The New Old World (92 page)

What of the Union viewed in still a longer
durée
, that of European civilization itself? Since 2001, Brussels has possessed an official Museum of Europe, affording its citizens a historical tour of the continent's past, culminating in the common institutions it has acquired today. The conception inspiring it has been explained by its academic director, the Franco-Polish historian Krzysztof Pomian, in the pages of
Le Débat
, of which he is a co-editor, and finds extended expression in both his
L'Europe et ses nations
(1990) and a work co-authored with Elie Barnavi,
La révolution européenne 1945–2007
, which appeared in 2008.
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It can be regarded as the nearest thing to a canonical version of Europe's route to its present condition.

Pomian's story unfolds in three great stages. Between 1000 and 1500, Europe formed a religious, cultural and social unity co-extensive with Latin Christianity, defined by common beliefs,
practices and institutions, replicated across the continent as far as the reach of the Roman creed. This first unification of the continent was destroyed by the Wars of Religion, which erupted with the Reformation, and lasted till the end of the seventeenth century. When these finally burnt themselves out, the arrival of the Enlightenment brought a second unification of Europe, across a more extended space, with a cosmopolitan republic of letters and a common court culture that eventually fused into a single ambience shared by all the elites of the period. This unity was in its turn undone by the explosion of the French Revolution and its Napoleonic sequel, unleashing not only popular but nationalist passions across the continent. These set in motion the fatal dynamic that would ultimately generate the Wars of Ideology of the twentieth century, when totalitarian creeds—exacerbated nationalism, fascism, bolshevism—shattered Europe in successive catastrophic conflicts. Out of these, however, emerged the third great unification of Europe: this time, no longer a by-product of other forces, as in the past, but a deliberate project—the construction of the economic and juridical Community we enjoy today. The immediate conditions of this unification lie in the defeat of fascism, the end of colonialism, the collapse of communism, the modernization of economies and life-styles. But at a deeper historical level, it would not have been possible without nostalgia for the second unification of the Enlightenment, just as the second would not have been possible without the legacy of Christianity in the first. It is the sedimentation of these successive strata in common memory that anchors European identity today.
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This schema has the appeal of symmetry, whatever its limitations, like that of any such proposal, as history. Since mediaeval society had no consciousness of Europe, as opposed to Christendom, and the Enlightenment sense of it was confined to a narrow layer of society, whereas the Community claims both the conscious allegiance and factual inclusion of all citizens, its tale could be summarized in Hegelian terms, as the passage of Europe, through successive ordeals, from a totality in-itself through a selectivity for-itself to a totality in-itself-for-itself. The conclusion of the triad, however, raises a difficulty. The novelty of the continent's third unification is to be a project. But a project for
what? It is precisely the contemporary absence of one—the lack of any coherent or compelling finality—that is a refrain of even such unimpeachably well-disposed observers of the Union as Dehousse or Habermas. What motivating end—or is it ends?—the EU now serves seems to have become increasingly obscure. The building of the institutions that make up the Union was certainly a project. But, once constructed, what is the ultimate purpose of these forms? The sense of a finality lost, or gone astray in bureaucratic doldrums, is pervasive.

This was not always so. In the heroic phase of European integration, its goals were clear: to assure peace to the west of the Iron Curtain, by binding France and Germany into a common legal framework, and prosperity in the Six by creating a semi-continental market. In Milward's succinct formulation, the Community served to bring security to the population of its member-states—security in both senses, national and social, by the elimination of any risk of a third round of war between the two leading states of the region, and the provision of faster growth, higher living standards and more welfare protection. Retrospectively, it is less clear than it seemed at the time that integration was the indispensable keystone of these. The imperial order of the
pax americana
, more than any local endeavour, guaranteed the tranquillity of Western Europe. The increment to overall growth yielded by the common market was, historically speaking, quite modest, because of the similarity in output structures of the assorted national economies. The most careful recent study estimates that, taking together the creation of the Common Market, the passage of the Single European Act, and the introduction of Monetary Union, the net addition to GDP growth in the EU has been, over half a century, perhaps some 5 percent, not an overwhelming figure.
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Such calculations aside, however, by the eighties, neither peace nor prosperity was any longer much of a positive inspiration within
the Community. Two generations after the war, they were taken for granted by most of its citizens, many of them aware that growth had been no less, and in some cases more, elsewhere. Victory in the Cold War made threats of invasion even more remote, and while the promise of higher living standards was once again a powerful force of attraction in the Union's enlargement to the East, citizens in the West, comprising three-quarters of its population, were no longer greatly excited by them. In the discourses of justification, official and unofficial, the emphasis shifted to solidarity, as a specially—perhaps even, in some measure, uniquely—defining value of the Union. Here European welfare systems and income distribution have been regularly contrasted with those of the United States, as more generous and less unequal.

