Hannah Arendt in 1944. Portrait by photographer Fred Stein (1909-1967) who emigrated 1933 from Nazi Germany to France and finally to the USA. Fred Stein/Press Association. All rights reserved.In this Festrede, I will try to use an Arendtian
inspiration (the "right to have rights” and “citizenship in the making”)
to address current developments in the crisis of European construction, contradictory
aspects of Europe’s unity and disunity, as well as the prospects for a “new
foundation”, taking Europe as an institution whose foundations are neither to
be found in a transcendent revelation nor in some eternal natural rights, but
purely in the action of those human beings who jointly apply their diversity
to its constitution.[1]
I have relatively
little time, therefore I must remain at a very general level, only touching
superficially on many questions which deserve a complex discussion. Still, I
want to frame a problematic that brings together all the dimensions which need
to become correlated if we want to understand what kind of history is now affecting
us, what the choices are that now lie before us, and also why we have problems
in defining them clearly.
In the first
place, I will describe what I suggest we might call ‘the double bind’ of Europe: on the one hand, a political constitution of Europe is more necessary than ever, in
the best interest of its population, and even others in the world; on the other
hand, it has become indefensible and unsustainable in its current form. To
follow, I will discuss the conditions required for a “New Foundation” of
Europe. This has become a widely debated concept, albeit interpreted in
contradictory ways, but in my view these versions are still not radical enough.
Finally, I will invoke a Machiavellian principle (which is typical of the
“political theory” whose legacy Arendt was reclaiming) to discuss how such a
New Foundation could also be related to the origins of European Construction in
the after-war period.
At whichever level
a community is instituted – local or continental –, it can neither perpetuate
nor develop itself if the foundations of its legitimacy and efficacity are not
permanently confirmed. This political truth was enunciated in the past with
regard to City-States or Nation-States: it must be applied now to the European
Union. However, a blatant contradiction arises when we look at the current
situation from this angle. How long it will prove possible to retain its
effects is anyone’s guess.
On one side, it
is crystal clear that “we” citizens of Europe (by which I understand both
nationals of the various member-states, plus all the residents on the
“territory” of the Union) have a standing
interest in the existence of a European political construction, of
whichever juridical form. The reason most frequently invoked is that if
European nations belong to a supranational system, adopting a common political
project, they may well have opposite interests on many issues, but these will
not give rise to violent hostility, in the worst case leading to mutual
extermination.
I think this
argument, based on past experiences, is valid, but it must undergo an even more
dynamic reformulation: this is not only a question of a guarantee against war
or applying a precautionary principle, it is a question of endowing Europe with
the capacity to build the historic path leading from its past, marked by
violence against itself and others, to its future, ripe with challenges and
uncertainties, in a global context where Europe, while remaining an important
economic, political and cultural ensemble, will never again occupy the place of
a “center”.
Our future
requires a European frame, therefore, for geopolitical reasons, but also
because of our position in the world-economy, and – most importantly – because
of planetary environmental issues. Between early modernity and the middle of the
twentieth century, Europe was able to impose on the world its domination,
drawing from there its prosperity (even if very unevenly distributed) and its
universalistic civilization (even if brutally imposed on others). Today, in
Dipesh Chakrabarty’s words, it has become “provincialized”. And more precisely
it finds itself located in what I would call in Wallersteinian terms a semi-periphery of the world.
The “great Game”
for global hegemony is now played between America (the US and its immediate
dependencies) and Asia (foremost China), with Europe as a political spectator
and a big market. But Europe is also not inscribed in the peripheral
regions of overexploitation (and the death zones) to the South and East of the
Mediterranean, even if it has many involvements there through investments,
armed interventions, border police operations, and movements of populations.
