III. Comment on the following quotations:

• The most universal quality is diversity (Montaigne)

• Our philosophy is jump in the pool, there is always water there (Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign-policy chief)

• Gentlemen, you are trying to negotiate something you will never be able to negotiate. But if negotiated it will never be ratified. And if ratified it will not work (a British representative at the negotiations form which the European Economic Community emerged in 1957)

• We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don’t know what has been decided we continue step by step until there is no turning back. (Jean-Claude Junker, the EU’s longest-serving head of government)

• The EU is needed to prevent us from falling back into the bad old days of war and European barbarism which stalked the Balkans into the very last year of the last century (Timothy Garton Ash²²)

VI. Suggested activities for students:

1. Study the following table and try to answer the questions given in it. How do you view the process of integration?

Alternative accounts of European integration Integration as process

(а) Political variables Key issues: which are the main agents of integration, nation-states or non-state actors such as the European Commission or transnational interest groups? (b) Structural stimuli Key issues: what external economic, social and technological variables drive the integration process? Do they work independently of governments, or do they act as agenda-setters for intergovernmental business? Integration as outcome (а) State models Alternatives: а centralized, authoritative set of institutions at the European level; а European "federal" system, with а layering of power between Europe, nation and sub-national region; а supranational network involving the interaction of state and non-state actors. (b) Community models Alternatives: а European security community; а European socio-psychological community; the enhanced interaction of the peoples of Europe.

2. What is European integration and why has it taken place?

3. Do the factors which account for the genesis of what we now know as the EU still explain the Union’s dynamism?

4. Is the EU emerging as a new form of government/state? Give your reasons.

5. Speaking about the EU we again find ourselves in а debate about the role to be attributed to the agency of the nation-state in the development of politics above the nation-state. Are major advances in European integration to be understood as the result of member-states pursuing their national interests? Or does the very existence of regional integration denote the weakening of the power of nation-states?

6. Take any of the treaties mentioned in the text and prepare a report. What changes took place after they were singed and enforced? How did this influence the development of the EU? You can take any other treaty if you consider it to play a crucial role for the EU’s development.

7. Prepare a report about the Lisbon Treaty. Speak about its background, and purposes. How is it going to change the institutions of the EU?

8. Prepare a report on one of the institutions of the EU. How do they operate? What are their powers? What are their primary goals? To what extent have particular/unique patterns of politics (intergovernmentalism/supranationalism) evolved within the EU’s institutions?

9. Does the development of the EU demonstrate the decline of the nation-sate as the key unit/focus of political activity in the contemporary world?

10. In her famous speech to the College of Europe in Bruges in 1988, Margaret Thatcher used the following formulation: “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them reimposed at a European level, with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels”. She feared the evolution of a powerful, interventionist state at the European level. She thought that a more fully integrated “Europe” would pose a severe threat to some cherished principles (e.g. national sovereignty). Would you share her fears? Why or why not?