19:34, 23 September 2009
Since the ill-fated 1980s efforts to give Europe an ‘identity’ like a national identity–via the flag, the anthem and so on–there has been a vacuum where a sense of Europe’s normative purpose should be. The implication has been that a Europe without an identity can never inspire widespread public affection and so can never be more than an elite project, of limited potential, characterised by a shifting institutional fix–a view apparently confirmed by efforts by that elite to engage the demos, from the Maastricht referendum in Denmark to the Lisbon referendum in Ireland and declining European Parliament turnouts throughout.
Yet Europe can have an ethos without an identity–indeed the informal European motto of ‘unity in diversity’ militates against the very idea of a single identity. That Europe can have an ethos which is magnetic has been indicated in the continuing ‘pull’ of EU membership for accession states. And a very simple way of defining what that ethos can at best be is an orientation to the ‘other’–a cosmopolitan social solidarity which is of mutual benefit to Europe’s many publics and which can ensure it reciprocates in its openness its attractiveness to the wider world. In its absence, there has been no understanding that the failure to match US competitiveness as envisioned in the Lisbon agenda has not been unrelated to the failure to match the US immigration experience, with all the cultural enrichment and innovation it has brought over many decades.
Such a Europe has though been quietly emerging for decades in the Council of Europe, an institution which never attracts the ’scepticism’ that attaches to the EU amongst the nationalistic and the excluded, and which has been driven for 60 years by an ethical rather than market-making imperative: commitment to the norms of democracy, human rights and the rule of law which made post-war western Europe a haven of peace. And in its 2008 White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue (which I had a hand in helping to draft), subtitled ‘Living Together as Equals in Dignity’, the Council of Europe set out a governance and policy framework for a Europe characterised by Ulrich Beck’s ‘really existing cosmopolitanisation’.
Thinking about the future of Europe has too often been caught in the legacy of its past. The path-dependent route followed by the European Union since 1957 has closed eyes to alternative futures. Yet the Council of Europe provides us with pointers to another route–one which can give the peoples of Europe a genuine sense of a common home. Turning EU institutions around can be compared to turning an oil tanker. Maybe turning around European studies faces just such inertia.
Why not settle for EU citizens with full political rights?
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Good question, and I fully support the idea of developing a sense of cosmopolitan citizenship, where national citizenship is complemented by European citizenship. But ‘citizens’ need a ’state’ (though not subscription to a homogeneous ‘identity’), and the Dutch and French referenda on the draft constitution did mark a setback on the progress of the EU towards ’stateness’, with the retreat to the intergovernmental treaty mode with Lisbon. So the prior question of the legitimation crisis remains.
Yet the ‘European project’ is more necessary than ever: by 1957, post-war peace and prosperity in Europe were assured after a fashion by the cold war, yet now we face the impossibility of national solutions to the global capitalist crisis, climate change and political instability and violence, and the role played by Europe is critical. So how then to resolve the huge ‘co-ordination dilemma’ of developing a coherent European response which ‘European citizens’ can widely embrace?
This can not depend on a utopian conversion from national to ‘European’ identities–and still less on public affection for extremely long and impenetrable treaties. But it might be achieved by a collective (re)commitment to universal norms. In other worse, what Europe needs to match its demos is an ethos, not an ethnos.
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You seem to be confusing national identity with ethnic identity. The two are not necessarily synonymous. A national community does not need to be founded on ethnicity or race, but can be founded on commonly accepted and valued principles, much like France, Britain or the United States (i.e. these communities are based on ‘civic nationalism’ rather than the ugly ‘ethno-nationalism’). As such, if we can work out what we want ‘Europe’ to stand for (and by implication, what we want/need it to stand against) we can articulate a European national (or communal if ‘national’ upsets you) identity. Nationalism should not be universally disregarded; there are different kinds of nationalism, some of which are inherently positive things.
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A thoughtful comment, but the civic/ethnic nationalism typology no longer stands close scrutiny. The following is a very brief extract from my forthcoming book:
…there are fundamental epistemological problems with such Weberian, ideal-typical constructs. They do not identify real objects as the ‘rich totality of many determinations’ (Marx, 1973: 100) but rather represent them as if they were impure embodiments of a quantity which only exists as such in thought. This is problematic enough, but any ‘actually-existing’ nationalism will then be a blend of the two antagonistic, putative types – somehow to mix, despite being like oil and water.