Accordingly,
if we don’t want our labour and our lives to become a simple object of
maneuvers disposed of in the hegemonic conflicts; if we want Europe to really
have weight on norms of international law and systems of protection, to prevent
as much as remains possible the devastation of the environment leading to a
gradual extinction of life on earth; if we want to impose commercial and
financial regulations without which the “European welfare model” (not yet
totally dismantled by neoliberalism) can be saved and adapted to new conditions
and activities, we need much more than the kind of norms and governance
existing today. We need a political
unity and an institutional representation
of the common interest – which however is not the same as uniformity eliminating
every contest or vestige of diversity. We need a political
unity and an institutional representation
of the common interest – which however is not the same as uniformity eliminating
every contest or vestige of diversity.
Are we getting
closer to this goal? The total opposite is true. After the historic turning
point of 1989, with the reunification of Germany and the end of the separation
between the two “parts” of Europe (leaving aside most of the former Soviet
Union), there was much talk of “broader” and “deeper” union, but the reality
was a steady destabilization of the political foundations of the EU. From
whichever angle and over whichever time span you examine these evolutions, they
all converge towards the same negative result, which now appears hardly
reversible.
What are the
causes? They are multiple, of course, but in the first place I will mention policies
implemented to neutralize the financial crisis after 2007, which dramatically
increased inequalities between
territories (hence nations) and social classes throughout the continent. This
is true for revenues, for the safety of employment, for the amount of debts of
individuals and collectivities: Wolfgang Streeck is right on this point, from
which he however draws hazardous and reactionary conclusions.
At this point an
economic crisis became a political crisis, or more precisely, it became a crisis of the political institution in
Europe. Evidence of this crisis is given by the increasing tendency to
substitute authoritarian and technocratic forms of governance for parliamentary
procedures: as in France at this moment, where the voice of citizens is no
longer really taken into account, which also means that “output legitimacy” has
become the single fragile support of a government’s stability. “Representative
democracy” seems to have exhausted its capacities, and one country after
another becomes “ungovernable”: witness the UK since Brexit, Spain replying to
the independentist challenge in Catalonia with infringements of the rule of law
unprecedented in a democratic state… Most spectacular and symbolic,
ungovernability has reached Germany, a country that not so long ago could be
presented as the political model to be imitated everywhere. This is at one and the
same time a germ of instability for the whole of Europe.
There is an
obvious reverse side to this ungovernability, which is authoritarian
“de-democratization”, and this has its own chain of effects. We should inscribe
here the universal backlash of nationalism:
this is absolutely not a privilege confined to Eastern Europe (Istvan Bibo’s petits Etats d’Europe de l’Est, which
were also, in Arendt’s terms, subjected to “continental imperialism”, before
falling prey to Nazism and Soviet totalitarian hegemony). It emerges just as
strongly in the West, everywhere activating a combination of anxiety about the
disaggregation of the community or the historical “We” with feelings of social
demise and collective powerlessness.
The outcome is not only “populism” (a misleading
category), but actual xenophobia, hence potential violence, and a rebirth of
fascism – or, if we want to avoid mechanically transporting categories from one
historical situation to another, it is a constitution of neofascist movements in Europe, with more or less aggressive
detachments everywhere on the continent, now close to power or
accessing it in some countries. I insist on
using this term on purpose: not only is neofascism a danger to the levels of
tolerance and exercise of liberties in our societies, it is different from past
nationalism and more than its recreation.
I insist on
using this term on purpose: not only is neofascism a danger to the levels of
tolerance and exercise of liberties in our societies, it is different from past
nationalism and more than its recreation. If we refer only to nationalism, we
create the illusion that this is a phenomenon
of the past that is returning, reviving conflicts of interests and
collective passions from before European
unification. The truth is that the current phenomenon looks instead in the
opposite direction: it is a pathological result of European unity in its
current form. In particular, identity feelings which, traditionally, were mutually
hostile and incompatible, tend to merge into a common hatred toward the Other,
the construction of a “public enemy” of all European peoples, whose specter amalgamates
all sorts of ethnic, cultural, religious differences inherited from
colonization and imported through immigration – with now an added component:
the “refugee problem” that is inflated and demonized, in spite of admirable
gestures of solidarity by certain countries, certain cities and associations of
citizens. Terrorism, a very real threat indeed, contributes
to the same artifact.
