What solutions have politicians, diplomats and analysts proposed to the EU’s multifaceted crisis? Debates have traditionally focused on two familiar paths. One option is to take a leap forward towards far deeper integration, to ‘complete’ the integration project by putting in place the final pieces of a full ‘political union’. The other option is to take a step back, accept that post-crisis European economies, societies and political systems are simply not ready for significant convergence, and give back greater autonomy to EU nation states. Some experts insist there is no halfway option: either the EU opts for full federation or its national economies must unhook themselves from each other.1
Most policy-makers have come to adopt a more subtle position, talking of the need to overcome such sharp divisions. Yet, in practice, their debates still focus on degrees of integration, more than on qualitatively new ideas for reshaping the European project. Even if they claim in principle to be open to novel types and permutations of policy cooperation, politicians and officials retain a preference for very traditional approaches to integration. And as the poly-crisis appears to flatten out, innovative concepts of integration have received little airing in recent policy documents.
New approaches are needed because both sides of the ‘more versus less’ debate present an overly narrow diagnosis of the EU’s problems and envisage solutions that are one-dimensional. Both fail to home in on the most potent sources of the EU’s woes. In the absence of deeper democratic quality, a leap forward towards a single Euro-state could worsen the very problems that have wreaked such calamity since 2008. Conversely, there is little reason to think that full national autonomy and an unwinding of European cooperation would remedy the factors driving the EU’s poly-crisis. Despite the emerging official rhetoric about transcending the binary divide between Europhiles and Eurosceptics, both camps still tend rather haughtily to dismiss the possibility of a qualitatively different kind of European integration.
In response to the crisis, there has been no shortage of calls for stronger unity and cooperation between European nations. Indeed, for most EU leaders, governments and politicians the instinctive, default response to the crisis has been to call for deeper EU integration – and these calls have become more numerous and vociferous in the improved conditions of 2017. The crisis has reinforced rather than dented the conviction of many in the EU that an extension of existing patterns of cooperation is required. The EU’s problem is certainly not a lack of blueprints for centralising more policy-making powers at the European level.
Perhaps most high profile was the already-mentioned Five Presidents’ Report that was presented in June 2015 and pushed for a process of change leading from economic union to financial union, then to fiscal union and finally to political union.2 The Italian government has for several years called particularly forcefully for fiscal centralisation and the creation of an EU finance minister to run economic policy across the continent.
The several dramatic moments of the eurozone crisis have triggered a wave of proposals for further integration. These proposals have nearly all contained the same elements: a centralised budget and fiscal competences, along with a political union based around a primary role for the European Parliament. Many politicians have argued that the fragile economic context requires tighter, more bureaucratised rules to prevent problems from resurfacing in the future. Politicians’ speeches, officials’ memos and analysts’ articles follow a standard playbook: greater Europe-wide infrastructure spending combined with EU job-creation initiatives, supplemented with ideas for deeper integration to manage refugee flows.
In many studies, ministers and experts advocate an extension of the existing structures of European integration.3 While governments may often talk of the need for novel approaches, the EU continues to introduce plans and laws that follow the existing top-down and regulation-oriented means of centralising more powers – in areas from information technology to services, energy and banking. Many in the EU have pinned considerable hopes on the ‘Energy Union Strategy’ agreed in 2015. They believe this could be the core element of a relaunch and deepening of European cooperation, based on the model of how integration in coal and steel kick-started integration in the 1950s.
In May 2016, a group of notable European politicians, writers and public figures issued a manifesto for a ‘new Europe’, again consisting of calls for a common EU budget, more centralised spending and redistribution, more defence integration and a directly elected Commission president.4 The morning of the UK referendum, the Spanish foreign minister, José Manuel García-Margallo, wrote that whichever way the result went the EU now needed to move forward to full political and economic union and a ‘United States of Europe’.5
A manifesto put out by the French and German foreign ministers after the Brexit vote advocated pushing ahead with political union. The plan acknowledged that
We have to be more focused on essentials and on meeting the concrete expectations of our citizens […] we have to strictly focus our joints efforts on those challenges that can only be addressed by common European answers, while leaving others to national or regional decision making and variation.
