Global Discourse • vol 9 • no 1 • 31–44

© Bristol University Press 2019 • Online ISSN 2043-7897

https://doi.org/10.1332/204378918X1545393450591

Themed Issue: The Limits of EUrope: Identities, Spaces, Values

Part I: De-Europanisation Theory

RESEARCH

Theorising the EU in crisis:

de-Europeanisation as disintegration
Ben Rosamond, br@ifs.ku.dk
Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

The current ‘perfect storm’ of European crises seems to provide evidence that the EU is
suffering from severe tensions that could reverse many of the key integration gains of the past
seven decades. The presence of apparently existential threats to the EU has provoked calls to
theorise ‘disintegration’. This presumes, first and foremost, that scholarship is lagging behind
urgent real world developments. It could also be argued that any attempt to theorise integration
should by definition be capable of theorising disintegration. EU studies scholarship has tended,
in recent years, to shy away from the analysis of integration, developing instead a range of sub-
literatures that together presume institutional and systemic resilience. The paper makes three
broad arguments. First, it notes that any return to the analysis of integration/disintegration
presents a risk for scholarship, namely the fallacy of sampling from past experience to project
future probabilities. Second, it demonstrates that earlier neofunctionalist scholarship had,
in fact, developed quite sophisticated accounts of disintegration, which, in turn illustrated
the importance of understanding the key role played by political economy and sociological
dynamics in European integration. Finally, the paper explores the ways in which extant scholarly
knowledge about the EU may inhibit the development of robust policy understanding of
potentially disintegrative dynamics.

Key words European Union • disintegration • Brexit • crisis • neofunctionalism

To cite this article: Rosamond, B. (2019) Theorising the EU in crisis: de-Europeanisation

as disintegration, Global Discourse, vol 9, no 1, 31-44,
DOI: 10.1332/204378918X1545393450591

Introduction
Brexit has prompted renewed calls for EU studies to take seriously the problem of
European disintegration. In fact, ‘disintegration’ has been on the field’s agenda for
some time. With the EU suffering a ‘perfect storm’ of crises, some of which are
thought to be existential, it is perhaps unsurprising that there have been calls to

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theorise disintegration (Zielonka, 2014) as well as a few attempts to map out what a
theory of disintegration might look like (Jones, 2018; Vollaard, 2014, 2018; Webber,
2014). Part of the turn to disintegration has involved thinking through how and
whether standard theories of integration would cope with the unravelling of the EU
(Schmitter and Lefkofridi, 2016) or at least to posit ‘disintegration’ as an outcome
that could follow from the interactive effects of several independent ‘crisis’ variables
(Schimmelfennig, 2017). Meanwhile journalistic treatments, confronted by the
eurozone and refugee crises along with the prospective exit of a key member state,
often question the sustainability of the EU project. There is a clear logic at work
here. Most simply, the idea that the real world of the EU is changing provokes calls
for an appropriate response from those charged with generating systematic knowledge
about the EU. The disintegration turn presumes, first and foremost, that there is
empirical evidence of the EU suffering from severe tensions that, in turn, are likely
to reverse some, if not all, of the key integration gains of the past seven decades.1 It
follows that the field’s theoretical coordinates need to be reset in ways that presume
the possibility of integrative collapse or decline. Analytically, and independently of
any trends or events in the real world of the field’s object (the EU), there are strong
grounds to suppose that any theory of integration must, as a matter of methodological
principle, be able to explain disintegration as well as integration. These two stimuli
are not necessarily incompatible, but they do emerge from quite distinctive concerns
about why extant theory is lacking or flawed. In the first, theory needs to get its act
together because the world it seeks to account for is changing in important ways. In
the second, it has always been incumbent upon theorists to specify the conditions
under which disintegration would occur; the absence of a theory of disintegration
thus reflects poorly on established theories of integration.
Despite this evidence of a new concern with disintegration, it is worth noting
that the field of EU studies (or at least some portions of it) has for quite some
time been less interested in ‘integration’ (and thus, by the logic suggested above,
‘disintegration’) as a central defining problematique than it once was (Manners and
Rosamond, 2018). At least this has been the longstanding and well-established premise
of scholars interested in treating the EU as a ‘normal’ polity with state-like features
(Hix, 2007; Kreppel, 2012). The supposed analytical gain here is well known: the
EU becomes compatible with all other political systems and the sui generis problem –
the analytical inconvenience of there being only one case of the phenomenon under
investigation – is solved. That said, one question worth posing is whether the move
away from ‘integration’ as subject matter has rendered the field less able to analyse
disintegration? Or put a little more strongly, has the field of EU studies (especially in
its political science mode) rendered itself incapable of analysing the possible collapse
of its primary object? By focusing on a range of political system, governance and
institutional processes, it could be argued that EU studies as a field tends towards a
kind of inertia bias which blinds it to the importance of potentially disintegrative
happenings/outcomes and thereby leads scholarship, as a matter of course, to assume
institutional continuity as near axiomatic rather than to posit radical institutional
change as an immanent possibility.
These questions are worth posing for what they have to say about the state of EU
studies, but they also remind us of important broader critiques of political science,
not least its problematic tendency to project future probabilities from recurrent
sampling of the past record (Blyth, 2006). The cautionary tale of Soviet Studies,

