The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

  From economics to sociology is a short step in the literature on the Union—no more than a stroll across the hall at Berkeley, to the office of Neil Fligstein, the author of the most ambitious study of the social underpinnings of European integration, misleadingly titled Euroclash.32 Taxing much discussion of the EU with too state-centred a focus, Fligstein sets his sights on a larger reality, ‘the creation of a European society’. This is not the same object as explored by scholars like Göran Therborn or Hartmut Kaelble, tracking social changes since the war in every domain of life across the continent.33 Fligstein’s aim is to demonstrate, with a mass of carefully assembled statistical evidence, the emergence of something more specific: the sphere of social interactions created by, and tied to, European integration. What forms do these take? First and foremost, there is the market: the daily transactions of rising intra-European trade, and the increasing numbers of intra-European mergers and acquisitions, enabled—but also regulated—by the directives of Brussels, where business interests gather to press their cases and concerns, also in increasing numbers. ‘These figures tell a compelling story’, Fligstein writes, of how ‘trading, litigating, legislating and lobbying’—the ‘key indicators of European integration’—have grown over time.34 Travel within Europe has steadily grown, to a point where by 1997 a quarter of the population of the pre-enlargement EU had been outside their native country in the past year. European-wide civic associations too—professional, scientific and non-governmental organizations—have multiplied. Culturally, two out of every three West Europeans can speak a second language; well over a million students have followed courses outside their homeland; degrees in higher education are gradually being harmonized.

  But if a genuinely European society, distinct from the particular national communities that make up the EU, has crystallized, it is not shared equally by all inhabitants of the Union. Those who have materially benefitted most from integration, who interact socially most often across national borders, and who have the strongest sense of a collective European identity, form an upper-class minority, drawn from business, government, high-income professions and the academy. A larger middle class has only intermittent contact with life beyond local frontiers, while the lowest classes have little or none. Since these layers are the most exposed to the costs—however temporary—of economic integration, they are potential protesters against it. Undeniably, Europe has so far been—at any rate socially and culturally—a ‘class project’. A clash of interests could therefore break out over it, in conditions of economic crisis.35

  But though bannered in its title, the notion of a clash is purely virtual in Fligstein’s book, without any presence in it. In part this is because the lower classes, lacking any sense of a supranational identity, simply do not belong to the European society that is the focus of his work, and so fall outside its framework. But more fundamentally, it is because a force is at work within that society which transcends the possibility of any conflict of interests. For the upper classes that compose it do not just consist of the wealthy, with their often selfish attachment to their own good fortune, but also of a more selfless group, motivated by ideals—the educated. These, Fligstein suggests, are ‘the real moral engine of the EU’. For ‘at its core, one of the reasons that educated people support the European project is because the European values they espouse are identical with the Enlightenment values that have been a hallmark of educated people for over two hundred years. Indeed, if Europe stands for anything, it is the completion of the Enlightenment project of democracy, rule of law, respect for the differences of others, and the principles of rational discourse and science’.36 With ethical guidelines as compelling as these, why should the Union fear division over mundane questions of relative advantage? As higher education spreads, more and more young people will study abroad, and ‘the best new jobs’ in a shifting economy will increasingly be ‘in services such as banking, real estate, and insurance’, or computer programming, requiring higher skills and paying higher salaries. Predictable sociological changes should of themselves create a more unified Europe, imbued more evenly with the values of the Enlightenment.

  So glowing with enthusiasm for the forward-looking achievements of the Union is Fligstein that his work might have more aptly been entitled Eurodash. Again and again, he is ‘amazed’, as he recounts, at ‘the marvellous character of what has happened’. On page after page, the epithet ‘remarkable’ resounds like a compulsive refrain.37 But triumphalism of vocabulary is not matched by coherence of construction. On the one hand, no more than ‘a very small number of people are deeply involved with other Europeans on a daily basis’, ‘only a tiny part of the population is directly involved’, while ‘the vast majority of Europeans still remain firmly tied to the nation’. On the other hand, those with ‘deep economic and social ties with their counterparts across Europe’ comprise 10 to 15 per cent of the inhabitants of the Union—that is: no less than 38 to 56 million people, or at the upper range more than the entire population of Britain or Italy, and not far short of that of France. As for those who are ‘partly European’, they compose another 40 to 50 per cent of the population—or getting on for 200 million.38 The fantastical nature of these figures is the product of a switch of definitions. Whereas an emergent ‘European society’ is computed by intensity of actual social interactions, measured objectively, these inflated percentages are simply taken from opinion polls that asked people whether, notionally, they felt European or not. It goes without saying that the gap between the two is enormous. The reality answers to Fligstein’s first description, not his second. Those deeply involved, on a daily basis, with non-nationals form a very small minority of the citizens of the EU, one that has fallen since enlargement. To speak of them as a ‘society’, as if they composed a self-connecting whole, is a metaphor, not a truth.