In any event, the concepts ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ are so volatile that they cannot be used to establish a stable classification or normative scheme (Brubaker, 2004: 136-44). Thomas Miley (2007) shows their inapplicability to a comparison of Catalan nationalism with its Basque counterpart (the former presented as ‘civic’, the latter ‘ethnic’). Gellner (1993: 19) punchily describes nationalism tout court as ‘the beast we all have to contain’. And Özkırımlı (2005) makes a convincing case that any variety of nationalism, in privileging a particular imagined community, contradicts the liberal principle of equality.
That principle is however sustained by the non-nationalist notion of ‘constitutional patriotism’ advanced by Habermas (2001), where civic allegiance is given to democratic institutions, rather than to the ‘nation’ – a notion as applicable at the transnational level of the European Union as the ‘nation-state’ and essential for multi-ethnic societies.
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Interesting, and I accept that there has been a merging of ‘civic’ and ‘ethno’ nationalism in the past and that extreme forms of nationalism can be dangerous and must be contained. I also accept that there is an inherent contradiction between nationalism (which is a particularist ideology) and liberalism (which is a universalising ideology). Yet, I think these arguments are straw men.
First, that there has existed a political linkage between ‘ethno’ and ‘civic’ nationalism does not mean that the concept of nationalism should be disbanded. There is no reason why the ‘ethno’ dimension cannot be de-articulated through political action, much as it has been in the United States over the past century. Unfortunately, racists and other bigots will always exist, but we should not allow them to stain or taint the wider community.
Second, nationalism can (and should) be contained. It does not need to reach the heights/depths it reached during the twentieth century. It seems to me that it is only when authoritarian regimes stoke up nationalism for their own purposes that it turns ugly.
Third, the contradiction between liberalism and forms of particularity (i.e. the national community, or, indeed, even democracy) cannot be undone. Carl Schmitt realised this (as have contemporary political philosophers such as Chantal Mouffe), even if his conclusions were way off the mark. Surely, it is this very (necessary) tension that keeps liberalism/internationalism from becoming a repressive totalitarian/totalising ideology?
And is there not a fundamental problem with your approach too, in the sense that a patriotic attachment to democratic institutions will never garner the loyalties required for a cohesive social, political and cultural community? Is this not also the bind we now find ourselves in in Western Europe? The European institutions seem utterly incapable of holding the loyalties of the European people; there is no popular vision other than some banal and dreary discourse about ‘peace’ and ‘unity in diversity’. And in some respects, the hollowing out of the national identity in the various European Union Member States (which is often completely separate from the European project) has actually increased the power of ethno-nationalism (i.e., in the British case, the rise of the British National Party, as well as the rise of other forms of ugly nationalism, like religious-nationalism).
The problem with your (?) suggestion (’constitutional patriotism’) is that it cannot offer a popular vision for the future. Patriotism, by definition, is based on a supposed love for the community – or even the past glories of that community. Nationalism, on the other hand, produces and puts forward a common vision for the community’s future, and stitches together a range of ideas into a integrated agenda. Surely it is this civic and secular form of nationalism – which can and should be structured around liberal- or social-democratic institutions – is what we as Europeans should all be working for?
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I would absolutely agree with you if the only alternative to the embedded nationalism you are advocating was an arid, abstract internationalism. But what characterises cosmopolitanism is an understanding of the (increasingly) complex and layered character of identity, which can and does encompass local, national, class, gender, religious etc aspects at once. Beck’s ‘really existing cosmopolitanisation’ aims to stress indeed that this is no utopian project but actually reflects emergent quotidian realities.
Moreover, in Postethnic America, David Hollinger argues that only a cosmopolitan approach can address the Balkanisation of identity communities in the US along ethnic lines of recent decades. The conventional US-nationalist argument, which one could encapsulate as E Pluribus Unum, otherwise finds itself facing the centrifugal trends associated with the multiculturalism of identity politics.