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seemingly blindsided by the sudden collapse of the USSR, looms large here (Cox,
1998). The cautionary tale has two aspects. In the first, the claim is that Sovietology
became so fixated on the mechanics of its object that it focused overwhelmingly on
how the system reproduced itself. As such it was blinded to a series of exogenous
and endogenous factors that together threatened sudden systemic collapse (and
which were – arguably – hiding in plain sight). This might imply that all fields
(whether disciplines, subfields or area specialisms) have an inherent tendency towards
conservative interpretations of their object.2 The second aspect is related to the ways
in which academic fields become more and more specialised over time (Becher
and Trowler, 2001). As fields become sustainable communities of scholarship with
professional circuits, academic norms and ‘literatures’ of their own, so they tend
(inevitably) towards self-referentialism. This can compound the fallacy of sampling
from past experience to project future probabilities by ruling out pasts other than that
ascribed by the field to the object in question. Taken together, it might be argued that
these sociology of knowledge factors are generative of a kind of bias where scholars
become incapable of anticipating or even recognising ‘black swan’ events. To return
to our example, the damage done to Soviet Studies was not solely down to a failure
to predict the collapse of the USSR ex ante. It was also because the field lacked the
conceptual toolkit to properly understand what had happened to its object ex post.
If we push this even further to argue that in some cases (like the EU) the object
and knowledge about the object are potentially co-constitutive (Adler-Nissen and
Kropp, 2015; Mudge and Vauchez, 2012; Rosamond, 2015; White, 2003), then the
implications of not thinking through disintegration become more complex. For one
thing, the collapse of the EU would no doubt sound the death knell of EU studies.
More interestingly, disintegration might follow from the failure of key policy actors
to grasp the gravity of the situation in which they find themselves. If aspects of EU
studies form key parts of the road map of EU policy actors (particularly EU policy
actors), then their understandings of relevant problem and solution sets are likely to
have been skewed by the field’s inadequate grasp of disintegrative forces. This is very
much the story related by White (2003) in his discussion of the Hallstein Commission’s
internalisation of the conceptual vocabulary of (early) neofunctionalism. Because of
this, argues White, Hallstein and his key officials completely failed to grasp the threat
posed by De Gaulle and the ‘empty chair crisis’ of 1965–66 for the simple reason
that their collective mindset did not enable them to see the assertive manoeuvring
of the French government as a crisis.
This paper is attentive to these concerns and represents a tentative exploration
of how we might usefully think about disintegration in EU studies. In so doing, it
explores how the field – particularly in the phase of classical integration theory – has
conceptualised disintegration. That there is an old literature on disintegration may
come as a surprise to those who have simply assumed that integration theorists of
the past had relied upon normatively loaded, unidirectional models of integration
that were only capable of correction by doses of intergovernmental scepticism.
The argument developed here is not that we should mount a full-scale intellectual
recovery of neofunctionalism’s forgotten discussion of disintegration, but rather that
in pursuit of an understanding of disintegrative dynamics and their systemic effects
we should (a) appreciate – as neofunctionalists ultimately did – that the institutional
expressions of European integration are embedded (and always have been) in a broader
political economy and political sociology of Western Europe; (b) thus recognise

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that disintegration (or symptoms of disintegration) in the object of study (the EU)
might be expressions of broader dynamics such as the breakdown of the democratic
capitalist compact that emerged in the immediate aftermath of World War II and
(c) take much more seriously the relationship between knowledge production and
policy practice in European integration.

