Ever closer union? Europe in the west Perry Anderson Verso, London, 2021, 272pp., ISBN: 978-1839764417

Against constitutionalism

Martin Loughlin

Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2022, 258pp., ISBN: 978-0-674-26802-9

Zwischen Globalisierung und Demokratie: Politische Ökonomie im ausgehenden Neoliberalismus

Wolfgang Streeck

Suhrkamp, Berlin, 2021, 538pp., ISBN: 978-3-518-42968-6

‘Be your self! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself’ (Nietzsche, 1997 [1874], p. 127). Friedrich Nietzsche’s exhortation in ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ captures the romantic sensibility that came to define our predicament. We praise hyper-individualism, thinking of societal constraints as inherently repressive. ‘The man who does not wish to belong to the mass’, Nietzsche tells us, ‘needs only to cease taking himself easily’ (1997 [1874], p. 127), by defying societal pressures and finding his true destiny within. Nietzsche arguably radicalises the Enlightenment project. His celebration of individual freedom is reminiscent of Immanuel Kant, and his demand on us to overcome ‘laziness and cowardice’, which explains ‘why so great a portion of mankind’ gladly ‘remains under lifelong tutelage’ (Kant, 1983 [1784], p. 3). The Enlightenment is thus captured in a simple command: ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding’. Whether and how such a radical premise can be combined with a stable political order animates much of Kant’s political philosophy and many liberals who came after him. Nietzsche was not one of them. His project of individual emancipation is not conducive to political communities that would both create and maintain conditions for liberty.

A sociologist, a historian and a legal scholar looked at the state of contemporary western societies and none of them liked what they saw. Wolfgang Streeck, Perry Anderson and Martin Loughlin share a concern for the erosion of democracy in Europe, along with the virtues that make democratic citizenship a viable basis for self-governing societies. From their differing perspectives, they decry the advance of neoliberalism, which prioritises individual aspirations at the expense of the common good. Citing Alexander Somek, Loughlin challenges ‘postnational citizenship discourse’ as ‘neoliberalism with a leftist face’ (2022, p. 190). In a similar vein, Streeck criticises ‘left-wing globalism’ as a neoliberal fantasy, which links its demands for the abolition of nation states to a universalist conception of justice devoid of concerns for citizens here and now and their conflicting material interests. Class conflicts in a world of ‘global governance’, argues Streeck, can be recast as ‘cultural and moral conflicts’ (2021, p. 33), pitting enlightened cosmopolitan elites against bigoted masses. ‘He who wants to speak about Europe’, Streeck writes, ‘must not remain silent about capitalism’ (2021, p. 385). Anderson, in turn, cites approvingly Adam Tooze’s description of neoliberalism as ‘an anti-democratic politics, which resolves the tension between capitalism and democracy either by limiting the range of democratic discretion or by interfering directly in the democratic process’ (2021, p. 61).

The scope and depth of the three books under review here are immense. Anderson’s Ever Closer Union does not refer merely to the best-known phrase that came to define the European project, but also its spiritual proximity with the USA, expressed in the subheading, Europe in the West. Similarly, Streeck’s Between Globalism and Democracy: Political Economy in Late Neoliberalism discusses the world, not just Europe—a world, in which a relentless push towards ‘global governance’ (2021, p. 11) has been accompanied by the continuing erosion of powers vested in democratic governments. This is done in the name of freedom and democracy, as Loughlin compellingly demonstrates in his polemic Against Constitutionalism. Having been developed as a theory to challenge the arbitrary rule of absolutist leaders in the eighteenth century, constitutionalism has betrayed its initial aims. Devised ‘as a philosophy of government to reconcile order and freedom’ (2022, p. 188), constitutionalism ended up becoming an instrument to defend the interests of the few at the expense of the many. Constitutionalism, in Loughlin’s view, has thus become ‘the primary medium through which an insulated elite, while paying lip service to the claims of democracy, is able to perpetuate its authority to rule’ (2022, p. x). This again is a global phenomenon, with cosmopolitan elites ‘at home in the world rather than just in one’s own state’ acting as ‘depoliticised being(s)’ (2021, p. 189).

