Part 2 of a three-part essay on the European Question and what Europe means, historically and today. Only by looking at the history of Europe as an idea can we properly contextualise the Europe we have today, and perhaps discern some insights from history on how to proceed with our project of unification.

What’s strange about contemporary Europe, this technocratic ‘Europe of Offices’, is just how far the debate has devolved. The questions and arguments no longer revolve around what kind of Europe we want but a strange binary between whether we say yes to Europe or not; the worst recent example of this one could say was the British referendum on leaving the Union in 2016. All nuance and variation – the very diversity we are supposed to be celebrating and protecting – has been stripped from this discussion. The best the Remain side could come up with leading up to June last year was that saying yes to Europe would mean a stronger economy, whereas saying no would lead to a major shock – something which has seemingly not materialised. Indeed, one could argue that little better could be expected of Britain, whose political classes have long viewed Europe as a mere transactional arrangement; an association rather than a union. However, as I look at things, political arguments on the continent seem rarely to be any more robust, and as previously mentioned, there seems to be a lack of vision when it comes to what Europe should become. Over the past seven years it has become obvious that Europe’s political classes lack the necessary strategic vision required to properly extricate ourselves from the crises the continent has faced, but perhaps this extends also to the citizens who believe in the idea of Europe without considering the long-term and trying to shape it. This may have something to do, as I suspect, with the problem of not quite having a concrete idea about what Europe is. As if Europe is a railway with one destination, this distant and shrouded by fog, questions of purpose, means, shapes, foundations and ideals go insufficiently answered.

III. United in Diversity

I suggested before that the Europe of Offices we have today is not one people would like to tell stories of. Of course, this isn’t entirely true; the intrigue of the Halls of Power in Brussels isn’t described as Byzantine for nothing. However, those of us interested in the struggle for power among the ruling elite realise that in truth, the power being wrestled over in the Berlaymont is not the kind that attracts much attention. The tussle is over technical pieces of legislation, divided neither by ideas nor visions of the world or even the continent, but, more often than not, over which supranational institution is best fit to represent the Union on a certain issue. There is nothing compelling about this conflict, because ultimately, it all leads to the same end. What’s more, it is clear that the real power is still held in Europe’s Chancelleries (crucially, its one remaining Chancellery), and not its Commission. Only in 2014 did politics dip its toe into the workings of the Commission, with the parliamentary elections having some bearing over who would be appointed the Commission President, and even then, the politics of ideas had to squeeze in alongside the intergovernmental power-politics being fought out in the Council. When it comes down to it however, in the day-to-day work of the Commission, little has changed. The only overt political policy the Commission manages is Enlargement, the purpose of which is to transform states wanting to join the Union into civilised little provinces of the empire. Beyond this, everything else is intensely administrative and bureaucratic in tone and purpose; highly legalistic, mind-numbingly technical, absent of any spirit or overarching political belief and enslaved to the objective of creating a raison d’être for itself. Weber argued that bureaucracies, thanks to their very nature, accumulate more and more power over time if not kept in check. He forgot perhaps that in the process, power is stripped of all ideals, beliefs and potential which attract mortals to it.

What end does the Commission serve beyond justifying its own existence? What vision of Europe is it advancing, and what changes are there in that vision as power changes hands from one College to the next? Jean-Claude Juncker recently admitted in an interview with the Financial Times that power has lost its eroticism over the course of his presidency; perhaps because he realised that the ends it is serving are no longer his, or any other politically motivated European, but the system itself. Worse than this however, is the premises on which the contest for power in Brussels rests on, and the absolute absence of Europeanism in them. Each institution wants to justify its existence, in the system and beyond that, in representing Europe. This is why we see both the Commission President and Council President at key moments of high politics for Europe, because neither institution can allow the other to gain the upper hand as more significant in such moments. However, these assumptions are the very problem, for they mean that there is supposed to be just one institution representing all of Europe on a certain issue. We must ask ourselves: is this something to be desired?

