Organized Duplicity? When States Opt Out of the European Union

Abstract

As part of a grand plan to make the European Union (EU) more popular, Margot Wallström, Commissioner for Institutional Relations and Communication Strategy, posted a short video on the Web site YouTube showing eighteen couples having sex. The conspicuous video (which promotes EU support for European films) ends with the couples’ orgasms and the double entendre “Let’s come together.” Untraditional methods to convert the skeptical European publics into convinced Europeans are invented as the EU faces various forms of contestations of its supremacy from the member states. In the last decades, doubts over the benefits of Union membership have given rise to controversial national opt-outs (exemptions) from EU and EC treaties, which indicate that selected “outsiderness” may be preferred to being a full member of the Union. Opt-outs are interesting because they postulate that it is possible to reconstitute the boundary of the state in face of European integration. Opt-outs draw a line in the sand, as it were, and establish an area where the state is to remain sovereign. To the degree that statehood is fundamentally changing because of international and regional integration, national opt-outs will be a good indicator of how far this process has gone.