Where did this leave the nation-state that was saved by the Community? ‘Since all history is change, that rescue could only be temporary’, for ‘the process of economic development itself has eroded the political consensus which sustained both nation and supranation after the war’.3 That did not mean the Community was doomed, but its destiny was now uncertain. A major international currency managed by a central bank answerable to no government was without precedent. It was pointless to blame Brussels or Strasbourg for the absence of a democracy in which the ECB might be rendered accountable. Voters would only take the European Parliament seriously if it acquired powers of taxation, but its lack of them—like the unelected character of the Commission—was not any unintended flaw of the EU, but the deliberate choice of the national governments, each democratically elected, that had created it. ‘If that however is construed as evidence that the nation-states themselves are not truly democratic, or that in internationalizing policies they are seeking to restrict the force of postwar democratic pressures’, Milward concluded grimly, it was difficult to object. ‘Indeed there is much to suggest that the post-war role of more democratic political parties in formulating the immediate post-war domestic policy choices on which consensus depended was only a temporary phase and that these parties, especially since 1968, have become increasingly part of the executive’.4 Since 1968 . . . The date, and all it implies, says enough. Tacitly, what needed to be rescued now was not the nation-state, but democracy within it. Or even beyond it? Forces might emerge to propel integration further, but everything would depend on their political nature. ‘In whose interests will the brutal power of the state continue to exist? Who will run it? And for whom? It is the answers to these questions which will determine the future of the European Union’.
Written as the euro came into being, these lines found their first response six years later, in the pitched battle when the European Constitution was submitted to a popular vote. Milward’s blunt voice, with its characteristic ironies, came from England. What of later judgements from the core continental cultures? In France, the country’s leading authority on integration, Renaud Dehousse—a Belgian—reacted to the result of the French referendum with a work entitled, misleadingly, La fin de l’Europe. The Union, he remarked, might be compared to the bourgeois societies of the nineteenth century, that had replaced absolutism with constitutions that, while they protected the liberties of the subject, ignored women and the poor.5 It had, in effect, yet to pass from a censitary liberalism to a citizens’ democracy. But the principles of such an order should be understood realistically. Neither of the opposite camps in the French referendum had grasped them. The Constitutional Treaty itself, a document opening with grotesque flourishes of diplomatic anachronism, had been touted with a rhetoric of novelty that concealed its substantial continuity with past instruments of integration, to the point that most of the fire directed against it had fastened on to an acquis communautaire already long embodied in the Union—imperatives of the free market, allegiance to NATO inscribed in the treaties of Nice and Amsterdam—as if these were provocative innovations, rather than on the modest though useful institutional changes it did contain. But, of course, electors had never been much informed, let alone consulted, about the acquis, and were anyway little interested in the intricacies of institutional machinery. They had divided into two social blocs over their perceptions of what the EU represented to them: workers, the young, the least well-off and educated, but also now a significant layer of the middle class—all those exposed to the costs and risks of the economic and social development of the past decades—against all those who stood or hoped to gain from them.
The Constitution had failed because it offered no concrete project that could have overcome this division. For legitimacy in the EU came from the output rather than the input side of its institutions—not abstract principles of accountability or subsidiarity, but the practical benefits it could deliver. This did not mean that Moravcsik’s apology for the status quo, dismissing any concern with a democratic will at Union level, was valid. The French referendum had revealed a crisis of legitimacy in the EU, and one that was not unfounded, since decisions in Brussels had a real impact on national social policies, without electorates having any say in them—politicians indeed typically shifting blame to the Commission. Modernization was not a neutral process. It involved winners and losers. It could not be sealed off as a technical arena from democratic conflict. But if the Constitutional Treaty had been unable to convey any compelling project to European publics, that was because no consensus—of the kind that had informed the Community after the war—any longer existed as to the raison d’être of the Union. As objectives for Europe, neither international autonomy, nor social solidarity, nor even just a free trade zone, commanded any general agreement. But this was not set in stone. The EU will be judged by what it does, not what it is. Foreign policy ambitions should be set aside. The public goods the Union could offer are protection of the environment and income support for the worst-off. A European social pact should not be beyond reach.
If little in Dehousse’s analysis appeared to warrant this prospect, or perhaps simply proposal, its general tone remained relatively sanguine, if compared with the most conspicuous German reaction to the same conjuncture. Jürgen Habermas, who had signed one of the most intoxicated appeals to French voters to ratify the European Constitution, on pain of nothing less than regression to barbarism, dried out in the aftermath. Ach, Europa, which records his subsequent interventions on the EU, offers a chart of the process. The Treaty of Lisbon, though little more than a decorous Xerox of the same Constitution, met with a very different reception. For Habermas, it offered no solution to either the democratic deficit of the Union or its lack of any moral-political finality. It could only ‘cement the existing chasm between political elites and citizens’, without supplying any positive direction to Europe.6 The problems the EU needed to tackle were plain. The nation-state was being drained of much of its substance, without the Union gaining powers to compensate for what it had lost. The market, no longer tamed by social rules, was increasing inequality and threatening the environment. The international scene was wanting in any united action from Europe to uphold international law and reform the UN.
