Intervento di J. Weiler - Presidente Jean Monnet

We are here today for a celebration, for a Festa. But there is little to celebrate, pocco da festegiare in the current circumstance of Europe. Make no mistake – historically, Europe is a resounding success – a noble experiment which has delivered on its two most important promises – Peace and prosperity. Still, right now, Europe is at a nadir which one cannot remember for many decades and which, various brave or pompous or self-serving statements notwithstanding, the Treaty of Lisbon is not about to redress. I could mention immediate political events – Euro, Lybia et cetera. But instead I want to go to deeper, structural issue, the three most pressing and profound manifestations of the current weakness, some would say crisis, of Europe. First there is the persistent, chronic, troubling Democracy Deficit, which cannot be talked away. Then there is a deeper legitimacy crisis, where citizen growing indifference is turning to hostility and worse. And finally there is, Lisbon notwithstanding, the embarrassing failure of Europe to translate its economic might into political power and what I would consider its irresponsible abdication of a 2 serious commitment to security, leaving the field as it has for decades to a less and less engaged America. The sad thing is that I could have said the same 10 and even 20 years ago, except that the trajectory, on all three issues in negative, things getting worse rather than better. I will say a bit about each of these three issues and then offer my thesis – how, in some ways, we are prisoners of the past, of the very Schumann Declaration the anniversary of which we celebrate today. 1. The manifestations of the so-called Democracy Deficit are persistent and no endless repetition of the powers of the European Parliament will remove them. In essence it is the inability of the Union to develop structures and processes which adequately replicate at the Union level even the imperfect habits of governmental control, parliamentary accountability and administrative responsibility that are practiced with different modalities in the various Member States. The two primordial features of any functioning democracy are missing – the grand principles of accountability and representation. As regards accountability, Even the basic condition of Representative Democracy that at election time the citizens ‘ ‘…can throw the scoundrels out’’ – that is replace the Government – does not operate in Europe. The form of European Governance, indeed Governance without Government, is – and will remain for considerable time, perhaps forever – such that there is no ‘‘Government’’ to throw out. Dismissing the Commission by Parliament (or approving the appointment of the Commission President) is not quite the same, not even remotely so. Startlingly, political accountability of Europe is surprisingly weak. In European governance, who has ever paid a real price for failure (rather than misconduct)? Likewise, at the most primitive level of democracy, there is simply no moment in the civic calendar of Europe where the citizen can influence directly the outcome of any policy choice facing the Community and Union in the way that citizens can when choosing between parties which offer sharply distinct programmes. The political colour of the European Parliament hardly gets translated into the legislative and administrative output of the Union. The Political Deficit, to use the felicitous phrase of 3 Renaud Dehousse is at the core of the Democracy Deficit. The Commission, by necessity, cannot be ‘‘partisan’,’ neither can the Council, by virtue of the haphazard political nature of its composition. So where does that leave us? Democracy without Politics? Is that not an oxymoron? Thus the two most primordial norms of democracy, the principle of accountability and the principle of representation are compromised in the actual practices of the Union. 2. The second manifestation of the current sad European circumstance is the evidence of a continued slide in the legitimacy and mobilizing force of the European construct and its Institutions. I pass over some of the uglier manifestations of European ‘solidarity’ both at governmental and popular level as regards the Euro-crisis or the near abandonment of Italy to deal with the influx of migrants from North Africa as if this was an Italian problem and not a problem for Europe as a whole. They are not coming to Italy. They are coming to Europe – Here is a success of European integration. I look instead at two deeper and longer-term trends. The first is the extraordinary decline in voter participation in elections for the European Parliament. In Europe as a whole the rate of participation is below 45 per cent, with several countries, notably in the East, with a rate below 30 per cent. The correct comparison is with political elections to national parliaments where the numbers are considerably higher. What is striking about these figures is that the decline coincides with a continuous shift in powers to the European Parliament, which today is a veritable co-legislator with the Council. The more powers the European Parliament gains, the greater popular indifference to it – and this is the presumed vox populi. No less worrying is a seemingly contagious spread of ‘Anti-Europeanism’ in national politics. What was once an ‘English disease’ seems to have taken root in several other Member States where political capital is to be made among non-fringe parties by anti-European advocacy. Here is another case of amnesia. We seem to have air brushed out of our historical consciousness the rejection of the so-called European Constitution, an understandable amnesia since it represented a defeat of the collective political class in 4 Europe by, yes, the Vox Populi, albeit not speaking through, but instead giving a slap in the face to, the European Institutions. 