But, somewhat at odds with this apparent willingness to rethink, the document then boldly announced that, anyway, France and Germany ‘will therefore move further towards political union’.6
At their August 2016 meeting, the French, German and Italian leaders raised the need for deeper commitments to cooperation in defence, migration and economic growth. In particular, they presented a ‘Europe of Defence’ as a core proposal for regenerating the EU project. Building on this meeting, at yet another supposedly make-or-break summit in Bratislava in September 2016, EU leaders insisted on the need for a post-Brexit relaunch based on similar ideas for security integration. In June 2017, the EU set up a ‘Military Planning and Conduct Capability’ to facilitate the management of conflict resolution and counter-terrorism missions. In the same month, the Commission launched a new Defence Fund to draw money for the first time from the EU budget for military projects. The plan is for up to 1.5 billion euros to be spent each year from 2020, with smaller amounts to kick-start military-technology collaboration before then.7
Meanwhile, in the European Parliament two high-profile reports on the future of the EU were agreed at the beginning of 2017. They followed a standard pattern of running through every area of policy in turn and advocating deeper, supranational integration as the solution to problems in each area. The reports urged more, not less binding EU rules; measures to undercut the role of national governments; more resources for various parts of the EU budget; more European Parliament power over the Council; and less scope for flexible forms of cooperation outside existing, formal EU procedures. Neither report acknowledged any need to consider new approaches – indeed, they gave no clue at all that recent events might have raised questions over these stock policy recipes.8
Debate then centred on the sixtieth-anniversary Rome summit in March 2017. To provide ideas for this summit, the Commission presented a long-awaited white paper offering scenarios for the EU’s future. This document refers to the need to look beyond existing templates and combine different integration logics. Yet its scenarios – basically: more cooperation, less cooperation or variable-speed integration – in fact still define the question of the EU’s future mainly in terms of degrees of integration.9 More widely, in debates leading up to the crucial series of European elections in 2017, parties offered few detailed or radically innovative ideas on EU reform.10
At the Rome summit, leaders put off any major decisions until the end of the year, stressing the need to wait until elections in France and Germany had been held. Their logic was that with these elections out of the way, leaders would then be less restrained from moving forward. And indeed, there is now a widespread feeling that the results of the Dutch and, especially, the French elections dramatically improve the prospects for reviving the EU. The Commission is set to present a programme for deeper integration at the end of 2017 that many believe can now be taken forward in 2018.
The British election in June 2017 has fed into this conviction. The UK’s post-election uncertainty seems to have reinforced unity among other member states. EU politicians now assert that Brexit has worked as an antidote to Euroscepticism and populism across the continent. In many settings, maximalist, federal options are back on the table – a buoyant self-confidence in the EU is now displacing talk of the need for alternative models of integration.
Since his election in May 2017, there has been much talk of President Macron being a catalyst for deeper integration. Macron has talked astutely about how fundamental change is needed to the way the EU works and has even recognised that the UK vote to leave reflects the Union’s current shortcomings. The new president has suggested an innovative series of ‘democratic conventions’ on the EU’s future (a proposal we will return to in Chapter 5). At the same time, he calls unequivocally for deeper integration and full economic union. Eyes have been trained on Germany’s reaction. Even if most observers doubt that significant convergence on economic policies will occur, the French and German governments have suggested they may now be willing to contemplate treaty change to usher in some areas of deeper integration. At the end of summer 2017, Chancellor Merkel made positive comments about economic union, but clarified that she favoured a very limited version of this.
With their national rehabilitation so tied to the postwar model of integration, the French and German elites still seem to show little appetite fundamentally to question the status quo and explore less formal, less hierarchical, more open forms of cooperation. They have both supported a tilt towards intergovernmental power in recent years. German politicians often stress that they dislike disruptive politics within Germany itself, preferring smoothly managed trade-offs – and they tend to believe the same style of politics is best for Europe and the EU too. With Angela Merkel now obliged to begin difficult talks to form a new government, this caution is even less likely to change.
Moreover, the external context in 2017 has not been propitious for ambitious, new thinking. Donald Trump’s mercurial and erratic actions have encouraged a ‘banding together’ mentality among EU member states – with much talk of the need to deepen current integration plans as a response to a US president now openly critical of the EU project. While this is welcome, insiders acknowledge that this has once again diverted attention from any ‘risky’ rethink of the integration model.
