Europe’s Christian Polity

Based on a non-secular account of history and a proper understan-ding of the theologico-religious legacy of Byzantium, we can briefly chart an alternative vision to the dominant view that Europe’s futu-re is liberal-secular and that the European project is wedded to the primacy of nation-states. Europe – despite its many imperfections – is best described as a neo-medieval polity with a political system sui generis. Even today, remote indications of this include the peculiar functioning of the EU but also the Council of Europe, the OSCE and other structures that are associations of nations and peoples – rather than a centralised federal super-state or a loose network of countries that merely trade with one another.

Europe’s polity is characterised by hybrid institutions, overlapping jurisdictions, polycentric authority and multi-level governan-ce[48]. In this sense, it resembles a vestigially Roman-Byzantine poli-ty that is less religious but more Christian than the USA[49]. In the previous section, I already suggested that Europe is not her own fo-undation (unlike America or China) but the continuous unfolding of the Hellenistic fusion of Jerusalem with Athens and Rome and also the integration and transformation of other European traditions such as Germanic law, the Celtic, Slavic and other languages.

Connected with this blending of diverse cultures within an over-arching framework is the Judeo-Christian distinction of religious from political authority. Based on this distinction, a «free space» emerged between political rule and society wherein politics is not monopolised by the state but pertains to the public realm in which individuals and groups participate. Indeed, the Church – together with local communities and professional bodies like guilds or universities – tended to defend the freedom of society against political coercion. It thereby helped protect the autonomy of Jewish, Muslim and other religious minorities. In addition to complex debates about the relative balance of state and church or the «mix» of different so-urces of law (canon, common and civil), the presence of Jewish com-munities and Muslim-ruled lands on the Iberian peninsula ensured that «Christian Europe» was never a clerically dominated monolith but rather a realm of political argument within and across different faith traditions. Just like Christianity was never exclusively purely European, so too Europe is not an exclusively «Christian club».

Moreover, Christendom in East and West blended the principle of free association in Germanic common law with the Latin sense of equity and participation in the civitas. In this manner, European Christendom defended a more relational account (in terms of objective – not subjective – rights and reciprocal duties) that outflanked the dialectic of the individual and the collective that we owe to the American and the French Revolution. Ultimately, Europe’s unique legacy of faith and reason provided the basis for European claims to an «organically» plural universalism. The mark of this variant of universalism is that it avoids both moral relativism and political ab-solutism by offering a free, shared social space for religious and non-religious practice – the «realm» of civil society that is more primary than either the central state or the «free» market. As the «corporation of corporations», the European polity rests on common civic culture and social bonds that are more fundamental than either formal constitutional-legal rights or economic-contractual ties.

In turn, this gives rise to the idea that the ‘intermediary institutions’ of civil society are more primary than either the centralised national state or the transnational «anarchic» market. Intermediary institutions include groups and bodies like professional associations, manufacturing and trading guilds, cooperatives, trade unions, voluntary organisations, universities and religious communities. As such, the European polity really is neo-medieval in this sense that it combines a strong sense of overlapping jurisdictions and multiple membership with a contemporary focus on transnational networks as well as the institutions and actors of «global civil society».

Nor is this model limited to the sub-national level. Rather, mo-des of association and corporation apply to neighbourhoods, communities, cities, regions and states alike. The idea of Europe as a po-litical union is inextricably intertwined with the notion that national states are more like «super-regions» within a wider polity – a subsi-diary society of nations and peoples rather than a centralised super-state or a glorified «free-trade» area. Far from diminishing the impor-tance of nations, such an account views nations as balancing the righ-tful claims of regions and the rightful claims of Europe as a whole.

This suggests that even nations can uphold and promote relations of mutual giving and reciprocal help. As such, Europe offers a vision of associative democracy and civil economy beyond the authoritarian central state that seeks to regulate the transnational, anarchical «free market»[50]. Such a vision is inspired by the twin Ortho-dox-Catholic Christian principles of subsidiarity and solidarity that underpin the entire project of European integration and enlargement. Ultimately, we owe such and similar principles to Europe’s Christian heritage, in particular Catholic social teaching[51].

With the advent of neo-liberalism that both the left and the right enthusiastically embraced, the European polity has failed to defend this legacy against the collusion of the central state and the free-mar-ket. However, twenty years after the collapse of state communism, the continuing crisis of «free-market» capitalism provides a unique opportunity to chart an alternative path that re-embeds the state and the market into the relations of civil society. Thus, the principles and practices of reciprocity, mutuality and solidarity that are embedded in institutions and practices do not just underscore Europe’s Christi-an heritage but also offer an alternative future for the Union and the continent as a whole.