The focus of the present piece is more modest: democracy in Europe. If the European Union continues to be hailed by its proponents as a model of global governance, the sober analysis offered by our three writers suggests that contemporary Europe exemplifies major dysfunctions of western-style democracy, which are to be avoided. Anderson’s assessment is unsparing and worth citing at length:

The European Union, as it has come to take shape and looks to the future, speaks continuously of democracy and the rule of law, even as it negates them. No ill intention need be ascribed it. What it has become was inscribed in what it was intended to be, in the minds of those who took possession of the project: a unification of the continent from above, by stealth where possible, by diktat where necessary (2021, p. 229).

And yet, however obliquely, Anderson ascribes ill intention. Few books about the EU are as enjoyable as Anderson’s Ever Closer Union precisely because it is populated by real people who have shaped the project—the likes of Luuk van Middelaar, whom the author praises and condemns in equal measure. Middelaar, ‘The Special Adviser’, is the main character of the longest chapter in the book, introduced to us ‘as the first organic intellectual of the EU’ (2021, p. 70) and commended for ‘impressive scholarship and historical imagination’ (2021, p. 85). His Passage to Europe, ‘a tour de force’ (2021, p. 97), we learn, is ‘unlike anything written about the EU before or since’ (2021, p. 85). And yet, Anderson builds up both Middelaar’s academic credentials and his political influence all the better to demolish him in the pages that follow. Middelaar ends up epitomising all that is wrong with the EU—the remoteness of its governing elites who are satisfied by ‘an ersatz opposition – a chorus, a gallery, an audience – that could offer a façade of democracy’ (2021, p. 140). Yet, Middelaar is mainly guilty by association, especially with his conservative teacher, Frank Ankersmit and conservative Dutch commissioner, Frits Bolkestein.1

The irony is that Middelaar’s and Anderson’s positions are far closer to each other than the reader of Ever Closer Union is led to believe. Both authors are exasperated by the EU’s excessive reliance on technocracy, and both are concerned about its lack of democratic accountability. But while the former continues to believe that the project is worth pursuing, the latter appears to be more sceptical, coming close to endorsing—however cryptically—Brexit. ‘In design’, Anderson writes, ‘Westminister is a pre-modern construction that has survived long past its due date, while Brussels is a post-modern fabrication that is determined to outlive every alternative to it’. And yet, for all its flaws as a retrograde political system, ‘Westminster is vastly superior to this lacquered synarchy’ (2021, p. 228) that the EU represents.

The lengthy polemic with Middelaar does not detract from the strength of Anderson’s monograph.2 For a student of European integration, accustomed to reading the turgid prose prevalent in the field, Anderson’s unsparing analysis of the European project comes as a breath of fresh air. Refreshing too is his critical detachment from the lofty claims that the EU itself likes to propagate in its defence. There is no danger that Anderson would want to join ‘some five hundred Jean Monnet chairs planted across the Union’ (2021, p. 143), unlike the present author, who benefited from the EU funding scheme twice, albeit from a distance. Writing against this vast academic industry and its conformism, Anderson demolishes every myth and every attempt at justification of the EU’s self-proclaimed noble goals. Preventing war in Europe? ‘NATO, not the EEC, was what laid the military conflicts of the past to rest’ (2021, p. 187). Human rights? Think of the EU’s position towards refugees: ‘the record of European inhumanity in the Aegean and Libya speak for itself’ (2021, p. 189). Solidarity? ‘The current European Pillar of Social Rights, announced in 2017 … is largely a dead letter’ (2021, p. 190). The unifying element of all of these shortcomings is the EU’s betrayal of democracy. As Anderson observes, ‘structurally, European integration was “born technocratic”, as it has remained’ (2021, p. 191).

The Rule of Law, or Rule by Judges?

Whatever role Anderson ascribed to Middelaar, the European Union is not a creation of political theorists, but lawyers. And if this wasn’t problematic enough, as Anderson documents in considerable detail, personal histories of some of the founding fathers showed direct lineage to regimes against which Europe’s unity was pursued in the first place: Nazism and fascism. Without overstating the Dark Legacies of Law in Europe (Joerges and Ghaleigh, 2003), it is remarkable just how easily judges and influential legal scholars with questionable pasts were able to reinvent themselves as staunch defenders of European unity. The first president of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), Massimo Pilotti, honed his skills in the 1930s as assistant secretary-general of the League of Nations, where ‘he had acted as the long arm of the fascist regime in Rome, personally advising Mussolini on what countermeasures to take in manoeuvres to shield Italy from condemnation by the League for its actions in Ethiopia’ (Anderson, 2021, p. 145).

