Ever Closer Union?

Europe in the West

Perry Anderson

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781839764417
• eBook ISBN: 9781839764431
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The European Union is a political order of peculiar stamp and continental scope, its polity of 446 million the third largest on the planet, though with famously little purchase on the conduct of its representatives. Sixty years after the founding treaty, what sort of structure has crystallised, and does the promise of ever closer union still obtain?

Against the self-image of the bloc, Perry Anderson poses the historical record of its assembly. He traces the wider arc of European history, from First World War to Eurozone crisis, the hegemony of Versailles to that of Maastricht, and casts the work of the EU's leading contemporary analysts - both independent critics and court philosophers - in older traditions of political thought. Are there likenesses to the age of Metternich, lessons in statecraft from that of Machiavelli?

An excursus on the UK's jarring departure from the Union considers the responses it has met with inside the country's intelligentsia, from the contrite to the incandescent. How do Brussels and Westminster compare as constitutional forms? Differently put, which could be said to be worse?

II. EUROPEAN ORDER

2

THE SPECIAL ADVISER

By repute, literature on the European Union and its pre-history is notoriously intractable—dull, technical, infested with jargon: matter for specialists, not general readers. From the beginning, however, beneath an unattractive surface it developed considerable intellectual energy, even ingenuity, as contrasting interpretations and standpoints confronted each other. But for some sixty years after the Schuman Plan was unveiled in 1950, there was a striking displacement in this body of writing. Virtually without exception, the most original and influential work was produced not by Europeans, but by Americans. Whether the angle of attack was political science, economics, law, sociology, philosophy or history, the major contributions—Haas, Moravcsik, Schmitter, Eichengreen, Weiler, Fligstein, Siedentop, Gillingham—came from the United States, with a singleton from England before it acceded to the Common Market, in the pioneering reconstruction of Alan Milward.

This has finally changed. In the past decade, Europe has generated a set of thinkers about its integration who command the field, while the US, now increasingly absorbed in itself, has largely vacated it. Among these, one stands out. By reason both of the reception and the quality of his work, the Dutch philosopher-historian Luuk van Middelaar can be termed, in Gramsci’s vocabulary, as the first organic intellectual of the EU. Though related, applause and achievement are not the same. The Passage to Europe: How a Continent Became a Union, which catapulted van Middelaar to fame and the precincts of power, is a remarkable work. The tones in which it has been widely received are of another order. ‘There are books before which’, a Belgian reviewer declared, ‘a chronicler is reduced to a single form of commentary: an advertisement.’ As once of The Name of the Rose there was now simply a ‘before and after of its appearance’.¹ The author himself posts some forty encomia of his book on his website, in seven or eight languages, tributes ransacking the lexicon of admiration: ‘supremely erudite’, ‘brilliant’, ‘beautifully written’, ‘a gripping narrative that reads like a Bildungsroman’, ‘all the fields of human knowledge and culture are convoked in abounding richness’, ‘succeeds as no one else has done in understanding the essence of what it is to be European’, ‘near-Voltairean’, ‘like all great novels, tells us something about our European condition’, ‘a Treitschke with the tongue of Foucault’. Even the austere European Journal of International Law found it ‘thrilling’.

I

Signal amid this enthusiasm has been a general lack of curiosity about the author himself. That could be expected in the columns of newspapers and magazines, less so in academic journals. But in the depoliticized ether of professional Euro-studies, enquiry into the background of a scholar is not comme il faut; while the Netherlands is in any case among the countries of Western Europe whose culture and politics are least familiar outside its borders. To understand The Passage to Europe, however, a sense of where the author comes from is required. Van Middelaar, born in 1973 in Eindhoven, the company town of Philips in Brabant, took history and philosophy at the University of Groningen in the early nineties. There he studied under the philosopher of history Frank Ankersmit, a sui generis thinker whose ideas left a lasting mark on him.² Good political thought, for Ankersmit, was never of the sort personified by Rawls: an abstract system of principles detached from any concrete reality. It was always a response to urgent historical problems, produced by thinkers—Bodin, Hobbes, Locke, Burke or Tocqueville—immersed in the great conflicts of their time: religious strife, civil war, revolution, democracy. The first and most original of this line was Machiavelli, confronting the crisis of Italy’s division at the turn of the sixteenth century. It was he who founded the novel idea of raison d’état that would become a central tradition in European political thought, and one formative of modern writing about history, as Meinecke had shown in his studies of historicism.³

