The Importance of Being Nice: An Institutionalist Analysis of French Preferences on the Future of Europe

This article offers an institutionalist explanation of French preferences on the future of Europe from the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 through the Constitutional Treaty of 2004. It argues that the autonomous institutional logic of the constitution-drafting exercise increasingly shaped the evolution of French preferences. More specifically, the French Government’s preferences reflected its acceptance of the European Union’s new method of debate at the Convention, the contingency of a revived alliance with Germany in that debate, and the legacy of a half century of European integration. Beneath the surface, this autonomous institutionalist logic offset French leaders’ aspirations to maximize national power interests, to improve decision-making efficiency, and to achieve their ideal visions of Europe. Domestic politics also played a relatively unimportant role because the French constitution enabled the president to discount domestic coalition-building considerations. Altogether, this argument suggests that state preferences cannot be understood in isolation from the international and domestic institutional environment in which they are formed.