The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

  Yet current uncertainties go deeper. They are rooted in the nature of European integration itself, which has always been an elitist project, enjoying no more than a passive consent of the population. That licence is now running out, as the huge gap between voters and parliament in even such an exemplary land of liberal outlook as the Netherlands has made clear—the Dutch referendum, naturally, striking Majone much more than that of the French. ‘Most key ideas of modern history, from popular sovereignty to the idea of the nation and the principle of nationality, were originally advanced by intellectual and political elites’, Majone remarks. ‘But these ideas proved their vitality by their capacity to mobilize people and push them to political action. This is not the case of European integration’. Over half a century, there has been ‘a certain europeanization of intellectual, economic and political elites’, but ‘no “europeanization of the masses” has taken place even remotely comparable to that “nationalization of the masses” . . . which occurred in all countries of West Europe at the end of the Napoleonic wars’.67

  The gulf between those above and those below remains irreparable. It is dictated by the way unification was originally designed, and has always proceeded. ‘No realistic assessment of the EU . . . is possible without keeping constantly in mind the elitist nature of the project’—since ‘the functionalist (or Monnet) approach to European integration taken in the 1950s entails a fundamental trade-off between integration and democracy. The logic of the approach is such that any time a choice between integration and democracy has to be made, the decision is, and must be, always in favour of integration’. To see this, one need only look at the Commission’s monopoly of legislative initiative—‘a flagrant violation of both the constitutional principle of the separation of powers and the very idea of parliamentary democracy’.68 So long as there is a sufficient material pay-off for this voiding of familiar constitutional norms, the masses will go along with it. But if the elites fail to deliver adequate levels of employment and job security, or increases in purchasing power, the Union could start to pitch.

  In this diagnosis the tension, already visible in Gillingham’s work, becomes tauter and more extreme, between what in Majone takes the form, in effect, of an apology for oligarchy and an afterthought for democracy. On the one hand, the EU is approved as a system of confederal power of distinguished intellectual lineage, rightly shielded from decision by popular majorities, where ‘the growing importance of nonmajoritarian institutions’ is proof that ‘reliance upon qualities such as expertise, professional discretion, policy consistency, fairness, or independence of judgement is considered to be more important than reliance upon direct democratic accountability’.69 On the other hand, the Union is a regrettably hierarchical project, whose anti-democratic design was the outcome of a deliberate choice, for which Monnet bears responsibility, capable of alienating a passive citizenry as soon as GDP falters.

  But is the EU a confederation in the first place? Not in any sense to be found, certainly, in L’esprit des lois. There Montesquieu’s république fédérative was a union of city-states, provinces or cantons—such entities being necessarily small in size—for mutual defence against aggression from larger monarchies. He did not use the word ‘confederation’, and his description of a federated republic is incompatible with what the term has come to mean or the way in which it is employed by Majone, since it not only includes armed intervention from without to quell any popular rising in a constituent unit, but specifies that such units must renounce the right to treaties with other powers, since they ‘give themselves up entirely, with nothing more to resign’ in such a union once formed70—as if forces from Brussels were entitled to crush riots in Budapest, and the UK to be forbidden membership in NATO. Nor can Montesquieu, of all thinkers, be enlisted without paradox as a champion of mixed government, as opposed to the separation of powers. Though his idealized portrait of England as ‘the one nation that has for the direct end of its constitution political liberty’ reproduces the standard local formula of a mixed monarchy—the trinity of king, lords and commons—Montesquieu’s innovation was to overlay this with a vision of the executive, legislature and judiciary as three independent powers, which never corresponded to island realities but transformed the expectations of the world.

  For the credentials of a conception of mixed government as a hodgepodge of overlapping corporate bodies, Majone would have done better—as his invocation of mediaeval and preabsolutist models implies—to go back 150 years, to Althusius as the appropriate ancestor. Where this can lead is to be seen in the work of Jan Zielonka, as noted above.71 In his Europe as Empire (2006), the Union is extolled as a post-modern version of the Holy Roman Empire, superseding statist conceptions of political order for a complex realm of governance in which crude majoritarian rule is becoming a thing of the past. Enlargement, seen by Majone as—at any rate so far—a shadow threatening progress towards the realization of a single market, is here greeted with Anglo-Polish elation as the coup de grâce to delusions of a European super-state.

  Stretched to the Dnieper and the Bug, the EU according to Zielonka is now irrevocably a neo-mediaeval maze of variegated jurisdictions, whose unity will not rest on bureaucratic directives of any kind but on spontaneous market adjustments. True, the Middle Ages saw a good deal of predatory conduct—but also precocious welfare systems and the valuable doctrine of just wars. There is still much to be learnt from these. Democracy? ‘Whether the evolving European governance system can still be called ‘‘democratic’’ is a matter of debate’.72 In any case we are moving beyond traditional notions of rule by the people. Elections are a crude means of controlling officials. More effective can be ‘policy networks’ lobbying for specific decisions. Individual citizens should be able to contest these—but not, it is to be hoped, by populist referenda or unruly demonstrations. Private litigation and appeals to the ombudsman are a better path.