For Machiavelli, statecraft was the art of mastering the contingency of fortune with a virtuoso existential decision capable of giving shape to a political order that, while not fearing conflict, would prove as stable as any such order could hope to be. In this, he prefigured a problematic that would in different ways haunt Western thought down to our own time. For what, after all, Ankersmit asked, is the appropriate definition of representation? Is it a resemblance to what is represented, or a substitute for it? Rousseau mistakenly believed it was the first; Burke showed it was the second. In politics as in painting, representation is not a biometric likeness of what is represented, but an act of basically aesthetic nature—the creation of something new, which was never imagined or existed before.⁴ It was an effect of style, beyond fact or value. The creative politician perceived a possibility, glimpsed by no one else, of founding a new conception of things capable of winning the assent of citizens as so many connoisseurs viewing a painting or a building.⁵ The supreme act of such an aesthetic politics was the construction of a compromise between conflicting parties, which was at once the condition and core of any modern democracy. ‘The politician formulating the most satisfying and lasting compromise is the political “artist” par excellence.’⁶ Contrary to received opinion, the origins of such an aesthetic politics did not lie in the Enlightenment, but in Romanticism. Its first glimmering came in the German Frühromantik, where Schlegel extolled the manifold of opposites in a clouded language that Carl Schmitt would later attack for its vagueness, yet which just for that reason was propitious for compromise. But it was the French doctrinaires of the Restoration, above all Guizot, who gave full expression to this breakthrough, as they laboured to reconcile what had been irreconcilable—the nostalgia of ultras for the Ancien Régime and the cult by radicals of the French Revolution or of Napoleon—in a politics of the juste milieu.⁷

Such was the true formula for the parliamentary democracy emergent in the nineteenth and perfected in the twentieth century: the antithesis of the direct democracy preached by Rousseau, which had dishonoured representation by extraditing it to the boundless impulses of a collective political libido.⁸ After the Second World War, the genius of compromise on which Western democracy rested would reconcile the conflict between capital and labour with the invention of the welfare state which brought peace between them, while preserving capitalism intact.⁹ Today, however, division in society no longer sets one camp against another. Instead, the unprecedented issues of crime, environment, ageing, juridification of every relationship, split human beings inwardly, leaving a conflict within themselves. Such problems could only be resolved by a strong—though certainly lean—state, as the necessary locus of power. Ignored in a Rawlsian matrix concerned only with rights rather than interests, such a state was the indispensable lever of an aesthetic politics capable of restoring the boundaries between public and private realms in the century.¹⁰

Ankersmit terms himself a conservative liberal. Distinctive in the heady brew he offered is the combination of a meta-politics generally associated with the radical right—Mussolini had vaunted a politics of style, and Benjamin concluded that the aestheticization of politics was a trademark of fascism—with a politics of the moderate centre: the juste milieu of the French liberals of the Restoration as the last word of democratic maturity. Meinecke, whose historicism is perhaps the most important single influence on Ankersmit, could be described as another conservative liberal displaying something of the same mixture: in 1918 a founder of the liberal German Democratic Party; in 1939 an enthusiast for Hitler’s invasion of Poland. In Ankersmit, les contraires se touchent in a more theoretically articulated fashion, capable of another kind of imprint on listeners receptive to it. Under his guidance, van Middelaar set off for Paris in 1993 to write a Master’s thesis on French political thought since the war. There he would find a local mentor in Marcel Gauchet, a leading light of the anti-totalitarian galaxy of the eighties who by that time had become a critic of the promotion of human rights to a central position in democratic thought. In 1999 van Middelaar published the result of his labours in the Netherlands, Politicide. De moord op de politiek en de Franse filosofie—‘Politicide: The Murder of Politics in French Philosophy’. Perhaps advised that this penny-dreadful note might not go down well in France, the book did not appear in the country it was about.

