Like many stories about the future of European integration, this one starts in Berlin. On 9 November 2011, to be precise, when I sat in the audience at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele while JosĂ© Manuel Barroso, then president of the European Commission, gave the State of Europe speech. This speech was the apotheosis of a large two-day conference, at which academics, politicians, and public figures of all sorts discussed the future of Europe. Sitting in the audience I felt a sort of rising frustration that I hadnât felt since my teenage yearsâa mix of powerlessness and embarrassment that parents tend to provoke in their 15-year old sons and daughters. I was angry at what these people where doing to Europe, at how they thought about her future, and how helpless I was in stopping any of it from happening. More precisely, I was frustrated with the way they treated my generationâas one which will have to deal with the consequences of austerity, welfare rollback, and a deranged climateâand with their collective inability to imagine something more ambitious, more progressive, or simply better for Europeâs future.
Years later, in the week immediately following the Brexit vote, I found myself in Berlin once again, this time for a conference on the management of the Euro-zone. The weekend prior to the conference was filled with catching up with friendsâand talking about Brexit and the future of Europe. Most of my friends are not particularly politically active. In decades of friendship, we barely ever talked about the EU or Europe. Yet, on that weekend, many Europeansâincluding my contemporaries, colleagues, and friendsârealised two things.
The first was that the story of European integration can end. This might sound a bit daft, but for me and many of my contemporaries, the EU has simply always been part of our lives. Imagining a life without the EU is like imagining a future where there is no internet. The stories of our parentsâof carrying different wallets with different currencies for a car trip from Belgium to Italy, of their amazement at the discovery of pizza, or of queuing for hours on the border between Spain and Franceâare, literally, unimaginable to us. But Brexit brought the contingency of the European project back into full view. The EU is not like the internet. It is not something that will always be at our disposal, which will increase in density and allow people to come together. It is something that can end if we do not care about it. And even caring about Europe is not enough. We must also take care of Europe. Brexit, then, brought a change in mood, in particular with the younger generations. I can see it in my students, my apolitical friends, and the explosion of young activists that are engaging with the future of the EU. If we keep passively consuming the EU, it will not survive another 60 years. The only way to protect the integration project is to actively engage with it.
The second feeling that many contemporaries and friends shared after the Brexit referendum was not unlike the teenage frustration that I had felt years before in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. It was anger at what the EU had become, or, to be more precise, at the way in which it had decided to portray Europe. For our generation, Europe is everywhere: in our classmates, our teammates in the local sports team, in the tourist that asks us for directions, in the food we eat, the football stars we revere, the first holidays with friends, and in the future career, spouse, or life we dream about. Yet, the European Union, which portrays itself as a sort of institutional echo of Europe, is none of this. It does not feel natural but artificial. It does not feel local, and all around us; instead it feels distant and unreachable. And, perhaps most importantly, it does not feel urgent and fresh. It doesnât exude the playfulness, extravagance, and excitement that Europe does. Instead it feels aged, tired, and guardedâanxiously looking over its shoulder to see if anyone is trying to capture it, suspiciously eyeing everyone who comes close.
The EU certainly was a progressive and ambitious project in 1957. But now, over 60 years later, its institutions, processes, and policies are still largely the same, even though the challenges that it faces, the complexity of the world in which it operates, and its salience are larger than ever before. Letâs put it this way: if European states had decided in favour of an ambitious institutional structure for cooperation today, they would not have devised the EU as it currently is.
The premise of this book is simple. Like many of my contemporaries, I believe in cooperation. I love Europe, in its glorious diversity, with all its dysfunctional quirks and its surprises. But like many of my contemporaries, I am increasingly dissatisfied with the EU, that is, with this particular institutional echo of Europe. Europe is, to put it simply, so much more than the EU is. This book offers a narrative towards another Europe. It seeks to argue that the two positions that are currently most popular (from the âprotect the EU against the populistsâ to âdown with the EUâ) have both got it wrong. We cannot continue to support the EU as it currently is and blindly expect that it will survive the challenges of the next five decades. If the future of the EU is one in which it tries to defend itself against changes, it will be one full of suspicion and anxiety: it will be one where the EU finally implodes due to inertia and general apathy.
We cannot go the other extreme, either. A future based around nation states âtaking back controlâ is one big illusion: it is much like David Copperfield âwalkingâ through the Chinese Wall. With all the good will in the world, there is one big Chinese wall standing in the way of nation state taking back control. The interdependence between the different parts of Europeâin trade, in monetary affairs, in culture, in mobility, in capital movement, outlook of life, and in their place in global affairsâmeans that any decision in which state A âtakes back controlâ inevitably leads to state B losing the power to do the same.
We have had a taste of what a Europe run by the national capitals looks like, and it is neither pretty nor sustainable: it is one where walls protect borders, where open antagonism between locals and migrants is the norm, reciprocal recriminations about âlazy Greeksâ and âNazi Germansâ escalate, and every decision in state A is immediately condemned by its neighbours. If the future of Europe is one where the nation states are in charge, the EU will not implode over the years due to inertia and apathy. But chances are that it will explode.
