Ulrich Beck: Time to Get Angry, Europe, Create the Europe of the Citizens Now!
– Lecture – Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao – Thursday, December 1, 2011 –
Europe already accomplished a miracle once before: enemies became neighbours. In the light of the euro crisis, the cardinal question must be confronted once again: How can Europe guarantee its citizens peace, freedom and security in the risk storms raging in the globalised world? This calls for nothing less than a second miracle: How can the Europe of bureaucracy become a Europe of citizens? I am going to develop this perspective, this argument in six steps:
My first question is, why has Europe become a community of fate?
Second, what do we mean by Europe?
Third, Europe seen from without.
Fourth, the dangerous cocktail of global money and national politics.
Fifth, German euro-nationalism
Sixth, Create the Europe of the citizens now!
First: why Europe has become a community of fate?
Germany’s European policy is about to undergo a transformation as significant as Ostpolitik – the country’s improvement of relations with the Soviet bloc – was in the early 1970s. In both cases, it is a question of overcoming a divide, between the East and the West in the 1970s and between north and south today. Politicians tirelessly insist that Europe is a community of fate. It has been that way since the establishment of the European Union. The EU is an idea that grew out of the physical and moral devastation following World War II.
Unlike earlier nations and empires that celebrated their origins in myths and heroic victories, the EU is a transnational governmental institution that emerged from the agony of defeat and consternation over the Holocaust. But now that war and peace is no longer the overriding issue, what does the European community of fate signify as a new generational experience? It is the existential threat posed by the financial and euro crisis that is making Europeans realize that they do not live in Germany or France, but in Europe. For the first time, Europe’s young people are experiencing their own “European fate”. Better educated than ever and possessing high expectations, they are confronting a decline in the labour markets triggered by the threat of national bankruptcies and the economic crisis. Today one in five Europeans under 25 is unemployed.
In those places where they have set up their tent cities and raised their voices, they are demanding social justice. In Spain and Portugal, as well as in Tunisia, Egypt and Israel (unlike Great Britain), they are voicing their demands in a way as nonviolent as it is powerful. Europe and its youth are united in their rage over politicians who are willing to spend unimaginable sums of money to rescue banks, even as they gamble away the futures of their countries’ youth. If the hopes of Europe’s young people fall victim to the euro crisis, what can the future hold for a Europe whose population is getting older and older?
News programs offer new visual material for the dawning of a new age of risky confusion – the “world risk society” – on an almost daily basis. The headlines have been interchangeable for some time: Insecurity over the Future of the Global Economy, EU Bailout Fund in Jeopardy, Merkel Attends Crisis Meeting with Sarkozy, Rating Agency Announces Downgrade of US Debt. Does the global financial crisis signal the deterioration of the old centre? Ironically, it is authoritarian China that is playing the moral apostle on the financial front, with its sharp criticism of both democratic America and the EU.
There is one thing the financial crisis has undoubtedly achieved: Everyone (experts and politicians included) has been catapulted into a world that no one understands anymore. As far as the political reactions are concerned, there are two extreme scenarios that can be juxtaposed. The first is a Hegelian scenario, in which, given the threats that global risk capitalism engenders, the “ruse of reason” is afforded an historic opportunity. This is the cosmopolitan imperative: cooperate or fail, succeed together or fail individually.
At the same time, the inability to control financial risks (along with climate change and migration movements) presents a Carl Schmitt scenario, a strategic power game, which opens the door to ethnic and nationalist policy.
The community of fate is inescapable in both models, because, no matter what we do, global risk capitalism creates new existential divisions and bonds across national, ethnic, religious and political boundaries.
