Why Europe Should Become a Republic! E-Book

Ulrike Guérot

• Herausgeber: Verlag J.H.W. Dietz Nachf.
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 514

Beschreibung

Ulrike Guérot outlines the idea of a radically different Europe: Europe as a Republic. The concept is based on two pillars: Firstly, the principle of political equality for all European citizens and the separation of powers, instead of a non-transparent and technocratic "trilogy" of the existing European institutions. Secondly, strong European regions actively participating in European decision- making. One market, one currency, one democracy: Ulrike Guérot presents a passionate plea for the completion of the European project by creating a single European democracy in which the citizens are the sovereign and solidarity across Europe is institutionalized.

Leseprobe

Ulrike Guérot

WHY EUROPE SHOULD BECOME A REPUBLIC

A political utopia

Bibliographical information of the German National Library

The German National Library catalogues this publication in the German National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic information can be found on the internet at: http://dnb.dnb.de.

ISBN 978-3-8012-7017-9 (E-Book)

ISBN 978-3-8012-0559-1 (print)

Copyright © 2019

by Verlag J.H.W. Dietz Nachf. GmbH

Dreizehnmorgenweg 24, 53175 Bonn

Translated by Ray Cunningham

Cover design: Flora Frank | Rem Kohlhaas, European Flag

Typesetting: Jens Marquardt, Bonn

E-Book conversion: Zeilenwert GmbH, 2019

All rights reserved

Find us on the internet: www.dietz-verlag.de

This is a fantastical story. In it, the citizens of Europe come together on a basis of political equality to create a European Republic and to leave the nation states behind. The story is so beautiful, and so fantastical, that every reader will immediately want to help make it a reality. And if they and their children are still alive, then in 2045 they will all be living in a decentralised, democratic, socially just European Republic that is showing the way for rest of the world – on the path to a global society of equal citizens!!

#The European Republic is under construction

#newEurope

For my two sons, Felix and Maxime, and for all my European friends

representing here all the young people in Europe

who dream of a different Europe, and who deserve a better

Europe; and all the older people who believed in the EU

and who today are disappointed beyond measure.

And finally there are the Many.

This refers to all those whom I met in countless discussions

about Europe – live or in TV or radio studios – in recent years.

It was ultimately these discussions with the Many

which made it clear to me that people in Germany

and elsewhere wish for a Europe that is completely different

from what we currently have,

and that there is a reason for writing this book.

Contents

Cover

Title

Copyright

About the book

Dedication

Preface to the English version

Preface

PART ITHE LOSS OF A POLITICAL AESTHETIC

BEFORE WE START:

A quick gallop through the book

CHAPTER 1

The European malaise

CHAPTER 2

Welcome to European post-democracy

CHAPTER 3

The ‘Weimarisation’ of Europe and the problem of the political centre ground

CHAPTER 4

‘Everything is language’, or: European terminology and discourse

CHAPTER 5

The wrong solutions, or: a system running on empty

PART IIUTOPIA

BEFORE WE START:

Utopia as a thought projection

CHAPTER 6

Why a European Republic?

CHAPTER 7

The new political order of the European RePublic: building the first post-national democracy

CHAPTER 8

The new territorial order of the European RePublic: regions, cities & Europe’s Tower of Babel

CHAPTER 9

The new economic order in Europe: digital manufacturing

PART IIICODA

CHAPTER 10

For women only: bulls’ balls and bonnets – European emancipation

CHAPTER 11

#Error404EuropeNotFound#: Europe’s young people – creative, digital, post-party activists

CHAPTER 12

Europe, we’re on our way: the pioneers on the road to a global cosmopolitan society

Closing remarks

APPENDICES

Notes

List of figures

Preface to the English edition

Brexit is just about to happen, in a most uncoordinated and painful way, even while many people in the UK are still hoping for a second referendum or a delay to the departure date in order to avoid the worst. Leaving Europe seems, in the real world of politics, to be almost impossible, so strong are the ties that bind us (or – in the eyes of those who feel that the EU is a monster, and who think that independence is the solution – the strings attached).

But perhaps there is a third option? A totally reformed political Europe that gives the Brexiters back the sovereignty over decision-making that they yearn for, and the Remainers the open, liberal economic space they want to stay in?

‘Why Europe should become a Republic. A political Utopia’ sketches out this third option. It paves the way for a completely new way of thinking about Europe at a time when Europe needs it most and when many are already talking about an entirely new entity. The EU badly needs profound institutional change to reconnect with its citizens.

Forget everything you’ve ever heard about the EU. This book is not about a Brussels bureaucracy, or cucumber regulations, or a European superstate. In the best traditions of Thomas More’s great work ‘Utopia’, it is about applying everything dear to us in our national democracies – the separation of powers, the principle of political equality and the sovereignty of the people – to a political entity called Europe. In short: it takes the best of English political thought – from the Putney Debates to Thomas Hobbes to John Locke – and applies it Europe.

It is about putting the autochthonous regions in England and beyond – Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland – in the driving seat of European decision-making, whilst respecting their cultural differences and identity. And it is about giving Europe back to the people, because the Republic is about them and respecting their interests.

Is this doomed to remain a Utopia? Perhaps not. The German edition of this book became a bestseller, and many political parties have been inspired by the political framing of Europe as a republic, and have integrated the idea into their party programmes. So have many European regions and city councils, and many European citizens. Europe as a republic is precisely about putting citizens back in control of what is happening, and about making Europe democratic by applying the principle of political equality to all citizens, which is the necessary condition for each and every democracy, across Europe.

Does this brief introduction trigger a passion to read on? The European Republic is a smart, tech-savvy, decentralized, sustainable, digitalized, open, tolerant and liberal Europe that pursues the common good, where solidarity is written with a capital S; it is a network of town halls rather than a centralized body, where Europe can evolve into what it always wanted to be: unity in diversity; a place where everybody wants to live! To find it, read on; and then join us on www.eudemlab.org. We are a group that is growing bigger every day, working hard to make that dream of Europe a reality.

