Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

6 Anna Triandafyllidou and Willfried Spohn
transnational institutions and policies. At the same time, the degrees of sovereignty
transfers and functional integration vary according to national preferences. As a
result, there has developed a multi-level system of European governance with a
variable geometry of different speeds and scopes of integration.
In the public and scholarly debate, European integration as both a complex
socio-economic process and the resulting type of European political system in
relation to the member states, has been quite a controversial issue. The perception
and conceptualisation of the European Communities/Union range from a mere
intergovernmental framework leaving the nation-state basically intact, to an
evolving federal state fundamentally changing the traditional sovereign nation-state.
These contrasting perceptions and conceptualisations reflect, on the one hand,
public attitudes in the different EU member states to what the European Union in
the end should be (see the recent debate on a European constitution, V.A. 2001).
On the other hand, they also reflect the scientific difficulties to determine the nature
of a continually developing process that is neither predetermined nor finalised.
Despite these contrasting perspectives, however, there has crystallised a scholarly
consensus that the European Union should be viewed as a transnational regime
sui generis in between a confederation of states and a federal state. Accordingly, the
originally antithetic positions of realism (starting from the individual nation-state)
and of functionalism (starting from the integration logic) have moved towards
a neo-realist, neo-functionalist and liberal–intergovernmentalist synthesis. Within
this synthesis, the crucial problematique is focusing on the modes and degrees of the
Europeanisation of nation-states and their change over time. This volume is
particularly concerned with the Europeanisation of collective identities – rather
than that of public policies, a subject that is dealt with by political scientists and
international relation theorists – to the extent that the existence of a collective
identity is seen by many scholars (see the chapters by Giesen and Hutchinson in this
volume) as a prerequisite for the functioning of a democratic polity. An alternative
line of argument, however, would have it (see the chapter by Münch in this volume
and Habermas 1994) that a sense of community can be built through active
participation in a polity. Thus, Münch argues that the European polity may be
based on a society of individuals enmeshed in a dense set of networks that keep
them together.
The imminent Eastern enlargement of the European Union continues, in terms
of a set of institutional and procedural mechanisms, the former enlargement waves
of the European Community/EU to North Western, Southern and Northern
Europe. As such, the Eastern enlargement will also mean a similar process of
growing incorporation of the post-communist nation-states in Central and Eastern
Europe into the transnational governance regime of the European Union. As a
concrete socio-economic and political process, however, the Eastern enlargement
is much more challenging than any former enlargement waves. From the
perspective of the European Union, the Eastern enlargement means the inclusion
of a large number of future members, which will (potentially) alter the power
equilibrium between current members and require crucial reforms of the existing
governance institutions and decision-making procedures. The still ongoing social