The Crisis in Europe IV

There is one further dimension of the crisis that demands analysis and this is the European Union, together with the extent and intensity of integration and interdependence.

In brief, Europe’s problem in this perspective is that integration has gone too far to be reversed without terrible cost, but has not gone far enough to cope with the political and economic environment that integration has brought into being. Crucially, the EU’s institutional structure was designed for a pre-globalisation era, when the intermediacy of the EU, its balancing act between the power of member states and the needs of integration, was sustainable. In the interim, the last two decades roughly, both the integrity of the state and of the EU’s architecture have come under enormous strain from the multiple level inputs coming from a variety of directions.

A brief list will have to suffice, most of it is self-evident – China as an economic superpower, Russia as an energy superpower, the US in its short-lived role as hyperpower, the other BRICs, the Arab spring and so on. What is crucial here is that Europe had long been accustomed to seeing itself as moral, intellectual, cultural legislator to the world, albeit as sidekick to US in power political terms. These legislative prerogatives have all begun to fray and losing status is, maybe, the hardest loss of all.

The conclusion to be drawn from the above is that the need for a redesign, a renewal of the how and why of the “ever closer union”, has been imperative for a while. And, given the vastly different environment, the redesign should have been far more innovative than the outcome of Laeken and the Lisbon treaty. That is where the drawbacks or, to be fairer, the original design problems played the negative role that they did. Given the circumstances and objectives of the initial push towards integration, especially its elite-led, technocratic, legalistic modus operandi, together with the continued role of member state power, a radical thinking was inconceivable and, for that matter, unattainable. The failure of the Constitution in 2005 could just have been another opportunity, but once again Europe and Europe of the EU were not ready for a step as far-reaching as this, not least because the crisis was far from being visible. So it was business as usual, even while a great deal of the business was far from being usual.

From 2008, however, the assumptions of linear development were brought into question and the crisis of the EU, still a creeping crisis, was no longer remediable with the existing instruments. A radical rethink was essential, but it was not to be and the outcome today is a multiple crisis, with visible cracks – cleavage lines – that appear to be growing stronger all the time.

The multiple cleavage lines are widely acknowledged. In no particular order, they are: large states v. small states, net contributors v. net beneficiaries, north v. south, old members (EU-15) v. new members (EU-12). When it comes to the first of these, two particularly sensitive questions arise. Large states are generally better placed to sustain their cultural security than small states, albeit France is increasingly exhibiting the symptoms of cultural insecurity. Hence they are seldom open to the argument that small states need special attention if the European integration model is to work. The occasional disdain shown by some large states towards one small state or another – maybe the treatment accorded to Greece by the German media illustrates this most vividly – indicates that large states are unaware of their superior cultural power and will seldom apply the necessary self-limitation in this area. This does nothing to assist the solidarity that supposedly underpins further integration, quite the contrary.

That debouches into the second sensitive area. From the outset, European integration was predicated on the proposition – a normative one – that all member states enjoyed a parity of esteem. True, this was sometimes more evident in the breach than in the observance (e.g. the Austrian boycott), but the principle held up reasonably well. In the current crisis, it seems to be going by the board. The strains of managing a single currency under global pressure have spilled over into culture and politics, so that whatever solidarity may have existed between member states has begun to disappear. The extraordinarily vicious exchanges between Germany and Greece already noted, abetted by the media in both countries, are only the tip of the iceberg. In this context, the attitudes of the EU-15 towards the new member states are proving insidious and even poisonous – there is very little trust in evidence. Even the Commission has played its part in this by singling out Hungary for severe treatment, while letting Spain off relatively lightly.

All this augurs badly for the third problem area. The solution to the imbalances in the Euro-area evidently demands far greater integration, but that in turn requires a degree of political unity for which there appears to be little support, if at all. Economic and political imperatives are pulling in the opposite direction and are pulling very hard indeed.

It is very hard to see how further integration can mobilise the popular support without which it would have no legitimacy. Hitherto that legitimacy could be taken for granted or finessed as a legal matter, rather in the way in which the Lisbon Treaty sought to replace the defunct Constitution that was born of Laeken. In a sense, the problem of EU integration is that it functions at the institutional level, albeit the regulatory regime of the acquis gives rise to a good deal of grumbling especially from among the Eurosceptics, but neither the EU nor the member states has done much to let the integration process become a matter of politics. And the depoliticisation of a site of power – the EU has become a major site of power – is never a good idea if one wants to remain true to one’s democratic principles. In a democracy, serious concentrations of power, and the EU is just that, should be open to direct challenge and that challenge should be political.