Just as much as policy-makers, writers, academics and think-tankers have also advocated a centralisation of similar sets of policies to existing EU institutions and processes. For instance, the much-cited if controversial Bernard-Henri Lévy argues that only deeper political integration and common policies can now save Europe, as he sees the choice as an existential and binary one: ‘Europe or barbarism, Europe or chaos.’11 In one illustrative example of the standard set of reforms generally espoused, an influential project carried out by the European Policy Centre has called for a ‘New Pact for Europe’, comprising a package of large-scale stimulus investment at the EU level, more union spending on social policy, centralised fiscal capacity, a centralised unemployment insurance scheme, and EU-wide voting for single lists of European Parliamentary candidates.12
Author Ulrike Guérot agrees that integration needs a new start, and calls for a ‘Republican Europe’. This would involve power being taken away from governments in the European Council; voting on a pan-European rather than national basis; voters defining themselves as citizens of Europe as much as national subjects; and Europeanised taxes and social rights.13 More subtly, Sergio Fabbrini argues that powers should be centralised, albeit without a single EU government: a federal union rather than a federal state.14 I could cite many more articles and reports in the same vein. In general, analysts may suggest slightly different terminologies and different policy mixes, but they insist that more formal, institutionalised cooperation is needed.
Many writers and reports start by acknowledging that old-style federalist visions are no longer feasible, but then advocate measures that in most senses look very similar to traditional models of supranational integration – even when dressed in the different language of confederalism (the notion of cooperation flowing from states that retain ultimate sovereignty) or republicanism (whereby political authority flows from citizen consent). They invariably map out a form of political union that is still based around much greater centralisation of powers. The impression is that at least some seek to drop the term ‘federal’ mainly for presentational reasons.
Despite their many judicious ideas, these calls suffer from several shortcomings in how they relate to the context of the current crisis. First, they do not work with the grain of member states’ and citizens’ actually existing concerns and positions. Proposals invariably take the form of injunctions that can appear to be plucked from thin air. Europe must be more united. Governments must have more common policies. Powers must be transferred to the EU centre. Ideas are replete with a litany of ‘shoulds’ untethered from political and social reality. They build castles in the air. If unity and solidarity were so easy to conjure up, one imagines that governments would already have implemented these ‘shoulds’ and the EU would not have found itself in the current morass.
There is a nagging air of unreality about some such proposals: member states that have fought tooth and nail over the last decade are expected suddenly to give up huge chunks of power in the name of a shared vision of economic development. These blueprints never seem to explain how governments are likely to make this step. And even if it does now, from late 2017, prove possible for governments to follow through on steps towards deeper integration, they would risk misidentifying the structural drivers of the poly-crisis, deepening divisions and exacerbating citizens’ feelings of disempowerment.
Generations of political elites have been acculturated into thinking of European cooperation in terms of one set framework, and of holding a specific model of EU institutions and rules to be synonymous with European solidarity. Understandably, this makes it difficult for them to think outside these parameters, even when many of them now insist they are favourably disposed to doing so. Elites’ rhetoric is counterproductive in ratcheting up the level of aspiration and making more ambitious promises in response to the crisis. If the EU were more modest in its level of ambition, citizens might be less frustrated and angered when results fall short. The Energy Union provides one concrete example: governments committed to this in a blaze of high-level promises, before they realised that member states have increasingly divergent notions of what energy security means and that the sharper competition for ever-more finite resources could be a source of major disunity rather than a new platform for EU success.
Of course, it is entirely logical and desirable to call for stronger European unity. After all, who would aspire to disunity? But the ubiquitous and habitual calls for deeper integration implicitly understand ‘unity’ in a very particular form. All governments preach ‘unity’, but each state wants unity in the sense of its own interests being supported by others in Europe. Few mean they are willing to relinquish vital interests of their own in the name of European unity. Appeals to unity and solidarity may strike a desirable note, but they have become vacuous – that is, they add little in terms of understanding how we map a practical path out of the quagmire in which the European dream finds itself.
The standard proposals fail to explain why we should expect support for the concept of European citizenship to materialise now, after such a divisive period of crisis. Analysis uniformly posits the resurfacing of local or national identities as a problem. Ideas for moving forward rarely get to grips with the practical need for a new Europe to work with the grain of local identities rather than against it. Any desire to reclaim local ownership from the EU is now widely dismissed as nativist nationalism. Often it may indeed be so, but this is not always and certainly not necessarily the case. I will return to this point later, in drawing out what legitimate and productive roles such local identities might play in an alternative Europe.
