The EU is a unique, treaty-based institutional framework that decides and manages economic and political cooperation among its…members.Footnote 2
BACK TO BASICS: INSTITUTIONAL THEORY, POLITY AND NARRATIVES
By way of reminder: I am pleading for an old-fashioned institutional theory of the EU, which is not the same as the trendier institutionalist theories. The latter proffer tentative explanations of the emergence and effects of a given set of institutional arrangements (following March and Olsen I would rather use ‘organizational’), especially the compliance they elicit from their subjects. The former describes the working of institutions, and conjectures and assesses the logical and sociological coherence and comprehensibility of patterns of governance and cooperation fit for a definite polity and the specific policy challenges it has to face. These patterns are not only systems of rules but also symbolic tools for building identities and inducing trust (they are sometimes called ‘myths’). While an institutionalist theory describes and explains an ever-moving process,Footnote 3 an institutional theory describes and explains how processes are designed and controlled and how they are related to purposes and outcomes. To use a metaphor, an institutionalist theory is like a movie where the final ‘The End’ barely appears, except in macro-sociological histories where it signals an epochal change when Minerva's owl flies off (‘a form of life has had its day’); an institutional theory tries to freeze a frame. Institutionalist theory outlines broad inter-temporal margins; institutional theory tries its hand at drawing precise analytical borderlines.Footnote 4
The task is not easy since the EU has some features of a federation in some policy sectors while in other domains it is reminiscent of an intergovernmental organization. In certain circumstances it speaks with – seemingly – one voice when a specific agent has to say something on the spot without a previous formal consultation of the concerned members. This is the case for the presidents of the Council and the Commission, sometimes for the president of the European Central Bank (ECB) and the commissioners – at the risk of being taken to task by a member state. It is seldom the case for the presidents of the Parliament and the European Court of Justice (ECJ), for obvious reasons that are valid at the national level as well. In other circumstances a tepid declaration is issued or a splendid cacophony fills the air. We cannot systematically manage the language mix of European politics (to the extent that we tend to deny the relevance of the distinction between domestic and international politics). This makes the intertwining of substantive policy and institutional issues (the linkage is widespread in many polities; comparison with the United States is fruitful) all the more difficult to apprehend and assess, since the two types of issue are often phrased in both languages that the ECJ sometimes tries to combine to promote a federal view in the name of equality between member states in domains that do not fall within the jurisdiction of the EU (e.g. in matters of higher education: Commission versus Austria, 2005) or are expressly reserved to the exclusive jurisdiction of the member states (e.g. in matters of regulation of labour relations: Laval versus Svenska Byggnadsarbetareförbundet, 2007. The 2005 ruling favoured a ‘welfarist’ view whereas the 2007 ruling favoured liberal economics).Footnote 5
The outcome is that in the current state of EU studies we can stress exclusively the need for an institutional system with new rules of representation and decision-making, sometimes made up of isomorphic organizations (the lawyers speak of ‘structural congruence’), as if every policy sector should be governed by the same institutional setting,Footnote 6 which is not even the case in the most centralized nation states themselves. Alternatively, we can stress the variation in policy-making – even within a single ‘pillar’– without taking into account the need for a modicum of coordination between sectors, conveyed by the concept of ‘regime’. Simon Hix seems to think that such a coordination, necessary to the rise of a politics of ‘political’ choices, does not need deep institutional changes, yet the behavioural and organizational reforms he advocates (e.g. on p. 186) are expected to bring about a renewed institutional regime. In this respect, his theory is genuinely institutional, as are Zielonka's and Colomer's, whose visions of a European polity are widely at variance with Hix's own conception of a European polity (and with each other as well). By the way, what is a ‘polity’?
As I have been taken to task by readers of the first part of this review for not defining what I mean by a ‘polity’, let me begin with a crude tentative definition. Political theory has to do with polities, what Raymond Aron called ‘pre-eminently political aggregates’ (‘agrégats politiques par excellence’) such as cities, principalities, kingdoms, empires and statesFootnote 7 and with systems of polities. These systems of polities might be ‘international’ systems governed by the blanket concepts of war, opposing parties that distrust one another and rely first and foremost on self-help and the claim to be legally ‘waterproof’ to one another,Footnote 8 or they might be part of a foedus that binds parties that trust one another – what William Riker called ‘federation in a very broad sense’, from alliances to federations of polities. In modern times, the foedus dates back to Grotius and the Enlightenment and has gained strength with the recent transformations of the concept of state, becoming a ‘market state’, a ‘trading state’ and even a ‘virtual state’, due to the changing nature of the resources necessary to its existence and the supply and demand for new collective goods that the territorial Westphalian state is no longer able to provide. This leads to the concept of a state deregulating massively, or regulating wisely, leaving much room for private initiatives and local autonomies; this is one of the core arguments that Josep Colomer shares with the lawyer Philip Bobbitt, without drawing the same international conclusions at all, as we will see below. More basically, the foedus view holds that relations between polities need not be governed by the ‘state of war’ (meaning that war is always possible as the only way to bring about peace, to quote the provocative Edward Luttwak's Virtual Empire), since the opposite view taken in 1917 by Colonel Gatti after Caporetto is the motto of our times: ‘It is idiotic to imagine that war can be a means of healing.’ As with every motto, this one is far from being implemented, and Barack Obama's argument in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech restoring the notions of ‘war of necessity’ and ‘just war’ may look closer to facts, yet as a matter of principle it is the only available discourse, which leads us to hold that the autonomy of polities can exist alongside their well-organized cooperation (as President Obama told his Oslo audience, ‘we can understand that there will be war and still strive for peace’), hence the logical continuum from alliance to federation.Footnote 9 The alliance, even against a common enemy, is much more entangled in an awkward combination of distrust and partnership between allies, however close they may be.Footnote 10
However important, and uncomfortable, the coexistence of the war and foedus concepts might be, it remains universally true that the Greek kings who waged war on Troy did not form a polity despite Agamemnon's claim to be ‘king of kings’. Basically, a polity is not merely a set of elites, processes, cultures, public policies or techniques of administration, although almost any polity may of course be described with these toolboxes – terms also utilizable to describe any kind of organization, from a guild or a religious order to a corporation, an union or an international organization where ‘political activities’ take place, ‘rule-making’, ‘measure-taking’, ‘dispute-settling’, ‘party-politics’.Footnote 11 A polity is first the corporate organization of a set of collective choices binding parties whose membership is not revocable unless secession is permitted by a special provision,Footnote 12 and who cannot legitimately resort to a type of physical violence forbidden by the accepted division of political labour (which does not cover all types of violence). The members (that is, the individuals) cannot be ‘sovereign’, they cannot be the supreme judges of the value of their own interests, material or symbolic, including their own lives. They are de facto free to defend it on the basis of the Hobbesian ‘desire of liberty’ (survival) that is at the root of the first ‘natural right’ of the ‘state of nature’, but the civil society, that is the polity in Hobbes's terminology, is de jure entitled to take their body (and in ‘religious’ polities, their soul as well) in the name of common good, be it dictated by a supra-political Law or enacted by the polity itself. Second, no specific domain is ascribed to a polity by an organization of a higher order and it may pursue as many, or as few, substantial finalities as conceivable. It is precisely this ever-present and threatening capability that explains the many attempts made at submitting a polity to a higher order (usually religious but also what Hans Kelsen called a ‘super order’, legal for Kelsen but it may be also moral or economic), circumscribing its ‘proper domain’Footnote 13 and dividing its organization into mutually countervailing powers. This is where domestic federalism comes in as a sophisticated way to ascertain and guarantee the right of individuals not to obey anyone who would set forth a decree of nature to justify his commands.Footnote 14 I am aware that I am presenting a particular narrative of a polity, the ‘nation state’ legitimized logically by the social contract and sociologically by the existence of a community of communication, inherited or in the making. By those standards, many – but not all – empires are much ‘thinner’ polities. This is precisely the point: a polity is also, third, the ‘assertion of an overall collective identity’,Footnote 15 the taken-for-granted answer to a global question ‘who are we?’ disaggregated into ‘where do we come from?’ (genealogy), ‘where are we going?’ (teleology), ‘who are our partners?’ (commerce) and ‘who are our enemies?’ (polemics, too easily deconstructed today through the trick of the ubiquitous ‘discursive construction of the enemy’Footnote 16 ). These questions are complemented by a fifth and more specific question that brings us back to square one when collective choices are not unanimous: ‘quis judicabit?’ (who decides? and in the name of what?). Those assertions of a ‘political community’ are embedded in grand narratives. A framework for collective choices, compulsory membership, non-sovereignty of individuals and the assertion of an exclusive or dominant collective identity through a narrative are permanent features of polities.
I am here under the imperative of making a few points of method. (1) I do not deny that narratives may be found almost anywhere (in families, mafias, corporations, ‘bands of brothers’, ‘old boys' networks’, professional groups etc.). The political feature of a narrative only emphasizes the corporate and organic aspect of a polity, even when it is not directly based on blood ties – a feature that may be explained in terms of rational choices, or alternatively required functions, but cannot be felt as a mere outcome of self-interested (possibly unconscious) calculation and games or of impersonal processes short of losing its credibility as a source of commitments. (2) More troublesome is the fact that this article is in some respects a third-order construction based on second-order ones that utilize (sometimes, not always) sources based on primary documents (first-order constructions). I have to concede that my narratives are not based on opinions and folk knowledge. Most of the European citizens do not know, and do not care for, the story of past European polities (except the states, their recent wars and their current protective duties), despite the European officials' hard work at persuading them that such a story does exist.Footnote 17 But this is exactly what happened to the national (and other) narratives. As Habermas (quoted in the first part of this article) has pointed out, a narrative is always a top-down process that runs the risk of not being accepted by a fractious audience, since, as Paul Ricoeur has put it, a narrative ‘is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience’.Footnote 18 The outcome of the interplay between the experience of living and narrative is often problematic;Footnote 19 all the theories of legitimacy are at great pains to deal with the issue. I am trying to sort out narratives for two reasons: they are present in the books I am commenting upon, and any viable institutional theory (I am tempted to add, ‘any theory’, even the most ‘scientific’) is more or less explicitly based on a narrative. Yet I am not drawing the authoritative conclusion that one of the narratives is going to succeed. Both of them may fail. My stubborn contention is that only those two stories may give rise to a coherent European polity. The following paragraphs are devoted to developing these points.
