The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

For invoking Tocqueville, Siedentop has not remembered him. The historic achievement of American federalism, in Tocqueville’s eyes, was to overcome the weaknesses of the European confederations—Dutch, Swiss, German—that Montesquieu had praised. It had done so by endowing a central authority with its own taxes and troops, and the power to enact laws with direct effect on its citizens, where confederations in Europe had no independent means to enforce their will on the states that composed them. Democracy in America is a far more centralizing text than Democracy in Europe. Tocqueville’s principal misgiving about the US republic, in fact, was that the federal government still lacked sufficient strength to deal with potential resistance from the states. The Founders ‘gave money and soldiers to the Union, but the states kept the love and prejudices of the peoples’, hence the ‘absurd and destructive doctrine’ that allowed Connecticut and Massachusetts to refuse to send their militias into the war with England in 1812.77

  But Tocqueville’s overall verdict was clear. In America, he explained, ‘the central power acts without an intermediary upon the governed, administers them and judges them itself, as national governments do, but it acts in this way only in a restricted sphere. Evidently that is no longer a federal government, it is an incomplete national government. So one has found a form of government that is neither precisely national nor federal; but one stops there, and the new word that ought to express the new thing still does not exist’.78 Such robust views would be an embarrassment in Brussels, where talk of an incomplete national government could only set the teeth of its functionaries on edge. By comparison, Siedentop’s recipes are weak medicine.

  Philosophical and legal approaches to the EU are necessarily quite distinct, but in moving from one to the other at their best, we remain in Greater America. Of Israeli origin—he describes himself as the ‘quintessential wandering Jew’—the jurist Joseph Weiler, after teaching at Michigan and Harvard, now holds a chair at New York University. Since law in a virtually pure state, without any of its normal accoutrements of administration or enforcement, is the defining medium of the EU, lawyers play an enormous part in both the workings of the Union and the meanings extracted from them. So it is not altogether surprising that even a heterodox legal mind can play more of a role in its affairs than orthodox eminences in other disciplines. Weiler’s services to the Union include helping to draft the European Parliament’s Declaration of Human Rights and advising the Commission on the Treaty of Amsterdam.

  But such insider roles have done nothing to blunt intellectual interventions of notable sharpness and verve. The iconography of literature on the EU, like so much of what lies between its covers, is typically of mortal dullness: dominated either by its dreary supermarket-sticker logo—even Gillingham’s book is a victim—or such uplifting clichés—Moravcsik’s—as a streamlined clipper cresting the waves, its sails billowing with the flags of the member-states. With the cover of Weiler’s The Constitution of Europe, from which the grotesques of Ensor’s savage anarchist masterpiece, Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889, leer out at us, we are invited into a different world

  The central chapter of the book, ‘Fin-de-Siècle Europe: Do the New Clothes Have an Emperor?’, sets the note. What kind of a polity is the EU? Weiler disposes of inter-governmental and confederal paradigms without ceremony, as ‘wishful ideological thinking’ that not only ‘masks serious problems of social control and accountability’ but induces ‘complacency as regards the assault on democracy that the Union often represents’.79 If the EU is not captured by either of these descriptions, it is because the Community, though historically it has often strengthened its member-states, cannot be reduced to a design of which they remain the masters, even if this was what they intended. Rather, in many ways ‘the Community has become a golem that has ensnared its creators’.80 The European Court of Justice is a prime example of this involuntary sorcery. Weiler offers a dazzling analysis of the changing functions and fortunes of the Court, showing the way in which it seized the initiative in establishing an ever-widening supranational jurisdiction that caught governments unawares, before eventually triggering a reaction from them that took the form of stepping up the role of the Council of Ministers and its diplomatic minions in Brussels, at the expense of the Commission. In this dialectic, developments on the legal and political planes moved in opposite directions, both of them departing from the Treaty of Rome.

