And more on Europe and its institutions (part 2) – Perry Anderson in LRB:

“One absence in it is so striking that it has occasionally been noticed. The book says virtually nothing about the economic record of European integration. The early rulings of the European Court, the Single European Act, the advent of Monetary Union, enter the narrative as juridical milestones on the road to union, but their economic outcomes receive no attention. The simple fact that what the Treaty of Rome created was a European Economic Community is whited out; the acronym EEC is nowhere to be found. This is not an oversight on van Middelaar’s part. It is a function of his insistence that the objectives of European integration – not a term he favours: he prefers ‘European project’ – were always political. Economic steps were a means to a political goal, not ends in themselves. In this he is certainly right. But, of course, since the overwhelming bulk of the activities and enactments of the Community that became a Union have always been, as they remain, economic in nature and in impact, the politics of integration cannot realistically be isolated from them.”

(…)

“Since the European Parliament lacks any of the ordinary character of a legislature, van Middelaar is realistic in terming it essentially a court musician to the powers of the Union. But this does not, of course, mean that the political careers and affiliations of the actors involved in the events around which his narrative revolves can be bracketed as having no bearing. The effect of doing so is blandly apologetic. The background of the judges in Luxembourg, whose decisions made European history, is left a complete blank. As for statesmen, what innocent reader could guess that the hero of the drama at Milan on which van Middelaar dwells with such relish, Bettino Craxi, leader of the Italian Socialist Party, was the single most corrupt Italian politician of his time, a figure so odious to his compatriots that he was pelted by the public with coins of contempt and had to flee the police to Tunisia, living out his days in gilded exile on the proceeds of his extortion of corporate funds and theft of taxpayers’ money? Other than extolling Craxi’s ‘brilliant bluff’ in the European Council, van Middelaar breathes not a word about him. In the world of princes, lowly though a court musician may be, the part of a courtier can be more demeaning.”

(…)

“Van Middelaar leaves little doubt of the much lower regard in which he holds the Commission, a useful but humdrum factory of rules, and the Parliament, a windy cavern of words. The Council, by contrast, is the seat of authoritative decisions. The Commission and the Parliament are given to utopian temptations of European federalism, for which he barely hides his scorn. The Council is the vehicle of the true sense in which Europe has moved, and is continuing to move, towards ever great union, as a club of states bound together by a common project that does not extinguish their identities as nations, but joins them in a common destiny, a new form of Schicksalsgemeinschaft.”

(…)

“In a compromise, the parties reach an agreement without concealing or suppressing their differences. In a consensus, on the other hand, the differences are erased: the authority of the Council is monotone. In this, its pendant is the Court of Justice, which also deliberates in secret and forbids publication of any dissenting judgment, delivering its rulings as unanimous edicts.”

(…)

“Many of Machiavelli’s maxims are familiar worldwide, but his governing concepts – ‘virtue’ and ‘fortune’ – have lost currency. Naudé’s much more restricted focus gave the world a term that has lasted. His usage of it was wider than its current meaning, a coup d’état denoting not just the sudden overthrow of a regime, but any comparably unexpected action undertaken to found, preserve, alter or aggrandise a state. What defined such a stroke – here Naudé departed from Machiavelli – was always stealth. Ruthless, violent actions to seize or defend power – many are celebrated in The Prince – did not qualify, since they might be announced in advance, and conducted in broad daylight. Prior declaration or intimation was incompatible with a coup d’état, whose essence was not just suddenness, but secrecy. It must come as a complete surprise.”

(…)

“Savonarola, another monk, had sought to bring a revolution to Florence, but in Machiavelli’s judgment, a ‘prophet without arms’ was fated to be destroyed. For Naudé, it was true that Campanella had failed to found a new faith in Calabria for want of arms, but the Reformation had shown that ideology could be a power stronger and more destructive than force: I hold discourse so powerful that till now I have found nothing that is exempt from its empire; for it is that which persuades and instils belief in the most fantastical religions, incites the most iniquitous wars, lends wings and colour to the blackest actions, calms and appeases the most violent seditions, excites rage and fury in the most peaceable souls, plants and cuts down heresies, instigates revolt in England, conversion in Japan.
If a prince had a dozen preachers of eloquence at his disposition, ‘he would be better obeyed in his kingdom than if he had two powerful armies’. Naudé’s respect for ideology was founded on contempt for those swayed by it: the ‘populace’.”

