Thesis Eleven

http://the.sagepub.com A Political Identity of the Europeans?

Furio Cerutti Thesis Eleven 2003; 72; 26 DOI: 10.1177/0725513603072001133 The online version of this article can be found at: http://the.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/72/1/26

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A POLITICAL IDENTITY OF THE EUROPEANS?

Furio Cerutti

ABSTRACT The peaceful and democratic integration of the European countries cannot be completed if the EU does not become a true, though not-federal, polity. Making the European institutions fully legitimate and accountable requires the development of political identity in a shape which is different from both national and cultural identity and is not merely opposite to diversity and change. Its contents can be seen in a specic set of constitutional values and principles, including a model of social relations, an international standing and a peculiar and unprecedented system of governance. Identity-formation in the EU goes through several channels, but has still to generate a European public sphere, though the source of this difculty does not lie in the lack of a European people or demos. KEYWORDS demos European union legitimacy political identity public sphere

The question of the political identity of the Europeans, i.e. the present (15 member states) and prospective (10 of the candidate countries) citizens of the European Union, is at the same time theoretically relevant, intellectually stimulating and politically momentous. It confronts us with the problem of what political identity means in political philosophy, of how it interacts with cultural diversity and institutional innovation, of how it affects democratic legitimacy at a time when globalization and the connected revolution in political communication challenge the very notion of democracy. Intellectually, it is stimulating to watch how the identity issue develops around the still open and uncertain European process, whose outcome (the United States of Europe hoped for by federalists? a loose confederation of capitalist economies? a new and unprecedented polity?) will also depend on how

Thesis Eleven, Number 72, February 2003: 2645 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Copyright 2003 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Pty Ltd [0725-5136(200302)72;2645;030133]

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issues of identity and legitimacy will be addressed in the near future. Finally the question of identity is involved in three current political questions: 1. Will the EU complete in a full political way the development it went through from the Maastricht treaty of 1991 to the introduction of the single currency in everyday life and the inauguration of the European Convention in 2002? 2. Which way does the EU want to go so as to meet the challenges of the considerable enlargement planned for 2004? 3. Is the EU really willing to counter the threat of localistic or xenophobic opposition to transcultural integration an opposition that takes advantage of the widespread lack of a democratic and dynamic view of identity? Widespread refers to the fact that this absence and the subsequent confusion are to be found not just in neotribal movements, but in philosophies of history such as Huntingtons clash of civilizations as well. The postmodernism of the 1980s, with its equation between identity and total domination, also contributed to this confusion: as if identity was not a fundamental category in understanding why societies keep together or fall apart in disarray and war, and could be reduced to just an ideological tool of intolerant regimes. To make clear what identity means in political theory and analysis of the European process it is indispensable to start with a denition (1) and then to raise the question: What kind of identity for what kind of politics? (2). Political identity does not just consist of structures, but of certain contents as well (3); in any case, the very core of the identity problem lies in its relationship with legitimacy, an essential category in political theory and an open question for the political future of the Union (4). The chances for this future to develop are examined in 5.1 1. DEFINING THE POLITICAL IDENTITY OF THE EUROPEANS Political identity is, rst, the set of social and political values and principles that we recognize as ours, or in the sharing of which we feel like us, like a political group or entity.2 Recognition, which is as much an act as it is a process, Renans plbiscite de tous les jours, is what makes identity real, something which is indeed self-identication, mirror-identity,3 even if the others contribute to this process in as much as we also have to deal with our image as reected in their eyes (it is easier for a German or Italian to perceive him-/herself as European when travelling outside this continent). The recognition of those elements as peculiarly ours unfolds argumentatively (when we read, say, the European Charter of Fundamental Rights and identify ourselves with its norms and its inspiration) as well as alogically or symbolically (when we approve of the European banner being hoisted along with our

