THE VIRTUES AND SHORTCOMINGS OF PRACTICAL AND SCHOLARLY WISDOMS

The diplomat's tale written by Tony Blair's former European Union adviser makes clear several important things about the EU as it is perceived by its practitioners.Footnote ¹ First of all, national governments are more or less experts in dressing up their national interest as if it were the ‘European interest’ (Britain would be a glaring exception since its government seems to have played a constant zero-sum game, ‘Britain versus Brussels’).Footnote ² Second, all governments delight in blaming ‘Brussels’ for failure and in taking credit for any success, either through their imaginative participation in the EU process or by their heroic opposition to encroachments by ‘Brussels’.Footnote ³ Last, the EU pervades almost every corner of public policy, yet most of the politicians know next to nothing of the EU methods, even though they think they perceive something and they pretend to hold strong opinions on everything. As for the ‘European citizen’, she is far more candid and down to earth. While she behaves like the professional elite vis-à-vis her national institutions, she stops pretending as far as the European institutions are concerned: they are illegible to the citizen, however well-informed she might be. Between the politicians and the citizen, the active members of countless special interest groups, including those defending ‘public causes’, are perfectly conversant with the complexity of the European decision-making process, yet their practical knowledge does not contribute to the production of the ‘well-grounded illusion’ that the undifferentiated ‘phantom public’ (to quote Walter Lippmann) that constitutes the citizenry knows, or thinks it knows, the political system controlling the lives of its members.

As often happens, practical wisdom holds more than a kernel of truth, yet it should be taken with a handful of salt. The first two statements take it for granted that there are clear and self-evident ‘national interests’, as well as a ‘European interest’. Occam's razor could be safely used to distribute blames and rewards through a system of political benchmarking analogous to the ‘peer reviews’ in policy benchmarking. Instead of evaluating outputs by gauging the governments' implementation of given common goals, we – political scientists, political economists, political analysts – could evaluate governmental inputs, the values (European vs nationalist) defended and implemented by the member states, and place them on ascale of ‘Europeanism’, just as we place the national parliaments,governments, officialdoms and private organizations on a scale of ‘Europeanization’ to measure the degree of ‘compliance’, that is, of ‘transposition’ and implementation of the European directives in the national spheres.Footnote ⁴ Such an unbiased ‘political evaluation’ of the states may look more feasible in the EU than the evaluation of political parties within a national state, since a party, not being a sovereign unit, has always to claim its legitimacy, and accordingly to behave as if its interest is de jure the national interest (even the revolutionary parties do this, only the anarchists part company), thus making any evaluation a party quarrel. De facto it is another matter, and precisely for that reason political evaluation is part and parcel of the ideological debate. On the other hand, a member of the EU might legitimately oppose its interest to the ‘European’ interest. Have European institutions not been designed, until Lisbon, both to avoid the ‘free riding’ and to protect national interests?Footnote ⁵

This perception of two kinds of clear-cut interests is by and large an illusion. While it is obvious that the nation-states, to quote Norbert Elias,Footnote ⁶ are still ‘the first referential image of the “we-thinking” ’– at least in the opinion of its professional elites, who identify themselves with this social unit, and of the ordinary people who think they are thus equipped with a usable political compass – it does not follow that all the representatives of a given state hold the same view of its national interest. They might change their opinion, however incrementally, according to their positions and the dynamics of their interactions in a political or administrative body, whether national or European. The same could be said, a fortiori, of the European interest. The ‘institutional’ view identifying the ‘Community’ with the Commission and the states with the CouncilFootnote ⁷ does not look that self-evident any more.Footnote ⁸

Here lies the reason why ‘constitutional’ language is left to the innocuous imagination of the lawyers,Footnote ⁹ sometimes to the injunctions of the economists, or distorted to produce curious concepts (Teubner's ‘societal constitutionalism’, Shaw's ‘constitutional flexibility’, but a constitution is always flexible even when the lawyers deem it ‘rigid’, since it is whatever the practitioners and the judges say it is) while so many middle-range descriptive concepts have flourished in the last decades: ‘comitology’, ‘multilevel governance’, ‘governance by networks’, ‘shared governance’, and with the Open Method of Coordination construed as a means of making the member states more ‘community compatible’, ‘deliberative intergovernmentalism’, ‘deliberative supranationalism’, ‘supranational governance’, ‘reflexive governance’, ‘directly deliberative polyarchy’ (my favourite), to quote just a few.Footnote ¹⁰ These concepts are – whatever their uncertain status – useful, albeit fuzzy, useful because fuzzy. But the question should be addressed: useful for what? and useful to whom?, beyond the admittedly wide circle of social scientists and lawyers of all persuasions, in addition to the ‘Eurocrats’ and devotees making up ‘the European circus’. I leave out the vast majority of mainstream economists whose conflicting views are immune from these niceties since most of them ignore the thesis of ‘the discursive construction of economic imperatives’.Footnote ¹¹ I suspect that, should they be made privy to it, their reply would be: ‘all right, then so what? As long as we care for the consequences of interactions and not for the emergence of their justifications we scrutinize the feasibility of the EU's economic policies, either left to the discretion of the member states or “imperatively coordinated” (Talcott Parsons's idiosyncratic translation of the Weberian herrschaft) to eschew the “free-rider effect” and the “leak effect” putting a country that practises a given policy (for example a fiscal policy) in a situation worse than the countries where that policy is not implemented and that benefit from their neighbour's efforts.’ Then they would resume their familiar quarrel, limited regulation versus expanded economic policy, Hayek versus Keynes, and they would jump boldly to political conclusions.Footnote ¹²

