The Future of Europe

How do you reply to that line of argument? In terms of confronting the perpetrators of the Madrid and London attacks, does it really make any difference how Europe is configured?

Glyn Morgan:
    The first few paragraphs of the conclusion to the book came back to me this morning when I turned on the news. I'll repeat them here:

Imagine that on September 11 next year, terrorists based somewhere in the Magreb fly hijacked passenger jets into the Westminster parliament, the Reichstag, the Vatican, and the Louvre. These attacks kill thousands. Let it further be imagined that the United States is either preoccupied with China or, in the wake of the recent disasters in Iraq, has lost all appetite for foreign military intervention. After years of complaining about US unilateralism, Europeans now fulminate against US isolationism.

It is worth bearing this scenario in mind, because given existing military capabilities, Europe’s nation-states, acting either singly or jointly, would be unable to conduct anything resembling the operation that the United States conducted to destroy Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan in October and November of 2001. If terrorists based in camps in the Magreb—perhaps protected by a friendly host government--promised to repeat their attacks, there would be little that European powers could -- other than fulminate against US isolationism -- do about it.

It is partly in recognition of Europe’s current military weakness and its one-sided dependence on the United States that a number of European political leaders have said that Europe needs to become a “superpower.” Most of these political leaders want to see Europe become a “superpower” without becoming a “superstate.” Some intellectual proponents of a post-sovereign Europe believe that Europe could become a “superpower” -- albeit a “superpower” of a new and different type -- while operating under a radically-decentered form of “mixed government.”

The arguments of the last few chapters have tried to show that when situated in a context of violence, conflict, and wide disparities of power between states, many of the prevailing assumptions about European political integration look rather naïve.

I pretty much stand by that argument.

The central claim of the book is that the EU is less in need of an institutional fix than a justificatory fix. The project of European integration needs, if it is go any further, a debate about this project’s point or purpose. Europe has gone as far as it can as an elite-led project. Europeans need to pose the question: what’s the justification for European political integration? Political theorists can help them answer this question.

Unfortunately, political theorists have tended to ignore the issue of justification in favor of a debate about Europe’s (alleged) “democratic deficit.” The assumption here is that many of Europe’s popularity problems can be attributed to the fact that Europe’s institutions are insufficiently democratic. That argument always struck me as silly for at least two reasons. One, Europe’s institutions are not much less democratic than those of Europe’s member states. And two, Eurosceptics tend to object not to the democratic failures of Europe’s institutions but to their very existence. I think political theorists ought to focus on the justificatory challenge posed by Eurosceptics. The book makes a stab at this justificatory challenge. It does so in three stages.

Stage one defends what I call a democratic theory of justification. This part of my argument is indebted to the later work of John Rawls. I argue that any fundamental constitutional transformation needs to meet a stringent justificatory hurdle. Not just any argument will do. I argue that a democratic theory of justification must satisfy three requirements: (a) a requirement of publicity; (b) a requirement of accessibility, and (c) a requirement of sufficiency. In working out this part of my argument, I’m indebted not just to John Rawls but also to Gerry Gaus, Steve Macedo, Tim Scanlon, Chris Bertram and others who have thought through the idea of public justification.

Stage two examines some of the most common arguments for European political integration in the light of this democratic theory of justification. I focus on two particular types of argument that have been put forward by proponents of European political integration -- welfare-based arguments and security-based arguments. In my discussion of welfare-based arguments, I focus primarily on the contrasting sets of arguments put forward by Jϋrgen Habermas and Friedrich Hayek. Habermas represents the social democratic perspective; Hayek represents the classical liberal perspective. Broadly stated, their arguments capture, if at a more sophisticated theoretical level, much of what’s at stake in the current debate -- thrown up by the French referendum -- over "social Europe” and “liberal Europe.”

Stage three defends a particular type of security-based justification for European political integration. Security, as I understand it, is a complex value that includes at its core a conception of non-dependence. Here my argument is indebted to various contemporary neo-republican political theorists such as Richard Bellamy and Philip Pettit.