There is little doubt that this claim has popular resonance. But though it can point to real differences between social arrangements, within a common matrix, these scarcely amount to a finality of the Union. For there is very little that is EU-specific about them. The provision of welfare remains the province of the nation-states, not of the Community, and varies widely across even Western Europe, not to speak of the continent as a whole. In fact, the range of that variation is such that there are few areas within or without the Union which do not, along one or other dimension of social security, fall within the parameters of one or other state or region of the US, which is much less unlike the mosaic of Europe than is often imagined.
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The ideology of solidarity is much stronger in Europe than in America. The realities are closer. With predictable reforms from the incoming administration, and ongoing retrenchments by the various European governments, they are likely to become more so.

Of course, in so far as they match a single nation-state of continental dimensions against a congeries of eighteen or—depending on inclusion of the East—near thirty nation-states of widely differing sizes, histories and levels of development, socioeconomic comparisons between America and Europe can be taxed with a paralogism. Brussels is not Washington: the Community neither has a central administration, nor is it a global power. But should it not become one? Is not just this the finality that would make of today's Union a coherent project? It is clear that something like this was present from the start, in the mind of Monnet himself,
although it was quietly and privately expressed, and many have pressed the case more openly since. In its contemporary versions, it has typically taken two forms, geo-political and ethico-political. For the first, the Union—with a total population and economy now considerably larger those of the United States—must accept the political responsibilities of its objective status as a Great Power in the making.
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That requires the creation of a European military apparatus and diplomacy capable of executing, and enforcing, a unitary foreign policy, in both adjacent and more far-flung regions of the world. For theorists like Cooper or Münkler the vocation of the Union, so conceived, is to become a new—this time truly benevolent—empire, not in rivalry with but autonomy from the American empire.

For a broader band of opinion, geo-political projections of this kind are neither entirely wholesome nor realistic. The proper mission of Europe on the international scene is rather ethico-political—to become something never seen in this form before, a ‘normative power'. In the most radical version, offered by Habermas, the EU, in its constitutional supersession of the nation-state, is blazing humanity's trail towards world government, and needs to take on the tasks appropriate to that ultimate goal, a responsibility which the American republic—admirable though it has always been—is still, as a nation-state, less inherently inclined to fulfil. The United Nations is the universal in which Europe can sublimate, without denying, its own particularity, and seek to constitutionalize the rule of law and human rights for all peoples, by equipping the UN with the necessary machinery—Kant had overlooked this—for punishing those who violate them, whatever the outmoded attributes of national sovereignty.

