A Political Theory of Identity in European Integration

Memory and policies

Catherine Guisan

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136599118
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a theoretical and historical examination of the speech and deeds of European founders.

Using a fresh and innovative approach, this monograph connects political theory with concrete political practices based on empirical evidence, and theorizes the internal process of European reconciliations as it has been experienced by those involved. The book draws upon over 100 interviews, memoirs, autobiographies and essays of elite and grassroot actors across the history of the European Union, from the founding of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1950-2 to the 2010 financial crisis. It introduces the reader to major contemporary Western political thinkers, Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor and Paul Ricoeur, and examines how their theories develop the interpretation of political phenomena such as European integration. As one of the first studies of EU memories, this approach opens a unique window of analysis to view the development of the European community, and makes a fascinating contribution to our understanding of the political tradition born of 60 years of European integration.

A Political Theory of Identity in European Integration: Memory and Policies will be of strong interest to students and scholars of European politics, contemporary democratic theory and EU studies.

1 Principles of Action or Clichés?

Why hermeneutics matters to European integration

Introduction¹

European integration provokes intense political strife among Europeans. This book takes the view that on balance and so far European integration’s positive outcomes outweigh the negative ones. This should not be construed as a prediction of similar outcomes in the future, but it heightens the relevance of an inquiry into the putative political European identity(ies), because a political project needs the underpinning of shared self-understandings. “A new political science is needed for a world itself quite new,” Tocqueville wrote about the still young American political experience.² Likewise the successive foundings of European integration broke with the past, and therefore cannot appeal to a pre-established sense of identity for legitimacy. This book retrieves elements of an EC/EU shared identity by interpreting philosophically the ethical and political practices of the founding actors. This approach, quite common in the study of American political roots, may seem less applicable to the technocratic projects of European integration.³ Yet repeatedly, policies have been implemented that eschew explanation from the point of view of economic self-interest or national power politics alone. To date, much of the scholarship on European integration has overlooked, or misinterpreted, the self-understandings of political actors central to the process.⁴ This has made it difficult to fill the rather blank category of European identity with meaningful content. This book is the first to draw from the interpretation of the speech and deed of the founders (elite and non-elite) of the EC/EU as a source of shared identity.⁵ Major political theorists of a post-Holocaust political order provide the framework for a content analysis of these texts, which transcends the national level of reference and connects empirical evidence with philosophical reflections. This thoroughly original attempt to connect novel political practices with innovative political theory sheds light on the relevance of hermeneutics to EU studies, and provides fresh evidence and a new interpretation of the role of ideals and their relation to interests in the process of EC/EU identity formation.

The fact that former enemy nations could pool the production and marketing of coal and steel in the 1951 European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), only six years after the end of a murderous conflict, is too often taken for granted, or justified primarily by economic calculations.⁶ Such accounts, however, do not disclose how participants in the European founding dealt with their historical memories of war, invasion and mutual exploitation, and how they could trust one another enough to put their war industries under a common authority with no hegemonic power mediating conflicts. As a result, the much-touted European reconciliation remains a concept devoid of concreteness and with little apparent relevance to current conflicts and the resurgence of “national populism” in several EU Member States.⁷ Neither has there been enough attention paid to how European founders understood community, a word laden with emotional and affective connotations, and which they chose very deliberately to name their highly technocratic enterprise. The reexamination of the negotiations of the European Economic Community (EEC) elucidates the conceptual break with an ancient understanding of political power that was effected rather unselfconsciously at the time: it was to be action in concert rather than domination over the other. And to interpret the meaning of the accession to the European Union (EU) of 12 new Member States since 2004, I suggest that the Hegelian concept of recognition is a more useful lens than the concepts of enlargement, reunification or, worst, “absorption.”

Exploring the ethical politics of European integration is important for scholarly purposes, and it matters also politically. Voluntary associations such as the EU rest on a sense of common identity formed around ideals and traditions, as well as on material and security interests. But many EU citizens, and even some of their leaders, express confusion as to what this common tradition might be.⁸ The heated debates leading to the French, Dutch and Irish rejections of major EU treaties illustrate this lack of common understanding. Scholars and public figures engaged in conflict-resolution efforts often cite European integration as a model to follow;⁹ but what is to be emulated? Specific economic policies and legal arrangements may not be transferable. However, issues of trust and truth-telling, of personal and collective accountability for past deeds, of the tension between economic and political imperatives are not unique to the European context. Focusing on the self-understanding of important actors in the process can help illuminate a more hidden yet vital factor for the success of the enterprise. As Andrew Moravcsik writes, it is important to “generalize” the European experience, because “By subsuming European integration wherever possible under general theories, rather than treating it as sui generis, we invite outsiders to treat its lessons as relevant to their own experience.”¹⁰ Moravcsik concludes that the European experience fits the liberal rather than the realist view of International Relations because primarily the “commercial interests” of the nation-states involved have driven it. My conclusion is different: I interpret the European integration experience as a political theorist, and commercial interests, seen through this lens, are too simple an explanation for this complex phenomenon.¹¹