Its lurid title, however, captured the crudity of the work, much of it warmed-over Cold War pabulum. Touted in the preface as the first treatment of all three generations of misbegotten French political thought since 1945—the Marxism of (the early) Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, the Nietzscheanism of Foucault and Deleuze, and the Kantianism of Ferry and Renaut—it glossed Vincent Descombes’s critique of the first two as vicious derivations of Kojève, and the rejection by Gauchet and others of the third as pious reversions to the thought-world of the Categorical Imperative. Overall, this was a body of thought that ‘invariably led to a defense of terrorism or a declaration of impotence’,¹¹ the two united in a common moralism—active in the Marxists and Nietzscheans, passive in the Kantians—whose effect was to put politics to death. Redemption was to be found in the wisdom of Gauchet’s teacher Claude Lefort, whose great work on Machiavelli, taking its cue from the Florentine’s masterly analysis of the relations between ruler and ruled, had restored democracy to its proper dignity by redefining it as the empty space of liberty in which contention between different voices and forces could of necessity never end.

Little of this was new in the Paris of Aron and Furet, Rosanvallon and Descombes, though it could hardly fail to please. In the more provincial context of the Netherlands, on the other hand, it was greeted as a revelation. Garlanded with prizes, its author was declared a philosophical prodigy, and returned to Paris for further research in 1999. There, meanwhile, the country had been shaken four years earlier by the massive wave of strikes against the package of pension and welfare cuts introduced by Chirac’s prime minister Alain Juppé to comply with budgetary requirements of the Treaty of Maastricht. Confronted with the largest social movement since 1968, the country’s intelligentsia split. Bourdieu led widespread support for the uprising. Lefort was among those who supported the government, pronouncing the movement against it infected by ‘rancor and resentment’, ‘populism’, ‘archaeo-marxism, maoism and sartrism’.¹² Unhappily, public opinion did not heed the resuscitator of politics, but expressed overwhelming solidarity with the protests, which ended with a humiliating defeat for the government.

Perhaps with a view to seeing how such setbacks could be avoided, van Middelaar started to study pension systems in the EU at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. But worse was to follow. Cycling past the Place de la Bastille a few months after 9/11, he was appalled to see a rag-tag crowd of youth waving red banners against the American invasion of Afghanistan, and sat down to pen a blistering attack on such idiocy. After a few more imprecations against Sartre and the other advocates of terror who had fostered it, he pointed out that even if Bin Laden was not being hidden by the Taliban, who in their right mind could be against a war on the regime in Kabul? The West stood for the values of civilization, and was bringing modernity to Afghans and others across the world who craved it. Yet:

We Westerners, weighed down by the past, hardly even dare to understand this any longer. The White Man’s Burden, that heroic civilizing mission depicted by Rudyard Kipling in his proud poem of 1899 as the destiny of the white race, has turned against us and become a true burden, a depressing sense of guilt about colonization, slavery and economic exploitation of the developing world. Which now prevents us from understanding that colonization did—indeed!—mean something good for the colonized. Colonization brought schools, hospitals, science, emancipation of women. Colonization brought modern reason and freedom within reach of individuals hitherto unable even to be individuals. Sure, colonial crimes occurred—rape, torture, institutional racism—and yet, what a beautiful body of work!

Today, the main political question had become:

Can human rights spread globally without the action of a Napoleon? The answer is no. Anyone who thinks that it can has a moralistic view of reality. Anyone who thinks that good may impose itself on the world without struggle or the use of power is mistaken. Anyone with a basic understanding of politics knows that what is good does not come automatically. That may require an army. A Napoleon. Or a George W. Bush. A price must be paid if we want human rights to spread. We should not blame Napoleon for using violence, but for not going far enough. Napoleon’s mistake was that he employed freedom and equality as symbols to help his army win battles rather than incorporating these concepts in sturdy institutions in the constitutions which he scattered across Europe. To continue the analogy: our hope must be that Bush finishes his job thoroughly, dragging Afghanistan into modernity with bombs and abundance.

