Cuba, but even declined an American offer to release him. In a letter to the captive’s mother, Joschka Fischer, Green foreign minister at the time, explained that the government could do nothing for him. In ‘such a good land’, as a leading admirer has recently described it,17 Fischer and Steinmeier remain the most popular of politicians. The new interior minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, is more robust, publicly calling for assassination rather than rendition in dealing with deadly enemies of the state, in the Israeli manner.
Such is the record set out in Marty’s two detailed reports to the Council of Europe (nothing to do with the EU), each an exemplary document of meticulous detective work and moral passion. If this Swiss prosecutor from Ticino were representative of the continent, rather than a voice crying in the wilderness, there would be reason to be proud of it. He ends his second report by expressing the hope that his work will bring home ‘the legal and moral quagmire into which we have collectively sunk as a result of the US-led “war on terror”. Almost six years in, we seem no closer to pulling ourselves out of this quagmire’.18 Indeed. Not a single European government has conceded any guilt, while all continue imperturbably holding forth on human rights. We are in the world of Ibsen—Consul Bernick, Judge Brack and their like—updated for postmoderns: pillars of society, pimping for torture.
What has been delivered in these practices are not just the hooded or chained bodies, but the deliverers themselves: Europe surrendered to the United States. This rendition is the most taboo of all to mention. A rough approximation to it can be found in what remains in many ways the best account of the relationship between the two, Robert Kagan’s Paradise and Power, whose benignly contemptuous imagery of Mars and Venus—the Old World, relieved of military duties by the New, cultivating the arts and pleasures of a borrowed peace—has predictably riled Europeans. But even Kagan grants them too much, as if they really lived according to the precepts of Kant, while Americans were obliged to act on the truths of Hobbes. If a philosophical reference were wanted, more appropriate would have been La Boétie, whose Discours de la servitude volontaire could furnish a motto for the Union. But these are arcana. The one contemporary text to have captured the full flavour of the transatlantic relationship is, perhaps inevitably, a satire, Régis Debray’s plea for a United States of the West that would absorb Europe completely into the American imperium.19
Did it have to come to this? The paradox is that when Europe was less united, it was in many ways more independent. The leaders who ruled in the early stages of integration had all been formed in a world before the global hegemony of the United States, when the major European states were themselves imperial powers, whose foreign policies were self-determined. These were people who had lived through the disasters of the Second World War, but were not crushed by them. This was true not just of De Gaulle, but of figures like Adenauer and Mollet, of Eden and Heath, all of whom were quite prepared to ignore or defy America if their ambitions demanded it. Monnet, who did not accept their national assumptions and never clashed with the US, still shared their sense of a future in which Europeans could settle their own affairs, in another fashion. Down into the seventies, something of this spirit lived on even in Giscard and Schmidt, as Carter discovered. But with the neo-liberal turn of the eighties, and the arrival in power in the nineties of a post-war generation, it faded. The new economic doctrines cast doubt on the state as a political agent, and the new leaders had never known anything except the Pax Americana. The traditional springs of autonomy were gone.
By this time, on the other hand, the Community had doubled in size, acquired an international currency, and boasted a GDP exceeding that of the United States itself. Statistically, the conditions for an independent Europe existed as never before. But politically, they had been reversed. With the decay of federalism and the deflation of inter-governmentalism, the Union had weakened national, without creating a supranational, sovereignty, leaving rulers adrift in an ill-defined limbo between the two. With the eclipse of significant distinctions between Left and Right, other motives of an earlier independence have also waned. In the syrup of la pensée unique, little separates the market-friendly wisdom of one side of the Atlantic from the other, though as befits the derivative, the recipe is blander still in Europe than America, where political differences are less extinct. In such conditions, an enthusiast can find no higher praise for the Union than to compare it to ‘one of the most successful companies in global history’. Which firm confers this honour on Brussels? Why, the one in your wallet. ‘The EU is already closer to Visa than it is to a state’,20 declares New Labour’s infant prodigy. Europe exalted to the rank of a credit-card.
Transcendence of the nation-state, Marx believed, would be a task not for capital but for labour. A century later, as the Cold War set in, Kojève held that whichever camp accomplished it would emerge the victor from the conflict. The foundation of the European Community settled the issue for him. The West would win, and its triumph would bring history, understood as the realization of human freedom, to an end. Kojève’s prediction was accurate. His extrapolation, and its irony, remain in the balance. They have certainly not been disproved: he would have smiled at the image of a chit of plastic. The emergence of the Union can be regarded as the last great world-historical achievement of the bourgeoisie, proof that its creative powers were not exhausted by the fratricide of two world wars; and what has happened to it as a strange declension from what was hoped from it. Yet the long-run outcome of integration remains unforeseeable to all parties. Even without shocks, many a zig-zag has marked its path. With them, who knows what further mutations might occur.
1. Postwar, London 2005, p. 799.
2. Mark Leonard, Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century, London 2005, pp. 7, 85.
3. Why Europe Will Run the Twenty-First Century, p. 4.
4. Jeremy Rifkin, The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream, Cambridge 2004, p. 382.
5. The European Dream, p. 385.
6. Jürgen Habermas, The Divided West, Cambridge 2006, p. 43.
7. ‘Ulrich Beck, Understanding the Real Europe’, Dissent, Summer 2003.
8. ‘Le problème européen’, Le Débat, No. 129, March–April 2004, p. 66.
9. Eneko Landabaru, ‘The Need for Enlargement and the Differences from Previous Accessions’, in George Vassiliou (ed.), The Accession Story: The EU from Fifteen to Twenty-Five Countries, Oxford 2007, p. 15.
10. See Le Monde, 20 May 2005.
11. Andrew Moravcsik, ‘In Defence of the “Democratic Deficit”: Reassessing Legitimacy in the European Union’, Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 40, No. 4, November 2002, p. 618; Financial Times, 14 June 2005; ‘Conservative Idealism and International Institutions’, Chicago Journal of International Law, Vol. 1, No. 2, Autumn 2000, p. 310.
12. The Divided West, p. 40.
13. ‘Deconstructing Europe’, p. 287.
14. ‘The Next Empire’, Prospect, October 2001.
15. Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European Union, Oxford 2006, pp. 54–7.
16. See Dick Marty’s first report to the Council of Europe of 7 June 2006, Alleged Secret Detentions and Unlawful Inter-state Transfers Involving Council of Europe Member States, Strasbourg, footnote to paragraph 30.
17. Timothy Garton Ash, ‘The Stasi on our Minds’, New York Review of Books, 31 May 2007.
18. Dick Marty, Secret Detentions and Illegal Transfers of Detainees Involving Council of Europe Member States: Second Report, 8 June
