An Historical Analysis of Pillarization

Abstract

With a view to arguing that the politics of pillarization in the 1990s were critically shaped by patterns of path dependence, this chapter moves through the following stages. The first section considers the development of the external dimension of European integration before 1991, focussing mainly on European Political Co-operation (EPC). The second section attempts an appraisal of EPC in an attempt to establish the institutional challenges that CFSP and pillarization could be expected to meet if they were to constitute an improvement on EPC. The third section reconstructs the bargaining process by which the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) on political union (1991) fashioned CFSP and the wider decision to ‘pillarize’ the Union. The fourth section then concludes by specifying the form of path dependence that seems to have governed the evolution of CFSP and pillarization, and by justifying the contention that it offers a better understanding than the likely alternatives of the structures and processes studied by this book over the period 1993–99.