A second concern is that the standard proposals may risk aggravating the causal drivers of the poly-crisis. They suffer from a kind of circular hollowness. They call for an extension of the same integration model that has been the cause of the EU’s current crisis. Simply calling for more unity and convergence is unlikely to be productive when the crisis has revealed the very opposite – divergence and a creeping distrust between European peoples. Council president Donald Tusk has realised that ‘A vision of a federation does not seem the best answer to euro-scepticism, euro-pessimism and the spectre of a break-up that is haunting Europe.’15 This is not to argue against deeper cooperation per se but rather to suggest that more focus is first needed on improving the basic structure of integration that is to be advanced. ‘More Europe’ may be desirable, but ‘more Europe’ of the wrong type will be counterproductive.
Many recent reform blueprints are repackaged from previous, very different periods. Proposals now seek to replicate the institutional model of the European Coal and Steel Community in areas – such as the digital market – that could not be more different in their basic economic dynamics from the heavy industries of the 1950s.16 The new European defence plans also return to proposals tried decades ago and put forward many times since then. While citizens are undoubtedly concerned about security, they have hardly been demonstrating in the streets for shared defence procurement as the means of restoring their faith in the European project. The new Defence Fund is at the least somewhat insensitive in committing 1.5 billion euros of new money per year to help arms manufacturers develop prototype military equipment at a time when the EU is forcing member states to cut pensions, education and health spending. When Federica Mogherini now regularly talks about the possible development of a common Euro-drone, one wonders if this is really what citizens want as a means of feeling reconnected with their EU. Indeed, a focus on the notoriously opaque policy sectors of defence and intelligence-sharing risks taking the EU even further away from people’s desire for more transparency and accountability.
The standard proposals misdiagnose what is needed to get to the root causes of today’s Eurosceptic populist surge. An unfortunate dynamic is at work: as rightist populists appropriate the discourse of redemocratising the EU – they gathered together in Germany in January 2017 under the banner of ‘Freedom for Europe’ – this makes mainstream politicians more reluctant to deviate from the current model of integration. They fear that to do so might be seen as a defeat, playing into the hands of right-wing populists.
However, for all the simplistic, intolerant and parochial positions held by populist parties, their rise cannot be dismissed as an errant anomaly. The standard pro-integrationist prescriptions struggle to understand the depth of citizens’ concerns and underlying social change. European governments and officials work to an overly simplistic trope that unhappiness with the EU is coming from those ‘left behind’ – implying that all the EU needs to do is to extend the benefits of existing integration to more people. Centrist, liberal, internationalist politicians have increasingly talked of the need to rethink how to defeat the nationalist right; but few of them have suggested that devising different ways of doing European cooperation could help towards this end. Prime minister Mark Rutte defeated Geert Wilders in the Dutch election by promising to rebuild patriotism and national identity – but he did not spell out what kind of reformed EU he would seek in order to fulfil these promises.
The EU poly-crisis is the manifestation of a broader clash between, on the one hand, changes in the international economy and global political order, and, on the other, citizen empowerment. It is well known that people turn away from cosmopolitanism to nativist identity as protection against uncertainty and turmoil. Current EU policies and integration models seem to have accentuated the economic, political, social and cultural disorder that drives such fretful insularity. These are deep-rooted trends, not mere popular caprice – and as such, it is unlikely that they can be excised simply by pushing ahead with more of the same from the EU. The point is that there are profound, structural reasons why the traditional templates for deeper EU integration need to be rethought.17
Flowing from this, a third weakness is that many calls for ‘more Europe’ flow from a questionable assumption that the key change required is for stronger political leadership to push forward with deeper integration against misinformed and irrational doubters among the population. If only national governments would stand aside, the narrative runs, citizens would cooperate across borders free of petty national rivalries. The premise is that cooperatively minded European citizens are being held back from EU harmony by devious and feckless national governments.
This is, surely, a dangerous caricature upon which to base a vision of the EU’s future. It is dependent on an understanding of power, agency and political change that is discordant with ongoing social change – a pervasive problem with much EU analysis to which we will return many times during the book. A common argument has been that Europe needs strong leaders to push on with integration against populist opinion. But if done too heavy-handedly this may risk widening the increasingly striking disconnect between leaders and citizens even further.
With polls showing that the more citizens engage with EU debates the more doubts they express about the EU, solutions cannot simply be about explaining or communicating the EU better – as elites often claim.18 In the wake of President Macron’s election, there is again much talk of a repaired Franco-German motor being the key to reviving the EU. While this is clearly a welcome prospect, it once again risks detracting from the underlying changes in political process that are required. It should be remembered that for many other member states, the hauteur of the Paris–Berlin duopoly has been one of the causes of the EU’s crisis, not its potential remedy.
