Cosmopolitan

Eurosclerosis

cosmopolitan — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 22:11:00 +0000

A quarter of a century ago, it was said that Europe was in the grip of ‘Eurosclerosis’. The intellectual retreat of Keynesianism, as the modest inflation critical to a Keynesian demand-management programme became a vertiginous problem, and the failure to develop a persuasive post-capitalist model, exemplified by the defeat of the wage-earner funds project in Sweden, meant that ‘Europe’ no longer meant the better tomorrow with which it had been associated ever since the defeat of fascism and mass unemployment. It was the Delors presidency of the EU which, even though Delors himself had no answers to these new challenges, eventually rescued Europe–even if that only postponed the crisis.
Today, there is another Eurosclerosis. In part it is a product of success: the attractiveness of the European ‘club’ has brought about its marked expansion to 27 members, but at the expense of the broad, progressive, anti-fascist consensus which once it shared (no surprise since the east and central European members could understandably take a cynical view of that rhetoric, measured against their own post-war experience). In part, it is that globalisation has allowed capitalist firms to escape national regulation, yet an obvious co-ordination dilemma has prevented the EU taking on that role, which would imply for not just a monetary but a fiscal union.
Yet the paradox is that the citizens of Europe, however alienated they feel from the ‘actually-existing Europe’ of the institutions, are crying out for solutions to the challenges they currently face–job insecurity, cultural diversity, environmental crisis, and so on–which can only come at a European, and then global, level. The only other show in town is a mistrustful and lowest-common-denominator relationship between a centre-right (under Obama) US and, as at the climate-change summit, a right-wing Stalinist dictatorship in China.
Finding a way through this is going to be incredibly difficult. And while huge amounts of academic analysis of ‘Europe’ in recent decades has gone into endlessly (and tediously) surveying the institutions and their evolution, relatively little has addressed whether it is possible for the PES and NGOs across Europe to construct a new historical bloc. Yet this is key to determining whether ‘another Europe is possible’ and whether it can provide a beacon to the world–in the absence of which, we are, among other things, on a countdown to global ecological disaster.

Van Rompuy: Europe as Christian club?

cosmopolitan — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:34:23 +0000

Gulay Icoz has raised a critical aspect of the appointment of Herman von Rompuy as president of the European Council which has not received enough emphasis.

According to the Guardian, van Rompuy believes: “The universal values which are in force in Europe, and which are also fundamental values of Christianity, will lose vigour with the entry of a large Islamic country such as Turkey.” This is a disingenuous claim: the whole point about universal values (democracy, human rights and the rule of law) is that they provide the basis on which individuals of all religions and none can feel at home in a Europe characterised by ‘unity in diversity’.

And it is not just significant vis-a-vis a future Turkish accession, still some years off in the most optimistic scenarios. It is critical in the here and now for individual Muslims in the Europe of 27, who are being implicitly told by van Rompuy that their support for universal values is in question. Progressive Muslims recognise that embracing a ‘European Islam’ is not only valuable to promote integration between Muslims and non-Muslims; it is also of value to foster the reform of Islam. Van Rompuy’s is exactly the wrong message to send to them.

Intercultural dialogue has become a key challenge in Europe. Van Rompuy has, ironically, been appointed partly because of his capacity to re-establish a government in Belgium including Flemings and Walloons. Yet he has shown no sensitivity whatever to Europe’s newer cultural diversity.

Much has been made of the lack of celebrity of van Rompuy–’Mr Nobody’ in much of the media coverage of his appointment. But he is a chair, not an executive president as the English connotation of the word suggests. The more serious issue is that he must not only be able to achieve a consensus around the table with the heads of government at the European Council: he must be able to enjoy the respect of European citizens, of all religions and (in my case) none.

What’s Europe for?

cosmopolitan — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:34:32 +0000

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.

Hello world!

cosmopolitan — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 12:38:24 +0000

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