The Search for a European Identity

Values, Policies and Legitimacy of the European Union

Furio Cerutti, Sonia Lucarelli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134063734
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

This book examines the link between political identity and legitimacy in the European Union. Stimulated by the crisis of legitimacy and identity suffered by the EU after the referenda on the Constitutional Treaty, the editors have developed a theoretical framework to examine the interplay between these two items in the problematic development of the EU into a fully-fledged political actor.

The contributors to the volume seek to:

• Redefine the key notions in the rigorous way of political philosophy, thus avoiding the generic or imprecise language usage found in a large part of political science literature on identity
• Test these concepts in the analysis of EU policies that may reveal the world views and the principles upon which EU legislation is based, and whose degree of acceptance on the side of the citizens is an indicator of how far a shared political identity has developed.

Featuring case studies on foreign and environmental policy, biosafety policy, biotechnology regulation, civil society, human rights promotion, as well as studies on the role of memory, space and external views on the process of European identity-building, this book will be of interest to students and researchers of political science, political philosophy, European politics and European Studies.

Part I
Theorizing the link between identity and legitimacy

1 Why political identity and legitimacy matter in the European Union

Furio Cerutti

In this introductory chapter I first take note of the various and confusing meanings of ‘identity’ that can be found in academic and political discourse and propose a phenomenological rather than normative approach to it, based on a reflexive notion of identity (what the citizens and the elites perceive as shared values and principles: a process of self-identification). Given the ineliminable double nature of the European Union (EU) (half a regulated singlemarket with high integration, half a would-be polity), in the section on ‘Political identity’ I argue that it is only possible for it to possess, if any, a thin, strictly political identity, which does not tend to cancel the national identities, or to replace Europe’s cultural diversity. As for legitimacy, I stick to a broad understanding of it based on its conformity with models of good governance, supported but not able to be replaced by its economic performances, and ‘wrapped’ in shared memories and symbols (see the section on ‘Legitimacy’). Why in a union of states identity is still an essential condition for institutions and policies to be legitimized, and what makes the development oa European identity so difficult, is explained in ‘What has identity to do with legitimacy?’. In the conclusion I argue that only the correction and relativization of old notions about democracy can clear the way for a non-populistic understanding of it in the would-be polity that is the EU.

Definitions

Political identity (and legitimacy) in the EU can be broached in so many ways that the question can only be raised if all the authors mean the same thing. A credible answer is no. There is hardly so confused and polysemic a topic in European affairs as identity. What follows is a catalogue of this not-so-productive diversity:

1. 1identity as a set of things (say, European security and defence Identity) or
2. 2as a set of laws (constitutional first of all) and court rulings or public policies generated by the EU;
3. 3European identity as a substantive definition, derived from normative ethics, of what the EU ought to be (a deliberative democracy in the Habermasian sense as in Eriksen (2005), a superpower, a caretaker for the rest of humanity) or
4. European identity as a substantive definition, based on historical and philosophical considerations, of what Europe could and should be [a civilian power, see Telò (2006); a regional state, see Schmidt (2006); an offspring of Renaissance Humanism and Enlightenment, see Rudolph (2001)];
5. political identity as a reflexive feature: how the Europeans, common citizens and elites, perceive the Union, how far they perceive themselves as European, what potential for identity formation and for legitimating EU policies and institutions is or is not contained in their mindset. A further question, beyond the phenomenology of European identity, regards how far those potentialities may correlate with the evolution of world politics, in which Europe’s future is embedded.

I call 1 and 2 analytical approaches based on a reified notion of identity, 3 and 4 respectively a hypernormative and a moderately normative approach, and 5 a phenomenological approach. My first preference is for 5 and only at a distance for 4, but in the following I will at least sketch the reasons for rejecting 1–3. This starts with a political and meta-scientific consideration based on my assessment of the present predicament of the EU as a deep crisis that could develop into an existential crisis if the present discrepancies between the member states increase and no new strategy is devised in order to address the post-enlargement and post-referenda paralysis.¹ Things being as they are,² I cannot help sensing some intellectual futility, largely out of touch with the political process, in approaches such as those regarding the legislation passed in Brussels or even the EU declaratory policies (Manners 2006) as sufficient proof of the existence of our identity as Europeans; or those inferring from an interpretation of Rawls’ Theory of Justice (it could as well be Plato’s Republic, for that matter) the prescription for making the EU a superpower (Morgan 2005), a theorem that is light years away from what the Europeans wish for and what they can effectively bring about. For all scholars, but particularly those who are citizens of the Union and do not need to evoke a promising if a little fictional EU as a land of salvation to be gazed at from the shores of Bush’s America [cf. again Morgan (2005) and Rifkin (2004)], the prevailing interest seems to me to lie elsewhere: we are interested in deploying our best analytical and critical tools rather than in developing prescriptive wishful thinking, in order to find out if a political enterprise as tortuous and open-ended as the European process still has a chance of becoming consolidated; that it will go on and thrive is not certain, and an eye should be also kept on the possibly disrupting consequences of this enterprise running indefinitely out of steam. Furthermore, to look with curiosity at the multifarious appearances of a European consciousness as can be read from what citizens and elites think and imagine, wish or reject, to conjecture where these attitudes may lead, and what could lead them in one direction rather than another is a more exciting intellectual task than inventing and touting the perfect formula capable of making Europe a state or a community. To understand identity formation in the odd EU beast³ the phenomenological sociology of Schütz, Berger and Luckmann is a better source of inspiration than an approach from a historicist (finding Europe’s identity in its past) or engineering (let us make a blueprint of it and then wait for the people to implement it) angle; even good old Hegel, who in the Phenomenology of Mind studied the process through which self-consciousness evolved from personal and collective experience, can inspire us to develop a phenomenology of the European consciousness that integrates empirical and theoretical tools in order to interpret in an evolutionary context what people think and where they are heading. In the end, it is as ever less the academic debate and rather the attitude of the people (leaders, elites, citizens, in varying configurations) that determines if and which ‘idea of Europe’ or normative project will play a role (and how much of it) in shaping the final design of tomorrow’s Union. This is why it is the method of studying the identitylegitimacy complex rather than the debate on its possible contents that is at the centre of this chapter.