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national ag; but also when we look at the Charter or the Euro beyond their legal or economic substance, as symbols of European unity and items of a common history). In its elementary structure, there is little difference between other political identities and the European one, and there is no point in denying a priori the possibility for the latter to develop because of its abstractness or lack of foundational myths. Symbols (and narratives) are essential elements of political communication and cohesion; myths are not, even if they have accompanied so much of the history of the last century. One does not need to fall back into the short-sighted rationalism of early modernity when asking for a scientically rened differentiation of symbol and myth. The trendy search for foundational myths becomes ridiculous when the presumptively lacking glue for the Europeans to feel like a community is sought in new variations on the ancient myth of the rape of Europe, which Titian along with other Renaissance artists revived in a famous painting.4 There are indeed serious difculties with European identity, but they will come up in this article at a later, different point. An important corollary of the denition is that in their generality, values and principles do not by themselves shape the identity of the citizens as individuals feeling and acting in their diversity: they need to be interpreted, to be reread and translated into the specic language of citizens, generations and communities. This is the moment of (the ability to use) judgement (Urteilskraft), in the sense of the Kantian notion revived by Hannah Arendt. Those values and principles more precisely, their political and legal formulations in the Charter or perhaps later on in a European Constitution may be universalistic and shared by all, well beyond the culture in which everyone is embedded, but when it comes to interpreting and debating them, attitudes and arguments are sensible to the individual cultures of citizens and national, local, religious and ideological groups. Unity of political values and principles versus cultural diversity inuencing their interpretations: these are the two poles of a magnetic eld in which European identity as a postmodern identity (see below on this notion) can develop in a never denitive balance, and this is the structural reason as to why fears of identity mowing down all individuality are misplaced. More generally, cultural and political identity are two rather different things, and much confusion derives from the failure to respect their conceptual distinction.5 Political identity results from the mental elaboration of political and social experience, which in Europe is the experience of 30 years (or rather centuries) of war and genocide and later 50 years of well-being through cooperation. It is by no means the outcome of the idea of Europe cherished for centuries by intellectuals and now becoming effective, as a commonplace post-Hegelian view would have it. Political and cultural identity do not coincide conceptually; thus the lack of cultural identity among the Europeans (indeed welcome, as I will later argue) cannot be used as an argument against the possibility of their political identity; nor do they overlap empirically, as

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shown for example by the circumstance that in 1999 52 percent of them supported the integration process, while only 38 percent believed in a European cultural identity.6 It is only upon the basis of this distinction that we can hope to understand the relationships between them. Cultural identity appears then to be the reservoir of philosophical reections, legal and moral justications, historical perspectives and literary formulations to which we can turn whenever we want to give shape and legitimacy to a political process and to debate about norms and decisions that may result from that process. For example, the rst steps towards European cooperation and later integration in the 1950s, motivated by the will to prevent new clashes on the continent, took concrete shape in declarations and treaties as well as articles, books and speeches aimed at justifying or criticizing them, all drawing on the various moral, religious, legal and historical cultures of the different countries or across them (as in the case of Christian social doctrine in Germany, Italy, France and the Benelux countries). So far, in the 50 and more years of European integration, unity and diversity have productively counterbalanced each other, thus implementing a principle of constitutional tolerance, as Joseph Weiler put it (2001). This is a good basis, but no guarantee for the future, as the balance is now put under stress by the challenge of more unity (which is proposed for constitutional, foreign and economic policy) and more diversity (Eastern enlargement and immigration from developing, particularly Islamic, countries). Let us now turn to the second element of the denition: as happens in any polity, the sharing of European values and principles cannot remain in the air, but must take roots in common institutions, otherwise the selfidentication of the Europeans remains in the best case a social phenomenon and does not solidify in the realm of the political. For political identity institutions are on the one hand a stabilizing device, as they help citizens to reproduce their identity over time and across generations. They do so not only by creating cultural and educational organizations, such as the school system in the nation-state, which foster identity, but primarily by establishing a permanent framework for agenda setting and decision making, the two leading forces in identity formation, as day by day they let all of us feel that we share chances, constraints and responsibilities. On the other hand, institutions are the embodiment of the normative element that is essential to political identity, as different from social identity,7 and is usually enshrined in the rst part of recent Constitutions, in which the essential aims of the polity and the fundamental rights of the citizens are formulated. In a postnational polity institutions do not need to resemble those of the nation-state writ large; the only essential thing is that they communicate in some way with the citizens and pre-existing institutions. Now, we will see that exactly the decit of decision-making capacities and of clarity in the normative dimension as well as the lack of communicative attitudes on the side of the institutions are the factors that hinder identity formation in the EU.

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2. IDENTITY AND LEGITIMACY After a rst exploration of European political identity in the way of denitions, two doubts can be raised and do in fact lie at the root of some debate on the future of Europe: 1. How can something like identity, which is usually regarded as unitary and compact, t the extremely composite European Union, an entity that is something more than a confederation, but is not on the way to becoming a federation, and in which governance is based on a continuously changing balance of vertical and/or horizontal integration, while geopolitical borders as well as legal competences are not clearly and denitively dened? 2. Do the European citizens really need to develop an identity? What is the advantage if they develop it, and what is the loss if they do not? 2.1 To address the rst doubt, we have to look at the postnational and postmodern nature of European identity, which is likely to result from both general and specically European factors. On a general level, we are witnessing a shift in the very constitution of politics in western democracies. This shift includes several elements, of which the most representative are: Politics and the state are no longer able to provide full and stable protection for the citizens from new and global threats such as nuclear weapons or climate change; consequently, they cannot require obedience to and identication with the Leviathan as in Thomas Hobbes time, and have in fact given up the request that every (male) citizen consent to his life being sacriced in war. Not only the globalization of the economy, but also globalized mass culture, the global village and the World Wide Web have upset our communicative universe, transforming it into a multiverse in which borders, states and nations play a lesser role. In the normative dimension, more and more citizens and communities are convinced that procedural norms and methods of conict resolution and prevention that we can agree upon better satisfy their sense of justice than thick substantive imperatives (after 1989 we live in this deideologized version of democracy of societies that accept and integrate conict and, in contrast to the US, September 11 is not going to make this situation change in Europe). The reection on democracys unkept promises, as Bobbio (1987) put it, introduces a more sober and critical version of it, in which democratic deliberation of Rousseauian inspiration enters an admittedly conicting partnership with negotiation among interest groups (e.g. lobbies in the European Parliament and around the Commission, member states upholding their particular interests in the European Council), while the protection of

