The New Old World (91 page)

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 Bundestag, 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, internal 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.

This is a system that Bartolini dubs ‘collusive democracy', in which elites make sure electorates cannot divide over questions to which they have no access. In such a system, issues of legitimacy—over which European elites occasionally agonize, to comic effect—never arise. For legitimacy involves, by definition, principles, for which mere performance—capable at most of securing a passive assent, something very different—can never be a substitute. The resulting order is incoherent. The nation-state, relinquishing control of its economic, legal and administrative boundaries, has attempted to retrench itself behind its cultural, social and political boundaries. But these, penetrated and eroded by the larger space
surrounding them, are no longer what they were. Rather than any clear demarcation or division of labour between the two zones, of the kind imagined by Majone or Moravcsik, there is incongruity and incompatibility. The social and political life of its nations cannot be quarantined from the impact—infection for some, medication for others—of the economic, bureaucratic and judicial operations of the Union. The processes that historically went to build the nation-state have not been recapitulated, but unscrambled and disjoined. Critically, European integration has seen an ‘enormous expansion of socio-economic practices that bear no or little relation to social identities and to decisional rules'. Bartolini's conclusion affords no comfort. If acute conflicts are not to arise in future, ‘the scattered elements of identities, interests and institutions need to be reconciled in some way into a new coherent order'.
¹³
But any such way remains obscure. At the head of the book stands an epigraph from Goethe:
Am Ende hängen wir doch ab / Von Kreaturen, die wir machten
. The words come from Mephistopheles; the creature is a homunculus; the next scene Walpurgis Night.