Introduction

Notwithstanding the extraordinary institutional development of the EU and the formidable complexity of its decision-making systems constitutionalized by the Lisbon Treaty and made even more complex by the need to deal with the euro crisis, the claim that the EU is and should be an economic community similar to other regional economic organizations has continued to be heard in the European debate. In his speech on Europe, given on January 23, 2013, the British Prime Minister David Cameron said that “at the core of the European Union must be, as it is now, the single market,” adding that “the EU must be able to act with the speed and flexibility of a network.” Cameron reclaimed the concept of an EU as the organization of an economic community that was subsumed into a larger Union with the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. Indeed, the Northern core of the ex-EFTA countries has persistently interpreted the EU as an economic confederation, a forum where national governments meet to find solutions to common economic problems (Berrington and Hague 2001). As Cameron stressed on that occasion, if some member states “are contemplating much closer economic and political integration … many others, including Britain, would never embrace that goal.”

Politically, the economic community perspective has been interpreted by their supporters as the one that both allows for cooperation between states and preserves the sovereignty (or crucial parts of it) of each of them. In this sense, this has been and continues to be the perspective of the sovereignist coalition. Although the economic community perspective has never been coherently elaborated, it might be assumed that it is based on cooperation rather than coordination between states regarding the promotion of common policies, a cooperation that is much looser than the one envisioned in the intergovernmental constitution of the Lisbon Treaty.