This is less a work of explanation, however, than a work of memory and interpretation. As Paul Ricoeur reminds us, founding stories help ground the political community. These narratives may consist in fictional or historical accounts, and they remain open for rectification and retelling, as the debates on the meaning of the French Revolution or the German Historikerstreit demonstrate. In fact, controversies help build the democratic political community. What is striking in the case of European integration is that such narratives are almost entirely missing. Where are the founding “stories” of the ECSC or the Treaty of Maastricht or the enlargements? There is little memory although there is history. What is the difference? For Ricoeur, the work of memory is an “ambition,” an attempt to be “faithful to the past,” an action-oriented responsibility of citizenship, whereas history, the task of professional historians, aims at truth. Memory and history both matter politically, and what links them is the testimony of those who can say, “I was there! Believe me or not. And if you do not believe me, ask someone else!” Ricoeur wishes for a “happy memory,” that is a memory reconciled to the tragic roots of all political foundings, which are born out of violence. Such a memory is a hard-won gift, granted to those who have done the work of mourning and moved beyond melancholia, a paralyzing denial of loss, which Freud analyzed in Mourning and Melancholia. This is what makes the “capable human being.”¹² So we may ask: could the lack of memory in the EU be caused partly by an all too successful exorcism of the past? I leave the question open; the need for memory(ies), constitutive of identity, remains.¹³

Political Theorists and the ECSC/EC/EU Politics

How can we interpret (or “generalize”) political experiences in a manner respectful of the intents of their initiators, yet also analytical and critical? There is no direct access to identity for any subject, singular or collective. The road from self to self is through the other and never reaches the Hegelian promised land: “To interpret meaning is, for Ricoeur, to arrive in the middle of an exchange which has already begun and in which we seek to orient ourselves in order to make new sense of it.” This exchange takes place “in the midst of various long intersubjective relations, mediated by various social institutions, groups, nations and cultural traditions:” it leads the individual to a kind of second naïveté, propitious for action, yet self-reflective.¹⁴ Twentieth-century political thinkers who took seriously the challenge of rebuilding a world in ruins have created some of the “long intersubjective relations,” in the midst of which hermeneutics can deploy its best effects. Hannah Arendt’s reflections on natality, plurality, forgiveness and promise, action and thinking, and the responses of Arendtian scholars, provide me with my main interpretative categories.¹⁵ I also draw from Isaiah Berlin’s discussion of pluralism, Karl Jaspers’ exploration of collective responsibility, Jürgen Habermas’ discourse ethics, and Charles Taylor and Paul Ricoeur’s concepts of recognition. What makes this conceptual framework meaningful is that both the actors and thinkers share one urgent concern: to invent new forms of political life in Europe after the murderous wars of the early twentieth century. They also hold in common several opinions: social reality does not consist merely of hard and immutable facts, but of the self-understandings of those who act and, therefore, it can change, and human agency matters politically; the past must be accounted for without pre-empting the future, hence the need for civic self-reflection and the letting go of hatred; in the nuclear age, violence is an obsolete means to solve international disputes; politics as a discursive and ongoing process of conflict resolution, arbitrated by the most persuasive argument, must progress beyond national borders.

Jaspers and Arendt: Actors and Thinkers in Dark Times

There is no need for theorists to have thought positively or at length about a particular political phenomenon to develop useful concepts for its analysis. Arendt and Jaspers endorsed the project of European integration enthusiastically in the late 1940s. But Jaspers became more interested in “world unity” than European unity, and turned away from the European Communities by 1964 for the sake of German security, condemning Adenauer’s policy of rapprochement with France, because “if we play up to De Gaulle we are disloyal to America.” Yet his discussion of German guilt, which illuminates both the virtues of self-incrimination, and its political pitfalls – a form of disempowerment – and his insistence on the sharing of responsibility for recovery after major political breakdowns are relevant to the early years of European integration.¹⁶

In contrast to Jaspers, Arendt was suspicious of world government. Freedom could only exist as a living political reality if national laws hedged it in. The 1954 French National Assembly’s rejection of the European Defense Community (EDC) and Political Community with their transeuropean representative institutions disappointed her greatly. Twenty years later she had this to say in The Origins of Totalitarianism:

