Rendering the Contingent Necessary: New Labour's Neo-Liberal Conversion and the Discourse of Globalisation (PSGE 8.4 1998), Colin Hay and Matthew Watson

The thousands of books and articles on Charles de Gaulle's policy toward European integration, whether written by historians, social scientists, or commentators, universally accord primary explanatory importance to the General's distinctive geopolitical ideology. In explaining his… (More) The thousands of books and articles on Charles de Gaulle's policy toward European integration, whether written by historians, social scientists, or commentators, universally accord primary explanatory importance to the General's distinctive geopolitical ideology. In explaining his motivations, only secondary significance, if any at all, is attached to commercial considerations. This paper seeks to reverse this historiographical consensus by examining the four major decisions toward European integration during de Gaulle's presidency: the decisions to remain in the Common Market in 1958, to propose the Fouchet Plan in the early 1960s, to veto British accession to the EC, and to provoke the "empty chair" crisis in 1965-1966, resulting in the "Luxembourg Compromise." In each case, the overwhelming bulk of the primary evidence-speeches, memoirs, or government documents-suggests that de Gaulle's primary motivation was economic, not geopolitical or ideological. Like his predecessors and successors, de Gaulle sought to promote French industry and agriculture by establishing protected markets for their export products. This empirical finding has three broader implications: (l) For those interested in the European Union, it suggests that regional integration has been driven primarily by economic, not geopolitical considerations-even in the "least likely" case. (2) For those interested in the role of ideas in foreign policy, it suggests that strong interest groups in a democracy limit the impact of a leader's geopolitical ideology--even where the executive has very broad institutional autonomy. De Gaulle was a democratic statesman first and an ideological visionary second. (3) For those who employ qualitative case-study methods, it suggests that even a broad, representative sample of secondary sources does not create a firm basis for causal inference. For political scientists, as for historians, there is in many cases no reliable alternative to primary-source research. ·The author welcomes comments at: Dept. of Government and Center for European Studies, 27 Kirkland Street, Cambridge MA 02138; Tel.: (617) 495·4303, x205; Fax: (617) 495-8509; E-mail: moravcs@{as.harvard.edu (Less)

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Tags:	european studies Conversion harvard Globalization CES neoliberal New Labour european studies Conversion harvard Globalization CES neoliberal New Labour (fewer)

Rendering the Contingent Necessary: New Labour's Neo-Liberal Conversion and the Discourse of Globalisation (PSGE 8.4 1998), Colin Hay and Matthew Watson

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