Institutions ultimately set the parameters of what’s acceptable in political discourse – they are a representation of, literally, established politics and all its limitations. National institutions have been struggling to enforce such tight confines at the national level for years – and now we are going to accept such a state of affairs for Europe? As a European who believes in the European idea, of diversity and conflict being at the heart of our civilisation and the culture and progress it produces, how can one accept such a settlement? Separatism has survived and even flourished throughout the centuries in Europe precisely because of the liberation, not only from any kind of physical or economic oppression, but also liberation from the intellectually crushing mainstream of culture and politics established in some city hundreds of kilometres away, as a result of the existence of a ‘centre’ for politics. Do we want a single anything in Europe? The ideology of the Bundesbank, which has now been transferred to the common European Central Bank, is completely at odds with my own beliefs, never mind the millions of others in Southern Europe and of course in Germany itself. The metropolis, with its institutions all arrayed in a single alignment, suffocates diversity in politics, society and culture. You can see this from London, or Paris, the great metropolises of the continent which have crushed all cultural diversity from the ‘provinces’ of France and Britain.

Europe, already, has resisted this fate, one could argue. Agustín José Menéndez and John Erik Fossum argued that Europe is pulling in two different directions; on the one side, European law is being pulled together into a single monolithic mass, thanks to the nature of law. On the other side, we have Europe’s political institutions; unfinished when integration began in the 1950s, as the institutional network has grown it has taken influences from different states, forming an uneven patchwork of institutional cultures. Hence, we have the Central Bank which is heavy with German influences in Frankfurt, and the Commission, with all the hallmarks of the French executive, sending its decrees from the Brussels metropolis to the provinces. This diversity in political institutions is only thanks to Europe’s own diverse institutional cultures, and the fact that in the beginning, the institutional structure was a threadbare skeleton of what was required. And yet I still ask: is this good enough? Even the above theory doesn’t underline the crime enough, for Europa strains and wrenches at the idea of being represented by a single voice on anything. The price we pay for prioritising unity is inevitably a fall in diversity.

A terrible failure of the current discourse is the immediate acceptance of this trade-off, and even that it is our greatest achievement. As if nothing is to be lost and all is to be gain, the absence of diversity in thought at the European level, about our destination, our priorities and our motivations, has been completely ignored. It’s as if people forgot that ‘permissive consensus’ means no dissent. Europe isn’t just supposed to praise itself with its fledgling attempt to reconcile unity with diversity. This isn’t our greatest achievement. Diversity is Europe’s greatest strength. I’ve been wrestling a long time with the question of whether this can be best protected and defended by a Europe that is politically united or politically divided. Until now I’ve still believed that politically unity and social-cultural diversity can be reconciled; in a nation-state, certainly not, but if we were to create something greater than the nation-state – maybe?

‘Europe’s not the destination, it’s the journey’. This in effect sums up what appears to be the general consensus on the project of integration. In part, this is true, and in many ways is the distilled idea of Europe being about the diversity of its culture more than anything else. And yet at the same time, the political institutions which govern us are of profound importance, for the shape and tone of the rest of society. Where we are now and where we are going should never be forgotten. Right now, those institutions are completely dysfunctional, and worse, are devoid of anything that many of us would recognise as European; any sense of conflict, dissenting voices, belief, argument, spirit or feeling. Worse still is where we are going: whether by default or by design, the path we are taking is capable of stripping Europe of everything which lies in its heart, the very diversity which makes Europe in many ways the opposite of America. In America differences are taken, mixed up and melted together into a single whole – any new influence gets added to the greater mass. This is not Europa; Europa is the home of difference and diversity, where new influences are not added to anything but clash and conflict with each other, fighting on the great Hegelian battleground of culture, creed and beliefs. The problem is of course, when this civic conflict of words, arguments, images and sounds becomes one of bullets and bayonets; it is then that we remember why we need a United Europa.

IV. A Europe of Nations

The question at the core of the debate we are having in Europe then, is how to balance economic and political convergence with social and cultural divergence?  Is it possible, and if so, is it a goal worth pursuing? I would like to say with conviction that is most certainly is worth pursuing, and trying to realise. It is oft-repeated but no less true, that one of the great victories of the European Project is its transformation of our conflicts, so that they can be settled around the conference table (or better still, in the parliamentary chamber) rather than in the trenches. And yes, naturally there are several reasons for this development, not least the presence of thousands of tonnes of American military equipment across the Western and now Eastern European landscape, and the acceptance of American leadership in our affairs. Nevertheless, I would argue it is wrong to marginalise the efforts of our own; it is Europeans who made the continent of war into a continent of peace. Our forebears turned this into a workable reality in the way no NATO base could. Europe’s conflicts have been formalised and institutionalised so that they don’t erupt into violence, and we own this transformation. This is the great success of democratic politics and the triumph of a civil society undivided by national borders.