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general or diffuse interests can be entrusted to special institutions and bureaucracies that are partly (European Commission) or fully (European Central Bank) insulated from the parliamentary process (Moravcsik, 2002). The result of these changes is that, particularly in Europe, politics has become much more limited a business than it used to be in the age of extremes, as Hobsbawm calls the century of ideological struggle around the presumptively best way to reshape the whole of society. This type of politics can only accommodate a much thinner identity than used to exist in the nation-state,8 and the Eurosceptics9 are not too far from the truth when they maintain that Europe is not a true polity because its identity must remain thin, pale and abstract. The problem is only that they fail to understand that this is the main trend in the politics of our time in western countries; to this trend states and parties are already adapting, even if faute de mieux and sometimes engaging in a cover-up that results in an inated exhibition of national and party pride. On the contrary, the EU, which has no remnants of a strong past identity to defend, would be able to make the best of being established in this time of transition to post-modern politics.10 Besides, this makes it impossible to think of European identity in the terms indicated by the nowadays fashionable republicanism, an approach that is indeed incapable of grasping what is going on in the space between society and politics, even within the nation state, and tries to come to grips with it by means of obsolete normative formulas. However, that opportunity remains quite unexploited because in Brussels, that is in the EU lite, the present stage of the process is still perceived largely as a passage (as it certainly is still in an unclear direction) to a fully federal Europe with a corresponding robust identity in the American fashion (which is unlikely ever to emerge and would also cancel the European specicity). In any case, this transition does not come up without a backlash in groups that are disoriented and seek rm ground in a new tribal identity, as Walzer (1994) puts it, such as Vlaams Block or Lega Nord, or in a highly ideologized opposition to integration of any kind (the most sectarian sections of the no globalization archipelago). 2.2 Among the specic European factors that may inuence political identity in the EU, primary importance belongs to the fact that the EU is the rst polity to be established from scratch on the basis of the separation of demos from ethnos, whose entanglement characterized the modern state since the French revolution. Their once glorious unity, the cradle of popular sovereignty and democracy, has been eroded by the weakening of the nationstate under the stress of globalization and the much less glorious evolution of nationalism until 1945. To the puzzlement of the Bundesverfassungsgericht,11 the European demos is partly a partnership of demoi coinciding with ethnoi (the peoples of the member states), partly a demos without an

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ethnos in the making (the constituency of the European Parliament or the European Convention, perhaps later the main player of a European Constitution); or rather a combination of the two.12 This structural novelty makes European identity so different from both national and supernational identity; in the rst one all local and regional components are melted into the nation, an (imagined) process which also applies to federations such as the United States of America,13 where the nation is a central item in the political rhetoric. Furthermore, European identity can be called supernational, as some do without much reection, only if we assume that Europe is going to become a federal superstate, also implying the birth of a nation writ large something which looks as unlikely as it is undesirable. It would be perhaps wise to reserve the attribute supernational only to cosmopolitan identity, a phenomenon that in our time seems to be about to gain more than a purely notional status, but cannot be examined here. 2.3 The assumption that Europe is not going to become a classical federation should not be taken to mean that the process of integration will necessarily remain incomplete. The reasonable criticism of the EUs many deciencies in leadership and governance, including the following comments, cannot be simplied into a call for nally establishing the United States of Europe, a move that would obliterate the unprecedented and vital complexity of European integration, the very reason why after 1945 Europe has in a few decades become a success story inside and outside the continent. Inside, it has been the new political space for peace among nations, integration among citizens and prosperity for all; outside, it has become a primary and welcome partner in development aid and regional cooperation, also representing a leading example of conict prevention through the cooperation of actors that respect each others difference. Now, if the EU is not going to be a federation, what is its true nature? We do not know yet, even if we can mention some hypotheses. We do not know for two reasons: rst, the nature of this subject is not to have a (welldetermined, stable) nature, but rather to live in a process of permanent selfdenition and adaptation, doing so with more exibility and visibility than other institutions such as the nation-state. Second, the terminology of political science as well as of public law is still very much centred around the state (in the Westphalian sense, going back to 1648) and has trouble in nding new denitions that may be able to accommodate the ontological changes of politics in the nuclear and global era. Meanwhile, the available hypotheses can be grouped in two baskets: in the rst one, the Union is seen as a novelty in the eld of intergovernmental cooperation and integration in relevant policy elds, yet not as something that is bound to become capable (at least in the foreseeable future) of making legitimate decisions of its own