Rethinking classical integration theory

Discussions about disintegration very quickly run into two familiar issues. The first
is the question of generalisability. The second follows from the first: the dependent
variable problem. Generalisability means that the propositions of integration theory
needed to apply to the entire universe of cases of regional integration and not just
Europe. Given that Europe was the primary empirical site for the development of
regional integration theory, the danger of sampling on the dependent variable was
always high.3 Later scholars of comparative regionalism castigated classical integration
theory for its Eurocentric biases, identifying in particular the neofunctionalist idea
of ‘spill-over’ as nothing more than a descriptive concept that only made sense in
the spatial and temporal context of Western Europe in the 1950s and early 1960s.
It followed that the dependent variable – ‘regional integration’ – was defined in
ways that wholly or mostly relied upon studies of the early European Communities.
Integration in other regions of the world was thus benchmarked against the highly
specific version that had been developed by ‘the Six’.
Of course, this presumes that we are wedded methodologically to the idea that the
results of knowledge production should be nomothetic rather than idiographic. And
the question of methodological priors is as important to the formulation of theories
of disintegration as it should have been to discussions of integration theory. In any
case, following the generalisability and dependent variable problems through in light
of the nomothetic logic just outlined suggests that theories of disintegration should
be applicable across all prior, current and future cases and that the dynamics and/or
the telos of disintegration should not be defined out of ad-hoc empirical observation
of the European experience. This deduction raises a further crucial question, namely
whether the best way to understand or even explain the present European predicament
is via the theorisation of ‘disintegration’ in these terms.
The dependent variable problem was well known to neofunctionalists. It is simply
wrong to imply that the early integration theorists were unaware of the issue and/
or that crude Eurocentrism was at the heart of their enterprise. In his retrospective
piece surveying the problems and prospects of regional integration theory after 15
years of collective scholarly endeavour, Ernst Haas offered this definition of the field’s
dependent variable:

The study of regional integration is concerned with explaining how and why
states cease to be wholly sovereign, how and why they voluntarily mingle,
merge and mix with their neighbors so as to lose the factual attributes of
sovereignty while acquiring new techniques for resolving conflict between
themselves. (Haas, 1971: 6)

As Haas himself noted, the dependent variable here includes both a posited outcome
and a set of processes. The outcome of integration is defined in such a way as to

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be consistent with a number of possible terminal conditions. In the same piece,

Haas speaks of the dependent variable of integration theory being at best ‘putative’
(1971: 27). In some ways this is quite distinct from his earlier formulation of political
integration as ‘the process whereby actors in distinct national settings are persuaded to
shift their loyalties, expectations and political activities towards a new centre, whose
institutions possess or demand jurisdiction over the pre-existing national states’ (Haas,
1968: 16). This definition owes rather an obvious debt to the inductive study of west
European integration in the 1950s and early 1960s. It is also a product of a particular
way of thinking analytically about the state and politics – neofunctionalism’s very
visible debt to the pluralist political science of the 1950s. What links both definitions
is their interest in both integrative processes and integrative outcomes. Indeed, if
outcomes are understood in purely teleological terms and require the positing of
distinct possible ‘end states’, then it would be fair to say that the bulk of integration
theory (particularly from the late 1950s though to the mid-1970s) was interested in
integration as a process. Using the case of the Communities (or any other previous
case of regional integration or regional community building) to project prospective
general end states would simply exacerbate the dependent variable problem and
neglect the possibility that a wide range of integrative outcomes were possible.
Most discussions of neofunctionalism fix on ‘spill-over’ as the theory’s central
preoccupation. There is much to be said for investigating: (a) the extent to which
integrative momentum is acquired through the logic of functional linkage across
distinct sectors; (b) how de facto and de jure processes of economic enmeshment
might be generative of centralised regulatory and governance institutions; (c) whether
the emergence of a regional supranational policy regime is enough to reorient the
activities and organisational attributes of domestic producer groups; (d) the extent to
which deeper integration might be the product of bold problem solving initiatives by
elites; and (e) the extent to which these processes are the product of deliberate agency,
automaticity or unintended consequences. Yet even the act of parsing these multiple
forms of spill-over fails to capture the wider concerns (or indeed the dynamism) of
neofunctionalist integration theory.
One key theme that has been systematically forgotten is the interest of early
integration theorists in ‘background conditions’. In the Haas-Schmitter model (Haas
and Schmitter, 1964) – which, incidentally, is notable for successfully predicting
the failure of the Latin American Free Trade Area in the 1960s – the key question
concerns the necessary and sufficient conditions for regional economic integration
initiatives to spawn strong and durable institutional orders. Part of the explanation
resides in governmental preferences and the powers ascribed to region-level
institutions at the moment when economic union is initiated, and ‘process conditions’
– the emergent decision making style within the union, the adaptability of actors
to the new regime of policy making, and the extent to which economic union is
associated with a discernible growth in transactions among participating units – are
also floated as predictors of success. But Haas and Schmitter also maintained that the
transformation of an economic integration initiative into a substantive supranational
political order is also dependent upon the degree to which a set of conditions apply
across participating nations. Haas and Schmitter’s model implied that similarly sized
pluralistic societies with already high mutual cross-border transactions and high degrees
of elite complementarity would be the best candidates to form political communities
out of the technical business of integrating economies.