Unlike cosmopolitanism, nationalism does not just recognise the existence of national aspects to identity but insists that these take primacy and, whereas cosmopolitanism is a root a positive orientation to the ‘other’, nationalism always implies, as Anthony Smith has argued, a concept of a special mission attaching to one’s own imagined community, over and against others’. And this is where American nationalism, even in its liberal version, still grates with so many in Europe and the wider world, because of its association with the ‘beacon on the hill’ and the taken-for-granted US ‘leadership’ which flows from it. As we see now with the difficulty of getting the US into a position at Copenhagen which can make a meaningful contribution to a climate-change deal, this has real consequences–never mind the outworking in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths from the unilateral adventure in Iraq under a previous presidency.
It seems hard to argue that the BNP has emerged because of a ‘hollowing out’ of ‘British’ national identity. Not only is the BNP’s support confined to England within the UK multinational state, but, within that, it has been clearly concentrated in disadvantaqed working-class neighbourhoods which ‘New’ Labour is seen as having left behind in its (now discredited) courtship of the City. Jon Cruddas MP has shown in east London how the BNP can be effective challenged by a strong social-democratic agenda addressing issues like the supply of social housing.
Moreover, we have just seen in the Irish vote on the Lisbon treaty how commitment to European Union membership can have a sufficient ‘pull’ to trump nationalistic politics. The second referendum demonstrated another point made by Beck, which is that in today’s world the best way to advance the perceived national interest is by acting in a cosmopolitan way: it became blindingly obvious to wide swathes of opinion in the Republic of Ireland that, after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, the loss of goodwill from other EU members states consequent on bringing about the failure of the treaty would damage Ireland severely. The whole Lisbon imbroglio of course arose from the very popularity of the EU–that it was a club so many central and eastern European states wanted to join that it had to reform its institutions.
Finally, ‘constitutional patriotism’ is Juergen Habermas’ idea, not mine. By that he means not ‘love for the community’–a Volkish sense of Gemeinschaft which he would associate with the very German historical legacy he wants to shake off–or of a putative special mission. Rather, he means an allegiance to the institutions of a democratically constituted state–or, in the case of the EU, what Vivien Schmidt would call a state-like body.
Germany’s own history shows how critical it has been that the language of peace and unity in diversity in Europe should have replaced the language of war and the destruction of the ‘other’ which had played out to such devastating human effect in the first half of the 20th century. If it is banal and dreary, it is because it has, in most parts of the continent (not including my own), thankfully become taken for granted. It never was before.
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I accept that identity has fractured since the 1950s, away from a near-exclusively national identity, and towards something that encompasses a number of other identities simultaneously. You call this cosmopolitanism. I think you are right: that is an apt description. You are also correct in stating that it has spread far and wide, so much so that it has become ‘taken for granted’ by many Europeans.
But it is precisely this problem that I sought to address in my first reply. Cosmopolitanism is an unsustainable ideology; it has been made possible only due to the existence of a relatively benign international environment structured under the aegis of American power. This is particularly so in Western Europe’s case, which has lived under the protection of the American military since the late 1940s. Unfortunately, this situation seems to have enabled a number of fantasies (incidentally entwined with and including the very cosmopolitanism to which you allude) to proliferate on the part of many Western Europeans.
Many of us have come to believe in quaint ideas such as ‘human rights’ and ‘peace’, failing to realise that these do not actually exist but must be imposed and sustained through acts of power. In the United States, there still exists a solid sense of national community, based on America’s democratic institutions and myths of exceptionalism (as you correctly state). Americans seem to be willing to surrender their lives for their own national community, which they think is superior to most other communities in the world. This might also apply to Russia, China and India, which also all have strong forms of national identity.
Yet is there anyone in Europe willing to die for Brussels? Today, the idea seems almost absurd. This returns us to the problem at hand: what is Europe for? As I see it, unless Europeans are willing to stand up and defend their democratic institutions – and their way of life – we will eventually be swept away or subdued by foreign or domestic enemies who seek to usurp our system. We need to believe in ourselves, and in the superiority of our way of life.