Many scholars of the EU insist that Brussels suffers from a serious democratic deficit. Alex Warleigh's recent book, for example, argues that the democratic deficit is serious, and that it "arose from the mistaken institutional design and developmental trajectory respectively given to and hoped for the Union by its key founders, who created technocratic structures that were supposed to create a federal state by stealth (and thus in the absence of public engagement, or even knowledge)."

Glyn Morgan:
    The "democratic deficit" debate has, in my opinion, attracted far more attention than it deserves. True, there are undemocratic features of the EU. The same holds true for most "democratic" states--there's nothing terribly democratic about the U.S. Supreme Court or the Electoral College, for instance.

The more important point to recognize, I think, is that were the EU to become much more democratic -- say, by empowering the European Parliament -- the EU would immediately become even less legitimate in the eyes of European voters than is now the case.

The EU suffers from a justification deficit rather than a democracy deficit. Many ordinary citizens have no clear view of why it ought to exist and why it ought to be granted more powers.

I wouldn’t endorse any of these claims. Europe, at the moment, does not possess a single model of society; and to the extent that it does, that model of society is neither more nor less humane than that of the United States. More specifically, there are aspects of Europe that are more humane -- it does not, for instance, rely upon mass incarceration as a solution to its social problems. And there are aspects of the United States that are more humane—it is generally more open and accommodating to immigrants than Europe, for instance. Efforts to construct a European identity on the basis of differences with the United States -- a proto-European nationalism, as it were -— have all the drawbacks of every type of identity politics. It was disappointing to see Jacques Derrida and Jϋrgen Habermas (in their joint letter) go in for this sort of drivel.

Europe currently contains a variety of different models of welfare capitalism -- “Liberal,” “Scandinavian,” “Continental,” call them what you will. Europeans disagree among themselves about the merits of these different models. That disagreement cropped up (for largely unwarranted reasons) in the French referendum and led some people to vote against the Constitutional Treaty. Europeans have yet to work out which of these models they want to embrace and how much intra-European variety they will permit. In my view, for what it’s worth, this disagreement is best played out at the parliamentary level -- both national and European -- and not cemented into place in a Constitutional Treaty.

The claim that Europe is uniquely qualified to run the next century is also unpersuasive. Europe, if it continues on its present path, will be uniquely well-qualified for nothing but global irrelevance: economically moribund; demographically geriatric; and internationally impotent. One of the gravest threats to the future of Europe comes from the misguided notion that it can prosper as a non-military “civilian power.” To rely, as Reid, Rifkin and others suggest, on “soft-power,” would turn Europe into a superannuated version of Liechtenstein.

He wrote: "So it was not the substance of the emerging constitutional settlement that triggered opposition. The objectionable aspect was its form: an idealistic constitution. Since the 1970s, lawyers have regarded the treaty of Rome as a de facto constitution. The new document was an unnecessary public relations exercise based on the seemingly intuitive, but in fact peculiar, notion that democratisation and the European ideal could legitimate the EU."

What do you think of that line of argument?

Glyn Morgan:
    Complete rubbish. Europe was hardly in a very healthy state prior to the decision to embark upon the Convention and the Constitutional Treaty. It had recently experienced a number of embarrassing referendum defeats; Europe's economy was (and still is) moribund; transatlantic relations were at a postwar low; Europe's existing institutional architecture was ill-suited to handling 10 new members; and Europe's budget was--and still is--a disgrace. The recent national referendums also make it abundantly clear that when given the chance many Europeans attacked the very substance of the EU itself. If this is a model of stability and legitimacy, I would like to know what my good friend would consider a constitutional crisis.

I think Eurosceptics need to use a democratic standard of justification, because their proposals amount to a fundamental transformation of the existing institutional status quo. Not happy with the current intergovernmental EU -- still less happy with the very minor changes envisaged in the Constitutional Treaty -- many British Eurosceptics seek either the withdrawal of Britain from the Union or the transformation of the Union into a free trade zone. These are far-reaching changes. They need to satisfy the same democratic standard of justification that applies to arguments for a single unitary sovereign Europe or to a multi-level post-sovereign Europe.