Current conventional wisdom holds that there is no longer any room for monolithic grand narratives whose function was to impose their own conception of truth on the rest of the world. Today's reality, being much larger and vastly more fractured, would be unlikely to give rise to these modern visions (to wit the Enlightenment and ‘the white man's burden’) through which a genius, whether political or artistic, would present himself as an example to the whole of humankind. In this would lie the reason for the decline of great composers: Elliott Carter is not Ludwig van Beethoven or even Piotr Illich Tchaikovsky; Luciano Berio's ‘Symphony’ is to a world of (not necessarily conflicting) ‘collage’ what Haydn's ‘London Symphonies’ were to a world of (conflicting) systemic orders. This view is mistaken: an aesthetic narrative does not always perform the same functions as a political one unless one decides that both are part and parcel of the same meta-narrative (which is just a narrative among others). More important, such a grand narrative is precisely what the EU proposes to the rest of the world for such matters as human rights, free trade, climate change and peace-building (this is the heart of Jan Zielonka's argument but Jacques Delors, far from his institutional views, shares the same vision, as do Jurgen Habermas, Peter Sloterdjick and a myriad of intellectual European elites of various persuasions, with a few conspicuous exceptions – Perry Anderson and perhaps Axel Honneth among them). The European narrative envisions quality of life, sustainability, peace and harmony;Footnote 20 its five key concepts are human rights, democracy, diversity, prosperity and security.Footnote 21 A grand narrative need not be ‘imperialist’ in the usual sense – imposed by the sheer force of conquering armies or technological, economical and ideological weapons. It may be pluralist, tolerant, multiculturalist and backed by a ‘soft-soft power’ (not combined with a potential hard power as in J. Nye's construction) that is nothing other than its attractiveness to the rest of the world entranced by its charms and struck with an intense sympathy to the particular polities supposed to embody that universal model of civilization. This is Western Europe's mania to present itself as a disgusting old man that has cast off all the sins it is still brooding over and has emerged as a young and wise prophet. Admittedly, some tough hardliners outside and sometimes inside the Western world deem this endeavour a form of cultural neo-imperialism even more pernicious than the clash of civilizations since it is a vicious attempt to win the clash by denying its existence, just as the Soviet Empire's ‘hard-soft power’ over the non-Trotskyist communists throughout the world denied, until Tito and much later Mao, the existence of an enduring clash of nations.
To sum up, a narrative may be identified as an authoritative ‘story’, an imaginary reconstruction of the past or of a historical trajectory utilized to convey a convincing description of what is going on now and a plausible prediction of what the future challenges might look like. Accordingly, it is bound to select relevant (to its authors) aspects of the past as well as of the future. Whether it is created in an official political framework (like the ones I am going to expound), or in a non-political context – albeit dealing with matters that the scientist may deem political in a broad sense – a narrative endows the world with meaning by locating the experience in time and place and ‘moralizing the events’.Footnote 22
The two narratives I have sorted out emphasize as pressing challenges economic globalization, global environmental issues and the needs for a global humanitarian rule of law, competitive growth and sustainable development, but they tend to ignore the demographic ordeal awaiting Europe as a result of its early and overextended transition to low birth and death rates compared with its southern neighbours' late and insufficient transition to the same state, which makes for a disproportionate high fertility and population growth (the exceptions are Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia and Iran). Although the overall European population will keep growing, Germany and, outside the EU, Russia – which has in addition a male life expectancy of 60 – are expected to lose people in the next 30 years. In Germany today around a quarter of the children are born to immigrant families and, unsurprisingly, they drop out of school at more than double the rate of ‘native’ Germans, a sound recipe for dangerous social cleavages since everywhere the evolution of the breakdown by age and ethnic groups will lead to drastic changes in the welfare regimes and Europe's social fabric. Zielonka pays some attention to the topic, but only in his strongly argued chapter on ‘Economic Governance’, to show that – despite some achievements – several European countries suffer from the rigidity of their welfare systems, the failure of welfare reforms and the fact that ‘the EU must increase its growth rate and improve its overall competitive position’. Those commonplace views are wide of the mark; welfare reforms are on all the developed countries' agendas, not only because the population is ageing but also because the costs of health care grow faster than the economy, and the two phenomena are not quite connected. Suffice it to note, with the demographer Paul Demeny, that in 2005, for every 10 people in the 27 countries of the EU there were 14 people in the surrounding Arab countries, and if the current trend is extended by moderate projections the proportion will be 10 to 28 in 2050. The entire population of the Arab world is expected to grow by some 40 per cent over the next two decades, the equivalent of two new Egypts (153 million people), and in 2050 the EU-25 will reach 450 million and its southern and south-eastern neighbours will grow to perhaps 1.25 billion, and that in a region that already has the lowest employment rate in the world, with about one out of five young people out of work, and where total manufacturing exports are below those of the Philippines or Israel. The only industry growing steadily is the manufacturing of political alienation and ideological resentment.
None of the authors reviewed cites those widely known figures, which are ignored by the European circus, admittedly for good reasons (why should we assume that no change will occur in the labour market and in industrial production? Why should we ignore that the hostile attitudes towards certain immigrants are triggered by consistent ‘group cues’, emotionally convincing whatever their objective validity?Footnote 23 ), but also because everyone is careful not to darken its rosy picture or to look xenophobic (Ferguson could be an exception but he does not care about the issue and he does not belong to the company). Colomer seems to think the issue settled if self-government is transferred to small units without their own armies, borders and customs but with a strong cultural homogeneity allowing democracy to be effective. This would only move the problem down to local governments without solving it: how can a small borderless unit remain homogeneous unless it resorts to some unpleasant techniques of social control likely to be judged unlawful by the European courts? Little Botswana, one of the best governed and most prosperous African countries, has borders to protect the exceptional cultural homogeneity of its democratic polity.
For his part, Zielonka does not neglect the consequences of the Arab and African imbalance on neighbouring Europe but he wisely refrains from depicting the EU as a besieged fortress analogous to Byzantium in the fifteenth century. His solution is to recommend that the governments give up their bad habit of showing an unwarranted and malignant distrust of the Muslim citizens, to forget or qualify traditional foreign and security problems and to export a model of good economic governance. He recommends this, as if the success of an economic and administrative model (supposing it might bring about immigrants' upward mobility, see the German case among others) were enough, together with the government's and officialdom's virtuous and tolerant attitudes, to transform people with legitimate grievances expressed in a nationalist, ethnic or religious language into good liberal and loyal citizens of European Union. Most of them are willing to act in perfect good faith and to do their utmost for this purpose, provided they keep and deepen their core identity. While we do not know any dominant interpretation of the meaning and the range of that identity (it is likely that many Muslims do not feel more Muslim than the secular French or German Jews felt Jewish in the 1920s), or how many Muslims (a majority? a minority?) adhere to a strict interpretation of Islam and which one, it remains that the topic is hotly debated (and not only in the ‘liberal’ and ‘Islamophobic’ circles) and that the Islamic orthopraxy is often averse to a liberal and individualist value systemFootnote 24 that is only one value system among others. That value system is arguably best as a political order to the contemporary European public opinion (despite, or because of, its somewhat excessive cultural and moral permissiveness), with some residual resistance in Poland, Ireland and Italy, yet it is not universal by any ‘scientific’ or other standards.Footnote 25
The issue is not new, nor is it that it encourages local-level clientelist practices of politicians to conquer a safe immigrant constituency, even in laïque, republican and Jacobin France. After all, those practices used to be and still are part and parcel of the healthy US democracy, threatened by other problems such as growing social inequalities, the culture war and, more importantly, the culture of war. The real issue, which should be recognized quite apart from any feeling of racism and Islamophobia, is that a significant number of Muslims in Europe have good reasons of their own to share the feelings of some of their radical cousins in the Arab and Muslim world and may be less hostile in 2010 to radical, or simply fundamentalist, Islam than the East Europeans refugees were to communism in the 1950s and 1960s. Besides, they are under heavy external pressures exerted by radical missionaries. I will not expand on the topic, which is the subject of a mass of repetitive literature of poor and uneven quality,Footnote 26 since the stories I am considering stay aloof from this kind of post-colonial narrative, which does not concern directly, for the time being, Scandinavia (apart from Denmark) or Eastern Europe (the problems of Greece, Bosnia, Kosovo and Bulgaria have their own history). Only comparativists such as Hanspeter Kriesi, to whom we will return later, pay growing attention to the story, at least in so far as it has some bearing on the dominant populations' prejudiced behaviours and attitudes and is in some ways related to the transformation of the traditional cultural cleavage and the emergence of a new cleavage (not always linked to immigration): two phenomena caused by globalization.
Narratives treat history as a whole as the ‘grand theories’ of ‘big science’ treat the evolutionary nature of physical reality. They are different from academic theories that aim to explain a mechanism or deconstruct a conventional wisdom based on the common sense of actors. Yet, even these theories are more often than not embedded in a theory, explicit or tacit, one of whose functions in the modern times has been to restructure political space to control and annul political timeFootnote 27 in order to tame the tidal wave of change. In the same way a constitution – both a higher law and a tool for political governance – is, according to Jon Elster remembering Rousseau, ‘a way for the dead to tie the hands of the living’ by providing the latter with rules and meaning. By the same token, it is possible to detect self-images in the workings and justifications of specific policies.Footnote 28 Narratives are different from the doctrines, programmes and circumstantial justifications proffered by the agents involved in policy-making and fighting for empowerment, for the conquest of power positions or access to power holders. Yet, even those ideological and strategic justifications, however cynical or manipulative, make up, or are a blueprint of, one zeitgeist (or more), available at a given time to be used as a reservoir or toolbox of strategies that can be activated in different situations by social actors.Footnote 29 Let us give an example of the use of narratives as toolboxes. Vivien Schmidt has aptly identified four types of discourse among the political rulers' different ways of responding to the dissatisfaction of their peoples by improving their sense of empowerment and finding innovative EU solutions to their economic problems: ‘pragmatic’ (the EU as a borderless problem-solving entity ensuring free markets and regional security), ‘normative’ (the EU as a bordered value-based community), ‘principled’ (the EU as a border-free, right-based, post-national union), and ‘strategic’ (the EU as a global actor pursuing a grand strategy by doing things differently in international relations through multilateralism, humanitarian aid and peace-keepingFootnote 30 ). Those discourses are circumstantial rhetorical strategies – not such a recent practice in the process of European integration, according to Anand Menon – yet, like the ‘long cheap talk’ of games theorists, they must draw on available reservoirs of symbols. We will show that the pragmatic and principled discourses draw on the imperial-clerical narrative, while the normative and strategic discourses draw on the federal narrative. Of course, the discursive agencies may have (good) reasons of their own to deny the terms used here to describe the core narratives but that is entirely another matter: the scholars' political concepts are not the actors' politically and ideologically manipulated concepts. The former cannot be conflated by scholars to form a new concept without solid logical arguments, whereas that is the usual fate of the latter when the sociopolitical context constrains the political agents to do so.