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This facet of the neofunctionalist research programme continued to be revised

and developed. By the turn of the decade, Nye (1971) had developed an account
of ‘integrative potential’ that sought to uncover the set of conditions that could
be associated with a positive institution-building response to various ‘integrative
mechanisms’. The latter might be positively calibrated but, even so, in the absence
of positive structural and (interestingly) perceptual background conditions, Nye
maintained that integration would flounder.
In passing, it is important to note the heavily sociological emphasis in this work,
which in turn confirms the substantial intellectual debt owed by neofunctionalists to
the contemporaneous ‘transactionalist’ approach of Karl Deutsch and his colleagues
(Deutsch et al, 1957; Jacob and Toscano, 1964). If nothing else, this serves as a reminder
that the particular integration project associated with the European Communities
was embedded within Europe’s broader post-war political economy and political
sociology (see Rosamond, 2017). It follows that any ‘disintegration’ of the EU might
have less to do with factors endogenous to the EU and more to do with significant
changes to the underlying political economy/sociology within which it has been
nested. We will return to this point.

Ways of thinking about disintegration

We have already noted how scholars of regional integration were interested in cases
where integration failed. Failure in such instances is defined as both the inability to
develop or even maintain an economic integration initiative and, more fulsomely as
the absence of political integration/institutionalisation as an adjunct to a technical
economic integration scheme. They also developed an interest in ‘disintegration’.
There are only two index entries for ‘disintegration’ in Lindberg and Scheingold’s
(1971) collection of papers from the 1969 conference attended by pretty much all of
the key American neofunctionalist scholars, but the text is peppered with numerous
references to the concept, suggesting that this was something of a hot topic as far as
the participants were concerned at the time.4 The gathering had set itself an interesting
set of objectives: ‘the development of a more sophisticated theory and methodology,
the acceleration of comparative regional integration analysis and the exploration of
inchoate links to the problems of nation-building and political change’ (Lindberg and
Scheingold, 1971: ix). The explicit linkage to the macro-historical issue of nation-
building was consistent with established currents of integration theory (Etzioni, 1965;
Jacob and Toscano, 1964; De Vree, 1972) and, while it had the analytical merit of
widening the universe of possible cases, it also promised to avoid the problem of
subfield closure outlined above.
Lindberg (1971: 56–57) developed a list of ten variable properties that describe the
extent to which a group of countries engage in collective decisions. Higher degrees
of political integration would be associated with high or rising scores across the ten
variables. Lindberg then maintained that if all variables decrease in value, then we
would undoubtedly be witnessing political disintegration. Of course, as Lindberg
acknowledged, the scores across the ten variables may exhibit a range of integrative
and disintegrative features, hence his call for sophisticated multivariate analysis to
determine the level and directionality of political integration. Lindberg was here
building on his work with Scheingold (Lindberg and Scheingold, 1970), while trying
to strip it of its ‘EECentricity’.5 At the same time (and a full quarter of a century