If we work on it together, it need not remain a utopia: the European Republic is under construction!

Ulrike Guérot

Preface

‘The Utopians are particularly fond of mental pleasures,

which they consider to be of the highest importance,

and which they associate with virtuous behaviour

and a clear conscience ...

Of course, they believe in enjoying food, drink, and so forth;

but purely in the interests of health, for they don't regard such

things as very pleasant in themselves —

only as ways of resisting the onset of disease.

A sensible person, they say, prefers staying healthy to taking

medicine, and would rather feel well and cheerful

than have people comforting him.’

Thomas More, Utopia

‘No idea is a good one

which does not seem wholly illusory at the outset.’

Albert Einstein

‘Only if that which is can be changed

is that which is not everything’

Theodor W. Adorno

500 years ago, Thomas More published his description of Utopia, the story of a fictional island where peace and social justice prevail. Utopia became a symbol and embodiment of an imaginary social order, and the impulse behind numerous social innovations and the desire to create together a better future. Europe today needs that kind of utopia, because the EU is broken. Europe, however, remains an unfinished task. Within this dialectic lies the opportunity for a different Europe. Whatever happens on the continent of Europe over the next few years, we can neither leave this continent nor cordon it off, and nor do we want to. Exits, walls and borders are not the answer. What is happening before our eyes is the dissolution of the Europe of the founding fathers: the end of ‘the united states of Europe’ based on the concept of the nation state. So we have to come up with a new concept for Europe – and one that delivers a European lifestyle as close as possible (in a kind of ‘post-modern remake’) to that described in the quotation from Thomas More above. We need a shiny new social utopia.1 And perhaps in today’s Europe we have the wealth and the means necessary, which weren’t available in the past. What is needed is a fundamental re-thinking of Europe on the basis of the so-called MAYA principle used by futurologists: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable!

So let’s imagine we were able to run a coarse comb over the continent of Europe. The national borders would simply catch in the teeth of the comb; those thick, annoying strands would be pulled away. The citizens of the European regions and cities would create a brand new Europe: decentralised, regional, post-national, parliamentary, democratic, sustainable and socially just. A political and institutional system that would enable just the kind of society Thomas More once dreamed of – a society in which modern forms of mental pleasure, virtuous behaviour and health were regarded as central shared aims. The post-national European democracy outlined here would be a network of European regions and cities under the protective roof of a European Republic in which all European citizens would be politically equal. This utopia describes a Copernican Revolution in Europe,2 in which the United States of Europe becomes the European Republic.

This utopia also includes some reflections on what a political community on the continent of Europe might look like. It goes without saying that these reflections remain at the level of abstract sketches. My purpose is to develop a conceptual framework for a coherent project of European integration beyond the nation state and in line with Europe’s shared intellectual and cultural heritage. Our task is to revitalise this common heritage and to bring it forward into the post-modern era.

I choose the term ‘republic’ advisedly. It is the oldest term in the history of political thought for the foundation of a political community. The republic is the quintessence of our common European intellectual heritage. It is from this term that I derive the concept of a democratic Europe which is based on two principles: the political equality of its citizens and the networked, transnational, European character of its governance. The utopia of a European Republic entails the institutional, territorial and economic re-ordering of Europe in the interests of the common good – that is, the res publica.

The utopia described here is not a rigid construct. It is understood as something relational, something in process, and something transitive; that is, as an ongoing form of interdependent, networked, developmental thinking. We have no need for yet another story of European federalisation or centralisation; rather, the aim of this book is to capture here, in its diverse wholeness, the idea that the essence of Europe is without borders. The aim is a granular and collaborative model of Europe accessible for the Many – not a grand historical or institutional project for the few; the topology of a holistic European entity, which remains to be created in all its details, contingencies and modalities by the Many themselves. This approach is in accordance with the many theories of ‘co-leadership’, ‘co-creation’, ‘creative innovation’ and ‘cognitive networks’, with ‘swarm intelligence’ and with ‘central place theory’, all of which express the idea of connectivity and proceed from the assumption that innovation can only arise out of the connectedness and collaboration of many individuals.3

I divide the ‘Many’ into five social groups and tendencies, and I hope that my utopia will be especially relevant to these five. The number five is special in many respects. Depending on how they are classified, Europe is one of five continents. Plato’s geometry identifies five shapes or ‘solids’. Aristotle distinguishes five senses; in Christian tradition, Jesus suffered five wounds during the Crucifixion; Islam is based on five pillars. There are five elements in the Tao tradition. The first five books of the Hebrew Bible are known as the Pentateuch, and the fifth, Deuteronomy, is sometimes known as the Book of Love; and five is held to be the number of the Goddess of Love, Venus. The number five seems to encompass and unify all the elements, including Love. And that is what we need for Europe today!

But who are the ‘Many’, the five social groups and tendencies who make up my – illustrative, and by no means exclusive – target audience, with whom I hope the utopia of a European Republic will resonate, and who then might possibly help to bring it about? They are, first and foremost, the European citizens of today’s European regions and cities – whether settled, nomadic or hypermobile – who constitute the social basis for the European Republic. They represent European civic and civil society and the principle of decentralisation, and thus all the new and modern concepts of sustainability, electromobility, distributed generation, new spatial planning, sustainable agriculture, Slow Food, and so on. Chapters 7 and 8, on the new political and territorial order for Europe, are for them. Secondly, all those who are involved in thinking about the new economy, about cooperatives, the post-growth society, basic income or new forms of the commons. Chapter 9, about a new economic order for Europe – something that is necessarily implied by the reference to the common good inherent in the concept of a republic – is for them. Third, the young people of Europe, for whom we need to create plenty of new space in Europe (Chapter 11). Fourth, with a conspiratorial wink: women. Because the Europe of tomorrow will also, and above all, be a girl thing – won’t it? (Chapter 10) Fifth, finally, the experts and professors in constitutional law, because in Chapter 6 I try to examine the concept of the republic and to set it apart from the neoliberalism which prevails today, an attempt which should be of interest to specialists in the history of European constitutional law. My use of the term ‘we’ throughout is intended inclusively, to represent the Many who I hope will enjoy this book.

