A different ‘new story’ for the EU

James Gubb, 20 February 2007

One can easily agree with the premise of Timothy Garton Ash’s search for ‘the story Europe wants to tell’; namely that ‘Europe has lost the plot’. In an essay recently published in Prospect magazine Garton Ash states that ‘as we approach the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome…most Europeans have little idea where we’re coming from; far less do we share a vision of where we want to go’. Very true. And the vision he offers of focusing on shared goals – freedom, peace, law, prosperity, diversity and solidarity – is not necessarily a bad one; it’s just that he somehow assumes the current structure of the EU is the best way to go about achieving them.

Garton Ash opens his account by making three very good points about where any European ‘vision’ should or should not be going. Specifically that:
1. ‘Europe should have a capacity for self-criticism’;
2. ‘No good will come of a mythopoeic falsification of our history [retelling European history as the kind of teleological mythology characteristic of 19th century nation-building]’;
3. ‘[No] sense of European togetherness should be achieved by the negative stereotyping of an enemy or ‘other’’.
One reason why the European public is so apathetic and increasingly sceptical of the EU is precisely because European ‘elites’ have so often disdainfully rejected criticism of it from all quarters. Falsification of European history – as with any attempts to introduce a false notion of European citizenship or introduce a straight-jacketed ‘European curriculum’ – will only produce tension. As Garton Ash states: ‘what one nation wishes to forget, another wishes to remember’.
Quite correctly rejecting these notions, he then goes on to argue Europe should adopt a ‘new story’ composed of six common strands: freedom, peace, law, prosperity, diversity and solidarity. (Democracy comes under ‘freedom’.) Apparently all quite innocent; I wouldn’t really take issue with any of them being a legitimate goal of any society.
But what Garton Ash doesn’t make much reference to is the time-old debate in political philosophy and, of course, practical policy, about how to reach them. There is nothing in having such shared values across Europe that necessitates the ‘binding together in a political community [the EU]’, that Garton Ash talks of. We should concede that the EU has been an important catalyst of democracy across Europe; we should concede that the EU forms some system of ‘permanent, institutionalised, conflict resolution’; the EU is certainly a ‘community of law’; the EU is the world’s largest single market; the EU contains hugely diverse cultures; and the EU certainly embraces a ‘social’ goal.
But none of these (with the possible exception of the ‘social’ market) require the perpetuation of political integration and harmonisation in the EU that Garton Ash apparently takes as a given. The EU was both an important catalyst of democracy and a means for conflict resolution prior to the flurry of treaties that followed the Single European Act, when it was much more an intergovernmental structure than a supranational one. The EU is a community of law, but then so are nation states; the difference being that law in nation states, law is made by elected politicians rather than unelected officials. Yes, the EU is a relatively prosperous area, and the single market (as the removal of barriers to the free movement of goods, services, capital and labour) has undeniably contributed to this. But, as Garton Ash refers to, protectionist policies, like the CAP, and excessive regulation and social policy have ‘almost certainly not’. Diversity is also more likely to flourish in a looser, more intergovernmental, EU, than a unifying supranational one.
I have no problem with Garton Ash’s idea of ‘shared’ goals; it would be a healthy improvement on the current tendency of the EU to propagate only itself. As Garton Ash writes: ‘the stories of European freedom, peace or diversity can and should be told differently in Warsaw and Madrid, on the left and on the right…there need be no single one-size-fits-all version of our story’. But this is just it; why not also concede that a one-size-fits-all EU need not be?