Problematizing Preferences: The New Intergovernmentalism and the Political Economy of Post-Maastricht European Integration

The new intergovernmentalism provides a framework for understanding European integration in the post-Maastricht period. It takes as its starting point an integration paradox: whilst EU activity since Maastricht has progressed at an unprecedented pace, there has been little by way of lasting transfers to supranational institutions. How to explain this forward momentum in integration combined with a reticence on the part of member state governments to delegate to the traditional ‘engines of integration’? The new intergovernmentalism argues that the evolution of Europe’s political economy provides us with the context in which we can make sense of the integration paradox. The nationally bound social pacts between business and labour so characteristic of post-war Europe have given way to far less rigid state-society ties that are amenable to closer European cooperation in a wide variety of areas. In order to grasp the specific and particular route taken by EU integration in the 1990s and 2000s, however, this process of convergence in political economy preferences needs to be studied alongside growing difficulties in preference formation at the national level. A growing scepticism about the efficacy of political actors and political systems has created incentives for member state governments to opt for voluntary policy coordination as the preferred mode of integration. The new intergovernmentalism pushes us to rethink the relationship between macro-economic changes, the aggregation of interests and preferences, and the direction taken by European integration in the post-Maastricht period.