Enter the second piece of practical wisdom exemplified by Stephen Wall's third statement: the EU does– skilfully or awkwardly and sometimes to no avail (nobody is perfect) – so many things that even the most adamant Eurosceptics, even the ‘noes’ of the ill-fated Dutch, French and Irish referendums, are unable, and have no intention, to expel it from their familiar landscape.Footnote ¹³ Perhaps that is the main and indeed the only source of its legitimacy. But how does it do this? The answer provided by most of the members of the European circus is to resort to the concepts listed above, sometimes influenced by the powerful school of the ‘discursive turn’ we have just mentioned, and complemented by the French sociologists with general stipulative concepts, ‘fields’, ‘sectors’, ‘transactions’, ‘configurations’ (Elias), ‘intellectual capital’, ‘habitus’, ‘strategies’ (all in Bourdieu's acceptation),Footnote ¹⁴ ‘instruments’ (‘mechanisms’ dear to Jon Elster and Raymond Boudon is almost absent). These terms are at times covered up by a summa divisio of some sort. The covering dichotomy is no longer what the Founding Fathers fought over, a supranational and federal Europe versus an intergovernmental ‘Europe des nations’, a ‘free trade zone’ versus a ‘political’ union, an ‘Atlantic’ Europe playing second fiddle to the USA versus an autonomous Europe (a ‘third force’ giving some clout to Giddens's contemporary ‘third way’). More important, it is no longer a dichotomy although many of these cleavages surface time and again. Who still quotes Schuman, Monnet, Gasperi, Spaak, Hallstein, apart from a handful of ‘true believers’? The ‘federation of nations’– read ‘nation-states’– has won the day among the politicians. Why not? and who cares? De Gaulle has long been dead, the war is over. If it remains true that rigorous lawyers are still using, and deepening, the federal vision in a technical sense, allowing the coexistence of autonomous member states with a ‘federal state’ protecting and guaranteeing their autonomy,Footnote ¹⁵ political scientists prefer to play with the ‘community method’ complemented by ‘the new modes of governance’ or ‘the re-politicization of the EU’ versus (sometimes complementing) the de-politicization of certain strategic sectors through their ‘judiciarization’ implemented by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the European Central Bank (ECB), not to forget the Commission itself. Likewise, in the ‘foreign policy’ field we doubt the validity of the dichotomy ‘normative power’ versus ‘strategic power’.Footnote ¹⁶ The core of the matter is that many political scientists are keen to depict and design coherent functional processes of decision and implementation that would not be subject to structural and institutional constraints once they have determined (rightly in my opinion) that the EU could not, and should not, be construed on the model of the unitary and centralized nation-state.

THE DOMINANCE OF POLICY ANALYSIS AND THE ‘MISSING PIECE’

The specialists in ‘European Studies’ know better than the blind men in the story of the elephant. Faced with the so-called ‘unidentified political object’ or the ‘sui generis institution’, or, better, the ‘post-national union’, they are careful not to decide on what the elephant, this ‘post-natural species’, is, each from her own standpoint, a tree, a snake, and so on. They know that if they follow routinely (and recklessly) the historical institutionalist path of mainstream political science and try to decide what an institution is and in what kind of polity it is embedded,Footnote ¹⁷ and then conjecture the behaviour of rational agents subjected to its incentives and constraints, they will be confronted with theoretically impossible developments, since Paul Pierson's ‘law of increasing returns’ will hinder any understanding of social change.Footnote ¹⁸ This will leave them at a loss when they find that the elephant has grown in size and changed its form ‘at the very moment that the blind men ought to grasp it’.Footnote ¹⁹ So, they content themselves with asking: ‘if it is a tree, or a snake, or both, does it do what the usual tree or snake does, or is it a mutation?’ The language of ‘policy analysis’ tends to supersede the language of empirical political theory, historical or formal, that we have been taught in the twentieth century by Easton, Dahl, Lipset, Bendix, Rokkan, Finer, Barrington Moore, Skocpol or Tilly,Footnote ²⁰ and in the field of international relations by Bull, Aron, Gilpin, Wolfers, Waltz, Keohane, Rosecrance, Buzan or Ruggie.

There is nothing faulty with this approach, which has brought about much excellent research initiated by such pioneers as W. and H. Wallace, A. Heritier and B. Kohler-Koch, to name just a few. It may usefully contribute to deconstructing assumed dichotomies and thus to providing better explanations of specific processes. The core of the research consists of carefully tracing single instruments, allowing us to understand changes in longstanding institutional arrangements.Footnote ²¹ Politics come back, not through the elucidation of the general nature of the European polity, but through the recognition of the political nature of apparently neutral policy instruments (Foucault's legacy is pervasive here).Footnote ²² So far so good, as long as we are dealing with an approach whose core tenet is the issue ‘Who gets what, when, and how?’ (in a process), stated in 1936 by Harold Lasswell, one of the founding fathers of the policy sciences. The problem is not so much that it is impossible to provide a clear picture of the European types of policy-making,Footnote ²³ it is rather that it is impossible to trace those processes to a set of identifiable authors and thus to deal with the ‘intelligibility problem’, whose democratic figure is the ‘accountability problem’. ‘Who does what, when and how?’ at the systemic level is the core issue of constitutional theory from Aristotle to Montesquieu, The Federalist and the contemporary ‘constitutional engineering’. This ‘formal’ problem comes (logically, but not always chronologically) before the ‘substantial’ one: what Claus Offe names ‘the normatively convincing defence’ of a project.Footnote ²⁴ We have learned, from Allison onwards, that many ‘decisions’ are not made by a ‘decision maker’, yet it is a feature of empirical political theory and practice that someone–‘authorities’, ‘regimes’, ‘communities’ (including ‘policy communities’, ‘epistemological’ or not) – must be held accountable for the outcomes of ‘public actions’, and that resorting to ‘networks’, ‘instruments’, ‘pillars’Footnote ²⁵ or even ‘arenas’ will not do (‘forum’ is somewhat better since it conjures up the idea of ‘public space’ dear to the devotees of deliberative democracy).

