies have always been constituted in this way and will necessarily continue to be constituted in this way in the future. Human agency is necessary to effect change, and ideas of rights as part of even a weak democratic project – which are, if not generated, supported by the project of European capitalist integration – could encourage European peoples to expect and demand deeper forms of democracy. On the other hand, as Mark Rupert has pointed out, there is no guarantee of automatic emancipatory outcomes in the globalising world. It is equally possible that the sorts of employment insecurity generated as the other side of the ‘rights’ coin of capitalist integration could provide a space for authoritarian and populist ideologies (Rupert 2000).
In terms of the last criteria for judging theory, the emancipatory criteria, the argument is that the rights agenda of Amsterdam and Maastricht, of the entire European integration project, generates ‘conditions of possibility’ for the human beings that it affects. Liberal democratising projects legitimate the pursuit of rights within the context of some version of democracy. It would take human agency to demand more democracy and deeper human rights than those proposed by the European integration project. The Green movement in Europe is one example of a group that has mobilised around the institutions of the European Union to promote what has sometimes (although not always) been a very radical vision of human emancipation. This political project has not been confined to the realm of environmental issues but has sometimes expanded to include action and mobilisation around issues such as the promotion of peace internationally (for instance in the 1980s Central America conflict) and wider political participation within the European Union. Historical materialist theories would also suggest that the exploitation which underpins the formal relations of political equality can only be overcome through what used to be termed class struggle. In contemporary parlance what we mean is that it is only the purposeful activity of collective human agency organised around many of the axes of disenfranchisement generated by and through capitalist social relations, the most fundamental being the broad relationship between those who depend on wage labour and those who do not, which can transform and transcend those relations of production.
Conclusion
Historical materialism draws from a labour theory of value whose intellectual heritage is as much John Locke and David Ricardo as Marx and offers explanatory power in terms of its reminder that the relationships of politics and economics, labour and capital, society and technology are not accidental or conjunctural but neither are they structurally determined. Outcomes are shaped by human agency.42 Historical materialism provides explanatory, normative and emancipatory potential for investigating the project of European integration. It is not an interest-driven theory in that it predicates explanation on an individual who operates in social life through a process of instrumental, preference-optimising rationality. It is a theory instead that argues that individuals both constitute and are constituted by the historically specific societies in which they live. These societies are understood as modes of production which are defined by their social relations. In modern times the social relations of production are capitalist in that the society is constituted through the very specific way that capital is valorised – in respect to the activities of human beings within the labour process. The criteria for judging European integration and the Amsterdam treaty must be as to whether it satisfies the demands and needs of workers and the excluded – in Europe and elsewhere. The theory is emancipatory in that it unfolds the mystifications of the processes of integration and at the same time suggests that the processes of exploitation inherent to it are not natural, inevitable or determined. To finish with an apt Marxian aphorism: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please: they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’ (Marx 1990: 15).
Notes
1. This chapter takes as the core of historical materialist thought that developed by Marx (not his apologists or detractors).
2. Clive Church and David Phinnemore have pointed out that the codification of all the EU/EC treaties envisaged by the Amsterdam treaty as consolidating and simplifying exercises has, in some cases, led to more confusion. See Church and Phinnemore, Amsterdam: the Disappearing Treaty’, mimeo, undated but 1998. In this chapter and unless otherwise specified, I utilise the Amsterdam codification of treaty clauses. I am indebted to Clive Church for his kindness in giving me a copy of his ‘Consolidated Version of the Treaty on European Union’ (mimeo), as well as a copy of the annex to the Amsterdam treaty entitled ‘Tables of Equivalencies Referred to in Article 11 of the Treaty of Amsterdam’.
3. I am very aware that I am begging a good number of questions with this statement. However, it would take another article to trace these relationships and in any case my interpretation is not very controversial. The point is that my investigation of the ‘rights agenda’ does not preclude either in fact or in logic the legitimacy of other interpretations of the process. This does not mean that every explanation carries equal weight. An investigation of inter-elite motivation and behaviour might say something interesting about those elites but for the purposes of explaining European integration, it is something of a second-order dynamic.