Any political narrative is always in competition with other narratives. In Carl Schmitt's terms a narrative is not political if it is not at war with another narrative, and Skinner has extended this polemical view, perhaps excessively, to ‘the more abstract works of political theory’ that ‘are never above the battle, they are part of the battle itself’.Footnote 31 Accordingly, there is a sizeable number of European stories, each differing according to the local situations it stems from.Footnote 32 For example, a continental story may be matched by a Europe of archipelagos (I owe the formula to John Pocock), or by a Europe where Great Britain has in modern times been an insider from the Reformation onwards. Likewise, a territorial Europe may be matched by a borderless Europe.Footnote 33 All of them, be they theories or Theories, that deal with the comprehension and thus the control of present time, are dependent on their authors' location in their own past time: Anand Menon may go too far saying that only a French American such as Stanley Hoffmann ‘could have written as he did of the obstinacy of the nation state, just as only a German could have perceived so clearly the “joint decision trap” ’,Footnote 34 but his point is well taken. It is still true that reading Vivien Schmidt conjures up the image of the US polity (and certainly its congressional party system); likewise, one wonders if Josep Colomer would have written his book had he not been from Catalonia (Jordi Pujol, the president of Catalonia from 1980 to 2003, has gladly endorsed his book), or if Simon Hix does not have a modified version of the Westminster model deeply rooted in his mind, far away from a consociative model more familiar to Belgians or Dutchmen,Footnote 35 even though, when gently teased, he denies it vehemently, as he has rightly done in his book.Footnote 36 As Général de Gaulle used to say, Walter Hallstein's European Community was West Germany writ large, a kind of Rhineland, and almost half a century later many well-informed pundits may hold that Nicolas Sarkozy's ‘Europe that protects’ is a gigantic version of France with its own idiosyncrasies. Incidentally, this would explain why Angela Merkel, who shares this overall vision of a protecting state, strongly disagrees on several issues (among others, the budget deficits and the economic government), not only because she is the guardian of the German national interest (which she is, of course), but also because she, as a former East German, holds another vision of the German past and therefore of its national identity. However, anecdotes are not arguments, and it would be foolish to explain away what somebody says by holding that, being who she is and given where she is located, she could not have spoken otherwise. Has not Angela Merkel recently abandoned, at least for a time, the dogma of ‘no deficit’? Besides, while it is obvious that European stories are first and foremost national – and to a lesser extent regional – stories, it does not follow that for that reason alone they cease to be EuropeanFootnote 37 if we have not scrutinized what they mean about the identity of Europe, its imagined past or the meaning of this past, reconstructed from the ways that relevant agents perceive their present and evolve an ontology of what is going on.Footnote 38
I have sorted out two of those narratives since they are (at least in my view) the only ones liable to give rise to a fully fledged institutional theory of a European polity, although neither of them is currently completed. I could have included Vivien Schmidt, whose regional state comes close to a mixed federal vision of sorts. Admittedly, she has recently offered substantial policy prescriptions, of which only one implies an institutional innovation, but they are not based on an overall narrative of what a European polity might be.Footnote 39 Her concept of regional state, designed to meet the challenge, does not do the job, precisely for a reason she gives herself: whereas empire is a normative conceptualization (like the supra-national state she also mentions), ‘calling the EU a regional state reflects empirical reality’. This is a much-needed caveat against normative theories forgetful of the whole empirical reality, and I have highlighted this trap myself in the first part of this article when dealing with philosophical fancies, picking out only the bits suiting the purpose. Yet, there may be normative theories immune to such a widespread disease and, besides and above all, a grand narrative – being symbolic, and a genuine symbol is not the figment of an irrational imagination – is always more or less normative since it gives meaning and value to empirical reality, so contributing to its making and finally reflecting it if and only if it achieves the status of grand narrative, a well-grounded illusion. This is precisely what the concept of regional state cannot do because it simply reflects (with a somewhat inappropriate use of the term ‘state’) a European empirical reality that comes to us in disjointed bits and pieces.
The ‘regional state’, Schmidt tells us, ‘reflects state quality in certain domains’ (European Monetary Union (EMU), ECB, ECJ, competitive policy) while in many other domains it is the province of differentiated participation, variable boundaries and so on. To put it bluntly, the regional state is the place where the language mix triumphs and a grand narrative should leave no room for a language mix. If it does so it calls for a new and convincing language that will transform the former language's mixed nature into a new vision of empirical reality, just as a new paradigm or grand theory reduces the former paradigm's enigma to a new all-encompassing paradigm. This is not the case at the moment and it is perhaps a sufficiently pragmatic reason for holding that every attempt at departing from this polycentric polity and advocating a liberal intergovernmentalism or its opposite – an idealistic federalism – would weaken its legitimacy.Footnote 40 Why not? In the meantime, that wise and candid position should not keep us from depicting the messy structure in a non-messy language. For example, a mixed government, whether it means a distribution of power between class or status-based organs (the pre-modern meaning) or a combination of ‘pure’ regimes conducive to a separation of functions (presidential leadership, parliamentary legislation, autonomous judiciary)Footnote 41 that the French pluralists name a régime mixte, is not just a regime of power-sharingFootnote 42 in a context of confusion of powers (deemed dynamic to enhance its qualities) in which one does not know, even roughly, who is accountable before whom and for what.Footnote 43 That is why a mere empirical concept reflecting that confusion cannot give rise to a genuine institutional theory fit for a polity. As an empirical concept the region state may well be a conceptual innovation, admittedly better than its earlier relative, multilevel governance.Footnote 44 Yet the single statement that the EU should not be modelled on the nation state – which is just a negative conceptual prescription born of an uncontroversial empirical observation (a nation state made up of resilient fully fledged nation states is a rarity; even a successful military conquest does not easily achieve this goal) – must not lead its author to venture a bold theory of a post-state or non-state federalism, or better, a hybrid customized federalism produced by an evolutionary pragmatism and based on the (once again uncontroversial) empirical observation that in the EU the issue of competence is fundamentally indeterminate and it is not possible to identify specific actors as responsible for dealing with a specific set of problems.Footnote 45 The crucial point is that no institutional theory aiming for coherence and intelligibility for laypersons can be directly derived from (or worse, confused with) sociological observations that allow the scientists to make sense in their own language of a messy state of affairs (any human state of affairs is messy).
Moravcsik's and Menon's outstanding works do not quite fit in the picture, at least in my opinion, since they are first and foremost explanatory and demystifying narratives of a system of polities in a state of relative equilibrium. When they make a theoretical move these narratives defend the democratic legitimacy of the EU by arguing, as Moravcsik does, that the modes of delegation to the ECJ, ECB and other autonomous authorities are consistent with the late twentieth-century practice of most advanced industrial countries.Footnote 46 This argument overlooks on purpose the obvious difference from the EU: to wit the EU has no responsible government. More logically, their description and justification of the EU could apply to an international organization as well: it ‘empowers states by limiting them’, it supplies functional benefits by doing things that the states are no longer able to do, it enhances legitimacy by embedding within national political and administrative systems legally enforceable obligations to respect the interests of actors whose voice is excluded or muffled (de jure or de facto) within purely national processes.Footnote 47 We could add that it may induce the member states to a reciprocal modification of their national interests.Footnote 48 That is the spitting image of an international organization that works and so improves the democratic legitimacy and efficiency of its member states.Footnote 49 Even the shift from a balance between different branches of government to a balance between different processes of government, and so from a ‘separation of powers’ to a ‘separation of processes’Footnote 50 could happen in the case of an international organization devoid of any overall system of coordination of those processes, or, to use another language, lacking a supreme authority to decide the criteria by which networks of power should be regulated.Footnote 51 Why should we go further? My interpretation may be wrong, but it looks fairly certain that Moravcsik and Menon waste no time caring for an institutional design and are focusing on the explanation of the actual working of a consensus-based messy system where the only coherent institutional innovations are the arrangements for the single market and monetary policy. Anand Menon, from whom I borrow the latter assessment, has a lot of sensible things to say in describing and explaining why the European Parliament is both highly effective in its capacity as law-maker and widely perceived as irrelevant in the EU polity, yet he does not feel the need to go further, given what the European national governments and other organizations and groups are and how they behave. Once again, why not? After all, should we not avoid the trap of nominalism and be satisfied with the current name or its equivalent – a Union of States (note that the term ‘state’ is carefully avoided in the Commission guidebook quoted earlier)? He may be quite right and what I am going to present may be nothing more than an exercise in fiction. It remains to be seen if some of these exercises do not end in making up a social reality. As the Thomas theorem has it, ‘if human beings define situations as being real, they shall be equally real in their consequences’.Footnote 52 I only hope that my definition of the situation is not too mistaken.
TWO MASTER NARRATIVES – PRELIMINARIES
I have no intention of following here the familiar opposition between, on the one hand, a nomos of the earth, a Federation with a definite territory, and, on the other hand a cosmopolitan norm, a potentially universal empire, or even the Kantian ‘league for perpetual peace’, universalistic but not imperial. This is despite their obvious relevance in many philosophical and empirical debates in bygone and present days (we could oppose Madison to Kant, chronologically and logicallyFootnote 53 ) and several imperial theses' bias in favour of the norm. Both narratives have their particularistic and universalistic sides. They may advocate in various proportions both exclusionary and universalistic norms,Footnote 54 the adamant nationalists being, in the present process of globalization, the only ones likely to rely on exclusionary norms at the national (distinct from European) level, all the more so if they feel they are the losers in the process. Both narratives admit that a European model based around open borders, free trade and consolidated welfare systems may have some difficulty in being viable, all the more so when the 2008–9 crisis has exposed such issues as how to marry a European cross-border single market for finance with the reality that only national governments can and will step in when things go wrong.Footnote 55
By the same token, neither concept questions the empirical evidence of the lowering, unbundling and destructuring of national boundaries and the dual phenomenon of the sectoralization and ethnicization of politics, that is, ‘an increasing salience of differences between sectors of the economy and of cultural differences, respectively, as criteria for the distribution of resources, identity formation and political mobilization’. They may even concede (unwillingly on the part of the federalists) that national boundaries may be, paradoxically, rendered more salient by the new features of politics, and so bring about a demand for exclusionary measures.Footnote 56 Kriesi and his co-authors rightly take it for granted that the process of denationalization is of an unprecedented magnitude and that the new patterns of globalization display unparalleled qualitative differences surpassing the earlier epochs' patterns.Footnote 57 We should be careful to note, however, that globalization has not the same magnitude everywhere: Africa, so important to Europe given its geographical and historical proximity to the southern part of the EU, is more an outcast than an integral part of the process. Staying on the margins, it has been less affected by the 2008–9 crisis but has suffered from the withering away of foreign direct investments, the decrease in exports and remittances of expatriates, which is likely to speed up the migrations of the poorest people. Besides, as we have already noted in the first part of this article in stressing the resilience of territorial boundaries and citing Michel Foucher's works, although global politics and local politics are interlinked by the processes of globalization, they remain separated by the sheer physical distance with its geography. Physical distance remains a causal factor alongside topological distance (the presence of other countries between two countries), gravitational distance (the rise or decline of influence according to the mass and proximity of a country) and – the only non-geographical distance – attributional distance (the affinities between cultural and political regimes).Footnote 58
It is true nevertheless that, from a European standpoint, both narratives recognize globalization's universal effects and the conclusions drawn from that fact about the universalistic (or not) features of the European polity cannot be used as a watershed between them. As we have seen in the first part of this article, Jurgen Habermas is both federalist and cosmopolitan, as were Arnold Toynbee, Aldous Huxley and Bertrand Russell in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, and above all Alexandre Kojève, whose vison of the end of history included a ‘universal and homogeneous state’ in the making.Footnote 59 For his part Zielonka seems to think of a borderless empire while Colomer holds that one empire stops where another empire begins. We will see later that this seemingly small difference will become a huge gap between their conceptions. For the time being their agreement is limited to the notion of flexible, moving and functionally differentiated imperial borders and to a resolute disconnection of ‘nation’ from ‘nation state’ (Westphalian). There is nothing inherently contradictory in the imperial cosmopolitan vision, despite its seemingly oxymoronic (for the non-connoisseur) flavour when it has become fashionable to oppose cosmopolis to imperium.Footnote 60 For its part, the federal narrative may also aim either at a world federation or at a particular federation among (and against?) other polities, or it may leave the question open, the final decision depending on one's political ontology (is a universal polity logically conceivable as a polity?Footnote 61 ) rather than on one's image of Europe.
