Promoting the regulatory or the redistributive state? The politicisation of core state power integration in the German Bundestag, 1978-2019

ABSTRACT

We analyse the party politics of core state power integration in all German Bundestag debates on EU government declarations since 1978. Our analysis shows an increasing politicisation of the costs of integration. In general, all mainstream parties have expressed a continuous preference for regulation over capacity-building. Over time, however, cross-party differences increased. Parties developed distinct, ideologically grounded profiles on core state power integration, and costly supranational capacity-building produced particularly outspoken opposition. Ultimately, core state power integration ended the general consensus on EU affairs among integrationist mainstream parties in Germany, revealing fundamentally different understandings of the EU polity. Centre-right parties regard the EU as a market-centred community of self-reliant states, championing the instruments of the regulatory state. Centre-left parties, by contrast, see the EU as a political union that also organises solidarity among its member states, increasingly embracing a European redistributive state.

KEYWORDS:

• European integration
• core state powers
• politicisation
• political parties
• Germany
• Bundestag

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the participants of the two special issue workshops, hosted by the Hertie School in June 2019 and (virtually) in May 2020, as well as the two reviewers for their valuable criticism and suggestions. The authors gratefully acknowledge the dedicated research assistance by Lalit Chennamaneni.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. To illustrate this further, we excluded the years 2010 to 2014, the heyday of the Eurozone crisis, from our dataset. In this case, the share of capacity-building opposing statements vis-à-vis regulation opposing statements drops from 57 to 35%. The capacity-building share among supportive statements, however, only drops from 34 to 32%.

2. The results for the 16^th legislature (2005–2009) are distorted by a low case count of opposing statements (only 12) and the fact that government parties in the ruling grand coalitions held up 73% of all seats in parliament.

3. German language original: “Zweitens wollen wir – so haben wir es auch im Koalitionsvertrag verabredet – den Europäischen Stabilitätsmechanismus zu einer Art Europäischen Währungsfonds weiterentwickeln.“ (Angela Merkel, CDU/CSU, 28.06.2018).