Let me say something briefly about just the first of those three points. It is important to recognize that people disagree about the nature of security as a value. Some people certainly do think of security in terms of the absence of immediate current military threats. If that’s your conception of security, then Professor Sweeney’s probably right to say that Europe does not face any serious vulnerabilities. But that’s not my conception of “security.” And I would hope that that’s not the conception of security adopted by Europe’s political leaders. My argument works with a more expansive conception of security, which includes “adequate safeguards” against “serious harms,” even if they are currently of quite a “low probability.” The book spends quite a lot of time defining and defending “adequate safeguards,” “serious harms,” and so forth.

The near-term steps I would be in favor of adopting all involve engaging the citizenry in a debate about the desirability of European political integration.

He wrote: "Enlargement has proven to be the most successful strategy of regime change ever devised. While NATO enlargement proved important, for it provided security to countries living in the Soviet and Russian shadow, EU enlargement was absolutely crucial because it provided the basis for solidifying political freedom and enhancing economic prosperity in countries that had known little of either."

What do you think of that line of argument?

Glyn Morgan:
    I think that this is absolutely right. I've long been an advocate of European Enlargement -- including the admission of Turkey and the Ukraine. Ivo Daalder is absolutely right to worry about the consequences of the referendum defeats on political reform in places like Romania and Bulgaria. Hopefully, Europeans will come to their senses and re-commit themselves to European Enlargement. Having said that, I think it is important to recognize that European Enlargement is likely to generate far-reaching social and economic changes throughout Europe. We are likely to see a lot more mobility of people, industry, and financial capital than many people will like.

I came to spend quite a lot of time on the post-sovereignist position, if only because it is extremely fashionable amongst contemporary legal and political theorists. Post-sovereignists like to tell us that sovereignty -- both internal and external -- is now obsolete. The age of the sovereign state is now over and done with. The great difficulty with this line of argument is that no one seems to have informed the United States government of this fact. The US is a jealous guardian of its sovereignty. This is not an invention of the Bush administration. The Clinton administration was exactly the same. When the most powerful entity in the international system is a sovereign state, then it makes no sense to talk about the death of sovereignty. If post-sovereignists wish to attack sovereignty, they must conduct the argument in normative terms. Here their arguments become altogether much weaker. I think post-sovereignists remain vulnerable to a security-based challenge. If we care about security as non-dependence, then it is not a good idea to adopt a form of governance -- as post-sovereignists would have us do -- that is incapable of balancing the power of the dominant entity in the international system. The post-sovereignist vision of the EU would contribute to the disappearance of Europe as an historical actor.

What do you think of that line of argument?

Glyn Morgan:
    I don't see any link between the geographical size or scale of a state and its capacity for democratic institutions. I do, however, think that a common language is necessary. That minimal form of shared culture is absolutely indispensable particularly in the advanced industrial democracy that Europe hopes to become. True, there are some multinational exceptions to this rule -- Belgium, Canada, and India, for instance. But Belgium and Canada are forever on the verge of falling apart; and India is not (yet) an advanced industrial society. If Europe is to become politically unified, it needs a common language. I fully expect most Europeans to speak English (plus one other language) within fifty years.

Much though I’d like to think that a modern state could survive in the absence of these solidarities grounded in at least some of these characteristics, I’m prepared to concede that no modern state could flourish in their absence. Ideally, these characteristics ought to be as nonexclusive as possible -- a common language, for instance. A European State thus needs, if it is to flourish, a common language. In all probability that language will be English -- which is already the de facto lingua franca of Europe as it is. Is this thin “nationalism” -- if it even counts as such -- feasible on a pan-European level? Sure. Why not? I don’t think that national identities are fixed forever in place. Of course many ethnic and traditional nationalists would disagree. But their arguments -- to the extent that they have any -- are not consistent with what I’ve termed a democratic theory of justification.

One final point on this topic: I think it is especially important to avoid efforts to identify a much thicker pan-European nationalism grounded in a set of unifying values alleged to distinguish “Europe” from “America.” That’s the trouble, I think, with the line of argument taken by Derrida and Habermas in that letter I mentioned earlier.