For this very reason, I will not dwell more than is reasonable on sovereignty, a nagging issue, being both highly technical and an occasion for vague yet heated political quarrels. The dual phenomenon of the sharing of sovereignty (with its possible companions, its ‘fragmentation’ and ‘decline’) and the endurance of sovereignty is at the source of all the troubles.Footnote 62 The two narratives that – as do all narratives – tend to avoid technicalities and favour big utterances, look somewhat at cross-purposes, but appearances may be deceptive. The imperial narrative is decidedly against a sovereign Westphalian European state and shows more leniency to the residual sovereignty of the member states, although it also holds that even at this level sovereignty is actually shared and divided (some federalists would not disagree). The federal narrative is suspected of sticking to a Westphalian sovereignty at the European level while denying it at the national level, which is only partially true. The founding fathers (Schuman, Gasperi, Spaak, Hallstein, but not Monnet) probably shared such an outlook, but that is no longer the case, given the conceptual stretching to which the unfortunate term is submitted by some would-be federalists. Actually, no sharp dividing line can be drawn between the two narratives. Both of them encompass variegated views, from the purposeful ignorance of the meaning of the concept to evade the issue of an European democracy's institutional consistency, to an utter rejection of its utility for the issues at hand.Footnote 63
An additional note on sovereignty is therefore needed: it is definitely not a descriptive sociological concept that would be empty for want of any empirical illustrative case: nobody in the real world rules supremely for more than a few instants to do whatever he wants (Caligula, as emperor, was not sovereign, he was just mad). It is a stipulative juridical concept, a necessary fiction expressing a claim (which has to be justified and vindicated) utilized by the agents as a ritual to put their house in order and carry through political battles inside and outside. In this context, the famous image of ‘organized hypocrisy’Footnote 64 should be seriously qualified since it cannot be taken for a falsification of the concept, the difficulty being not in truly believing it or not, but in behaving as if it had some legal validity. Neither is it a problem to renounce or infringe the principle at times while claiming it always reigns (any legal norm is in that uncomfortable situation), provided too obvious and repeated violations of its meaning and effectivity are avoided. Therefore I do not find so shocking Robert Keohane's statement that sovereignty is a ‘bargaining resource’ in a situation of global interdependence.Footnote 65 Contrary to a rather widespread thesis,Footnote 66 sovereignty as a juridical concept is not absolute (unique and above everything), despite the interpretation we might derive from a part of the early twentieth-century German legal doctrine. Neither is it an inconsistency for an international system to be founded both on limits put to the states' competences and on the formal assumption of the sovereign equality of states,Footnote 67 provided the states have consented to those limits by using their free (legal) will under factual constraints that they have to assess and put up with. Although it is quite possible that the argument of the limits on sovereignty might be manipulated to ‘rationalize a narrowing of political possibilities and diminished sense of human agency which pervades politics today’,Footnote 68 a legitimate concern shared by Simon Hix and several political liberals,Footnote 69 it does not follow that the two statements are identical. The first is legal and the second is sociopolitical, the proof being that Hix is a federalist who is rather hostile to the member states' sovereignty without pleading either for a EU modelled on a Westphalian state or a demise of politics in favour of the dogmas of global market.
It is true that the current debates about the transformations of ‘private’ international law and the extension of the lex mercatoria may lead to a demise of sovereignty, detrimental to social rights.Footnote 70 That highly technical debate opposes a liberal vision that makes the parties' autonomy a consequence of the public law, since their autonomy is conceded by the state or the agreement between states (according to the concept of the polity I have outlinedFootnote 71 ) to a neoliberal vision. That vision makes the parties' autonomy the fundamental rule facilitated by the actors' mobility and enables them to do their shopping among the member states' national economies and their legal systems as it is recognized by the ECJ in the Laval case and regulated by different rulings of the EU (‘Rome 1’ art. 3; ‘Brussels 1’, art. 23). More important, beyond and despite regulation, the most powerful private actors may treat national laws as commodities and use their mobility to appropriate the state regulations by exporting their activity's social cost,Footnote 72 thus creating a well-known situation of ‘moral hazard’.Footnote 73 Such a trend is resisted by the ECJ, which has refused to recognize the primacy of the judge chosen by one party to rule on the validity of a jurisdiction clause when a parallel procedure has been previously engaged (ECJ, December 2003, Gasser, C-116/02) and has referred to the ‘Community's public order’ to repeal arbitral sentences in matters of competition and consumption (ECJ, 2000, Eco Suisse, C-126/97; and 2006, Mostaza Claro, C-168/05). To make things a little clearer to non-lawyers, let us say that the ECJ, while bound to stimulate the legislative competition between member states (to the imperialists' satisfaction), expresses here a federal resistance to globalization and accordingly the expansion of private laws, a resistance ill-perceived in Britain (the same debate takes place about inheritance laws). In doing so the Court may help to avoid the downward spiral that would bring social norms into line with those least favourable to the workersFootnote 74 – a powerful argument for the federalists who hold that only a federal Europe can be a social Europe and resist the manipulations that result from globalization. Keohane's argument lends itself to such manipulations if interdependence is left to the unilateral interpretation of a particular state, or group of states, thus making any choice over whether a state should or not be bound by the EU's rules disappear from the landscape, replaced by the inescapable interdependence recalling Brezhnev's doctrine of limited sovereignty, and raising some international rules to the status of dogmas. The EU is at times accused of behaving as infamously in Eastern Europe as the Soviet Union did, with economic rules replacing Marxist political ideology.Footnote 75 There is a little truth in such bold judgements and we will show that it is permissible to see the acquis communautaire as a new dogma, something Zielonka will do his best both to vindicate and to prove that it is not infringing on the member states' autonomy. It remains that the states are still free not to apply for membership and that the EU does not need a Red Army. Actually, the debate is perhaps less about sovereignty (national or European) than about whether or not the European Social Charter should be a part of the European dogmas.
Last, I have to say something more than a passing comment about the problems regarding war and security, at least in their most extreme forms. Is European integration ‘a solution to war’?Footnote 76 This is a world that we have got used to seeing (rightly) as a world where the total number of wars is decreasing steadily. But we have conveniently forgotten that it is also a world where the most murderous war since the Second World War, involving 14 states and parties, ended only in 2002 out of sheer exhaustion after the loss of more than 4 million lives (the war in Congo), where ever-expanding nuclear proliferation is a permanent fact of life and brutal physical violence is considered a normal way to play politics in most parts of Caucasus, Asia and Africa (its consequence being the dominance of asymmetric warsFootnote 77 ). All things considered, Ferguson is right in his chapter mischievously entitled ‘ “Impire”: Europe Between Brussels and Byzantium’. Neither Hix nor Colomer and Zielonka will disagree. I suspect that Hix does not care. Zielonka has a whole chapter on ‘Governance Beyond Borders’, focused more on the ‘neo-medieval’ way of ensuring a peaceful coexistence and preventing or managing conflicts than on ‘hard cases’, and his conclusion is surprisingly cautious. Colomer has logically determined that the democratic rulers' self-interest makes them think twice before engaging in warfare, except in the interest of political survival (p. 39), an important Schmittian concession that simply poses the question one step further back: how are democratic rulers going to assess survival in the same way?Footnote 78 His conclusion is to take as a current expression of empirical reality (actually to advocate) an ‘idealistic realism’ through which ‘democratic rulers may pretend to make the great powers' interests coincide with the diffusion of the values of freedom and democracy across the world’, provided that they renounce the assumption that democracy requires nation state-building. According to Colomer, this is a mistaken assumption that ignores the fact that democracy can work in polities other than the state and that an imperial polity may save the states from building their own centralized bureaucracies, armies and border controls (p. 40, an interesting inference that Hayek also makes regarding ‘interstate federalism’). That leads him to a purely idealistic prescription for peace in the Arab world and the Middle East. The late Elie Kedourie (ignored by Colomer) used to say – not without seemingly good reasons – that nationalism had been the great disease passed from the Europeans on to the Arab world like an epidemic. However, is it enough to recommend the creation, through a revival of the 60-year-old Arab League, of a ‘union of democracies, in several cases organized as federations of smaller units’ (p. 41)? So easy! How can we have missed such a simple solution? However, the other prescriptions have not worked very well so far.
Let us go back down to earth, from logic to sociology: the EU as a whole holds no hard power and therefore has determined that it should be banned, this is what Jolyon Howorth calls its grand strategy. The EU has some capabilities it may be willing to use in a war on something, preferably poverty or violations of basic human rights rather than on terrorism. The latter has been discredited as a casus belli, and so making the war on it is something both useless and illegitimate (for international and domestic reasons of its own the USA itself seems to have abandoned the ‘war on terror’ idiom after August 2009). The alternative view is implicitly discarded: that a war on terrorism is as stupid an idea as a war on war, since terrorism is itself a kind of war – a specific strategy pursued by at least one of the protagonists. The reason is fairly obvious: the EU has no intention of waging a war on someone except as a possible indirect consequence of the soft-hard power that consists in proposing rewards and withdrawing them when the other party fails to behave as we hoped in response to our incentives. The current relationship with a proto-nuclear Iran, where democratic elections seem to have been rigged, give a serious headache to everyone, yet in Europe, Germany, Italy and France are at great pains to reach a common decision to act.
‘When there is no solution there is no problem’, the cynical saying goes. Accordingly, the EU has no official threatening enemy, only a ‘turbulent environment’ liable to cause shocks to be cushioned.Footnote 79 ‘No enemy, no war’. Yet the adage is not quite accurate in the European situation. The EU, by denying the existence of a problem, has found a solution to another – and, for some, more pressing – difficulty: war can no longer coexist with democracy. The mere possibility of war threatens democracy as soon as something that the rulers claim to be a crisis gives rise to a ‘culture of emergency’ blurring the boundary between foreign war and domestic crisis, thus favouring a concentration of power in the governments' hands and edging the other countervailing powers out of decision-making.Footnote 80 The solution to the American post-9/11 problem could be summed up in an empirical statement and a prescription: asymmetric wars kill democracy, so to keep democracy alive, do not wage this kind of war, and preferably no war at all. There is a far-reaching fringe benefit to such an intellectual posture: it eschews the dilemma gripping the people (scholars and politicians alike) caught in the different temporalities of politics and global problems. Global problems are very long-range problems and managing them forces one to take the long view and to put the interests of the whole world to the forefront, as if it was a single democratic polity of which all the members are increasingly dependent on one another and no member can claim a commanding place on top. Yet, politics takes its revenge when, confronted by a world-risk society, the same people tend to rely on their own community because their awareness of the short-term problems makes them discount the long-term ones, just as the rulers who are close to them are more amenable to their concerns than the distant members of a world government unless it is composed of philosopher-kings. Hence the return to an international view of the world as a system of polities and the recurring question, which should not be asked if one believed seriously in a single world community: which nation(s) will rule the world?Footnote 81 The European answer is that the pacifists will rule the world since only they can manage a system of polities without being leaders. They will act as if there was already some world polity in the making, of which the core identity consists in being, as Zaki Laïdi puts it, ‘risk averse’ in matters of war, environment and finance. The term ‘rule the world’ still sounds too authoritarian and hegemonial; the correct expression should be ‘they will possess the earth’, but that sounds a little too evangelical.