It is quite plausible, as Andrew Moravcsik has argued, that the European system works in a more transparent (to whose eyes?) way than the national systems, and Yves Mény has rightly observed that the national states' democratic credentials leave much to be desired.Footnote ²⁶ Yet this is beside the point. We are not dealing with ‘hard facts’ but with another kind of ‘facts’: beliefs and perceptions evolving from a set of cultural habits and practices. Actually, whoever we are – citizens of ‘transparent’ Sweden or of ‘opaque’ France, of ‘democratic’ Germany or, say, ‘less democratic’ Bulgaria – we are united by the strong belief that we understand the European system much less than our national systems, whether we find them transparent and democratic or not. The reason is that we, citizens and scientists, have to answer the question: ‘Who governs when nobody governs?’,Footnote ²⁷ since it echoes the old Hobbesian question ‘quis judicabit?’ There is something slightly ironic in this: when ‘Europe’ was much less influential and still a bone of contention, a collective leadership emerged, impersonated by Schuman, Monnet and the European Christian democrats and social democrats (at the times the German socialists were dissenting and Great Britain was aloof). After the failure of the ‘European army’ in 1954 those leaders had to proceed softly by promoting minor reforms to yield irreversible changes; as a result they were sometimes accused of deception.Footnote ²⁸ Now that Europe is omnipresent and its leaders no longer constrained to conceal their intentions (at least that is what they claim), it has become ‘leaderless’,Footnote ²⁹ which means that it is no more transparent than it used to be when it was contested. The vicious circle of success is complete: no European polity without a leadership, no leadership without a global project, towards either the outside (as was the Bismarckian project, according to Michael Giessen) or the inside or both, no project without a polity.

In this respect, the study of policy processes makes sense as long as we can rely on an overall polity within which they take place. Politics is about dealing with common problems that are not only ‘policy problems’ but also ‘purely political problems’, to cite Bertrand De Jouvenel. Those problems do not pertain to ‘low politics’ (the competition for power positions) but to ‘high politics’, the determination and meaning of a collective identity before and beyond the one sometimes brought about by the effects of a given policy on its public. As Schattschneider and Lowi put it more than forty years ago, ‘policy determines politics’; yes, but how is the stage of politics set, and by whom? As a logical prerequisite we need a polity whether it is a tribe, a village, a city, a state…or an empire (sometimes utilizing a minority church on the verge of becoming ‘a polity within a polity’, as Constantine did in the fourth century ad) since it is not just a level of government (although this is, of course, a necessary feature of a polity). Instead it is a level understood by, and justified (or at least inevitable) to, the relevant people affected by and the various elites participating in its working. It does not matter how that polity has historically and sociologically emerged out of various processes encompassing politics and policies. The relevance of the social contract theory has almost nothing to do with the explanation of the existence of modern nation-states and everything to do with their intelligence and justification. Incidentally, that is one of the main reasons why it is so difficult to make international organizations accountable to the ‘citizens of the world’ and to make sense of the idea of an international, or transnational, democracy. Even though we know of specific processes and outcomes in the field of ‘international relations’ and even though we may construe them as outputs of ‘international regimes’ as Krasner did long ago,Footnote ³⁰ something is still ‘missing in the picture’ as long as we have not run the risk of deciding in which overall political system they occur and how the system is understood and justified. A ‘Europe des patries’ is not a ‘Europe des partis’.Footnote ³¹ A system of polities is not a polity, an international institutionFootnote ³² – when ‘intergovernmental’, made by and for the states as sovereign groups – is not an institution made by and for individuals or non-sovereign groups such as parties. Simon Hix knows this so well that his main prescriptive strategy to ‘fix’ the EU consists of strengthening the role of parties rather than designing new institutions. I concede that such a terminology sounds dreadfully ‘Westphalian’ and ‘methodologically nationalist’ (a far from self-evident judgement). Suffice it to say that, however inadequate the answers may look, the question it addresses is still with us: what is the EU, not as a metaphysical reality lying behind all our representations (the Continental philosophers' ‘Being’), but as an empirical reality perceived and made meaningful through our senses equipped with, and complemented by, a technical apparatus and a set of tested theories and hypotheses? The fact that such a reality is always evolving, ‘in the making’ (and by the same token, ‘coming apart’), does not matter here since we continually have to stop the movement in order to produce a picture and to decide what it looks like.

THE TWO LANGUAGE GAMES AND THE NEED OF AN INSTITUTIONAL SYNTHESIS, WITH A NOTE ON THE EU'S ‘SYMBOLIC DEFICIT’

Admittedly, the problem stems from the dual-language game played by the political actors themselves: international in certain matters (for example the European defence in the Title V, art. J. 4, of the Maastricht Treaty) and ‘domestic’ in others (especially fair competition and human rights, implemented by the ECJ, which emphasizes the supremacy of European law by judging that the founding treaties are a ‘constitutional charter’).Footnote ³³ This dual language was made evident in the Maastricht Treaty, this ‘masterful combination of nationalism and neo-liberalism’,Footnote ³⁴ which explains the ‘language mix’ practised by governments dressing up their national interest (Language 1) as the ‘European interest’ (Language 2) and justifying the practice by the conviction that the EU works not only in each of its members' best interest but also that it is the projection of their own national interest. It is a mix made more difficult for everybody in times of crisis and, for the founding members (especially France and Germany, the too-famous ‘French–German couple’ born of the De Gaulle–Adenauer treaty of 1963) when they come to realize that the enlargement of the EU has made it less likely that it will serve their manifest destiny.Footnote ³⁵ Zielonka utilizes those troubles to make his point: mainly that enlargement should transform the still-dominant conceptions of the nature of the EU. By doing so, he emphasizes the shortcomings of the social scientists' language.

