| This dissertation examines, in legal-historical terms, the relationship between European integration and the twentieth-century administrative state. Part One focuses on the national level, examining efforts from the 1920s--1950s in Germany/West Germany, France, and Britain to reconcile parliamentary democracy with the transfer of normative power to the executive and administrative spheres. What this study calls the "postwar constitutional settlement" of administrative governance reflected two lessons of the interwar period: first, that increased executive and administrative power was essential to the operation of the welfare state and the regulation of modern capitalism; and second, that to preserve some semblance of separation of powers and human rights in the system, independent parliamentary and judicial checks---"mediated legitimacy"---needed to be maintained. Part Two then turns to the supranational level, asserting that European integration emerged as a viable political project in the postwar decades precisely because the constitutional foundations of administrative governance at the national level had also been secured. Part Two further asserts, however, that European integration did not merely build upon, but also seriously disrupted, the postwar constitutional settlement of administrative governance. Because the Member States remained the locus of democratic and constitutional legitimacy in the system (even as normative power was transferred to a supranational executive-technocratic process), this gave rise to a central contradiction. On the one hand, forms of nationally mediated legitimation (primarily, but not exclusively, intergovernmental control of supranational norm-production) were still necessary to advance the integration process. On the other hand, national mediation ran contrary to the Community's countervailing needs for normative autonomy, uniformity, and supremacy---i.e., the same set of "constitutional" values of integration that the European Court of Justice took it upon itself to promote and protect. This study then attempts to use this legal-historical perspective as a means of reconciling intergovernmentalist and neofunctionalist theories of integration, while also tentatively exploring normative proposals to harness the legitimacy of national constitutional structures as a means of advancing, rather than impeding, the historically administrative process of European integration. |
