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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Books |
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Review |
Where is Europe Going?
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| A view from the intellectual left, which is producing some of the best work on contemporary Europe |
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Published : 1 January 2012 |
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GREGORIO BORGIA / AP PHOTO |
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| Protestors clash with police in downtown Rome on 15 October 2011. Protestors smashed shop windows and torched cars as violence
broke out during a demonstration in the Italian capital.
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EW PEOPLE WOULD DENY that Europe has been mired in crisis since the near collapse of its banking system in 2008. The entire continent has fallen prey to the sort of debilitating pessimism that last infected it when Hitler was still alive. Even its best-governed nations are stricken by the sense that things have gone badly wrong and that no one knows how to |
put them right. A future of hyperinflation, soaring unemployment, slashed productivity, social unrest and political repression suddenly seems frighteningly possible.
One of the most disorienting features of the crisis is that its origins and future course seem so obscure. Scores of commentators have competed with each other to explain the traumatic events of the last few years and to speculate about what happens next. By and large their theories are wildly incompatible. The left blames neoliberalism while the right blames the legacy of post-war social democracy. Some claim that globalisation needs to be reined in while others call for it to be extended.
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Brussels, the Gentle Monster, or
the Disenfranchisement of Europe
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Seagull Books, 83 pages,  350 |
Nevertheless, there are two observations about the current European scene which tend to unite observers from across the political spectrum. The first is that we have reached a decisive moment in the process of European integration. Nearly everyone now agrees that the leaders of the European Union (EU) will try to use the crisis to further their goal of creating a European superstate. There is also widespread agreement that the crisis has opened a new chapter in the history of popular protest. Although many countries in Europe moved to the right as the economic downturn began to take hold, the past two years have seen a massive mobilisation of workers, young people and middle-class dissidents in pursuit of left-of-centre objectives. Many believe that this coalition of enragés is forging new styles of protest that will play a crucial role in shaping Europe’s future.
The crisis has had an especially galvanising effect on the intellectual left. Most of the best recent work on Europe has been produced by socialists, Marxists and left-liberals, though there is rarely much agreement between one writer and another. For anyone wanting a sense of what the left has been saying, the three books under review are a good place to start.
Brussels, the Gentle Monster, by the great German essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger, provides a stimulating introduction to the affairs of the EU. Concise, lucid and amusingly sardonic, it is entirely free of the self-regarding cosmopolitanism that mars so much writing on the ‘European project’. Enzensberger is a supporter of the EU but he knows very well that it has taken a wrong turn. His essential point is that the EU’s current structures represent an entirely novel (and almost wholly regrettable) attempt to construct a form of political authority that is simultaneously undemocratic and incapable of outright repression. The EU’s most important institutions are unelected, impervious to pressure from below and exercise functions that are wholly incompatible with the principle of separation of powers. At the same time, they have virtually no coercive power at their disposal. In the absence of a European army or police force, they can only enforce their edicts by relying on the willingness of member states to implement them. Ultimately the EU is a sort of Leviathan without teeth. It seeks to reshape a continent not through force of arms but by the power of exhortation.
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The New Old World
Perry Anderson, Verso,
561 pages, £14.99 |
The fact that it lacks hard power has done nothing to limit the EU’s political ambitions. Like many commentators before him, Enzensberger is astonished by the sheer scale and intrusiveness of European law. For more than 60 years the European Commission has pursued the fruitless dream of abolishing national differences in the interests of free trade. Its efforts prove beyond any doubt that large-scale regulation sometimes does as much to impede social justice as to promote it. Anxious to make competition between the EU’s member states seem ‘fair’ and ‘transparent’, unelected technocrats have burdened the continent with an acquis communautaire, or body of law, that now runs to more than 150,000 pages. Its overriding goal has been to standardise economic activity across every part of Europe. It is now illegal for European companies to manufacture tractor seats in more than one size. Strict rules govern the production of ‘non-directional household lamps’. Legislation has even been introduced to specify the size of condoms.
As Enzensberger cannily notes, this wave of ‘regulation mania’ has not only stymied economic dynamism but gone a long way towards undermining individual liberty. If the citizens of Europe are denied access to a wide variety of goods by a slew of insanely detailed laws, it follows that their capacity to organise their lives as they see fit is greatly reduced. Anyone who believes that free trade tends to augment human freedom would do well to consider the actions of the European Commission. So far its keenest brains have proved unable to dismantle trade barriers without trampling on individual liberty at one and the same time.