For a long time Language 2 was matched by the social scientific language of functionalism and of the ‘epigenesis of political communities’,Footnote ³⁶ and Language 1 by the language of strategic interaction.Footnote ³⁷ Both are still used to some avail.Footnote ³⁸ There was no purely logicalnecessity in this process; rather it was an effect of a logic proper to the situation. Had the governments been more willing to espouse the federalist idea, the scientific language of strategic interaction could have been used to explain the emergence of a European interest implemented by an authentic federation. Functionalism would have been useless and replaced by the language of action based on a common will, as the first president of the Commission Walter Hallstein put it forcefully: ‘Let us create the European State or is Europe finally to abdicate?’Footnote ³⁹ As this was not possible, the role of ideas was downgraded, and functionalism took over. Actually it was not exactly the role of ideas that was replaced since, whatever the paradigm used, they always play a role in justifying or motivating the actors,Footnote ⁴⁰ but the role of one hegemonic idea. Later, when functionalism was on the wane,Footnote ⁴¹ Fritz Scharpf, after giving up any hope of promoting a federal Europe at the explanatory and prescriptive levels, tried to use the language of game theory to explain the contrasting trends of the ‘government of Europe’.Footnote ⁴² Thanks to those efforts, it was still possible to relate ordinary citizens' language to the scientists' one, but in a more and more difficult yet still meaningful way. From the ‘Lisbon agenda’ (2000) onwards, it has become a linguistic Everest, and beyond the European circus almost everybody stays at Base Camp. After rejoicing over the mantra of the ‘knowledge economy’– the blinding brilliancy of which conjures up the Promised Land of jobs, wealth and welfare – the ordinary person listens to the (bad) global news affecting her local worlds.

This is one of the most striking paradoxes of empirical European studies: they never question the existence of a European ‘polity’ (a kind of necessary a priori judgement)Footnote ⁴³ that most of them, with the exceptions already hinted at, have not defined. At times the studies go further and decide it is a ‘superstate’, federal in domestic politics and challenging the USA in international politics,Footnote ⁴⁴ or that it is the institution of a European demos that has been a reality since the adoption of the Single European Act in 1986. This is a highly dubious contention despite the right of petition to the Parliament already in force and the ‘Swiss’ provision of the Lisbon Treaty allowing one million European citizens to propose a referendum under certain conditions and in certain matters.Footnote ⁴⁵ Only a few have tried to top the justly famous, and unjustly derided, definition issued by Philippe Schmitter: ‘a postnational, unsovereign, polycentric, non-coterminous, neo-medieval institution’Footnote ⁴⁶ whose main merit is to expose an ordeal from which people such as Locke, Madison, Hamilton, Jay, Sieyes, Constant, Tocqueville or Mill (and earlier Hobbes, Filmer, Harrington, Milton etc.…) were protected. The new political science of Europe makes some sense to the aficionados and no sense to the common man (a nice example of ‘epistemological rupture’). The ‘old’ terminology made sense to both the scientists and the agents, the ‘new’ one is just part and parcel of a language game reserved to a specific closed community of ‘Europeanists’ (of all nationalities) whose contribution to general comparative political science may even be disputed.Footnote ⁴⁷ Admittedly, general political science too has its own language (for example ‘punctuated equilibrium’), but it makes a contribution to scientific progress, which is not the case here. ‘Directly-deliberative polyarchy’, for all its oddity, might be a useful exception but it raises an awkward problem: it cannot be used as a watershed clearly demarcating the European polity from the ‘Westphalian state’ since it is construed as a ‘mode of governance’ to be found in a classical state as well as in the European polity. So, it becomes useless to Zielonka, whose obsession is to prove that the European polity cannot and should not be a state or a federation of member states with a federal state. Yet ordinary people and their (much despised) ‘common sense’ and ‘ordinary language’ are not ‘things’, even though we may feel entitled to deal with ‘social facts’ as if they were things, to cite Durkheim. The scientist has the duty to understand the agents and by the same token she has the corresponding duty to make herself understood by them, to supply some meaningful translation of her findings and conjectures since she is also an ordinary citizen. If this statement conveys some truth, we cannot do without an institutional theory.Footnote ⁴⁸