His German colleague on the court, Otto Riese, ‘had been so devoted a Nazi’ (Anderson, 2021, p. 145) that he retained his membership of the NSDAP until 1945, even though he spent the war in the safety of Switzerland. And what are we to think of Hans Peter Ibsen, one of post-war Germany’s leading jurists, who was instrumental in the establishment of the primacy of EU law via the decision of the ECJ’s Costa v Enel? Two decades earlier, the same Ibsen waxed lyrical about a ‘future Grossraumordnung of Europe, to which Germany could look forward, organised around it’ (Anderson, 2021, p. 152). If this sounds like Carl Schmitt’s Grossraum theory, that’s because it is. Ibsen was very much indebted to Schmitt, praising in Politik und Justiz—a book that made his career in Nazi Germany—‘“sovereign acts” by the state that dispensed with consideration of justice’ (Anderson, 2021, p. 151).

Anderson does not suggest that the ECJ too ‘dispensed with consideration of justice’, but by highlighting the personal and ideational genealogies, he forces us to think more carefully about the impact that European integration has had on democracy in Europe. We are right to be sceptical towards European judges who saw themselves as pioneers of a new Europe that was yet to come; heroes performing ‘jurisprudential miracle(s)’ (Anderson, 2021, p. 154), turning the ECJ into a constitutional court and Europe into a quasi-federation.

A Nietzschean Digression

Whether Nietzsche ever had a coherent political project remains contested. But if he had one, it would be difficult to think of it as democratic. Against the ruling class of superhuman elites he posited the existence of the slaves. The sole purpose of the latter was to enable the greatness of the former. Nietzsche’s celebration of a ‘good European’, who would ‘work towards the amalgamation of all nations’, focuses on the revival of culture.3 The EU’s ruling classes might share Nietzschean contempt for common people and their nationalist attachments, but rather than creating a superior culture, they gave rise to an administrative moloch embodied in the acquis communautaire—some eighty thousand pages of EU laws and regulations that make the EU perhaps the most comprehensive and influential regulatory body on earth. What is more, far too many of these legal provisions have attained a quasi-constitutional status, making them very difficult to change. This is why the EU came to embody all that is wrong with constitutionalism—the key argument of Loughlin’s provocative study.

Like Anderson, Loughlin is highly critical of the juridification of politics and identifies the EU as one of the main culprits in this process. As he puts it, ‘a system of sovereign states interacting as formal equals through public international law had to be displaced by a federated cosmopolitan order’ (2022, p. 187). Loughlin’s book raises an important question about the ultimate source of the EU’s legitimacy: ‘If cosmopolitan constitutionalism is not dependent on a conventionally understood exercise of constituent power, whence comes its authority?’ (2022, p. 183). This is the famous ‘no demos thesis’, which animates a great deal of EU scholarship and a number of important decisions of the German Constitutional Court, which never fully accepted the EU’s legal supremacy. Instead of the people, Loughlin argues, ‘an abstract idea of human rights’ became ‘the universal standard of legitimacy’. The role of democratically elected legislators is increasingly taken by judges. The judiciary is to fulfil ‘the duty of parliamentarians’, whose task—in the words of Walter Bagehot—was ‘to know the highest truth which the people will bear, and to inculcate and preach that’ (Bagehot cited in Loughlin, 2022, p. 189). Loughlin’s key aim is thus to defend constitutional democracy against constitutionalism—a task that can only be pursued at local and national level against the hubris of ‘the cosmopolitan project’ (2022, pp. 179–190).

