Search

Core state powers continue moving to the centre of the European polity, yet a sense of collective identity among EU citizens remains fragile. We argue that participatory democracy at the European level is a missing element that might create a more robust collective identity in Europe. We examine the history of polity formation in the early American case to probe the link between collective identity and practices of democratic participation, focusing on contestation about the 1789 US Constitution and the creation of pan‐US political parties in the early 19th century. Everyday democratic practices helped both to represent and to constitute the nationalization of politics in the early USA, as it moved from being a de facto international organization to a unified polity. This suggests that practices of democracy may likewise help to generate a more robust collective political identity in the EU. The historical record makes clear, however, that these processes are often exclusionary, uncertain, and far from unidirectional.

Moravcsik's liberal intergovernmentalism irrevocably upgraded the rigour of European Union scholarship by categorizing the EU as an international organization, and analyzing it in terms of general theories of international relations. The deepening of European governance has meant, however, that the EU today is better understood as a polity in formation, generalizable through the lens of comparative politics instead of international relations. Alongside the burgeoning literature on the EU's politicization, I advocate for comparisons to historical episodes of state‐building and nationalism, with particular attention to the role of culture and identity in shoring up, or contesting, political authority. Doing so allows us to better delineate the challenges presented by European citizens’ lack of impassioned attachment to the EU, while also informing a broader understanding of the populist backlashes occurring in the context of more global trends of transnational authority construction.

The creation of EMU has been one of the most striking examples of economic integration in history. Such deep economic co-operation between states has often proved elusive. This article revisits The Currency of Ideas and assesses what role ideational consensus may play now that the euro is a reality.

The critical foundation for European monetary integration is the neoliberal economic policy convergence that occurred across the majority of the European governments beginning in the mid-1970s and solidifying in the 1980s. While capital mobility determines the conditions under which international monetary agreements can be sustained, political leaders’ policy ideas or shared normative and causal beliefs about monetary policy are necessary to explain whether states choose to meet those conditions. These ideational factors are critical in part because of the high degree of uncertainty over the distributional effects of exchange rate and monetary co-operation, ambiguity which mutes both mass political debate and sectoral interest-group activity. A template of ideational change is thus proposed to explain the path of European monetary integration.