These five, therefore – the regions and their people, the post-growthists, the young people of Europe, the women and the constitutionalists – represent all those who could now set to work and create the European Republic as a historical subject. For this utopia – as I have said already – is not something already finished, but only an idea. The ‘Many’ have to join in and work on it. The ‘Many’ are all of us. Because as sovereign citizens – if we ever actually become truly sovereign – at any given moment we hold the future of the continent of Europe, and of its role in the world, in our own hands.

PART I

The Loss of a Political Aesthetic

‘Imagine there’s no countries – it isn’t hard to do.’

John Lennon

BEFORE WE START:

A quick gallop through the book

Welcome to the European Republic! This book is an attempt to rediscover, in a political utopia, the beauty of the European project, which in recent years has been betrayed and lost. Beginning with Plato, Aristotle and Cicero, the republic and other key concepts of political philosophy were first conceived of in Europe. Europe is the continent which has produced the most significant and sophisticated essays and other writings about the state and statehood, and about how societies and human coexistence should be organised. However, ever since it congealed into a system of nation states, this continent has lost its way, and now finds itself in a permanent European crisis in which all that matters is power, the market, and money. Not only the so-called Eurozone crisis in itself, but also the way it has been handled, are testament to the moral and cultural bankruptcy of over 300 years of European political and cultural history. So the attempt to rediscover a European political aesthetic is comparable to restoring an old painting – stripping away layer after layer of colour to reveal the original work which philistines subsequently painted over. In the collective cultural memory of the continent, Europe is always whole – a single body. She was dismembered in the course of the development of the nation state in the early modern period.4 But in terms of cultural history and philosophy, Europe has always been whole and without borders.5

In Part I, the aim is to demonstrate how the design of the EU fails to satisfy fundamental democratic requirements, and why it consequently cannot function properly, and never will. The way the EU is currently constituted cannot lead to the democratic unification of Europe, its hoped-for epiphany. The blueprint was wrong. The nation states – insofar as it was something they ever wanted – have never crossed the Rubicon to a political Europe, and they are now actively blocking the path to a transnational European democracy.

Map of Europe, 1589.

They have therefore outlived their usefulness as actors in the project of European integration. The old EU, its legitimacy founded on a grand narrative of peace, could only be perceived as fulfilling its purpose so long as it was not required, under the rigidly frozen geostrategic conditions of the Cold War and a comparatively stable global economy, to meet any actual political challenges. But that period ended with the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 at the latest. The currency union, imposed on the European states without any form of democratic underpinning, has forfeited any claims the old EU might have had to be furthering the democratic integration of Europe.

The current crises, which seem to pile up on top of each other – the Eurozone crisis, Grexit, Brexit, refugees – are thus only the cyclical symptoms of deep-lying structural faults which have their origins in the way the EU is constituted. The EU is therefore incapable of overcoming them. These structural problems are also the root cause of the political phenomena of populism and nationalism. In this way, the EU is itself the progenitor of the political crisis in which we find ourselves, and is increasingly the problem and not the solution. Its slow death began some time ago and has now started to be noticed by the public. Part II sets out a radical utopia, in preparation for the moment when history will once again release and set free the essence of the European project. For – whatever becomes of the EU – Europe will go on. The re-ordering of the continent of Europe must of necessity be both political and democratic. For that reason, it must respect the general principles of the political equality of all European citizens and the separation of powers. In addition, it has to re-connect what has become an inflated and tendentious interpretation of liberalism to the notion of the common good. What is being proposed here is therefore not more EU reforms, more integration, but a European democracy which observes fundamental democratic principles and adopts them as the basis for a political and institutional re-ordering of the continent with the idea of the community at its core.

It follows that this utopia means conceiving of Europe as a republic, because a republic is what the restorers will find Europe to be when they have scratched away the nation states (which, paradoxically perhaps, almost all defined themselves as republics when they were founded; almost every single time a new political entity has been created in Europe it has been a republic). We should now apply this cultural-historical insight to the epiphany of the European idea itself.

The concept of the republic is multi-faceted and organic. It has grown from within a number of different traditions, and it encompasses three fundamental principles which represent the preconditions for any foundational political project: civic equality, or equality before the law; political equality, or equal voting rights, coupled with a representative parliamentary democracy; and finally, an explicit commitment to the common good, the res publica. The republic is thus defined in normative terms. In essence, the concept of the republic is the link between the two fundamental values of liberty and equality; in it, these two are bound together and interconnected. This applies also to everyone who is a member of the republic, a member of the republican ‘fraternity’. The legacy of the French Revolution of 1789 is equality beyond – or regardless of – class. In the European Revolution of the 21st century, the principle of equality must be extended to encompass equality beyond the nation.

Following the description of the origin and development of the concept of the republic in the second Part, the consummation of the European Republic is then outlined over three chapters. This means the political, territorial and economic re-ordering of Europe, which entails the conceptual combination and practical realisation of a number of current megatrends – localisation, civic emancipation, sustainability, post-capitalism, the post-growth society, the commons, the rejuvenated cooperative movement, decentralisation, gender equality – and their implementation across Europe. What would a new European project that was able to successfully enact these megatrends look like? It would involve the social design of a different Europe: a transnational European democracy, a new institutional edifice for Europe, a spatial reordering, and, finally, a proper and appropriate application of the economic principles of liberalism on which the current internal market philosophy of the EU is based. This Europe will be something woven together out of regions and cities that think globally. It will have left the nation state behind; it will be a European polity in the form of a non-hierarchical, horizontal, decentralised network of regions and cities under the common roof of a republic – not a centralist federation or union of states. This Europe will be an intellectual and political trailblazer for the new relationship between the local and the global beyond the nation.