  If Zielonka’s notion of a luxuriant neo-mediaeval empire can be regarded as no more than an elaborate conceit, its upshot is still instructive—protestation after the event, not representation before it, as the future political norm. In effect, a return to petitions submitted to the prince. Majone is more realistic. The denial of democracy in the Union can be neither avoided nor stabilized. Integration has left little room for decisions from below. But once legitimacy is shifted from the will of voters to the fortune of markets, it becomes captive to their vagaries. Continuous high growth is a promise harder to keep than representative government. Maybe the will of the people cannot be circumvented so easily after all? In holding Monnet responsible for ‘sacrificing democracy on the altar of integration’, Majone implies an alternative was possible. But his premises preclude one. Monnet and his colleagues should not have proceeded by stealth, he explains in Dilemmas, but put the federal state they had in mind to the electorates of Europe. The reproach is a bluff, however, since for Majone such a prospect has never been acceptable to voters, yet the integration that has occurred—even if it has not so far acquired its true name—is just what he thinks it should be: a confederation exempt from the demands of popular sovereignty.

  The charge against Monnet is a sign of unease. For viewed historically, the boot is on the other foot. Monnet’s federalism envisaged just what Majone’s confederalism rules out, namely the creation of a United States of Europe answerable to its population through the ballot. Hence the parliamentary structures built into the ECSC and EEC from the start, and the importance for Monnet of the European Defence Community, whose significance for the history of integration Parsons rightly stresses. That the EDC was aborted, and the European Parliament proved ineffective, have been not fulfilments but frustrations of Monnet’s vision, which even now is not quite banished from the scene, as the oscillations of his critic suggest. In 2005, Majone could open Dilemmas of European Integration by hailing the architecture of the EU as ‘the successful prototype of postmodern confederation’.73 Two years later, surveying the wreckage of the Constitution, it h
ad become a precarious edifice swaying on all too cramped foundations.

  The location along the ideological spectrum of the four leading accounts of the Union thus far considered is clear enough. Spanning the significant differences between Moravcsik, Gillingham, Eichengreen and Majone are a set of overlapping commonalities. Hostility to any smack of federalism; minimization of the bearing of classical democratic norms; elevation of negative over positive integration; preference for voluntary over mandatory regulation; rejection of welfare barriers to market dynamism—no one analysis or prescription features all of these in equal measure, but there is a family resemblance between them. Conventionally speaking, they represent a phalanx of neo-liberal opinion, more or less pronounced or nuanced as the case may be. Where they diverge most sharply is in prognosis. Essentially agreeing on what the Union should be, they vary widely as to whether it is likely to become what it ought. Moravcsik displays a eupeptic optimism à toute épreuve, Majone expresses an unexpected pessimism, Eichengreen traces a prudently hedged scepticism, Gillingham gives voice to an agitated alarmism. Do such extreme discrepancies reflect on the commonalities, or do they simply mirror the normal opacity of the future?

  4

  At other points along the spectrum, there is less congregation of authority. Conceptions that break with the premises of the neo-liberal consensus are more dispersed and isolated, though by no means intellectually weaker. Here too, however, it is thinkers from America who make the running. The leading cases come, respectively, from philosophy, jurisprudence, and comparative politics. Larry Siedentop’s Democracy in Europe (2000) stands out as a refreshingly idiosyncratic—that is, old-fashioned and independent-minded—vision of dangers in the Union, and remedies for them. The degree of its deviance from current conformism is suggested by the indignant response of Moravcsik, scarcely able to contain his disbelief that it should pay no attention to ‘mainstream contemporary analyses’.74 In fact, what separates Siedentop from these is the distance between a classical political liberalism, inspired by Tocqueville—his title echoing Democracy in America—and the ruling neo-liberalism of the period, to which such an outlook can only appear out of joint.

  A career at Oxford has left its mark on Siedentop—Isaiah Berlin, of whom he has some interesting criticisms, is a central reference for him—but his starting-point could not be more squarely American. Federalism is a US invention, inscribed in the Constitution of 1787. Can Europe ever hope to emulate it? Montesquieu had believed there could be no liberty in a modern state that was of any size, hence necessarily a monarchy, without an aristocracy capable of restraining royal power. By devising a constitution that preserved liberty in a vast republic, Madison proved him wrong: a federation in a commercial society could realize what intermediary bodies had secured in a feudal society, without benefit of a nobility. Tocqueville, who first understood this, saw too the distinctive configuration that sustained America’s successful federalism: a common language; common habits of local self-government; an open political class composed mainly of lawyers; and shared moral beliefs, of Protestant origin. Binding the new structure together, moreover, was—unacknowledged—the ghost of Britain’s imperial state, that had accustomed the colonists to a single sovereign authority, now reinvented as a federation with powers of taxation and means of coercion.