  Although Weiler admires the work of the Court, he warns against excessive celebration of it. Ever since it attracted greater public attention, and increased its caseloads, it has become far more cautious, no longer playing much of a dynamic role in today’s Union. The Council of Ministers and its Committee of Permanent Representatives (Coreper)—the secretive hub of most deal- and decision-making in Brussels—have, on the other hand, certainly not drawn in their claws. For Weiler, the Council not only distorts a proper distribution of powers at Union level, by exercising executive control over legislative activity, but castrates parliamentary authority at national level by the volume, complexity and timing of decisions passed down to it for theoretical approval. The European Parliament, with its huge constituencies and feeble powers, is no counterweight. Moreover, within the Council itself, ideological divisions are typically neutralized, since governments are always of different complexions, evacuating normal political conflict or debate for a technocratic consensus—a ‘consociational’ style of rule that is the formula for a cartel of elites.

  The upshot of this institutional drift is bleak. In the beginning, the Community stood for ideals of real significance in post-war Europe: peace, prosperity and supranationalism. Today, the first two are banalities, and the third has been reduced to banknotes. ‘The Europe of Maastricht no longer serves, as its grandparents the Europe of Paris and Rome, as a vehicle for the original foundational values’.81 Already with the Single European Act, not just a technocratic programme for the free movement of factors of production was in train, but ‘a highly politicized choice of ethos, ideology and political culture’, enthroning the market as the measure of social value.82 In this Europe, where politics is increasingly commodified, individuals are indeed empowered, but as consumers, not as citizens. Nor is enlargement changing this: for, as the prevailing idiom would put it, ‘when a company issues new voting shares, the value of each share is reduced’.83 Public life risks sinking into rounds of bread and circuses, without further dignity or legitimacy.

  What is to be done? Weiler, no enemy of markets as such, would have them conceived in the spirit of Paine rather than Friedman, as forms of sociability as well as exchange, arenas ‘for the widening of horizons, for learning about and learning to respect others and their habits’—hence in themselves a kind of community too.84 Citizenship, however, is a political bond, and the issue posed since Maastricht is how it can be made effective simultaneously at national and at supranational level. With a sly wave to Marcuse, Weiler casts this as the problem of conjoining Eros and civilization: the nation as abiding, existential focus of romantic attachments, the Union as modern framework of an enlightened reason, each as necessary for a democratic Europe as the other.

  The Constitution of Europe concludes with four concrete proposals to this end. On collection of a sufficient number of signatures, citizens should be able to place legislative initiatives, in areas subject to Community law, before voters on the occasion of elections to the European Parliament, which if passed by requisite majorities would be binding on the Union and its member-states. Complementing this Legislative Ballot, a ‘European Public Square’ could be created in which the complete set of decision-making processes in the Community—in particular, the currently impenetrable recesses of comitology in Brussels—would be posted on the internet for the inspection of citizens, above all the younger generations for whom the Web will be like print of old. A Constitutional Council, in turn, would arbitrate issues of juridical competence, a continual bone of contention, within the Union. Finally, the EU should be able to raise a small income tax directl
y from its citizens to bind the two together with one of the classic ties of democratic representation.

  The ideas themselves are uneven. Weiler thinks his internet scheme—Lexcalibur, as he would call it—the most important and far-reaching, whereas to a sceptical eye it looks the flakiest: as if future teenagers will be eagerly scanning the 97,000 pages of Community directives or the hydra-headed minutes of Coreper for their political caffeine. The suggestion that a Constitutional Council be modelled on the tame French version is not much of a recommendation. But the Legislative Ballot is at once a highly imaginative and perfectly feasible proposition, one that would sow panic in European establishments. The idea of a direct fiscal tie between the Union and its citizens is not quite so original, but no less relevant and radical for that. The essential point is that with proposals like these, the discursive terrain has shifted. We have left the establishment consensus that the European constitutional order inhabits the best of all possible worlds, namely that of the second-best, for any other is impossible.

