Ideologies and the European Union

Carlo Invernizzi Accetti, Jonathan White, Carlo Invernizzi Accetti, Jonathan White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000348859
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume examines what the concept of ideology can add to our understanding of the European Union, and the way in which the process of European integration has inflected the ideological battles that define contemporary European politics, both nationally and transnationally.

Contemporary debates on the nature and value of the European Union often touch on the notion of ideology. The EU's critics routinely describe it as an ideologically-motivated project, associating it from the left with a form of 'neo-liberal capitalism' or from the right with 'liberal multiculturalism'. Its defenders often praise it in explicitly post- or anti-ideological terms, as a regulatory body focused on the production of output legitimacy, or as a bulwark against dangerous ideological revivals in the form of nationalism and populism. Yet the existing academic literature linking the study of the EU with that of ideologies is surprisingly thin. This volume brings together a number of original contributions by leading international scholars and takes an approach that is both historical and conceptual, probing the EU's ideological roots, while also laying the grounds for a reappraisal of its contemporary ideological make-up.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.

Europeanizing ideologies

Jonathan White

ABSTRACT

This article explores the relationship between ideology, the state and the transnational as it bears on European integration. Though typically studied in national contexts, ideologies and their clash have been Europe-wide since their emergence. As I argue, the European Union (EU) can be understood both as the continuation of these long-standing cross-border dynamics, and as the attempt to supersede them. Contemporary developments renew this dialectic. By exploring how ideology and European integration entwine, the paper underlines the value of a research agenda of heightened importance as the ideological hegemony of recent decades breaks down.

The emergence of political ideologies tracked the emergence of the modern state.¹ Accepting the ambiguities of definition and causality, a temporal overlap seems clear. Isms of diagnosis and prescription tied to groups of various kinds developed with the reorganization of authority that brought the feudal period to a close. Whether in the guise of doctrines intended to legitimise new institutions, contest them in the name of self-determination, or restore the world that preceded them, ideologies came to the fore with the emerging state. Yet equally, ideologies were never likely to be constrained by state boundaries. Already in the late-eighteenth century, isms developed wider horizons, being extended to conflicts international in scope and deployed for cross-border constituencies. From the conflicts of the French Revolution to defences of empire, ideologies became transnational phenomena.

It is the extension of ideologies outwards from the state that this article examines, with an eye in particular to European integration. Scholars typically approach ideology as a phenomenon of national settings, or else leave its sphere undefined (Bell, 2002, p. 224). Studies that set the likes of liberalism, socialism and conservatism in transnational context are rarer, like those of ideologies linked to transnational institutions (Martill, 2017). Where scholars look beyond the state, it is often to the global level. Steger’s work on ideologies and globalization is one example (Steger, 2009); studies of the ideologies of nineteenth-century empires (Bell, 2013), of white racism (Lake & Reynolds, 2008), global Islamism (Aydin, 2017) or the United Nations (Thérien, 2015) are others. Largely overlooked has been the space between the state and the global – ideologies in and of the regional. As one of the major experiments of the post-war era, the EU is a rich place to study ideologies transnational but less than global in extension. Their analysis remains under-developed in EU studies, something only now changing in the context of recent upheavals.

Studying ideologies cross-nationally presents distinct problems given the opacity of the research object. To speak confidently of the existence and influence of an ‘ism’ is never easy, and the challenges look greater beyond the state, not just because ideologies have often been denied, but because of their frequent detachment from visible organizations, and the semantic ambiguities born of language diversity. But still they demand closer reflection. Such currents of thought tend to be amongst the most deeply-held, widespread and lasting, and also those closest to power. These are ideas oriented to action and underpinned by collectives (Freeden, 1996, p. 105), with the influence and durability this can bring. How the social world is signified, the opinions formed, the interests appraised, and their connection to institutions, are all matters in which ideologies are implicated. Even things treated as cultural givens, including (supra-)national identities, can be the legacy of ideological projects. Given the state of flux in Europe today, the significance of the form only increases.

