The Greek referendum shed light on the most contradictory and frantic scene in which Europe has found itself since it took the path towards integration. The destiny of this peace-through-cooperation project is suspended, more than ever before, amid opposing wills and intentions. Opacity and, above all, the overbearing rebirth of national interests follow the farsightedness of its visionary founders; they are eager to use Europe as a weapon to offend and humiliate, or as an alibi to conceal their own lack of decision-making capacity. The vision of a European Union came into being in between the two World Wars in order to defeat nationalisms and their followers.
The original guidelines of this pragmatic utopia were substantially two: that hinging on a constituent political will, and that hinging on the idea of building the habit to cooperation through rules and economic agreements. The first was embodied by Altiero Spinelli and explicitly called for States to establish a federal political order, a project to be carried out by confronting ideas and through a political work (as the European federalist movement did). The second was represented by the personality of Jean Monnet. It became the EU's inspiring paradigm, and its first bud sprouted in 1950 with the creation of the High Authority for the Franco-German production of steel and coal. That treaty was the first of many others to be signed by European governments regarding common interests in all sectors. The European federation could thus grow by accumulation, with no founding decree. Instead, it would grow as a self-harnessing policy of its member-states, that would gradually constitutionalise supranational practices.
This unpolitical path towards European integration is rooted in the 1700s, in the philosophy of the "Invisible Hand" and the civilizing function of trade. The Kantian assumption was that individuals tend to move, interact and communicate for their personal reasons, but consequently an indirect process of public relations and rights consolidation is put in motion, allowing peaceful coexistence to be consolidated in time for general convenience. Prospectively, the integration could generate a more perfect union even without any explicit political will. This was the philosophy supporting the European project through second order decisions, induced by the convenience to cooperate.
This paradigm was a successful strategy in the expansive phase of post-War reconstruction, precisely as a result of its capacity to contain the conflict-prone political potential and provide space to the formulation of accords and treaties. But in our time of economic crisis, this method has lost its driving force. The challenge which Europe is facing would require a political determination in Spinelli's spirit. As argued by the constitutionalist Dieter Grimm, the network of rights and legal constructions has to be anchored to an "expression of self-determination by the sovereign European people", for it to authoritatively impose its authority on everybody and in all the states.
To trust in the practices brought about by the use of European rules, in the habit to live European-style as if things go ahead by their own force: all this functions as long as things proceed easily, when no further will or necessary onerous decision need to be taken. The “heterogenesis of ends” paradigm on which the EU has been modeled, is the product of the eighteenth-century utopia of the so-called "doux commerce", of the civilizing force of trade as long as it is the market's "invisible hand" to determine the decisions to be taken, not politics. The problem is that, while this strategy had the virtue of stabilizing peaceful relations, it is unable now to guide the European Union towards a democratic political integration, so needed nowadays. Routine reproduces practices but does not know how to create new scenarios. This is why today's struggle in Europe is between the party of the invisible hand and the party of the federal political will.
Never will a more perfect union achieved unless the European demos is consulted, unless the political will does not be acknowledged its founding authority, a condition without which, after Greece, others could think of using the tool of consulting the national people to react against decisions which have not been taken on behalf of the European people. The "No" result of the Greek referendum, regarding the conditions the EU imposed on the country to "heal" its national debt, revealed that only within an accomplished political union can the Greek case be more than an issue of private debtors and creditors. Only in a political union could the Greek problem effectively be a European question, and its solution an extraordinary opportunity for continental growth. In order to understand this, the logic of the invisible hand does not serve. Rather, it is an obstacle, because by rejecting the idea of giving importance to politics, it strengthens the practice of intergovernmental negotiations, thus it further strengthens national interests. In doing so, it furthers the decline of the European Union.
In Come ho tentato di diventare saggio ("How I tried to become wise") Altiero Spinelli tells of how the federalist and pro-European idea came into being. He thus depicts Europe in the 1930s: “All these European States obeyed above all others the law of conserving and asserting their own sovereignty. Whether democratic or totalitarian, they were more and more nationalist... The European federation was not in our eyes an ideology, was not intended to colour in this or that way an existing power... It was the negation of nationalism, that was becoming rampant once again”.
Translated by Alon Helled
The article was originally published in La Repubblica, July 8th, 2015
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