Is the EU therefore comparable to a federal nation-state, such as the United States, with its members roughly equivalent to the fifty states? Some would say so, but the comparison is false. Unlike the United States, the EU cannot claim to have a citizenry with a common understanding of its national history and a sense of belonging to the same nation. “Europeans” persist in thinking of themselves first in national terms – as Italians, Dutchmen, Spaniards, Greeks, etc. – before they think of themselves as Europeans.10 And this is not surprising. There is no European demos. Although ethnicities and languages do not track exactly with national borders, each European nation-state has its own long history, culture and self-understanding. There is no unifying language. The EU has twenty-four official languages. English is now the lingua franca, having replaced French at the latest in 2004, when ten new member states joined, mainly from Eastern Europe, where the second language of elites was generally English.
So what is the EU? To repeat what I said earlier, here is the best definition I can think of: the EU is 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 global peace, stability and prosperity, are pooling, and thus relinquishing, significant elements of the member states’ national sovereignty, and doing so over the heads of their national electorates.
But as we will see in the following chapter, to try to define the EU is to go out on a limb and risk being sawed off. There is a caveat to everything one could attempt to say about the EU. On the one hand, the essence of the EU is supranationalism. But what does it mean to be supranational in an organization in which the member states jealously but inconsistently and confusedly – sometimes in deed but not in word and sometimes in word but not in deed – guard their national prerogatives? Because of this unresolved conflict, and as a tactical response to it, the essence of the EU is also to have no definable essence: to exist in the “in-between-ness” described earlier. The constant change, uncertainty and flux of postmodernity are integral features of the EU.
To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, the EU is the EU is the EU. It must be understood on its own terms. After you have finished this book, you will know the EU as well as it can be known, and you will understand how the fate of democracy in the EU will affect the transatlantic alliance and the future of liberal democracy in the world.
* It is important to distinguish the terms “international,” “transnational” and “supranational.” To quote John Fonte, “The term international is used mainly to denote relations among sovereign nation-states. . . . On the other hand, transnational means ‘across’ or ‘beyond’ nations . . . the term signifies legal action and authority beyond national laws, constitutions, and officials. Transnational politics is activity directed at the internal political affairs of nation-states, undertaken by both foreign and domestic non-state actors and by foreign states. . . . Supranational means ‘above’ or ‘over’ the nation-state. While advocates of transnational law are sometimes ambiguous about respect for national sovereignty, those who champion supranational law are more explicit about their aim to transfer decision-making authority (sovereign self-government) from the nation-state to global institutions, superior to any national institution.” Fonte, Sovereignty or Submission: Will Americans Rule Themselves or Be Ruled by Others? (New York: Encounter Books, 2011), xxiii–xxiv. The EU could be characterized as either a transnational or a supranational organization, depending on the context. The vision of the global governance advocates in the EU is a supranational future for the EU and the world.
POSTMODERN: THE EU AS AN UNANSWERED QUESTION
In late 1951, in the heady days when the postwar dream of peace through European integration was in the air, Alcide De Gasperi, prime minister of Italy and a founding father of European integration, mused about what steps Europe should take toward a more harmonious future: “Which road are we to choose,” he asked, “if we are to preserve all that is noble and humane within these national forces, while co-ordinating them to build a supranational civilisation which can give them balance, absorb them, and harmonise them in one irresistible drive towards progress?”1
This query captures the great unanswered question of the European Union – the foundational uncertainty that has stymied so many attempts to understand what the EU really is. Is it a group of states that work very closely together in almost every realm but nevertheless retain their national sovereignty, or is it a supranational entity that absorbs and digests the member states? And this foundational uncertainty, in turn, arises out of a disagreement so profound that it encompasses both means and ends. De Gasperi directly asked, “Which road must we take?” He assumed agreement on the ultimate end: the building of a “supranational civilization.” But there is no agreement there, either – no consensus among EU elites on the question “What do we want to achieve?” Both of these basic questions – which road must we take and where do we want to end up – are still very much subjects of heated disagreement.
CLASHING VISIONS
Selected pronouncements from some of the greatest European statesmen suffice to illustrate the clash of visions for the EU. Almost all of these competing visions cluster around one of two paradigms: the intergovernmental, sovereigntist paradigm, or the supranational, integrationist paradigm. The first sees the EU as an organization of sovereign member states whose power supersedes that of the EU. The second envisions the EU as a supranational governing entity distinct from the EU member states and exercising significant sovereign powers over them.
On the sovereigntist side, Charles de Gaulle, president of France, called for a strong “Europe of nations” in which the various countries of Europe would collectively form an effective counterweight to the United States on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other.2
Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister from 1979 to 1990, was perhaps the most forceful advocate of the sovereigntist vision of the European Union (at the time, the European Community) as an organization promoting cooperation among independent and distinct member states. She elaborated on this view in her famous speech at the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium, in 1988:
My first guiding principle is this: willing and active cooperation between independent sovereign states is the best way to build a successful European Community. To try to suppress nationhood and concentrate power at the centre of a European conglomerate would be highly damaging and would jeopardise the objectives we seek to achieve. Europe will be stronger precisely because it has France as France, Spain as Spain, Britain as Britain, each with its own customs, traditions and identity. It would be folly to try to fit them into some sort of identikit European personality. . . . We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels. Certainly we want to see Europe more united and with a greater sense of common purpose. But it must be in a way which preserves the different traditions, parliamentary powers and sense of national pride in one’s own country; for these have been the source of Europe’s vitality through the centuries.3
A prominent voice on the integrationist side was Helmut Kohl, the chancellor of Germany from 1982 to 1998 and a tireless advocate of a united Europe. In April 1992, shortly after the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, which would turn the European Community into the European Union, Kohl said, “The Treaty on European Union marks a new, decisive step in the process of European integration that in a few years will lead to the creation of what the founding fathers of modern Europe dreamt of after the last war: a United States of Europe.”4
José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission from 2004 to 2014, also laid out a strongly integrationist vision. He talked of political union