How can Europe even prevail in this environment? Paradoxically, the success of the EU is also one of its biggest obstacles. People have come to take many of its achievements for granted, so much so that that perhaps they would only notice them if they ceased to exist. One only need imagine an EU in which passport controls are reintroduced at borders, there are no longer reliable food safety regulations everywhere, freedom of speech and of the press no longer exist under today’s standards (which Hungary is already violating, thereby exposing itself to strict scrutiny), and Europeans travelling to Budapest, Copenhagen or Prague, or even Paris, Madrid and Rome, are forced to exchange money and keep track of exchange rates. The notion of Europe as our home has become second nature to us. Perhaps this explains why we are prepared to jeopardize its existence so carelessly.
Second: what do we mean by Europe?
Attempt to look more closely at Europe, either politically or social scientifically, and one ends up in a hall of mirrors. Europe gets bigger or smaller depending on your perspective; the slightest movement and its proportions are distorted. Where it begins and where it ends, what it is and what should it be – there are no straightforward and unambiguous answers. Whether one equates Europe with the European Union and its member states, or means a larger geographic and political space, including Russia and Belarus for example: Europe per se doesn’t exist, there is only Europeanization, understood as an institutionalized process of ongoing transformation. What “Europe” includes and excludes, where and how its territorial boundaries run, what institutional forms this Europe possesses and what institutional architecture it should possess in the future – none of this has been defined. Europe is not a fixed state of being. Europe is another word for a variable geometry, variable national interests, variable states of upset, variable relations towards interior and exterior factors, variable forms of statehood, variable identity. This is also the case for the institutionalized core of Europeanization, the European Union.
On first approach, Europe seems to be merely the counter-image to nation-state organization: the EU is not a large nation, nor a super-state in which all other nation−states are sublimated. The highly particular, historically specific “power” of the EU, yet to be fully understood, resides, for example, in the fact that even non-member states that want to become member states (e.g. Turkey) are involved in an process of internal reform. In short: Europe is not a pre-existing spatial shell within which “Europeanization” can unfold, nor does there exist a conceptual model or a historical example of the goal to which this process leads.
We are currently seeing this in the euro-crisis. When the euro was introduced, many economists smugly warned that introducing the currency union without having established a political union was putting the cart before the horse. They couldn’t or didn’t want to understand that this was precisely the intention! The idea was that the euro and the predictable political problems would, through the force of material interest, force governments and nations, in thrall to national egoisms, to extend the political union – following the cosmopolitan imperative: cooperate or bust.
The national point of view sees two ways and two ways only of reading contemporary European politics and integration. It sees it either as federalism, leading to a federal super-state, or as inter-governmentalism, leading to a federation of states. Both models are empirically inadequate. They fail to grasp essential things both about present-day Europe and about the nations that make it up. But they are also, in a deep-structural sense, anti-European. They deny the goal most worth attaining: a Europe of diversity, a Europe that helps diversity to flourish.
This is obvious when it comes to the idea of a federation of states that are seen as defending their sovereignty against the expansion of European power. From that perspective, European integration is a kind of European self-colonization. But it’s just as true in the conception of a federal super state. That is how Europe looks when it is filtered through the exclusive categories of national thought, which can only understand it in one way: as a huge ethnocultural nation-state. This makes no sense, as its opponents point out. Such a nation is improbable, unwanted and un-European. It never occurs to them that perhaps Europe isn’t properly conceived of as a nation-state.
Both the federation of states and the federal super-state describe the same zero-sum game from different angles. Either there is one single state of Europe (federalism), in which case there are no national member states; or else the national member states remain Europe’s rulers, in which case there is no Europe (inter-governmentalism). Within this framework of thought, whatever Europe gains, the individual nations lose. And this is true whether one is for a given option or against it.
This is what it means to say that national categories of thought make the thought of Europe impossible. Caught up in the false alternatives of the national viewpoint, we are given the choice between no Europe – or no Europe! Methodological nationalism denies the empirical reality of Europe, which is that it is already a unity of diversity.