This explains
why I speak of a double bind
situation. In Europe there does exist in fact a quasi-federal system of institutions, juridical norms, and
interdependent interests: it was again illustrated negatively when attempts at
expelling Greece from the monetary union could not succeed, or more recently,
through the obvious impossibility for Britain to really exit the Union, at
least without important losses. Conversely, an accumulation of inequalities
pushing societies to the verge of explosion, ungovernable states no longer masked
by such political recipes as centrist parties “alternating” in power or forming
“great coalitions”, technocratic rule creating a gulf between the governing bureaucrats
and the governed citizens, nationalist ideologies merging into potential
violence against the “enemy from within”, all these phenomena generate an
existential crisis for the democratic political form in Europe.
It doesn’t lead
to a “revolutionary situation”, or a “coming insurrection”, I am afraid,
contrary to the sincere hopes of old anarchists and young activists, who dream
of a radical break with parliamentary regimes. Rather, it produces a steady decomposition
of citizenship. The Union itself, lacking a sense of orientation, seems now to
be awaiting the next financial crisis to learn if it will experience the same
collapse as was the case for that other great historical attempt at overcoming
national limitations on the continent: the Soviet Union. Some pundits now
predict as much.
All this
sufficiently explains why, suddenly, there is so much discussion among the
political class and the experts, of a “new foundation” for the European
project. I am far from rejecting this idea, but I want a more radical
understanding of what political conditions it would require, and a critical
assessment of some pseudo-solutions.
Probably the
most coherent plan in this sense is now offered by the French President
Emmanuel Macron. It really resumes and updates an idea which, in the past, had
been proposed by German conservative politicians: that of Kerneuropa (in the terminology of Wolfgang Schäuble’s and Karl
Lamers’s project from 1994). In order to create a “strong core” of the Union,
several countries from the eurozone would agree to pool their financial
resources into a common treasury, or a European Monetary Fund, which then could
be used for long term investments, perhaps even a form of collective planning, in
order to prevent financial crises, and under the condition of a stricter
control of public debts. Explicitly, this idea leads to institutionalizing
“multispeed Europe”. And, as such a plan does in fact increase the “quasi-sovereign” status of financial institutions in
Europe, a democratic counterpart is needed (at least in the liberal or
social-democratic varieties of the plan), which provides greater legitimacy:
e.g. a specific parliamentary representation in the “core”, in addition to the
European parliament and the national parliaments.
Undeniably there
is some rationality in such a project. This arises from the fact that – since
the “community” was built in the post-war period – economic government has been the engine propelling the construction
of the political unity of Europe, and the center from which integration proceeded
socially and administratively. The project also acknowledges the fact that, in
the era of financial globalization, “economy” and “politics” do not really
belong to separate spheres. Accordingly, there would be no real possibility to
further a federalist agenda if economic and monetary policies did not become
more integrated themselves: it would simply never materialize. We
need much more if the reciprocal function is to be fulfilled as well: namely
the political control of the economic
government, in forms sufficiently democratic themselves for the” sovereign”
to obtain legitimacy.
Granted, but we
need much more if the reciprocal function is to be fulfilled as well: namely
the political control of the economic
government, in forms sufficiently democratic themselves for the” sovereign”
to obtain legitimacy. As it appears, the project has two major flaws: first, it
keeps the representation of citizens in a subaltern function, meant for
consultation only, which doesn’t effectively balance decision-making by the
executive or the “directorate” (what Habermas famously called a
“postdemokratischer Exekutivföderalismus” – no translation is needed) with a
possibility of debate or contest; and, second, it creates a new gap between
different types and degrees of membership in the Union, which, while not ensuring
that “core” countries will maintain the same interests, is a sure recipe for
fostering resentment and stronger nationalism among all the others. In short, rather
than a new foundation, the plan appears to develop already existing tendencies
towards the concentration of powers and the hegemony of certain nations over others.