Part III begins with a brief excursion into art history. The subject is the myth of Europe (or Europa), and it is written with a conspiratorial wink to my sisters – because of course Europa is a woman. The reason why it is important for the coming European project to bear this fact in mind is explained there. After that, we cast a glance at the young people of Europe, who have long begun creating, from the bottom up, a radically democratic Europe of a kind that Brussels could not conceive of in its wildest dreams. Finally, we set out briefly why, if it does eventually prove possible to establish the European Republic, this European project of a deep post-national democracy should be seen as the blueprint for a global citizens’ republic – which is something we need to build before planet Earth is finally destroyed. Or before more intelligent beings6 are obliged to show us the way!

* * *

CHAPTER 1

The European Malaise

‘Not enough Europe, not enough Union.’

Jean-Claude Juncker

Anyone who talks to the citizens of Europe these days, from Helsinki to Athens, from Prague to Rome, from Budapest to Warsaw, hears two things: a deep dissatisfaction with the EU, and a deep desire for Europe. Somehow, people have a shared cultural memory of Europe, and within it is the idea that we all belong together. To most people it is clear that the European nation states have no hope of making it on their own in a globalised world. The majority of all EU citizens, around two-thirds, still supports the idea of Europe. These people don’t want to lose Europe. Many of them are deeply worried right now that the European project could fail. More than that, they are scared. But they no longer trust the EU. Over the last few years, this loss of trust has amounted to about 20 per cent on average across Europe. The EU has forfeited the trust of most of its citizens. Only about 30 per cent of the German, French and British populations – that is, of the three largest EU member states – still support the project of a ‘united states of Europe’.

Yes to Europe, no to the EU. That’s the general feeling. What they want is a different Europe. But this other Europe is not here yet; it has to be invented – a democratic and social Europe. A Europe of citizens, not of banks. A Europe of workers, not of businesses. A Europe that acts in concert in the world. A humane Europe, and not one that shuts itself off behind barriers. A Europe that defends its values rather than trampling all over them. This Europe doesn’t exist.

The betrayal of the European ideal by the nation states is almost physically painful. The betrayal of human rights, first drowned in the Mediterranean, then trampled into the mud of the Balkan route. The most recent of the ongoing and fast-moving developments in the refugee crisis could not be taken into account in this manuscript, which was completed at the end of January. So I would just like to add here, following the EU Council meeting of 7 March 2016, that the unseemly haggling being carried out on the backs of the refugees, and against the backdrop of the humanitarian crisis in Idomeni in Greece (Germany and Europe cosying up to Turkey, the de facto agreement to support Greece financially while transforming it into a kind of European Lebanon – anything, so long as the refugees are no longer allowed to reach the Balkan route), can only be described as deplorable. The betrayal of the promise of a political union, suffocated in the endless hot air emitted by the Brussels technocrats. The betrayal of the idea of a Europe without borders, now impaled on fences. The betrayal of the idea of overcoming nationalism and populism, both of which have come back with a vengeance. The betrayal of the dream of a social Europe, of a converging European economy as foreseen in the Maastricht Treaty, swept aside by the neoliberal Single Market. The betrayal of the next generation, and the one to follow, who have been burdened, via the socialisation of bank debt, with the costs of a scandalous, shameless binge on the financial markets. The betrayal of the savers, whose savings and life insurance policies are being eaten away by low interest rates. In recent years, the EU has created many losers and only a few winners – but very big winners.

As a result, few things are as fragile as the European narrative today. 50 years of European integration now seem like a thin veil which is being torn back to reveal a historical abyss threatening to swallow up Europe once again. An EU incapable of reform, almost apathetic, now produces only endless and growing crisis. Clearly the EU, with its multiple integration projects, has lost its way. First, the Single Market project; then, Economic and Monetary Union. Lately there has been a concerted but fruitless effort to bring about a Common Foreign and Security Policy. Yet it is clear that the EU has managed to lose the very thing needed to inspire popular enthusiasm for the project of a common Europe: the essence of politics.

The death of political Europe can be sketched out in a few sentences. The Maastricht idea of an ever-closer union had fizzled out already by the end of the 1990s. The Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) has not worked. The emancipation of Europe from the USA has not succeeded: what remained of it was buried in the confusion wrought by the American war on Iraq in 2003, where the slogan of ‘united we stand’ succeeded only in uniting the eastern Europeans against the German-French tandem. From that point on, a deep division has split the EU in two. As was often said in the 1990s, enlargement and deepening could not be undertaken in parallel. Maastricht and Amsterdam, Nice and Laeken are all European place names and treaties which today hardly a single student knows. In all of them, the EU worked feverishly on a reform agenda which grew ever more complex, and which produced ever less political union, so that in the end the modest achievement of the establishment of the post of European ombudsman by the European Parliament was celebrated as a victory for European democracy.

The opening of negotiations with Turkey in October 2003 is almost impossible to understand from today’s perspective, and in hindsight can only be explained by American pressure on Europe during the Iraq war. The EU simply wasn’t up to it – France especially, which in May 2005 voted in a referendum against the European constitutional treaty, which made it easier for the Netherlands subsequently to do the same. The German-French relationship, which had already long ceased to be the intimate partnership it had once been, was unable to survive the shock. What was left of the constitutional treaty was cobbled together with some difficulty in 2007 into the Lisbon Treaty, a textual monstrosity and a cardinal political error which from that point on served to thwart the EU’s further progress and capacity for action. It is possible today to look back and recall – with irony or with cynicism, according to personal preference – that at that time Poland was fighting hard for the acceptance of a complex mathematical formula for the weighting of votes in the European Council, and to wonder why it was not possible to acknowledge the absurdity of it all at the time. The Lisbon Treaty emphasised the greater role being played by the European Parliament, yet failed to accord it full parliamentary rights or even to question the grotesque fact that the European Parliament is elected via national candidates’ lists.