Just as the Peace of Westphalia ended the religious wars by separating state from religion, we might consider it the ultimate goal of the European project to separate state and nation. Cosmopolitanism does not mean an abolition of nation, any more than Westphalia meant an abolition of religion. Rather, it means the constitutional enshrinement of the principle of national and cultural and ethnic and religious tolerance.
Many people consider the Peace of Westphalia the foundation of the modern European state system. If that is true, then the principle of tolerance was Europe’s founding principle, the basis of its unwritten constitution. And on this argument, the essence of the postwar European project has been to deepen this principle of tolerance and to extend it. The a-religious state did not abolish religion. Rather, it allowed it to flourish. It allowed there to be more than one; it allowed true religious diversity. And the same is true of a cosmopolitan state. The goal is not to abolish national identities, but to save them from their own perversion, just as Westphalia saved religion from its perversion into religious war.
Third: Europe seen from without.
Perspectives on the cosmopolitanization of Europe have so far ignored (and I mean this self-critically) the question of the influence exerted by de-colonization upon the emergence and subsequent development of the European Union. Here, too, it is the victories of modern, industrial capitalism and its effects – global risks, crises and geopolitical shifts, especially since 1989 – that call into question the bases of nation-state orders both inside and outside Europe.
From the perspective of the developing countries, however, the present picture of Europe is somewhat different. It is characterized by a power shift in favour of postcolonial, developing countries (reflected in their participation in the new G20 meetings, for example); a shift in the global economic geography of power from the Atlantic to the Pacific; and the steady de-monopolization of the US dollar as the leading global currency in favour of a conglomeration of various currencies and bilateral currency treaties. In addition comes the increasing significance of South-South and East-South partnerships for the resolution of economic problems, not to mention the loss of moral authority and exemplariness of the former Euro-American centre.
The result is that old, western dominated centre-periphery models are in danger of collapsing. In the future, things will not revolve primarily around the relation between postcolonialism and Europe. More pertinent will be the extent to which we are seeing the start of a kind of “pre-colonialization” of the former centre, Europe, by its former colonies, in particular China and India.
China, at any rate, is becoming increasingly involved in European concerns – though ironically by no means to Europe’s disadvantage, but in support of the euro and thus the European Union – for reasons of Chinese self-interest. Itself in possession of immense euro reserves, China initially came to Greece’s help with a loan of over 3.6 billion euros and the purchase of government bonds, and has since offered Spain similar assistance. All this naturally shifts the global structure of power immensely.
Fourth: the dangerous cocktail of global money and national politics.
The euro crisis is another manifestation of the clash between global money and national politics. Mixing the constraints of national politics with the demands of global money creates a witches’ brew whose effusions can topple governments and shape the global economy. Coping with this contradiction is, of course, one of the major challenges of our time. Understanding national and local problems, and promising solutions to them, is far more critical for political success than hatching initiatives to address global threats. Planetary problems feel too remote to the average voter. Even in this information-saturated age, polls show, that only minority think about problems beyond their nation’s-borders when deciding who to vote or to what political party to support.
The crisis of the euro zone’s periphery is merely the latest example of the contradictory requirements of international finance and national politics. Nothing strokes public demonstration and political violence like cuts in public budgets. Nothing assuages the anxieties of jittery foreign investors more than a government fiercely committed to making budget cuts. While this tension has always existed, the globalisation of finance coupled with the speed at which money crosses borders makes it even harder for politicians to respond to the demands of financial markets without infuriating voters.
The figures are extraordinary. The global foreign exchange market is eight times larger today than it was only 20 years ago. Last year alone the daily volume of currencies traded was 220 per cent higher than that in 2001, and 65 per cent of the transactions were cross-border – up from 54 per cent in 1998. Since 1990 foreign direct investment increased more than six fold. International credit flows have multiplied by two and a half times since 2000, while in the ten years to 2007 the number of non-US companies listing their shares on the New York stock exchange has quadrupled.