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in the area of high politics.14 Consequently, these scholars do not regard identity formation as a necessary element of the process, also because, as Moravcsik (2002: 11) put it, the decentralised form of limited government that the EU is today may not require greater democratic legitimacy. Other hypotheses look at the EU as an entity that is far beyond the federation versus confederation alternative and exists as a still changing and productively conicting mix of nation-states and central European institutions,15 while its dimension as a regional (continental) structure of integration in a multipolar world makes it unavoidably a worldwide political actor, as Tel (2001) put it; not to speak of the normative and historical reasons for the political and juridical completion of the European process argued for by Habermas (1996, 1998, 2001). 2.4 Whatever the overall assessment of the EUs nature, these hypotheses converge in stressing its unprecedented complexity and variety as the very basis for its success. It is thus hard to think that the identity of its citizens can develop around a simplied set of strong beliefs and shining symbols as in the nation-states nest hour. On the other hand, there is no good reason to believe that citizens of the globalized earth, who are already reshufing their cultural and social identities along the lines of a world at the same time fragmented and borderless, should be in principle unable to do the same with their political identity; whether they really do so or not remains obviously an empirical question. In the case of Europe, two contrary risks should be addressed, however. One lies in a trend, which shows up in the political EU debates, including those in the Convention, to uncritically yield to our natural search for unity, clarity and distinction and to translate the reasonable need to streamline European legislation into a quest for a constitutionally xed division of competences between the local, national and European levels of government. This statal attitude could go too far and kill the multilevel and multilogic richness of European governance; multilogic refers to the prevailing of either intergovernmental or quasi-federal (as in the acquis communautaire) procedures or logics according to different issue areas, as well as to the variable geometry practice and, now, principle (enhanced cooperation), which allows for certain steps to be taken by a number of member states to form a coalition of will, but again according to issue areas (for example, foreign and security policy is excluded). On the opposite side, the praise for European diversity and productive confusion should not make the need for some degree of unity of will vanish, nor should it be an obstacle to the rational and visible rethinking (while writing a Constitution) of norms and structures, which is essential to whatever polity. With regard to European identity as a postmodern path to nd orientation in a swiftly changing world neither unity nor diversity can be worshipped as fetishes.

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3. THE CONTENTS OF EUROPEAN IDENTITY Our second doubt was: is political identity a real necessity for the European Union? With the aim of clearing the way for a necessarily complex answer to that simple question, we are now leaving aside for a while the structural aspects of European identity and taking a long detour into three constitutive and substantive elds, that is three of the contents that the Europeans may recognize as essential to their self-consciousness. 3.1. Values and principles They can only result from a exible overlapping consensus among Europes liberal-democratic systems and their most representative parties and doctrines; this consensus already underlies the Treaties as well as the Charter of Fundamental Rights, but can be better dened in a constitutional process and must be later reinterpreted and adapted in formal and informal procedures of public deliberation. Where it cannot be presently reached, as in the bioethical problem of the denition of life, it must be facilitated by procedural norms on how to handle disagreements concerning ultimate values. Several European traditions16 overlap in regarding solidarity and social cohesion as core values, thus taking a distance from the (in the standard view) American attitude of reliance on unchecked individualism, only compensated for by charity and sense of community.17 This overlapping consensus has found an important formulation in the Social Charter of 1989 and later documents. It is perhaps worth underlining that these semiconstitutional statements do not by themselves justify conservation of obsolete and costly structures of the social state, or a lack of attention towards weak social partners such as the youth and unemployed, or big government as an end in itself. It is a set of moral and political values, not particular policies that can become part of European identity. 3.2. Being somebody in the world: values, principles and international power The relevance of this element has rarely been given its due, as if Europe was completely dened by the proclamation of democratic principles or the support to the European social model. But there is no citizenship without polity, and any polity whatsoever is also dened by how much power it has in the world and how it deals with power. Only recently the White Paper on European governance has made the point that an improved acceptance of European values and institutions can result from successful international action.18 The international component of European identity seems to consist of: the Unions and the member states ability to represent not just a leading example of regional integration and stabilization, but also to