Institutions are not just ‘formal’ systems unable to account for the ‘real’ structures of decision-making, neither can they be equated with those structures. They are more than that: thanks to their effectiveness, ‘legal facts’ come about as necessary fictions liable to bring some intelligible order to the ‘brute facts’ and to create through a process of objectifying a ‘legal reality’ constraining the agents and manipulated by them, and also providing them with an identity. If, as we have already noticed, politics is not just about ‘who gets what, when and how?’ the central question is rather: ‘from which group does the Eastonian “authoritative allocation of values” emerge and to whom does it extend?’ Hence the relevance, not only of ‘institutional design’ and ‘institutional engineering’, using institutions as formal systems of decision where the ‘logic of consequences’ governed by rational utility maximization operates, but above all of ‘institutional symbolics’, viewing institutions as identity builders where a ‘logic of appropriateness’ is at play. We should keep in mind March and Olsen's distinction to do justice to their now famous, and misunderstood, theory of ‘the organizational basis of politics’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The real issue is not that they give too much weight to a rigid breakdown of actions by types of logics that are actually intertwined, nor is it that they ignore domination and the conflicts opposing ‘real’ people, but that they may be considered as overlooking the social-scientific problem of identity-building (or ‘how has a sense of European identity evolved, if at all?’). That is not at all the same as the ideological problem of the normative definition of the European identity (‘what European identity should be taught to all the children so that they know what it means to be an European?’).Footnote ⁵⁰ When we describe European institutions as arenas of interactions between actors endowed with political and economic resources enabling them to seize the opportunities to further their goals and maximize their resources, so consolidating the institutions that have, sometimes unwittingly, provided those opportunities,Footnote ⁵¹ we are not only stating a – most useful – truism. We are also evading the question: why are ‘historic moments’ (say, the enlargement to post-communist Europe when, so are we told, ‘a sense of kinship-based duty’ was at the root of ‘ethical-political arguments’)Footnote ⁵² always overshadowed by debates over budget and agriculture? I am not taking the idealist position that bread-and-butter issues should wither away in ‘moments of enthusiasm’ but I will ask the reverse question: why do they always take precedence? In other words, why and how are the ‘a-symbolic institutions’ (e.g. the Bank) valued for their utility (to whom?) while the ‘symbolic political’ ones (e.g. the Parliament) are not valued for their own sake?Footnote ⁵³ It is a question that even the most functionalist theorists of nationalism (Karl Deutsch and Ernest Gellner) could not pass over.

Then the crucial question becomes: is a polity conceivable without the ‘gods of the city’ or what Jan Patocka called ‘the Soul of a City’? We frequently hear ‘the EU has brought about peace…’ (why not the other way around?) ‘… prosperity, welfare, human rights’ (how about the other organization, the Council of Europe?) and so on. It is puzzling to witness so many justifications phrased in the utilitarian language of performance without the slightest hint of what endows a polity with a symbolic objectivation, what the Ancients called the numen and sometimes the genius of peoples and great individuals,Footnote ⁵⁴ the Weberian sociologists' charisma,Footnote ⁵⁵ a representatio Majestatis of some sort whose rhetoric provides a frame to the triviality of ‘party politics’ through which the Majestas emerged to acquire a value of its own.Footnote ⁵⁶ Even though a modern polity is no longer requested to be the representative of the ordo mundi as Constantine's empire or Muhammad's Medina were (although I feel exasperated at the European mania of presenting the EU as a model to the rest of the world), Clifford Geertz is still right: a world entirely demystified is a world entirely depoliticized.Footnote ⁵⁷

Almost nobody has gone so far as to explore the potential for the EU to be a loose system of policy-making (and ‘policy-forbidding’) organizations without being a polity. It would not just be a set of ‘policies without politics’, now a well-entrenched idea, but ‘policies without a polity’. Once again, Philippe Schmitter has been insightful with his concept of a condominio that Zielonka finds related to his idea of empire; instead of one ‘Eurocracy’ there would be ‘multiple regional institutions acting autonomously to solve common problems’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Maybe…yet I wonder if there is much difference between a non-Eurocracy and a non-polity as long as there is no clear imperative coordination between these institutions, which leads, in a democratic zeitgeist, to a ‘democracy of organizations’ rather than to a ‘democracy of citizens’.Footnote ⁵⁹ To define ‘governance’ as Schmitter does, as ‘a method/mechanism for dealing with a broad range of problems/conflicts in which actors regularly arrive at mutually satisfactory and binding decisions by negotiating and deliberating with each other and cooperating in the implementation of these decisions’ emphasizes that it is not a process of government. Instead, it is seen as a process either taking for granted the demise of the governmentFootnote ⁶⁰ and the ensuing estrangement of the citizens,Footnote ⁶¹ or involving a plurality of sovereign governments. Schmitter is not very keen on this form.

Schmitter's other conjectural model, consortio, bringing together interest groups, cities, regions and states to deal with an issue, calls to mind the British East India Company or even more accurately the Hanseatic League of merchant cities that Colomer gives as an example of the current ‘borderless cooperation’ forming, among other things, ‘a new Hanseatic network grouping about 100 cities and towns’. A fortiori this form barely satisfies what we mean by polity today (Colomer makes no claim that it does) since, to consider it a polity, we have to rely on the wrong assumption that a set of interest groups is a civil society, this ‘moral root of the state’ in Hegelian parlance.Footnote ⁶² Suffice it to quote here the definition offered by Mary Kaldor: ‘a rule of law and a political community, a peaceful order based on implicit or explicit consent of the individuals’. Although Kaldor is too parsimonious and seems to overlook the role of corporations and associations that strengthen pluralism and protect minorities in an appropriate institutional setting, she rightly emphasizes the difference: a civil society is not a mere ‘constellation of interests’ (to cite Weber), nor is it a set of private networks without public political participation. Should that be the case, it would mean a total mutation of the concept, aimed at concealing the reality of a demise of civil society in a climate of social fragmentation and privatization favoured by the unbridled dynamics of market forces.

