It is said that an Englishman was praising the operation of a certain device and a Frenchman objected: âYes, that works well in practice, but does it work well in theory?â It is not very appropriate to tell a joke reproducing national stereotypes of a Europe that is so often blocked by its national short-sightedness, but it may be useful to explain what I intend to say. My hypothesis is that the EU is living a âtheoretical momentâ, that is, a moment where conceptual innovation is essential if we want to escape the deadlock in which we find ourselves, which is, first and foremost, a conceptual deficit. The current moment seems to agree with a character in Mozartâs CosĂ fan tutte who claimed that everything needs philosophy. It is true that the European integration crisis cannot simply be solved with a good theory, but we will not emerge from the current crisis without a clarification of what is at stake. We need to talk more about concepts than about mechanisms and leaders. New meanings, rather than financial or institutional engineering solutions, will lead us out of the crisis; it is less a matter of political will than a matter of understanding what is truly at stake. It is not a problem that can be solved through institutional procedures and leadership, but a crisis that must be well diagnosed, so that the basic concepts of democracy can be reconsidered in the context of that new and complex reality that is the European Union and in a globalized world where profound social and political changes are taking place.
1 A Political Philosophy for Europe
Among the many deficits attributed to the EU, one of the ones that is least denouncedâalthough it is no less importantâis the intelligibility deficit. There are big controversies as to whether Europe is democratic or fair, representative or efficient, but there is no doubt that it is currently incomprehensible, making it nearly impossible for anyone to understand it. Europe has lost its sovereigns and has not recreated one at the European level. Instead, the sovereigns have been replaced by a consensual or asymmetrical machine, depending on the situation, that avoids conflicts and enshrines irresponsibility. Europe cannot make sense as long as there is no narrative that can be understood and accepted by its citizens (which may even justify its relative distance, the element of delegation or complexity that inevitably accompanies it). For these reasons, I maintain that the EU must be understood as a complex democracy, not based on democracy models related to the nation state, and it thus has great potentialities when it comes to thinking about how to politically organize more difficult, open and complex spaces.
Why a philosophy of the European Union? One could easily object that we do not lack theories and that my statement actually hides the âexclusive competenceâ desire shown by any other discipline. There have been some claims about the importance of philosophy for the development of an appropriate concept of the European Union (Friese and Wagner 2010; Olsen 2004), but there are also those who consider that European constitutionalism is over-theorized (Krisch 2005, 326; SchĂŒtze 2009, vii) or that the integration is not so much a question of theoretical reflection but of empirical observation, âa process that must be understood rather than philosophically builtâ (MĂŒller 2003, 69).
I understand the distrust when faced with excessively theoretical approaches that usually wander comfortably through the corridors of theory and avoid institutional design or the complexity of the political game. But if political philosophy has any ambition, it is to breach that gap between theory and practice, between normative and descriptive, which is a sign of exhaustion shown by theories about Europe. One consequence of this rupture is the lack of cooperation or of an interdisciplinary approach between philosophy, law, and the political and social sciences. Some lack proximity to the institutional praxis, while others lack theoretical development; some disciplines have such a normative horizon that they forget the social conditions needed for moving theories into practice, while others suffer from a limited interest in the theories of democracy or in the history of concepts. That lack of interest is repaid with a perplexity hidden by an excess of empirical studies with little significance.
Moravscik (2006) is right in his assessment that there are too many normative theories in European Studies, but in my opinion, there is a more radical problem: there is a dichotomy between factual and normative that has turned this field into a battle between realists without much hope and idealists with little knowledge. What we probably need the most is a theory of Europe that is neither a simple description of the institutional mechanism nor a vague cosmopolitan haze. And this is precisely the topic about which philosophy still has a lot to say. The polarization between theory and practice, between normative approaches and an empirical point of view, between disciplines dealing with values and those more comfortably moving amongst functional realities, has given rise to many different controversies within the human and social sciences. This dissociation is both a problem and a symptom, and we will not make Europeâs reality comprehensible if we do without a certain assessment horizon. But we cannot address this shortcoming if we maintain a level of exhortative speech which seems to care very little about the real game of interests, the weight of our historical past or the multiple determining factors that limit political action in a space of deep interdependences. Given the current status of European integration, we should not merely await a description of facts or an abstract normative model when it comes to political philosophy, but we should expect a critical response and research into the possibilities of shaping the future ahead of us. Understanding the EU is not merely a descriptive exercise, but a reflection with normative consequences, that is, it determines which expectations may reasonably be considered in relation to its form of government, its legitimacy and its democraticness. It is not the same to view it as an intergovernmental negotiation or a transnational experiment; we will not suggest the same solutions if we understand it as an aggregation of interests or as a deliberative discussion required by the political transformations of contemporary societies, their possibilities and specific risks.
Political philosophy is essential to understanding such a polity that is as unique and novel as the EU in relation to the model of the nation state. It even has some comparative advantages to the extent that it is not a discipline whose evolution is closely tied to the conceptual universe of the states, as is the case with Political Science, International Relations or Constitutional Law. At the same time, the EU poses such a huge challenge for political philosophy and the theories of democracy that it imposes an obligation to verify certain presuppositions and to examine the conceptual and practical resistance in new contexts. I am convinced that it will be a valuable contribution to European Studies that seem to have lost the capacity to develop a general theory about the meaning of integration. The abandonment of ontological matters and the preference for individual institutions and policy areas have generated a great deal of empirical material but have left a fragmented and excessively specialized space, without theoretical ambitions or the ability to develop an all-encompassing notion of what is at stake (Bickerton 2012; Ludlow 2010, 24).
