When I arrived in Brussels in the fall of 2015, the sense of crisis was palpable. And this was before armored vehicles appeared in the streets in a rather futile show of strength after the killings in Paris. Not long ago, EU officials and their boosters in the media tended to speak triumphantly of “Europe” as a beacon of peace, freedom, and democracy, a model for the rest of world. The rhetoric was now distinctly downbeat.
I attended a dinner party in an elegant apartment on the Boulevard Winston Churchill. My fellow guests were all connected to the EU in one capacity or another. One spoke openly about the possibility of the euro crashing. Another mentioned the increasingly bad image of the European Commission, as an undemocratic, semi-authoritarian body. Parts of it should probably be dismantled, he suggested. At an EU conference held in one of those magnificent palaces left behind by the Belgian Empire, the Dutch vice-president of the European Commission, Frans Timmermans, warned that if Europe didn’t solve the refugee crisis soon, the EU could easily fall apart.
At a lavish banquet following yet another EU conference in the same gilded palace, I listened to a speech by Étienne Davignon. If anyone personifies the grand European “project,” it is Davignon. This aristocratic Belgian businessman, banker, diplomat, former commissioner, and now president of a think tank called Friends of Europe operates precisely where Belgian and EU elites overlap: on the summit of big money and lofty ideals. Davignon is, in a sense, the unofficial king of Brussels. In the past, he could be counted on to hold forth about the glories of a united Europe. Now he struck a more defensive note; he was sick and tired, he said, of European despondency: “We have lost pride in what we have done.”
It sounded to me as though Brussels triumphalism was turning into a lament. In a way, this was refreshing. Many observers have described the dangers faced by Europe, not least George Soros in these pages. One of the most cogent thinkers about the EU is Luuk van Middelaar, a historian educated in Holland and France, and now based in Brussels. His articles frequently appear in France, as well as his native Holland. As a former member of the cabinet of the Belgian Herman Van Rompuy, the first president of the European Council, van Middelaar knows the EU from the inside out. He sees the problem of Europe mainly as a political crisis.
In the beginning, the conception of European unity, first as the Coal and Steel Community of six nations, and then as the European Economic Community, was deliberately apolitical, or in van Middelaar’s words, a “dedramatisation of European politics.” The distant goal of technocratic founding fathers, such as Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, might have been a United States of Europe, but peaceful relations between the European nations, which had just emerged from a catastrophic war, needed to be secured first by pooling such economic resources as coal and steel. European institutions were constructed to transcend national politics. Peace and prosperity would come from economic cooperation and negotiation. Consensus would be reached by responsible leaders out of public sight.
The founding fathers were, however, more than dry technocrats. There was a moral, even quasi-religious dimension to the postwar European ideal, a whiff of the Holy Roman Empire; most of the leading figures in the unification of Europe—Konrad Adenauer, Schuman, Alcide De Gaspari, Paul-Henri Spaak—were Roman Catholics.
The French intellectual Julien Benda was not. But he still had a vision. “Europe,” he wrote in a fascinating essay on European unification, published in 1933, “won’t be the result of a simple economic, or political transformation. It will not really exist without adopting a system of moral and aesthetic values, the exaltation of a certain way of thinking and feeling….” But Benda also believed that the idea of Europe should remain utterly rational, abstract, devoid of any national or tribal sentiments. And French, in his view the most rational language, should be the common means of pan-European communication. It is this rationalist, abstract, deliberately deracinated quality, exemplified by the main EU buildings in Brussels, that would prove to be an obstacle once it became necessary to claim the loyalty of the citizens in twenty-eight different nation-states.
The flaws in the founding fathers’ construction, as van Middelaar sees it, became evident once Britain joined in 1973, and even more so after the end of the cold war in the early 1990s. Problems related to climate change, security, immigration, and a common currency demand political solutions. Bureaucratic tinkering, financial planning, and institution-building are no longer enough. To play a part commensurate with its economic power, Europe needs common policies that are democratically legitimate.
