If you listen to European leaders today, one would think that the EU and European integration is all about money. How are we going to arrange the Multiannual Financial Framework in a way that everybody is happy, how will we save the common currency, how can appease financial markets, how will we ship money to troubled member states in an acceptable way, and so on. Granted, the current worldwide economic and financial crisis unavoidably stresses the importance of money, but that does not mean we should forget what Europe really stands for. The EU, to me, stand for much more than a single market with a single currency, it is the applied outcome of a normative idea that cooperation works better than confrontation.
Up until the 1950s, when the European integration process started, European states tended to talk through muscle. If one nation-state did something the other didn’t like, they simply declared war upon each other. The winner takes it all; the loser is always at fault. Although this is of course a simplified image, international politics were actually quite simple in those days. However, with the Second World War, something so terrible happened that even the hardboiled Europeans got weary of war. After decades of war and conflict at home and in the colonies, Europe wanted peace. Creating a common supranational authority that would govern Europe’s war industry was the elite’s answer to the peoples’ demands.
Despite the current focus on economic issues, the core of the integration process is peace – and it has indeed managed to establish the longest period of peace in (most of) Europe since the Pax Romana almost 2000 years ago. A recent book by Guisan (“A Political Theory of Identity in European Integration”) explains the three core principles that “have motivated actors to action: reconciliation, power as action in concert, and recognition of the other.” Indeed, peace in Europe could only succeed once the reconciliation between France and Germany – and the rest of Europe – was accomplished, once individual nation-states were convinced of the added value of cooperation to their national objectives, and once those nation-states were forced to respect and recognise other nations as equal partners.
So yes, Europe is about more than money, more than cohesions funds, more than growth measures. But we are forgetting it. Instead, we should honour our fundamental principles, who “remind us that the ability of the founding fathers to unite the efforts of countries that have had one of the bloodiest wars in history should not be overlooked or explained by a narrow economic interest dimension.” The people don’t remember what Europe is all about, and their leaders translate this incomprehension into the realm of high politics. This is, of course, a two-way process: people express their growing alienation with Europe, and most politicians, too afraid to lose their voters, play along and even boost this populist sentiment.
But can we blame them? Are those noble ideas of Europe’s founding fathers enough to build a strong and stable EU? Obviously not. In the words of Guéhenno (from “The End of the Nation State”): “It is not the institutions that create a sense of belonging, but a sense of belonging which makes institutional constraints acceptable. To have thought otherwise is the original sin of the ‘European saints’.” Indeed, half a century after the incarnation of these principles in the Founding Treaties, the European idea is lost in institutional fuss and the people of Europe are losing focus of the essence of the integration process. The European idea is dying, and no one is willing to save it, entangled as we are in our monetary, institutional and other struggles.
These struggles are important, no doubt, but Europe needs its ideas. The time of easy functional integration, when creating an incomplete European single market that generated prosperity simply due to its scale, is over and we have now come to touch upon those areas of the economy that lay at the heart of a nation-state. Without a normative driver, i.e. a popular European idea to back institutional development, this functional approach to integration is doomed to fail, wither and die. We are at a crossroads here. Unless we reinvent the European idea and abandon populist discourses, we risk destroying the world’s most successful peace project. Alas, Europe is no longer considered as a harbourer of peace, but merely as a means to make ever more money. To have come so far and learned nothing, that is our failing.
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