2 Problems of Narrative
This is the context where the problem of formulating a new narrative for the European Union is considered with special intensity, once certain big narratives, which made it comprehensible and conferred social legitimacy, are over. If Tocquevilleâs statement about human beings inventing things more easily than words to describe them is true (Karmis 2005, 152), it could be confirmed that after the action and the description, we still have one more difficulty: that of making it intelligible. We are referencing this third task when we talk about a narrative for Europe.
Since the different integration legitimacies have been weakened, the only powerful narratives that are still standing are populist rebuttals fed by that evil game of âblaming Brusselsâ and, above all, by the evidence that we are not up to the problems we need to manage. At a time when a lack of the epic is not compensated by functional legitimacy, a time when the European project cannot turn to emphatic achievements or the discreet favor of effectiveness, the landscape is filled with negative references. Everyone can understand what is being suggested when there is talk about the âmonster of Brusselsâ (Enzensberger 2011), which, in the best case scenario, makes the appeal for âmore Europeâ appear to be mere weakness. Among other things, this is taking place because this is a moment of evolution for democratic societies in which, though there is no worthwhile legitimacy without effectiveness (whether economic or in regards to conflict resolution or the social order), the citizenship has the right to link the value of the European project to certain normative and strictly political hopes.
But in the worst case scenario, the rhetoric of progress in integration may implicitly suggest a deterministic historical linearity. The narrative of the Monnet methodââdynamics in small steps with sustainable significanceâ (Wessels 2001)âtakes many things for granted and, at the same time, has a coercive resonance, inviting us to surrender to what will end up being imposed. Any narrative that suggests that what we should do has nothing to do with freedom, with a contingent configuration, but with acceptance, and submission to an inevitable dynamic has little or no future in a democratic society. A narrative is not a simple list of historical events, an inevitable dynamic or a list of our future obligations, but a story conferring certain significance to our past and future actions, a significance of which we approve. And the best way to ensure that a narrative is rejected is for it to imply that we are facing a reality that we cannot refuse.
In this sense, integration theories have focused all too much on inevitability. Explaining our crisis as a simple regression or stagnation of the integration process is mistaken and, above all, democratically unacceptable to the extent that it implies that our freedom is not convened in any way. Therefore, European narratives must stop thinking about integration as a linear process and about the crisis as an agent of change for that development and must pay more attention to the regressions and even the concept of European disintegration (Eppler and Scheller 2013). What I mean with this is that there will not be a Europeanist narrative as long as we keep it in a deterministic corset which discredits, in principle, all other possibilities. We made it much too easy when we established a simple antagonism to organize the controversies between the âpro-Europeanâ and the âeuro-scepticâ. While discussions revolve around whether certain political decisions should be communitarized or continue in the arena of the states, these distinctions constitute a sufficient framework for analysis. But with the increasing complexity and multidimensionality of European politics, the distinctions clash with their own limits because many of our problems cannot be reduced to the âmore or less Europeâ issue. This is so, among other things, because our controversies do not focus exclusively on levels of competence but on the content of policies. Today, we discuss the political measures that can or must be adopted in order to achieve the objectives developed in the political fields that are already integrated, in such a way that those arguments cannot be categorized in pro-European or euro-skeptical neutral perspectives.
3 The Double Democratic Challenge of the European Union
The idea of providing a narrative for the European Union suggests that we are going to explain what is inevitably complex in an arbitrarily simple manner. If that were the case, what we would get in terms of popularization would be lost in accuracy. We would have gained nothing if what has been understood and accepted was something substantially different from what we need to narrate. This is the crux of our problem, and the sooner we recognize it, the less exposed we will be to populist or technocratic simplifications.
The European Union is facing a democratic challenge, but that also implies a challenge to political philosophy. âThe EUâs democratic deficits reflect less about democracy in Europe than they do about democratic theory itself. The EU is a problem for democratic theory because it is not the kind of thing that can be democratic on modern accounts of democracy. Institutional deficits arise not because of faults in the design of democracy within the EU but because the normative significance of the same institutional designs changes when it is translated into a new context.⊠The true democratic deficit, I submit, lies on the side of democratic theory, which cannot comprehend developments like the EUâ (Goodhart 2007, 575).
Thus, the question we need to ask ourselves is a double one: What contribution must political theory make in order to understand the European Union? And, what challenge does a polity as novel as the European Union pose to said political theory? If the former demands organizing institutions and decision-making procedures so they can achieve our criteria of democraticness, the latter implies revising those same criteria of democraticness to make them compatible with the complex realities of the European Union. The first move by itself leads to an extreme normativism, indifferent to the conditions of possibility within which our political life actually develops. If we only perform the second move, we would be degrading our democratic ideals to the facticity of our mediocre âmuddling throughâ. In my opinion, the only way to avoid moralism and cynicism is to understand the double democratic challengeâtheoretical and practicalâof the European Union and to solve it within a complex theory of democracy. This operation would not be a kind of zero-sum game between theory and practice, between democratic values and political realities, but a huge possibility for both of them. So much so that, if we do it right, we could end up with a more sophisticated theory of democracy and more democratic institutions.
It would entail, first of all, chasing the aims of the European Union in relation to those of the member states, without subordinating the latter to the former. Neither subsidiarity nor assigning new roles to national Parliaments nor even the boundaries established by constitutional courts have managed to determine the type of power that corresponds to the EU. The current model has had a high cost in terms of detachment and victimization. The key would be a brand-new idea of power at the European level ...