Schmitter's last two models, confederatio and stato/federatio, are more classical, located at the two extremes of the international–national spectrum.Footnote ⁶³ Unfortunately, neither of them seems to fit in the actual practice of the EU or in its currently dominant interpretations. I wonder if all the debates around a democratic polity, the ‘democratic deficit’ and the ‘depoliticization of civil society’Footnote ⁶⁴ are not muddled by the fact that we fight fiercely over the attributive adjective ‘democratic’ before deciding on the substantive ‘polity’. The cogent historical argument made by Jytte Klausen and Louise Tilly that a democratic deficit has always been ‘endemic’ in any process of state-building and is not specific to the European constructionFootnote ⁶⁵ should not induce us to hold that ‘all is right with the (European) world’ (an endemic bias of many European studies). It is not historical enough: as was documented by Rokkan, all the European processes of state-building took place when democracy was not considered a necessary requisite for a legitimate polity (and even the USA was no exception, the only real ones were perhaps Switzerland and the Netherlands), whereas today ‘democracy’ is necessarily part and parcel of a ‘Master Plan’. Such a plan is missing, though, as Offe, quoted above, pointed out, and Klausen and Tilly themselves admit. The situation is reversed: the process of state-building was both ‘grown’ and ‘designed’ in a non-democratic culture, whereas at the very moment when democracy becomes the bottom line of a polity this polity vanishes despite a ‘constitution’ (now a ‘simplified constitutional treaty’) that is not a set of intelligible fundamental rules, whether customary or written, but a cluster of intertwined patterns of states', groups' and individuals' behaviours. For example, if one tries to compare and assess the heuristic value of the two well-crafted tables offered by Gary Marks and Stefano Bartolini to contrast the ‘post-national state’ (Marks) or the ‘phase VI of the process of political structuring’ (Bartolini) to the previous orders or phases, one notices two things. Not only are they built in reference to the state order – an inevitable move (Tocqueville did likewise in contrasting the Ancien Régime to democratic society, and the much criticized couple ‘tradition–modernity’ is modelled on Auguste Comte and Henry Maine) – but they also offer a disjointed picture of various characters, the viable coherence of which is still debatable.Footnote ⁶⁶ The ‘knowledge deficit’ that ensues has less to do with the fact that a society ‘evolves’ in quite an untidy way than with the fact that real actors fight over market-oriented issues and foreign and security policies while at the same time fighting over institutional issues that are left unresolved.Footnote ⁶⁷ This renders citizens' involvement and participation very difficult in a large-scale and multilevel ‘polity’ such as the EU.Footnote ⁶⁸ The outcome is, in Peter Mair's felicitous terms, that ‘because we are denied an appropriate political arena in which to hold European governance accountable, we are almost pushed into organizing opposition to Europe’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Simon Hix, in the book reviewed here, thinks he has a solutionFootnote ⁷⁰ and so does Jan Zielonka. The problem is their answers are widely at variance with each other.

An epistemological consequence is that, however careful we may be in defining a general concept such as ‘integration’,Footnote ⁷¹ we remain trapped in the language mix. In Language 1 (‘international’, including the language of geopolitics, much neglected by Language 2)Footnote ⁷² integration means a common process of decision-making in certain domains in order to promote certain common goals on the understanding that the implementation of the ‘decision’ is left to each party's discretion (provided they do not openly violate the decision) and that certain parties may decide to ‘opt out’ and not participate in the decision or its implementation. In Language 2 (‘internal’) there is no opting out and only a limited and controlled discretion in the implementation since the decision is supposed to affect de jure equally all the members of the polity it concerns. It seems illogical to speak of ‘different processes of integration’ without specifying beforehand which kind of integration we are talking about. As I understand it, Fritz Scharpf's seminal distinction between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ integrationFootnote ⁷³ actually refers to Language 1 and Language 2 respectively. An ideal positive integration pertaining to Language 2 would mean that the member states are under the positive obligation to guarantee to their citizens the same minimum levels of welfare necessary for them to benefit de facto by their ‘positive liberty’, which should empower the EU to determine those levels and to constrain the member states to fulfil those goals. The goals would be reached through either injunctions or the organization of federal services (something already envisaged by the Schuman Plan with respect to the situation of the workers likely to be affected by the restructuring of coalfields and steel factories).Footnote ⁷⁴ An actual negative integration, also pertaining to Language 2, forbids any member state to do certain things and empowers the EU to constrain them to refrain from acting in matters such as free trade and civil liberties in order to enable the individuals to fully practise her ‘negative liberty’.Footnote ⁷⁵ As it is highly unlikely that positive integration be really implemented and quite possible that negative integration will constrain certain member states to narrow some social benefits – to the detriment of their democratic legitimacyFootnote ⁷⁶ – Language 2 will apply only to negative integration, and positive integration should remain the domain of Language 1.Footnote ⁷⁷ So the residual meaning of integration, once we have realized we cannot use it as mathematicians or economists do, might be ‘ “something”, a set of processes, networks, organizations and institutions, that almost nobody actually wants to abandon even though most of the people do not know what it consists of and disagree on the way it should be improved’. The proof of the elephant is that we want it with us, whatever we think it is.Footnote ⁷⁸ Likewise, ‘Europeanization’ means what we want it to: a cultural climate, a discursive process, an integration of decision-making processes, a convergence of goals, of outputs (let's keep in mind that there may be convergence without the EU playing a specific role – and vice versa), a set of engagements submitted to a system of sanctions, etc., or, above all, a trick to take politics, the cleavages and their public conflictual dimension out of the decision-making process.Footnote ⁷⁹

Meanwhile, the real agents do their job, they fight for the institutional interpretation that they think more suitable to their interests and ideas, both as individuals and as representatives of (what they think are) their groups’ interests. For example, a powerful permanent president of Europe, backed by ‘strong nations’ with ‘more responsibilities’, might belittle the Commission (a view ascribed to the French president, given his behaviour when the financial world crisis was met by a lame-duck American administration), or a chairman might try to reach a unanimous agreement (as the same French president did with the dossier of climate change, given the German resistance). Likewise, a six-month president of the Council might act as a consensus builder to push a European agenda or an activistic president in charge of all the special councils of ministers and relegating, with the help of the Commission (and perhaps the Parliament), the permanent president to a ‘symbolic’ (meaning here ‘irrelevant’) role of formal representation. All those options are left open by the Lisbon Treaty and they entail quite different conceptions of the European, national and group interests and their interplay.