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before the onset of the supposed ‘comparative politics turn’ in EU studies), Lindberg
and Scheingold were working hard to analyse the EC as a political system, thereby
pushing the field to consider the determinants of system stability and change. Chapter
4 of Europe’s would-be polity developed a sophisticated Eastonian take on alternative
models of (EC) system change. Lindberg and Scheingold posited three broad system
outcomes: ‘fulfilment’, ‘retraction’ and ‘extension’. Of these, ‘retraction’ is of the most
interest to current discussions of disintegration.6 ‘Retraction’ is subdivided into two
further concepts: ‘output failure’ and ‘spill-back’. The former describes a situation
where the joint decision system is unable to develop policies consistent with the
delivery of an agreed goal. Situations of ‘output failure’ can lead to a diminution of
the system’s authority and of the scope of its policy coverage. It does not necessarily
refer to the maintenance of the status quo ante. ‘Spill-back’ (a concept developed by
Schmitter, 1971) is associated with actor withdrawal from specific policy obligations:

[Rules] are no longer regularly enforced or obeyed.The scope of community

action and its institutional capacities decrease. Spill-back may occur in an
area that had once been in equilibrium or enjoyed forward linkages. While
spill-back does entail risks for the system as a whole, it is likely to be limited
to the specific rules in question. (Lindberg and Scheingold, 1970: 137)

Schmitter’s (1971) discussion associates ‘spill-back’ with deliberate agency. It is a

disintegrative strategy with the explicit purpose of reducing centralised decisional
authority in given issue areas as well as more generally. The concept survives into
Schmitter’s most recent work where spill-back is associated with at least four (EU-
related) phenomena: (a) a member state refusing to participate in a given supranational
policy area; (b) enforced exit of a member state from a given aspect of the supranational
regime; (c) the voluntary exit of a member state from the EU; and (d) the enactment of
a range of right and left wing Eurosceptic policy preferences (Schmitter and Lefkofridi,
2016: 2–3). In his 1971 essay, Schmitter writes interestingly of actors developing
disintegrative (spill-back) strategies with the purpose of forcing the overall policy
system into a state of ‘low risk entropy’. This is probably best understood as a kind of
institutional equilibrium, albeit one deprived of the kind of dynamics that could take
it forward towards deeper integration. Moreover, entropic systems are prone to the
insertion of randomness and disorder. This would imply not only stasis and a lack of
forward momentum, but also a situation of heightened uncertainty where systemic
decay could be expected. Once again, there is no projected endpoint of integration
(the moment when it would be possible to state categorically that disintegration has
occurred). Rather Schmitter is interested in how stable systems such as the EU can
be rendered unstable through disintegrative acts by purposive actors.
Two points are worthy of note here. First, the emphasis on integration as system
centralisation, and disintegration as partial or wholesale decentralisation resonates
with the neofunctionalists’ interest in comparing regional integration to nation-
building or, put in Bartolini’s (2005) terms, ‘centre formation’. This idea is picked
up by Vollaard (2014) as the most promising way of capturing what disintegration is
all about. Second, even if we can specify particular phenomena as disintegrative, in
so doing we do not necessarily specify an overall system-level consequence (at least in
terms of finality). For example, if Greece were to leave the euro, we can posit a range
of possible consequences of that disintegrative moment, including deeper positive

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integration by the remaining eurozone countries. Much the same can be said of the
effects of Brexit. Brexit is disintegrative, but its long-term systemic consequences
might be quite the opposite. Lindberg and Scheingold’s notion of ‘retraction’ does not
suppose full-scale system collapse. Indeed, ‘retraction’ should perhaps be thought of as
compatible with what we now call ‘differentiated integration’ (Stubb, 2002; Warleigh,
2002; Leuffen et al, 2012; Adler-Nissen, 2014). Of course, differentiation itself could
be read as a systemic coping mechanism to prevent wholesale system collapse, which
of course is the most obvious imaginary of disintegration. One interesting question
raised directly by Brexit and other ongoing crises is whether the coping strategy of
differentiation is able to cope with disintegrative shocks to the system.

