A Pan-European Commonwealth

The continuous euro crisis is accelerating and intensifying the emergence of a multi-speed EU and multi-polar Europe that can be traced to the post-1989 era and the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. Coupled with the failure to implement the 1990 Paris Charter and overcome the Cold War opposition between the West and Russia, the three-pillar system that was enshrined in the European treaty introduced a division into the newly established Union. Crucially, the EU did not build the right institutions to translate its political ambition into rea-lity and transform the neo-functionalist logic at the heart of the inte-gration process. Throughout the 1990’s and 2000’s, subsequent en-largement waves and treaty revisions failed to stop the rise of the European «market-state» by building a proper polity that reflects the EU’s diverse societies and can embed the increasingly interdependent national economies.

However, one fundamental difference between the post-1989 era and the post-2009 years is that the ongoing turmoil in the eurozone has shifted the dynamic from the centripetal forces that unified the Union between 1957 and the early 1990’s to the centrifugal forces that risk dividing it now in three ways: first, between the core and the peripheral countries within the euro area; second, between the euro members (and euro candidates such as Poland and the other «euro-plus countries») and the rest of the EU; third, between EU member-states, candidate/access countries and the «European non-West» (including Russia, Ukraine and the wider Europe that extends to the greater Caucasus, parts of the Middle East and North Africa).

On what basis can the entire European continent and neighbouring countries cooperate? As I have already hinted, what sets Europe apart from the other global «poles» is the autonomous space of civil society and the intermediary institutions that mediate between the individual, the state and the market. In an interesting report on «The Spiritual and Cultural Dimension of Europe» published in 2004, a reflection group composed of European statesmen and intellectuals put this point very well:

Europe itself is far more than a political construct. It is a complex – a «culture» – of institutions, ideas, expectations, habits and feelings, moods, memories and prospects that form a «glue» binding Eu-ropeans together – and all these are a foundation on which a political construct must rest. This complex – we can speak of it as European civil society – is at the heart of political identity. It defines the conditions of successful European politics and the limits of state and po-litical intervention[52].

Contrary to common misconceptions, Europe is neither a fede-ral super-state nor an intergovernmental structure. Instead, Europe-an nations pool their sovereignty and are more like «super-regions» within a pan-national polity that combines a political system sui ge-neris with elements of a neo-medieval empire[53]. The German constitutional court, in a landmark ruling on the Lisbon Treaty in June 2009, emphasized that the Union is neither just an international organisation nor a federal super-state but rather a voluntary association of states – unlike the USA since the civil war.

The mark of the European polity is that it limits both state and market power in favour of communities and groups. This associatio-nal model combines vertical, more hierarchical elements with horizontal, more egalitarian aspects, with overlapping jurisdictions and a complex web of intermediary institutions wherein sovereignty is dispersed and diffused. By contrast, the US is a commercial republic where civil society is equated with proprietary relations and market-based exchange[54]. In other parts of the world, civil society is subordinated to the administrative and symbolic order of central state po-wer. Thus, Europe’s greatest «gift» to its people and the rest of the world is to offer a narrative that accentuates the autonomy of associations vis-à-vis both state and market and re-embeds both politics and economics within the civic and social bonds of civil society.

Amid the current crisis of legitimacy, this suggests that all Euro-pean structures need a better model of shared sovereignty and reciprocal power by building a subsidiary polis that connects supranatio-nal institutions much more closely to regions, localities, communities and neighbourhood. In turn, this requires a much greater sense of a common demos with a mutual ethos and telos. In line with its own best traditions, Europe could do worse than to renew and extend its political project around the following principles and practices. First of all, a commonwealth of nations and peoples rather than a market-state of «big government» and «big business». Second, the pursuit of the common good in which all can share – beyond the maximisation of individual utility or collective happiness (or both at once). Third, a series of political transformations that not only acknowledge the recent failures and the current crisis but also reconfigure the key institutions in accordance with Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman notions of constitution rule and «mixed government».

Externally, a commonwealth that reflects the mediating univer-salism of the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman tradition would con-trast with the exceptionalism of old empires and new colonial powers such as the USA, China and (to a lesser extent) some newly emer-ging markets such as neo-Ottoman Turkey or Indonesia. However imperfectly, Europe remains so far the only serious attempt to build the first transnational political community whose members come to-gether to form a voluntary association of nations that pool some of their sovereign power for the common good of their people and others across the globe. Europe has a terrible colonial history, but it has also given rise to a set of institutions and practices that have transformed tribalism and nationalism at home and abroad.

Indeed, Europe has shaped global history not through sheer size or military might but rather thanks to its inventiveness and the creation of force multipliers, as Christopher Coker has argued[55]. European inventiveness today is mirrored in the international order that reflects Europe’s Christian heritage. For example, European Protestant theologians and Catholic figures played a decisive role in creating the League of Nations after 1919 and the United Nations in 1946. Christian Democrats from Italy, Germany, the Benelux countries and even France led the way in setting up the project for European integration and enlargement in the late 1940’s and 1950’s. They were inspired by Christian social teaching which, since the ground-breaking encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), has always viewed the supremacy of the national state and the transnational market over the intermediary space of civil society and economy (ultimately up-held by the Church) as contrary to the Christian faith[56].

In contemporary parlance, the Christian origin and outlook of the post-1919 world order is based on the idea of «networking» and «mainstreaming» Christian ideas and thus multiplying the power of European’s vestigially Christian polity. The invention of internatio-nal organisations and supranational bodies reflects the Christian com-mitment to create a cosmopolis – a cosmic city that upholds universal, global principles embodied in particular, national or regional practices. Arguably, Christianity in both East and West – whose glo-bal spread outstrips that of Islam and other world religions[57] – is the force multiplier of Europe. Without embracing its shared Roman-Byzantine Christian heritage, the future of Europe is seen uncertain and bleak.