To put it in a nutshell: Money that moves at the speed of light, trade that moves nearby at the speed of cargo containers, governments that move at the speed of politics (re-election!) and labour that does not move much: this is Europe today. For millions this crisis has become a quick but painful lesson on the direct links between ‘out there’ and ‘right here’.
Investors are mobile and they increasingly mistrust the debt of many euro-zone sovereigns. That is the most important lesson of recent events. The consequence is a power shift from state to global money. Many politicians want to declare war on global money. And indeed there have to be new cosmopolitical regulations. But as long as there are none, they need to remember that they want people to buy their debt. Which presupposes confidence which is dissolving. Why is this so? There are three explanations:
a) Investors realize that a number of euro-zone countries are at a far greater risk of insolvency than previously thought.
b) The euro-zone sovereigns lack a true lender of last resort.
c) There is a break-up risk. No currency union is irrevocable. And a currency union is perceived as more fragile than a normal national country. In other words: The investors don’t understand what the EU is all about.
Fifth: German euro-nationalism
Once upon a time, after the Greek debt had been devalued, people began to breathe easily and to draw hope: Europe had survived and was perhaps even strong and agile enough to overcome its problems. Then the Greek prime minister Giorgios Papandreou announced that he wanted to put this fateful question to the Greek people in a referendum. Suddenly, the hidden, inverted reality came to light. In Europe, which is so proud of its democracy, someone who practices democracy becomes a threat to Europe! Papandreou was forced to call off the democratic referendum.
Whereas just a short time ago we had hoped, to quote the German poet Hölderlin, that “Where there is danger, salvation grows too”, now a new counter-reality is appearing on the horizon: Where there is salvation, danger grows too. At any rate, the anxious question has suddenly wormed its way into people’s heads: Are the measures introduced to rescue the euro abolishing European democracy? Will the “rescued” EU cease to be a European Union as we know it and instead become an “EE”, a European Empire with a German stamp? Is this never-ending crisis giving birth to a political monster?
Not long ago it was still commonplace to speak in disparaging terms about the cacophony in the European Union. Now all of a sudden Europe has a single telephone. It rings in Berlin and for the moment it belongs to Angela Merkel.
Yesterday it seemed as though the crisis was raising the old question of the finalité of European unification: Should Europe become a nation writ large, a confederation, a federal state, a mere economic community, an informal United Nations or something historically new, namely, a cosmopolitan Europe founded on European law which performs the role of politically coordinating Europeanised nation-states? All of that suddenly looks like folklore from times past. Even asking “Which Europe do we want?” is to act as though one could still choose one option or the other after rescuing the euro. The train seems to have already left the station – at least for Greece, Italy and Spain. The Greek government, which has to demand the most of its citizens, is in effect under guardianship and, in view of the domestic disturbances, has its back to the wall. Debt liquidation specialists are in demand – for example, Mario Monti and Lucas Papademos. For the austerity packages have proved to be suicide programs for the governments of the debtor nations, which were promptly elected out of office. The Irish and Portuguese governments were the first to suffer this fate, then the Greek, Italian, and Spanish governments.
Not just the power structure has undergone a permanent shift. Instead, a new logic of power is taking shape. Remarkably enough, Max Weber included a brief excursus on the concept of the “Empire State” in his sociology of domination (though its main focus was on the state). “Even without any formal power of command”, Weber wrote, an Empire State “can exercise a far-reaching and occasionally even a despotic hegemony”. As examples he cited the role of Prussia in the German Customs Union and the status of New York “as the seat of the great financial powers”. Must Germany’s role in crisis-ridden Europe now be added to this list?
And this is what the new Merkel Europe looks like: The grammar of power conforms to the imperial difference between lender and borrower countries. Thus it is not a military but an economic logic. (In this respect the talk of the “Fourth Reich” is wide of the mark.) Its ideological foundation is what I would like to call German euro-nationalism, that is, an extended European version of Deutschmark nationalism. In this way the German culture of stability is being elevated to the guiding idea for Europe. The stabilisation of hegemonic power rests on the assent of the dependent European countries. Some Germans do believe that the German model exerts a magnetic power of attraction on the people of Europe: Europe is learning German, they say. But it is more realistic to ask: What is the basis of the power of enforcement? Angela Merkel has dictated that the price for incurring debt without restraint is the loss of sovereignty.