Enzensberger’s vision of the European future is a lot less apocalyptic than his concerns about individual freedom might lead one to expect. Recognising that the EU bureaucracy is utterly determined to push on towards the creation of a superstate, he comes close to predicting that its ambitions will sooner or later be thwarted by a peaceful reassertion of national consciousness. It is only possible to force a diverse group of countries into a single mould for so long, or so he implies. The member states of the EU are anxious to sustain their national traditions but have no interest in imposing them on anyone else. One day they will bridle at the EU’s efforts to “homogeniz[e] all living conditions” and slough off its institutions without a single shot being fired.
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Socialist Register 2012:
The Crisis and the Left
Leo Panitch, Greg Albo and Vivek Chibber (EDS)
The Merlin Press/Monthly Review Press/Fernwood Publishing,
308 pages, £15.95 |
Whether the EU can survive these possible developments is entirely dependent on how sensitively it responds. If it continues to behave as if nothing short of a superstate will do, it may well disappear altogether. If it evinces a little modesty and adopts a more relaxed style of governance—if, in particular, it adheres to the principle of “graduated integration” and allows member states to choose which aspects of the EU project they wish to sign up to—it could yet survive in a more democratic and less intrusive form. What is not in doubt is the survival of European comity. In a moving passage addressed to an imaginary EU bureaucrat, Enzensberger argues that post-war developments in economics, technology and culture have bound together the peoples of Europe so powerfully that very little could now tear them apart. In any future that we can foresee, the multifarious states of Europe will co-operate with each other even if the EU is no longer there to chivvy them along:
... as far as the integration of Europe is concerned, we, long ago, made ourselves independent of the authorities. Today, civil networks bind us more tightly than all the treaties you negotiate here in Brussels. Millions of threads create interdependencies which elude your control and which you can neither tie nor tear.
Enzensberger’s book can be read in about 90 minutes. The same can hardly be said of Perry Anderson’s vast, impossible-to-summarise and astonishingly accomplished The New Old World, first published in 2009 and now reissued in a handsome paperback edition. A major presence on the Anglophone left since becoming editor of New Left Review in 1962, Anderson has a well-deserved reputation for knowing virtually everything and making links where most people would see only a tangle of detail. His new book succeeds in combining a penetrating survey of the EU’s development with lengthy, wide-ranging and suavely compressed essays on the recent history of France, Germany, Italy, Cyprus and Turkey. It also incorporates a useful critique of some of the main academic theories of European integration, showing considerable sympathy for the work of Alan Milward, Craig Parsons and Giandomenico Majone, but precious little for that of the American right-winger Andrew Moravcsik. It seems unlikely that anyone except Anderson could write with such authority about so wide a range of topics. If the reader is willing to devote two or three weeks to engaging seriously with The New Old World, he or she will find the experience incomparably educative.
| LIONEL BONAVENTURE / AFP PHOTO |
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People take part in the traditional May Day demonstration in Paris on 1 May 2009. Left-wing opposition leaders and the country’s
trade unions called for marches to be turned into a ‘historic’ protest to demand more help for workers and families. |
Unlike Enzensberger, Anderson looks forward to the day when the EU acquires the characteristics of a genuine state. Although he never quite comes out and says so, it is clear that he still dreams of what his former comrades on the Trotskyist left would call a United Socialist States of Europe. His sense of what a socialist EU might achieve makes his pessimism about the immediate future of Europe seem all the more stark. Speculating about the near future in a glum chapter entitled ‘Prognoses’, Anderson hints that we may be facing a period in which the EU pursues a reactionary form of centralisation while social cohesion across Europe begins to crumble. His concerns about centralisation relate primarily to the area of foreign policy. In an icy survey of the recent efforts of the EU’s member states to adopt a common position on international affairs, he argues that Europe is preparing itself to play a “sub-imperial role”. Too cowardly to challenge the power of the White House, it looks set to spend the next few years undergirding American bellicosity in the Middle East, cosying up to Israel and forcing a neoliberal agenda onto the countries of the developing world. At the same time it will have to deal with powerful forces pulling it apart from below.
Whereas Enzensberger believes that pan-European solidarity is now all but indestructible, Anderson fears that cultural differences are beginning to fragment the continent beyond repair. Immigration gives him particular cause for concern. Noting that the “richer Western states” of Europe now play host to somewhere between 15 and 18 million Muslims, he argues that European culture may currently be too feeble to assimilate the influence of Islam. The great dream of European unity could yet come to grief on a tidal wave of immigration from South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Adhyatmaramam Bulusu
14 January 2012
03:00 PM
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The fall of USSR signaled the death of communism; so thought many. But the war between Capitalism and Socialism is not over. It is just hotting up. The shape of the world, not to speak of Europe will be decided by who wins. But then why all this noise about Occupy? Why not simply ask for Gandhian society?
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A Hamid
1 January 2012
10:50 PM
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An excellent article that lucidly reveals the precarious state of the EU. Moreover, a genuinely fascinating and eloquent read.
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