United Kingdom

Abstract

European integration has represented one of the most fundamental challenges for politics in the United Kingdom since 1945. Integration has highlighted the problems of, and possibilities for, the re-orientation of foreign policy as part of the United Kingdom’s post-war descent from world power status. The ‘Monnet method’ of supranational integration raised constitutional concerns for a state which had elevated territorial integrity and parliamentary sovereignty to key normative principles of its institutional order.1 Integration has at different times divided the main political parties internally as well as being a source of division between them, from the ratification of accession right through to the present. Levels of public support for integration have been among the lowest of all Member States. And yet the business of preparing, making and implementing European policy has been characterised by considerable efficiency at the official level. For the United Kingdom as for the other Member States the result has been a pattern of ‘fusion’: ‘trends of merging public resources at several state levels, leading to increasing complexity, a lack of transparency and difficulties in reversing the development’.2 However, this fusion has not led to a homogenisation of patterns of European policy-making within the Member States. The British approach remains distinctive. Its political and legal institutions are outside the continental mainstream, and its European policy discourse remains distinctive. But that is not to say that there has been no impact of EU membership. The UK constitution is in the process of undergoing major reform as part of the Blair government’s political agenda of modernisation. European integration is among the stimuli for this change.