  That even this minority scarcely possesses much self-awareness of its existence is suggested by the appearance of Euroclash itself. American dominance of a field of work could hardly be more graphically expressed. In a bibliography of some 260 items, there is just one book in French, one in German. Even allowing for writing in English by Europeans—overwhelmingly from the cultures closest to the United States: Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands—the proportion of authors originating outside the Anglosphere is about one-seventh of the total. All central references to work on the Union in the body of the text itself are to American scholars. It would be wrong to impute this to parochialism. Fligstein has made use of what findings from the continent were material to his research. But here, as elsewhere, Europeans figure as under-labourers, whose work has been employed for a synthesis exceeding them.

  2

  If these stand as currently the most authoritative economic and social prognoses of the Union, what do the rival historical theories of integration as a political process have to say about the present, in the wake of the rejection of the European Constitution? Moravcsik, as might be expected, allows no doubts to cloud an unfailingly sunny vista. The Union has just completed its most successful decade ever, with an enlargement to the east that has cost little and required no significant modification of its already satisfactory institutions. These continue to deliver policies which, he can inform satisfied readers of Prospect, are ‘in nearly all cases, clean, transparent, effective and responsive to the demands of European citizens’.39 What then of the Constitution? Little more than an unnecessary exercise in public relations, whose demise, far from representing a failure of the EU, actually demonstrates its stability and success.

  But isn’t there any democratic deficit in the Union? None whatever—the very question arises from a confusion. The EU deals with issues best handled by experts, of little direct concern to voters: trade barriers, rules of competition, product regulations, legal adjudication, foreign assistance. Insulation of such areas from popular decision-making is not just practicable, it is desirable. Citizens understand this: they have little respect for their parties or parliaments, but hold their armies,
courts and police in high regard. Those political issues people do care about, because they are directly affected by them—essentially, tax-rates and social services—are decided at national level, as they should be, where the Union, lacking any independent fiscal base or civil administration, does not impinge. In its own sphere, however, the EU needs to be shielded from demagogic interference by referenda or other hopeless attempts at direct democratic decision-making. ‘Forcing participation is likely to be counterproductive, because the popular response is condemned to be ignorant, irrelevant and ideological’.40 In any case, the wish to democratize the Union is bound to fail, because ‘it runs counter to our consensual social scientific understanding of how advanced democracies actually work’41 (italics in original). For we should never forget that ‘political learning, mobilization, deliberation and participation are extremely expensive for rational citizens’.42 Fortunately, the masses realize this themselves, declining to pay the high costs in time and attention that interest in EU affairs would require. They would quickly turn against any effort to get them more involved: far from enhancing the legitimacy of the Union, schemes to democratize it would only render it less popular. Such features of the defunct Constitution as might be of some use can be quietly infiltrated through national parliaments without attracting undue public attention, for ‘the EU’s greatest tactical advantage is that is, in a word, so boring’.43

  As a casuistic for chloroforming any residual trace of popular will, these avowals have the merit of candour. But if the legitimacy of the Union does not lie in some inappropriate democracy, what is its raison d’être? Moravcsik’s answer—as we have seen above—is commendably straightforward: ‘The EU is overwhelmingly about the promotion of free markets. Its primary interest group support comes from multinational firms, not least US ones’.44 Or, more bluntly still: ‘The EU is basically about business’.45 So it should remain. The neo-liberal bias of the Union is ‘justified’, for no responsible analyst believes current national welfare systems in Europe are sustainable.46 Nor can or should they be rearticulated at Union level. ‘Social Europe is a chimera’. In its perfect rationality, on the other hand, actually-existing Europe is the best of all international regimes.

  Moravcsik’s Panglossian outlook is alien to Gillingham. Far from any triumphalism, the diagnosis of the current state of the Union offered by his Design for a New Europe (2006) tends towards an extreme alarmism. The repudiation of the Constitution at the polls is stark evidence of a crisis in the legitimacy of the EU, and one for which there is good reason. Since the era of Delors, bureaucratic corruption, prejudice and meddling have been hallmarks of the unaccountable Commission in Brussels, where only the internal market and competition portfolios have retained integrity. The Parliament in Strasbourg remains an impotent talking-shop. For much of the time the Council has been hi-jacked by absurd French projects such as a global positioning system in outer space to rival the comprehensive American one already in existence, not to speak of rotten deals to extend the life of a moribund Common Agricultural Policy. What credibility could such a retrograde and venal contraption enjoy? The essentially simple tasks of negative integration have been perverted into a machinery of such complexity and opacity that few citizens can make head or tail of it.

  Worse, in its resistance to scientific advances in agriculture, the EU has sunk into actual obscurantism. The blockade by Brussels of GM crops—Monsanto, the world’s leading producer of them, is based in St Louis—represents a ne plus ultra of statist ignorance and incompetence. The same Canute-like attitude threatens to render the EU incapable of coping with the two greatest challenges it faces today: on the one hand, the momentous transformations under way as a new scientific revolution makes info-, nano- and bio-technology the cutting edge of industrial innovation; on the other, the entry of vast reserves of cheap labour into the world market, available for mass production of traditional goods at much lower prices than in the past. Lagging behind US in the first, Europe is already under pressure from China, tomorrow perhaps India or Brazil, in the second.