4. Author’s emphasis.
5. Author’s emphasis.
6. Author’s emphasis.
7. Author’s emphasis.
8. Author’s emphasis.
9. For detail on the social relations of capitalist accumulation see Marx, Capital Volume 1.
10. There are of course important debates about what constitutes the nature of the state in capitalist society. The approach of John Holloway and Sol Picciotto seems particularly fruitful to me. They reject both economism and politicism as satisfactory approaches, and discuss the state as ‘a particular surface (or phenomenal) form of the capital relation, i.e. of an historically specific form of class domination’. See Holloway and Picciotto, ‘Capital, Crisis and the State’, in Capital and Class, 2, Summer (1977): 77.
11. For a useful commentary on the liberal component of liberal democracy see Bhikhu Parekh, ‘The Cultural Particularity of Liberal Democracy’.
12. There is an appreciation in some of the globalisation literature of the tensions involved between notions of democracy as equality and the constraints set by globalising capital. See for example Lester Thurow, The Future of Capitalism. One wide discussion argues that globalisation produces both universalising consumerist homogeneity at the same time as generating essentialist fundamentalisms and that both of these are inimical to democracy. See Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad Vs. McWorld. For a discussion which specifically refers to the project of European integration see Philip Resnick, ‘Global Democracy: Ideals and Reality’. For a discussion of the tensions between capitalism and democracy see chapter six, entitled ‘Pluralism, Corporate Capitalism and the State’, in David Held, Models of Democracy. Paul Cammack utilises similar premises to those developed in this chapter to provide an excellent discussion of the relationship between capitalism and democracy in a case study on Latin America, reminding us that, in the context of capitalist relations of production, ‘[O]ne can certainly have meaningful citizenship without democracy’. See Paul Cammack, ‘Democratization and Citizenship in Latin America’, p. 193.
13. For one of the most explicit understandings of democracy as purely procedural see the influential Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the late Twentieth Century.
14. John Hoffman, ‘Liberals versus Socialists: Who are the True Democrats?’, pp.40–1. The quote from Marx is Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970), p.586.
15. I have discussed these relationships more extensively in Hazel Smith, ‘The Silence of the Academics’.
16. Although Robert Cox does not work within the framework of the labour theory of value as developed by Marx, he can be credited with introducing into the mainstream of international relations scholarship the idea that historical materialism can be used as a legitimate intellectual resource. See his seminal ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory’, in Robert O. Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
17. Robert Cox, ‘Structural Issues of Global Governance: Implications for Europe’, in Stephen Gill (ed.), Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Cox’s work has provided the intellectual foundation for investigation of European integration. See for instance Stephen Gill, ‘European Governance and New Constitutionalism: Economic and Monetary Union and Alternatives to Disciplinary Neoliberalism in Europe’, New Political Economy, 3, 1 (1998): 5–26.
18. One useful critical review from within the perspective of this approach is Magnus Ryner, ‘Gramscian International Political Economy as Critical Research on European Regionalism: Contributions and Limitations’. Paper to BISA, December 1997. For an ‘external’ critique of these approaches see Peter Burnham, ‘Neo-Gramscian Hegemony and the International Order’, Capital and Class, 45, Autumn (1991): 73–93.
19. The discipline of international relations has suffered from caricatured interpretations of historical materialism. See particularly V. Kubalkova and A.A. Cruikshank, ‘The “New Cold War” in Critical International Relations Studies’, Review of International Studies, 12, 3, July (1986); and V. Kubalkova and A.A. Cruikshank, ‘A Rambo Come to Judgement: Fred Halliday, Marxism and International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 15, 1, January (1989).
20. A good survey of integration theory, particularly as pertaining to early theories of European integration, is Michael Hodges, ‘Integration Theory’. For a more recent perspective that adopts the consociationalist interpretation see Paul Taylor, The European Union in the 1990s.
21. For discussion of the historical materialist theorising that has emerged in the international relations discipline see Hazel Smith, ‘Marxism and International Relations Theory’.