(…)

“Van Middelaar situates his writing in the tradition of Machiavelli, and in the literature of the EU, not without reason. But in the structure of his argument, he is closer to Naudé. Machiavelli valued ‘tumult’ as the life blood of a flourishing republic, whose foundation was inconceivable without an active citizenship. Van Middelaar has no time for tumult, and had no hesitation in welcoming the foundation of a union in which citizens were all but passive, neither playing any significant role in its construction nor even taking much notice of it. But why should that matter? The constitution of the United States, after all, was born of a procedural coup, accepted after the fact by its citizens, long internalised as their own and today near worshipped by them. Why shouldn’t the European Union reproduce the same happy outcome? The answer should be plain enough. The Thirteen Colonies had fought a victorious revolutionary war and already declared themselves an independent nation. The colonists, united in the prospect of continental expansion, were of one language and origin. The constitution did not undercut such democracy as uniquely in that time each of the states possessed, but assembled and centralised it in a federation. The EU of today is neither the creation of a revolution, nor does it enjoy any homogeneity of culture or language, nor is it united by the intoxicating prospect of expansion. Moreover, and decisively, what degree of federation it has achieved has been bought by crippling rather than enhancing what democracy its constituent nations possess. Comparison with 1783 is a paralogism.”

(…)

“Earlier that year, hailing Obama’s inauguration in Washington in the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, he set out the global context, updating his conception of the Modern Man’s Burden: Obama makes America more powerful. The ability to cast the national interest in terms of a universal mission is deeply embedded in American consciousness. America is a force for good. That is its imperial trump card. Anyone who can credibly identify power with virtue is strong. The president himself knows this very well, and spoke to it in his masterly inaugural speech. Why did he move hundreds of millions? Certainly, because of the colour of his face, the sound of his voice, the moment in time. But also because he said that America, ‘the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth’ is and will remain a beacon of light and freedom, a country that is ‘a friend of every nation’ and ‘willing to lead again’. Obama’s audience, inside and outside America, yearned for this message.
This was all the more important since anti-Americanism had been gaining ground worldwide. ‘The Statue of Liberty was no longer the symbol of America, but Guantánamo Bay. That’s why Obama decided to remove that blemish immediately. Symbolism is power politics.’ That the Netherlands, which had relied on America for its safety since 1945, should ‘refuse to help polish up the American blazon by accepting a few Guantánamo prisoners’ was ‘completely incomprehensible’. It was in the Dutch interest ‘to strengthen our military protector against rivals like China or Russia’. But there was more to US paramountcy than simple might. Just as barbarians had been attracted to Rome by its aqueducts, villas with underfloor heating, and fine wines, so besides its military and economic superiority, America’s power lies in the global appeal of its lifestyle, racial equality and education. In this sense, Obama won on 4 November not only because he was able to promise a New Deal-like break with a deep crisis. It was striking that not only the poorest but the wealthiest voted for him. For in the long run the richest too served the cause by the display of their lifestyle.
Equipped with these convictions, van Middelaar made his way to Van Rompuy’s cabinet, and the four years spent with him resulted in Alarums and Excursions: Improvising Politics on the European Stage. Reception has matched that of The Passage to Europe – some thirty dithyrambs posted on his website; pre-publication superlatives galore, this time topped by Donald Tusk, the incumbent president of the European Council (‘quite simply the most insightful book on Europe’s politics today’), and Britain’s former ambassador to the EU, Sir Ivan Rogers (‘brilliant’ – the sixth award of this epithet).”

(…)

“If member states were to defend themselves against external attack, and offer their peoples a powerful role in the world, an ‘emancipation of the executive’ of the Union was vital. Meeting six to ten times a year as something like a provisional European government, the Council handles Chefsachen – the stuff of high politics, not low regulation – in closed sessions. At these, van Middelaar can report, all 28 heads of government call each other by their first names, and may find themselves agreeing to decisions they had never imagined beforehand, before emerging together for a beaming ‘family photograph’ in front of the cameras of the one thousand reporters assembled to hear their tidings, whose presence makes ‘failure impossible’, since every summit (with just one upsetting exception) ends with a message of common hope and resolve. Flanked by its trusty ‘Eurogroup’ of finance ministers and above all by the European Central Bank, ‘a monetary version of the passage to Europe’s new politics’ capable of equally decisive action in defence of the single currency, this is not a Council to be garlanded with the academic ribbon of mere legitimacy. What it now wears is something older, firmer and more capacious – the uniform of authority.
True, the Union still wants for one final complement. Opposition is ‘oxygen for political life’, lack of it a danger to any system. The technical, legal and procedural workings of the Commission and the court were low profile, but their ‘dullness was a price worth paying to subdue national resistances, idiosyncrasies and pretentions’. For a time, depoliticised progress towards a closer union was valuable, but by obstructing protest it eventually had the unfortunate side-effect of driving it into mobilisation outside the arena of Brussels. The Council does not proceed so bureaucratically. But even the politics of events as opposed to rules can be depoliticising, its decisions presented as necessities imposed by a series of emergencies, making opposition impossible. The risk of declaring measures alternativlos – a favourite formula of Merkel’s – is the same. ‘A strategy of faits accomplis feeds scepticism. The public hears this as “like it or lump it.”’ What is to be done? It would be better, van Middelaar writes, if opposition could be fostered democratically within the system, ‘to stage-manage and pacify social and political conflicts symbolically’. But that could hardly take the form of partisan division in the Union, since the diversity of politics in its member states precludes uniformity of governments in the Council, or blocs in the Parliament, because left or right parties never prevail simultaneously across the EU. In the Council and Parliament alike there is, on the contrary, always a de facto Grand Coalition of conservatives, Christian democrats, social democrats and liberals. Only political fringes on the far right and far left lie outside it, but these hold power nowhere in Europe, and their ‘polemical’ opposition is futile, as Syriza and Podemos discovered. So where is the right sort of opposition to be found? These problems are ‘not easily resolved’, van Middelaar concludes lamely, his last pages trailing away into the tritest of bromides from Brussels. The Union, of course, needs ‘dissensus’, inspired by ‘the conviction that what unites us as Europeans on this continent is bigger and stronger than anything that divides us’. In effect, consensus by any other name smells as sweet.”