  Europe, by contrast, remains divided by a multiplicity of languages and sovereignties, ancient states with distinct cultures and no experience of common rule. Nor does it possess anything that resembles either the social stratum or the credal unity that buoyed the young liberal republic in America. On the contrary, it still bears the scars of a destructive anti-clericalism, and a divisive class consciousness, unknown across the Atlantic—calamitous legacies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, fortunately now attenuated, yet not entirely effaced. In one sense, such burdens of the past render all the more remarkable the steps towards unity achieved by Europeans since 1950. But if their outcome remains not only incomplete but unhappy, the reason lies also, and above all, in the ideological drought of the present. For Tocqueville could only contemplate with melancholy what has happened to liberalism since his day, its rich vision of human flourishing dwindled to the thin alternatives of a utilitarianism of wants or a contractualism of rights. In this reduction, any active conception of citizenship vanishes. We are left with the roles of mere consumers or litigants.

  The result has been a conception of European integration dominated by an arid economism, as if the Union were solely a matter of market efficiency. Such a narrow calculus has naturally been unable to engage popular imagination, leaving a void that could be filled only by competing governmental projects. Here just one contender has had a coherent vision. Britain, still without even a written constitution, and in the grip of a political culture continuing to rely on customs rather than ideas, is in no position to propose a compelling future for the Union. Germany, though itself possessing a federal framework that could in principle offer a mock-up of arrangements for a European federation, remains disabled by guilt for its still too recent past. France alone has had the institutional apparatus and political will to impose a design on the EU, whose formative years coincided with its own postwar recovery. The result is a Union to a large extent created in its own étatiste image—a centralizing administrative structure, in which decisions are reached behind closed doors by power-brokers in Brussels.

  In France itself, this famously elitist, rationalist model of government, descending from Louis XIV, through the Revolution and Napoleon, has time and again fomented its antithesis: anarchic rebellion in the streets, popular risings against the state. The great danger facing the European Union, as a still more remote version of the same bureaucratic style of rule, is that one day it too could provoke such mass rejection—civil disorder on a continental scale. Today’s combination of economism and étatisme is a toxic formula for future unrest. A wide-ranging political debate is needed to prevent Europeans feeling that the EU is merely the resultant of ‘inexorable market forces or the machinations of elites which have escaped from democratic control’.75 The Union requires new foundations.

  What should these be? Siedentop’s answer takes him back to America. For a genuine federation, composed of active local self-government rather than a system of bureaucratic directives, Europe needs an open political class, communicating in a common language, and a shared set of beliefs, shaping a moral identity. To create the first, he recommends a small and powerful European Senate, composed of leading parliamentary figures from each country elected by, and serving concurrently in, their national legislatures. English, already widespread as the informal Latin of the continent, should become the official language of the Union, in which senators could get to know one another as intimately as their homologues on the Hill. Meanwhile, less exclusive recruitment to the legal profession—where Britain is a particularly bad offender—should gradually supply the human material of a new political class, in a European system that is anyway already highly juridified.

  There remains the trickiest question of all. Where is Europe’s counterpart to America’s civil religion—Tocqueville’s ‘habits of the heart’—to come from? Faithful to US example here too, Siedentop replies that a liberal constitution for Europe would in itself be an answer, affording a moral framework in which individuals become conscious of their equality as citizens, and so acting in the fashion of a surrogate religion, as ‘a source of identity and right conduct’.76 But is a mere surrogate quite enough—don’t Americans, after all, rely on the original article as well? To the scandal of Moravcsik, Siedentop does not flinch from following his argument through. Liberal constitutionalism is indeed just the latest frontier of Christianity, as the world religion that historically combined universalism and individualism, its moral equality of souls before God leading eventually to an equal liberty of citizens under the state.

  For a European democracy to acquire cohesion and stability without sacrificing individualism, this link needs to be recovered
. A weak-minded multiculturalism substituting for it—to which even such a liberal light as Berlin, perhaps because of his Jewish background, was not altogether immune—should be rejected. The Union must assume its tolerant, but not shame-faced, underlying Christian identity. All this will take time. Siedentop ends on an Augustinian note. Europe needs something like its own version of the complex federalism that took shape in America, but not yet. To rush towards the goal in current conditions, before the Union is ready for it, could produce only the caricature of a federation, dominated by an elite without any true sympathy or understanding for federalism.

  Unlike any other work of significance in its field, Democracy in Europe has won a European readership, with translations into most of the languages of the original Community. It owes its reception to attractive qualities that set it apart from the mass of technical literature on integration: a direct argument and engaging prose accessible to anyone. In both its sensitivity to the contrasting political cultures of the leading states of Western Europe, and its dismissal of the intellectual poverty of standard celebrations of the Union, it is a rarity in the writing on the EU, where philosophical reflection of any kind is for the most part at a discount. That said, the effect of its calque of American virtues for European users is simply to reproduce the constitutional blankness it criticizes—as if Evangelical faith and the US congressman were conceivable, let alone desirable, implants in the body politic of the Old World. No original proposals for Europe eventuate, in a case that dissolves into vagueness just where the sharpest clarity is required: at the virtually opposite meanings of federalism on the two continents, as a centripetal force in America, creating a new sovereignty, and a centrifugal one in Europe, devolving older sovereignties.