meaning of the European Union: it is two different things. It is a group of distinct and independent states that work together yet retain their national sovereignty; and it is a supranational entity that absorbs and integrates the member states. It can’t be both, but it is both. And it maintains a certain balance, remaining enough of everything to enough of everybody to keep the momentum going toward the soft utopia of supranationalist governance.
Even practitioners, not just out-of-touch philosophical dreamers, often refer to this “bothness” of the EU. Wolfgang Schäuble, currently the German minister of finance and long an establishment figure in the supposedly staid, gray-suited German center-right, writes of his vision for the future of the EU:
To describe it technically, Europe would be something like a “multi-level democracy,” not a federal state whose focus would be centered in a body politic that was basically like a nation-state. At the same time, though, it would be much more than a federation of independent states whose connecting element would remain tenuous and weak. No, Europe would be a mutually complementing, intermeshing system of democracies of varied scope and jurisdiction: a “national-European double democracy.”8
A “national-European double democracy” built from “mutually complementing, intermeshing democracies of varied scope and jurisdiction”? Schäuble may be a practitioner rather than an abstract philosopher, but you can tell he was reared in a culture that lives and breathes the impenetrable “thought-edifices” of philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Habermas. In the original German, moreover, the entire quotation is in the subjunctive mood, which usually expresses something counterfactual – and which here betrays the unreality that surrounds so much of the foundational thinking about the EU.
Maybe, then, the great unanswered question is unanswerable. Maybe the EU really is best understood as a postmodern, quintessentially European mind game. And maybe its inscrutability is the key to the EU’s success. Never answering the most basic question – while hiding what one is doing behind a smokescreen of unintelligibility – may be what makes the EU a largely unnoticed and thus acceptably soft utopia, rather than a blatantly oppressive and unacceptably hard utopia. In an interview with the German weekly Der Spiegel in 1999 (when he was prime minister of Luxembourg), Jean-Claude Juncker, now the president of the European Commission, spoke of how European integration was being pushed forward by the governing elites: “We decide something, and then we just throw it out there and wait awhile to see what happens. If there are no big howls of protest and no uprisings, because most people don’t even understand what was decided, then we just go on – step by step, until there is no turning back.”9
In other words, the EU is process. It is constantly evolving into something new – something that no one clearly understands; something about which every point of view is right, and wrong. As Juncker revealed in his statement to Der Spiegel, the EU’s impenetrability is also intentional. Subterfuge is a central component of its modus operandi. Being unknowable has always been an aspect of the EU. That attribute might be good in a poem or a work of art, but not in a polity, which cannot be democratically accountable to its citizens unless they understand it.
By the process of developing an undefinable supranationality, De Gasperi and the other founding fathers of the European project – like Barroso and Juncker in our own day – wanted to achieve a soft utopia that would be a regional model for what we now call global governance. In the next chapter, we will examine the utopian ideology of global governance and how it grounds the EU.
THE UTOPIAN DREAM OF WORLD PEACE
The European dream of a supranational paradise of peace, prosperity and amity has gone global. As we have seen, the founding fathers of European integration already had this idea in mind. The opening words of the Schuman Declaration, proposing the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1950, were not limited to Europe. Summing up the purpose of the first truly supranational undertaking in modern history, Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister and probably the primary founder of the European Union, declared: “World peace cannot be safeguarded without the making of creative efforts proportionate to the dangers which threaten it.”1 Jean Monnet, the principal intellectual architect of the European project and Schuman’s close associate, also revealed his global perspective early in the process of European integration: “The sovereign nations of the past can no longer provide a framework for the resolution of our present problems. And the European Community itself is no more than a step toward the organizational forms of tomorrow’s world.”2
With the end of the Cold War, the vague aspirations of the EU’s first-generation fathers have become a full-fledged ideology of global governance, although still an amorphous one, both strategically and intellectually.
A NEW WORLD ORDER
Among high-level EU officials, Pascal Lamy is one of the more articulate advocates of global governance. A Frenchman, he served as the European commissioner for trade from 1999 to 2004, and as secretary general of the World Trade Organization from 2005 to 2013. In a speech on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Lamy said that the Cold War’s ending had “caught everyone by surprise,” suddenly presenting the world with new challenges that hadn’t been prepared for: “A new world order was being born. And yet there was not enough thinking and discussion about its governance structures. . . . Global challenges need global solutions and these can only come with the right global governance . . . .”3
The statement “global challenges need global solutions” is key. The global governancers base their entire case on the assertion that a globalized world requires a globalized form of governance. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, a leading proponent of global supranational governance, puts the argument as well as anyone, with a dash of Germanic fogginess. The processes of globalization, he writes,
enmesh nation-states in the dependencies of an increasingly interconnected world society whose functional differentiation effortlessly bypasses territorial boundaries. . . . Nation-states can no longer secure the boundaries of their own territories, the vital necessities of their populations, and the material preconditions for the reproduction of their societies by their own efforts. . . . Hence, states cannot escape the need for regulation and coordination in the expanding horizon of a world society . . . . 4
The EU, according to Habermas, “already represents a form of ‘government beyond the nation-state’ that could serve as an example to be emulated in the postnational constellation.”5
Habermas and Lamy both exemplify the foundational consensus of European elites that the EU is the model for the governance of a future world in which unrestricted national sovereignty will have become a thing of the past. In the speech quoted above, Lamy purports to establish the post–Cold War need for global governance and then goes on to tout the European Union as the prototype, “the most ambitious experiment to date in supranational governance. It is the story of a desired, defined and organized interdependence between its member states.” The EU is “the laboratory of international governance – the place where the new technological frontier of international governance is being tested.”6
Another longtime member of the EU governing elite, the previously cited German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble, also illustrates how the view of the EU as a model for global governance is shared across nations and along the political spectrum. A center-right establishment figure, Schäuble agrees with Lamy, a mainstay of the French center-left, in the belief that people beyond Europe could take inspiration from “a national-and-European ‘double-democracy’ as a model for global governance in the twenty-first century.”7