The defence of our system requires a dominant master identity – a national identity – to inspire everyone to contribute to the common economic, social and political agenda. I waiver that any community without this identity, far from becoming more integrated, will actually stagnate and fall apart. This is particularly so in our case, as America’s relative power declines in the world, leaving Europeans to fend once again for ourselves.
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Any state, and any state-like body like the European Union, relies for its existence on a combination of coercion and consent, as you rightly hint. Different European thinkers have thought of that balance in different ways at different times in the 20th century.
Vladimir Lenin believed that consent was just a smokescreen for dictatorial state power, and so established a dictatorship of his own following the collapse of Tsarism. Antonio Gramsci, by contrast, recognised that in western Europe the development of civil society since the latter 19th century meant authority was based primarily on the summoning of popular consent, leading to his pioneering concept of hegemony (often misunderstood as mere domination).
‘Realist’ thinking in international relations has unfortunately not got beyond Lenin’s reduction of authority to power, and power to interests. Yet what was to end the division of Europe in 1989 was not the fact of post-war American power, which looked a shaky competitor at the time of Sputnik, but the sheer incapacity of the Soviet industrial system to keep up with the new ‘informational capitalism’ of western Europe and north America and the mobilising capacity of the ‘quaint’ language of human rights, which so embarrassed the Soviets through the Helsinki process.
Far from supporting cosmopolitanism in western Europe–the modern use of the term has only been evident in the last two decades–the cold war reduced identity expressions to polarised alternatives which could all too easily have led to nuclear holocaust. As the French-Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf has argued in his excellent book On Identity, it is precisely through such identity bifurcations (including where I live in Northern Ireland) that ‘murderers are made’. It was only when the Wall collapsed, and people like Ulrich Beck could write about how the 20th century had been dominated by ‘either/or’ while the 21st would be dominated by ‘and’, that the fundamental cosmopolitan conception of identity as complex, labile and relational became thinkable–and could be captured in the unofficial European motto of ‘unity in diversity’.
Europeans will not die for that slogan, you are quite right to point out. Yet given the human waste of what Europeans were willing to die for in the 20th century, in the name of the Fatherland, that surely is no bad thing. By contrast, the bipolar thinking behind the US-led ‘war on terror’ has led to the deaths, not so much of huge numbers of Americans committed to fight for their country (though the losses in Afghanistan are obviously mounting) but of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians who suffered the ‘collateral damage’. Only the UK within Europe still thinks, in such a nationalistic fashion, that global governance arrangements like the UN can be ignored in pursuit of unilateral war–even when the absence of international consent for such adventures dooms them from the start.
You suggest that Europe risks being ’swept away or subdued by foreign or domestic enemies who seek to usurp our system’. Yet who are these bogeymen? Europe no longer fits the friend-enemy political model of Carl Schmitt. So Europe will not make the mistake of setting up a Guantanamo Bay or developing a system of ‘extraordinary rendition’ or forsaking civil liberties by a ‘Patriot Act’.
As Mark Leonard (2005: 27)has pointed out, ‘In fact, Europe has even managed to reverse the very idea of the balance of power. As its strength grows, it is becoming a powerful magnet for its neighbours who want to join it rather than balance it … this is the first time in history that a great power has arisen without provoking other countries to unite against it.’
Because Europe does not require an enemy to define it it can be a ‘we’, rather than an ‘us’ that needs a ‘them’. One of its biggest successes in recent years has been to tame the dominant nationalistic identity of Serbia, with all the damage that did during the wars of the Yugoslav succession, by offering the attraction of European integration to the non-nationalist leadership around Boris Tadic, which has been able to secure successive electoral victories as a result.
Europe’s biggest problem is, on the contrary, the fact that it has been so popular. The arguments around the EU constitution, then the Lisbon treaty, highlight how hugely difficult it is to manage a club of 27 countries. Yet, as I said at the outset, the Council of Europe seems not to suffer from the cacophony of voices in Ireland, the UK, Poland and the Czech Republic threatening Lisbon. And that is because it strengthens the ‘unity’ in the ‘unity and diversity’ by its much more upfront normative commitments.