From that point on, the power of the European Council grew. It was a turning point. In 2010, the ‘European community method’ was ‘re-coded’ in the mouth of the German Chancellor into the ‘Union method’.7. Political Europe, if it ever existed, is long dead; it died well before the public became aware of the slow, agonising demise of the EU now under way. France has been sulking in a corner for at least ten years now, and this has left Europe to the Germans. But they had a football fairytale to celebrate in 2006, followed by Lena’s victory at the Eurovision Song Contest; then they became the ‘land of the engineers’, and celebrated an ‘export miracle’; and so they politely declined.8 Through all this time, European banks and European businesses were able to make the best of this politically abandoned space and to exploit the inherent weaknesses of the euro and the lack of regulation or public supervision in order to binge on exports and loans.

Where politics could not take hold, economics won out in Europe. This book is not the place for a detailed examination of the many, multi-faceted factors that made up the European malaise, of the slow and painful death of political Europe over the last twenty years. And certainly not the place for a national blame game. In essence, in 2008, a European system without political underpinning was hit very hard by a banking crisis it was politically incapable of dealing with. The Eurozone crisis was never a currency crisis. Throughout the crisis, the euro remained stable with respect to inflation and exchange rates. Countries like Ireland and Spain were not encumbered with debt before the banking crisis. But in political terms, the euro was an orphan currency. The victim of the crisis was already, politically, one of the walking dead; this was why it turned into a European nightmare. It could not be decided politically who should bear the costs of the crisis. Capital was able to flee, but the citizens had to stay put. After the early bold decision to allow Lehman Brothers to go to the wall, nobody subsequently showed similar courage again. Nobody could bring themselves to reassert the primacy of politics and to make those responsible for the crisis – the banks – pay the final price. Instead, a clapped-out and perverted financial system was rescued at taxpayers’ expense, and austerity was imposed to limit the debt. The sell-off of Europe to the financial markets ran its course.

Wherever the political path was blocked for Europe, a relapse into chauvinism remained open. And since it was not possible to point the finger at the failure of European politics and democracy, countries – and with them their citizens – were made the scapegoats. The Greeks drew the shortest straw. From then on, the ECB and ‘the institutions’ governed Europe. The era of European post-democracy had dawned.

The ongoing crisis is the crisis of a non-existent European democracy. It has torn away the veil that lay for so long over the EU’s ambivalent essential character: legal, but not democratic. An absurd institutional system, which from the beginning was described in every EU textbook as sui generis (that is, ‘of its own kind’, unique) as a clever way of obscuring its absurdity – because anything that is sui generis does not need to be explained. Now the EU, the European emperor, is naked. In hindsight, one can only shudder at the way we allowed ourselves to be persuaded for so long by the endless libraries of studies on European multi-level governance that the EU could function indefinitely without any form of direct input legitimacy, without a fully-fledged European parliamentarism, without political accountability. In reality, what we did was to build a Potemkin village and to endow European universities with lots of Jean Monnet Chairs in EU studies so that we could settle this village with the coming generation. But certainly not – perish the thought! – to call into question this sui generis construct.

The neofunctionalist method, according to which – by 1992 and the Maastricht Treaty at the latest – a political union was expected to evolve out of the integrating market, has failed. Its legacy is a constitutional tangle of EU Treaties and overlapping governance structures so complex and multi-layered that even experts cannot understand it. It no longer bears any relation to a functional political system, much less to a system for which one could win popular support. Not only because the blueprint was faulty and incomplete (precisely because it was apolitical); in the meantime, it has also been totally perverted by the course of historical developments.

A market system which is supply-side oriented, not to say neoliberal, has become self-sustaining and has embedded itself in European constitutional law, effectively divorced from any form of democratic legislative process. This has made it more or less irreversible. A triad of Brussels institutions, consisting of the Council, the Parliament and the Commission, primarily concerns itself with its own business, and is not organised in accordance with the principle of the separation of powers. The citizens of Europe are not equal before the law, and are not taxed equally. The principle of the equality of all citizens, a fundamental, constitutive element of every polity, is breached within the EU at the national level. The European Parliament has no right of legislative initiative and does not provide equal voting rights: European citizens do not have equal representation in the voting procedures of the European legislature. Both of these facts represent a full-frontal attack on democracy in Europe: without political and civic equality, there can be no properly functioning parliamentarism. The Commission is simultaneously both executive and guardian of the Treaties; the latter role is normally carried out by a court. A European Council with only indirect legitimation systematically blocks decisions which are in the interests of all European citizens and negotiates in the preferential interests of individual member states, usually the powerful ones – that is, if it is capable of taking decisions at all (cf. the financial transactions tax, or refugees). The Brussels technocracy is overly concerned with small things (the ban on olive oil jugs, light bulbs, or the legendary directive on cucumbers) but cannot manage the big things, for example the registration of refugees at the EU’s external borders and their internal dispersal. Brussels-based officials rather than the parliaments decide on national budgets, and thus on the fates of their citizens. The sitting President of the European Commission suffers the indignity of being accused of tax fraud, and in response the European Parliament doesn’t even institute a commission of inquiry. Powerful lobbies push agreements and regulations through the corridors of Brussels that many European citizens do not want, for example the TTIP free trade agreement, or the so-called ‘Better Regulation’ directive, which will oblige the European Parliament to carry out a cost-benefit analysis for every parliamentary decision and to reverse it if it is found to be too expensive. And when finally the citizens no longer have any idea what is going on, expensive PR agencies are commissioned to create new ‘European narratives’. As if reality could be glossed over with stories. In Aristotle’s typology, the philosophers of ancient Greece would probably have classified today’s EU as a form of despotism.