The EU is decisively a pacifist actor of a special kind. The usual pacifism means only the exhaustion of all the peaceful means to manage conflicts with enemies who are not of our own choosing; they choose us for good reasons of their own. Of course the enemies have the same opinion, the roles are simply reversed; even provocative and jeering North Korea may argue that it feels threatened by the nuclear umbrella supplied by the USA to Japan and South Korea. In the same way the noisy Libyan crowd had good reasons for greeting with cheers, in the towering presence of the president-for-life's son, one of the convicted killers of the Lockerbie bombing, compassionately released by the Scottish government in August 2009 after serving eight years in jail (perhaps for the sake of British realist interests hidden behind humanitarian medical reasons). The crux of the matter is that, very often, a polity has enemies not because of what it does but of what it is; what it does is perceived through a lens of its past actions – there is some hidden truth in the much-derided notion of ennemi héréditaire. For example, many European states may be resented as ‘powers of an unjust status quo’, guilty of aggression against the peoples of the Middle East (among others) and of covert complicity with American actions in Iraq, as documented and denounced by the report of the Swiss senator Marty to the Council of Europe. The European pacifism goes one step further by determining that, since Europe is nobody's enemy, Europe has no enemy (except the ‘enemies of humankind’), only unwise neighbours who have not yet understood their interest in recognizing that they could be friends. Therefore the best way to avoid war is not only to stay neutral (as the European neutralists claimed to no avail at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s) but also to deny war's existential possibility and to denounce all the linguistic constructions leading to an acceptance of war as a fact of (current) life. Actually, as such a position is indefensible as a political position, in many cases the decisions are made by the states, within the UN or NATO (noticeably in Afghanistan where a 30-year war is under way, with in addition more than a touch of the Vietnam War), or on their own. Thus the member states go into action regardless of the convoluted provisions of the Title V, Article J.4 of the Amsterdam Treaty of 1992, which should be compared to the crystal-clear stillborn EDC Treaty of 1953 that mentions in its Preamble a ‘supra-national European Organization’. Different states have different foreign policies, going from an Irish quasi-neutralityFootnote 82 to British or Polish commitments; Great Britain has been at war in various theatres since 1939, despite Orwell's remark on ‘the English hatred for war and militarism’– not such an English peculiarity nowadays in Europe, where the states have to cope with resistance from public opinion and scarce military resources. Even in international trade it is not certain that this supra-national Europe actually exists, since the EU's successful role in multilateral trade negotiations (predicted by Patrick Messerlin and documented by Sophie MeunierFootnote 83 ) does not prevent the member states from competing harshly for the conquest of foreign markets and treating commercial balances as part of high-power politics related to the security of territorial peoples with little mobility. A fortiori the EU's ‘common “security strategy” is not a security strategy’.Footnote 84
The agency that deals with cooperative armament procurement (Organisation Conjointe de Coopération en matière d'Armement, OCCAR) was founded by Germany and France, joined later by other countries, and based on the dogma of more market-oriented and cost-effective procurement in a context of decreasing military budgets. Admittedly, the existence of OCCAR may lead, together with the creation of the European Defence Agency (EDA), to a shift from a common European preference in matters of procurement to a preference in matters of military goals through the ‘military capability debate’.Footnote 85 However, for the time being, the shift from a military policy dealing with ways and means to a defence policy dealing with goals is far from being achieved, so the EU looks to be constructing a tool without knowing exactly when and how to use it, and why it is doing so. One may wonder if the impressive European diplomatic service with a big budget described in detail by the new Lisbon Treaty (one has carefully avoided calling it a ‘foreign office’; it is ‘the external-action service’) will not follow the same path, all the more so as the powerful high representative sitting at the top who is to head foreign operations of both the Commission and the CouncilFootnote 86 needs to coexist with the permanent president whose role is barely outlined by the treaty. That suffices to make the thesis of a kind of G2 made up of America and the EU, enjoying both legitimacy and power, look rather fanciful unless we go back 35 years to the Cold War and revive François Duchêne's notion of Europe as a ‘great civilian Power’ in a division of labour with the USA as a great military power,Footnote 87 or we adopt Ferguson's thesis that Europe could, and should, have acted ‘as a peacekeeper that follows in the wake of the peace-maker’. I would venture that the idea was floating about in many Europeans rulers' minds until 2003 despite some states' uneasy feelings about NATO, and it may still be alive in 2010 under the new Obama administration, especially with respect to Palestine and Afghanistan. More sober observers may conjecture a likelier G2 made up of the USA and China if the biggest debtor and its biggest creditor settle their differences.
The key issue is the question of ‘multilateralism’, which has never been suitably defined since John Ruggie proposed its formula more than 15 years ago. He defined it as a certain form of international relations that coordinates behaviour between three or more parties on the basis of certain general principles of conduct, regardless of exceptional circumstances when the parties' particular interests and strategic demands may be considered.Footnote 88 I guess that this vision of international relations is shared by highly responsible, and provisionally retired, European statesmen (say, Joshka Fischer or Chris Patten). At the European level, whatever the domain concerned (domestic European politics or international policy), multilateralism is the only game in town, at least as a rhetoric often conflating multilateralism and multipolarity, two notions that should be carefully distinguished (multipolarity implies a ‘balance of power’, a division of the world between powers that may even be enemies, whereas multilateralism implies that a whole has different sides). The problem is, as John Ruggie noticed, that ‘the adjective multilateral modifies the noun institution yet it should not be (con)fused with any one particular institutional expression of it’. A mindset, however vague, is more reliable than a formal organization, yet both need each other.
For this very reason, I do not intend to oppose a constitutional model, federation, to a pragmatic-dogmatic (sorry for the apparent contradiction in adjecto, soon to be clarified) model, empire. The nagging and vexing quarrel opposing a constitution to a treaty has no logical foundation as soon as we reconcile ourselves to the evidence that most of the European nation states with their own constitutions, languages and particular political structures and processes, are here to stay (which leaves the ‘foundational constituent power’–pouvoir constituant originaire– dear to Sieyès, Carré de Malberg and Carl Schmitt perhaps redundant). The current EU, despite its power to regulate interstate commerce, is still closer to the American Articles of Confederation preceding the circulation of The Federalist's Papers and the holding of the Philadelphia Convention than to the text later issued from the Convention. ‘Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence and every power, jurisdiction and right which is not by the Confederation expressly delegated to the United States in Congress assembled.’ Moreover, in Europe nationalisms are no longer running the show, but they are still well and alive as ‘banal nationalisms’ of cultural-political entities (nationalism in Gellner's and Deutsch's sense as the story of a community of communications encompassing within the same territorial boundaries one economy, one culture and one polity, a story perhaps declining in Belgium and Spain, still unfinished in Balkan and Eastern Europe and under a destructive attack everywhere in the economic domain) rather than as a nationalist ideology (nationalism in Isaiah Berlin's sense, ‘my nation, right or wrong, above and against the others, be they other nations or an international organization of some sort’, and more, ‘my nation should rule the world’).Footnote 89 The recent emphasis put on a mysterious economic patriotism bears witness to the resilience of the first type of nationalism, also illustrated by ‘artistic nationalism’ such as Greece's obstinate efforts to reclaim the Parthenon Marbles, which, incidentally, would have been lost for ever had not Lord Elgin stolen them.
Last, a European people can, and should, coexist with European peoples. The Kelsen-Schmitt model that stipulates that a ‘constitution makes a people’ has no relevance in such a situation (during the constitutional debates, the American lawyer J. H. H. Weiler made the point forcefully and put forward the sophisticated concept of mutual ‘constitutional tolerance’).Footnote 90 Besides, Olivier Beaud has noticed that history is replete with treaties that end up as constitutions. After all, the Constitutio Westphalica predated the idea of constitution as we know it,Footnote 91 and Britain does have a written constitution, interpreted by the courts (and now a constitutional court), but it is not written all in one place; and among its various pieces there are even European texts that the courts are required to consider in order to assess whether British laws violate their provisions (the European Convention on Human Rights is a case in point and it does not emanate from the EU).Footnote 92 Finally, the books reviewed here may take the same position across the dividing line: Zielonka is against a constitution but Hix is not a supporter of the document either since he holds the astounding view (to be explained later) that the main issue on the EU agenda is no longer ‘how to construct the basic political and economic architecture of a continent-scale polity’, the problem having been solved to the satisfaction of all countries and mainstream political groups. Thus the policy agenda ‘has shifted from polity-building to what economic and social policies should be pursued’ (p. 89).
INTRODUCING THE TWO NARRATIVES
Past and Present
As the federal story has been dominant until recently,Footnote 93 I will be relatively brief here. Let us forget for a while the losers of the seventeenth (J. Althusius) and nineteenth (P. J. Proudhon, Max von Seydel) centuries, together with Count Coudenhove-Kalergie and even the Déclaration Schuman of 1950 – not mentioned by any of the books reviewed here). In 1854, Giuseppe Mazzini was invited with Giuseppe Garibaldi to a dinner organized by the American ambassador in London, James Buchanan – soon to be one of the worst presidents of the USA – for the celebration of George Washington's birthday. ‘At Mazzini's request, other leading revolutionaries were present: Kossuth (Hungary), Worcell (Poland), Ruge (Germany), Herzen (Russia) and Ledru-Rollin (France). Together they toasted the alliance between America and “the future federation of free European peoples”…The initiative had no real consequences…but it created expectations.’Footnote 94 Before three wars that set France against Prussia, later Germany, and two world wars, the idea of a cosmopolitan federation modelled on the USA (of that time) was launched by men wanted in their own countries, and those men were not only revolutionaries but also nationalists! At about the same time, Victor Hugo was uttering his famous prophecy: ‘There will be the United States of Europe!’, prompting one of his colleagues at the House to exclaim ‘Indeed, Mr Victor Hugo is mad!’ This story, coming from another historical world, conjures up bizarre feelings today, not devoid of current relevance. All those members of Young Europe set up by Mazzini, bringing together his own Young Italy and copycat organizations, Young Poland, Young Germany, Young France, Young Austria, Young Switzerland, were not only opposed to the second restoration of Metternich's European order shaken by the revolutions of 1848, they were also distrustful of the capture of the new revolutionary moment by the French organizations haloed by the dual prestige of the great Revolution and the Napoleonic legend.Footnote 95 In a minor key they were also critical of the liberal economic order illustrated not much later by the Cobden–Chevalier treaty concluded by liberal Great Britain and imperial France. To be sure, as far as the social question was concerned, the Communist Manifesto was about to steal the show, although the Socialist Internationale had to wait half a century to emerge.