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cooperate with the rest of the world in fair and peace-promoting terms, which is quite different from Europe puissance or Superpower Europe and would give a political and not purely commercial sense to a neoregional and multipolar reorganization of the post-Cold War international order.19 It is only in this sense of a power that does not try to match its economic dimension with military means that we can speak of the EU as a civilian power; not in terms of an overall refusal to possess and to use military instruments for limited aims and operations. Europes determination in upholding and protecting human rights particularly in nearby foreign countries, which means active conict prevention as well as military intervention whenever needed. In the downfall of Yugoslavia it was certainly needed, but it did not happen, not even when faced with ethnic cleansing and genocide, and Europe only followed suit to American action which came three years too late in 1995. The embarrassment and cynicism of the member states governments and the hypocritical pacism of public opinions greatly contributed to Europe showing a lack of moral decency and political credibility.20 Only limited progress was made in the Kosovo crisis of 1999, and later there was a major step forward in Macedonia. Europes ability to take note of the failures in handling mass immigration: the European principle (with the French exception) not to induce immigrants to assimilate, which as a way of respecting diversity may represent a sensible alternative to the American model, has too often turned into ghettoizing immigrant communities; this is a crucial challenge to the project of Europe as integrated multiculturalism must be more successfully addressed if the Union is not to unwittingly produce a clash of civilizations in its own borders.21 3.3. Who governs whom? The third pillar of identity is some sort of shared persuasion that the way the Europeans, both as EU citizens and citizens of the member states, are governed is acceptable and deserves their trust which is still far from true. At best, the present Convention and the Intergovernmental Conference of 20034 (a new treaty-founding session of the heads of state and government) will nd a compromise among national lites, which they will be able to make understandable (unlike the Nice Treaty of December 2000) and acceptable to their peoples only if viable (in terms of institutional efciency) and decent (in terms of democratic legitimacy, see below). Basic trust in democratic values is not enough to build identity, it is the distribution of power among the levels of governance (both vertically: European, national, local, and horizontally: political instances, interest groups, public opinions), its efciency as well as its credibility regarding representation that may make citizens recognize in it the specic and adequate European way of governing the polity. In criticizing its oddities and failures we should never forget

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that it is the rst polity to arise from a voluntary integration of previously enemy countries, which had slaughtered each other up to ve years before and did not even respond to a common external threat, like the American colonies in front of British repression; the answer to the Soviet threat was given with the North Atlantic Treaty, not the European Community of Coal and Steel. More than ever, institution building in Europe cannot be but a trialand-error procedure, and identity formation an open learning process. Of the many topics contained in 3, only the underlying core question of legitimacy can be addressed in this article. Before turning our attention to it, let us stress that in sketching the three main issues of European identity I have chosen formulations that favour one solution over others, and have done so not without some polemical accent. This is intended to highlight that also on this continent the learning process of identity formation is loaded with adversary alternatives, which require public debate, managed conict and far-sighted compromise; this reveals its potential as a political and democratic process, quite far away from the pictures of a Union dominated by bureaucratic/technocratic logics. 4. AT THE CORE OF THE ISSUE: IDENTITY AND LEGITIMACY In the general theory of politics, identity is a precondition, or rather metacondition, for legitimizing a polity or regime, along with substantive conditions or performances in the elds of security/protection, well-being and minimal legality; afnity with one or more of Max Webers types of legitimacy is also necessary, but not sufcient, as I have argued in Cerutti (1996). But the way in which the legitimacy of European institutions and policies has been examined so far rarely goes beyond exploring and classifying its legal or social sources, obviously with exceptions among the authors mentioned in this article. The patterns in question are legal (treaties as well as legislation passed by national parliaments or the European Parliament), technocratic (resulting from the efciency of the institutions) and corporate (resulting in the trade-off of goods provided by the system and allegiance expressed by those who benet from it).22 The result looks like a patchwork, very like the multiplicity of institutional levels and patterns of order that constitute European governance; but this is not the true source of the much talked about issue of the EU democratic decit which I am now going to discuss very briey and in a way that differs from the most common version. Patchwork legitimacy can be a problem, but is not the problem; this seems to lie elsewhere, precisely in two critical points. First comes an attempt to redene the notion of democratic decit, then the essential link of legitimacy and identity. There is a common, popular view of democratic decit as a discrepancy. On the one hand, those (the lites in the EU institutions and their national counterparts in negotiations) who make more and more momentous

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decisions are not sufciently legitimated in a direct and visible way by democratic procedures such as elections, parliamentary law making and control, which would make them fully accountable to the citizens this still being in their view the basic requirements of legitimacy, even if scholars have some reason to raise doubts on whether these are still effective ways to make decision makers accountable. On the other hand, the legitimate national institutions legislate on issues23 that are no longer of primary relevance to the citizens well-being, as they are predened by European legislation or regulation regardless of whether they originate in the European Council, the Commission or the European Central Bank. Finally, national parliaments are not really involved in deliberations on European issues, they just approve or disapprove from time to time of the overall policy pursued by their respective governments in EU affairs. Brought down to a rule of thumb, democratic decit means here that those who make real decisions have not enough legitimacy, and those who enjoy this legitimacy are no longer in a position to make decisions on core issues. It looks like a discrepancy between agency and justication for actions, which can only be addressed by redening agency in a way that looks at the European actors (an upcoming odd demos, a multiheaded government) as well as rediscussing the rules of justication. If we admit that omission or delay of action is morally and politically as relevant as (positive) action itself, then we must also acknowledge a second, less visible version of democratic decit. This appears to lie in a hidden lack of justication for national or intergovernmental (European Council) institutions whenever they block or delay decisions on issues that are recognizably European, for example in the eld of foreign policy. There are two, not necessarily overlapping, tests for recognizing the European nature of those issues: the rst is the experts judgement that they can be addressed effectively only in the European dimension; the second is intersubjective, i.e. existing institutions and agreements such as the Common Foreign and Security Policy create among citizens the expectation that the Union will really deal with them. What is Europe doing now? or Why is Europe not doing something? are the questions that often come up among the public when their attention is hit by an international crisis. In this case, democratic decit or legitimacy crisis arise from the circumstance that national institutions exert (veto) power on the whole of the Union, that is also on citizens of other member states who did not elect them. All this highlights that a democratic decit or, as it would be perhaps more appropriate to say, a legitimacy problem does not lie with the Unions institutions alone, but with the member states as well. This is true also in terms of output legitimacy24 because omission and delay of action can reduce the Unions level of performance, thus making it less trustworthy in European public opinions. In short, the question who governs whom (see above, 3.3 ) emerges once again when we have to redesign actors, powers, responsibilities and loyalties; in a word, issues of identity and legitimacy.