However, the biggest problem is perhaps not even that the EU is despotic. The EU’s biggest problem is that it cannot even concede that fact in political discourse. For what would happen then? This is the only Europe there is, so it has to be defended. This is the trap in which the political debate over Europe is caught. In Greek, the word for crisis is the same as that for decision. The EU has long outgrown intergovernmentalism, but it cannot bring itself to unify. It cannot make the decision to become a political entity and thus democratic. If you cannot decide to live, you die. That is the true nature of the crisis.

CHAPTER 2

Welcome to European post-democracy

‘We have created a monster.’

Thomas Piketty

As if we hadn’t known. In fact, it was clear from the beginning. The political monster we have created is a system in which the state and the market have been decoupled – by the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. From that point on, decisions on monetary and economic issues were taken at the European level, whereas those on fiscal and social policy continued to be taken at the national level. There was simply no way that could work. Without a political superstructure, the internal market and the euro were doomed to become a dictatorship. A European economic and monetary system was forced on the nation states like a cork being pushed into a bottle, and this has put social policy almost beyond the reach of government. And because this was all embedded within a grand European peace narrative which reached a historic climax with Maastricht in 1992, with the reunified Germany as its emblem, then anyone who dared to criticise it risked having their motives questioned. Who, in the midst of all this, was going to give any thought to the possible economic dangers inherent in a market without a state and a currency without a democracy?

Essentially, the euro shifted the costs of economic policy from business on to the citizens. In the 1970s, due to the extreme volatility of the dollar, European industry – especially in Germany – suffered from severe exchange rate fluctuations within the European internal market. The value of the German Mark was systematically driven upwards and German business lost competitiveness through higher wage costs. This resulted in the demand for fixed exchange rates, and ultimately for a common currency. Economic and monetary union enabled European business (and more particularly once again German business) to avoid the costs created by the constant currency fluctuations within the European markets. The euro was thus a project driven largely by business, one especially dear to the heart of German exporters and banks. For them, exchange rates and transaction costs within the currency union disappeared. It was a gift. European business was given the euro without having to accept European fiscal and social union in return. This was the decisive mistake at the birth of the euro, one which subsequently couldn’t be undone. Crudely speaking, it gave the banks and (exporting) industry licence to milk the Eurozone without having to take on any responsibility for social equality and cohesion within Europe. From this point on, business enjoyed a free rider position in the European internal market that it was later not prepared to relinquish.

Labour and capital were thus de-coupled, and negotiations between them were taken out of the national context. This inevitably led to social upheaval, as ‘capital’ was able to exploit the European institutional structure whereas ‘labour’ was not: labour relations in Europe are not uniform across countries, and labour is much more poorly organised than ‘capital’. ‘Capital’ was given a level playing field, which was a huge advantage; ‘labour’ thereby suffered a huge disadvantage. Hayek 1, Marx 0.9

From contrasting labour relations systems to different rates of corporation tax: Maastricht and the euro created a shoppers’ paradise for business, but for those in paid employment only misery in their respective ‘national containers’.10 The European states undercut each other in a fiscal race to the bottom. Tax dumping by the states was compounded by wage dumping by companies, because collective bargaining at the European level didn’t exist. Basically, competition inside the single market was shifted from business on to the citizens. Whereas business got the freedom to relocate anywhere it wanted on equal or better terms, European citizens had no defence against divergent social standards or tax rates. What was missing was a transnational democratic framework. Because European citizens did not and do not have equality within Europe. The citizens were effectively handed over to the Single Market by their national governments. The European states abandoned their natural role as protectors of their citizens, while at the same time a properly functioning European parliamentary system that might have prevented the worst consequences did not exist.

The most fundamental breach of democracy in the way the EU is currently structured is the fact that the European citizens do not have equal representation in the European Parliament, even though it is there to represent their common interests. This contravenes the principle of electoral equality. Voting does not follow the same rules from Finland to Portugal. One member of parliament does not represent the same number of citizens from Malta to Germany. This blocks the path towards a true European democracy. Germany's Federal Constitutional Court regards the fact that the European Parliament in its current form does not comply with the principle of ‘one person, one vote’ as one of the most important reasons why the European Parliament cannot be considered democratic in the traditional sense. This is why the so-called ‘Responsibility for Integration Act’ (‘Integrationsverantwortungsgesetz’) was introduced in the German Parliament during the ratification process for the Lisbon Treaty, giving the German Bundestag, as the true guarantor of legitimacy, a legal responsibility to monitor the European Parliament.

This is the general pattern for the EU: what is really important cannot be accomplished; it is not possible to implement political and civic equality, a fundamental prerequisite for any polity – and so the EU ties itself in knots, for decades now, in complicated reforms and opaque measures designed to get around and make up for this failure. It thereby creates ever increasing levels of undemocratic entanglements within the system, which are then painted as necessary pragmatism, or as ‘a necessary response to crisis’, and fobbed off on the citizens. However, it is the supposedly sovereign nation states which are preventing the application of the principle of civic and political equality at the European level. Because originally it is not states but citizens who are sovereign,11 yet they are robbed of their legislative rights twice over in the dense jungle of EU governance.

From a structural perspective, parliamentary oversight in the Europe of the EU currently falls between two stools: the national parliaments no longer possess enough legal authority in this regard, while the European Parliament has not yet acquired it. The EU Commission, which initiates European legislation (whether directives or regulations) – usually driven by national governments and their interests – steps into this vacuum. Paradoxically, the national governments then get to vote on the new laws themselves in the European Council. Dieter Grimm,12 a former member of Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court, sets out very clearly how a system has thus evolved in the EU wherein the Executive and the Judiciary have been allowed for decades to operate without proper parliamentary checks. To put it another way: the EU does not comply with Montesquieu’s doctrine of the separation of powers. The Europe of the EU has thus been politically emasculated, and has mutated into an executive and judicial entity in which one thing above all is missing: a place where credible decisions are reached by a political process for which common responsibility can be taken at the European level. Caught inside this strange hybrid between a union of states and a citizens’ union, both national and European democracy are being ground down. The EU is eating its way into the national parliamentary systems. Around 70 percent of all laws are adopted from European legislation – regulations and directives – which for the most part is simply nodded through in the EU committee system. Its fundamental legitimacy is open to question, indeed downright problematic: it is legal but not democratic.

