Opinion Sur
E pluribus unum. To make one out of many is the challenge of every nation that wants to call itself a Union. In North America, the Union was forged by blood and tears in the War of Independence and later in the Civil War. Something similar occurred with the Latin American nations. But Europe cannot bring itself to forge a Union with more solid bases than instrumental treaties. It lacks the true foundations of sovereignty and democratic legitimacy.[[This article is also the Prologue to the oncoming e-book Why Europe? The avatars of a Fraught Project.]]
At the dedication of the first American national cemetery, and while a bloody civil war was raging, Abraham Lincoln started his short speech with the famous words: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The European Union traces its origins from the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and the European Economic Community (EEC), formed by the Inner Six countries in 1951 and 1958 respectively. In the intervening years the community and its successors have grown in size by the accession of new member states and in power by the addition of policy areas to its remit. The Maastricht Treaty established the European Union under its current name in 1993. The latest amendment to the constitutional basis of the EU, the Treaty of Lisbon came into force in 2009.
In this long and laborious process nobody will find a commitment to values equal to the strength of Lincoln’s statement. We may well ask, “To what proposition was the European Union dedicated?” We will find no easy answer, for there was no foundational act on which to base a true collective sovereignty. We find instead a series of economic arrangements and instrumental treatises, for which, frankly, nobody has ever been willing to sacrifice his or her life. When the Nobel Peace Committee conferred upon the European Union its Prize in 2012, it cited avoidance as a foundational principle. According to the Norwegians –themselves not part of the EU—a United Europe averted the horrible internecine wars to which Europe had been prone during the twentieth century. In short, the Union deserves praise for having saved Europe from itself. Quite apart from the contrarian argument that after 1945 Europe was held together by NATO [[On the present state and trends of European defense, see the sobering article by Gideon Rachman, “A Disarmed Europe Will Face The World On Its Own,” Financial Times, Februay 19 2013, p.9.]] and the Marshall Plan –that is by the protective umbrella of the United States during the Cold War—it is not enough to found sovereignty on a merely prudential basis. As William Blake put it in his tract The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) “Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.”
Europe’s inability to surmount its crises goes back to its foundational deficiency. It is a technocratic project, not a solemn commitment. It is a melancholy project, beset by a double deficit: a democratic deficit, and a value deficit. The highest thinker of Europe –Hegel– put this melancholy in print in his Preface to The Philosophy of Right: “When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.” This book analyzes the world crisis, the place of Europe within it, and the dim prospects of Europe’s united survival in its present form.