The EU’s other big failing, as the latest issue of Ethnopolitics highlights, is the weakness in practice, as distinct from rhetoric, of its ‘neighbourhood policy’. Its impact elsewhere in eastern Europe, as in Georgia, or on the middle-eastern imbroglio, has been very modest. Again, though, I would stress that this is more to do with the market-making origins of the European Union, and the associated path dependence, than its absence of a quasi-national identity and associated military power. Thus, Obama has been no more successful in the middle east, despite the US enjoying both of those capacities in spades. A strongly normative approach, as evidenced in the EU approach to Macedonia at the time of the Ohrid accord, which steered the way to renewed power-sharing, and in the critique of the Dayton accords by the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission, setting the agenda for subsequent calls for reform, can by contrast produce real outcomes.
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Quote – James Rogers: “As I see it, unless Europeans are willing to stand up and defend their democratic institutions – and their way of life – we will eventually be swept away or subdued by foreign or domestic enemies who seek to usurp our system. We need to believe in ourselves, and in the superiority of our way of life.”
I think the key of the subject partly lies in the paragraph above. In nowadays European societies which are increasingly favoring and witnessing the rise of individualism blended with an ever growing ethnic mingling due to globalization and migrations – of which post-colonial societies such as the UK and France are the utmost examples and recipients – the idea of a “binding nationalism” to structure these societies, within the context of the crumbling of the nation state paradigm, must be re-invented if not a new concept must be formed; A model at the European level capable of transcending our moribund European institutions and communities and favoring the rise of a European conscious among the demos. Or else the old continent will become a chessboard for the great powers.
There is no model that we shall consider as “superior” other than the one we aspire to create. Europe is a post modern endeavor which is about going beyond the nation state model and therefore creating a political model of its own (if the EU is anything to deliver beyond the single market scope). Looking to our American friends, China and India or Russia to some extent is equivalent to looking back at rhetoric machines that still thrive through the classics of nationalist (patriotic?) emotions steering within a well defined nation state framework.
While America is still united partly due to its ability to live above its means and therefore has been able to sustain the American dream model for a long period of time (monetary supremacy and financial market deregulation since Breton Woods 2, the first homogeneous and biggest market and, comparative advantage in most key industries after the second world war), China is using nationalist smoke screen as the last resort to keep its communist party (a party whose formal name is the last thing which appears as communist) in power and stick its people together against the common enemy (the Dalia Lama or East Turkestan terrorists). Indian and Russian nationalism are also remains/revisited dusty model of the 20th century…
To some extent I tend to agree with James argument that we need a certain dose of “nationalism” or call it “civic nationalism” but at the European level and the kind of injection which would actually help transcend nationalism as we hear it today. Nor a dogmatic universal ideology as the Age of Enlightenment produced neither a “volksgeist” romantic vision type. A simple set of values, culture and belief which solidify a common identity ground to all Europeans and define the European citizenship. Europa needs a “res-publica” where the “res” our “common thing” starts with our legacy: WE, the great grand children of the first and the second world wars, with Jean Monnet or Robert Schuman as our grand-parents… Belief in institutions only matters and functions as a binding element when there is already an acknowledged common public good to defend through these institutions.
Finally I would like to quote a quote from Robin Wilson: “As Mark Leonard (2005: 27) has pointed out, ‘In fact, Europe has even managed to reverse the very idea of the balance of power. As its strength grows, it is becoming a powerful magnet for its neighbours who want to join it rather than balance it … this is the first time in history that a great power has arisen without provoking other countries to unite against it.’”
I also agree with this statement – Europe is seen as a successful soft power. Yet, it does not exclude the possibility to induce a certain dose of “civic nationalism” that reflects a political Europe; or else the EU soft power is solely delimited by its capacity to absorb new countries looking for the single market entry and the subsidies from Brussels.
When you address the Serbian issue and the relative success of the EU in taming nationalism it relates to the Ethnic manifestation of nationalism which is of course not an alternative and could never work in Europe as a whole.
This is an extremely interesting subject, there is so much to be debated and so many ideas to be shared, I still have to learn a million things on this matter. Thanks for posting this blog!
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