As this paper argues, the EU has been built on ideology, and also against it. The Union is the expression of two countervailing tendencies. On the one hand, it is a continuation of the long-standing projection of ideologies across borders that has characterized Europe since the French Revolution. As the first section examines, the ideological conflicts of modern Europe typically unfolded on a regional stage, reflecting and consolidating a frame of reference (or ‘imaginary’) that was Europe-wide. European integration would mark the institutionalization of those ideologies pre-eminent in these contests in a given period. On the other hand, and as the second section examines, the ideologies shaping the EU were defined exactly by their hostility to this wider pattern. They were efforts to transcend ideological conflict and its cross-border reverberations, informed by an idea of the supranational as a realm beyond ideological division. Initiated in an era of heightened anxiety about political isms, European integration was defined in contradistinction as an anti-ideological project, its institutions intended to escape such clashes.

The present period sees the former tendency renewed and the latter challenged. As the third section examines, whereas for decades the EU could be dissociated from isms and these ascribed to its critics, with increasingly regularity it meets the charge of being an ideological project itself. This is a form of politicization where ideology and its attribution plays a central role. The section considers the specificity of critique on ideological grounds and its wider implications for the EU. In periods of ‘interregnum’ between one ideological settlement and another (Gramsci, 1947/1971, p. 276), future trajectories may be more open. Whereas this threatens to break up an order designed to exclude rather than accommodate ideological conflict, it also points to a distinct rationale for supranational institutions: as an arena in which to regulate these cross-border conflicts. Such a role depends on institutions being separable from ideologies, and how far such a decoupling is possible remains one of the central questions in contemporary EU politics.

Ideology and the modern European state

The first modern ‘isms’ were coined to describe heresies. Emerging in Reformation Europe, they were descriptions of religious doctrines advanced by their critics in the Catholic Church. Lutheranism, Calvinism, Puritanism and Anabaptism were amongst the first examples (Höpfl, 1983, pp. 1–2). For the pioneers of this pejorative rhetoric, isms denoted patterns of deviant thought and the ways of life said to attach to them. They evoked social groups, the ‘-ists’ amongst whom these ideas were at home. While the attribution of shared belief was characteristic, its content could be a matter of debate, also indifference (Höpfl, 1983, p. 5). One of the functions of the idiom was to position the speaker as orthodox and rightful, and by highlighting distorted views, to reaffirm more generally the core tenets of the Catholic faith. The identification of heresy served the identification and protection of orthodoxy (Kurtz, 1983).

The isms of early-modern Europe were used sporadically though, rarely being adopted by those they were said to describe. They were not ideology as we would come to know it, with its self-aware groups and political focus. To the extent they corresponded to real-world collectives, these were dispersed and weakly integrated, and their concerns mainly religious. Only in the eighteenth century did isms take on the characteristics we associate with ideology. In the years after the French Revolution especially, they became terms of self-description for those claiming like-minded views (Höpfl, 1983, p. 7), denoting idea-clusters centred on political interpretation and prescription. Spurred in part by the experience of revolution, with its suggestion of altered and alterable futures, collectives emerged defined by their transformative agenda. A new vocabulary developed centred on ‘concepts of movement’ (Koselleck, 2004, p. 273ff.), as words like republic, liberty, and society came to define future-oriented projects of change.

Ideology as we shall understand it has its origins in this period (Freeden, 1996, pp. 141–142).² It can be defined as patterned sets of ideas about the world as it is and as it should be, embraced by groups (often consciously as groups), and the basis on which they pursue some form of power (Freeden, 1996, pp. 22–23, p. 105; Leader Maynard & Mildenberger, 2018). Such ideas find their most coherent expression in canonical texts and statements, but appear also in tacit and everyday contexts. While the pejorative connotations of early-modern isms have never been shed, accounts of ideology today tend not to define it in terms of deception and domination, close at hand though such effects may be. Emphasis is retained on its collective basis, whether in movements, parties or less visible groupings, and its practical orientation. We are dealing with ideas intended to shape the exercise of power, whether by direct application to decision-making institutions or by wider processes of (de-)contestation (Freeden, 1996, p. 77).

Analyses of the historical origins of ideology tend to emphasize processes of nation-state-formation. Steger connects ideology’s appearance to the emergence of what he terms the ‘national imaginary’ – ‘the taken-for-granted understanding in which the nation – plus its affiliated or to-be-affiliated state – serves as the communal frame of the political’ (Steger, 2009, p. 9). This shared cultural space supplied the background ideas, symbols and reference-points on which ideologists drew. Liberalism, conservatism, socialism and their successors were built on this foundation, he suggests, and in turn replenished it as they were deployed in the nation’s name. Steger’s terminology is intended to highlight the novelty of more recent developments – the emergence of a global imaginary and its distinctive ideologies – but the primary suggestion is historical: that ideology in its formative period was inextricably linked to the national.

