Abstract
This article argues that the traditional European narrative based on the rhetoric of progress, openness, ‘an ever closer union’ and the ever greater sharing of sovereignty has lost traction with a significant percentage of the European electorate, who are gripped by frustration, insecurity and disarray. It sketches the broad lines of a new Europeanism, arguably one that would be better equipped to deal with populism and identity politics. It makes the case for a ‘leaner Europe’, less bureaucratic and intrusive, but also more openly political and culturally grounded.
Introduction
For all of us who believe in European unity, these are rather disquieting times. European integration has been thrown, together with so much else, into the confused cauldron of populist anger. Crises in a number of areas, from the economy to migration, and from terrorism to turmoil in Libya and the Middle East, are filling the ranks of anti-establishment movements and casting a shadow on the future of our political systems. EU institutions have never been so unpopular, and never in living memory have parties so utterly opposed to the European project made such inroads into the mainstream. Britain has voted to leave the EU and Donald Trump, the darling of all the EU's arch-enemies, is the new US president.
Amidst this perfect storm, there is no longer time for complacency about the European project. The traditional European narrative based on the rhetoric of progress, openness, ever closer union and the ever greater sharing of sovereignty has served us well for a long and successful historical period. However, it has clearly lost traction with a significant part of the European electorate, which is gripped by frustration, insecurity and disarray. If we are to pursue the overarching aim of maintaining and hopefully strengthening a supranational order in Europe, we have a duty to recognise, before it is too late, the historical exhaustion of traditional Europeanism, and to reinvent Europeanism for the challenges of the new century. This article is a modest and necessarily incomplete attempt to give a sense of the direction we could take. It is written with full awareness that deep forces are driving the revolt against the EU, and that fixing Europeanism is unlikely to be enough to thwart it. However insufficient it may be, it is necessary nonetheless, and we should put our minds and energies to it without further ado.
Traditional Europeanism and its limits
Traditional Europeanism has dominated European integration since the late 1950s. Its founding event was probably the failure of the European Defence Community in 1954, which led to the understanding that a one-shot transition to a federal Europe was politically impossible. The solution found was a specific mode of integration consisting of the sharing of sovereignty within common European institutions in more and more policy fields, starting with the fields necessary to create a common European market. It was expected that integration in these fields would generate common problems and encourage integration in other fields, thus fuelling a self-supporting integration dynamic that would one day culminate in the need for political federalisation. This is so-called neo-functionalism: this peculiar mode of ‘round-about integration’ is a central component of traditional Europeanism. It has great historical merits, as it has made possible significant transfers of power to supranational institutions, while maintaining the reassuring illusion that European states are still fully sovereign entities.
Since the 1990s, however, the limits and flaws of neo-functional integration have dangerously started to surface. First, its fundamental ambiguity regarding the final competences and constitutional set-up of the EU has become less and less tenable as the European project has become more openly political since the Maastricht Treaty. Without precise constitutional content, previously harmless slogans such as ‘ever closer union’ and ‘more Europe’ have left pro-Europeans open to the accusation that they are ultimately struggling to unify the continent within a state-like polity, with little autonomy left for member states. Supporters of integration have done little to correct the impression that they consider the transfer of more and more powers to the European level to be an end in itself. Second, a technocratic sense of inevitability has been disturbingly attached to neo-functional integration, often conveying the condescending impression that political opposition to any integration initiative could only be due to technical ignorance or to dangerous nationalistic tendencies.
A second, related, component of traditional Europeanism seems to be its tendency to conceive European integration as a process of state-making, as opposed to a genuine process of federalisation. Evidence of this tendency can be found, for example, in the often displayed preference for centralisation, harmonisation and detailed regulation that is clearly not in line with well-conceived federalism. Authentic federalism would require the centralisation of very few functions (e.g. foreign policy, defence, the four freedoms of the internal market) and the complete decentralisation of everything else, while traditional Europeanism proceeds through the ‘sharing’ of sovereignty in an ever-growing number of policy fields. Hence the widespread impression that, in the EU, sovereignty can potentially be ‘shared’ in virtually all areas of public policy, unlike in traditional federations, where the federal level has competence in a limited number of clearly enumerated fields. Further evidence is provided by the striking disconnection between EU rhetoric and the cultures and traditions of Europe's civilisation: the dominant cultural trait of traditional Europeanism seems to be a vague celebration of diversity with progressive overtones that bears little resemblance to the historically grounded identities of Europe's nations and regions.
This point allows us to signal an important distinction between what is here called traditional Europeanism and the Europeanism of the Christian Democratic founding fathers. The latter influenced the very first steps of integration: it was broadly federal in outlook, deeply attached to the cultural heritage of Europe's civilisation, and very respectful of national and regional autonomy. The former has lost sight of much of this wisdom.
Recent political developments have confronted us with the unmistakable return of identity politics all over the world. This is no longer the rational identity of appeasing, cosmopolitan ideals, but the stormy identity of nations, language and historical memory. It is imperative that the European project reconnects itself with the resurging identities of its nations and regions, or it will seal its own downfall.