Therefore, whereas
I completely agree that a new foundation is the order of the day, I suggest
that it should be imagined in a more radical way, not just through changes in
the existing balance of powers and the delegation of the “piloting” status to
some countries. Certain political
conditions are always required for a new foundation in history. I can think
of five such conditions, heterogeneous no doubt, but effective only if they
become tightly combined.
Five conditions
A first
condition, already stated, is a material
interest of the European peoples, or their great majority, in becoming an active force in the power relations and current
conflicts of globalization, in order to transform them for the benefit of
European citizens. This cannot rely on “isolationist” or pure “protectionist”
ideas (of the kind “make Europe great again” or “Europe first” …). As I said earlier,
such an interest amounts to making Europe a power for alternative globalization, particularly in matters of financial
regulation and the protection of the environment. A tragic present of
proliferating wars and interventions, in the immediate vicinity of Europe, also
makes it imperative to push for revitalizing a moribund international law, and
nurturing an independent capacity for mediation among declared and undeclared
belligerents. Such an interest amounts to making Europe a power for alternative globalization, particularly in matters of financial
regulation and the protection of the environment.
A second
condition is to define an institutional
objective for Europe, which is also
a constitutional novelty in history: this should take us beyond the pseudo-federal state that, in practice, already
exists in Europe but is officially denied. Economies, territories, cultures are
strongly interdependent: in other words, there exists a European “society” (as
argued by Ulrich Bielefeld and others), but national political and technocratic
elites retain the monopoly of representation and negotiation with the
supranational administrations and the “corporatist” powers (multinational
corporations, or professional unions). We need a renewed effort to invent a new
form of federation, where nationhood is not abolished, but relativized and
transformed in order to share in a joint sovereignty.
A third
condition means something different, but correlative: a great political ideal, making
it possible to measure the degree of perfection of the constitution. For many
years now, with some others, I have developed the idea that, for Europe to
become a political reality, we cannot simply keep the name democracy, doing our best to mitigate the strong “postdemocratic”
tendency that is fostered by the global concentration of powers in the economy,
communications, or the military.
Our aim must be to push democracy beyond the level it had reached in the nation-states
when they were at their best with regard to active citizenship. In other terms,
there will be no European federalism if, matching the development of executive,
administrative, judiciary, and parliamentary powers above the national level,
there is not a rebirth and an activation of popular forms of participatory
democracy (sometimes called assembly
in today’s political discourse), which are not confined to a local horizon, but
communicate across borders. Obviously, such an invention can’t be decided from above, and it will meet
powerful oppositions and huge obstacles which are not simply conservative (e.g.
linguistic obstacles). To overcome these difficulties, we must add other conditions.
A fourth
condition I would call an effective
demand for the new foundation, by which I mean not only Europhilic
sentiments, supporting governments which commit themselves to working for a new
foundation of Europe, but actual
collective movements that involve real, active citizens, with their diverse
cultural heritage and their anthropological differences, joining forces across
borders. Such transnational popular movements can be protest movements (e.g. against fiscal injustice and tax evasion, a
plague affecting all European citizens even if it benefits certain states). Or
they can be movements pushing towards cultural
revolutions that can no longer wait (e.g. to transform those economic modes
of production and consumption which have become self-destructive). This may
seem very far away in a period of nationalist reaction and declining interest in Europe amongst the population, but I don’t see why we should declare it
radically impossible. At least we should try.
Finally, a fifth
condition only articulates all the others: it is the explicit definition (which
I don’t call exactly a program, although it would have the function of
orienting the “party of Europe”) of the
political problems that need to be resolved for the European construction
to overcome the current crisis. Marx was certainly wrong to believe that
“mankind sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve”, but the reverse
proposition does make sense: only problems which have been actually formulated can
be resolved… therefore, a politics for the new foundation of Europe must define
its strategic “battles”.
