CONTENTS
Introduction: Understanding the EU
PART ONE – DEFINING THE SOFT UTOPIA
Chapter 1 Something Completely Different
Chapter 2 Postmodern: The EU as an Unanswered Question
Chapter 3 The Utopian Dream of World Peace
PART TWO – INTENDED AND UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
Chapter 4 Out of the Ashes
Chapter 5 The Transformation of Europe
Chapter 6 The Cloak of Constructive Ambiguity
PART THREE – CASE STUDIES IN SOFT UTOPIA
Chapter 7 Getting It Right the Second Time
Chapter 8 Écrasez l’Infâme: Religion and the EU Constitution
Chapter 9 The Eurozone Crisis and the Politics behind the Money
PART FOUR – TRANSFORMING HUMAN RIGHTS
Chapter 10 Absolute Autonomy: The Global Ethic of Women’s Rights
Chapter 11 The Deconstruction of Human Nature: LGBT Rights
Chapter 12 Antidiscrimination and Religious Freedom in a Post-Christian Europe
PART FIVE – OUR BEST FRIENDS AND OUR WORST ANTAGONISTS
Chapter 13 Global Governance and National Sovereignty
Chapter 14 Global Judicial Despotism and the International Criminal Court
Chapter 15 Binding the Leviathan in Its War on Terror
Chapter 16 Post-Christian Europe and Religion in America
PART SIX – SOFT UTOPIA AT A CROSSROADS
Chapter 17 The Price of the Euro: Unprecedented Integration or EU Breakup?
Chapter 18 Demographics and Islam: The Challenges for Europe’s Future
Chapter 19 The Crisis of Democracy in Europe
Epilogue: Will America Follow the EU into the Soft Utopia?
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
For Vici, Philip, Nicholas and Sarah
This is a book about the European Union, an organization that is exceedingly opaque, dauntingly complex and full of mutually opposing currents and interests. It is not surprising that the EU is poorly understood. But a grasp of the EU is necessary in order to understand international affairs, the global economy and the world’s most important alliance – the transatlantic alliance between North America and Europe. This book is not an “EU for Dummies;” nor is it a handbook that would explain the bureaucratic machinery of the EU institutions, or the technicalities of the EU treaties. Rather, it is a sketch of the EU’s essence: what kind of organization the EU is, how it is understood by those who are committed to the European idea, what its reason for being is.
Current events have made it more crucial than ever to understand what makes the EU tick. What are the ideological roots of the eurozone crisis? Why do so many EU leaders seem willing to risk exposing their people to more jihadist terror and to invite a potentially unmanageable de-Westernization of Europe by opening the floodgates to immigrants from a burning Middle East? And finally, what does all of this imply for the United States and Europe, the transatlantic alliance, and the world at large?
In dealing with these questions, this book is meant to sound an alarm. It is written out of great admiration for Europe, in the hope that Europe’s postwar democracies and the Western idea of self-government rooted in truth will not be lost to a new ideology – the soft-utopian ideology of global governance that has become the EU’s driving force.
THE SOFT UTOPIA OF GLOBAL GOVERNANCE
The European Union, rising from the ruins of two devastating world wars, embodies a longing for a world of peace, prosperity and stability. It is more than just a free-trade area, a customs union or an international organization through which the member states pursue their national interests. It is meant to be the harbinger of a new era, in which a cosmopolitan and harmonious Europe provides the model for a worldwide system of supranational governance. In this new world order, power is to be wielded not primarily by national governments on behalf of national electorates, but by an ever-thickening web of international organizations administering a growing body of international law and regulation, purportedly in the interests of a global citizenry.
The EU is, in effect, a “soft utopia,” engendered in the birthplace of the “hard utopias,” the antihuman ideologies that led to immense misery, death and ruin in the twentieth century. Unlike the hard utopias of communism and fascism, the EU has no political prisons or secret police. Despite its own deficiency of democratic legitimacy, it has helped foster the worldwide spread of democracy, free markets and the rule of law since its inception. Like communism and fascism, however, it is in essence a utopia – a political construct that seeks humankind’s ultimate purpose in a better-than-possible world created by politics. It puts politics before people, as it seeks to remake human beings in the service of its political project rather than to adapt the project to human beings as they are.
But the EU does not seek to realize its dream by force; it is too comfortable and too relativistic for that. The European idea itself remains amorphous, and its underlying ideology vague. There is nothing jagged or sharp-edged about the EU.
THE ENDLESS BECOMING OF THE EU
Despite the soft edges and vagueness, it is not impossible to delineate the EU and describe the essence of its soft utopia. The first thing to understand is that the EU cannot be defined in familiar categories, in the way that one could define the United States as a nation-state with a constitutional liberal democracy, for example, or the United Nations as a global international organization functioning as a forum for cooperation among its member states. The EU is sui generis. It is far more powerful than a traditional international organization, and its members are far more politically and economically integrated, but neither is it a European superstate. It is like nothing that has come before it, and, more than sixty years after the establishment of its first predecessor, the European Coal and Steel Community, the EU is still evolving, still in the process of becoming. And no one really has a particular end state in mind.
In fact, the EU has been in the process of becoming for so long that many believe the very essence of the EU is process – constant motion and change. Many commentators have said that the EU is “postmodern,” not only in the sense that it heralds a new, peaceful world beyond the modern world of nation-states and balance-of-power politics, but also in the way it exemplifies process rather than outcome, diversity rather than singularity, dialogue and open-endedness rather than conclusion, becoming rather than being. If nothing else, the EU is a fascinating and quintessentially European mind game.
But when all the vagaries, blurred distinctions and fuzzy edges are stripped away, the EU is essentially the following: a constantly evolving union of twenty-eight Western and Central European nation-states in which the governing and intellectual elites, in the interest of realizing an unprecedented degree of peace, stability and prosperity,