The consequences are the splitting of the EU. This is reflected, first, in the new internal conflict between the euro countries and the EU countries outside the euro zone. Those who do not have the euro find themselves excluded from the decision-making processes which are shaping the present and future of Europe. They find themselves degraded to onlookers and are losing their political voice. This is most apparent in the case of Great Britain which is sliding into European irrelevance.
However, a dramatic split is also occurring in the new, crisis-torn centre of activity of the euro countries, a split between the countries which already or will soon depend on the drip feed of the rescue fund and the countries which are financing the rescue fund. The former have no other option but to submit to the claim to power of German euro-nationalism. Italy, perhaps one of the most European countries, is threatened with playing no further role in shaping the present and future of the continent.
My point is not just that the euro crisis is tearing Europe apart. That is no doubt true. But the crux of the matter is that in the process the basic rules of European democracy are being suspended or are even being inverted into their opposite, bypassing parliaments, governments and EU institutions. Multilateralism is turning into unilateralism, equality into hegemony, sovereignty into the deprivation of sovereignty and recognition into disrespect for the democratic dignity of other nations. Even France, which long dominated European unification, must submit to Berlin’s strictures now that it must fear for its international credit rating.
In fact, this future, which is taking shape in the laboratory of the euro rescue as an intentional side-effect, as it were, resembles – I hesitate to say it – a belated European variant of the Soviet Union. In this case a centralised planned economy no longer means having to draw up five-year plans for the production of goods and services, but instead five-year plans for debt reduction. The power to implement them is being placed in the hands of “commissioners” who are authorised by “rights of direct access” (Merkel) to stop at nothing in tearing down the Potemkin villages erected by notorious debtor countries. We all know how the Soviet Union ended.
Why now a German Europe after all, an eventuality against which the German writer Thomas Mann already warned urgently? Without Europe, Germany cannot be German. Even the reunification of the two Germanys was made possible only by the project of constructing a European peace order. In the euro crisis, too, what is (or should become) “German” and what “European” are becoming mixed in new ways. Germany is too sovereign, powerful, European and economically interconnected to be able to enjoy the luxury of not rescuing the euro. An elephant doesn’t inspire confidence by pretending to be a dove. Thus the road to the EE is once again paved with good European intentions. Those involved are always at pains to replace the German taboo word “power” with “responsibility”, the favourite word of the Germans.
Angela Merkel spells out “European responsibility” in accordance with the maxims of power governing German euro-nationalism. This means that German answers must be sought to the European crisis, indeed the German culture of stability must ultimately provide the master key to a broader European answer to the European crisis. In this way a mixture of authentic commitment to Europe and genuine nationalism has arisen, a mixture of more or less feigned commitment to Europe for foreign consumption, but also of more or less feigned nationalism for the growing horde of Eurosceptics among the Germans. This is an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable on the basis of power pragmatism: to rescue the euro and the EU and win elections against the background of an anti-European mood in Germany.
The chancellor is cutting European values down to national size: internally democracy, externally “losers can’t be choosers”. The magic formula of post-war Germany, “stability policy”, means once again renouncing political freedom – the freedom of others. In a mixture of high-minded confusion, hypocrisy, Protestant severity and European calculation peculiar to Merkel, the Merkel government is elevating German euro-nationalism into the guiding principle for intervening in the economic policy of the offending countries. At stake is nothing less than civilising the debt-mad South – in the name of “economic reason”, “Europe” and the “world economy”. Here the slogan is: The more European our fiscal policy is, the more German it becomes.