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Let us therefore step down to a lower level of this relationship. Here the question is no longer how much legitimacy can be provided to the EU moving from one or the other source, but rather: why should there be one actor (or, more philosophically, one subject) seeking legitimacy? The patchwork legitimacy we have mentioned before can only sustain and help reproduce the sense of being one among the citizens of Europe: the better the legal foundation and, what is more, the more efciency the Union turns out to possess, the more reasons we have for sticking to it. But even efciency in the output of public goods alone is necessary but not sufcient to create meaning, the scarcest resource in the postmodern and particularly globalized world. Only when people come to nd staying united at the same time highly convenient for their well-being and highly relevant to their image of collective life, can a new polity reach the critical point of acceptance. In other words, they would then nd that decisions concerning ultimate issues such as peace or war, openness or closure towards the rest of the world, social solidarity or deregulated competition should not be left to national governments or the dynamics of globalization, but rather made within the new polity, whatever (federal, semi-federal, multilevel, etc.) method of government this may have chosen. This is what would make true the claim of substantial legitimacy, based on a shared political identity, of the European Union. Presently (mid2002) the process is still far from having this outcome, but European identity is also far from being the ens rationis to which Eurosceptics, particularly in Britain, would like to reduce it. The European process has already taken on political character, even if half-heartedly, and European identity is emerging as a controversial but relevant issue in both public debates and institutional steps (Charter, Convention). It is now possible to determine which conditions would foster or hamper further developments in one or the other direction.

5. HOW EUROPEAN IDENTITY MAY DEVELOP As the link between political identity and institutions outlined in 1 suggests, there is a two-faced process of identication: the citizens feel some identity with each other; they identify with the institutions. There is hardly a prius and post in the relationship between these two poles, which rather reinforce one another.25 Identity of values and principles (in the diversity of interpretations) can only be perceived and elaborated in the practical process of common decision making in an environment of conicting proposals. If this is the way how political identity goes about forming, in Europe there seem to be four channels leading to it: 1. banal Europeanism, as Wallace (2001) puts it; that is, the increasing leverage of EU directives, regulations and funds in more and more areas

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of business and public life, which confronts more and more people with the importance of the Union in our everyday life; 2. steps that push the symbolic moments of identication forward, in recent years primarily the Euro not only as one currency instead of many, but also as common measure of living standards across Europe; 3. the constitutional debate around rst the Charter and now the Convention, often but wrongly seen as the supreme sphere of identity denition, whereas it is just the space in which processes developing elsewhere nd a provisional legal formulation as well as a channel into Europes public opinions; 4. decision making in relevant political areas. This topic is likely to be the heart of the entire matter and deserves a longer discussion. A commonplace of Euroscepticism is that decision making on supreme matters must remain in the hands of nation-state governments because, say, the French feel they share destiny and responsibility only with other French nationals, not with the Dutch, the Germans or the Portuguese. This may be either true or a self-fullling prophecy: the individual peoples will never feel European as long as their governments refrain from giving European institutions (e.g. not a federal executive, but a European Council not subject to unanimous rule) the power to make binding decisions for all and everybody, without veto holders blocking the agenda and/or delaying necessary acts. To build identity among the people, there is nothing like being actors (as voters) and addressees for the good or evil of the same political acts (laws, decisions of the executive, rulings of the Courts). There is no cultural reform (not even a sudden and quite unlikely lot of talk about European identity in schools and on television) or constitutional debate that can rival actual politics in the formation of political identity. However, if this is not to shrink down to the tautology if you want more identity to sustain more European politics, make more political decisions in Europe, the interaction of identity and politics must be examined carefully. There are two levels of analysis. One deals with the dynamics of European politics, the other with the tat de conscience of the Europeans. Let us start with this one: the Eurobarometer tells us that, while on certain highly political issues such as foreign policy and defence an impressive consensus for more European unity exists, overall acceptance of the political Europe26 has only recently and by a few points passed the 50 percent mark. More important politically is perhaps the increasing lack of appeal that surrounds elections to the European Parliament; in spite of the increasing power of this body in the Union government, the elections have a low turnout and are ooded with national issues and national party rows. Banal Europeanism and other trends notwithstanding, there still seems to be among people and civil societies something of a structural lack of interest in the European agenda (Moravcsik, 2002: 11). Moravcsik links this lack of interest to the fact