The current EU system thus represents the quintessence of ‘post-democracy’,13 as described by the British political scientist Colin Crouch. You can vote, but you don’t have any choice. The EU is constantly engaged in further integration of the Single Market; it can’t do anything else, it is a political and social amputee. Where there is no European democracy, there national democracy, too, can no longer prevail against the diktat of Brussels, as the Greeks above all learned to their cost. National public opinion is consciously excluded by the European executive, a phenomenon which Jürgen Habermas terms ‘executive federalism’.14 So the alternatives are: either a proper, transnational European democracy, or a fictitious national sovereignty overruled in practice by the EU. What we have at the moment is the latter.

The problem is the absence of a genuine political opposition in the EU, and the fact that decisions are effectively not reversible. Politics in the EU proceeds largely without any checks and balances. Its much vaunted ‘politicisation’ is barely happening in practice; the path is blocked by the system. The European Parliament is incapable of politicising itself, as is often called for in the debate on Europe. Votes almost always require a ‘grand coalition’ across the parties in order to parry the national crossfire emanating from the European Council, because a two-thirds majority is required to overrule the Council. So the European Parliament is largely ‘depoliticised’, and over 90 percent of votes are passed by a majority of 70 percent + X so as to overrule the Council.

This asymmetry gave rise during the Eurozone crisis to the problematic phenomenon of national parliaments – more precisely, the German Bundestag – stepping into the breach in the European legislative process. During this crisis, the governance of the euro – that is, the real decision-making power over the Greek bail-outs – then lay with the German elected representatives alone. The decisions taken in the Bundestag had impacts well beyond the German national borders – in fact, across the whole of Europe – and thus affected European citizens who had no representation in the Bundestag. This unbridgeable gap between democratically elected decision makers and the people affected by those decisions is the core of the European democratic deficit. The Bundestag was in effect making decisions for the whole Eurozone without having been elected by all the citizens of the Eurozone. In the democratic vacuum of the EU, parliamentary rules were supplanted by national domination; in this instance, it was a German hegemon which decided over the fate of the Eurozone. At the same time, however, Germany adopted the role of victim within the domestic political discourse, and claimed to its electorate that Germany was having to pay for everyone. The power of the supposed ‘victim’ trumped the genuine rights of the powerless.

In addition, in the course of the eurozone crisis decisions were reached between the governments of member states outside the parameters of the existing EU Treaties – with the widely-criticised effect of weakening the European community organs and leaving the small EU countries without any kind of voice. This is not what European democracy is supposed to look like.

‘Grexit’ was not essentially about money, but about the political dominance of the donor countries and the European institutions. Ireland was treated in the same way. First the Irish were blackmailed, against their will, into rescuing their banks and ‘socialising’ the costs by passing them on to the Irish taxpayers; then the ECB looked the other way while the Bank of Ireland was allowed to print money. The Europe of the EU claims to the outside world to be a rule-bound organisation, but from the inside it is clear that all the rules are bent and bodged. The most important thing is to keep up appearances. Neither of these cases bears much resemblance to any form of democratic politics. What links them is that this kind of thing only works with small countries, the countries of the European periphery. Brussels holds the governments of small countries by the reins and enforces its rules alternately with the stick or the carrot. The big countries either have the stick in their own hands, like Germany, or they escape sanctions precisely because they are too big, like France.

Yet these outrageous breaches of democratic and parliamentary principle in the EU were hardly pointed out by anyone, nor could they be acknowledged officially. Instead, over a number of years – and especially in Germany – a public discourse was promoted which pilloried idle southern European spendthrifts who would have to be corrected by the stern application of European austerity policy. Germany, meanwhile, was depicted as the model student of good economic policy. In retrospect, it is astounding how long this discourse was able to dominate the public perception, thanks to the irresponsible cooperation of certain key media organisations. To give just one example: the magazine Wirtschaftswoche, under its then editor-in-chief Roland Tichy, shamelessly stirred up the German SME sector, a key constituency in the eurozone crisis, against any bail-out. Interestingly, the publishers later decided to replace the editorial leadership of the magazine; apparently, the pain threshold for reputable journalism had been exceeded. Germany engaged in the ‘construction of an ordoliberal temple’15 entirely in line with its own structural economic policy interests, at the same time, and with the support of the EU institutions, effectively subjugating the eurozone to those interests. The fact that its own economic success was due to the existence of same eurozone was ignored or denied. The spoils of its (exporting) success were not divided equally across Europe, and the fact that its success was based for long periods on German wage dumping in Europe – that is, on exporting unemployment – was not mentioned. Germany’s immense trade surpluses drove the rest of Europe into economic crisis.16 However, only national budget deficits are subject to internal negotiation procedures in the EU, not trade surpluses. The former can be capped, but the latter cannot be reduced. On the other hand, the German contributions to the rescue package (ESM) were at about the European average, in relative terms and in proportion to the total economy.17 So Germany can hardly claim to have exercised excessive solidarity, or that ‘it paid for everyone’. To say nothing of the fact that, as the only stable economy during the Eurozone crisis, Germany benefited from negative interest rates on its government bonds, which flushed an additional 100 billion euros into the state coffers, making it the real beneficiary of the crisis.18 Despite this, the idea of a ‘transfer union’ was met in Germany with loud and indignant protest, with the German Federal Constitutional Court playing the role of guardian of the Holy Grail and with frequent invocations of the ‘no bail-out’ clause in the Treaties. Yet everyone knew that a currency union without a fiscal and social union simply cannot work. But everyone simply pretended they didn’t know it. What this all boils down to is that the promise made by Germany in 1989 – namely that German and European unification were conditional on each other – has still not been redeemed today.

