This is a continuation of the extract of the talk I gave at the University of Geneva in Nov. 2011 on “European Identities.” This part deals with the failure to create an identity at a European level:
Let me turn to nation building at the EU level. When we pass from the level of these individual European states to the question of European identity as such, what is it and what kind of deficit do we have? Everybody who is going through this crisis of the Euro realises now in retrospect that there are many flaws in the Maastricht Treaty and in the whole process of creating Europe, such as the absence of a disciplining mechanism, the absence of exit mechanism out of the either Euro or European Union itself. A lot of this discussion is dominated by people in finance and by economists because that is the short-term problem that has faced us, a new recession and the collapse of the European banking systems as a result of Europe’s failure to address politically these kinds of problems.
I don’t want to minimize these problems at all, but in a sense, there is a deeper failure at the European level, a failure in European identity. That is to say, there was never a successful attempt to create a European sense of identity and a European sense of citizenship that would define the obligations, responsibilities, duties and rights that Europeans have to one another beyond simply the wording of the different treaties that were signed. The EU in many respects was created as a technocratic exercise done for purposes of economic efficiency. What we can see now is that economic and post-national values are not enough to get people to buy into this community. So wealthy Germans feel a sense of noblesse oblige towards poorer Germans; this social solidarity is the basis of the German welfare state. But they do not feel similar obligations towards the Greeks,whom they regard as being poor disciplined, very non-German in their general approach to fiscal matters.
So there is no solidarity in that broader European sense. I think for various reasons Europe is stumbling toward a short-term solution to this crisis. But I do not think that any form of deepening at this point is a viable project unless someone pays more attention to identity and is able to answer the question in a more substantive sense of what it means to be a European. Not just in a negative sense that we don’t want conflict and old nationalisms and war, but what it means in terms of positive values.
Now, let me just conclude by saying that these issues that I have discussed- immigration, national level identity and European level identity-in the next years are going to merge as really the same issue because these are the central issues of all the new populist parties that have arisen all over the continent of Europe. That is to say, opposition to immigration and Euro-scepticism. We have older parties like the Front National in France and the Vlaams Belang in Belgium. But in the last decade we have seen the emergence of new ones, the Party of Freedom in the Netherlands, Danish People’s Party, the Sweden Democrats, True Finn Party, the Swiss People’s Party (SVP) in here in Switzerland. Opposition to Europe and immigration has a common source amongst all these parties. It is basically a populist impulse. It is a feeling that the needs of ordinary citizens have been ignored by the elite with regards to both the deepening of the European Union and to immigration issues. In France, many people that voted for the Front National were extremely resentful of the fact that, for example, living in Marseille, there is a lot of crime and the state was not willing to deal with that problem because the crime was associated with Muslim gangs. You can replicate the story in many European settings. The mainstream parties were too politically correct to recognize that these were issues that bothered ordinary people and as a result, these populist parties had to take matters into their own hands and organize.
And to be quite honest, the whole European project has been an elite-driven affair. We know that on several occasions when the issue of agreeing to a treaty was put up for popular referendum and when the people gave the wrong answer, the elite would say the people were wrong about that, they are going to have to vote again. So, I think that in a sense the rise of populism reflects in a certain way the deepening of democracy in Europe: the public is not going to be lead along by their elites like they were in the first decades after the Second World War. But it means that there are tremendous dangers for European democracy that lie ahead in the immediate future. I think we all recognize in the European Union that an important process either deepens it or it begins to split apart. The current middle ground is not one that is sustainable.
I will just leave you with the following the following fact. The deepening project, that is to say to moving from monetary to fiscal union, may make sense in terms of economics, but it is going to have a tremendous number of political costs that need to be taken into account. There is absolutely no grassroots support in Europe for this deepening project; this is again going to be an elite-driven affair are undertaken for largely technical economic reasons. It is actually something that is already stimulating the renationalization of Europe. Already, people have said fiscal union is in fact the Germanization of Europe. And it also forces conditions that amount to the suspension of democracy in Europe, now you have technocrats running the governments of Italy and Greece that were not elected in normal fashion by their constituents. The reason why they are there is because of the conditions set not by the Italian and Greek public but set by other parts of Europe. This kind of deepening both on the part by Northern and Southern countries is going to lead to doubts about political accountability in both of the halves. All of this is being undertaken against the background of a prolonged and deepening economic crisis. In many respects this identity problem is one that we all need to think about very deeply; it is one that will come back, I guarantee you, in our politics in the near future.