(…)

“That the Union was never in danger from the departure or – Schäuble’s proposal – the suspension of Greece from the single currency, only the stake of German and French banks in Greek debt; that the humiliation of commissioners from Brussels dictating laws, policies, regulations in Athens – dignity à la hollandaise – aside, the Troika’s regime inflicted misery on the poor, the elderly and the young in Greece; that Greek public debt today stands higher than when Papandreou was forced by Berlin and Paris to call off one referendum, or Tsipras capitulated after another. None of this rates a mention.
Ukraine: geopolitical emancipation of Europe from America, resolute sanctions against Russia for annexing Crimea, enlightened interim compromise at Minsk? The realities: EU sanctions followed US sanctions, uniting stupidity and hypocrisy. Stupidity – does any Western politician, no matter how ignorant, really believe that Russia will ever relinquish Crimea, an accidental province of Ukraine, whim of a paper shuffle by Khrushchev for a couple of decades, when it was a hallowed part of Russia for more than two centuries, populated overwhelmingly by Russians? What possible gain could come from making relations with the country an indefinite hostage to the fiction that its recovery could be reversed? Hypocrisy: Europe has never lifted a finger over the annexation of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights by Israel, the South Sahara by Morocco, or the occupation of half of Cyprus by Turkey, though in all these cases seizure was against the will of most or all of the population, enforced by violent repression and ethnic cleansing, unlike Crimea where it was certainly welcomed by a majority, if one exaggerated by Moscow. Borders are inviolable only when it suits the West to say so. As for Minsk, its upshot has been zero.
Refugees: what is there to be proud of in the European record? Attacking Libya (France, Britain, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Denmark), bombing and fighting in Afghanistan (contingents from virtually every member state of the Union) and Syria (France, Britain), increasing refugee flows in each instance: a copybook case of the ethics of responsibility? Bribing Erdoğan with six billion euros to block fugitives from getting to Europe by penning them within Turkey, under a regime boasting a hundred thousand political prisoners: an exercise in the ethics of conviction? There’s not a line on the pay-off to Erdoğan in Alarums and Excursions, though van Middelaar mercifully spares us Euro-cant on human rights, confining himself to talk of love and freedom as internment camps fester in Lesbos and boats capsize off Lampedusa.
Brexit: a triumph of European statecraft? If the Union’s great breakthrough was to advance beyond a politics of rules to one of events, overturning one rule after another in pursuit of financial stability and border security, wouldn’t it have made more sense to concede to Cameron the brakes on migration he was asking for to win his referendum, rather than to risk Britain’s desertion by invoking immovable principles that are continually being moved? If, when necessity calls, the Treaty of Maastricht’s precise and detailed clauses on budgetary discipline and its prohibition of central bank purchase of government debt can be dismissed in the shake of a lamb’s tail, why not the far vaguer provisions of the Treaty of Rome on the free movement of labour? From the Realpolitikerstandpoint advertised by van Middelaar, the logic of pragmatically dodging the blow to the EU from across the Channel should have been obvious. No such thought crosses the mind of his book.”