But in the corridors of Brussels, people started to shrug their shoulders and whisper to each other that ‘Germany runs the EU ‘. The Italian Prime Minister at the time, Matteo Renzi, openly said that the eurozone would have collapsed if everyone had behaved like Germany. Today, respected Anglo-Saxon historians can write that Germany brought on the great European recession – but this time, not just on itself but on the rest of Europe.19 The German claim of strict fiscal rectitude, which has been met with increasing irritation and bemusement in the rest of Europe at least since 2010, managed to poison the atmosphere in Europe throughout the years of the eurozone crisis, up to the point where the ‘ugly Germany’ debate culminated in a SPIEGEL cover page headline reading ‘German supremacy’ in June 2015, and finally, slowly entered into German public consciousness as well. Seldom has the gap between Germany’s self-perception and its perception by others been as wide as during these years. And yet today people in Germany are surprised to find that other countries show so little solidarity over the refugee issue.

Although Germany in aggregate has profited from this policy, by no means every individual German has, because although the exporting industries achieved their foreign sales objectives, they also shifted their profits abroad, and real wages at home stagnated for years. This made the support from the German citizens for the European project very precarious, because by no means every German benefited personally from the aggregate profit that accrued to Germany from the introduction of the euro. Nevertheless, that profit – according to a McKinsey report of 201220 – amounted to 160 billion euros. Which means that over half of the total ‘Euro dividend’ of around 300 billion in the Eurozone went to Germany.

However, those neighbouring European states – like little Slovenia, for example – which lie outside the privileged zone of the German value creation chain (i.e. mainly those in southern Europe) suffered real social and economic turmoil. The political and social consequences – most notably a youth unemployment rate of almost 50 percent – are still deplorably severe today. The system of ‘uninterrupted governance’ in the Eurozone, via the EU institutions, circumvented key democratic principles and betrayed European democracy.

Of course, there have been, and still are, major economic errors and reform bottlenecks and a lack of competitiveness – in southern Europe especially, but also in France. And in this context, the high levels of tax evasion in Greece and Italy and the lack of land registries in Greece cannot go unmentioned.

But by far the biggest issue here is the way EU policy is still shaped at the nation state level. The solutions to economic problems are sought within the ‘national containers’, and therefore cannot be democratically successful when, firstly, national borders are still wide open for investment and for the repatriation of profits, meaning that the currency borders are the effective external borders; and, secondly, when fundamental principles of democracy are breached due to the absence of civic and political equality in the currency area, and when there is no proper European parliamentary system wherein a fair distribution of euro gains and euro losses can be negotiated. The point here is that it is essential for the euro to be properly embedded in a transnational democracy.

As long as the eurozone is not understood and conceived of as a single economic area with a single common economy it will be impossible for the consequences of the eurozone crisis to be overcome in a way which is democratic and socially fair and equitable for all European citizens. So what is needed is to ensure that all citizens of the eurozone receive an equal share of the aggregate wealth generated in the eurozone.21 And that requires, first and foremost, a transnational parliamentary democracy in which all European citizens are equal both politically (with respect to elections) and before the law (with respect to taxation and access to social rights). Otherwise, states and their citizens are in competition with each other, as is the case now in the EU: within a single currency area, different social welfare standards, different tax rates, wage levels and social welfare rights apply. In this sense, the introduction of the euro has not changed anything. Without a political union, the euro can function, but the point is that it cannot function democratically – only post-democratically, as it does now. Any genuine union has to be based on the political and civic equality of its citizens. But the nation states today cannot ensure equality among the citizens of Europe. That is why the ‘united states of Europe’ is a sham. More integration is not the answer. Europe must be turned upside down and re-imagined from first principles,22 and the first of those first principles must be that of the equality of all citizens. ‘Turning Europe upside down’, turning it on its head, is the golden thread that runs through the whole of this book. It corresponds to the volcano design on the cover of the German version of the book, by the conceptual artist Valeska Peschke from Berlin.

The assumption behind this is that political and civic equality would stabilise the European system over the long term – whereas now it is eroding.

Let us look at the damage which the current condition of post-democracy has done to Europe, and let us examine why the vocabulary with which we try to negotiate the European crises doesn’t work.

CHAPTER 3

Die ‘Weimarisation’ of Europe and the problem of the political centre ground

‘When I was young, reading the history books about the 1920,

I never understood how the elites of the time could lose the system.

Now, I understand.’

Martti Ahtisaari, Nobel Peace Prize winner

‘The womb that thing crawled out of is still fertile.’

Bertold Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

As a consequence of these massive breaches of democratic principle and of the decoupling of the economic and political arenas, forms of populism – both on the right and on the left – are now sprouting up like mushrooms everywhere in Europe, from Finland to Greece. The so-called populists oppose the EU. They break up classical two-party systems and thus make possible the erosion of national democracies. Populism is usually branded a threat to liberal democratic societies. However, Europe’s populism problem is a problem of the second order. Its biggest problem is the political centre ground!

For the political centre ground is not able or willing to denounce the EU as a violation of democracy. Nor does it feel any obligation to help the EU become a genuine transnational democracy, for example by proclaiming the positive political and social benefits of European integration. The EU is incapable of escaping from its own political self-repudiation. That’s the real problem in Europe!

European populism always has two faces. One is an anti-euro face, the other opposes migration and inundation by foreigners. Both faces are recognisable in Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orbán, in the ‘True Finns’, the Austrian FPÖ, the Swedish Democrats and Geert Wilders. The German AfD believed that under Bernd Lucke it could hide its ugly second face behind the professorial anti-euro face until Frauke Petry