In a similar vein, to conclude that Brexit shows the need for EU leaders to push forward to political union, if necessary against public ambivalence, must be a mistaken reading of what caused the poly-crisis. There is significant risk in the emerging argument that the UK’s apparent self-immolation will unlock the doors of full political union. Forging unity by using Brexit Britain as the EU’s antonymic ‘other’ will not address the structural roots of the poly-crisis. Indeed, EU leaders may be using a perfectly understandable antipathy towards Britain’s truculent Conservative government as a convenient distraction from their own inability to rethink integration. It might be entirely reasonable for the EU to feel little sympathy for the UK’s self-inflicted pain, but it is hardly an inspiring message to reignite deeper integration on the basis of fear – that is, by stressing that citizens should be afraid of the consequences of questioning the status quo.
A fourth point: there is a certain intellectual and analytical atrophy that prevents ideas about the EU’s future keeping pace with the way that European societies, economies and political processes are changing. The calls for more of the same do not flow from a theory of social and political change that captures the complexities of how politics and societies are evolving. The process of change upon which European integration has long been based looks simplistic today: it assumes that interdependence deepens, that it works, and that therefore states and citizens automatically fit into a pattern of wanting more of the same kind of integration.
These existing models of integration were fashioned over half a century ago. Since then European societies have changed out of all recognition. The relationship between citizen and state has undergone a far-reaching transformation. It is hardly surprising that the EU’s institutional processes also need updating in tune with these underlying shifts. We will pick up this crucial analytical issue in Chapter 4, when I attempt to set the parameters for a more rooted, bottom-up concept of change and power – and to tease out how this might lead us towards an alternative form of deeper European cooperation.
Among commentators and researchers, there is surprisingly little plurality of views. Most analysts stick closely to a very traditional way of interpreting the European project. There are journalists who are profoundly Eurosceptic, but few experts who question the basic premises of the integration model from a more positive standpoint. Writing commonly takes the form of journalists, intellectuals, think-tankers and former politicians calling for today’s leaders to adopt bold new ideas – without the writers themselves going beyond the familiar range of very old ideas about the EU project.
Academic work on European integration has focused on established concerns like the debates between intergovernmentalism and supranationalism (cooperation between governments versus policy powers being vested in EU institutions), between rationalism and constructivism (governments carefully weighing up their interests versus cooperation flowing from values and identities), or about multilevel governance (the coexistence of different levels of policy-making authority). These debates have deflected scholars away from the big questions about Europe’s future. The inadequacy of current concepts gives birth to a paradox: the crisis has deepened both supranationalism and intergovernmentalism, and both of these have intensified the turmoil and dissatisfaction now at hand. Ian Manners and Richard Whitman have drawn a link between these conceptual shortcomings and the ongoing EU crisis: they suggest that ‘more pluralism, productive dissent, inclusivity, robust scholarship and engagement with the EU political field would help address the yawning chasm between scholarly theories and the political realities of the EU.’19
More radically, critical thinkers lament that the standard solutions are failing because they simply mimic the forms and practices of the nation state. The EU has failed in its mission to map out a different kind of political system and in its post-modern promise of a deterritorialised politics. Post-structuralists – who search for power interests behind political concepts – say the EU project has come to replicate the same kind of exclusionary actions of the nation state, especially in terms of how it runs pro-market economic policies, how it seeks to develop European identities and now through its search for ‘harder’ borders around the Union.20 Ben Rosamond sums up the state of debates: the search for alternative approaches to European integration now requires analysts to set themselves against the rather limiting conceptual boundaries of accepted scholarship in EU studies.21
There is a specific strand of calls for deeper integration that has assumed particular resonance and force within post-crisis debates. Among analysts, the most common call is for future EU integration to be based on centralised measures that counteract austerity. Many understand deeper EU cooperation and solidarity to be synonymous with a Union less wedded to financial austerity. Many equate an alternative Europe with an anti-austerity Europe – and an EU capable of taming the unaccountable power of global markets and finance.
Hundreds of articles have been written arguing the same line: that saving and changing the EU is a matter of Germany allowing more inflationary and expansionary policies, and allowing wages of German workers to rise as a means of strengthening the competitiveness of periphery countries. Centre-left parties in France, Spain and Italy have pressed for a single EU-wide minimum wage, retirement age, unemployment fund and treasury. In some member states, conservative and other right-wing parties have also pushed back against stringent austerity.
