France within an enlarged EU: a fading influence?

Résumé du document

Following the fifth enlargement and the appointment of the Barroso Commission, worries about a loss of influence in Europe have been widespread in France. The new members of Central and Eastern Europe have been deemed closer to Washington and London, and the French Commissioner, Jacques Barrot, has been given the minor transports portfolio ? although he bears the title of Vice-President. French policymakers are worried that France, a founding member of the ECC, may find itself isolated in an enlarging Union. This concern is reinforced by a large trend in French public opinion, which considers European integration, and particularly the proposed draft Constitutional Treaty as being essentially neo-liberal and thus threatening what is called the French social model.

This essay will try to assess claims that French influence is vanishing, understanding influence as the capacity to have its favoured positions adopted at the EU level. It will argue that the task of capturing a country's influence within the EU has been complicated by the key features of the European Union: a multi-level type of governance and the progressive building of a polity. Therefore, France, a unitary state, has sometimes found it difficult to fit in, and still suffers from a lack of clout in key EU institutions, such as the European Parliament, whose influence is growing. Showing that influence within the European Union owes also to a country's particular culture, France also has negative prejudice towards the EU's consensual type of decision-making, which includes special interests.

After having looked at the difficult positioning for a unitary state like France within the European Union, we will study some recent markers of French influence ...

Extraits

[...] Where to exert influence in a compound polity? One of the difficulties of assessing the influence of a member state within the European Union pertains to its hybrid nature. The former French President of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, once stated that the European Union was an “unidentified political object”. This phrase highlights the complexity of the EU polity, which various theories have tried to capture and which has sparked controversy among students of European integration. A multi-level Europe Among those theories, two models emerged between the late eighties and the early nineties, focusing on the relationship between supranational, national and subnational institutions, drawing opposite conclusions on the role of these actors in EU policy making. [...]

[...] French policymakers are worried that France, a founding member of the ECC, may find itself isolated in an enlarging Union. This concern is reinforced by a large trend in French public opinion, which considers European integration, and particularly the proposed draft Constitutional Treaty as being essentially neo-liberal and thus threatening what is called the French social model. This essay will try to assess claims that French influence is vanishing, understanding influence as the capacity to have its favoured positions adopted at the EU level. [...]

[...] The European Union has built a specific order, distinct from other forms of international cooperation. Therefore, it has been difficult for France to fit in this complicated institutional setting. Some have opposed statist France to the EU style of governance, which operates along networks, in a cooperative fashion[7]. Vivien Schmidt has also pointed that in unitary states like France, the highly autonomous executives have lost significant amount of power and authority, as opposed to compound polities like Germany, characterized by a more consensual style of decision-making[8]. [...]

[...] The codecision process, which gives the European Parliament a greater say in European legislation, has indeed extended since Maastricht, and the Parliament exerts control on the Commission, thanks to the nomination process and its right of censure: in 1999, the Santer Commission preferred to resign over a financial scandal, in order to avoid censorship by the Parliament. The EU has also its own jurisdiction, with the European Court of Justice, whose competence is mandatory for member states, unlike that of the International Court of Justice. Member states are in principle bound by its rulings. Case law sustains this interpretation of the EU as an independent polity: in the case Costa v. [...]

[...] According to her opinion survey of EU practitioners, France is rated second for power, negotiation skills, information, and third for bargaining success[15]. Marie-Pierre Granger has also looked at the influence of governments on the Court of Justice and found that France has been assertive in Luxembourg, submitting most observations to the Court over the period 1995-2000. For the author, it is the translation into practice of a policy decision to be more influential in European Union decision making fora, to be achieved by taking position on every issue[16]. [...]