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that most of the issues that the EU deals with, such as trade liberalization, monetary policy, environmental regulations and foreign aid, have low salience in the citizens souls, while what matters most to them (health care, education, law and order, social security and taxation) is not primarily an EU competence and still seems to remain in the hands of national governments and parties, making national elections and policies much more interesting to the people. This is largely true, and partial corrections to this view would now be of little interest. The essential comment is that those still national competences are indeed heavily constrained by the budgetary and monetary provisions deriving from the single currency regime, thus making the national space for politics much smaller than it appears to be. It is rather in the European space27 that alternatives are weighed, trade-offs envisaged, essential interests asserted and nally absolute (for the consistency and relevance of the Union itself) and relative (for the individual member states and their conicting social groups) gains and losses are determined. It would be simplistic to conclude: let the citizens become aware of where the real decisions are made, let them overcome the gap between what really is and what only seems to be, and they will develop a corresponding, namely European identity. Let us say instead that that gap hints at a real problem, a last version of democratic decit : European institutions are not sufciently covered by the publics attention and parliamentarian control even when they actually make decisions, instead of blocking or delaying them, as in the second version of the decit ( 4). In a dramatic summary, European politics is either denied, as in this second version, or made without enough sense of identity and subsequent substantial legitimacy. This is primarily the responsibility of national executives and parliaments as well as public opinion and not so much of the European institutions, even if they do almost nothing serious to make themselves visible and to shed light on their own accountability.28 At this point two developments can be taken into consideration. In the rst one, the existing but hidden EU politics (the Union denes the economic guidelines, while the member states tax, spend, pay pensions, drugs and doctors, etc.) becomes more visible and accountable, that is more debated, opposed or supported by the Europeans, who learn to regard what is decided in the EU instances as their own direct concern as much as they do with what happens in the national capitals. The main condition for this development is the emergence of a truly European public sphere with an effective channel of communication with EU politicians and bureaucrats. This would probably be the sum of the national public opinions, with increasing international interaction among the media involved; to think of an integrated sphere with relevant transnational media29 and a lingua franca is premature, as some previous experience shows, or altogether wrong while based on nation-state patterns.30 The second development that can be envisaged brings us back to the dynamics of institutions, the rst level of analysis

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mentioned above. In recent debates the critical point looks like this: only if identity-relevant issue areas, rst of all social policy, are handled directly at Union level, will the Europeans feel like one demos and turn their attention to the new polity, also because in the EU institutions clear political cleavages will then become visible to all and involve everybody.31 The last one would be a welcome enhancement of the political dialectic already existing in the Union, even though there would be little point in bringing into the EU the paralysing fragmentation that from time to time affects the politics of certain member states; nor would the mere reproduction of national right/left cleavages contribute much to an effective and progressive role of the Union in governing globalization. Designing and implementing a new approach to the NorthSouth problem, for example, seems to be more important than uniting Europe in defence of its welfare state, even if it is true that a Europe on the way to losing its social cohesion32 would be less adept in contributing to that approach. Anyway, while we leave the social policy question open, the problem seems to be slightly different: are the political dynamics of the European process going so far as to require that member states and EU institutions take important steps towards completing the establishment of a full-edged, even if unprecedented polity? These steps would include Europeanizing in a decisive way issue areas until now left to the nominal but largely eroded power of nation-states (foreign policy, military capability for peacekeeping and peace-enforcing, border control) and politicizing other areas that have been up to now reserved to trade-offs between both national and European lobbies and bureaucracies (the Common Agricultural Policy, which swallows half of the Union budget, being the main example33). My guess is mixed: on the one hand, the establishment of new centreright governments in several EU countries, with little vision or capacity of leadership in European affairs, makes the political cycle unfavourable in the short term to push things forward, as does the predominance of power politics (not Europes speciality) in the version of anti-terror policy supported by the Bush administration. On the other hand, as was mentioned in the introduction, the existential challenges raised by enlargement, the quasiconstitutional process initiated by Charter and Convention and also the need to nd a more dened and effective European prole in dealing with the southern, Islamic rim of the Mediterranean as well as with Russia (which means being more than the European branch of NATO) are likely to make a status quo policy difcult to sustain, in any case in the medium to long term. Sooner or later, the European process will take on a full political character and further challenge political theory to confront this process with fundamental questions such as identity and legitimacy, while at the same time rethinking them in the light of the novelties (this time benevolent to Europe and the world) that the Old Continent, pronounced dead in 1945, surprisingly is bringing into being.