One needs to move carefully here, since speaking of national imaginaries risks positing the cultural unity that nationalists themselves tend to proclaim. One can slip from observing the centrality of nation-talk to accepting the reality of the community described. Surely correct though is that emerging discourses of nationhood provided a central object for contestation. Precisely because the nature, boundaries and interests of the nation were unclear, such concepts opened a space for competing interpretations. This revolutionary, secular language evoked a social world separable from political structures and with its own constituting power, contra divine-right theories and the unchanging communities supposed by traditional religion. Only then did it become possible to conceive doctrines of transformation and restoration, ones that would spark conflicts not least because the identity of that to be transformed was unclear.

To these symbolic shifts one may add the socio-economic upheavals of the period. As ‘dislocation’ theorists of nationalism have argued, the advance of the class structures of modern capitalism, accentuated by urbanization and industrialization, exposed people to new schemes of understanding (Gellner, 1983). Ideas of nationhood were just some: ‘it is here that the coining of numerous ‘isms’ belongs, serving as collective and motivating concepts capable of reordering and mobilizing anew the masses robbed of their place in the old order of estates’ (Koselleck, 2004). As communication and education structures developed, the constituency for such ideas expanded (Freeden, 1999; Koselleck, 2004, p. 251). Again, these transformations tracked processes of state-formation, as state representatives sought to steer, reinforce and take advantage of them. State institutions, increasingly defined and differentiated, enabled ideologies to take organized form (Freeden, 1999). In political parties, ideologies found their clearest expression.

The emergence of ideologies is inseparable then from the emergence of the modern state. Yet ideologies were never an intra-state phenomenon, even in the nation-state’s heyday. Ideological politics has been cross-border in scope since its emergence, a source of enthusiasm and anxiety in part for this reason.³ Such tendencies were visible already in the heresies of the sixteenth century, often explicitly transcontinental in outlook (Baskerville, 1994), given broad distribution by the papacy and the wider Catholic Church, and producing the first doctrinal wars by the seventeenth century (Pagden, 2002, p. 1). They are unmistakeable in the isms of the late-eighteenth century. The French Revolution, their catalyst, was recognized by contemporaries as of transnational status, like the conflicts it spawned.

Taking shape from the 1750s, the ideals of the French Revolution can be regarded, with all due caution about retroactive definition, as a brand of classical liberalism. As interrelated views about present conditions and their transformation, advanced by groups keen to imprint them on the exercise of power, they fit the definition of ideology well, albeit as an evolving combination of diverse intellectual strands, loosely centred on concepts of justice, reason and will (Baker, 1990, Ch. 1; Hobsbawm, 1997, pp. 58–59; Rosenblatt, 2018, p. 41ff.; Sewell, 1985, p. 74ff.). Early revolutionaries sought constitutional monarchy on the British model – liberalism as anti-feudalism and anti-despotism, combined with an insistence on law and individual freedoms. From 1791, under the Girondins and Montagnards, the goals turned to abolition – liberalism as republicanism, combined with democratic ideas of equality (Cassells, 2002, p. 39; Cattaneo, 1964; Haas, 2005, p. 46ff.). A constant throughout was that these were doctrines intended to travel (Hobsbawm, 1997, p. 54). Though proclaimed in the nation’s name, the Declaration of the Rights of Man was phrased in abstract terms, evoking something more expansive than could be denoted by cultural criteria (Fontana in Hobsbawm, 1997, p. 65; Pagden, 2002, p. 121). Under the Girondins especially, spreading these ideals was an intrinsic goal; under the Montagnards, it seemed the best way to protect them at home (Cassells, 2002, p. 29).

As transnational as the revolutionaries’ goals was the concern their actions sparked. Confronted with movements seeking rupture with the past, the makings of a conservative ideology took shape across Europe’s centres of power. The Pillnitz Declaration of 27 August 1791, authored by Prussia and the Holy Roman Empire, announced the condition of the French monarchy to be ‘a matter of common interest to all the sovereigns of Europe’, and committed them to aiding the French king in restoring ‘the foundations of a monarchic...