Department of Political and Social Sciences (SPS)

ABSTRACT In “Europe’s Troubles,” Sebastian Rosato argues that the high water mark of European integration has passed and that the fate of the European Union (EU) is increasingly uncertain.1 The European project, he claims, had a geostrategic imperative during the Cold War: unable to match Soviet power individually, the small and medium powers of Western Europe sought to balance the Soviet Union through economic integration. The Soviet collapse and the end of the Cold War removed the strategic rationale for preserving the community that European governments had built over many decades. At best, according to Rosato, Europe will continue to muddle along. At worst, the entire European project will collapse. Rosato’s article is an important contribution to the debate on the origins and persistence of European integration. His argument that integration was motivated by Eurasian balance of power considerations, however, leads him to make a number of dubious theoretical and empirical claims. Theoretically, Rosato’s structural realist premises are indeterminate regarding the magnitude, scope, and direction of European integration. Empirically, Rosato is forced to overstate the scope and degree of European integration during the Cold War and to understate the achievements and advances after the Soviet collapse. In addition, Europe’s troubles today are not only different from what Rosato suggests, but also more severe. Structural realism offers contradictory predictions and interpretations of post–Cold War European integration—especially in security and defense affairs. Contrary to Rosato, who predicts the EU fraying and fissuring in the absence of the Soviet Union,other structural realists have explained theoretically (especially as a reaction to American unipolarity) and documented empirically how the post–Cold War political landscape has led to greater European cooperation in security and defense, not less.2 Rosato’s exclusive focus on the balance of power largely ignores Western European threat perceptions. Perceptions of the Soviet threat rose and fell throughout the Cold War period. Some national leaders, such as French President Charles de Gaulle, did not view the Soviet Union as an implacable enemy, but instead, to the consternation of Washington, at times skillfully maneuvered between the two superpowers. Moreover, if regional power imbalance is all that matters, one is left to wonder why the small and medium powers of North and Central America did not take similar steps to integrate to balance the United States. Absent any account of threat perceptions, domestic politics, and the preferences, goals, and interplay of the main actors, this failure makes little sense. Monocausal explanations such as Rosato’s have trouble explaining events as complex and contingent as European integration over extended spans of time. Eurasian geostrategic power considerations were at best one of several reasons that leaders in Western Europe pursued integration in the immediate postwar period. Rosato states that the emergence of the EU “is best understood as a response to the postwar distribution of power” (p. 47). “Given the Soviet Union’s massive power advantage,” he writes, “the Europeans understood that they could compete effectively only if they built a single regional economy governed by a central authority” (p. 62). Rosato’s interpretation of European Cold War history vastly overstates the breadth and depth of integration during this period, and misstates the main motivation behind it. The 1951 Treaty of Paris, the first step toward what is today the European Union, formally established the European Coal and Steel Community, integrating the most important war industries of the time. The framers of the treaty—in the words of the 1950 Schuman Declaration—were more interested in making war between France and Germany “not merely unthinkable but materially impossible.”3 Sublimating the Franco-German rivalry, not balancing the Soviet Union, was the key motive behind the early moves toward European integration following World War II. In 1957 the “Six”—France, West Germany, Italy, and the Benelux countries—established the rudiments of a common market, including a customs union and the removal of internal barriers to trade in various economic areas. Although historically significant given Europe’s history of war and destruction, the first steps toward economic integration remained limited...

This policy paper examines the importance of France and Franco-German bilateralism for Germany's power and influence (Gestaltungsmacht) in Europe, as well as for its ability to safeguard German interests in the context of European integration and EU affairs. This policy paper holds that, for the time being, France remains indispensable and irreplaceable as Germany's central foreign policy ally. In order to rejuvenate Franco-German bilateralism, and to translate it for twenty-first century European and international affairs, however, France will have to implement the necessary economic, political, and social reforms announced by its new president Emmanuel Macron in order to modernize and to re-energize the country. Germany, on the other hand, must reconsider its historical reluctance or outright refusal to take on more responsibility internationally—not least in foreign policy, security and defence.