Читать книгу Why Europe Should Become a Republic! - Ulrike Guérot - Страница 11

BEFORE WE START:

A quick gallop through the book

Welcome to the European Republic! This book is an attempt to rediscover, in a political utopia, the beauty of the European project, which in recent years has been betrayed and lost. Beginning with Plato, Aristotle and Cicero, the republic and other key concepts of political philosophy were first conceived of in Europe. Europe is the continent which has produced the most significant and sophisticated essays and other writings about the state and statehood, and about how societies and human coexistence should be organised. However, ever since it congealed into a system of nation states, this continent has lost its way, and now finds itself in a permanent European crisis in which all that matters is power, the market, and money. Not only the so-called Eurozone crisis in itself, but also the way it has been handled, are testament to the moral and cultural bankruptcy of over 300 years of European political and cultural history. So the attempt to rediscover a European political aesthetic is comparable to restoring an old painting – stripping away layer after layer of colour to reveal the original work which philistines subsequently painted over. In the collective cultural memory of the continent, Europe is always whole – a single body. She was dismembered in the course of the development of the nation state in the early modern period.⁴ But in terms of cultural history and philosophy, Europe has always been whole and without borders.⁵

In Part I, the aim is to demonstrate how the design of the EU fails to satisfy fundamental democratic requirements, and why it consequently cannot function properly, and never will. The way the EU is currently constituted cannot lead to the democratic unification of Europe, its hoped-for epiphany. The blueprint was wrong. The nation states – insofar as it was something they ever wanted – have never crossed the Rubicon to a political Europe, and they are now actively blocking the path to a transnational European democracy.

Map of Europe, 1589.

They have therefore outlived their usefulness as actors in the project of European integration. The old EU, its legitimacy founded on a grand narrative of peace, could only be perceived as fulfilling its purpose so long as it was not required, under the rigidly frozen geostrategic conditions of the Cold War and a comparatively stable global economy, to meet any actual political challenges. But that period ended with the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 at the latest. The currency union, imposed on the European states without any form of democratic underpinning, has forfeited any claims the old EU might have had to be furthering the democratic integration of Europe.

The current crises, which seem to pile up on top of each other – the Eurozone crisis, Grexit, Brexit, refugees – are thus only the cyclical symptoms of deep-lying structural faults which have their origins in the way the EU is constituted. The EU is therefore incapable of overcoming them. These structural problems are also the root cause of the political phenomena of populism and nationalism. In this way, the EU is itself the progenitor of the political crisis in which we find ourselves, and is increasingly the problem and not the solution. Its slow death began some time ago and has now started to be noticed by the public. Part II sets out a radical utopia, in preparation for the moment when history will once again release and set free the essence of the European project. For – whatever becomes of the EU – Europe will go on. The re-ordering of the continent of Europe must of necessity be both political and democratic. For that reason, it must respect the general principles of the political equality of all European citizens and the separation of powers. In addition, it has to re-connect what has become an inflated and tendentious interpretation of liberalism to the notion of the common good. What is being proposed here is therefore not more EU reforms, more integration, but a European democracy which observes fundamental democratic principles and adopts them as the basis for a political and institutional re-ordering of the continent with the idea of the community at its core.

It follows that this utopia means conceiving of Europe as a republic, because a republic is what the restorers will find Europe to be when they have scratched away the nation states (which, paradoxically perhaps, almost all defined themselves as republics when they were founded; almost every single time a new political entity has been created in Europe it has been a republic). We should now apply this cultural-historical insight to the epiphany of the European idea itself.

The concept of the republic is multi-faceted and organic. It has grown from within a number of different traditions, and it encompasses three fundamental principles which represent the preconditions for any foundational political project: civic equality, or equality before the law; political equality, or equal voting rights, coupled with a representative parliamentary democracy; and finally, an explicit commitment to the common good, the res publica. The republic is thus defined in normative terms. In essence, the concept of the republic is the link between the two fundamental values of liberty and equality; in it, these two are bound together and interconnected. This applies also to everyone who is a member of the republic, a member of the republican ‘fraternity’. The legacy of the French Revolution of 1789 is equality beyond – or regardless of – class. In the European Revolution of the 21^st century, the principle of equality must be extended to encompass equality beyond the nation.

Following the description of the origin and development of the concept of the republic in the second Part, the consummation of the European Republic is then outlined over three chapters. This means the political, territorial and economic re-ordering of Europe, which entails the conceptual combination and practical realisation of a number of current megatrends – localisation, civic emancipation, sustainability, post-capitalism, the post-growth society, the commons, the rejuvenated cooperative movement, decentralisation, gender equality – and their implementation across Europe. What would a new European project that was able to successfully enact these megatrends look like? It would involve the social design of a different Europe: a transnational European democracy, a new institutional edifice for Europe, a spatial reordering, and, finally, a proper and appropriate application of the economic principles of liberalism on which the current internal market philosophy of the EU is based. This Europe will be something woven together out of regions and cities that think globally. It will have left the nation state behind; it will be a European polity in the form of a non-hierarchical, horizontal, decentralised network of regions and cities under the common roof of a republic – not a centralist federation or union of states. This Europe will be an intellectual and political trailblazer for the new relationship between the local and the global beyond the nation.

Part III begins with a brief excursion into art history. The subject is the myth of Europe (or Europa), and it is written with a conspiratorial wink to my sisters – because of course Europa is a woman. The reason why it is important for the coming European project to bear this fact in mind is explained there. After that, we cast a glance at the young people of Europe, who have long begun creating, from the bottom up, a radically democratic Europe of a kind that Brussels could not conceive of in its wildest dreams. Finally, we set out briefly why, if it does eventually prove possible to establish the European Republic, this European project of a deep post-national democracy should be seen as the blueprint for a global citizens’ republic – which is something we need to build before planet Earth is finally destroyed. Or before more intelligent beings⁶ are obliged to show us the way!

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