The attempts to build up a European elite with a program of intra-European understanding based on the common experience of the concentration camps have foundered in much the same manner as the attempts following the first World War to draw political conclusions from the international experience of the front generations. In both cases it turned out that the experiences themselves could communicate no more than nihilistic banalities.¹⁷

Arendt indicted (among others) the bourgeois, moved by materialistic considerations, whom she contrasted with the citizen motivated by the will to principled action. The 1957 Treaties of Rome may have struck her as one more of these merely “material” pursuits, and I will draw from her controversial distinction between economics and politics to analyze the principle of power as action in concert, which moved to action the Treaties’ negotiators according to my account. Like other victims of Nazism, Arendt continued to wrestle with her relationship to the Germans after the war. She linked the human capacity for political initiatives (natality) with promise and forgiveness, which palliate the unpredictability and irreversibility of human action. She was one of the first to make forgiveness a concept relevant to politics (she does not apply the term reconciliation to peacemaking), releasing it out of the preserve of familial and communal relationships and theological discourses.

Charles Taylor and Jürgen Habermas: Contemporary Theorists

Charles Taylor and Jürgen Habermas, in contrast to Arendt and Jaspers, have witnessed more recent developments of the EC/EU. Their strongly participatory view of politics makes them well aware of the weaknesses of this process. Nonetheless, they exhibit cautious optimism. In recent years Habermas has shifted his attention from European to global governance, proposing a three-tiered system of institutions of decision-making at the national, transnational (regional) and supranational levels. But the European Union experience continues to shape his more policy-oriented proposals, while his discourse ethics remains a reference for EU scholars studying the EU democratic deficit.¹⁸ Taylor draws lessons from the EU experience to solve problems much closer to home. Commenting on the status of Quebec in his native Canada, he suggests an “innovative” solution to overcome the Canadian impasse by distinguishing between the nineteenth-century French-American model of direct membership in an exclusive polity, and a new model, the European model where citizens “belong to the larger entity via their membership in constituent societies.” Citizens of the English-speaking provinces may choose to be Canadian citizens according to the French-American nation-state model while the Quebecois who stress their belonging to a distinct society could follow the EU model.¹⁹ Implicit in Taylor’s argument is his acknowledgment that the EU offers a viable model for the difficult “politics of recognition” of his homeland. In spite of their knowledgeable interest in European integration affairs, Habermas and Taylor do not derive their main political categories from the study of European integration any more than Arendt or Jaspers did.

Isaiah Berlin and Paul Ricoeur: Distant Observers

Isaiah Berlin displays an astonishing knowledge of European intellectual and philosophical tradition, but scant theorizing announced the politics of European integration, which may explain his apparent neglect of this issue. He makes no mention of it in “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” a largely autobiographical essay by his own account; nor does he comment on it in his wide-ranging conversations with Ramin Jahanbegloo shortly before his death. However, Berlin’s discussion of pluralism, “that is, the conception that there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational, fully men, capable of understanding each other and sympathizing and deriving light from each other,” and his stress on fantasia, a type of empathy that one should develop even for the opponent, provide rich theoretical resources to reflect on the ECSC/EC/EU representations of differences.²⁰ Paul Ricoeur is another encyclopedic thinker who does not engage directly with the project of Europe integration, but considers it with sympathy. He sees the need for a market to serve as the “basis of unification for Europe,” and new institutions with the rest of the world to solve the “problem of the multiplicity of nation-states.” The fundamental challenge underlying these economic and political arrangements, however, is spiritual: “narratives of founding are missing to provide some basis of unity for the diversity within the culture.” Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of memory and identity provides the theoretical justification and the methodology for my interpretation of European integration.²¹

“All memory is of the past,” writes Ricoeur.²² His concern is that the hard work of recollecting the past must be kept carefully separate from experiencing the present or expecting the future. This is less a temporal than a psychological distinction, an attempt to keep interpretations of the past “faithful to the past” as live...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1. Principles of action or clichés? Why hermeneutics matters to European integration
• 2. “After the deluge”: the principle of reconciliation
• 3. Remembering the principle of reconciliation: “applications”
• 4. Of power and purgatory: building the European Communities
• 5. Enlargements and the recognition of the Other: the case of Turkey
• 6. The question of the demos: truth-telling and right-speaking
• 7. EU borders and the “enlarged mentality”
• Appendix: list of interviews and questionnaires for elite interviews, 1999 and 2008
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index