EUROPEAN UNION AS A JOURNEY
Jorge Rodrigues Simão
2013
Dedication
To the memory of my father.Guardar
To Professor Francis G. Snyder.
To my son Jorge Miguel as an incentive for his Master and Ph.D in European Union Law.
Preface
Europe is standing at a crossroads. If Europe is a journey as our papers suggests, every enlargement, every treaty, every divided Council and every opinion poll often seems to place us at a crossroads of a kind.
The new constitutional treaty agreed at Brussels in 2004, and at the time of writing poised to run the gauntlet of national parliaments and public opinion, is unlikely to change the perception that European Union is a journey without a clear destination. Indeed, it is probably the greatest achievement of the EU that it has endured, and added so much to Europe’s common life, in the complete absence of any clear consensus among Europeans about what it is for and where it is going.
The fact remains that European Union is both a destination and a way of getting somewhere. It is a “modus vivendi” for a continent with an historic leaning towards armed conflict and military dispute.
It is a mechanism for creating a single market that has delivered extraordinary prosperity for Europeans. But it is also the expression of the idea, long latent on the European continent and its offshore islands, that Europe’s peoples form a political community of a kind and that they must someday have institutions that express that. If the first two, at least in the current liberal consensus about the value of regulated free markets, seem uncontroversial, the last still has the quality of an existential debate for many in Europe.
Decades of failure to properly articulate an objective view of European Union to European citizens on the part of governments, an increasingly powerful media and the institutions of the EU themselves has left a deep void of public incomprehension.
This in turn has encouraged a tabloid perception that unscrupulous pro-European integrationists have had the better of the past five decades, expanding their sinister project without the burden of too much public scrutiny or comprehension.
If the Eurosceptics sometimes sound paranoid and parochial, it is at least in part because defenders of European Union have too often given them little reason to think otherwise.
The space between the Philadelphia dreams of Valery Giscard d’Estaing and the more ambitious “conventionels” and the stubborn nostalgia of the British “withdraw lists” is still much too sparsely populated by public debate or media attention. And therein lies a real failure to make the European Union comprehensible to the people it serves. It also suggests that we may find ourselves at the European crossroads for a little while longer.
Part of the problem, as we point out, lies in the tendency to subordinate the political argument for European Union to the economic one, especially in more euro-wary countries like Sweden and Britain.
This creates a debate on Europe that is badly misshapen. Unless we can talk after the euro and deficits crises (sweep Greece with greater intensity but do not skimp Portugal, Spain, Ireland and other euro zone member States more moderately) openly about the political instinct that leads many Europeans to the conclusion that the European peoples have:
(1) A common cultural and political heritage;
(2) An inescapable political interdependence in the face of global political, economic and ecological challenges and
(3) A responsibility, given Europe’s traumatic history, to bind themselves together politically so that they can never again be broken by military conflict or disfigured by dictatorship both painfully recent memories in much of Europe the argument for European Union will sound half-baked, and Europe’s crisis of identity will persist.
If nothing else, we will have no apposite response to those who can and do make the inverse of this argument: that the tribal European nation states can never form any kind of political community, federated, confederated or otherwise.
Our papers do not duck that argument, or the questions it raises. Unless we try to understand Europe as a political problem we will never understand it at all. As important as it may be to understand the neo-functionalist analysis of the inter-institutional dynamic, unless you learn to see the European Union as it looks to a Brussels “fonctionaire”, or an Irish farmer, or a Portuguese businessman or the Prime Minister of Poland, it simply won’t make any sense. It won’t make a lot of sense when you do learn to see it that way but that is at least partly the point.
The fact that these papers are leavened with this kind of perspective makes it a refreshing analysis. For all of the ink spilt at the feet of individual Union policies, it is still rare for an academic writer to consider Europe as a whole, in its many political contexts.
Whether you agree or disagree, whether you think Europe’s journey tends to gloom or glory, the arguments in these papers will make a good companion at the European crossroads as we believe.
Total number pages: 477