  On this alternative terrain, one distinguished mind has envisaged a far more sweeping reconstruction of the Union. Philippe Schmitter, originally a pupil of Haas at Berkeley, later teacher at Chicago and Stanford, first made his name as a Latin Americanist, before becoming one of the world’s most inventive and wide-ranging comparatists, writing extensively on corporatism, regional integration and—perhaps in particular—the problems of transition from authoritarian to democratic regimes, in South America and Southern Europe. Stationed at the European University Institute in Florence at the turn of the century, he published in 2000 what remains in many ways the most remarkable single reflection on the EU to date, How to Democratize the European Union . . . and Why Bother? Typically, although a shorter early draft exists in Italian, this arresting work has never been translated into any other language of the Union, testimony enough to the provincial indifference with which it has abandoned thought of itself. As a systematic set of proposals for political change of visionary scope and detail, the text recalls another age, as if written by a latter-day Condorcet. An exercise of this kind normally belongs to a utopian style of thought, indifferent to constraints of reality. But a more worldly temperament, in every sense, than Schmitter’s would be hard to find. The second part of his title expresses the spirit of the other side of his intelligence, an ironic detachment worthier of a descendant of Talleyrand. The crossing of two such antithetical strains makes for a work unique in the literature on the Union.

  Schmitter begins by noting that the EU is neither a state nor a nation. Although it has irrevocably crossed the threshold of any mere inter-governmental arrangement, it displays neither the coincidence of territorial and functional authority that defines a state, nor the collective identity that marks a nation. Few of those subject to its jurisdiction understand it, and with good reason. ‘The EU is already the most complex polity that human agency . . . has ever devised’.85 It is plainly far from anything that could be described as an accountable structure under popular control. What would it take to democratize it? Little less than a reinvention of three key institutions of modern democracy: citizenship, representation and decision-making. Schmitter coolly specifies an agenda for the transformation of each. Of the resulting sixteen, sardonically designated ‘modest proposals’, it is sufficient to indicate the following.

  Citizenship? To promote a more active liberty in the Union: direct referenda to coincide with elections to the European Parliament, themselves to be held electronically over an entire week, with voters having the right to determine the terms of office of their favoured candidates. To make for the first time a reality of universal suffrage: multiple votes for adults with children. To foster social solidarity: denizen rights for immigrants; conversion of the total monies now spent on the CAP and Structural Funds into a ‘Euro-stipendium’ to be paid to all citizens of the Union with an income less than a third of the European average.

  Representation? To create a more effective legislature—capping the size of the European Parliament, seating MEPs proportionate to the logarithm of the population of each member state, and assigning all other than symbolic work of the assembly to commissions, as in Italy. To encourage more Union-wide political organization: half of the EU electoral funds now allocated to national parties in member-states to be switched to party formations in the EP, vested with the right of nominating half the candidates on their respective national lists.

  Decision-making? To manage equitably the complexities of a Europe with so many member-states, of vastly differing sizes—division of the Union into three ‘colleges’ of states by ascending number of citizens, votes weighted within each by logged value. Three simultaneous presidencies of the European Council, one from each college, nominating a president of the Commission to be approved by a majority in each college and of the EP; decisions in the Council of Ministers likewise to require a concurrent majority of the weighted votes in all three colleges.

  Schmitter, like Weiler, is not necessarily the best judge of which of his own proposals are the most significant. He argues that it is the alterations in the Union’s decision-making rules he outlines that have the greatest potential for democratizing it—changes in Euro-citizenship and Euro-representation having less immediate payoffs. This seems implausible, as his ‘collegiate’ orders appear least close to the tangible experience of ordinary voters, as a structure not only of considerable technical alembication, but operational at the remotest peak of European power. Ground-level changes in citizenship look much more explosive and swiftly transformative.