Sceptical of such aims as too vaulting, the French political scientist Zaki Laïdi, on the right of the PS, proposes a moderate version. Neither a European
Realpolitik
along Cooper–Münkler lines, nor a constitutionalization of the world along Habermasian lines, is practicable, because Europeans do not see themselves as guarantors of their own security. Like the Japanese, they entrust it to the United States. But the EU can play a critical role in the world as a normative power, properly understood. For the Union itself is based on norms, through which alone its member-states
have been able to pool their sovereignty without relinquishing it. In developing these norms—the Copenhagen criteria can be taken as a benchmark—the EU has become, not a model, but something more useful, a tool-box for the world, setting global standards in one area after another where the US lags behind: the environment, health care, competition. ‘Regulative rather than salvational', there is no point in trying to constitutionalize such norms, since they are anyway dynamic, and evolve over time. Nor can schemes for formal equality between states abolish their real inequality. If normative power is a kind of soft power, soft power is never entirely dissociable from hard power. The EU's creation of thirteen Battle Groups with a strategic range of up to two thousand miles, and neighbourhood dispositions from Moldavia to Morocco—‘a classic semi-periphery control policy'—are proof of that. But even if, inevitably, some double standards are involved, essentially the Union ‘does geo-politics with norms'.
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Like claims for a special European solidarity, aspirations for European autonomy enjoy wide support in public opinion across the EU, at any rate west of the frontiers of the Cold War. But the ideologies expressing them are brittle, and the support is shallow. However much Europeans extol the unique virtues of the Union as a haven of political rectitude, not to speak of moral foresight, there is little sign that the rest of the world is greatly impressed. Policy-makers from Latin America, Asia, Africa or the Middle East are not knocking at the doors of the Competition Commissioner in Brussels, the National Health Service in London, or the German automobile industry for lessons in markets, waiting-lists or emissions. Lectures on human rights ring hollow from governments collaborating with torture. The collusion of the Union with military occupation and ethnic cleansing in Cyprus, and repression of genocide in Turkey, exposes its rescue missions in the Balkans and commemorations of the Shoah as something more than double standards. The autonomy of Europe, conceived as a mission of ‘normativity' peculiar to it, is little more than an apologetic for post-moderns.

The less ethico-political versions have the advantage of a greater contact with reality, and smaller freight of euphemisms. Naturally,
they too cannot dispense with the equipage of moral rights and duties, any more than could their imperial forebears—Münkler is perfectly lucid about the continuity. But aware that the US can easily rival or outdo the EU in the rhetoric of a liberal civilization, they are less inclined to posit these as quintessentially European. Their conception of autonomy is more limited. Accepting the global imperium of America, they project a Union nested within it, patrolling its own vicinity as a sub-imperial power, in a loyal—if, where necessary, critical—solidarity with the hegemon. This is roughly the vision of the EU adopted by Sarkozy, though not yet by any other continental ruler, and implies more centralized, and on occasion mail-fisted, external operations than Brussels has hitherto been able to mount. As a geo-political prospect, it has a future. The aversion of European publics in recent years to the American role in the world—the sharp turn of French foreign policy towards Washington has not been popular at home—might seem to condemn it. But most of this has been a cultural dislike of Bush and the Republican administration for slighting European sensibilities, rather than any deeper political drift away from identification with the US. Predictably, the arrival of a Democratic administration has already generated even more star-struck enthusiasm for the new president in Europe than in America. In that sense, the conception of a Union stepping up to the plate more boldly on the international scene, without challenging the role of the manager, is likely to be perfectly acceptable. Its limitation lies only in the modest degree of autonomy that would actually be achieved. An EU unable ever to cross the will of the hegemon, on any issue the US holds important to it, is an agent diminished in advance. If this were to be the finality of the Union, it would be in miniature.

There is, however, one further conception of the kind of project that the Union could come to represent, that would connect it to some of the deepest and most persistent meditations of the past. The theme of European diversity, as the true historical signature of the continent, has its roots in Romantic thought and the Restoration. Given an agonistic twist by the end of the nineteenth century, it faded from prominence for much of the twentieth, without ever quite disappearing. But as the Cold War neared its end, it started to find potent new expression.
Penser l'Europe
(1987), by the French sociologist and all-purpose thinker Edgar Morin, was the flagship of its return. Repudiating all idealization or abstraction of Europe, Morin declared that the continent was
a complex of opposites. ‘We must abandon any Europe that is one, clear, distinct, harmonious, reject any notion of an original European essence or substance, drive out the idea of a European reality that would precede division and antagonism. We must, on the contrary, inscribe it in them'. The unity of Europe could be properly understood only in the light of two principles: dialogic and recursive. The first signified the presence of ‘two or more different logics bound together in complex—complementary, competitive, antagonistic—fashion within a unity, in such a way that duality is preserved within it'. The second implied a ‘vortex—as of air or water—in which a flux of apparently antagonistic forces become complementary', in a ‘self-generating spiral, reacting back on its constituent elements to drive them and integrate them'.
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