The story was first and foremost the (not so) oxymoronic story of a universalist federation of nationalists,Footnote 96 keener on self-government than state control (the nuance is capital) that is typically a pre-Marxist and post-Wesphalian narrative. Today it could be José Bové's story in France, or many anti-capitalist parties' story anywhere, from the GUE/NGL to a significant number of socialists, not to forget the greens who would be willing to accept the Soviet amendment of a ‘federalism with national form and social content’, had it been really implemented.Footnote 97 Even Josep Colomer would accept it, provided the nation should not be a nation state and the rule of individual free choice would be beyond question. But another story, much older and pre-Westphalian, was flowing underground: the imperial story, dead today – or so Zielonka, Colomer and a host of intellectuals believe, as the story of colonial Europe and of Christian Europe (the final blow was dealt by the members of the European Parliament, including the members of the EPP, when Commissioner Buttiglione was ousted and the issue of the ‘Christian origins of Europe’ dismissed) – but well and alive under a new guise: the (neo)-medieval story.Footnote 98 Its historical and political convolutions deserve a lengthier presentation.
Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, preceded by Montesquieu's questions, is the elaborate story produced in a system of Westphalian states that emerged fully through a long process in medieval times.Footnote 99 The religious basis of this system was strongly opposed by Pope Innocent X in a rearguard battle when the treaties were signed in 1648–59 but they succeeded in accommodating the intractable problems brought about by the wars of religion (with for the first time the growth of Protestant kingdoms that led to the territorialization of religion) and exacerbated by the Thirty Years War. At the beginning this conflict saw a Catholic emperor opposing the rebellious Protestant Bohemians, but it progressively involved new actors, sometimes engaged in unexpected alliances when religious, princely, national and imperial interests were so intertwined that the current peacelike European, and warlike Middle Eastern, politics look almost clear in comparison.Footnote 100 Yet, the much longer-standing story had been for a millennium the story of Translatio Imperii favoured by the neighbouring presence of Byzantium and of Islam, perceived as ‘the significant Other’.Footnote 101 This imperial tradition was inveterate even during the Dark Ages of the fourth to tenth centuries. Even though Roman law waned, it was taken as a model by Theodoric and his enemy Clovis in the sixth centuryFootnote 102 and codified a little later in Byzantium by Justinian, who reconstituted the whole empire for a short while. The later conflict between papacy and empire, was part and parcel of the same worldview, as Carl Schmitt has made clear. This was the view (meaning here both a description and a ‘well-grounded illusion’) of a world of diverse cultures, ethnic groups, cities and principalities supposedly unified under the same civilizational symbols of a moral-political order phrased in a religious language where Christianity had replaced the mere primacy of the emperor's religion over other religions accepted as parts of a religious ‘pluriverse’. In this respect it is mistaken and anachronistic to deem the Holy Roman Empire ‘secular’, as Zielonka does (p. 157): the Church was ecclesiastical but the empire was not secular.Footnote 103 Translatio Imperii was a way to cope with the stunning movement of political time whose Augustine was the prominent witness, by imagining a political space as both the heir of a past space and the image of a future space.Footnote 104
The problem with the imperial narrative today is that it conjures up two ideas at once: a conquering and autocratic centre submitting other peoples (the ‘empire by command and control’, authoritarian at its centre and imperialist at its peripheryFootnote 105 ), and a commonwealth of peoples unified by a common allegiance to a civilizational order recognized as supra-political and thus taking certain political choices out of the realm of politics while integrating and promoting to the highest positions people coming from the peripheries and the lower ethnic groups.Footnote 106 Even though a centre may be clearly separated from its periphery, having its own armed forces and/or its own source of legitimacy, that does not preclude it being accessible to peripheral elites and exhibiting a modicum of tolerance towards the cultures of the peoples it controls.Footnote 107 The consequence is that no autonomous civil (that is, in Hobbesian terms, ‘political’) society common to the Empire as a whole can emerge except at its core.Footnote 108 Beyond the scholarly and erudite methodological refinements of the concept of empire,Footnote 109 the core assumptions at the basis of those conceptualizations should be in my view related to two unexpected concepts; charisma and ‘social polity’.
To put it simply, charisma – be it ‘extraordinary and transformational’ or ‘routinized and consolidated’, personal or institutional – refers to a ‘descending legitimacy’, an ordo rerum, an ‘order of things’ whose value cannot be changed by the citizens' and politicians' choices. It can only be implemented and interpreted because it expresses a deep connection between the values governing politics and the rules governing social, personal and above all natural life, whether they are religious, scientific or simply moral.Footnote 110 It may even be claimed that although charisma trumps the other Weberian types of legitimacy (this is the main reason for its use for explaining social change), yet – and this is not a contradiction – legal rational legitimacy may exhibit a charismatic feature when it is distorted to become a ‘legal-rational myth’,Footnote 111 the ‘religion of law’, or more likely of rights, and the ‘religion of the market’, taking precedence over any other, and equally reasonable, values, and divorcing rights and law from justice and order. The core point is that only a new charisma may bring about social change, the process of ‘ordinary’ politics being powerless and even dangerous if it aims to create a new social order by legislation instead of following the old ways of the law (after all, Hayek's catallaxy is nothing other than both the conservative and innovative ways of submitting to the impersonal charisma of the cosmos-taxis combination that is embodied in Hume's laws of justice). Therefore, Popper's ‘piecemeal change’ will be achieved much more efficiently through non-political agencies and bureaucratic and judiciary activities than through the ambitious, noisy and often cheap talk of the political debates typical of domestic processes. This is where the social polity comes in.Footnote 112
A social polity is a polity where the organization and language do not clearly differentiate de jure concrete empirical politics from other domains of social life. The opposite, a political society, is endowed with a highly differentiated machinery and a specific language making up the champ politique, known as such (‘politics’) and not merely practised under another name.Footnote 113 In a democratic political society, it is permitted to consider the society itself as the ultimate source of power and legitimacy, as the nation was to Siéyès (it is unnecessary to stress the complete difference between the two words, yet as founts of legitimacy they are equivalent). This is what struck Tocqueville (‘society acts by itself on itself’) and how Madison seemed to understand it, which led him to the conclusion that for the majority not to be unjustly oppressive under the veil of society, it had to be divided into ‘so many descriptions of citizens as will render any combination of a majority on the whole very improbable, if not impracticable’.Footnote 114 But such a justification presupposes the existence of a political society; it would not even be thinkable in a social polity where there is no champ politique to be legitimized by a democratic device. A social polity does not need democracy as a political system. More precisely, the democratic language is alien to the very idea of social polity, what the Islamist intellectuals well know when they hold democracy to be contradictory to the Ummah, a Muslim social polity (self-)governed by the respect of a god-given law. To be a little more explicit, the democratic language is not banned out of an authoritarian contempt for the people (as usual, such a contempt may be lurking behind the discourse), but as an example of any kind of political legislative language that would contest the primacy of the jurisdictional language. Admittedly, any polity needs a set of overarching beliefs maintained above conflictual dissensus to constitute the ‘cement of society’ and all the more so if it is a free society. To quote Tocqueville again: ‘I tend to think that if a people wants to be free, he must believe, and if he does not, he must serve’; compare this with John Stuart Mill's chapter ‘On Nationality’ in his Representative Government. Yet it still makes a big difference whether we consider these supra-political norms as emerging from the agents' conscious political consent to their public culture so that they become their authors and may modify them (that is what The Federalist meant and what struck Tocqueville) or if we see them as expressing an ordo rerum. This is precisely what Rawls meant when he stated that his theory of justice was ‘political, not metaphysical’.
Are we light years away from the current European Union? When José Manuel Barroso maintains that ‘there is no politics at the Commission’ to the amazement of Simon Hix, he is not so foolish, or canting, as he looks: he knows full well that real politics is one of the main games real actors play, even in Brussels (this former professor of international relations was for a time the Portuguese prime minister), nor does he revive the old Gaullist image of the Commission as a ‘technocratic Areopagus’. He only means that the policy choices made at Brussels cannot be phrased in the language of political choices, any more than can the political choices made by the ECBFootnote 115 or by the 35 or so agencies operating throughout Europe. He may say so to placate the members of the Council who are always concerned about the Commission's initiatives, but here the argument is more interesting than the motives behind it: what he puts forward is the (intended or unintended) outcome of definite political choices (fully conscious or incremental), an outcome that in turn becomes one of the main inputs governing the European political game. The members of the European Council who in June 2009 endorsed grudgingly but unanimously his candidature to a second term may chide him for not being inspirational enough and for trying to please everyone, but they know that a new Jacques Delors would not be eligible today. Actually they are chiding their own hypocrisy, transferring their guilt onto Mr Barroso and keeping intact their proclaimed commitment to a truly political Europe, which is in reality ruled out by the logic of its rationale.
The European Parliament (EP) might be considered the only place where people use the language of politics in a European polity, yet we should note that that language is not at all similar to the language of national parliaments. Here lies the huge difference in the institutions, much more than in the voters' low turn-out, since abstention has not the same meaning according to the ties binding the representatives to their constituencies and the type of political language used. The EP's language is less confrontational, as befits a parliament that is more ‘working’ than ‘talking’. When it happens to talk (seldom about great European questionsFootnote 116 ) its language – distinct from its practice – is more driven by axiological rationality (stating principles regardless of the consequences) than by instrumental rationality (reserved to the working feature). Although I must confess that I find the working language, for all its jargonish technicalities, refreshing and soothing compared to the constant nastiness and aggressiveness of the national political languages, I also have to admit that the talking language makes the parliament at times look more like a giant NGO matching up big words with small deedsFootnote 117 than the policy-making body it is. Curiously yet logically enough, the more it expresses symbolic values (the great utterances, usually the preserve of exceptional and constituent moments), the less it is granted a symbolic institutional value of its own. Rozenberg thinks that the EU's low capabilities as an identity builder may be one of the main reasons for the growing abstention rate. Secondarily, the more it is efficient in the policy process and perceived as such,Footnote 118 the less the citizens are interested in its working.
The real problem is not the ‘Orleanism’ of the European public space, noted by Paul Magnette and modelled on the practices of the French monarchie de juillet (1830–48)Footnote 119 – its restriction to the concerned interest and public action groups – although that may be questioned, ‘comitology’ being more a fixture of the Commission and hence detrimental to the Parliament.Footnote 120 Olivier Rozenberg may be quite right in noting that the EP's participation in the policy-making does not contribute to de-Orleanize the European public space but only to diversify it.Footnote 121 However, this is not the most important point: Magnette's and Rozenberg's conclusions are exactly the same as Maurizio Cotta's at the end of a massive study of national representatives in 11 European countries over 150 years.Footnote 122 Orleanism holds true everywhere, yet the other differences with national parliaments still exist, as the shortcomings of democracy at the national level cannot hide the deficiencies of the EU. The first is the absence of elites of a European citizenry, only the elites of national citizenries are included in the Orleanist picture; admittedly they are also European but it is a different matter to be really a member of a real collective from just having the status of membership of a legal formal one. Second is the fact, also noticed by Rozenberg and others, that the EP's effective participation in policy-making is stimulated by its electoral support's weakness, which may be a blessing in disguise as we will show in the next section, but is still a paradox to the democratic theorists who do not have a go at democratic elitism. Likewise it may well be that the Parliament's ability to come to reasonable compromises for the common good and the absence of pork-barrel politics (concentrated benefits and diffuse costs)Footnote 123 are precisely due to its insulation from democratic pressures. As we will see in the last section when dealing with the ‘second-order’ theory of the European elections, the voters think it is rational to ignore the topic of European integration in those elections because of the domestic political supply offered by the parties in their electoral campaigns,Footnote 124 a beneficial effect that gives a headache to democratic federalists.