The anti-austerity argument is well-grounded and essential, but in some ways has clouded debate about future models of integration. The questioning of austerity might be a necessary part of reinventing European integration, but it is not sufficient for this purpose. While the criticisms of austerity are well made, they do not reimagine the core political processes of European cooperation. There may be powerful reasons to sympathise with the economic and social aims of the anti-austerity line, yet this line does not proffer a model of integration. It advocates different policies, not a different form of EU integration. My concern here is not to enter in detail into the long-running debate about whether fiscal prudence has been too harsh; rather, it is to distinguish this debate from the broader reflection required to reset the EU integration model.
For some leftist critics, the crisis was and remains a crisis of market capitalism more than of the EU as such. They berate governments for failing to curtail financial organisations, the real perpetrators of the crisis. Many writers strongly urge more centralised integration as a means to embed a more social-democratic or socialist set of economic policies. Their concern is not with the qualitative, political features of the integration process in itself. Rather, their goal is to change the nature of the EU’s policies – in order to bring about the creation of a more effective, supranational welfare state.22 A common assumption is that a commitment to fostering growth would suffice to resolve the EU’s crisis of legitimacy.
There is then a tendency to suggest that creating an anti-austerity, social Europe is the same thing as achieving a more workable way of organising the process of integration – rather than being a preference for one type of policy. The crisis has engendered endless debate about whether austerity is necessary or counterproductive; whichever position turns out to be right from the retrospective viewpoint of the longue durée, for now both will retain adherents. This means that in practice the EU needs to find a form of political process capable of dealing with diametrically opposed positions on this question.
This issue is now very much centre-stage in policy debates, as the newly elected President Macron calls for a fully centralised economic and fiscal union. It may be that Macron’s political momentum wins some concessions from Germany on economic policy and that the EU is now able to take modest steps towards deeper economic union. Many predict that Germany will feel pressure to show greater flexibility if Macron advances on domestic reforms within France. Even if there is a limited degree of rapprochement around some of Macron’s proposals, however, it will not negate the need for deeper political changes. A mild, welcome dose of Franco-German convergence on economic, fiscal and banking union would be beneficial, but not a panacea. Slightly more flexible spending rules and steps towards some redistributive union would not suffice to ‘refound’ the EU, as Macron himself has suggested is necessary. For the moment, the president’s early efforts to meet EU fiscal targets have dragged down his approval ratings.
Social Europe is invariably presented as a solution, a means of making the EU more popular and meaningful to its citizens. Again, however, it is by no means certain that there is common agreement on social Europe any more than there is on monetary policy. One might reason that if social entitlements are so dear to citizens, they are unlikely to cede control over these to EU decision-makers.23 One poll of eight member states shows that the areas of policy where citizens most strongly support competences remaining at the national level are budgetary policy and unemployment benefit – in these policy areas 73 and 66 per cent of people, respectively, want national sovereignty retained.24 Another late-2016 survey shows that those people fearful of economic interdependence are the most sceptical that more centralised integration is the best antidote to globalism.25
Leftists have not yet advocated or designed a new political model of integration. In Spain, Podemos speaks against ‘the bankers’ EU’, but does not have a vision of integration that is any less centralist than what currently exists; indeed, it came out against the notion of flexible integration. So-called ‘new’ parties like Podemos and Syriza in Greece, which promised to transform Europe, for the moment look to be as mired in the arts of trade-offs and power-seeking as the casta they so fiercely excoriate.
If it is to serve as the basis for a common EU identity, the European social model needs updating. A strong and convincing argument has been made in recent years that the state needs to switch its role from compensating losses to pre-emptively investing in what is necessary to make the EU globally competitive.26 Yet this has rarely been the focus of governments’ proposals for deeper integration. The main debates in recent years appear to have got struck on the single question of whether to increase or decrease state spending, replaying discussions from several decades ago, as if nothing had changed in the structure of global economic relations.
Both sides of the austerity debate seem stuck – constantly bewailing either the narrowness of German policy visions or, conversely, the free-rider rule-breaking of debtor states. If a magical, breakthrough summit should suddenly conjure up a new consensus, so much the better. But for now this seems unlikely. What is needed is a different process – one that can deal with the current divergences, work around them and explore new avenues for and understandings of solidarity.
If generic entreaties for ‘more Europe’ fail to address the particular characteristics of the poly-crisis, neither do positions at the other end of the spectrum: the increasingly shrill calls for ‘less Europe’. My purpose here is not to offer a general or exhaustive evaluation of the anti-EU case, but rather to explain why it fails to speak to the specific drivers of the multiple crises witnessed since 2008.
