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Integration and disintegration | 39
hardly ever explain their positions in an efficient way to the public, and they
have little voice in domestic politics.
On the other hand, at the domestic level, the politicisation of the EU is an
existing phenomenon (Kelemen 2017), leading to a one-sided communication.
As Habermas puts it,
as long as the European citizens see their national governments as the only players on
the European stage, they perceive the decision-making processes as a zero-sum game
in which their own actors have to prevail against the others. (Habermas 2010, 131)
Furthermore, in many countries, there is also a lack of proper social
policies. Welfare states are under pressure from neoliberals and market¬
fundamentalists, which can also generate disintegration at the domestic
level: the rich get richer, social mobility gets blocked, empathy and the
feeling of connectedness are waning. As a result, hyper-individualism and
the lonely struggle for survival fills in the void. People also turn away from
internationalisation if they feel that they do not benefit from it.
Finally, market rules are harmed regularly, as the new nationalism also
alters how we think about the European single market (Ziegler 2020). All
these have an effect on European countries, and all these developments
can generate a certain level of convergence, or disintegration, among the
countries. From this perspective, the question is: do these dynamics lead to
disintegration or not?
THE SCIENCE OF DISINTEGRATION
—- EUROPEAN COOPERATION AS A POLITICAL DISCOURSE
There are many conflicting interpretations of European disintegration. While
some scholars claim that disintegration does not exist at all, some others even
foresee the collapse of the EU (Krastev 2012). While this latter view seems
to be grossly exaggerated, we should still analyse the different theoretical
perspectives one by one.
From the perspective of neofunctionalist theory, Phillip Schmitter and Zoe
Lefkofridi, but also Annegret Eppler, Lisa H. Anders, and Thomas Tuntschew
explained disintegration quite plausibly (Eppler et al. 2016; Schmitter and
Lefkofridi 2016). According to Schmitter, disintegration is a multicausal
phenomenon, which is made up by different factors. One such example
could be the unequal distribution of benefits of European cooperation, like
Germany’s hegemonic economic dominance, while others benefit by far less
from the European market, and the weaker countries are not compensated
for their position.