So what can people like me do? How can we articulate a third narrative, beyond these two lazy alternatives, a vision for another Europe: one that celebrates the diversity of Europe, that is forward-looking, and that encourages its citizens to engage with it?
This book tries to build up a new narrative in both a theoretical and a practical way. The first half of the book deals with the theory. It looks at three ideas, and at how they have the potential to transform the EU into something that is more Europeanâthat is, more sensitive to what it is like to be a European today and tomorrow.
The first idea that is discussed is trust. If anything typifies the EU of today, it is the complete distrust between actors. In almost every Member State, political parties from the fringesâboth the left and the rightâare making electoral gains by articulating distrust. This distrust is spread around quite widely: directed towards the national political elite, the media, the European Union, technocrats, but also towards foreignersâbe it in the form of refugees, migrant workers, or governments of other Member States. In recent years, Member States have done things on the basis of this distrust that for decades were unimaginable: the suspension of Greek democracy in the name of austerity was justified because the creditors did not trust the Greek state. The building of border fences in Hungary was justified with reference to the distrust of refugees as well as of the neighbouring states. The decision of an Irish tribunal not to extradite Polish criminals was based on a distrust of the independence of the Polish judiciary. Italyâs refusal to allow boats with hundreds of refugees and migrantsâbarely saved from a death at seaâto dock in its ports was based on a distrust of both the individuals on the boats, but also a distrust of the willingness of the other Member States to help shoulder the burden that the refugee crisis has put on Italy. Brexit, perhaps, was the most explicit articulation of this: the Leave campaign was almost exclusively run on the sentiment of distrust of EU migrants, experts, political elites, and globalisation.
Any regeneration or reimagination of Europe has to start, therefore, by thinking about trust. Trust, as we will see, has an almost magical property: it allows people to cooperate, even though they donât know each other. Distrust does the exact opposite: it inhibits cooperation between strangers. The very first step towards another kind of Europe, therefore, must be to think about how we can improve the trust between Europeans. As we will see in Chap. 3, there is reason for optimism: trust in Europe is in plentiful supply. Trust is generated in a number of ways. Chief among them are cooperating with each other, being exposed to differences, and learning more about each other. Each of these reduces the distrust between citizens because it allows us to make a better judgement of the likelihood of the other person reciprocating our trust. All these sources of trust exist in Europe: there has never been more interaction between Europeansâon holidays, in the classroom, in the queue at the supermarket, in your neighbourhood, in the things we eat and drink. These types of interaction might seem banal and mundane, but lie at the very source of how we learn to trust each other.
How is it possible, then, that, despite these sources of trust, so much mistrust exists in Europe? The answer to this seeming contradiction is the European Union. The European Union hasnât been very good at making use of the trust between Europeans. If anything, as we will see in this book, the way in which the EU functions is creating more distrust between citizens than trust. The starting point for the regeneration of Europe, then, will be to rethink how the EU can be changed so that it makes use of the trust between its citizens. Because it is this trust that must be at the core of European integration, and not the internal market, the economic and monetary union, or whichever other policy the European Commission can dream up.
This criticism on the EUâs functioning might strike some readers as exaggerated. As we will see in Chap. 4, this ambiguity follows from the fact that the EU has always been very successful. In 1957, when the integration project started, its purpose was to achieve âpeace and prosperityâ. Now, more than 60 years later, we can see how incredibly successful the EU has been at achieving these objectives. War between European states seems unthinkable, which, after centuries of almost constant war, is an achievement that cannot be overstated. Poverty still exists in Europe, but, in both absolute and relative terms, the continent has never been more prosperous than today. The secret to the success of the EU has been that its entire set-up, from its institutions to its judicial structure, from the way in which Member States vote down to the way in which law is conceptualised, was constructed with this purpose of âpeace and prosperityâ in mind.
Today, however, these objectives no longer seem to inspire much passion in Europeâs citizens. The younger generations, who have lived their whole lives in a Europe that is, indeed, peaceful and prosperous, have other worries. They worry about the climate, about debt sustainability, about whether the welfare state will provide them with a pension, about whether they can stay on in a job, and about what effect technological innovations will have on the quality of their lives. All this creates a problem for the EU. Because if the EU wants to stay relevant to its younger generations, it will need to offer them a narrative that engages with the challenges faced by these generations specifically.
To put it as simply as possible, the project of European integration has been remarkably successful at meeting the aspirations of the generations after the war. But if it wants to survive another 60 years, it will need to change tack. Promising peace and prosperity no longer suffice. Nor do the aspirations that the European Commission is currently advertising. At the moment, it seems that the EU is being sold on the basis that it makes roaming slightly cheaper, that it is abolishing daylight savings, and that it protects the privacy of citizens online. This is not to say that these policy initiatives donât have merit; but to say that a project like European integration cannot be sustained by such initiatives. What is needed is a new aspiration for the future of Europe that takes specific account of the challenges and opportunities facing its younger generations. This notion of aspirations is ...