The requisite solutions were clear too. The ability of citizens freely to shape the forms of their political life must be restored to them at EU level, with a harmonization of fiscal and socioeconomic policies across the Union. The EU should acquire its own financial resources, and military forces capable of intervening to protect human rights around the world. For that role it needed not only a foreign minister, but a directly elected President. Time was running out to achieve these essential goals. Their urgency was so immediate that Habermas called for a Europe-wide referendum on them to coincide with the next elections to the European Parliament, due in 2009, with the requirement of a double majority—of states and of votes—for their approval. That demanded polarization. If such a referendum was not held by then, ‘the future of the European Union will be settled along orthodox neo-liberal lines’.7
The peremptory passion of these declarations has little, if any, precedent in Habermas’s writing. Few of his readers could fail to be impressed by them. But if they honour him, they also lead him into contradiction. This is not just because the theorist of consensus has belatedly discovered the virtues of polarization. However much at variance this may be with the discourse ethics he has advocated for so long, it is an awakening that can only be welcomed. More embarrassing is that his call for direct popular consultation on the future of the EU cannot easily escape the charge of political occasionalism, since though long consistent in his support for a European Constitution, neither earlier nor later had Habermas shown any enthusiasm for referenda on the issues confronting Europe. Far from calling for the Germans to be allowed to vote on Maastricht, as were the French, let alone on EU enlargement, he not only contented himself with the rubber-stamping of them by the Stimmvieh of the B
undestag, but did so even more flagrantly when the Constititional Treaty was on the table, taking it upon himself to intervene in the French referendum without so much as a word about the absence of any popular vote in his own country. Nor were his criticisms of the Lisbon Treaty followed by any trace of support for the campaign against it in Ireland, whose referendum was merely registered—passively, after the event—as a caution to European elites.
Indeed, though now describing the role of intellectuals as an avant-garde ‘early warning system’, alerting society to problems over the horizon, Habermas himself showed little awareness of the extent of mass disaffection from the arcana imperii of Brussels until after the debacle of the Constitutional Treaty, and even in 2007 was still arguing that European populations were much more favourably disposed to integration than elites. On such grounds he urged the SPD in Germany to take up the blue and gold banner to dish the Linke—advice making clear that no domestic radicalization of outlook is in question. Once a Hegelian Marxist, he explained, he had become a Kantian pragmatist. Class society had disappeared in Europe: there was now just a society of citizens.
Why then was he pulling the emergency cord in the European caboose so vigorously? Essentially, it would seem, because of a disappointment—not in the first instance with the EU as such, but with the US. For one who had so long proclaimed a philosophical allegiance to the West, the war in Iraq, launched without the seal of the UN, had come as an affliction. If the West was to recover its balance, and reputation, it was vital that Europe be capable of acting as a genuine partner of America, and—where necessary—restraining it from ill-considered reactions to common dangers. What was needed now was a ‘bi-polar community of the West’, committed to reforming the United Nations in the inspiring tradition of Roosevelt, by reducing the number of regional players within it, and equipping it with effective powers of global governance, to safeguard international security and enforce respect for human rights. The two poles of that community could not, of course, be absolutely equal. For America was not only the world’s sole superpower, it was ‘the oldest democracy on earth, that lives on idealistic traditions and has opened itself more than any other nation, in the spirit of the eighteenth century, to universalism’.8 But was it realistic to think it could push the necessary changes through without a loyal European partner at its side, independent of mind, but free of the slightest tremor of anti-Americanism?
Habermas’s prescription for the missing ‘finality’ of the Union was thus much more sweeping than that of Dehousse, and its upshot virtually the opposite. Far from renouncing external ambitions, the EU should increase them, for ‘foreign policy decisions, since they affect existential needs for security and deep-rooted outlooks, are always of high symbolic value for the population concerned’.9 So long as the Union has not acquired the powers of a unitary international actor, one opportunity after another for such initiatives will go on being tragically missed. The example Habermas gives makes it clear how close the EU of his desire would cleave to the US. If only Europe could in 2007 have stationed a ‘neutral force in the Middle East, for the first time since the foundation of Israel’—translated: instead of mere national contingents from France or Italy, with the German navy patrolling off the coast, a proper EU glacis for Tel Aviv in the zone of Lebanon invaded by the IDF. An independent foreign policy along these lines is unlikely to be much of a symbolic beacon to the European masses. In due course, with the arrival of a Democratic administration in Washington as ‘idealist and universalist’ as any admirer could wish, it will seem less urgent to Habermas too. Now that the bugbear of Bush is gone, Europe can surely relax. The lack of any EU-wide referendum is no longer likely to arouse much protest from its advocate. Whatever its limitations, Lisbon will no doubt be quietly pocketed after all.