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Furio Cerutti is Professor of Political Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, University of Florence, and Visiting Scholar at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University. He has recently co-edited Identities and Conicts: The Mediterranean (with Rodolfo Ragionieri; Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2001) and two volumes on the political and cultural identity of the Europeans, A Soul for Europe (with Enno Rudolph, Peeters, Leuven, 2001). He is currently working on philosophical aspects of global challenges. [email: cerutti@uni.it]

Notes
1. I am indebted to L. Couloubaritsis, S. Lucarelli, P. Magnette, M. Tel and J. Vignon for critical remarks on the rst draft of this article. 2. Political identity is a subspecies of group identity, not a collective identity, as this notion hypostatizes what is the result of interaction among the individuals constituting the group into a Volksseele, pretending to be superior to and independent from them. 3. See Cerutti (1996) and (2001c). 4. It is now owned by the Boston museum built by the great lover of European ne arts, Isabella Stewart: the myth of Europe has reached out beyond the Atlantic. 5. Think for example of the request made by the Pope and others that the European Constitution mentions the Christian tradition (clearly a fundamental cultural factor, by no means an encompassing political principle) as a major source of identity. 6. Cf. Risse (2002: 79). 7. Cf. Cerutti (1996). 8. On the difference of national and European identity see Cerutti (2001c). 9. Cf. Holmes (2002) and Tiersky (2001). 10. I am spelling it hyphenated in order to signal my distance from current postmodernism. 11. In 1993 the German Federal Court rejected objections to the Maastricht Treaty on the European Union, but stated that the EU has no sovereignty of its own because it cannot claim to be based on the existence of a European people (Staatsvolk) (cf. Habermas 1996). 12. Cf. Weiler (1999: 3448). 13. Not before the Civil War, in whose aftermath the US rst became a singular. 14. See Moravcsik (2002). Wallace (2001) regards the EU as based on intensive transnationalism. 15. Cf. Schmitter (2000), who is concerned with ways of democratizing what he still calls a consorzio and/or condominio, and Weiler (1999). 16. Cf. Tel and Magnette (2001); see also Perceptions of the European Union (2001). 17. Regrettably I cannot discuss in this article the difference between Europe and United States of America within western culture, or the problem of European anti-Americanism, the poorest solution to the problem of European identity. 18. See Commission of the European Communities (2001). 19. Cf. Tel (2001). 20. For the political and ethical relevance of Europe becoming a responsible actor in international relations, see Cerutti (2001a).

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21. I have explained why identity should not be conceived of in Huntingtons frame of reference in Cerutti (2001b). 22. I draw upon Lord and Magnette (2002). 23. To be specied later on. 24. I am borrowing this notion from Scharpf (1999); it is the legitimacy deriving to the government from promoting the common welfare of its constituency, i.e. acting pour le peuple. 25. I owe this clarication to a remark made by Richard Bellamy on a previous article of mine. 26. In Spring 2002 53 percent of European citizens expressed the view that their countrys membership of the EU is a good thing, while 67 percent declared themselves in favour of the euro, see Eurobarometer 57, 12. In another study (Europinion 9, Table 8) 60 percent of respondents feel very or quite attached to Europe, against 84 percent to their town or region and 90 percent to their country. As to the citizens view in the candidate countries, see Candidate Countries Eurobarometer (2001.1) and Perceptions of the European Union (2001). Needless to stress that political identity is a complex theoretical notion, irreducible to statistics and surveys, illuminating that they may be. 27. This includes the Commission regulating competition and industrial or agricultural standards, the European Court of Justice working as supreme instance of adjudication and the Council deliberating on issues such as the case in point, i.e. a less narrow interpretation of the stability standards that gives relief to national public spending (see the Seville summit of June 2002). 28. In the year 2000 nobody took the initiative to celebrate in schools and on the media Europe-wide the 50th anniversary of the Schumann Declaration, the act giving birth to the European process. Nobody ever made the proposal to change the name of the European Council in a way that makes it impossible for common citizens to mix it up with the Council of Europe, the pre-existing intergovernmental organization for cultural cooperation that already includes 40 countries, among them several successors of the Soviet Union. The lack of information on and the scarce visibility of the EU is sharply highlighted in Perceptions of the European Union (2001). 29. So far only the satellite-based, multilingual TV network Euronews exists, with very limited audience. 30. For more ongoing research on chances and conditions for an European public sphere to develop, see Eder (2002) and Koopmans and Statham (2002). 31. In a study focused on the Amsterdam Treaty of 1997 ideological cleavages and party preferences have been found to be more explicative of policy preferences (except in foreign and defence issues) than divisions among nations (see Aspinwall, 2002). 32. This value is highly appreciated by EU citizens, cf. Perceptions of the European Union (2001). 33. It will be telling to watch the outcome of the CAP reform proposals advanced by Commissioner Fischer in July 2002.

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References
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