Those rejecting the ‘deeper integration’ mantra overwhelmingly urge ‘a Europe of nations’: a winding back of European cooperation, not a new form for advancing collaboration. The option of national autonomy may have won support in response to the crisis, but it is out of sync with the factors that have caused it. Those pressing for a simple, blanket recipe of ‘less Europe’ misdiagnose the underlying causal drivers of the poly-crisis just as much as those calling for the opposite.
For sceptical analysts, the EU has simply become too ossified to reform in any significant way and therefore detachment from the European project is the only viable way forward. The ship is sinking and the best course of action is to jump overboard early enough to grab a lifeboat. The crisis shows that the only viable alternative now is to disband the integration project altogether. The underlying ‘deceit’ of the incremental method of cumulative integration has been laid bare and all its unresolvable contradictions rendered more acute by the crisis. There are no feasible different models of integration to consider. Disintegration is inevitable and governments can only cause harm by swimming against this unstoppable tide.27
Doubters predict that the EU may survive in vestigial form, but will no longer be central to the European conduct of affairs, as it will simply be bypassed. This is especially so because new technology has resulted in cooperation occurring on a completely different plane from that on which EU institutions are based.28 Some analysts insist that the EU’s dissolution would enable fully sovereign states to deal with security threats – from Russia to refugees and IS – more effectively than they are doing at present.29
Yet unspooling European cooperation would not address the underlying reasons why the poly-crisis has been so serious. The dynamics of the EU’s recent difficulties do not in themselves demonstrate that nation states are now more able to meet policy aims by freeing themselves from regional cooperation schemes. Europeanness may have lost some of its sheen in citizens’ eyes, but states have hardly gained the capacities needed to provide solutions without European cooperation.
Isolationists’ solutions fail on their own terms. Sceptics insist that either diluting or exiting the EU is the way to recover effective control and accountability. They equate ‘representing the people’ with defending a supposed national interest against the intrusions of European-level decisions. They wrongly see reviving democracy as synonymous with limiting European cooperation. In practice, national isolation or radically diminished degrees of EU cooperation would leave nation states vulnerable to the influence of deepening interdependence with even less say over the external constraints to which national economies are subject. It is a perspective on control and autonomy that contradicts its own premises and is unjustifiably pre-emptive in equating more democracy with less integration.
National isolation is not a guaranteed way of recovering democratic control. As we will see in the next chapter, the legitimacy of national political systems is waning just as much as that of EU institutions. Polls now regularly show that in several member states citizens have lost faith in national institutions just as much as – if not more than – in EU institutions. There are only a handful of exceptions to this trend, including the UK, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands.30
If the EU had not existed, it is by no means clear that citizens would have found better national political avenues to ensure effective remedies to the economic and political as well as security- and identity-related aspects of the poly-crisis in recent years. While concern has rightly grown over European integration producing marginalised ‘outsiders’, the strategies of national autarchy that predominated before the 1980s were hardly a resounding success in preventing this phenomenon. Perhaps reflecting this, central and Eastern European states have angrily huffed and puffed against the EU, but then in practice press for more benefits from the existing model of integration rather than mapping out any alternative.31
The argument put forward by Yanis Varoufakis is instructive, as a politician whose direct and punishing experience of the EU’s democratic distortions gave him more reason than most to campaign to leave the Union. He cautions:
I wish that we could […] have a degree of autonomy, autarky […] You can’t […] if you exit, then you will always be subject to a market that is run by technocrats and you will have even less degrees of freedom than you have now […] I believe in staying in [the EU] to subvert the rules.32
Leading French political philosopher Pierre Manent has elegantly traced the lineage of democracy’s historical development to conclude that the EU project has detached self-governance from its necessary moorings in the nation state. He argues for the reassertion of the nation state, not as a cultural construct that generates antagonistic nationalism, but as the entity that is necessary for organising self-government – a self-government that has to be about mediating political differences and not simply a set of formal rights enshrined in EU treaties.33 While such analytical frameworks represent a vital contribution to the debate over the EU’s future, it is striking that they invariably eschew any discussion of how nationally based self-government is to be combined with the democratic management of interdependence – and tend not to acknowledge that this latter imperative has unavoidably to be tackled.
