Rejoinder to Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks, ‘A Postfunctional Theory of European Integration: From Permissive Consensus to Constraining Dissensus’

Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks outline a research programme ‘that seeks to make sense of new developments in EU politics and the middle-range theories that account for them’.1 They argue that the debate on Europe is grounded in domestic political conflict, and that this conflict is above all driven by questions of identity, and not by economic preferences of interest groups, as is assumed by both neofunctionalists and liberal intergovernmentalists. Functional interest groups are decisive only under conditions of a permissive public opinion, i.e. under conditions of a depoliticized public. Once European integration has started to become a key political issue, ‘integration by stealth’ has ceased to be a viable strategy,2 and identity politics moves to centre stage. In a nutshell: ‘to understand European integration we need y to understand how, and when, identity is mobilized’.