3. The final weakness is a manifestation of an equally persistent and at times shameful European lack of both capacity and resolve (and a lack of resolve to have capacity) to defend and protect the values it professes to hold most dear. It is only our propensity for amnesia which enables us to avoid this problem – to look in our collective mirror without shame. Consider the evidence. In the 1990s, in the heart of Europe, not even 500 kms from Rome, for the second time in the same century, Europe allowed that which one had vowed would never be allowed to happen again, something the European Construct was meant to guarantee would never happen again: the genocide (so qualified by the World Court in The Hague) of a non-Christian religious minority. When finally the endless talking came to an end and the resolve was found to prevent the Bosnian genocide from repeating itself in Kosovo, Europe discovered that it had no capacity and, once again, the ‘‘cavalry’’ from across the Atlantic had to be called in. Europe alone could not plan, target, let alone execute, this relatively simple operation. The numbers tell the sad story. Each of the European states participating in the action to prevent a Kosovar humanitarian disaster executed at most several hundred aerial sorties. The Americans executed around twenty thousand. Kosovo represents, in my eyes, a deeper failure. I refer to the Srebrenica incident where Dutch soldiers within reach, and with full knowledge of the worst atrocity of that war, did not intervene to put a stop to it. Make no mistake: these could have been Italian or British soldiers or soldiers from any other of our Member States. And make no second mistake: these immobile soldiers were, like all of us, firm believers in human rights, solidarity and all the other values we profess from morning to evening. Their values were just fine. It is their virtue, our virtue, which was lacking. They lacked the courage that is born from a conviction that some things, like preventing a mass slaughter of the innocent for the simple reason that they do not share your faith, is worth dying for, is worth killing for. They are the 5 product of a culture in which it would appear that nothing is worth dying for or killing for, and if it is, it should be others who do the dying and killing. If anyone wants to entertain the illusion that Kosovo was an aberration, we now have Libya with a repetition of at least part of the Kosovar pathology: without massive American military involvement, Europe, let us be clear, would have simply been unable to undertake any action in so-called Mare Nostrum. It is not only a question of arms. All the Lisbon efforts to strengthen and give coherence to the international manifestation of European Union were showed up in their embarrassing poverty. Not only was it the expected absenteeism from the Libyan crisis management of the European Presidents (we now have two, no less!) and its ‘‘Foreign Minister’’ replaced by the usual Member State leaders – Merkel, Sarkozy and Cameron – (with an embarrassing, if understandable, reluctance to involve the Italian government; Spain has long disappeared as a serious international player), but even these leaders were unable to find an accord and the world was treated to a divided vote among the pillars of European integration within the Security Council. I recommend placing a bet with some London bookie on the chances of Germany gaining a seat on the Security Council. A penny might win you a million. II I want to offer some reflections on these three manifestations of this European circumstance. But first, some words of caution. There are many factors which explain complex political and social phenomena of the type I have described above. In my reflection I will not be offering ‘the explanation’ since, indeed, there is no single explanation, but one factor which to my mind has not received sufficient attention, namely political and institutional culture, and especially what is, in my view, the abiding effect of the early political culture of the Union, its political cultural DNA. I want to identify, in particular, two signal early features of that political culture. 6 In analyzing the legitimacy (and mobilizing force) of the European Union in particular against the background of its persistent democracy deficit, political and social science has long used the distinction between Process Legitimacy and Outcome Legitimacy (aka input/ouput, process/result etc). The legitimacy of the Union more generally and the Commission more specifically, even if suffering from deficiencies in the democratic process, are said to rest on the results achieved – in the economic, social and, ultimately, political realms. The idea hearkens back to the most classic functionalist and neo-functionalist theories – ‘James, please clear up that Spillover….’ But there is a third type of legitimation which, in my view, played for a long time a much larger role than is currently acknowledged. In fact, in my view, it has been decisive to the legitimacy of Europe and to the positive response of both the political class and citizens at large.We may call this “destiny legitimation,” or “mission legitimation” or, more colourfully, Political Messianism. The justification for action and its mobilizing force, derive not from process, as in classical democracy, or from result and success, but from the ideal pursued, the destiny to be achieved, the Promised Land waiting at the end of the road. In messianic visions the End always trumps the Means. Mark Mazower, in his brilliant history and historiography of 20th-century Europe (Dark Continent –Europe’s Twentieth Century, 1998), shows how the Europe of Monarchs and Emperors which entered World War I was often rooted in a political messianic narrative in various states (in Germany, and Italy, and Russia and even Britian and France). It then oscillated after the War towards new democratic orders, that is a shift to process legitimacy, which then retreated back into new forms of political messianism in Fascism and Communism. As it oscillated back after World War II it would seem that an interesting choice was made, not often noted. On the one hand, the Western states, which were later to become the Member States of the European Union, became resolutely democratic, their patriotism rooted in their new constitutional values, narratives of glory and empire abandoned and even ridiculed, and messianic notions of the state losing all appeal. And yet, 7 their common venture, European Integration, was in fact a political messianic venture par excellence. The hallmarks are easily detected as we would expect in its constitutive document, the Schuman Declaration. It is manifest in what is in the Declaration and, no less importantly, in what is not therein. Nota bene: European integration is nothing like its European messianic predecessors – that of monarchies and Empire and later Fascism and Communism. It is liberal and noble, but politically messianic it is nonetheless. The rhetoric speaks for itself: World peace cannot be safeguarded without the making of creative efforts proportionate to the dangers which threaten it…. The contribution which an organised and living Europe can bring to civilisation is indispensable … …a first step in the federation of Europe [which] will change the destinies of those regions which have long been devoted to the manufacture of munitions of war… [A]ny war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible. This production will be offered to the world as a whole without distinction or exception… [I]t may be the leaven from which may grow a wider and deeper