pronounced or nuanced as the case may be. Where they diverge most sharply is in prognosis. Essentially agreeing on what the Union should be, they vary widely as to whether it is likely to become what it ought. Moravcsik displays a eupeptic optimism à toute épreuve, Majone expresses an unexpected pessimism, Eichengreen traces a prudently hedged scepticism, Gillingham gives voice to an agitated alarmism. Do such extreme discrepancies reflect on the commonalities, or do they simply mirror the normal opacity of the future?
4
At other points along the spectrum, there is less congregation of authority. Conceptions that break with the premises of the neo-liberal consensus are more dispersed and isolated, though by no means intellectually weaker. Here too, however, it is thinkers from America who make the running. The leading cases come, respectively, from philosophy, jurisprudence, and comparative politics. Larry Siedentop’s Democracy in Europe (2000) stands out as a refreshingly idiosyncratic—that is, old-fashioned and independent-minded—vision of dangers in the Union, and remedies for them. The degree of its deviance from current conformism is suggested by the indignant response of Moravcsik, scarcely able to contain his disbelief that it should pay no attention to ‘mainstream contemporary analyses’.74 In fact, what separates Siedentop from these is the distance between a classical political liberalism, inspired by Tocqueville—his title echoing Democracy in America—and the ruling neo-liberalism of the period, to which such an outlook can only appear out of joint.
A career at Oxford has left its mark on Siedentop—Isaiah Berlin, of whom he has some interesting criticisms, is a central reference for him—but his starting-point could not be more squarely American. Federalism is a US invention, inscribed in the Constitution of 1787. Can Europe ever hope to emulate it? Montesquieu had believed there could be no liberty in a modern state that was of any size, hence necessarily a monarchy, without an aristocracy capable of restraining royal power. By devising a constitution that preserved liberty in a vast republic, Madison proved him wrong: a federation in a commercial society could realize what intermediary bodies had secured in a feudal society, without benefit of a nobility. Tocqueville, who first understood this, saw too the distinctive configuration that sustained America’s successful federalism: a common language; common habits of local self-government; an open political class composed mainly of lawyers; and shared moral beliefs, of Protestant origin. Binding the new structure together, moreover, was—unacknowledged—the ghost of Britain’s imperial state, that had accustomed the colonists to a single sovereign authority, now reinvented as a federation with powers of taxation and means of coercion.
Europe, by contrast, remains divided by a multiplicity of languages and sovereignties, ancient states with distinct cultures and no experience of common rule. Nor does it possess anything that resembles either the social stratum or the credal unity that buoyed the young liberal republic in America. On the contrary, it still bears the scars of a destructive anti-clericalism, and a divisive class consciousness, unknown across the Atlantic—calamitous legacies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, fortunately now attenuated, yet not entirely effaced. In one sense, such burdens of the past render all the more remarkable the steps towards unity achieved by Europeans since 1950. But if their outcome remains not only incomplete but unhappy, the reason lies also, and above all, in the ideological drought of the present. For Tocqueville could only contemplate with melancholy what has happened to liberalism since his day, its rich vision of human flourishing dwindled to the thin alternatives of a utilitarianism of wants or a contractualism of rights. In this reduction, any active conception of citizenship vanishes. We are left with the roles of mere consumers or litigants.
The result has been a conception of European integration dominated by an arid economism, as if the Union were solely a matter of market efficiency. Such a narrow calculus has naturally been unable to engage popular imagination, leaving a void that could be filled only by competing governmental projects. Here just one contender has had a coherent vision. Britain, still without even a written constitution, and in the grip of a political culture continuing to rely on customs rather than ideas, is in no position to propose a compelling future for the Union. Germany, though itself possessing a federal framework that could in principle offer a mock-up of arrangements for a European federation, remains disabled by guilt for its still too recent past. France alone has had the institutional apparatus and political will to impose a design on the EU, whose formative years coincided with its own postwar recovery. The result is a Union to a large extent created in its own étatiste image—a centralizing administrative structure, in which decisions are reached behind closed doors by power-brokers in Brussels.
In France itself, this famously elitist, rationalist model of government, descending from Louis XIV, through the Revolution and Napoleon, has time and again fomented its antithesis: anarchic rebellion in the streets, popular risings against the state. The great danger facing the European Union, as a still more remote version of the same bureaucratic style of rule, is that one day it too could provoke such mass rejection—civil disorder on a continental scale. Today’s combination of economism and étatisme is a toxic formula for future unrest. A wide-ranging political debate is needed to prevent Europeans feeling that the EU is merely the resultant of ‘inexorable market forces or the machinations of elites which have escaped from democratic control’.75 The Union requires new foundations.
What should these be? Siedentop’s answer takes him back to America. For a genuine federation, composed of active local self-government rather than a system of bureaucratic directives, Europe needs an open political class, communicating in a common language, and a shared set of beliefs, shaping a moral identity. To create the first, he recommends a small and powerful European Senate, composed of leading parliamentary figures from each country elected by, and serving concurrently in, their national legislatures. English, already widespread as the informal Latin of the continent, should become the official language of the Union, in which senators could get to know one another as intimately as their homologues on the Hill. Meanwhile, less exclusive recruitment to the legal profession—where Britain is a particularly bad offender—should gradually supply the human material of a new political class, in a European system that is anyway already highly juridified.
There remains the trickiest question of all. Where is Europe’s counterpart to America’s civil religion—Tocqueville’s ‘habits of the heart’—to come from? Faithful to US example here too, Siedentop replies that a liberal constitution for Europe would in itself be an answer, affording a moral framework in which individuals become conscious of their equality as citizens, and so acting in the fashion of a surrogate religion, as ‘a source of identity and right conduct’.76 But is a mere surrogate quite enough—don’t Americans, after all, rely on the original article as well? To the scandal of Moravcsik, Siedentop does not flinch from following his argument through. Liberal constitutionalism is indeed just the latest frontier of Christianity, as the world religion that historically combined universalism and individualism, its moral equality of souls before God leading eventually to an equal liberty of citizens under the state.
For a European democracy to acquire cohesion and stability without sacrificing individualism, this link needs to be recovered. A weak-minded multiculturalism substituting for it—to which even such a liberal light as Berlin, perhaps because of his Jewish background, was not altogether immune—should be rejected. The Union must assume its tolerant, but not shame-faced, underlying Christian identity. All this will take time. Siedentop ends on an Augustinian note. Europe needs something like its own version of the complex federalism that took shape in America, but not yet. To rush towards the goal in current conditions, before the Union is ready for it, could produce only the caricature of a federation, dominated by an elite without any true sympathy or understanding for federalism.
Unlike any other work of significance in its field, Democracy in Europe has won a European readership, with translations into most of the languages of the original Community. It owes its reception to attractive qualities that set it apart from the mass of technical literature on integration: a direct argument and engaging prose accessible to anyone. In both its sensitivity
