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.