No punctual intervention, but a panoramic synthesis, Stefano Bartolini’s Restructuring Europe (2005) confirms Italy’s claim to be the continental culture that has produced the most serious literature on the Union. Like Majone’s work, the book appeared—a not insignificant fact—in English, rather than the author’s native language, though unlike Majone’s, Bartolini’s career has been entirely Italian. In many ways, Restructuring Europe can regarded as the first really commanding study of the EU whose provenance is not Anglo-American. Its starting-point is calmly heterodox, a kind of historical thought-experiment. Everyone says the EU is not a state. But why not view the Union as if, rather than the opposite of the classical nation-state, it were a further development of it—how would it then look? With a tool-kit taken from Hirschman and Rokkan, Bartolini tracks back to the origins of the European state system, reconstructing the emergence of the nation-states we know today in five phases: first coercive, from feudalism to absolutism; then capitalist, with markets emerging in regions where coercion was least centralized; then national, with linguistic and cultural homogenization; then democratic, with the generalization of suffrage; and finally social-sharing, with the creation of welfare systems. The cumulative result of this long history was a fusion of war-making, commercial, national, constitutional and welfare functions within a coincidence of military, economic, cultural, political and social boundaries. In this development, the key components were the ‘system-building’ processes—creation of national identities, growth of political participation and arrival of social security.
Might the EU then become a sixth phase of state-formation, recapitulating on a continental scale the original five across a population of 450 million and a landmass of four million square kilometres? After 1945, integration was driven by the consequences of the Second World War, when the nation-states of Europe ceased to be self-sufficient military or economic capsules—control of security and monetary policies passing across the Atlantic. The unbearable costs of military competition and the risks of economic peripheralization had brought the Community into being, but in doing so they had broken up the coherence of the boundaries that had defined the nation-state. Maastricht could be seen as a bid to re-Europeanize monetary and security policies, but what is the balance sheet of the other dimensions of state-formation?
Bartolini’s verdict is bleak. Certainly, ‘centre-formation’ has developed apace, amid competition between Commission, Council, Parliament, and Court of Justice, leading to expansion of competences in many a direction. But Majone’s analogy of the resulting complex with the mixed constitution of mediaeval estates holds no water, since its lines of technocratic or commercial division are never clear-cut. Instead Brussels is a lair of decisional processes of staggering complexity, confounding executive and legislative functions—no less than thirty-two different procedures that ‘only specialist lawyers and trained functionaries can follow’.10 Three-quarters of the Council’s decisions, approved without discussion, are pre-packaged for it in the obscure recesses of Coreper; while at a lower level, hidden from public gaze, subterranean connexions between national bureaucracies and the machinery of the Community multiply. Ninety per cent of the lobbies infesting the extended committee system in Brussels are business organizations of one kind another. Trade-union, environmental, consumer, feminist, or other ‘public interest groups’, by contrast, make up, all told, about 5 per cent. In real terms, the budget administered by the Commission amounted in the nineties to less than 1 per cent of Union GDP. Of this, by the end of the decade about a third was spent on Cohesion Funds, more redistributive territorially than socially. Overall, social expenditure by the EU is a miniscule one-hundredth of the total laid out by national governments. In such conditions, no ‘visible or significant relevant layer of European social citizenship’ exists. Monetary union, on the other hand, has created an extremely strong economic boundary for the Eurozone, patrolled by the ECB. But, so far, lacking any institutional goals other than price stability, it ‘looks more like a rigid system for disciplining member states’ behaviours rather than like an instrument functional to common EU interests and economic hegemony’.11 With the beginnings of common immigration and crime control, interna
l security has moved into the area of Union competences, and with it some of the attributes of a coercive boundary. Last but not least, the European Court of Justice has steadily expanded the reach of its field of jurisdiction into new areas of law—most recently, and signficantly, labour law.
Set against this—still selective—accumulation of powers above, the processes that in the development of the nation-state created a complementary loyalty and identity below remain nugatory. ‘Linguistic fragmentation remains an insurmountable obstacle to any mass level symbolic interaction’. The use of English is spreading, but as a global not a European standard, effacing rather than tracing any cultural boundary between the Union and the world. Political representation is scarcely more than notional, in a European Parliament whose assorted blocs are so heterogeneous that their divisions can be sublimated only because the assembly itself is so invisible and its deliberations so inconsequential domestically. European parties, so-called, neither compete for electoral rewards nor answer to any real political responsibility. They do not aggregate or channel citizens’ demands in the fashion of their national counterparts, but act to dilute or suppress them. The most salient feature of their representatives is absenteeism: less than half the members of the European Parliament even bother to turn up for its resolutions, where the average attendance at votes is a mere 45 per cent.12 Not that the EP lacks all significance, since it too has benefitted from some, partly unintended, institutional creep within the competing peak instances of the Union. But practically speaking, its main effect has been to insulate the core phenomenon of the EU as a political process, ‘elite consolidation’, from popular scrutiny or contestation.
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