The bigger picture: the contexts of disintegration

To summarise, by the early 1970s, the neofunctionalists had the makings of an
account of disintegration that was largely about the insertion of disruptive dynamics
into the European Community system and which did not suppose a particular
type of disintegrative end state. Disintegration might provoke decentralisation and
the rolling back of previous integrative commitments, but the variegated effects of
disintegrative dynamics would have indeterminate systemic consequences. Integration
theorists had already developed theoretical accounts of the necessary and sufficient
conditions for the successful accomplishment of economic integration goals and
their transformation into meaningful and durable forms of post-national political
community. This, together with a developed interest in thinking about integration
in terms of nation-building and centre formation, had the potential to connect
neofunctionalist thinkers to broader accounts of the macroeconomic and macro-
sociological context into which post-war European integration was embedded and
of which it was partly constitutive.
To invoke context in this way is not the same as insisting, as neorealist International
Relations scholars typically do, that post-war European integration is an expression
of prevailing power structures in world politics. Intensive cooperative arrangements,
such as the EU, are possible (indeed rational) where the structuring principles of
geopolitics (such as the Cold War) are permissive (Mearsheimer, 1990) or where
the participant states have a common adversary (Rosato, 2011). Significant changes
to the structures of power politics and/or the removal of the threatening enemy
profoundly weaken the rationale for cooperation, which – in any case – is likely
over time to be beset by the destructive logic of relative gains. While this linkage of
states’ rational (security) calculus to the guiding logic of geopolitical power structures
makes a good deal of sense in its abstract and highly parsimonious modelling of
world politics, neorealism has, in practice, struggled to explain the perseverance of
European integration (Collard-Wexler, 2006). That neorealist work on the EU has
re-emerged of late is a sure sign that (a) European integration is perceived to be in
trouble and (b) the configuration of power relations globally is thought to be in flux. In
its crude form, neorealism simply predicts the disappearance of the EU. There might
be some mileage (although this is dubious) that Brexit could be read as an instance
of a state choosing to exit a cooperative arrangement because the UK saw the onset
of relative gains as intolerable. But there is no reason to suppose that the exit of one
state would generate a domino effect that effectively meant the wholesale and fairly
rapid destruction of the EU. As such, despite its pessimistic credentials, neorealism

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would struggle to formulate credible hypothesis about the end state of integration.
The logic (or perhaps more interestingly the widespread perception) of relative gains
could be read as a disintegrative force, but as we have seen this would simply become
one potential independent variable among many in pursuit of a dependent variable
(disintegration) that is more of less impossible to define ex ante.
In any case, liberal institutionalists have, for the most part, had a much more
successful time with European integration. It is no accident that the most influential
state-centred theory of integration (liberal intergovernmentalism) emerges from the
neoliberal institutionalist tradition of International Relations. Its principal advocate
is on the record expressing confidence that Brexit will not happen (Moravcsik, 2016,
2017), in part because – according to both the absolute gains logic of institutionalised
bargaining and any reasonable evaluation of the UK’s commercial interests – Brexit is
completely irrational. Institutionalists of all hues tend to regard the EU as a classic case
of institutional resilience. Institutional orders tend to develop self-preserving logics
(even when the imperatives that gave rise to their specific design have dissipated)
and they can be sources of absolute (as opposed to relative) gains. Also, governments
have a vested interest in maintaining the delegation of key aspects of policy making
to non-majoritarian supranational institutions, even if the performance of those
supranational agents is (temporarily) suboptimal. In terms of change, the assumption
of historical institutionalists is that conjunctural shifts (major crises) have the capacity
to discredit extant institutional equilibria and thereby create the space for new
institutional designs. In the most convincing versions of this type of argument, the
shift from one institutional equilibrium is sociological rather than technical/scientific.
Put another way, the collapse of an institutional equilibrium does not simply happen
because established policy solutions are demonstrably failing. They change because:
(a) there is widespread intersubjective agreement that they are failing; (b) their failure
is understood in terms of a common understanding of the problems they are failing
to solve (crises themselves are discursive constructions); and (c) there is an alternative
solution set that is advantageously placed to define the successor institutional order
(Hall, 1993; Blyth, 2002).
Thus, if we think of disintegration in terms of the displacement of the EU
institutional equilibrium (or parts of it) with something else (which almost certainly
would not be the status quo ante), then the conspiracy of several disintegrative dynamics
could not in and of itself bring about the change. The crisis or the constellation of
crises would need to be widely understood among policy actors as existential in that
established solution sets are no longer deemed viable so that there emerges significant
momentum behind alternative imaginaries of post-national political space in Europe.
Thinking across current crises, there would seem to be significant evidence that many
key actors understand ‘more Europe’ to be the solution, or more precisely ‘more of
the same kind of Europe’ (see Ross, 2011). All of this is consistent with the more
mundane version of what happens when disintegrative dynamics take hold in an
institutional order – Schmitter’s notion of ‘low risk entropy’.
In other words, disintegration may be compatible with the preservation of the
systemic order that is affected by disintegrative dynamics. It is not so much a case of
whether the institutional order – in this case the EU – survives; it is more a matter
of what it is capable of and whether, despite its continued existence, it can escape the
cycle of what might be called, for want of a better phrase, perpetual disintegration.