22. See Kubalkova and Cruikshank, ‘The “New Cold War” in Critical International Relations Studies’, and Kubalkova and Cruikshank, ‘A Rambo Come to Judgement: Fred Halliday, Marxism and International Relations’.
23. Those analysts who wish to go further than the institutionalist bias might allow remain obligated to start from within this framework – even if they wish to transcend it. I have developed this critique to evaluate EU foreign policy studies. The argument can be made in respect of European integration studies more generally. See Hazel Smith, ‘Actually Existing Foreign Policy – Or Not?: The EU in Latin and Central America’, in John Peterson and Helene Sjursen (eds), A Common Foreign Policy for Europe (London: Routledge, 1998).
24. Ibid.
25. For details see Clive Archer and Fiona Butler, chapter 4 entitled ‘Economic and Monetary Union’, in Clive Archer and Fiona Butler, The European Union: Structure and Process, pp. 83–97.
26. For the EEC treaty see Treaties establishing the European Communities, abridged edition (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 1987), pp. 115–383.
27. Information on the social charter in this paragraph and quote taken from Neill Nugent, The Government and Politics of the European Community.
28. The TEI is reprinted in Martin Holland, European Community Integration (London: Pinter, 1993).
29. For discussion see Communication from the Commission to the Council and the European Parliament, The European Union and the External Dimension of Human Rights Policy: from Rome to Maastricht and Beyond, Com (95) 567 final, Brussels, 22 November 1995, pp. 15–16.
30. There is some useful work on what is happening – much less on why we see these developments. For the former see Karen Elizabeth Smith, ‘The Use of Political Conditionality in the EU’s Relations with Third Countries: How Effective?’, EUI Working papers, SPS No. 97/7 (San Domenico: European University Institute, Florence, 1997).
31. Michel, Petite Treaty of Amsterdam, Annex entitled ‘Assessing the Achievements of the Commission’s Objectives for the IGC’, p.5.
32. Petite, The Treaty of Amsterdam, p.9 of 14.
33. ibid., p.4 of 14.
34. The ‘Reflection Group’ chaired by Carlos Westendorp met in 1995 and established a menu of areas of involvement for the IGC. The Reflection Group identified the broad areas for IGC involvement as, first, the citizen and the Union, and, second, efficiency and democracy in the Union. The Amsterdam treaty remained faithful to these topics – producing decisions in six areas – freedom, security and justice, the union and the citizen, external policy, the institutions, the management of cooperation (the flexibility provisions) and an agreement to codify and simplify the existing treaties. See Reflection Group’s Report, SN 520/95 (REFLEX 21), mimeo, 1995.
35. Michel Petite, The Treaty of Amsterdam, essay located on http://www.jeanmonnetprogram.org/papers/98/98–2-.html.
36. See Church and Phinnemore for a discussion of how these thematic areas were translated into treaty amendmanets and the consequences of this translation.
37. For discussion of the role of law in globalisation see the Claire Cutler chapter, this volume.
38. The ‘Protocol on Social Policy’ of the Treaty on European Union is reproduced in Clive H. Church and David Phinnemore, European Union and European Community, pp.422–5.
39. John Holloway discusses a similar process in the historical creation of citizens within capitalist states where ‘being treated as a citizen is thus a process of abstraction from class – a process of abstract individualism in which class conflicts are transformed into individual problems’. See John Holloway, ‘State as Class Practice’, Research in Political Economy, Vol. 3 (Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1980), pp. 12–13.
40. The metaphorical allusion is used by John Holloway to describe the creation of political constituencies in representative democracy. See John Holloway, ‘State as Class Practice’, p. 14.
41. Epistemological debates have characterised the discipline of international relations in the last ten years. For my discussion of these in the context of an historical materialist theory of international relations see Hazel Smith, ‘The Silence of the Academics: International Social Theory, Historical Materialism and Political Values’, Review of International Studies, 22, 2, April (1996).
42. For a discussion that argues that modern concepts of the individual, as a bearer of freedom, rights, obligation and justice and which derive from Hobbes and Locke, depend upon a notion of the individual as the possessor and owner of his or her labour, see the seminal C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
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