Unity in this sense became the highest regulative principle of modern Europe. The institutional reality of the new Europe that resulted was measured by the extent to which this uniformity through harmonization was successfully achieved in all policy domains, the Common Agricultural Policy, market regulation, competition policy, environmental policy, research policy, and many others. The more successfully EU policy operated under this primacy of uniformity, the greater the resistance it called forth and the more manifest its counterproductive effects became.
In practice, and as a consequence of these counterproductive effects, European politics has tended to relax the principle of uniform integration in the past in many ways. In its internal design of policies, various exceptional permissions, saving clauses, interim regulations, postponements, etc. have been conceded to individual member states, in order to make agreements more acceptable for them. Moreover, with the Maastricht Treaty, opting out possibilities were introduced, for example, in European social policy, to overcome the resistance of the British government and the Danish citizens. However, it is important to keep in mind that all these deviations from the common rule have been introduced with the aim of reinforcing and supporting the ‘community method’ and the principle of uniform integration, rather than replacing it with an alternative integration strategy.
This is exactly what cosmopolitan integration is about. Cosmopolitan integration, by contrast, is based on a paradigm shift whose principle is that diversity is not the problem but the solution. Any further integration of Europe must be guided not by the traditional ideas of uniformity in a European federal state, but must take the unalterable diversity of Europe as its starting-point. It must view difference not as the problem, as a restriction to economic transactions that has to be exterminated, but as a potential to be preserved and exploited (Landfried, 2002). Basically, what is at stake is maintaining a certain degree of uniformity, especially legal uniformity, in an integrated Europe, without damaging the autonomy of its member states, on the one hand, and the prospects of the European project, on the other.
Actually, there is nothing new in the practice of differentiated integration in Europe; rather, it has shaped Europeanization from the outset. As a political concept, differentiated integration was first devised in the latter half of the 1970s in an effort to overcome the stagnation of the integration process.4 It was rediscovered – hesitantly, because it was tainted with the stigma of being a highly problematic second-best solution – in the mid-1990s when the Community undertook to bring its institutions, policies and procedures into conformity with the economic and monetary union agreed upon in the Maastricht Treaty and to prepare them for the imminent eastern expansion.5 In this context, the principle
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European Journal of Social Theory 10(1)
of differentiated integration was assigned the role of ‘ultimate means’ (Art. 43, 1
c EUT-A); it was supposed to function as a ‘rescue concept’ (Janning, 1998), as the ‘dynamic preliminary and intermediate stage towards complete integration’
(Weinstock, 1984).
Our thesis is that the principle of differentiated integration must be radical-ized and extended in a cosmopolitan Europe. The principle of differentiated integration is an indispensable precondition for the realization of the recognition of difference in a cosmopolitan Europe. Only in this way is it possible to reconcile two at first sight mutually exclusive demands: the recognition of difference, on the one hand, and the integration of the different, on the other.
How, then, can the claim to uniformity – in particular, to legal uniformity –
which is constitutive for modern states, be upheld in an integrated Europe without impairing the autonomy of its constitutive elements? Here numerous answers of the most diverse kinds have been proposed. The key point is that the potential of the concept of differentiated integration can be fully exploited only when it is spelled out completely in both its dimensions, namely, differentiation and integration. Consequently, we can distinguish two principal varieties of differentiated integration:
1. Forms of difference-friendly integration (e.g. the principle of mutual recognition). Here the claim to complete integration is maintained but it is put into effect in ways hospitable to difference; hence, it is more tolerant towards national, regional and local peculiarities than the usual harmonization approach.
2. Forms of integration-friendly differentiation (e.g. functional differentiation, geographical differentiation). Here the claim that all member states must accomplish everything simultaneously is abandoned. Integration is restricted accordingly and the claim to complete integration is subject to spatial, temporal and material limitations.
We would like to illustrate this by three examples: (1) the principle of mutual recognition; (2) the method of open coordination; and (3) the concept of variable geometry.
First, the principle of mutual recognition, which has hitherto been applied primarily in regulatory policy, is based on the principle of the qualified recognition of difference (Scharpf, 2003: 242). In this case, the EU renounces the aim of harmonizing national regulations completely at the European level and allows national regulations to be upheld on the condition that they satisfy quite specific requirements stipulated at the European level. Among the latter is the specific requirement that they be compatible with each other and satisfy the functional requirements of European regulation. In this case, the member states commit themselves to recognizing their respective national regulations and thereby to Europeanize them. Thus, it becomes possible in the area of regulative policy to arrive at cosmopolitan, i.e. inclusive, solutions, hence regulations that satisfy both the requirement of European regulation and the desire to preserve national difference.6
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Beck & Grande
Cosmopolitanism: Europe’s Way out of Crisis