if a genuinely European society, distinct from the particular national communities that make up the EU, has crystallized, it is not shared equally by all inhabitants of the Union. Those who have materially benefitted most from integration, who interact socially most often across national borders, and who have the strongest sense of a collective European identity, form an upper-class minority, drawn from business, government, high-income professions and the academy. A larger middle class has only intermittent contact with life beyond local frontiers, while the lowest classes have little or none. Since these layers are the most exposed to the costs—however temporary—of economic integration, they are potential protesters against it. Undeniably, Europe has so far been—at any rate socially and culturally—a ‘class project’. A clash of interests could therefore break out over it, in conditions of economic crisis.35
But though bannered in its title, the notion of a clash is purely virtual in Fligstein’s book, without any presence in it. In part this is because the lower classes, lacking any sense of a supranational identity, simply do not belong to the European society that is the focus of his work, and so fall outside its framework. But more fundamentally, it is because a force is at work within that society which transcends the possibility of any conflict of interests. For the upper classes that compose it do not just consist of the wealthy, with their often selfish attachment to their own good fortune, but also of a more selfless group, motivated by ideals—the educated. These, Fligstein suggests, are ‘the real moral engine of the EU’. For ‘at its core, one of the reasons that educated people support the European project is because the European values they espouse are identical with the Enlightenment values that have been a hallmark of educated people for over two hundred years. Indeed, if Europe stands for anything, it is the completion of the Enlightenment project of democracy, rule of law, respect for the differences of others, and the principles of rational discourse and science’.36 With ethical guidelines as compelling as these, why should the Union fear division over mundane questions of relative advantage? As higher education spreads, more and more young people will study abroad, and ‘the best new jobs’ in a shifting economy will increasingly be ‘in services such as banking, real estate, and insurance’, or computer programming, requiring higher skills and paying higher salaries. Predictable sociological changes should of themselves create a more unified Europe, imbued more evenly with the values of the Enlightenment.
So glowing with enthusiasm for the forward-looking achievements of the Union is Fligstein that his work might have more aptly been entitled Eurodash. Again and again, he is ‘amazed’, as he recounts, at ‘the marvellous character of what has happened’. On page after page, the epithet ‘remarkable’ resounds like a compulsive refrain.37 But triumphalism of vocabulary is not matched by coherence of construction. On the one hand, no more than ‘a very small number of people are deeply involved with other Europeans on a daily basis’, ‘only a tiny part of the population is directly involved’, while ‘the vast majority of Europeans still remain firmly tied to the nation’. On the other hand, those with ‘deep economic and social ties with their counterparts across Europe’ comprise 10 to 15 per cent of the inhabitants of the Union—that is: no less than 38 to 56 million people, or at the upper range more than the entire population of Britain or Italy, and not far short of that of France. As for those who are ‘partly European’, they compose another 40 to 50 per cent of the population—or getting on for 200 million.38 The fantastical nature of these figures is the product of a switch of definitions. Whereas an emergent ‘European society’ is computed by intensity of actual social interactions, measured objectively, these inflated percentages are simply taken from opinion polls that asked people whether, notionally, they felt European or not. It goes without saying that the gap between the two is enormous. The reality answers to Fligstein’s first description, not his second. Those deeply involved, on a daily basis, with non-nationals form a very small minority of the citizens of the EU, one that has fallen since enlargement. To speak of them as a ‘society’, as if they composed a self-connecting whole, is a metaphor, not a truth.
That even this minority scarcely possesses much self-awareness of its existence is suggested by the appearance of Euroclash itself. American dominance of a field of work could hardly be more graphically expressed. In a bibliography of some 260 items, there is just one book in French, one in German. Even allowing for writing in English by Europeans—overwhelmingly from the cultures closest to the United States: Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands—the proportion of authors originating outside the Anglosphere is about one-seventh of the total. All central references to work on the Union in the body of the text itself are to American scholars. It would be wrong to impute this to parochialism. Fligstein has made use of what findings from the continent were material to his research. But here, as elsewhere, Europeans figure as under-labourers, whose work has been employed for a synthesis exceeding them.
2
If these stand as currently the most authoritative economic and social prognoses of the Union, what do the rival historical theories of integration as a political process have to say about the present, in the wake of the rejection of the European Constitution? Moravcsik, as might be expected, allows no doubts to cloud an unfailingly sunny vista. The Union has just completed its most successful decade ever, with an enlargement to the east that has cost little and required no significant modification of its already satisfactory institutions. These continue to deliver policies which, he can inform satisfied readers of Prospect, are ‘in nearly all cases, clean, transparent, effective and responsive to the demands of European citizens’.39 What then of the Constitution? Little more than an unnecessary exercise in public relations, whose demise, far from representing a failure of the EU, actually demonstrates its stability and success.
But isn’t there any democratic deficit in the Union? None whatever—the very question arises from a confusion. The EU deals with issues best handled by experts, of little direct concern to voters: trade barriers, rules of competition, product regulations, legal adjudication, foreign assistance. Insulation of such areas from popular decision-making is not just practicable, it is desirable. Citizens understand this: they have little respect for their parties or parliaments, but hold their armies, courts and police in high regard. Those political issues people do care about, because they are directly affected by them—essentially, tax-rates and social services—are decided at national level, as they should be, where the Union, lacking any independent fiscal base or civil administration, does not impinge. In its own sphere, however, the EU needs to be shielded from demagogic interference by referenda or other hopeless attempts at direct democratic decision-making. ‘Forcing participation is likely to be counterproductive, because the popular response is condemned to be ignorant, irrelevant and ideological’.40 In any case, the wish to democratize the Union is bound to fail, because ‘it runs counter to our consensual social scientific understanding of how advanced democracies actually work’41 (italics in original). For we should never forget that ‘political learning, mobilization, deliberation and participation are extremely expensive for rational citizens’.42 Fortunately, the masses realize this themselves, declining to pay the high costs in time and attention that interest in EU affairs would require. They would quickly turn against any effort to get them more involved: far from enhancing the legitimacy of the Union, schemes to democratize it would only render it less popular. Such features of the defunct Constitution as might be of some use can be quietly infiltrated through national parliaments without attracting undue public attention, for ‘the EU’s greatest tactical advantage is that is, in a word, so boring’.43
As a casuistic for chloroforming any residual trace of popular will, these avowals have the merit of candour. But if the legitimacy of the Union does not lie in some inappropriate democracy, what is its raison d’être? Moravcsik’s answer—as we have seen above—is commendably straightforward: ‘The EU is overwhelmingly about the promotion of free markets. Its primary interest group support comes from multinational firms, not least US ones’.44 Or, more bluntly still: ‘The EU is basically about business’.45 So it should remain. The neo-liberal bias of the Union is ‘justified’,