  Schmitter rightly underlines the importance of the ‘symbolic novelty’ of his suggestions for these, designed to have a benign shock effect to bring home the value-added of being a European as well as a national citizen. To engage people, indeed, politics must become more fun. As the American Founders, thinking it impossible to stop the causes of factions—regarded at the time as the worst of evils afflicting a republic—devised instead institutions to control their effects, so if there is no hope of doing away with today’s equivalent—the trivialization of politics by the media—the antidote can only lie, inter alia, in making politics more entertaining.86 The contrast with Moravscik’s prescriptions for a popular sedative—the more boring, the better—could hardly be more pointed. Later suggestions include voter lotteries for funding of good causes, electronic balloting, and participatory budgets. But these are trimmings. The boldest and most substantial single idea in Schmitter’s arsenal is certainly the proposal for a Euro-stipendium financed out of the abolition of the common agricultural and regional funds. As bien-pensant critics have not failed to point out, this would be bound to unleash redistributive struggles in the Union—the appalling prospect, in other words, of social conflicts that might engage the passions and interests of its citizens. In short, the worst of all possible dangers, the intrusion of politics into the antiseptic affairs of the Union.

  How does Schmitter himself view the social context in which he offers his reforms? Not through the lens of the philosophe, but the lorgnette of the Congress of Vienna. There is, and for the foreseeable future will be, no popular demand or spontaneous pressure from below to democratize the Union. So why bother with schemes to render it more accountable? The reasons can only lie in underlying structural trends, which could eventually erode the legitimacy of the whole European enterprise. Among these are ‘symptoms of morbidity’—Gramsci’s phrase—in national political systems themselves: distrust of politicians, shrinkage of parties, drop in voter turnout, spread of belief in corruption, growing tax evasion. Another is decline in the permissive consensus that the process of integration once enjoyed, as Europeans have become increasingly bemused and restive at secretive decisions reached in Brussels that affect more and more aspects of their existence. National leaderships lose credibility when major policies issue from bureaucratic transactions in Brussels, without Union institutions themselves gaining transparency or authority. Such degenerative trends now risk being exa
cerbated by monetary union, removing macro-economic instruments from member-states, and by enlargement, giving veto powers to as little as a quarter of the population of the EU. Democratization can still be deferred. But not indefinitely.

  Nor, however, can it be realized suddenly or completely. Well before the ill-fated European Convention, Schmitter had dismissed the possibility that such proceedings could succeed. Constitutions are born of revolutions, putsches, wars, economic collapses, not of routine peacetime conditions. The only way the European polity could—democratically—be constitutionalized would be through a Constituent Assembly with a mandate approved by a prior referendum of all European citizens. In the interim, the way forward must be a return to Monnet’s method, now relying not on economic spillovers to advance integration, but on political increments of democracy to transform it in similar, gradually cascading fashion—petits pas once again yielding, in the end, grands effets.

  It is appropriate that the most cogent programme for the democratization of the EU should come from an heir of neo-functionalism: the charge that Monnet’s method precluded one could not be more directly refuted. But Schmitter’s intellectual background includes more than Haas. His reflections end with a final, disabused twist. Where is the force that might take up his programme? One historical agent has been unequivocally strengthened by the EU, he writes. ‘That is the European bourgeoisie’. Could it rise to the challenge? Alas, it is too comfortably ensconced in power as it is, with little reason to alter the status quo. ‘Ideologically, its “liberal” positions have never been more dominant; practically, its “natural” opponent, the organized working class, has been weakened’. Were integration to come under threat from below, the bourgeoisie would be much more likely ‘to seek retrenchment behind a phalanx of technocrats than to take the risk of opening up the process to the uncertainties of transparency, popular participation, mass party competition, citizen accountability and redistributive demands’.87 Indeed. There is an echo here of Weber’s disappointment with the German bourgeoisie of his time. But in the EU, no quest for a charismatic leader to resolve the impasse—Weber’s solution—could be of avail. Perhaps after all, democratization of the European polity, like liberalization of the economy before it, will have to come like a thief in the night, overtaking all agents—elites and masses alike, if in uneven measure—before any are fully aware of what is happening.