However, the self-obstruction of the EU could ease in the shadow of this hegemonic structure – it could! In fact, the question of how this enormous space comprising 27 member states should be governed if, before every decision, 27 heads of government, cabinets and parliaments have to be convinced, has answered itself, as it were. In contrast to the EU, the EE is de facto a community of two speeds. In future only the euro zone (not the EU) will belong to the avant-garde of Europeanisation. This could represent an opportunity for the urgently needed institutional imagination.
There has long been talk of an “economic government”. What is behind this need to be fleshed out, negotiated and tested. Sooner or later the highly controversial euro bonds will also be introduced. The German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, is already arguing for the introduction of the tax on financial transactions which, in the larger EU, would certainly have foundered on the veto of Great Britain.
Yet this path leading to a Europe of apparatchiks – a Brussels or Berlin politburo – is the completion of the birth defect of the organised Europe and pushes the paradox of a really-existing Europe without Europeans to an extreme. Even more, the citizens of the lender nations regard themselves as being fleeced, the citizens of the borrower nations as being disenfranchised. For both, Europe is turning into the enemy. Instead of a Europe of citizens, an angry civic movement against Europe is taking shape.
Sixth: Create the Europe of the citizens now!
US President John F. Kennedy once astonished the world with his idea to create a Peace Corps. By analogy, the neo-European Angela Merkel could surprise the world with the insight and initiative that the euro crisis is not just about the economy but about initiating the Europeanisation of Europe from below, about diversity and self-determination, about a political and cultural space in which the citizens no longer confront each other as enemies who have been disenfranchised or fleeced. Create the Europe of the citizens now!
The talk of “enlargement” and “deepening” would thereby acquire a new meaning. What would have to be enlarged and deepened would be democracy in Europe. The rule of law and the market are not sufficient. Freedom needs a third pillar if it is to become secure; its name is European civil society or, in more concrete terms, doing Europe or European civic activity. Such an autonomous civic practice, providing basic funding for Europe’s unemployed youth, would doubtlessly cost a pile of money but just a fraction of the zeros which have been, and are probably going to be, swallowed up by the rescue of the banks.
Have no fear of direct democracy! Without transnational opportunities for interventions from below, without European referenda on European themes which send a shudder through the ocean liner Europe, the whole enterprise will fail. Why not directly elect the president of the European commission in an election campaign involving all European citizens on the same day, which would thus for the first time be European in the strict sense? It might also make sense to appoint a new constitutional convention which this time would confer democratic legitimation on another Europe – let us name it the “European Community of Democracies” (ECD). That would be a beginning, not the answer to the European crisis.
At stake is the opposition of social-human reason to self-destructive risk capitalism, the kind of opposition which the philosopher Ernst Bloch once called “pacifism of strength” in contrast to a “pacifism of weakness” which he described as a “familiar mixture of lemonade and platitude”. If one really wants to spell this future enfranchisement out in European terms, then the saccharine-sweet formula of “European understanding” is not sufficient. We have to speak of the Europe of the “citoyen”, the “citizen”, the “burgermaatschappij”, the “ciudadano”, the “opywatel”, etc., thus of the antagonisms hidden in the unifying formula “Europe of the citizens”. For it is a well-known fact that each of these national cultural key concepts stands for a different path to political modernity, hence for a different historical horizon of experience and memory which to this day profoundly shapes the understanding of democracy, the political institutions and cultures of the European states.
The cosmopolitan European democracy which binds the national democracies cannot be a national democracy. How is a European democracy possible without disenfranchising the national parliaments? Assuming one recognises that implementing democratic rights involves and requires many paths, arms, channels and guarantees – supranational, transnational, national and local – can the democratic empowerment of a cosmopolitan Europe be accompanied by a strengthening of its national democracies in the member states?
In a nutshell: Then the new Europe would not follow the model of German euro-nationalism but would be an emerging European Community of Democracies. And sharing sovereignty becomes a multiplier of power and democracy.