  Less publicly discussed, it is the former that is more critical. Confronted with technological changes comparable to those of the Industrial Revolution, blurring ‘the very distinctions between plants and animals, the animate and inanimate, and even life and death’, the EU has been incapable of unleashing the market dynamism needed to compete with these.47 What is to be done? Gillingham’s remedies are draconian. Certainly, the abolition of the CAP and liberalization of services are essential. But beyond such measures, whose necessity has so often been bruited without being acted on, more radical changes are required: nothing less than a true ‘bonfire of inanities’ that would wind up regional funds, ditch the euro, downsize the Commission, flog off the buildings in Brussels, and convert the Parliament into a small and harmless consultative body. Ideally stretching from Ireland to the Ukraine, a free-trade zone encumbered with no more rules or bureaucrats than EFTA of old, such a Europe would reclaim and extend democracy as the true final purpose of integration.

  The exasperation of these proposals—half tongue in cheek?—has something of the spirit of the more uncompromising passages in Hayek. But in another sense, they depart from his legacy quite sharply. Hayek’s vision of ‘inter-state federalism’, as he called it, was expressly designed to safeguard the free workings of the market from democracy, against whose dangers he was always on his guard, preferring to envisage a ‘demarchy’ dispensing with the fetish of universal suffrage.48 His reasoning was just that which would take shape in the European Central Bank—that the higher above national sovereignty regulation of the market could be raised, the more insulated it would be from electoral pressures for state intervention or redistribution from below. For his disciple to turn the argument round, as if the aim of integration, rightly conceived, were to promote democracy rather than protect us from it, is a whimsical move. But beyond further enlargement—Gillingham writes with special sympathy for the Ukraine, not the most popular candidate in Brussels—it remains a gesture without institutional specification.

  Design for a New Europe abstains from any scheme that might be taxed with constructivism. What it offers is, in effect, a sweeping demolition plan—negative integration as gelignite under Commission, Parliament, Structural Funds and Monetary Union alike. The extremity of these proposals reflects the baffled note on which Gillingham’s large history of European integration concludes. For what his narrative cannot explain is why the forces liberated by regime change should suddenly fade at the end of the story—true liberals vanishing, leaving behind only governments without conviction in deadlock with oppositions without a future. The balance of social forces below the surface of political events is missing.

  In their prescriptive upshots, the accounts of the EU offered by Moravcsik and Gillingham are polar opposites. One would keep everything as it is. The other would level much of it to the ground. Behind such divergences lie two contrasting outlooks, each devoted to the market, but differing completely in their conceptions of public life. The first conceives politics as if it were little more than a branch of economics, subject to the same kind of calculus of utilities and predictability of outcomes. The second, by contrast, seeks to insulate economics as far as possible from politics, as a system whose spontaneous workings can only be impaired, and risk being destroyed, by government intervention of any kind. Here consequences, in any important sense, are always unintended: to benign effect in the market, to ironic or malign effect, for the most part, in the state. One of J.G.A. Pocock’s most formidable essays, and his longest, is a historical reconstruction of ‘the varieties of Whiggism’. The varieties of liberalism have not been less. Curiously, in the galaxy of current versions, Europe might be described as a virtual object of predilection. Among these, ‘liberal inter-governmentalism’ and ‘classical liberalism’ are by no means the last word.

  3

  Mentally, perhaps even more than materially, America weighs on Europe. If citizens of the EU must
now look to the US for leading accounts of the community to which they belong, that is not the only way in which their past and present are being written from a transatlantic vantage-point. The most rigorous thinker to have reflected on the paradoxes of integration is an Italian, Giandomenico Majone, now retired at the EUI in Florence. Trained in Pittsburgh, he wrote his doctorate at Berkeley, and has taught at times at Harvard and Yale. More than stages of a career, however, attach him to the United States. The specialist field he commands, and the sources of his theory of Europe, are peculiarly American. The title of his first book on the subject, Regulating Europe, announces his angle of vision.

  In Europe itself, the term ‘regulation’—in so far as it had any currency at all—was long associated principally with a school of economists of Marxist derivation originating in France, who were interested in the ways in which production, credit and consumption became interconnected in distinct ‘structural forms’, or rules of reproduction of the system, in successive phases of capitalist development. In recent years, the word has acquired a more familiar ring in the vocabulary of a bureaucratic officialdom, without gaining much salience in public consciousness, not to speak of popular wisdom. Even in England, where regulatory bodies started to proliferate well before the rest of Europe, few have more than the vaguest notion of what functions, let alone personnel, lie behind their grey acronyms. The world of Oftel, Ofgem, Ofwat, Ofreg, remains a closed book to most citizens.