In effect, the situation is that the indebtedness of several member states has come close to being unsustainable, the debt in question is financed by the private sector capital of the globalised world, this private sector capital no longer takes it for granted that its purchase of the sovereign bonds of the affected states is safe, hence it demands an ever higher rate of interest to offset the possible risk of default. This indebtedness could notionally be paid off through stronger competitiveness, but that evolution is held back by the indebtedness. Simultaneously, this also signifies that the entire Eurozone is beginning to be regarded as suspect, at any rate as long as the economically strong states refuse to assume the burden of cross-financing their weaker partners.

There is another aspect of this situation, however. As the interest rates of the sovereign bonds increase, thereby making borrowing yet more costly, it is then the taxpayers of the affected states that have to finance these outlays. In brief, this means a continuous transfer of taxpayers’ money into private pockets, which at the same time means a growing economic power of the private sector, thereby intensifying the overmighty subject problem. The political movements described as populist will only gather strength by reason of the operation of this transfer mechanism.

Another dimension of the crisis reflects the continuing divergence between the EU-15 and the post-2004 (new) member states. In  sum, what it boils down to is this. In several of the former communist states, though not all, the initial divergence between the former nomenklatura, the beneficiaries of the communist system, has not disappeared, but continues to inform politics and, certainly in some cases, it is becoming wider and deeper by the year. Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia evidently fall into this category.

The former nomenklatura was successful in salvaging much of its power, used its political skills to secure its positions in the new system and rapidly, though generally superficially, adopted the then prevailing ideology in the West – the liberal consensus discussed earlier this series. How sincere this liberalism was is another question, but it succeeded in its aim of making former communists acceptable in the West not only as born again democrats, but as democrats who conformed to the West’s expectations of how democrats should behave – accommodating Western demands for access to the new markets, privatising state property (often enough with some of the sale price ending up in private pockets) thereby earning yet more plaudits. The Western left found itself with new recruits who simply followed whatever the liberal consensus demanded of them and ignored (at best) the state interests of the countries they were running.

This accommodating attitude was appreciated in the capitals of the EU-15. I can still remember a conversation with a high level British diplomat in 2002 expressing his relief at the defeat of the Orbán government by the Hungarian left, because (in his view) the centre-right government had become a Europe-wide nuisance in defending the Hungarian interest. The left, with its weaker domestic rootedness always needed the extra input it was getting from the West and, therefore, was seldom “a nuisance”.

The problem is that yet again, Central Europe was functioning as Europe’s early warning system as Milan Kundera once observed. As the post-communist left moved into the liberal consensus, it performed a couple of intellectual summersaults, in that it dropped Marxism-Leninism, and then rapidly absorbed a universalism that saw nationhood as an obstacle, but, given the shallowness of its liberalism, it was equally capable of using nationhood to rally support at home. The implication is that the post-communist left needed an external support system, whether that was the Soviet Union or the EU did not really matter all that much, because what actually did matter was power and privilege. Given that the EU itself had become a bastion of the liberal consensus, that the Europe that it represented was a liberal-consensus-Europe, the post-communist left acquired a helpful patron, in that it could rely on the EU for support and, equally, use the EU as the criterion of proper behaviour, something that was quite useful in its struggle with the centre-right.

What the post-communist left did not seem to have taken into its reckoning was that this turn would necessarily associate the EU with the left, thereby eroding the Europe of the EU as an idealised future for the formerly communist-ruled societies and that this development conjoined dissatisfaction with the left with unease about the EU. EU membership for Central Europe was supposed to have operated as a way of crossing an age-old threshold, that of being accepted as full members of the European comity of states. The irony is that the close relationship between the Europe of the EU, the post-communist left and the liberal consensus ended up by reinforcing the feeling that the EU was riding roughshod over local values, local customs, local ways of doing things and that the left was strongly abetting the EU in this endeavour.

The division between left and right, to continue to use these terms, was also becoming a feature of several Western state, like Spain, Italy and to some extent even France. The basic idea of a single democratic polity, demos and society was beginning to erode. The liberal consensus was causing serious discord, not to say dissensus.

