The Philosophy of 'Europe'

The Philosophy of 'Europe'

Mini Teaser: If the myth of destabilizing European nationalism continues to cast its spell over the decisions of Europe's political architects, then it will prove to be a self-fulfilling fantasy.

by Author(s): John Laughland

It is precisely because politics is the realm of freedom that
politics cannot be governed by prescriptive rules. It is depressing
to realize that the lesson learned by Britain and America in the
economic domain in the 1980s--that economies cannot be planned--has
been spectacularly unlearned in the political domain by continental
Europe since the Cold War. It is a modernist, constructivist conceit
to believe that political life can be planned in advance. (The CSCE's
aims to engage in "conflict-prevention" is a perfect example of this
mentality.) This is not just because political life, like economics,
is very complex. It is above all because statesmanship, like law,
contains as its fundamental principle the possibility of genuine
decision-making, i.e. the possibility that political decisions might
leave the normal framework of rules to create something exceptional.
It is hardly surprising, given that Europe's share of world trade has
declined by 25 percent in the last ten years, that Europe's economic
backwardness should spill over and influence its political reasoning
too.

For, as that other great German jurist and philosopher Leo Strauss
realized:

"What cannot be decided in advance by universal rules, what can only
be decided in the critical moment by the most competent and
conscientious statesman on the spot, can be made visible as just, in
retrospect, to all; the objective discrimination between extreme
actions which were just and extreme actions which were unjust is one
of the noblest duties of the historian."

Indeed, it is precisely the genius of the Anglo-Saxon common law
tradition to have preserved, unlike continental Europe, the
Aristotelian notion that justice inheres in individual decisions and
actions, and not in general principles. It is only in such sovereign
decisions that true statesmanship is revealed, just as it is only in
sovereign individual decisions that the virtue of the citizen is
revealed.

Sovereignty, Properly Misunderstood

Why so much attention to the CSCE, an organism which is at best in an
embryonic stage of development? The reason is that another
organization, the European Union, which is in a very mature stage of
development and apparent growth, draws on many of the same unwelcome
principles. Like the CSCE, for instance, the Maastricht Treaty is
full of "mechanisms" to enable governments to decide this or that,
especially in the domains of foreign and defense policy, as if
decision-making were a procedural matter. But, more profoundly, the
German plans for federal political union within the European Union
fit inside the CSCE's overall plans for the entire continent like a
Russian doll. This is for the same philosophical reasons as have been
outlined above.

Karl Lamers' conviction that national sovereignty has long since
become an illusion counts as one of the great accepted truths among
the Europhile cognoscenti. Indeed, the comments made about
sovereignty in the European Community are generally of an almost
unimaginable crassness and infantility. It is almost impossible to
find any modern European politician who can correctly define--or even
betray an instinctive understanding of--national sovereignty, and
there are plenty of European intellectuals who will tell you that it
is an outdated concept. Those in favor of European integration, for
instance, will tell you, in the same breath, that sovereignty is a
meaningless concept and that the nation-states have already lost it
anyway.

The argument usually goes like this: the nation-states of Europe are
economically interdependent and must react to events outside their
individual control. Therefore they are no longer sovereign. The only
way to regain their lost power (or "sovereignty") is to join forces
and act together. The former British foreign secretary, Lord (then
Sir Geoffrey) Howe, has expressed this thought by writing that
"sovereignty is a nation's practical ability to make its influence
felt in the world."

All this is deeply misguided. Far from being meaningless, sovereignty
is the definitive quality of a constitutionally independent state. If
a country is constitutionally independent, it is sovereign. A country
does not become less sovereign if it becomes less powerful. To say
that "sovereignty" is meaningless is to say that "constitution,"
"independence," and "state" are meaningless concepts as well. It is
rather like wanting to overcome the distinction between friend and
enemy.

Far from being a call for all-powerful national government, defense
of the concept of national sovereignty is the most important defense
of democracy in modern Europe. De Gaulle used to say that he
considered national sovereignty and democracy to be the same thing.
The point about national sovereignty is not that the state is either
internally or externally all-powerful (although there can, by
definition, not be a higher constitutional authority than that of a
sovereign entity), it is rather to clarify the source of the
authority which the state exercises. If the state is democratic, that
source is the people or the nation. At bottom, this inability to
understand sovereignty, and the concomitant view that it is "an
illusion," is based on a simple and worrying confusion between
authority and power, a distinction which is the cornerstone of all
legal reasoning. It is extremely worrying that all modern European
politicians, almost without exception, make this error.

This is why the CSCE's pretense to be the source of a new
constitutional order for the whole of Europe dovetails with the
proclaimed aim of some very powerful players in European politics,
most notably the German governing party, to subsume national
constitutions in a European one. Let us be clear: the weasel words
about "uniting Europe while protecting national differences," and the
widespread refusal (such as that of the French Prime Minister Edouard
Balladur) even to address the question of sovereignty, means that
what is an offer is not a clearly proclaimed intention to replace the
states of Western Europe by one super-state, but instead a legal and
political order predicated on the blurring of those fundamental
concepts which are the building blocks of law, democracy, and freedom.

The rhetoric about borders reinforces this dovetailing. It is
fashionable to say that borders are coming down all over Europe, and
unfashionable and seemingly narrow-minded to want to maintain them.
In the moments when Russia expresses hostility to the eastward
extension of NATO, for instance, it protests against "the creation of
new lines of division in Europe." But, like the others, this
political slogan ignores the legal importance of borders, whether
national or regional, as de-limiting domains of jurisdiction. In
ancient Greek, the word for "law," nomos, is derived from nemein, to
distribute, to possess (what was distributed), or to dwell--to the
extent that Heraclitus could pun on "law" and "hedge," as in, "The
people should fight for the law as for a wall." The law, indeed, was
originally identified with the boundary line between properties
(later, between cities), and even if the concept of law has evolved
since, it is clear that a domain of jurisdiction must be spatially
defined for it truly to exist. It is only in the communist mind that
a border need be a barrier.

To abolish borders (rather than to open them) or to make them so vast
and vague as to be non-existent ("from Vancouver to Vladivostock") is
ultimately to undermine the rule of law, for it risks abolishing even
the possibility of statehood. In the EU, outright federalists and
crypto-federalists are united by their failure to understand the
legal and political significance of borders. In the CSCE, there is no
proposal to abolish national borders (indeed their inviolability is
one of its central commitments) but rather the aim is to make them
irrelevant. But states, as the subjects of international law, must
exist as such if international law is to exist, and they must also
exist if domestic law is to exist.

The advantage of national sovereignty over supranational sovereignty
is that it is based on a reality, namely that pre-existing political
entity which is the nation. Nations are not founded, they grow. Even
if a state has a formal foundation date, the nation on which it is
based will already have contained a whole tapestry of habits,
conventions, rules, and historical and cultural reference points
which will enable it to exist as a political entity. It is only when
the cultural basis for political discourse exists that democracy can
obtain. A good constitution, like good law, is one which reflects
reality and does not seek to destroy it. This is why the notion that
the European parliament can ever replace national parliaments as the
holder of political legitimacy, or even as a forum for political
accountability and democracy, is naive.

The widespread misunderstanding of the inherently conservative nature of democracy is reflected in the strikingly undemocratic nature of the German proposals to construct a federal union of a "hard core" of states. First, the proposals ride a coach and horses through the principle of national self-determination, by insisting that all European policy henceforth be made by majority vote between the member states. Indeed, they even promise to provide the "hard core" with its own autochthonous constitution, and to abolish the national veto on any further constitutional and institutional developments.

Essay Types: Essay