WORLD VIEW:LIVING THROUGH the euro zone crisis, it helps to put the rush of events in political and historical perspective and to ask whether the states and people of the EU have a sufficient sense of common belonging to find a sustainable outcome.
What analysis, information and research is there to determine such big questions by argument and evidence rather than dogmatic assertion?
Two recent books, by political scientists David Marquand and Thomas Risse, both critical supporters of deeper European integration, provide some of the answers. They examine what is at stake, put it in context, and underline the crucial roles played by political leadership and transnational engagement between political elites and citizens.
Marquand is a veteran political analyst and journalist. He was a Labour MP in the 1960s and an official of the European Commission working with Roy Jenkins in the 1970s, helping to found the Social Democratic Party with him there in the 1980s.
Since then Marquand has been an academic and commentator. He coined the phrase “democratic deficit” to describe the disconnect between elite politics and citizens when the European Parliament moved to direct elections in 1979.
He is distinctive among British commentators in bringing a federal perspective to bear on the UK in the European setting. One scenario he offers is of Scotland deciding to stay in the EU if the UK majority votes to withdraw, leading to the final break-up of the union that began with the Republic 90 years ago.
Marquand's latest book, The End of the West: The Once and Future Europe, argues that the external and internal aspects of the EU's problems are deeply interconnected. Presenting the arguments in Dublin (see a video of him speaking at iiea.com), he said the EU and the US no longer presented a coherent western face to the world.
The era of western dominance and supposed civilisational superiority does not accord with an emerging multipolar world reflecting the “rise of the rest” – China, India, Brazil, Russia, South Africa and their regions. It is a painful adjustment for the US – and for the EU, which must find a path to greater political union if it is to survive in this new geopoliticised world economy.
Monetary union and fiscal disunion in the EU are no longer compatible, Marquand believes. The long period of financialised neoliberalism in which they co-existed is at an end.
So is the era of functionalist or technocratic integration and “low politics”, which had little place for public debate. Although this crisis is “financial and economic in form, it is political in substance and origin”, since the choices it raises go to the heart of European politics. It is in fact “the revenge of politics over economism”.
The choice now is between a two-tier system consisting of an inner core around Germany counterposed to the rest of the EU, which would fuel resentment and nationalism like the 1930s; or the EU can, by creating a limited fiscal union, forge a green, sustainable recovery beyond the current austerity based on a Keynesian New Deal.
Thomas Risse is professor of international relations at the Freie University in Berlin. For the past 15 years he has conducted research on European identity.
His book A Community of Europeans? Transnational Identities and Public Spheres is a comprehensive and innovative survey of academic studies and sociopolitical change.
He rejects the view that Europeans lack a sense of community as a uniform and shared identity above their national identities. The evidence, rather, shows an uneven but definite Europeanisation of collective local, national and other identities, so that Europe and the EU are incorporated in people’s sense of belonging.
The more than 50 per cent of those who accept Europe as a secondary sense of belonging support integration much more than those with exclusive national identities.
Two visions of Europe are involved: one embracing modern, democratic and humanistic values; and the other a Europe of white Christian peoples. This “nationalist Europe” is increasingly politicised by Eurosceptic parties.
Risse disagrees that the EU has no common communicative spaces because it lacks a common language and European-wide media. Rather, do we find a Europeanisation of public spheres “whenever European issues are debated as questions of common concern using similar frames of reference”? This is happening, albeit unevenly, profoundly reinforced by the euro zone crisis.
Risse too calls for more open politics and believes “democratising the EU means primarily to politicise EU affairs at home and to integrate them into domestic politics” so that citizens can debate what kind of Europe they want.
A redistributive fiscal union would need more than secondary multiple identities. Risse concludes, quite correctly, that elites “must learn that contestation and polarisation actually strengthen the EU instead of weakening it”.
Those who care for the more open and enlightened vision must also be prepared to fight for it.