This state affairs certainly demanded, and continues to demand, a thoroughgoing rethinking of what democracy is about, how it is to be sustained when the social-political division is questioning the nature of democracy itself. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that some kind of a consociational arrangement, a left-right power sharing, may well prove to be the most effective means of saving democracy both from the growing polarisation and from the emerging extremism to the left and right of the liberal consensus. The EU clearly has no idea what to do with a situation when politics in Europe is increasingly questioning European integration, when elections are increasingly winnable by being anti-EU and when the anti-integration forces have found the political language to articulate their ideas.

All this points to a much deeper level crisis, one that touches legitimacy, culture, ideals and aspirations. For most of Europe, the EU represented a successful and desirable way of organising the highly complex interdependence of the Continent – peace, prosperity, democracy, overcoming the disasters of the 20th century. In a word, integrated Europe had become a successful model of modernity, one to be emulated and to be idealised as the real-time embodiment of the successful polity and society. The idea of “unity in diversity” promised a stable equilibrium between the local and the universal (true, only a European universal). This promise was potentially attractive to the late modernisers where the contest between the universal and the local was always more acute than in the core of states of Europe where modernity was initially defined (France, Britain above all).

The crisis, therefore, was not merely a crisis of the EU, but a crisis of what modernity was, what it should be, how one defined what being European was. Even if the EU had become legalistic and technocratic, the ideal of modernity remained in existence at the half explicit level – the Constitutional Treaty was probably the last expression of this. The inability and unwillingness of the member state elites to mobilise public opinion behind the idealism of the Constitution was a symptom of this and it pointed the way towards relying on intergovernmentalism that, in turn, offered more space to the national interest and to nationhood. No matter that nationhood was supposedly post-national, it was still structured by an idea of the nation that was superior to the European ideal. In that sense, the economic crisis of 2008 and after was the second grand failure of the EU as the ideal of modernity in Europe, though few would admit to seeing it in these terms (the failure of the Constitution was the first). The consequence was a subtle shift in once again elevating national politics above Europe, a process that can be seen most obviously in the declining political legitimacy of the EU and the integration process. Evidently this development made the politicisation of Europe virtually impossible.

There’s the rub. While arguably the EU did have a degree of political input and political engagement in the early years, in its later years it became legal, bureaucratic and technocratic, and, what is worse, it relied on a legal and technocratic discursivity that made political engagement with integration effectively impossible.

It is not at all clear that the member states would actually welcome such political engagement on the part of society, a European integration open to political contestation, above all because they tend to see such a development as eating into their domestic political legitimacy. This is one of the central ironies of European integration. Member states have been quite prepared to transfer swathes of power to Brussels, but they have held on to the legitimation of that power themselves. So, for example, the proposal to give the EU its own taxing power, more to give the citizens something to engage with than for revenue-raising purposes, is a non-starter at this time. The member states would not accept it.

Not surprisingly, EU power is now widely seen as remote, unaccountable and undemocratic, flying in the face of the EU’s democratic commitment. Likewise it follows that for the average European, their citizenship is next to meaningless in political terms. They may enjoy passport free travel in Schengen, but they seldom attribute it to the EU. The consequence is that the average European has no meaningful political identity as a European, even while he and she may accept a shared cultural identity. The aspiration of creating a European demos remains just that, so that there is yet another paradox – something like a European polis is in existence, but it does not really have a demos to underpin it. Instead there is a gap. A democracy without a demos, though, would seem to be something straight from absurdistan.

The gap, the disconnect to use the term that came into fashion during the Irish referenda on the Lisbon Treaty, has another consequence. It is increasingly being filled by an imagined, malign Europe, one constructed according to the whims and caprices of the Eurosceptics. This might not matter all that much were it not for the fact that the crisis seems – I wish to stress that word – to be confirming the Eurosceptic narrative, quite apart from that narrative coming together with others that are nationalist, introverted and/or fuelled by the sense of exclusion from the liberal consensus (as sketched in Part I of this series).

In conclusion, the argument and analysis in this examination of the crisis in Europe seem to add up to a far more complex set of problems than the run of the mill assessments that are current. Some of these factors when taken together, like the entirely contradictory economic and political imperatives, imply that no satisfactory solution to the crisis is on the agenda. The inference to be drawn from the foregoing, however, does make one point with great insistence – no solution will work unless it deals properly with the political power involved, with the urgent need to repoliticise a large area of the integration process, to include those currently excluded, to listen to all the relevant voices and confront the urgent need to establish legitimation for the politics of Europe.

Democracy demands nothing less.

Sch. Gy.