Even within the various and highly political Councils of Ministers, where the built-in tendency of sectoral ministers to cooperate even against their own government is matched by the equally built-in tendency of the heads of states to fight harshly when their countries' national interests are at stake, the vote by unanimous decision, despite the supra-national or federal rule of a super-majority, far from bringing evidence of the immovable resilience of sovereignties, only shows the common determination apparently to take the only possible decision, a non-political one. In the language of international relations, it is a decision by ‘consensus and no-objection’. Indeed, the members do their best to hide the fact that some decisions are majoritarian (as an open political choice should be) and to present a façade of unanimity so the losers do not appear as a minority of losers. This avoids the losers paying too heavy a price in front of their national constituencies that are their main interest, since they are not concerned about a European constituency to whom they barely talk, even when addressing the Parliament (‘Government ministers and national party leaders will not want to reveal publicly that they lose any key battle’, as Simon Hix puts it, p. 89). So they resort to the classical politics of blame avoidance by feigning not to be defeated whereas in other matters, where the Commission is more involved, the same strategy incites the national governments to put the blame on Brussels, or to criticize the heavy-handed policy of the yellow cards (which are not without relation to the clerical power to brandish the threat of excommunication or to grant indulgences). All that comes at a price: under the false pretence of a clear opposition between unanimity (intergovernmentalism) and majority (the community method) there is the sheer reality of bilateralism, cosmetic concessions to rally the losers, double talk, delayed registration of votes before they are made public; in brief there is a trade-off between transparency and efficiency.Footnote 125 Once again, those practices are not alien to national parliaments, where under-politicization may happen alongside over-politicization,Footnote 126 but the little difference lies in the simple fact that the members of those national bodies are answerable to their constituencies as members of a ruling coalition or of the opposition, however loose and shifting they might be. That is not quite the case in the European Parliament and not at all in the Council, which were designed to avoid that such a situation (that actually does exist) be laid bare. Some difference indeed. In any case, the formula at the root of the strategies of depoliticization is simply: ‘the emperor is always good under his clothes, only his bureaucracy should be criticized and constrained to appear as it really is, naked’ (of course, the bureaucracy does its best to stay conveniently clothed).
To eschew such a disenchanted image some bold political scientists move up the ladder of abstraction and view those processes as parts of a more all-encompassing process, the ‘directly deliberative polyarchy’, identified in the first part of this article with a mode of governance virtually fit for all political units throughout the world. Or they insist on devising and christening specific goals and processes that we have listed in the first part of this article. The game is not frivolous,Footnote 127 yet it leads to a dead end since it does not help us to understand the overall logic of the European regime unless we raise a surrealist theoretical question: is the EU an international organization, a domestic polity or an experiment in new governance?Footnote 128 The question itself is a mere revival of the old sui generis fallacy under new clothes, due to the dominance of policy analysis in European studies and the great wave of new public management. In the way that it is expounded it reminds us of the elephant question: is it a flock of sheep, a wolf or a new set of teeth? Staying away from those theoretical generalizations, I tend to see the new modes of governance as examples of imperial government or, perhaps more accurately, clerical government, to capture the idea of a would-be polity where politics would be everywhere, provided it is not considered as a specific domain, in other words a social polity. In the EU, it takes an additional turn: its members do not want to recognize, to Simon Hix's sorrow, that, inside, in European politics, the EU always make political – non-consensual – choices, but they should not be recognized as such. On the other hand they may advocate in other circumstances the idea of a political Europe in world politics and in some matters, such as social policy or the management of the economic downturn, some members or some groups may lament the lack of a common European policy (true, when there is one, like the Common Agricultural Policy, it is vilified by other members and other groups). Yet, even in world politics, nowadays global politics, the clerical image is casting its spell in respect of human rights and climate change (witness the recent call by Daniel Cohn-Bendit for a unanimous position by all the – French – political parties on the eve of the December 2009 Copenhagen meeting) where it meets its old enemy, political realism.Footnote 129
Paradoxes of the Imperial-Clerical Narrative: International and Domestic Empires
The main paradox of the imperial-clerical image is not so much that one wonders why the powers of the European Parliament are growing under such circumstances. Zielonka does not think that institution fits within his framework, it is here just as a minor speck of dirt on his neat picture (we will return to that later). We might note that in the ultimately failed Bismarckian Reich the Bundesrat (the Chamber of States) steadily gained more powers to the detriment of the Reichstag, but although the comparison could vindicate Zielonka as the Bundesrat was a tool against the parliamentarization of the empire, it would embarrass him since the Reich was organized under Prussian hegemony, and the bureaucratic monarchic structure invaded it to the very detriment of the Bundesrat itself.Footnote 130 That is precisely the situation that Zielonka thinks impossible and unwanted in the European Union, no more than a Weimarian evolution. The main paradox is not even that; in international relations a sizeable number of Wesphalian states – Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands – were the centres of new colonial empires of great magnitude, ‘the Age of [colonial] Empires’ being declared history.Footnote 131 Despite his introduction, ambitiously entitled ‘The Neo-Medieval Paradigm’, and the tables that illustrate it, Zielonka is not that interested in the subtleties and intricacies of theory-building and professional history, whether it is the history of economics, techniques, institutions, ideas or cultures. When he ventures into those domains he jumps to weird conclusions. For example, in an endnote he gladly espouses Charles Maier's (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) suggestion that ‘the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem and Acre with their “condominized periphery” comes closest to [his] imperial notion of the EU’ (p. 198, note 50), which is not likely to make his ideal type so enticing to all the Arabs and Muslims invited to join it. Elsewhere, he makes a bold and unwarranted attempt at regrouping Britain, Russia and the USA, among others, under the rubric of ‘Westphalian empires, that is Westphalian centralized states turned empires through military conquests, territorial annexations or international economic exploitation’.Footnote 132
Let us ignore for the moment the highly dubious contention that the USA was, from the Philadelphia Convention onwards, a Westphalian centralized stateFootnote 133 that may have not existed until the three great turning points represented by the civil war and the two Roosevelt eras. This contention disregards the setting from the very beginning: of federal armed forces including an army waging an ambitious war in 1812, of a navy pursuing the pirates in the Indian Ocean, all claims vindicated by the Supreme Court's Schooner Exchange ruling of the same year, 1812, that asserted the international sovereignty of the federal state over the claims of the member states (in this case, Pennsylvania) to determine the nationality of a ship. Admittedly, there may be more than a kernel of truth in the idea of a ‘nation by design’ made up by the laws and measures of the federal state and its member states caught between the original ‘nativist’ view of an ‘Anglo-American nation’ and the ‘capitalist’ view of a ‘nation of immigrants’ (the early Tocqueville praised the first and loathed the second in 1835). We have also to make allowance for Tocqueville's little-quoted late remarks in the 1850s that America's sense of ‘exaggerated pride in its strength’ was promoting military adventurism.Footnote 134 Likewise, we should recall the compound legacy of the so-called ‘Age of Jackson’, with Jackson's threat of military action to enforce federal law nullified by North Carolina, his policy of Indian removal east of the Mississippi (a typical Westphalian move), the expansion of postal communications thanks to federal policies that multiplied small-town post offices and subsidized printed matter with low postage rates – in the process facilitating the development of nationwide mass political parties and transforming the patrician republic of the founders into a mass democracy (but, if V. O. Key is right, a national public opinion appeared only with the New Deal) – and even with his refusal to set up a national bank that would have jeopardized the president's powers.Footnote 135 However, we are still bound to emphasize the obvious: Zielonka fails to make the necessary distinctions between empires by design and empires by accident, in Desmond King's apposite terms.Footnote 136 It is a distinction between territorial empires, be they continental or overseas,Footnote 137 including the USA during the conquest of the West (John Pocock has aptly noted this early tendency of the young American republicFootnote 138 ) and ‘empires without a (territorial) conquest’– the USA after 1918 – whose core values may not be imperialist, which King has rightly emphasized and even Eric Hobsbawm has admitted. The territorial empires, even when they pretend to spread universal values (‘la mission sacrée de civilisation’ or ‘the radiant future of communism’), rely always on invasion, command and submission, in accordance with the pattern of ancient empires, minus the munificence displayed by the ruler to his loyal subjects (although it was sometimes claimed by the modern empires as a means of self-legitimization).Footnote 139
For want of making this crucial distinction and sorting out the non-territorial type of modern empires, Zielonka is straddling a perilous divide. If the EU – whose values are, in his (questionable) opinion, not that different from the American ones – were a part of a new kind of empire, not as nice as his own ideal type and closer to the famous Hardt–Negri thesis, a world domination of a universal republic, a network of powers and counter-powers structured by an unlimited and inclusive architecture, and if the USA was just the most visible part of the systemFootnote 140 but not its territorial centre, then the new system would be a decentred and deterritorializing apparatus of rules that progressively incorporated the entire global world within its open, expanding frontiers. The story told by Zielonka should at the very least be modified this way: while the USA was not yet a fully fledged Westphalian state it achieved an imperial territorial conquest and became both a continental empire by design and a Westphalian state, with the latter gradually superseding the former. In a second phase it became a non-territorial empire by accident because of its growing economic and military supremacy. Following Carl Schmitt's division between the powers of the earth and the powers of the sea, today extended to the air and outer space but yet not cyberspace, the USA holds what Barry Posen calls ‘the control of the Commons’.Footnote 141 It is still, perhaps only for a short time now (at a very superficial level the gentle, clever and popular President Obama holds no more sway than the nasty, clumsy and despised President George W. Bush), a hegemonial empire brandishing universalistic values, not fully legitimate yet invited to intervene, and thus liable to develop the hubris of the old ‘mission sacrée de civilisation’ under a wholly new guise.Footnote 142
Hence the dangerous question arises of whether we should not consider the EU as a post-hegemonial empire faute de mieux, lacking military power, yet with the secret desire to impose on the rest of the world its own weltanschung through the wise use of its economic and technological clout – in sum the continuation of imperialism by other means.Footnote 143 It proclaims the value of diversity but the would-be diversity is part of a ‘meta-unity’ based on the conviction that if so many countries are invited to join the empire and to take part in its civilization it is because its underlying values are also theirs, even though they do not yet know it.Footnote 144 The Muslim maxim has it, ‘every human being was born a Muslim, whether or not she knows it; all she has to do is to freely acknowledge it’. Similarly, ‘every human being was born a democrat and a free economic agent’ and it is up to her free choice to decide to join the Church or the Ummah and to follow her own genius to make the best use of the recipes offered by the Union, which, in return, will not issue direct orders but evaluate the results and pass judgement on the ‘orthodoxy’ of the new converts.
