WORLD VIEW:WINNERS AND losers. These terms are often avoided in analyses of European integration on the grounds that it is better understood as a win-win than a zero-sum process. Efficient rather than redistributive outcomes are best pursued by regulatory policies, ensuring everyone gains – or at least if some benefit others are not made worse off.
This account is more convincing about the time when the EU’s basic institutional and political structures were being created from the 1960s to the 1990s, than in the last 15 years when the project has become more political – and contested. While many of its policies and competences remain broadly regulatory rather than redistributive, their growing impact on EU member states are better imagined as a continuum than as alternatives. Thus food safety would be at one end, market regulation somewhere in the middle and spending policies on agriculture, regions or social protection at the other.
The shift from polity-building and market-creation to making decisions on what policies to pursue within this established European space has created a new field of political competition. There will be more circumstances in which some win and some lose when such decisions are made. Decisions have consequences, including more conflict over the impact of particular policies.
The clear winners in last week’s European Parliament elections are the centre-right parties grouped together in the mainly Christian Democrat European People’s Party. The clear losers are centre-left ones which make up the Party of European Socialists. Greens and radical right and left-wing parties also emerged with stronger support. But 80 per cent support the Lisbon Treaty.
This is an intriguing outcome during the deepest capitalist recession since the 1930s. In Germany, France, Poland and Italy voters preferred centre-right government candidates to social democrats – although there were exceptions in smaller states like Greece, Sweden, Denmark and Ireland where left-wing oppositions performed well. In the UK and (much less so) in Spain centre-left governing parties were punished.
Policy convergences and transfers help explain this. Centre-right governments and parties have pragmatically adopted Keynesian policies normally associated with social democracy at a time when state-market balances of the neoliberal period needed to be corrected. More state involvement is required when losses are socialised. Voters have more trust in centre-right parties to re-regulate capitalism within a consensual Rhineland model.
Social democrats performed less well before and during the campaign. They failed to agree a programme which voters could clearly differentiate from the mainly centre-right wing existing governments. Nor could they agree to put forward a common candidate as commission president to stand against the outgoing José Manuel Barroso. They made little or no effort to campaign on an EU-wide basis despite their self-proclaimed internationalism. Greens and radical left candidates outflanked them in several national contests.
European integration has also produced winners and losers in and between the 27 EU member states. Sociologically its main beneficiaries have been managers, professionals, government personnel, people with higher incomes, Europeans who work in other EU countries or for transnational firms, the young and more educated.
They make up 10-15 per cent of the EU’s 500 million population with the deepest economic and social ties among their counterparts across Europe, according to American sociologist Neil Fligstein. In his illuminating empirical study Euro-Clash: The EU, European Identity and the Future of Europe (Oxford UP 2008) he shows how they are also most likely to favour more integration in selected fields.
A second camp (40-50 per cent) has a shallower relationship with Europe. Their employment brings them into contact with other Europeans, as does travel, second languages, media and sport, but their principal cultural anchors remain national. A third camp (40-50 per cent, higher in the UK) speak national languages, travel little and consume less culture from other societies. They are older, less educated, poorer, more firmly wedded to the nation and more fearful of European integration, from which they have gained least compared to the other two – “losers” in short.
Fligstein argues that the future of integration depends crucially on whether the second camp – largely middle and lower middle class voters who view economic integration as mainly a good thing but who worry about their welfare states and employment – swing for or against it in coming years. Will they be on balance winners or losers?
It is revealing to read the elections results through this sociological lens. The political scientist Simon Hix, a specialist on the parliament, argues that many members of the third camp abstained from these elections, where they would normally vote in national elections for centre-left parties. Other white industrial working-class voters, affected most by the downturn, abandoned such parties for the radical left or right, especially in the UK, Germany, France, Denmark and the Netherlands.
Overall it is open to the centre-left to appeal more convincingly to the second and third camps if they want to do better the next time. These results will have policy and political consequences over the next five years. There will be more conflict over priorities between winners and losers; but that can help build a deeper political identity if it concerns policies in, not about, the EU.