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This is where the point about the broader political economy of European integration
becomes significant.7 What may be collapsing is the broader democratic capitalist
compact within which the EU is embedded (Streeck, 2014). For a relatively short
period in the aftermath of World War II (roughly three decades), the consolidation
and gradual expansion of market society was, in Western Europe at least, accomplished
under the auspices of democratic politics, which itself was consolidated and
strengthened. This delicate balance between the contradictory allocative principles
of market and popular will was facilitated by economic, institutional and ideational
factors, all of which have unravelled since the 1970s. Thus the unprecedented levels
of economic growth that characterised les trente glorieuses have been displaced by an
era of ‘permanent austerity’ (Pierson, 2001). Once powerful centrist political parties,
which used to act as effective mediators between societal will on the one hand and
governing raison d’état on the other, have more or less internalised the logic of the
latter, leading to the neglect of the former (Mair, 2013) and creating space for populist
and nativist parties to become conduits for and managers of popular will. Finally, the
re-emergence of the ideology of the self-regulating market and its institutional and
policy enactment has effectively quashed the idea that markets should be subordinate
to social purpose.
European integration emerged as the same moment as this democratic capitalist
compact. The factors that gave rise to the antecedents of the EU are well known, but
its project of gradual market opening was for a time compatible with the allowance
of domestic policy autonomy with the European capitalist democracies. As the
economic, institutional and ideational supports of the democratic capitalist compact
weakened, so the EU in turn was affected in complex ways. The onset of ‘permanent
austerity’ as a feature of the domestic political economies of its member states meant
that the EU was first cast as a solution to the crisis of growth and the dilemmas of
globalisation. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the EU has increasingly been
identified as a source of those problems. The dominance of market liberalism in various
guises has been associated with both the delegation of authority to non-majoritarian
institutions and the internationalisation of some state functions. The EU has been a
vehicle for both of these tendencies with the effect that it has become an object of
contestation. Finally the breakdown of the broadly centrist politics that helped to
give rise to the EU has meant that this contestation is more prone than ever to take
a nationalist/nativist form.
Once again the long-term aggregate effects of these disintegrative inputs into the
EU system is unpredictable. But it is important to remember that what we observe
as disintegration within the EU – visible through the lens of EU studies – may be
telling us something about the broader instability of the underlying political economy
of Europe.

Conflict of interest
The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this article was presented at the 24th International Conference of
Europeanists at University of Glasgow in July 2017. Its development has been aided by
comments from Scott James, Antje Wiener, Jan Grzymski and Russell Foster.

40
 De-Europeanisation after Brexit

Notes
1 This is not entirely new. See, for example, Bideleux and Taylor (1996), a book whose

bold sweep seeks to compare integration and disintegration dynamics in Western and
Eastern Europe. The latter is the most obvious site of systematic ‘disintegration’, but
(then) recent crises such as the Danish referendum result of June 1992 and the ERM
crisis of September 1992 are presented as examples of how the standard conceptual
vocabulary of European integration studies is poorly attuned to major integrative
setbacks.
2 A relatively recent example of note might be the tendency of mainstream electoral

studies to assume that a series of ‘iron laws’ of UK general elections would deliver a
handsome Conservative majority in June 2017.
3 Sampling on the dependent variable is essentially the practice of assembling evidence

from cases that are selected to support one’s theory. In the case of theories of integration,
this would amount to selecting the European case on the basis of meeting a theoretical
criterion and then use the case as evidence for that criterion.
4 For example, in his contribution to the volume, the Africanist Fred Hayward (1971:

335) insisted that ‘we need to pay attention to the process of disintegration’.
5 Haas’s word.
6 Haas (1971) notes, in passing, that he reads ‘retraction’ as a synonym for ‘disintegration’.
7 See Rosamond (2017, 2018) for more detailed elaborations of this argument, the latter

specifically in the context of Brexit.

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