To escape from the trap, Zielonka needs to prove that the EU has a strong but not territorial centre (not a place but a stratum, as Magali Gravier puts it) to which the periphery accedes gradually by becoming a set of places where economic development occurs through the market and the competition between regions.Footnote 145 It is understood that the territorial units (not always nation states) are preserved – a pressing concern for Colomer, who maintains that Spain is a failed nation state. There is more at stake: what does really matter in Zielonka's view is providing a convincing descriptive and prescriptive picture of the current EU polity as a polity based on a legitimate normative order located above politics, a manifest destiny devoid of any relation to military, economic or cultural adventures in authoritarian expansion. The new empire's identity is not genealogical, mired in the past's dubious ruts, it is teleological, decidedly moving towards an entirely new world. In accordance with its own brand of pacifism that we have defined above, the EU declares peace to all the peoples of good will, it is nobody's enemy and accordingly nobody is, or should be, its enemy. Its constant effort will be to transform the neighbour, this ill-known and thus threatening alien, into a potentially domestic partner, familiar to the anthropologists, a partner with whom the EU will share the full security of a normative regulation.Footnote 146 Zielonka goes even further and does not miss the opportunity of joining the choir of Huntington-bashers by citing the East European studies that show the overlapping of civilizational borders between Islam, Catholicism and Orthodoxy.Footnote 147 He could have added that pre-Westphalian Europe was, like Islam, relatively more tolerant in religious matters than the conventional Westphalian Europe.Footnote 148 He could have pleaded for a new political language freed from the Hobbesian presuppositions and emerging beyond the distinction of the Self and the Other, the Inside and the OutsideFootnote 149 – a combination of medievalism and postmodernism that would suit his thesis – were it not for his equally strong plea for the national economic and social preferences in his chapter on ‘Economic Governance’.
A note of caution is in order here. In the depths of a polity, within specific sectors or at its civilizational borders, there may be strong ties woven by commerce – trade and cultural cross-fertilization – so vindicating the modish notion of multiple identities and the thesis of the heterogeneity of in-groups and out-groups, leading to ‘the deconstruction of stereotypes and the recognition of the fluidity of identities’.Footnote 150 Michel Eyquem de Montaigne is a minor example: this enemy of holistic certitudes was the son of a Catholic father and a Spanish Jewish mother whose family had long been converted to Catholicism, his main spoken and written language was Latin until he was six (his tutor spoke no French), and when the schism of the Reformation came, he, his parents, two brothers and a sister remained Catholic while one brother and two sisters became Protestant. These sensible empirical descriptions are not unexpected since there are in the modern world very few purely homogeneous societies. Such societies are always more the (too often harmful) dream of ideologists feeding on widespread popular (and populist) prejudices than a true picture of empirical reality. The problem is that it is a feature of modern polities to aggregate the variegated identities into a dominant ‘We’ supposed to transcend them. We cannot afford to overlook what James Bowen calls scornfully ‘the big political dramas’ engineered by the politicians and echoed by the media since they are part and parcel of the endless debate about the nature of the ‘We’. To ignore them is to betray a hidden political agenda. Besides, the stories of conviviencia should be complemented with no less sensible descriptions stressing the enduring influence of those local identities on their very members whose identities are deemed fluid, from the baroque Catholics Ladinis of South Tyrol to the Sepharadic Jewish Ladinos of Slovakia, not to mention the better-known Roms or a part of the ‘Muslims’ who do their best to resist the move to fluidity, powerfully helped as they are by the various stigmatizations they have to put up with. Put together, they do not suffice to destroy Huntington's thesis (which is questionable only as far as the ‘clash’ looks inevitable between groupings of which the boundaries are ill-defined), to deny the existence of a genuine limes at the overall level and to engage in a far less sensible advocacy of a new postmodern image of a global and borderless, yet pluralist, world, with Europe as its dominant figure.
Whatever caveat we may enter against Zielonka's bold statements, he, as well as Colomer in his own way, indeed breathes new life into the first Roman concept of imperium around 100 BC,Footnote 151 as legitimate authority disconnected from any idea of a conquering or dominating power, a concept relayed several centuries later by the idea of empire as the immanent bearer of the Universal, ‘the ideal of a new age, the plural and universal gathering of the peoples under the same authority, just laws and within the same order of peace and prosperity, of happiness at a mytho-paleogenesic level’.Footnote 152 One cannot help being impressed by the affinity of this conception, still held in Dante's Monarchia, with the underlying rationale of Zielonka. I do not think he is in full command of the many historical cases (admittedly, that would require an impossible proficiency), which leads him to overlook, or downgrade, the truly important paradox.
The Paradox of a Post-Imperialist and Post-National Empire
The paradox lies in this: it is risky to apply the model of empire, worked out for either the ‘Axial Age’ or the ‘Age of [mostly colonial] Empires’ to either post-Axial or post-colonial times, with their vastly different economies, technologies and politics. The pre-Axial Age, as far as large units are concerned, was the age of god-kings who embodied both the cosmic and the earthly order. With the Axial Age new ontological visions emerged and were institutionalized, from 500 BC to the first centuries of the Christian era (and later on under Islam, where they are still alive). The conception included notions of a basic tension between the transcendental and mundane orders, articulated by elites that carried models of a cultural order centred on belief in the creation of the world according to some transcendental vision and command. Hence the clerical idea that the kings (the ‘Sword’ in Islamic parlance), although responsible for restructuring the political order, were accountable before a higher authority, be it God or divine law represented by the ‘Pen’.Footnote 153 Incidentally, yet most importantly, that proves that the baroque idea that the Sword and the Pen should be unified de facto and de jure in a single regime of government without any separation of powers between the princes and the clerks was never dominant in most of the religious social polities, except for a short while with the idea of ‘Césaro-papisme’; that includes the House of Islam, until the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s, after the suppression of the Muslim Caliphate by Ataturk. This model was thrown down as a political order, although it is still greatly relevant in the Muslim world. It partially subsisted almost everywhere as a moral order either god-made or man-made, but still marked by its location above politics (in the last case by a process of ‘self-transcendency’, as Luc Ferry puts it, to name the moral order of human rightsFootnote 154 ). This position justified Montesquieu's attempts to create a new political science founded on the relationship between power politics and moral character. For all their differences Rousseau and Tocqueville took their cue from Montesquieu in that matter.Footnote 155
The demise of the clerical-imperial model was revealed by the dual assault of republicanism illustrated by Machiavelli, and of the Westphalian order of sovereign states theorized by Bodin and Hobbes in Europe.Footnote 156 The kings were still crowned and anointed but Napoleon's coronation showed that the rot had set in since the desacralization of French monarchy had been under way for at least a century before the Revolution. If we set apart Joseph de Maistre's famous Du Pape, a fantastic denial issued 30 years after the Revolution (the Scottish Jacobite Andrew Ramsay's denial of the English Glorious Revolution of 1688 in the name of divine monarchy was already a rearguard battle in 1719–21Footnote 157 ), only Russia remained the towering exception since, as Tocqueville noted when he was the French foreign minister after 1848, the tsar still considered himself to be the guardian of the European religious order of the Sainte Alliance. Both the liberals and the Roman Catholics strongly disagreed with this, each pursuing their own dream, and in 1914 only Nicholas II still thought that he had a personal covenant with God. With the Hobbesian era, a social polity – as we have called it earlier in this article – was openly superseded by a political society, and modern politics emerged, to Leo Strauss's great dismay.Footnote 158 The so-called secularization was not this society's first and foremost feature, and religion did not become pluralist (actually it had always been more or less so). Neither did it lose its grip on public life to be replaced by the improbable ‘naked public space’: eighteenth-century liberal England and nineteenth-century post-revolutionary France were replete with heated religious–political debates. The core characteristic was a public sphere governed by the primacy of politics, free from any moral and legal constraint unless it had been consented to by the sovereign. Not that the sovereign was devoid of any morality, but his authority was, in Hobbes's parlance, jure divino, whereas the clerks' authority was only jure civili.Footnote 159 Hence, when sovereignty passed from the prince to the nation, the path led to democracy and secularization, all concepts alien to empire, which explains why the current imperialists are not much interested, to say the least, in the direct legal representation of individuals at the imperial level and are more interested – as we will show in the last part of this article – in other forms of ‘democratic’ representation. The representation of individuals is a constant concern of the democratic federalists, especially the republicans who share Skinner's conviction that liberty is today threatened by the arbitrary will of an omni-incompetent state.Footnote 160 We will see in the next part of this article that the imperialists retort that the EU is much less incompetent than the member states in truly important matters (an argument also put forth by Moravcsik, who is not an imperialist, given his agnosticism on the issue), and besides that an active involvement of different groups in the messy processes of power-sharing brings evidence of the republican flavour of the new empire (an astounding claim made by Zielonka). Is it possible to revive the imperial commonwealth in a non-theological framework? Would it not be like reviving the efficient natural conservationism of the Itza' Maya in Guatemala (a cooperative way to solve Garrett Hardin's ‘tragedy of the Commons’) without actually treating the forest resources ‘as intentional, relational entities, like friends or enemies’ and the ‘spirits of the forest’ as thinking beings endowed with supernatural powers of knowledge with whom the humans should stand in a relation of reciprocity?Footnote 161 Can James Lovelock really believe that science can re-enchant the earth when he speaks of Gaia?
The solution of the paradox of the revival of empire may follow two paths. First, if the coercive aspect of an empire is stressed, the solution is the denial of such a revival, reduced to a mere pun. This is how Zielonka is usually dismissed, and still more so Colomer, whose definition – however presented as covering all the historical cases – stresses the commonwealth aspect of empire (large size, no fixed boundaries, territorial diversity and multilevel jurisdictions, pp. 3–4) so exclusively that it looks obviously cut out to match the corresponding definition of the modern state. Thus Colomer's definition cannot claim to cover all the characters of most empires (his powerful retort is that he uses the term to define not a policy but a polity, thus only his definition is truly universal: all the empires are not imperialistic, nor should they be confounded with dictatorship, but he eschews the theological aspect of an empireFootnote 162 ). The second path is: if the commonwealth aspect is stressed, it entails the use of a post-sovereign lexicon, which should not be confused with a postmodern one. Zielonka makes a perfunctory and awkward attempt at using a postmodern rhetoric, mostly ignored by the more prudent Colomer since this rhetoric cannot fit into his framework of a rational imperial economic order combined with the self-government of small and homogeneous units (two features the postmodernists hate). According to the post-sovereign rhetoric, the transcendental order is replaced by a rational-natural (in Hayek's acceptation, at once cosmos and taxis) economic and liberal order, claimed to be universally valid whatever the variegated cultures it is embedded in.Footnote 163 Therefore, the clerical-imperial model is confronted with democracy whose achievement, often merely deemed nation-building, looks to be the main goal of the new empire (this is an oddity since nation-building is typically derived from a Westphalian conception). In any case, it has to conjecture the transformation of politics and accordingly the mutation of democracy short of being a mere oxymoron like the republican empire.Footnote 164 On the other hand, the federal model, which has no such problem since it is firmly rooted in modern democratic politics, has to confront the problem of a federal governance and the problematical supervening of meaningful structuring cleavages at the European level which are the only way to legitimize the asymmetry between members and possibly between them and a federal polity, now considered a tool for federal stability.Footnote 165 That explains why both are tempted to give a new meaning to their respective cumbersome couple of concepts, empire-democracy for the imperialists, federation-federal governance for the federalists unless they follow Simon Hix and pin all their hopes on the formation of a European party system.
To be continued: Part III – Empire and the Democratic Challenge; Federation and the Governmental Challenge