It is these national borders, and what they represent, which have acted as the greatest source of conflict over the past 200 years; long since the warlords of post-Roman Europe lost control of our society did the will to violence remain, like a cancer metastasising in another part of the body. It may appear strange given that I’ve praised Europe’s diversity without end in the other parts of this essay and yet am now criticising the seemingly most obvious example that. But do not be fooled. Nationalism is a fabricated diversity; false, aggressive and designed to enslave people, not emancipate them. Its purpose is to bind the population of a territory to the will of its rulers, not give them any freedom of thought or expression. In its long history on this continent, nationalism has only crushed Europe’s diversity, not reinforced it. It has been used to rewrite history, ban religions, ideas and beliefs, justify book-burnings, art-plunderings, ethnic cleansings, wars and genocide. Its manipulation ultimately pulled Europe in two radically polarising directions, in the face of which nuance and difference became ever more impossible – Europe’s soul was being bled to death. The national story told by one side was of freedom, civic duty, markets, liberal democracy, learning, law, entrepreneurial spirit and enterprise. The other was one of authority, order, purity, obedience, physical strength, ethnic loyalty, blood and soil.

Naturally, these were only stories, and the reality was much more blurred. Both sides borrowed lines and techniques from each other. Furthermore, both stories were still framed within national contexts, when the reality was very different; these ideas were playing out against each other across Europe, between nations and within them. Austria for example produced both the founder of National Socialism and the founder of Neoliberalism. Hitler and Hayek were neither fans of democracy, nor of each other. Nevertheless, there was a significant difference between the national stories and their respective camps which meant we could have only hoped for one to win. The first camp was characterised by a sense of progress; they were not looking to the past for answers and inspiration, but with hope at the future. This is what made this particular conflict so polarising, for it was a conflict of transition, from one era of civilisation to the next.

The 1920s and 30s were a defining period of European history precisely because it was the era in which these two sides of our psyche once again martialled their forces for war. There’s a reason people refer to the First and Second World Wars as Europe’s Civil War, for it was an internal conflict; a battle with ourselves. On the one hand, the nationalism, authoritarianism and militarism of our past which states across Europe were succumbing to; on the other, the enlightenment, democracy and liberty – values which we had created through our conflicts and which promised to be our future. They threatened to destroy the old ways of the Old Continent, but they likewise offered us a path to a more peaceful and prosperous civilisation. It was these conflicting values, both born of Europa, which clashed in the Second World War, European society having been cracked open in the First. The fact this conflict played out in the context of the nation-state, and the tribalism-in-overdrive there associated meant that for Europe there was no stepping away from the brink. These values and ideas no longer became a matter of pragmatic calculation or intellectual debate, of any reasoned-through consideration of why the enlightened civilisation was superior to that of feudal oppressive yester-year, but the pride and strength of the nation itself. Dissent was betrayal, reason was blasphemy, empathy weakness. Worse still was the interests of power involved; the power of the state married to the zealotry of the nation makes a potent cocktail. It is unlikely whether such a transition from the old world to the new could have been made peacefully, but certainly not in the heated atmosphere of Realpolitik, when these ideas had crystallised around nation-state rivalry.

Until now, the European Project has been everything the Project of Nationalism was not: rational, technical, cooperative, but also passionless, without the conviction of belief, even soulless. This has been a strength, as Europe took a breath after the intensity of conflict in the first half of the Century. It has now become a weakness; few believe in the European Project enough to defend it politically. A problem today with some federalists, I find, as well as the champions of the Europe of Offices, is that they hope to create, consciously or not, a loyalty to Brussels of the same order as those the nation-states forged in the 18^th & 19^th Centuries, in order to remedy this. A European identity with which people will believe in the righteousness of the ruling establishment; a European nationalism in effect, even if they would never think to refer to it as such. However, we must be clear: Europe can never fall into the same trap today of trying to achieve the kind of identity which nationalism forged centuries ago. With integration, we hope to supersede this destructive and false form of diversity, along with the hate, restrictive thinking, militarism and Realpolitik associated with it. To fall into that trap would be to betray everything the European Project has ever stood for, every purpose for which it was intended. What must be recognised at the same time however, is that this ‘European Rescue of the Nation-state’ that we see today is just as much of a failure as a potential European nation, if not as much a betrayal.

Photo Credits: Proclamation of the Second German Empire, by Anton von Werner, 1885