The poly-crisis is not a reflection of unravelling interdependence. Anthony Giddens points out that while the crisis has brought sharp divisions to the surface, it shows how interdependent member states and societies are and how deeply they share a single ‘community of fate’. The only viable way forward is for citizen-led models of integration to emerge based on the principle of ‘mutuality’ – the recognition that shared responsibilities are unavoidable in today’s closely interwoven patterns of social, economic and political relations that stretch across national borders.34 This reflects the fact that national isolation rubs against deeply entrenched patterns of cultural diversity and social linkages that have been built up across European borders.35
For example, many studies demonstrate the enormous cost of reinstalling national border controls. One calculates that over a decade the EU would lose the equivalent of Italy’s whole GDP.36 Some writers believe today’s most successful states are those that embrace the geopolitical advantages of migration.37 The startling growth in cross-border digital networks makes it especially clear that purely national governance is unlikely to be able to regulate modern social and economic activity.
Neither is it clear that national isolation would bring politics into line with the popular will, despite the gains registered by Eurosceptic parties. Overall, opinion polls show that while few citizens support deeper integration across the board, few support a dramatic unwinding of integration. The apparent paradox is that citizens seem to want to keep the basic level of integration more or less the same, yet they also express growing dissatisfaction with the way the EU works.38 An extensive polling project carried out by the Bertelsmann Stiftung found that ‘Europe’s citizens may be dissatisfied about the current state of affairs in Brussels, but they are equally unhappy with the situation in their national capitals’ – that is, citizens do not see the nation state as a vastly better alternative to European cooperation.39
The idea has taken root that support is holding up for the EU only among a privileged, urban and cosmopolitan elite; but the figures do not show that it is only an ‘elite’ who acknowledge the need for interdependence to underpin national interests. The debate is being reframed in a misleading way – as if a less liberal Europe would be less elitist. A common notion suggests that liberalism is some kind of disease specific to this same self-serving elite. But if liberalism is understood as tolerant protection for the voiceless, then surely it is clear that a less liberal Europe would be even more elitist, not less so.
Anti-EU populists’ division of society into ‘the good people’ versus ‘the bad elite’ does not correspond with views on Union policies. Among ‘the people’ there are huge variations, between those doing well out of European cooperation and keen for more integration and those less at ease with its cosmopolitan ethos. The populist dichotomy does not in itself help map any particular form of EU reform capable of commanding consensual support. Both leftist and rightist populism contain elements of genuine grievance, but both tend to an extreme. An alternative Europe cannot realistically be one that undoes economic interdependence, as some on the left advocate, or one set up to defend a supposed European civilisation, as some conservatives want.
Despite their support for prime minister Viktor Orbán, Hungarians still profess a favourable attitude towards the EU. Orbán’s Fidesz party only turned critical after the EU rejected its pleas for more flexible austerity; it also felt that the EU was biased against the conservative values of the voters it represented. Similarly, in Italy voters have switched to Eurosceptic parties while polls show they apparently still support the general aspiration of deeper union. All this suggests that disintegration would hardly address the problems of social frustration among may parts of the population. It would be no magic wand.
History does not suggest that weaker regional cooperation results in stronger nation states, as if there were a zero-sum trade-off between the two levels. Realists often celebrate the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia as a European security system based on national sovereignty. However, under the Westphalia system, France, Prussia, Spain, Austria, Britain, Russia and others tried just about every combination of alliances and enmities without stemming bloody conflict. Maintaining a balance of power came at a huge cost in terms of lost lives and societies’ constant mobilisation for war. Could Europe really expect to be free of such fraught geopolitical dynamics today if integration evaporated?
After such a chastening poly-crisis, many policy-makers acknowledge the need for fundamentally different approaches to integration. Yet beneath the rhetorical calls for experimentation, most formal reform proposals in fact tread well-worn paths. Even as they now talk of a new era of deepened cooperation, governments have failed to address the structural failings of the EU integration model as successive crises have hit the continent. Leaders work with the mindset that a leaking boat cannot be fixed in the middle of a storm. Yet the EU boat is constantly battered by gales and the moment of repair never arrives. There never will be a perfect, becalmed opportunity for designing and implementing a grand template for the future EU as an all-defining, all-clarifying solution. At the risk of over-extending this metaphor, it might be suggested that leaders should stop trying to add more and more layers to their heavily leaking boat and instead transfer to a more seaworthy vessel. Different ways must be found of recovering ground on the journey towards European solidarity – along with a more convincing conceptualisation of how positive, constructive change is likely to come about.