community between countries long opposed to one another by sanguinary divisions. It is noble, inspiring, Churchillian one might even say with a tad of irony. Some old habits, such as the White Man’s Burden and the Missionary tradition, die hard: With increased resources Europe will be able to pursue the achievement of one of its essential tasks, namely, the development of the African continent. It is a compelling vision which has animated generations of European idealists where the Ever Closer Union Among the People of Europe, with peace and prosperity an icing on the cake, constituting the beckoning Promised Land. It is 8 this compelling vision which explains in part why for so long the Union could operate without a veritable commitment to the principles it demanded of its aspiring Members – democracy and human rights. They had to become Members of the European Convention of Human Rights, but not the Union itself. They had to prove their democratic credentials, but not the Union itself. The difficult path to (partial) democracy is not accidental, if we examine the Declaration with an eye, this time, to what is not to be found in its magisterial narrative. In its original and unedited version it is quite elaborate in operational detail. But you will find neither the word democracy, nor human rights. It’s a Lets-Just-Do-It type of programme animated by great idealism (and a goodly measure of good old State Interest, as a whole generation of historians such as Alan Milward and Charles Maier among others have demonstrated). The European Double Helix has from its inception been Commission and Council: an international (supposedly) apolitical transnational administration/executive (the Commission) collaborating not, as we habitually say, with the Member States (Council) but with the Governments, the Executive Branch of the Member States, which for years and years had a forum that escaped in day-to-day matters the scrutiny of any parliament, European or national. Democracy is simply not part of the original vision of European Integration. Shocking? Is it altogether fanciful to tell the narrative of Europe as one in which ‘doers and believers’ (notably the most original of its Institutions, the Commission, coupled with an empowered executive branch of the Members States in the guise of the Council and COREPER), an elitist (if well-paid) vanguard, were the selfappointed leaders from whom grudgingly, over decades, power had to be arrested by the European Parliament? And even the European Parliament has been a strange vox populi. For hasn’t it been, for most of its life, a Champion of European Integration, so that to the extent that, inevitably, when the Union created fears (only natural in such a radical transformation of European politics) the European Parliament did not feel the place citizens would go to express those fears and concerns. It was an incredibly successful formula for action, for achieving stunning result. It was intended to be legitimated democratically – and it could not, at inception, be 9 legitimated by results. It was, and continued to be legitimated by the dream it promised, by its noble, messianic, objectives. But that very fact must be part of the explanation of the decline in European legitimacy and mobilizing pull which is so obvious in the current circumstance. It is part of the phenomenology of political Messianism. It always collapses – in part because of its success. The European construct is decidedly a victim of its spectacular success in the realms of prosperity and peace where the Promised Land has already been entered. Just as Paradise becomes such only when it is Lost, it is the Promise, that which one does not have, which makes the Land alluring. And once the Land has been entered, reality never matches the dream. The emblematic manifestation of this is the difference between the 868 inspiring words of the Schumann dream and the 154,183 very real words of the (defunct) European Constitution. If political Messianism is not rapidly anchored in the legitimation that comes from popular ownership, it rapidly becomes alienating and, like the Golem, turns on its creators. Democracy was not part of the original DNA of European Integration. It still feels like a foreign implant. With the collapse of its original political Messianism, the alienation we are now witnessing is only to be expected. III The second story, brief and rude, is usually considered a historical curiosity, but it, too, had a profound effect on the political culture of the Union and European Integration. I refer to the saga of the European Defence Community. A Treaty was actually signed in May 1952 but failed to be ratified in the French Parliament in May 1954 and the project was abandoned. My contention is that this ‘childhood’ trauma has had profound effects, not just material but principally political and cultural. It became part of European faith that defence, security and military matters had to be kept separate from the European construct – in a ‘it is not politically feasible, it is not politically desirable’ unholy alliance of arguments. It has bred amazing pathologies, not least wasteful 10 replications of the defence efforts of the Member States coupled with a total reliance on American force. If America has become the Policeman of the World, it is in part because Europe allowed it to become so – since when in trouble Europe itself would call not its own police but 911. Paradoxically, the failure to cooperate has also weakened each state individually, since the magnitude of expense simply removed certain projects from national agendas. Even worse, Europe failed to develop, slowly and painfully, the habits of cooperation, consensus-building, etc. in this field which remained outside the European construct. Like its democratization, it had to graft alien bodies – European Political Cooperation, Third Pillar, Common Defence and Security, etc. etc. Worst of all, it developed a whole new rationalization – the Civilian Power – in a laughable attempt to justify the failure of its own early project. Here there has been a veritable Spill Over also into national politics. Reasonable people can debate the extent of any existential threat to Europe. But there can be no debate that at times, unless one is a pacifist (a comfortable luxury when your friendly neighbour is not), the only way to prevent the worst kind of trampling on the most hallowed values might require decisive use of force. The consequences of this failure are to be found in the graveyards of Bosnia, Darfur and elsewhere. IV There are no easy fixes to these problems. That is the nature of problems which are not rooted in institutional arrangements but are a reflection of what has become part of a deep-seated political culture.