THE PHILOSOPHERS MAKE THEIR ENTRY

The obvious temptation is then to turn to philosophers and to ask what the elephant should be.Footnote ⁸⁰ It may happen that philosophers are also empirical political theorists, for example when they break European legitimacy down into various dimensions and objects, following Scharpf's deservedly famous distinction between input (commitment born of a feeling of identity strengthened by an ability to participate) and output (support depending on the performances of the public authorities) legitimacy. Neil Walker has made a useful distinction built on Beetham and Lord, and Bellamy and Castiglione, between the ‘performative legitimacy’ of the EU (to pursue the right priorities and policies), the ‘regime legitimacy’ (the institutional framework) and the ‘polity legitimacy’ (the support for what Easton named long ago the ‘political community’). Likewise they may follow Rawls in drawing, at the price of arduous logical work, some normative conclusions or prudent prescriptions from what they observe, without leaving out of the picture anything unsuitable to their purpose.Footnote ⁸¹ These exercises in analysis are much needed as counterarguments to the language of the politicians, whose language games often consist of uttering self-fulfilling prophecies that may become self-negating in the not-too-distant future, thus combining actions left unexplained with ‘transcendental' discourses that are not matched by any clear action. Thus they become ‘rational sentimentals’, deliberately substituting a mimed action for its actual implementation.Footnote ⁸² In such a context, philosophers and political theorists are needed as much as empirical political scientists.

I am more interested here in philosophers who are bold (or foolhardy) enough to venture explicit normative statements on what Europe should be by relying against all odds on ‘visions’ of the world to come. Such a frame of mind is often insidiously present underneath many so-called ‘empirical studies’ whose authors are at a loss to make sense of their observations and so hope to find a way out of their predicament. The road down which so many stylish old cars like Denis de RougemontFootnote ⁸³ used to parade in the good old times of innocence is congested today since it is the job of modern political philosophers to give a global interpretation of a world in its twilight (Minerva's owl). More importantly, it is also their task to follow Schopenhauer's advice, to start from a ‘painful amazement’ in front of an illusion or a utopia that is no longer credible and to commence their arguments with ‘a chord in a minor key’, like the overture of Don Giovanni. Unfortunately, too many political philosophers start in a majestic major key with new illusions. Reproducing the current European practices of evading any clear-cut covering cleavage, they are usually Kantian and postmodern, liberal and multiculturalist, ‘(neo)republican’and‘agonistic pluralist’. They are distrustful of the sovereign state and committed to a social-democratic welfare state, committed to ‘cosmopolitics’and to ‘regionalism’ (Europe as a special region), to ‘multiple, shifting and fluid’ identities, to the obsolescence of the ‘inside–outside, ingroup–outgroup’ opposition and to the search for a common European identity (more on that in the second part of this article). Unfortunately, the future as a whole is radically unforeseeable; only the history to come will allow us to declare those illusions ‘well-grounded’. For example Peter Sloterdjick, in his short and brilliant piece, is quite at liberty to reject any idea of ‘the United States of Europe’ since it would be a new empire ‘with a Dome and a Pantheon’.Footnote ⁸⁴ He is still under two obligations, though: to explain how a non-imaginary polity may exist without a modicum of symbols of power and ideology, and to bring evidence that such a ‘polity’ can be conceptualized in real contemporary Europe in its real environment and not in a utopian Europe. Incidentally, a utopia, properly understood, does not depict a real future summoned by the wisdom of the philosophers; it is a transcendental horizon we should always keep in mind today to help us stay on the alert when dealing with the actual political arrangements. To be aware of the corruption of the Dome–Pantheon couple is not the same as to dream that we can get rid of it forever.

Too many philosophers seem to think that a normative theory can be built on bits and pieces of the empirical world, picked out according to their subjective preferences, always nice and ethically worthy (most of the time, most of the philosophers are very good and well-meaning people on paper; Kant is their role model even when they are not Kantians). Needless to say, I do not take issue with the claim that ‘Normative arguments…are not vulnerable to sociological evidence that demonstrates that the conclusions of such arguments lack broad popular support. Indeed, the very point of a normative argument is to persuade people to change their minds.’Footnote ⁸⁵ That is a very powerful rejoinder to the conservative claims, already made by Brian Barry to Michael Oakeshott. Yet it concerns only the realm of opinions, and not the bulk of practices, values, structural and situational constraints that make up a public culture, however fragmented it may be. As the author we have just quoted admits in a very Rawlsian fashion: ‘There is an important difference between an argument that takes widely shared and reasonable values as a point of departure and an argument that takes existing preferences as a hard constraint on its conclusions.’Footnote ⁸⁶ Admittedly, there is a vast difference between the public culture Rawls took as a starting point when he published A Theory of Justice in 1971, and the current composite European public culture (a point Zielonka rightly emphasizes), which is closer to what he had to face when he published the much shorter, and embarrassed, The Law of Peoples in 1999.

Once again we have to confront the ‘language mix’ of European politics and we cannot ignore it by playing some intellectual trick. To take a single example, how can we make some sense of the fashionable concept of ‘constitutional patriotism’ that Zielonka thinks compatible with his concept of empire? Colomer does not seem to make the same mistake. In all fairness, I have to concede that Habermas has a square and definite European project: a federation with a constitution and the substantially ‘conservative’ or, better, ‘defensive’ project of protecting the ‘European social model’.Footnote ⁸⁷ As it is necessary to find some ‘soul of the city’ to sustain a feeling of commitment to such a down to earth (yet mightily attractive) project, ‘constitutional patriotism’ takes over.