A leaner Europe for the new century
After years in denial, parts of the European establishment have started to recognise that, notwithstanding the abysmal disregard of many Eurosceptics for basic facts and the norms of civility, certain aspects of traditional Europeanism do play into their hands when they attack the EU as a distant, bureaucratic and centralising entity with little respect for national differences. During his campaign for the presidency of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker used a slogan to convey a sense of change: the EU should be ‘big on big things and small on small things’. In the wake of his election, the new president followed this up by drastically reducing the number of new regulations proposed by the Commission, thus trying to curb the blatant over-regulation that had grown up since the late 1980s, often beyond what was strictly justified by the needs of the single market. Most strikingly, he declared in a speech last year that ‘we should stop talking about the United States of Europe, because the peoples of Europe do not want them… . Giving the impression that the European Union is on its way to becoming a state does not get us anywhere’ (Juncker
This article was written before the Juncker Commission published, in March 2017, its important ‘White Paper on the Future of Europe’. Thus, it does not refer to this document. However, signs of this change of mindset are clearly detectable in the tone and in the five scenarios provided in the white paper, in sharp contrast to the usual ‘ever more Europe’ rhetoric of the European Commission.
Some historical reference models for Europe's future
Whenever we imagine the future of Europe, it is almost inevitable that we do so based on some sort of reference model. As has been said, for a long time the implicit model of traditional Europeanism seems to have been some variation of the nation-state, or at best the contemporary US, a very centralised federation that long ago lost many of its genuinely federal attributes.
On the erosion of US federalism, see, for example, Greve (
The opposition between confederalism and federalism is largely exaggerated in contemporary literature. Virtually all historical federations started out as confederations and only evolved into more integrated polities when time and common practices had made it acceptable to their members and their citizens.
The extent to which economic openness within the internal market requires detailed regulation from Brussels is certainly overplayed. Mutual recognition and regulatory competition between different jurisdictions should, in general, be preferred to the imposition of a unique regulatory regime on the whole continent.
The biggest challenge: the euro area
The biggest challenges to a leaner Europe that can be rationally explained to its citizens and is well-equipped for the new century admittedly come from the state of the euro area. The euro was the boldest neo-functionalist experiment in the history of European integration, and it displays all the lights and shadows of traditional Europeanism to their utmost. Its seemingly technocratic rationale—the need to eliminate price distortions within the single market and to abandon a clearly dysfunctional system of monetary cooperation among independent currencies—made possible an unprecedented integrative step that transferred one of the traditional prerogatives of statehood to the EU. However, the euro has also demonstrated the ultimate inability of neo-functional integration to generate the political capital needed to unify the continent in accordance with the model of statehood favoured by traditional Europeanism. In fact, as a consequence of the euro crisis, opposition to the EU has surged to unprecedented levels. A complex set of rules and controls has been adopted that has hollowed out national budgetary sovereignty and introduced a rather intrusive form of co-management of the national economies between national and EU authorities. Long-term plans for the viability of the euro also include an economic and a budgetary union, which would further advance the EU on its way to statehood, albeit without announcing it too loudly and in a purely neo-functionalist fashion. When one takes even a distracted look at political trends in Europe, one must conclude that the strained edifice of EU legitimacy is likely to horrendously crack—and probably collapse altogether—under the heavy weight of this dense and intrusive integration. Honest pro-Europeans should admit that increasing democratic controls at the European level is unlikely to make any difference, as it has made little difference in the past, in the presence of far less intrusive initiatives. We are dealing with a substantive problem of identity and political allegiance (which are still primarily national). No procedural solution (e.g. no increase in the powers of the European Parliament) can offer a credible way out. We are therefore left wondering under what conditions a decentralised monetary union, in which member states can recover the core of their economic and budgetary powers, could be sustainable. The subject is too vast to be dealt with here with any accuracy. However, such a monetary union would seem to require a profound restructuring of national economies in the sense of more flexibility and a drastic reduction of public debt, which is not conceivable without radical changes to our expensive welfare systems. It would also seem to demand a truly unified banking system, integrated across national borders, and in which national banks have no special bonds with national sovereigns, as well as a return to the strict no bailout framework of the Maastricht Treaty, which was repeatedly broken during the crisis by fiscal and monetary authorities alike. This also means that countries that lose market access due to their profligate fiscal policy and high debt levels must be allowed to go bankrupt and potentially leave the monetary union.
Conclusion
The challenge is daunting, but if a transition along the lines described above could be accomplished, the European economy and the political integration of the continent would move off on an entirely new trajectory. Reforms and debt reduction would breathe new life into Europe's stagnant economies, long enfeebled by an overdose of taxation, bureaucratisation and regulation. And the whole continent would be reorganised based on a new Europeanism that gave strong but clearly defined and limited powers to the supranational level, while preserving Europe's nation states as largely autonomous communities. The density of the present integration model, which penetrates so deeply into the flesh and bones of national laws and practices through pervasive regulations, ubiquitous shared competences and detailed fiscal rules, must be greatly reduced for good. Europe would become easier to explain and defend, and its benefits more visible, especially in the presence of external challenges. If we are finding it difficult to explain the present EU to our citizens and defend it from the assaults of Eurosceptic parties, it is probably a sign that something is wrong with it. Let us try to change it before it is too late.
Footnotes