Van Middelaar ended his peroration:

And we, meanwhile, are patiently waiting for a modern-day Kipling who realizes that not white but modern people have a world-historical mission: to sing proudly and unabashedly in praise of the Modern Man’s Burden.¹³

By this time, he had become bored with pensions, and wrote to a conservative contact working with the Dutch commissioner in Brussels asking if he could find him an internship where he might study power close up. An interview was arranged. Van Middelaar has a highly developed sense of self-presentation, which he likes to dramatize. Introducing his Politicide a decade later, he would write: ‘My book did not pass unnoticed. It was a surprise that an unknown 26-year-old should unexpectedly dare to challenge consecrated French thinkers. Without knowing it, I was putting into practice an aphorism of Stendhal: entry into society should be conducted as if it were a duel. And what opponents I had chosen!’¹⁴ It took some nerve to pass off this plagiarism from Nietzsche as his own discovery. Van Middelaar’s account of his ascent to Brussels is another little piece of theatre. More original and no less theatrical:

In another era, on Tuesday March 27 2001, I took the train from Paris, where I was living at the time, to Brussels. I was nervous. A student in political philosophy living in a garret of no more than 18 sq meters, I arduously put on a suit that morning. Approaching the metro, I asked a surprised, well-dressed passer-by whether he could help me fix the knot in my tie. I was on my way to the European quarters in Brussels, where I was to have lunch with the Dutch European commissioner and his personal assistant.¹⁵

The commissioner with whom he landed the post that he wanted was Frits Bolkestein. In the Dutch political landscape Bolkestein cut an unusual figure. Son of a president of the Court of Amsterdam, after a polymathic education—degrees successively in mathematics, philosophy, Greek, economics (at the LSE) and law—he joined Shell, serving it for sixteen years as an overseas executive in East Africa, Central America, London, Indonesia and Paris. In 1976 prompted, as he would later explain, by his experience in handling trade-unions in El Salvador, where he was posted during one of its various death-squad regimes, he became interested in politics, and quit Shell to run for parliament on the ticket of the VVD, the Dutch variant of a liberal party. By this time the original ‘pillar’ system of post-war Dutch politics, in which the electorate was divided into four columns—Catholic, Protestant, Labour and Liberal—had been simplified by the merger of Catholic and Protestant forces into a Christian Democratic party along bi-confessional German lines, and voting had become more fluid. The Liberal sector of the system, upper-class and originally anti-clerical, rooted in business and the bureaucracy, was politically the weakest. Though the party was a standard, if not invariable, fixture of the coalitions on which all governments were based, there had never been a Liberal prime minister since the time of the First World War.

The hallmarks of Dutch political culture, as first criticized by the political scientist Hans Daalder, and later celebrated by the American Arend Lijphart, were an imperative of consensus, a requirement of secrecy for reaching it, and a cult of practicality. Consensus demanded a permanent disposition to accommodation between parties. That was best reached behind closed doors. Business-like deals negotiated discreetly precluded a battle of ideas. The supreme national virtue of Zakelijkheid—down-to-earth, no-nonsense practicality, with a self-righteous timbre distinct from its more neutral cousin, the German Sachlichkeit—had no time for intellectualism of any sort. In the memorable dictum of the country’s current premier, VVD leader Mark Rutte: ‘vision is like an elephant that obstructs one’s sight’. For Lijphart the system was an admirably ‘consociational’ democracy. For Daalder, it was a legacy of the ‘regent mentality’ of the country’s pre-democratic patriciate, a merchant class facing neither a powerful nobility nor a fractious plebs, settling affairs of state comfortably among themselves without need of concepts or credos, confident of the passivity of the masses. The political elite of post-war Netherlands was their complacent descendant.¹⁶

Into this scene Bolkestein burst like a bazooka. He had plenty of ideas; and, a fluent writer and eloquent speaker, no inhibitions in aggressively expressing them. He soon made his mark. In the eighties, the dominant figure in Dutch politics was Ruud Lubbers, a Christian Democrat who led the country for a dozen years (1982–94), and was for a time regarded by Thatcher as the nearest thing to a soulmate she had in Europe. But to her disappointment he domest...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• I. Atlantic Order
• II. European Order
• Notes
• Index of Names
• Index of Authorities