Having sketched in this first round the contours of my position in the research on identity, I will now define it in a more systematic manner.

Political identity

If ‘political identity’ is to be used as a conceptual tool connected to ‘legitimacy’, we have to agree on a well-defined language, which excludes four fairly common usages.

First, political identity is not whatever feature (a governance mechanism, a set of policies or declarations) may be attributed to the EU or produced by it as an institution, but only what is clearly or confusedly perceived and talked about by Europeans (common citizens and elites) as a communal issue. Just to mention an extreme example, the notion of a ‘European defence identity’ made of military units, common procurement and joint command is a conceptually abhorrent reification of the identity concept. Policies and institutions are not ‘identity’ in themselves, but only as far as they are perceived by the individual actors as something which is meaningful to their self-description as Europeans as well as relevant to the image of themselves they want to project onto external actors. Political theory is different from objectivistic Soziographie.

Second, when talking about political identity we are not necessarily assuming an inescapable path dependence that is a dominance of the past over what we would like to be in the present and the future. The cultural heritage, the ‘idea of Europe’ celebrated in so many philosophical and historical books from Husserl to and Gasset, from Croce to de Rougemont and Gadamer does matter, but what is more important for the understanding of political reality is the re-elaboration we make of it in our projects for the future. Here we should not overlook that in the age of globalization the cultural heritage itself is changing more rapidly than ever and producing ‘glocal’ life forms, which admittedly are often inspired by American rather than European models.

Third, identity is not based primarily on exclusion, and Huntington’s view that ‘we know who we are when we know whom we are against’ is an oversimplification, and a distorting one at that. It means taking a pathological development, e.g. the ethno-nationalist identity, for the very nature of identity. Suggestions aimed at shaping European identity as what is opposed to American culture and politics or, on another count, to Islam are not very far from this approach. Yet it is true that even the identity of a liberal and tolerant group, made predominantly of the sense of having certain shared values and goals, needs to be accompanied by the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘the others’; otherwise identity vanishes into diffusiveness and does not accomplish its task of defining political groups, giving them internal cohesion and making their coexistence and interaction possible (‘good fences make good neighbours’). Group identity⁴ always contains two moments: the mirror, in which the group reflects and redefines its features, in a conversation among members of a group (development of a common political culture, constitutional debates), and the wall, by which the group (nation, political party, social community) gives itself a self-contained image which also defines its relations to other groups in a more open or exclusive or aggressive way.⁵ New and post-national it may be, but European identity cannot be cosmopolitical in the sense that Europeans should see themselves as citizens of the world who just happen to live on the European continent, but refuse to identify themselves as citizens of a particular polity with certain geopolitical problems and interests (cf. Fuchs 2000); or should take responsibility as representatives for the rest of humankind, as suggested by Bauman (2004). The universalistic values on which the Union is based should rather be reconciled with the inevitable particularistic features of the European polity by keeping the configuration of the EU open to those values, but this constitutive philosophical and legal problem cannot be addressed here,⁶ although it remains relevant to its legitimacy, if this is meant in the sense outlined in the following section on ‘Legitimacy’.

Fourth, the identity that plays a pivotal role for legitimacy is political, not social or cultural.⁷ Epistemologically and ontologically, society and polity are two different things, the second is not simply a by-product of the first, as some Marxists and most sociologists would have it, and has specific features: the ability to make ultimate decisions acting as one sovereign actor⁸ (in this sense it is premature to call the EU a polity, as it is at best a would-be polity) and the normative framework (usually a constitution plus ordinary legislation, but also the ethics of patriotism or civic obligations) in which the preferences and projects of social groups are put in hierarchical order and reconciled with each other.

In its core definition, political identity is the overarching and inclusive project that is shared by the members of the polity, or in other words the set of political and social values and principles in which they recognize themselves as a ‘we’. More important than this set (identity) is the process (self-identification through self-recognition)⁹ by which the people recognize themselves as belonging together because they come to share, but also modify and reinterpret those values and principles which are the framework within which they pursue their interests and goals.¹⁰ To do so, a degree of homogeneity in the political culture (say, an orientation favouring liberal democracy) is needed as a pre-condition, while a convergence of the entire cultural world (language, religion, morality, images of the world and forms of everyday life, cf. Joas and Wiegandt (2005)) is not. This is why to speak in the same sentence of the ‘European cultural and political identity’ is flawed, and leads inevitably to denying the Europeans any chance of achieving a political self-awareness of themselves as an actor, since a unified European culture exists and will exist to as small an extent as a European society—perhaps with the exception of football. On the other hand, a thick cultural and political identity could foster the dangerous image of a Fortress Europe, or result from the ethnocentric projection of mistaking one’s own national or ideological identity for the European identity as a whole (Mummendey and Waldzus 2004). With regard to the history of modern nation-states, developing a purely political identity that is not backed by a unitary culture is admittedly an unprecedented challenge, one it is not yet clear if the Europeans are up to. Recent signs do not go in this direct...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Acronyms and abbreviations
• PART I Theorizing the link between identity and legitimacy
• PART II Memory and space
• PART III Politics and ethics: the regulation of technology
• PART IV Social and civil Europe
• PART V Outside the EU: policies and images