Or, to put it in less militaristic terms, it must
clarify the “campaigns” to be organized in order to transform obstacles into
terrains for initiatives and communications among people. This is true when it
comes to tackling inequalities (based
on profession, generation, gender, race, and affecting residence, education,
security, health…), to which the current triumph of the principle of
competition over solidarity has given free play. It is also true when it comes
to tackling the new “national question” in
Europe: a crucial and most difficult question which has certainly inherited
many determinations from the past (resulting from imperial domination, national
antagonisms), but was substantially transformed only when nation-states, on
both sides of the Cold War divide, also became “social States” (I once coined
the name “national-social State”). And a
fortiori it is true when (in Kantian and Derridean terms) it comes to
meeting the challenge of hospitality,
addressing the effects of migration and other movements of people at global
scale, which can’t be dealt with through the current mixture of dishonorable bribery
and military interventions, but call for a “just” combination of humanitarian
commitment and North-South cooperation…
Growing inequalities, unhappy identities, uprooted
populations: these are the problems Europe must
confront in a collective manner in order to move into the twenty-first century
(already well advanced) not passively, but as a historical agent, combining within itself multiple agencies.
Let me finish
with a philosophical reference. In a famous passage from his Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (III,
1) (that Arendt knew well, as shown by her elaborations on this thinking in On Revolution and the essay on Authority),
Machiavelli explained that a “republic” (or a polity) is able to last only if it proves able to compensate for the
corruption generated by weak leadership or citizenry through a return to the origin, reviving its
founding principles.
This political theorem would seem to apply directly to the
current situation of the European Union. There are difficulties in implementing
it, however. In the first place, the “principles” on which the Union is
grounded never received a single interpretation. We can even say that they were
an object of permanent antagonism, a struggle between different ways as it were,
which also evolved over time. In a sense, therefore, several “new foundations”
have already taken place, although their true meaning was never openly
acknowledged. This happened after the “Fall of the Wall”, when the common
currency was adopted by most countries and the idea of a “social Europe” was
dropped, or when the procedure of ratifying new treatises among states replaced
a failed attempt at having citizens in each country adopt a Constitution
project (let us observe in passing that referendums in Europe seldom have the effects predicted…). It happened again when austerity policies were imposed on
countries (like Greece) whose possible default threatened the banking system.
From my point of view, regarding their long-term effects, these were forms of
“corruption” rather than a “new foundation” …
Which leads us
to our second difficulty: how can we justify a new foundation that reverses certain decisions already inscribed in texts or treatises? How can we reverse a dominant ideology and a
government’s practice which has produced the victory of certain social
interests over others, while simultaneously claiming to continue a project that is already ancient, but remains unfinished?
How can we suppress the recurrent confusion between relativizing the boundaries
of ethnicities and paralyzing the
capacity of the demos (or, as Kalypso
Nicolaidis would say, the demoi in
the plural), hence the democracy itself?
Clearly, we need
a new work of interpretation, a revised understanding of the “founding
narratives” of the European Union. Hence we need to clearly distinguish between
the philosophical prehistory of Europe (more or less
mythical references to medieval Christendom, to “Perpetual Peace” projects, to
cosmopolitan utopias), the political
origins of the federalist project (particularly in antifascist resistance),
and the historical beginnings of
supranational institutions (at the time of the Cold War). This is a complex web
of intricate references among which we may have to make choices to give an
orientation to our effort.
For a new
foundation, I don’t think that we now need a neoliberal Monnet, or a European
De Gaulle, or even a Willy Brandt who would be able to fulfil his promises.
Rather, we need people like Altiero Spinelli and Ursula Hirschmann, who wrote
and circulated the Manifesto di Ventotene
in 1941, but in the hundreds, to collectively write the new federalist Manifesto, taking into account what the
Europeans need, and what the world expects from them.
[1] openDemocracy is proud to carry this
English adaptation of the main part of Etienne Balibar’s
“discourse of acceptance” for the Hannah-Arendt Prize in Political Thought
2017, awarded by the Heinrich Boell Foundation and the City of
Bremen (Germany), on December 1, 2017.