(…)

“For Siemann, Metternich’s career after 1815 offers a premonition of our own times, and inspiration for how to handle them. The epoch of the Restoration? Banish the term, which is a misleading description of the objectives of the prince and his fellow statesman in those years. ‘It would be much more appropriate to describe their aims, and the constraints under which they acted, as giving rise to “security policies”.’ These were required to defend ‘the system of international law established in 1815’ from ‘attempted revolutions and rebellions, or assassinations and seizures of power’, such as the Greek revolt against the Ottomans (best for it to ‘burn itself out beyond the pale of civilisation’ was Metternich’s humanitarian response). For the brand-mark of the period was ‘the hitherto unwritten history of Europe-wide terrorism, which developed between 1817 and 1825. It was only because of this terrorism that nationalism was able to become an unassailable social power.’ In Greece and elsewhere, ‘modern nationalism presented itself as a form of religious salvation and exploited a context of social and economic backwardness,’ thereby generating a ‘universally usable myth’ of utopian dimensions. It is easy, Siemann remarks, to accuse Metternich of repression, but if we look around us today, the counter-measures he took against the jihadis of the period are comparable to ‘the activities of modern intelligence services and other state institutions responsible for safeguarding constitutions’. Do not ‘the holy warriors of 1789, 1813 and 1819 have something in common with those of today’? The security policies set in place by Metternich were far-sighted not only in dealing firmly with a nationalism spawned by terrorism, but in furnishing the antidote to it. That lay in the ‘historically evolved legal orders’ of the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg monarchy, and the fashion in which these were folded into the German Confederation set up at Vienna. In this, Siemann goes on, Metternich was astonishingly modern, as we can see if we consider the contemporary scene in this respect too. ‘The European Union follows the same model, guaranteeing national identity under the umbrella of composite statehood’ in a way that ‘advances the common interests of all’. Perceiving the deadly bacillus carried by the nation-state whose unity ‘led only to war’, and rightly suppressing it in Italy, Metternich pioneered the vaccine against it. The Concert of Europe created at Vienna has found its historical successor in Brussels.” (…)

“The commonest arena for nationalism is the football field. Nevertheless, tension, mostly submerged but sporadically visible, is widespread between the elites and the peoples of Europe, as it was in the days of the Restoration, once again requiring extra-territorial interventions to keep public order. No longer military expeditions of the kind sent to crush Spanish or Italian liberals, these now take economic form: dictates of Berlin, Paris or Frankfurt evicting unsuitable governments in Rome and Athens; commissaries of Brussels invigilating the taxes, labour laws, pension systems of other countries for conformity to neoliberal principles, today’s legitimism.
In defending and illustrating this system, van Middelaar is the closest thing the Union has produced to a modern Gentz. Like the secretary to Europe, he won his spurs with a philippic against ideological toxins from France: the ideas of 1789, the ideas of 1917. Politicide, denouncing latter-day philosophers of terrorism, was his translation of Burke for moderns. Both propagandists yet also original thinkers, each combined gifts of literary eloquence with calculations of raison d’état. Both enjoyed a European reception for their political writing beyond that of any contemporary. Gentz exercised real power, though always as a subordinate; van Middelaar to date has not. On the other hand, compared with Gentz’s prolific writing, remarkable though it was in its age, van Middelaar’s work is of another order of intellectual complexity and sophistication, as befits the distance between the relative simplicities of the Congress system and the labyrinths of the EU.”

(…)

“Democratic systems have effective oppositions that may one day govern. The European Union is organised in such a way that it does not. But since it is good form to regret its ‘democratic deficit’, it would be better if it at least appeared to do so. Hence van Middelaar’s successive attempts to supply an ersatz opposition – a chorus, a gallery, an audience – that could offer a façade of democracy to the construction he extols. No thinker agitated the young van Middelaar more than Jean Baudrillard. But the public invoked in protean guises across so many of his pages is always in substance the same, the neutered onlooker of a spectacle, as depicted by Baudrillard. European democracy? Less diplomatic than his aide, Van Rompuy has voiced the truths of Brussels more bluntly. In Greece, ‘the performance of the troika may have taken place a little too much in the media spotlight’: better in a blackout. What of the continent at large? ‘I believe the Union is overdemocratised’: in so many words.”

Read the article here.

The EU is Brussels is the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815)? Well, “Le Congrès ne marche pas, il danse,” even after the recent orgy that interrupted the career of a conservative Hungarian politician few would say that Brussels is dancing.
The idea that the EU is responsible for the Brexit by not giving Cameron “the brakes on migration he was asking for to win his referendum,” is a revisionist take on the Brexit.
Yes, in a democracy you need opposition, but do states need opposition? They have plenty of opposition by nature, other states, but we cannot compare a union, what the EU still is, with a democracy without internal opposition. There’s I would say plenty of opposition within the EU, but the secession movements are not yet strong enough, outside the UK that is.
It remains unclear whether the vaccine of this union will be effective against the nation-state and its unavoidable warmongers.
Mr. Anderson is skeptical about the European project, he has some good arguments, and his historical overview is enlightening, I had never heard of Gentz for example, but to complain about the “democratic deficit” of the EU in 2020 in Europe is a bit like complaining about the socialist deficit in 1990 in let’s say Bucharest.
It’s not this deficit that’s undermining trust and spreading paranoia.