As Loughlin reminds us, many a cosmopolitan betrayed the legacy of Kantian cosmopolitanism. The worldly philosopher who never left Königsberg never advocated a world without nation states. In contrast to Nietzsche, Kant understood that a post-national world would also be post-democratic. Kant’s perpetual peace, for example, is not to be attained by a world-state, but by coexistence of well-governed republics. As Streeck forcefully argues, size matters for political communities, and a process of denationalisation leads invariably to de-democratisation (Entdemokratisierung). Democratic politics requires ‘we, the people’, a political community of citizens who have something in common, including a common language. How is a Europe with 24 official languages (not 26 as Anderson (2021) erroneously writes on p. 229) ever going to be governed democratically without re-empowering its nation states? None of our writers is convinced by Habermas’s ‘constitutional patriotism’. The idea that ‘the international community of states must develop into a cosmopolitan community of states and world citizens’ (Habermas cited in Loughlin, 2022, p. 181) is neither feasible nor desirable.

In line with this, both Loughlin and Streeck appear sympathetic towards populist rebellions across Europe, seeing in them ‘a sign of the possible renewal of democracy’ (Loughlin, 2022, p. 200). Streeck thus calls for an ‘escape downwards’ (Ausweg nach unten) and is not afraid to advocate ‘a Europe of fatherlands, or motherlands for that matter’—a Europe, that is, which remains anathema for most adherents of European integration. Would such a Europe ‘be really less peaceful than the current regime of an ever closer union’ (2021, p. 390, italics in the original), Streeck asks? This takes us to a question that none of the books could address directly, but one that is inescapable for anyone contemplating the world we live in now: can the EU effectively stand up to Russia?

War as ‘father of all and king of all’4

In his concluding reflections, Anderson speculates about the possibility of change, predicting that ‘it would take another, altogether more seismic 2008 to shake these political coordinates apart’ (2021, p. 234). It is hard to think of a more seismic event than the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Yet both Anderson and Streeck are so critical of the European Union and the west in general that they appear sympathetic towards Russian positions, at times adopting the Kremlin’s language to describe the conflict in Ukraine.5 This is particularly baffling in the case of Streeck. After all, he is perhaps one of the most eloquent critics of imperial mindsets wherever he sees them—why can’t he condemn Russian imperialism with equal verve as he does US and European delusions of greatness?

‘The EU is an experiment in multilateralism on a continental scale’, Middelaar argued, ‘born to break power politics, but not to make power politics’ (cited in Anderson, 2021, p. 237). In response, Anderson wonders whether in Middelaar’s note of ‘strategic resignation’ lies ‘the germ of some structural flexibility to come’ to turn Europe into a credible counterweight to ‘superpowers of America and Asia’ (2021, p. 237). He concludes with a question the answer to which will decidedly shape Europe’s future:

is the current formula of the Union - dilute sovereignty without meaningful democracy, compulsory unanimity without participant equality, cult of free markets without care of free trade - likely all the same to last indefinitely?

My answer is no, no and no. If democracy in Europe is to have a future, its constitutive units, nation states, need to reclaim power and assert themselves, acting in concert against the threats from within and without. Europeans need to have the courage to reclaim sovereignty at the national level, the better to stand up to the threat of sovereignist, imperialist Russia.

Notes

  1. 1.

    In fact, it is questionable whether Middelaar’s biography is of much relevance to the bigger story of the book. What’s more, Anderson seems to have invented basic biographical facts to fit his narrative. For example, by likening Middelaar to Friedrich Gentz, ‘Metternich’s closest collaborator as policy advisor and propaganda chief’ (2021, p. 132), Anderson insinuates that Middelaar’s part-time position of ‘special adviser’ to a Commission vice-president was ‘a key position in the Brussels power game’ (Middelaar, 2021). If only I were English enough to say, ‘play the ball not the man, Perry!’

  2. 2.

    For readers of the London Review of Books, however, there is not much new here. Apart from Chapter 1, the earlier version of which appeared in New Left Review, the book is a compilation of a series of review articles previously published in LRB.

  3. 3.

    Nietzsche’s ‘was a Europe that had a special role in fostering a new European culture on the basis of good Europeans, and although the latter can sometimes be discerned, the former is patently lacking’ (Drochon, 2016, p. 183).

  4. 4.

    Heraclitus cited by Streeck, 2022.

  5. 5.

    Anderson goes so far as to misconstrue Tooze’s argument in Crashed claiming that he left ‘no doubt of his view about where primary blame lay in the descent of Ukraine into civil war’ in 2013. Tooze does not refer to a civil war, which is the preferred language deployed by the Kremlin and its apologists as it minimises the impact of Russia.