Admittedly, I have myself emphasized earlier the importance of institutional symbolics and the role of institutions as identity builders. The paradox is that Habermas makes the same claim as if those institutions were with us already instead of being in limbo. Should we conclude that institutional patriotism is enough to make up institutions? That would be to put the cart before the horse, and locks one in a vicious circle, unless the object of patriotism is not something institutional, but then ‘constitutional patriotism’ becomes self-defective. The concept improvised by Habermas, who perhaps did not foresee its immense success, suffers from several major flaws. It is ill formed, as Habermas means to say that the constitution is (should be) the object of a patriotic affection, but he actually says that the constitution keeps (should keep) in check an unbridled patriotism, on the model of the ‘constitutional monarchy’ or ‘democracy’. The objection is not as farfetched and sophistic as it looks, since Habermas actually aims at keeping the emotional political attachments under control and to replace them by a rational attachment to a system of laws, supposed universally (at least at the European level) attractive enough to supersede the (dangerous) emotions raised by a particular land or group. To be viable in the real world, such a construction either requires a people of (Habermasian) philosophers akin to Rousseau's ‘people of gods’, or presupposes that it is possible to rule out any emotional commitment to a group, here a polity – which has never been the case until now since emotional social constructs are still more pervasive than the rational ones. It was not the rule ‘no taxation without representation’ that united the American people against their old country, but the feeling that they were no longer part of the ‘foreign’ (English) community that they had come from. The Bill of Rights was the consequence of the rebellion, not its cause, and it is as the representation of this particular community that it acquired the emotional dynamics embodied by the lawyer played by James Stewart in John Ford's The Man who Shot Liberty Valance. If the ‘civic nation’ seems today a ‘myth’, then even more mythical is the idea of a civic commitment to something as ‘abstract’ and obscure as the European institutions that we have found earlier sorely in need of some symbolic value.Footnote ⁸⁸

This longish and yet flippant visit to the political philosophy of the EU does not aim at humbling those who occupy the subfield. To a great extent it is just the opposite, given the almost impossible task allotted to them: to give some general meaning to the elephant. In some respect this has always been the case, the language mix of, say, feudalism, empire, republic and monarchy was not alien to Machiavelli, and all of us have piously quoted Marx: ‘Men make history, yet they do not know [apart from Marx himself?] the history they make.’ Let's say that today we need perhaps more urgently than in the past to know where we stand because of the contrasted effects of the accelerating processes of capitalist and ecological globalization, intellectualization, religious sprawling, communal tensions, mass mobilizations and…war-making. So, the weaknesses of the philosophers, and of the social scientists too, are even more precious than their achievements since they emphasize unwittingly the very simple and tremendously important fact that ‘Europe’ is not yet, to the citizens and the scientists alike, an empirical reality known by a Kuhnian paradigm. Certainly, it is known in bits and pieces but not as a whole. ‘Europe’ as an empirical reality comes to us in bits and pieces that do not fit together. Until we are able to figure out a better picture it looks like a physical organism with (soft) muscles, no skeleton and no brain, devoid of a central nervous system, to use a well-worn metaphor (not so worn out if we have read Karl Deutsch's The Nerves of Government). In other words, as a polity it is a ‘monstrosity’ analogous to the Durkheimian ‘sociological monstrosity’, superimposing an absolute state on a mass of isolated individuals. As the current monster is much less appalling than its Durkheimian cousin, and indeed more attractive – since for many stylish intellectuals (and ordinary people, too, when they belong to threatened or oppressed minorities) Leviathan is the real monster – let's say it is more an earthly millipede than a behemoth rising from the ocean deeps. After all, the millipede is viable, albeit neither enticing nor impressive enough to elicit feelings of ‘patriotism’. But there may be another metaphor at hand.

As a whole, ‘Europe’ is, as we have said, ‘something out there’: we do not know what it is, yet we know it is everywhere whether we like it or not. In brief I have just presented the figure of God (or of Satan for the anti-Europeans or those who believe in the intimate union and inflexible hostility of the ‘Westerners’– to use the term coined by Condorcet). It is plausible that the Europeanist ideologies are religions, ‘political’ or not, with their corruptions (idolatries and fetishisms), their heresies and their sects (matched by atheist beliefs, with their own variations), all of them manipulated, yet not created, by the political agents whose duty it is ‘to make the “system” (whatever it is) work’ and to move in the direction(s) of their choice. Racine's picture of Yahweh by the young Eliacin in Athalie is apposite here: ‘Celui qui met un terme à la fureur des flots/ Sait aussi des méchants arrêter les complots/ Aux petits des oiseaux il donne la pâture/ Et Sa bonté s'étend à toute la nature.’Footnote ⁸⁹ The fact that it is a manmade god does not matter, so was the mighty Leviathan, this ‘mortal god’. For want of appropriate symbols we have to make do with a core combination underlying many European studies: immanentism (everything that happens in the European ‘construction’ is good – panglossism – or bad – catastrophism), and teleonomy (everything in Europe is governed by the law of the ‘final causes’). Contrary to what we claim, we are still under the spell of a Eurocentric Whiggism that Jack Goody detects in the great works of Moses Finley, Joseph Needham, Norbert Elias and Fernand Braudel (he could have added David Landes):Footnote ⁹⁰ some vague religious feeling is not an adequate substitute for a lack of conceptualization. By the same token, that is also the reason why we should scrutinize fresh concepts, however surprising and idiosyncratic or seemingly ill-grounded and inconsistent. ‘One more Grand Theory’ should not be held in contemptFootnote ⁹¹ without a careful examination; we need it, or otherwise risk staying trapped in the dark while the much-vaunted ‘reflexivity’ is supposed to reign – unless we content ourselves with an underhand ‘Grand Theory’ that holds that people need not know what they are doing, provided they do it out of a ‘strategy of domination’.

To be continued: Part II – Empire, Federation, or What?