Third, European monetary union, the introduction of the euro, is the most momentous example of a policy decision made not on its own merits, but in pursuit of the utopia of a politically integrated Europe. It defied basic economics to introduce a common currency to countries with radically varying levels of productivity and economic development. But the decision was taken, in the words of some of its most enthusiastic supporters, explicitly because they believed a common currency would prove unsustainable without political integration. Thus, it would ultimately force Europeans to accept a politically integrated EU. But that didn’t happen. And with the 2008 global financial crisis that began in the United States and the ensuing sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone, economic reality asserted itself. Massive bailouts were necessary to avert sovereign default in Greece especially, but also in Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Cyprus. As of this writing, the survival of the eurozone is by no means certain, regardless of encouraging words emanating from Frankfurt and Brussels.
Beyond the specific issues of a common currency and repeating referenda, the EU’s utopian ideology affects all areas of policy and practice. The EU’s approach to human rights is perhaps most emblematic in that, like the ideology of global governance, it is transformative and liberationist. The global governance movement seeks to transform the world by liberating peoples from their traditional primary allegiances to local communities and nation-states with a common history, culture, language and values. Likewise, the primary objective of the globalists’ human rights advocacy is to liberate individuals from the mediating institutions, such as family and church, that are associated with traditional, community-based, locally rooted life and that imply an objective moral code based on an essentially unchanging human nature. In the globalists’ view, human nature is malleable, and individuals should therefore be free to transform themselves, to define and redefine themselves as they wish, unfettered by community, tradition or inherited values.
The belief in the liberationist and transformative right to define oneself and to determine for oneself what it means to be human is especially apparent in the areas of LGBT rights, women’s rights and children’s rights.** The EU’s approach to each of these priority areas kicks against the traces of traditional views on human nature and on the importance to the individual of deference to family and church and other time-honored institutions – especially those institutions that imply a commitment to an authoritative moral code revealed by God or transmitted through religious tradition, an acceptance of the limits of human knowledge and capability, and skepticism toward transformative globalist ideologies.
“LGBT” is the abbreviation for “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transsexual.” But the terminology in this arena is fluid. Sometimes, the term is expanded to “LGBTI” to include intersex people.
Neither the global governance movement nor the human rights movement associated with it accepts, in principle, any limits handed down by tradition or by the human experience of reality. Just as global governance, heralded by the EU, can bring about a utopia of peace and prosperity for the human collective, so can unlimited choice and absolute autonomy for individuals allow every person to remake and redefine him- or herself at will. This belief has clear implications for the classical rights, such as freedom of religion, which are based on an anthropology that is less fluid and much more compatible with the idea of objective truth. Thus, we will also examine the state of religious freedom and the threats to it in today’s European Union, especially the growing use of antidiscrimination and hate-speech laws to suppress faith-based views or practices that conflict with the EU’s conception of human rights.
THE TROUBLED WATERS OF TRANSATLANTIC RELATIONS
Unfortunately for the transatlantic alliance, and for the worldwide spread of democracy and prosperity that the partners in the transatlantic alliance have worked so hard to realize, the EU’s soft utopianism has profound implications for its relations with the United States. In the short-to-medium term, appearances can be deceivingly placid. After all, the Europeans are our best friends in the world. We are bound together by history and by commonalities in our culture and values. But the Europeans can also be our most tenacious antagonists. Anti-Americanism is an inevitable outgrowth of the European idea. As the world’s most powerful nation-state and one that jealously guards its national sovereignty, the United States by its very existence stands in the way of the EU vision of a world that has evolved beyond the nation-state. The same goes for Israel, which suffers unrelenting EU hostility largely because the existence of a democratic and proud nation-state, and moreover a country grounded in an essentially ethnoreligious view of nationhood, flies in the face of the EU’s supranational, postreligious and postethnic vision for the world. The fact that Israel dares to be fundamentally Western and yet rejects much of the EU’s perspective on the world inflames EU ire.
Naturally, fissures and imbalances are developing constantly in the complex U.S.-Europe relationship. What has often gone unnoticed is that many of the more serious tensions have resulted from the fundamental contradiction between the United States’ concern to safeguard its national sovereignty and the EU’s advocacy of global governance. This has been the key point of friction in the U.S.-EU dispute over the International Criminal Court. Even the near break between the United States and many EU member states over Iraq during the George W. Bush years had much more to do with this fundamental difference in worldview than most observers realize. Throughout the war on terror that began on September 11, 2001, many in Europe have opposed U.S. policy primarily on global governance grounds – they opposed the U.S. decisions to open the Guantanamo prison and to invade Iraq without a UN mandate, and they continue to oppose unilateral anti-terror actions by the Obama administration. Even as the civil war in Syria spreads to Europe in the form of an uncontrollable refugee influx and deadly terror attacks on European soil, a robust military involvement of EU forces other than the French in Syria appears unlikely to most and unthinkable to many.
Another enduring source of transatlantic tension is that the United States remains deeply shaped by traditionalist Christian faith, while secularism pervades Europe. Global governance and secularism are more closely connected than is immediately apparent, and this book will delve into the connection.
After pondering these aspects of soft utopia in the EU’s past and present, we will turn to the EU’s future. Today the EU is at a crossroads, having been shaken to its core by the eurozone crisis. Will the policy response meet with success? If so, it could prove to be a Great Leap Forward toward the soft utopian European dream. The policy response is now shaping up to be a transfer of an unprecedented level of sovereignty from the member states to the EU in the areas of banking policy and regulation, budgetary and fiscal policy, and economic governance. What does this mean for the European idea on the one hand, and for the EU’s already considerable democratic deficit on the other hand?
Or will the policy response prove unfeasible? Will EU leaders continue to talk European unification, but inevitably, out of the nature of things, act in their own national interests? Currently, the UK is acquiescing to the EU’s policy response to the eurozone crisis while declining to participate itself, being a nonmember of the eurozone. The British are talking seriously of repatriating powers that have previously been ceded to the EU, and might even withdraw from the organization. Could this mean that the EU will essentially break up, with the UK and perhaps others in its wake either limiting their participation in the EU to certain policy areas or leaving altogether?
In addition, there are portentous questions related to demography and migration, brought into stark relief by the migration crisis of 2015 and the terrorist attack on Paris in November. Will postwar European social democracy prove unsustainable given the demographic trends in Europe today? How will the EU cope with the unprecedented influx of migrants from a Middle East that is collapsing into chaos? Was the savage ISIS-inspired massacre of 130 innocent people in Paris only a foretaste of how a growing, strongly anti-Western Muslim population will change Europe? What are the implications of all this for the transatlantic alliance? Despite Europe’s manifest problems, are the EU and its soft utopia winning the war of ideas even in the United States? These are the questions we will examine in our appraisal of the EU’s future.
FILLING THE VOID
A final, crucial point about the European Union: