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    Re: The European Coup Perry Anderson 2 Archived Message

    Posted by Keith-264 on December 14, 2020, 11:57 am, in reply to "The European Coup Perry Anderson 1"

    Perhaps with a view to seeing how such setbacks might be avoided, van Middelaar started to study pension systems in the EU at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. But worse was to follow. Cycling past the place de la Bastille a few months after 9/11, he was appalled to see a rag-tag crowd of youths waving red banners protesting against the American invasion of Afghanistan, and sat down to write a blistering attack on this idiocy, which appeared in the Dutch newspaper Trouw. After a few more imprecations against Sartre and other advocates of terror, he pointed out that even if bin Laden was not being hidden by the Taliban, no one in their right mind could be against a war on the regime in Kabul. The West stood for the values of civilisation, and was bringing modernity to Afghans and others across the world who craved it. Yet

    we Westerners, weighed down by the past, hardly even dare to understand this any longer. The White Man’s Burden, that heroic civilising mission depicted by Rudyard Kipling in his proud poem of 1899 as the destiny of the white race, has turned against us and become a true burden, a depressing sense of guilt about colonisation, slavery and economic exploitation of the developing world. Which now prevents us from understanding that colonisation did – indeed! – mean something good for the colonised. Colonisation brought schools, hospitals, science, emancipation of women. Colonisation brought modern reason and freedom within reach of individuals hitherto unable even to be individuals. Sure, colonial crimes occurred – rape, torture, institutional racism – and yet, what a beautiful body of work!

    Today, the main political question had become:

    Can human rights spread globally without the action of a Napoleon? The answer is no. Anyone who thinks that it can has a moralistic view of reality. Anyone who thinks that good may impose itself on the world without struggle or the use of power is mistaken. Anyone with a basic understanding of politics knows that what is good does not come automatically. That may require an army. A Napoleon. Or a George W. Bush. A price must be paid if we want human rights to spread. We should not blame Napoleon for using violence, but for not going far enough. Napoleon’s mistake was that he employed freedom and equality as symbols to help his army win battles rather than incorporating these concepts in sturdy institutions in the constitutions which he scattered across Europe. To continue the analogy: our hope must be that Bush finishes his job thoroughly, dragging Afghanistan into modernity with bombs and abundance.

    ‘And we, meanwhile, are patiently waiting for a modern-day Kipling, who realises that not white but modern people have a world-historical mission: to sing proudly and unabashedly in praise of the Modern Man’s Burden,’ van Middelaar ended his peroration.

    By​ this time he was bored with pensions, and asked a conservative friend in the VVD who was working with the Dutch commissioner in Brussels if he could find him an internship where he might study power close up. An interview was arranged. Van Middelaar has a highly developed sense of self-presentation, which he likes to dramatise. Introducing Politicide a decade later, he would write: ‘My book did not pass unnoticed. It was a surprise that an unknown 26-year-old should unexpectedly dare to challenge consecrated French thinkers. Without knowing it, I was putting into practice an aphorism of Stendhal: entry into society should be conducted as if it were a duel. And what opponents I had chosen!’ It took some nerve to pass off this plagiarism from Nietzsche as his own discovery. Van Middelaar’s account of his ascent to Brussels in The Passage to Europe is another little piece of theatre. More original and no less theatrical:

    In another era, on Tuesday, 27 March 2001, I took the train from Paris, where I was living at the time, to Brussels. I was nervous. A student in political philosophy living in a garret of no more than 18 sq metres, I arduously put on a suit that morning. Approaching the metro, I asked a surprised, well-dressed passer-by whether he could help me fix the knot in my tie. I was on my way to the European quarters in Brussels, where I was to have lunch with the Dutch European commissioner and his personal assistant.

    The commissioner with whom he landed a post was Frits Bolkestein. In the Dutch political landscape Bolkestein cut an unusual figure. Son of a president of the court of Amsterdam, after a polymathic education – degrees successively in mathematics, philosophy, Greek, economics (at the LSE) and law – he joined Shell, serving for sixteen years as an overseas executive in East Africa, Central America, London, Indonesia and Paris. In 1976, prompted, he would later explain, by his experience in handling trade unions in El Salvador, where he was posted during one of its death-squad regimes, he became interested in politics, and quit Shell to run for parliament on the VVD ticket. By this time the ‘pillar’ system of postwar Dutch politics, in which the electorate was divided into four columns, Catholic, Protestant, Labour and the liberal VVD, had been simplified by the merger of Catholic and Protestant forces in the Christian Democratic Appeal, or CDA, and voting had become more fluid. The liberal sector of the system, upper-class and originally anti-clerical, rooted in business and the bureaucracy, was politically the weakest. Though the VVD was a standard, if not invariable, fixture of the coalitions on which all governments were based, there hadn’t been a liberal prime minister since the First World War.

    The hallmarks of Dutch political culture, as first criticised by the political scientist Hans Daalder, and later celebrated by the American Arend Lijphart, were an imperative of consensus, a requirement for secrecy in reaching it, and a cult of practicality. Consensus demanded a permanent disposition to accommodation between parties, best reached behind closed doors. Businesslike deals precluded a battle of ideas. The supreme national virtue of Zakelijkheid – down-to-earth, no-nonsense practicality, with a self-righteous timbre distinct from its more neutral cousin, the German Sachlichkeit – had no time for intellectualism. In the memorable dictum of the country’s current premier, the VVD leader Mark Rutte: ‘vision is like an elephant that obstructs one’s sight.’ For Lijphart the system was an admirably ‘consociational’ democracy. For Daalder, it was a legacy of the ‘regent mentality’ of the country’s pre-democratic patriciate, a merchant class facing neither a powerful nobility nor fractious plebs, settling affairs of state comfortably between themselves without need of concepts or credos, confident of the passivity of the masses. The political elite of postwar Netherlands was their complacent descendant.

    Into this scene Bolkestein burst like a bazooka. He had plenty of ideas; and as a fluent writer and eloquent speaker, no inhibitions in aggressively expressing them. He soon made his mark. In the 1980s, the dominant figure in Dutch politics was Ruud Lubbers, a Christian Democrat who led the country for a dozen years and was for a time regarded by Thatcher as the nearest thing to a soulmate she had in Europe. But to her disappointment he domesticated rather than crushed the trade unions, and mindful of the golden rule of consensus, administered only moderate doses of privatisation and welfare reduction. Bolkestein, by contrast, had read his Hayek and was contemptuous of such paltering. What the economy and society of the country needed was a true neoliberal makeover, breaking the clammy grip of corporatism and welfare dependence to release the creativity of the free market. Nor were these tares the only threats to modern liberalism. Culturally speaking, in the 1960s the Dutch elites had surrendered to a local New Left floating hare-brained schemes and upending moral restraints, and were now failing to stem an inrush of Muslim immigration whose religious beliefs and customs were incompatible with Western values. There, Huntington and Kristol were needed to fortify Friedman and Hayek. With this combination of neoliberal and neoconservative ammunition, Bolkestein did battle within the VVD too, catching the tide of a New Right that swelled a season later than in the Anglosphere, generating Pim Fortuyn and Geert Wilders as successive tribunes of a libertarian economics and Islamophobic politics. Both were formed in the VVD, Wilders serving for a time as Bolkestein’s chief of staff.

    But though by 1990 Bolkestein led his party in parliament – a position that did not automatically make him its candidate for premier – he remained in a minority within it. The party, moreover, was now in a coalition headed not even by the Christian Democrats but Labour – Bolkestein declined to become a minister. Invigorated by him, the VVD increased its vote in 1994, and in 1998 achieved its best ever result. But it was still in second place behind Labour, and believing that the Labour leader, Wim Kok, would refuse him the foreign ministry, Bolkestein quit parliament. In his hardline combination of free market economics and anti-immigrant sentiment, he had been the Dutch version of Enoch Powell. Both proved lastingly influential, yet remained outsiders and personal failures. Though Bolkestein was well-read and, compared with the norms of the Dutch elite, at home with ideas, he was not, as he confessed, really an intellectual, more of ‘a politician and pamphleteer’. By background a businessman, and not a dedicated ideologue like Powell, he lacked the latter’s scholarly and poetaster side, and was not a temperamental isolate. Blunt but convivial, he never lacked companions and collaborators. He was not a political failure: though he never became premier, he paved the way for the triumph of the VVD under Rutte, who has been prime minister of the Netherlands for a decade.

    By way of compensation for frustration in The Hague, the job Bolkestein took in 1999 at Brussels was and is, after its president, one of the most powerful in the European Commission, the internal market portfolio. It was here that German ordo-liberals once worked to ensure that European integration conformed to the principles of a free market, keeping dirigisme at bay. Bolkestein was a natural in the post, and tutoring van Middelaar in the ways of the Commission evidently found him a good learner, since he extended the younger man’s internship. There van Middelaar observed close up, and perhaps even had a speechwriting hand in, the final episode of Bolkestein’s public career, the Directive on Services he promulgated in spring 2004, which decreed that firms could in future employ workers at the pay and conditions current in that firm’s country of origin rather than of their work – in effect, the lower wages prevailing in the newly incorporated states of Eastern Europe, rather than those customary or obligatory in Western Europe. No decision made by the Commission before or since has caused such an uproar. Deputies agitated, trade unions mobilised, port workers stormed the European Parliament, protesters a hundred thousand strong descended on Brussels. Uniquely, too, the directive had to be watered down, and eventually converted into something not unlike its opposite. By that time, his term of office over, Bolkestein was safely at home in a bespoke chair at the University of Leiden. It may have been another kind of lesson for van Middelaar. Europe was not necessarily always best served by the Commission.

    Van​ Middelaar’s own career proceeded smoothly upwards. After service in Brussels, he became political secretary to Jozias van Aartsen, Bolkestein’s successor as leader of the VVD in The Hague. There the muffled world of the Binnenhof, where the Dutch elite transacted discreet business between consenting parties, was revealed to him – it was an eye-opening opportunity, he explained to a friend, to dwell for a time at the centre of power. Van Aartsen, averse to Bolkestein’s tranchant, came from the temporising moderate wing of the party, to which van Middelaar readily adapted, rising high in his chief’s confidence. When a commission including Ankersmit was formed to produce a new manifesto for the party in 2005, van Middelaar wrote the final eighty-page document, For Freedom, a carefully weighed composite of (classical, social and neo) liberal themes. Ingredients included a flat tax and clearing beggars off the streets, a directly elected prime minster and the curbing of quangocrats, private pensions and strict compliance with the EU’s Stability Pact, help for the neediest but no truck with a basic income. ‘The primary responsibility for material well-being lies with the individual himself. Private initiative, self-reliance, entrepreneurial spirit and willingness to roll up one’s sleeves are completely normal and in principle accessible to everyone. It is pre-eminently the hard-working middle class who embodies these liberal virtues.’

    The VVD could be proud that ‘when immigration and integration were still taboo topics’, it had been the first to see that ‘the unregulated influx of asylum seekers and the uncritical embrace of multiculturalism would cause major problems’. While it did not countenance Islamophobia, it warned Muslims what could be their fate if they sought to introduce fundamentalism into the country: ‘In 1535 a group of Anabaptists rebelled in Amsterdam, seeking to build a religious theocracy. The city council crushed this radical uprising, to the great satisfaction of most citizens.’ That was a century, according to For Freedom, to which people should look for inspiration. The Dutch were now doing well. On average, they were satisfied or very satisfied with their lives. But they should always remember that ‘the desire for freedom is the foundation of our nation,’ as was not the case for their neighbours:

    The origin of our country does not lie in an elusive distant past, as in the case of England or France. Nor was the country forged from above by a strong will, like Germany or Italy. No, our country was born at the end of the 16th century from the tough, concerted effort to wrest freedom from the authority of a tyrannical Spanish king. Freedom and tolerance ignited the light of our Golden Age. These two enabled the miracle of a country inhabited by barely two million people that left every other European country far behind in entrepreneurial spirit, culture, science and political-philosophical wisdom.

    Every country has its own brand of smugness. But patriotic uplift and a pledge of regressive taxation were of little avail to the VVD, which under van Aartsen’s stewardship was steadily sinking in the polls. Six months later, after telling just two intimates – Rutte and van Middelaar – that he would resign if the party fell below 14 per cent in the upcoming municipal elections, van Aartsen quit when it failed to do so. Rutte became leader, the manifesto was forgotten and van Middelaar out of a job. He retired to his study, and over the next two years wrote the book that would make him famous. Published in 2009 (the English-language edition appeared in 2013), it showed how much he had learned since his time in Paris. The Passage to Europe is not the masterpiece of the extravagant bouquets that have greeted it. But it is a work of impressive scholarship and historical imagination, whose range of intellectual reference and polish of style make it unlike anything written about the EU before or since. Van Middelaar took great pains with its literary surface, if not always to its advantage. The title of his book, he once explained, contained a four-fold allusion: to anthroplogical rites of passage, to Forster’s Passage to India, to Benjamin’s Passagenwerk and to a romance by ... Giscard d’Estaing. Epigraphs strewn from Tolstoy to Monty Python by way of Bismarck and Bagehot, Foucault and Arendt, are less than value-added. Such pretensions aside, however, van Middelaar produced something rare in the literature on European integration: an attractively readable account of it. The account, moreover, is powerful and original, fruit of the distinctive blend of philosophy and history taught him by Ankersmit.

    It opens by remarking that discourses about Europe have revolved around offices, states and citizens, with corresponding theories about whether it is best conceived in terms of functionalism, inter-governmentalism or constitutionalism: the first oriented to a static present, the second to a familiar past, the third to a longed-for future. Yet none of these passes the critical test of genuine historicity, that flux of unpredictable events which makes of government, van Middelaar writes, citing Pocock, ‘a series of devices for dealing with contingent time’. To do so requires, instead, that three different spheres in which integration has unfolded be distinguished: an outer sphere comprising Europe understood as a continent – including states that are not part of the Community – in the world of powers at large, where borders and wars obtain; an inner sphere, comprising the Commission, the Court of Justice and Parliament of today’s EU; and an intermediate sphere composed of its member states as they deliberate in the Council of Ministers and its apex, the European Council, where heads of government assemble.

    For the founders of modern political thought – Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau – the primordial question was how the state could arise from a condition of nature composed of an anarchy of individuals: how, in particular, could the unanimity required for a pact of civil union to bring a state into being lead to majority decisions once it was constituted? The same puzzle, van Middelaar argues, is posed by the emergence of a unitary European polity out of an anarchic order, not of individuals, but of states themselves. To answer it, he reconstructs the path from sectoral agreements between the original Six – France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg – derived from the Schuman Plan of 1950, which set up the European Coal and Steel Community, to the broader European Economic Community, or ‘Common Market’, created by the same Six with the Treaty of Rome seven years later. Under the treaty, a permanent Commission situated in Brussels, its personnel appointed by the member states, would submit proposals implementing the articles of the Treaty to a Council of Ministers representing their governments, with decisions requiring their unanimous consent, with the provision that after eight years majority voting could occur. Once set up, the Commission rapidly started to expand its activities. Its first president, the bumptious German diplomat Walter Hallstein, openly spoke of it as the ‘executive’ – i.e. government – of Europe, and in 1962 sought to bounce the Council into giving it a substantial tax base, and the hitherto powerless Parliament created by the treaty, regarded by the Commission as an ally, rights over the Community budget. Germany, Italy and the Netherlands backed him. By this time, however, de Gaulle ruled in Paris and he killed the scheme by calmly withdrawing France from the proceedings of the Community, paralysing it. The ensuing ‘crisis of the empty chair’ was resolved by the so-called Luxembourg Compromise of 1966, which in effect accepted that a decision could not be taken by a majority in the Council if ‘very important interests’ of a member state were at issue, giving that state a veto. ‘Supranationality has gone,’ de Gaulle would declare. ‘France will remain sovereign.’

    The horse, however, had already bolted, through a door unnoticed by de Gaulle. Three years earlier, the European Court of Justice had ruled that national legislation must comply with Community regulations, and where the two conflicted, courts in the country concerned must enforce the latter. Nothing in the Treaty of Rome authorised this. The court invoked the ‘spirit’ of the treaty, rather than its letter. Van Middelaar makes no bones about this, celebrating it as ‘a masterful move’. True, ‘the court was bluffing,’ since ‘who can know the spirit of a pact?’ But it was to be congratulated for doing so: ‘The court staged a coup on 5 February 1963 in the name of a new, auto-nomous legal order, while claiming that – although no one had been aware of it – this order was as old as the treaty itself. So its infringement of the status quo was concealed.’ Better still, in a second ‘handsomely constructed self-affirmation’, the court ruled a year later that since Community law overrode national legislation, citizens could appeal to it against the states to which they belonged. It was, in juridical language, of ‘direct effect’. In the vocabulary of The Passage to Europe, the intermediate sphere where the general had checked the ambitions of the Commission was silently trumped by the strongest actor in the inner sphere.

    In the event, the outcome in the intermediate sphere wasn’t an impassable obstacle to further European unity. Though the veto remains ‘an invisible weapon in negotiations’ between member states, van Middelaar argues that its effect is to foster not conflict but agreement. ‘It is the psychological certainty of being able to block a resolution if you truly oppose it that makes consensus possible.’ Indeed, even when the principle of majority decisions was formally enshrined in certain areas of the Single European Act of 1987, it was rarely exercised, consensus typically being reached ‘not in the shadow of the veto, but in the shadow of the vote’. Should a member state resist a majority decision, it cannot be enforced, short of foreign occupation, but pressure can be put on it to conform by ‘other means’. The alchemy of the Union is to achieve unanimity through the threat of majority, rather than to pass from unanimity to majority as imagined in classical theory.

    Such was the rule. There was one decisive exception, however. In 1985 the European Council met in Milan to discuss whether, to facilitate the proposed Single European Act, essentially intended to extend the common market from goods to services, the Treaty of Rome should be amended to convert the Community into a Union, which required an inter-governmental conference. Led by France and Germany, which had been secretly planning such revisions beforehand, seven out of the ten member states were in favour. Three – Britain, Denmark and Greece – were opposed. By the convention established at Luxembourg, that was more than enough to block the move. Overnight, however, Italy – host and chair of the meeting – suddenly announced, in the person of its premier, Bettino Craxi, that since convening an inter-governmental conference was a procedural rather than a substantive issue, he was putting it to the vote. Thatcher, along with her allies Papandreou and Schlüter, was outraged. Craxi was not deterred, and the motion passed seven to three. Thatcher was furious, but – she lived to regret this – did not use her veto because she regarded the SEA as in some degree her own liberalising handiwork, as it was. Van Middelaar can scarcely contain his enthusiasm at the outcome. Taking ‘the opportunity to capitalise on the flow of time’, the ‘brilliance of Craxi’s bluff’ had delivered a ‘magnificent moment of passage’, opening ‘the way to Europe’s permanent renewal’ and endowing ‘the Community with a robust supreme authority’. How was it done? ‘Secret: a coup disguised as a procedural decision.’

    After Milan, the ‘gate was unbarred’ to successive treaty revisions: 1986 (Luxembourg-The Hague), 1992 (Maastricht), 1997 (Amsterdam), 2001 (Nice), 2007 (Lisbon) – every one approved by a unanimous decision of the heads of government, each a step further towards a compact European Union, with juridical authority over its member states. The only national court daring to question this constitutional supremacy, the German Bundesverfassungsgericht, after emitting a few grumbles at the Treaty of Lisbon, sensibly set legal niceties aside, since these would have caused ‘an acute political crisis’, and took no action. Lisbon now empowers the European Council, via the discreet device of a passerelle, to make treaty alterations without any need for special conferences or ratifications, merely the Italianate blessing of a ‘unanimous non-refusal’ by national parliaments, which would prove so useful during the euro crisis.

    If these were the critical episodes that brought the Union as we know it today into being, what of the capacity of Europe to act as a single political body in the face of the outside world? There, van Middelaar explains in a resonant exordium invoking Machiavelli’s famous image of fortune as a raging river that can either flood a landscape with disastrous consequences or be diked and channelled with practical foresight, the Community must contend with aleatory, unpredictable events in the 1960s for ‘history has no plan, no logic’ – and be tested by them. It had to ‘step into the river of time’ and see how far it might master the current, as Machiavelli taught his contemporaries that heroes of virtue could. In the second part of The Passage to Europe, van Middelaar looks at how the Community fared when it did so. His story unfolds in three stages. In the first, 1950 to 1957, all six member states relied on an American umbrella for their security; only Paris – typically playing a double game – pretended otherwise. Still, in these years it was France, possessed of political tenacity, bureaucratic discipline, diplomatic skills and an eye for the long term that its partners could not match, which made the running. Determined to recover control of its destiny after 1945, it brought the Community into existence with the Schuman Plan and later gave shape to the intermediate sphere. Germany, needing both America and France for its political redemption after the Third Reich, preferred to operate in the inner sphere. Britain merely wanted not to be excluded, without being willing to participate. Critical to the birth of the Common Market was the shock of Suez in the outer sphere, when the US forced Britain out of the attack on Egypt. Abandoned by its ally on the battlefield, France turned to Europe with the Treaty of Rome, founded on an understanding between Adenauer and Mollet.

    A long second phase, lasting from 1958 to 1989, began with the Franco-German deal exchanging the agricultural subsidies Paris wanted for the competition policies patronised by Bonn; after repeated setbacks, it saw eventual British entry into the Community, once France realised that the UK could be a counterweight to the growing economic prowess of Germany. Then came the oil shock of 1973, when ‘Arab aggressors’ in the Middle East imposed an embargo on Europe, and the Bretton Woods system finally collapsed. In this dual crisis, van Middelaar writes, ‘the member states did not transfer their political voice to the institutions of the inner sphere as a way of becoming better able to respond to the demands of the outside world.’ Rather, ‘the heads of state staged a coup, uninvited,’ when at French initiative – Giscard’s incalculable contribution to the unity of the continent – they started regular summits and ‘as a result the in-between world of the member states took shape’, evolving into the European Council, the commanding instance of the Union to come.

    The third stage of Europe’s encounter with the rapids of time came when East Germany collapsed in 1989. The ensuing crisis led to the deal struck between Kohl and Mitterrand at Strasbourg: France would accept the reunification of Germany, making the Federal Republic the preponderant power in Europe, in exchange for German acceptance of a single currency, dethroning the Deutschmark. Two years later the Treaty of Maastricht sealed this bargain, indeed went further, encompassing the Community within the grander structure of a Union equipped with its own foreign policy, as well as agencies for justice and internal security. Thereafter, the end of the Cold War assured the entry of the former neutrals Austria, Finland and Sweden into the Union, and then its progressive enlargement into Eastern Europe, more than doubling the number of signatories to Maastricht. An important side-effect was to qualify the juridical fiction that all member states were equal by introducing weighted voting in the Council of Ministers, to ensure that newcomers from the East did not by mere number rise above their real station in the Union.

    Enlargement was a great achievement. But when ‘fortune wreaked havoc’, as Yugoslavia descended into a series of civil wars, the new Union proved powerless to dam the waters of disaster. America alone, though it was reluctant to become involved, put a stop to genocide in the Balkans. But when another genocide loomed in Kosovo, Europe ‘drew a line in the sand’, as Joschka Fischer put it, or as van Middelaar would have it, ‘Nato bombed Serbia. Europe had finally shouldered its regional responsibility,’ as it would do again in Libya. But divisions and uncertainties still lay ahead. Europe was irrelevant when 9/11 struck, and split over the war in Iraq. Nevertheless, in 2003 a Franco-German agreement moved the Union forward once more, introducing two vital innovations: the election of the Spitzenkandidat of whichever bloc of parties won the most votes in the European Parliament as Commission president; and more consequentially, the creation of a no longer rotating but permanent president of the European Council, appointed by its members for a five-year term, and holding – an ‘institutional revolution’ – no national office. With this innovation, Europe acquired a figure who could speak for it at the highest international level, where previously it had none. ‘That void had now been filled.’ Already strengthened, the Union could dispatch crisis missions, military or civilian, across the world, from Kosovo to Iraq, Mali to Afghanistan, and in the war between Russia and Georgia of 2008 stopped the Kremlin from seizing Tbilisi, Sarkozy flying to Moscow and extracting a ceasefire, in the name of ‘the ancient French state and the power bloc of Europe’. The upshot, van Middelaar concludes, is that ‘under pressure from inevitable appearances by Fortune, the Union is clambering up into the outer ranges of high politics. In light of the past, this is remarkable.’

    In​ the third and last part of his book, van Middelaar moves to the problem of locating or constructing, as he puts it, a ‘European “we”’ that accepts the decisions of the Union as its own. In the 18th century, the unworkable fiction of a state of nature out of which by common decision a civil society could arise, gave way to the workable idea of a nation that in fortunate circumstances, as in the Thirteen Colonies of America, could generate a state enjoying ex post facto acceptance of the sleight of hand that had circumvented the need for unanimity among them, even if in less fortunate cases – Germany in 1848 – this manoeuvre misfired. What these differing experiences made clear, however, was that in all cases ‘the initiative lies with the representatives,’ who must precede the represented and call them into existence as a collective body. For the summons to be effective, more than power from above and habit from below are required, since if a ‘we’ is to come into being, laws and institutions – and their agents: judges, civil servants, police – must be accepted as in some sense ‘ours’, in the fashion of Hart’s citizens who abide by primary rules (do not steal) because they accept the secondary rules behind them (their legitimacy). Over many years, politicians have striven to create that identity for Europe, for politicians can no more do without a public than a football match without spectators, who may applaud or boo the players but do not question the rules of the game. To date, the efforts of such politicians have been of limited effect. But the geopolitical context has now changed in a direction more favourable to them. For with the end of the Cold War, the division of the planet into First, Second and Third Worlds has disappeared, and big powers – America, China, India, perhaps tomorrow Latin America – detached from what was once the Old World have emerged, demarcating Europeans in a new way.

    In seeking to attach Europeans to a Union they can call their own, van Middelaar argues, the projectors of the EU have employed three basic strategies that by historical association may be termed German, Roman and Greek. The German strategy, pursued above all by the Commission in the inner sphere of the EU, has sought, in line with the tradition of Fichte and other 19th-century pioneers of German nationalism, to foster a sense of common identity among Europeans by a work of symbolic animation. Faced with low voter turnout to the Parliament in Strasbourg, the blue and gold flag was lifted from the (unrelated) Council of Europe of 1949, with its nearly fifty members, and ceremonially displayed whenever and wherever bureaucratically possible; Beethoven’s music to Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ was adopted as an official anthem; a pantheon of Founders created to baptise squares, buildings, chairs. Euro coins with appropriate symbols were minted; European values declaimed; European ‘criteria’ for accession codified. All attempts to give a cultural and historical grounding to the political construct of the Union, however, remain somewhat arbitrary so long as it still does not actually encompass geographical Europe. Only when all its states are safely gathered under the roof of the Union can the German strategy come to a natural fruition.

    By contrast, the Roman strategy relies, as once the empire founded by Augustus, on material benefits: in classical times, order and provision – protection from barbarians and distribution of grain supplies. Protection is no longer an issue. It is provision that can inspire citizens with loyalty to the Union. Unimpeded travel across borders; inexpensive phone calls; access to hospitals anywhere: these are familiar, everyday advantages conferred by the EU, available to anyone. Rights to live and work anywhere in the Union, though universal too, are more ambiguous: a boon for elites, less so for the masses. Benefits that involve redistribution – so winners and losers – are inevitably more divisive than symbols. The Common Agricultural Policy recalls the corrupting clientelism of ancient Rome, the Cohesion Fund is a source of geographical dispute, ‘compulsory solidarity’ reawakens national animosities. ‘Europe is always a benefactor to some at the expense of others’ – typically taxpayers in the better-off countries, creating little sense of fellowship. Only the UK ever regarded European integration as legitimated simply by economic gains. The Eurobarometer readings of the Commission can measure only Roman-style acclamation.

    The Greek strategy banks not on the creation of a sense of Europe as ‘our people’, along German lines, or ‘to our advantage’, along Roman lines, but as a matter of ‘our concern’. In ancient Greece the public was at once ‘spectator and participant’: not ‘as a player’, but like the chorus in Greek tragedy, whose part lay in its ‘voice’, which Nietzsche held more original and important than the action itself. So what a political body in search of a Greek-style public can give it is a voice: that is, a ‘say in decision-making’, or a ‘drama’ that captivates it. Europe, van Middelaar assures his readers, has made ‘a huge effort’ to grant its population a say in decision-making. But can there be Greek legitimacy without German identity – a European democracy with a demos? Commission and Parliament have befriended each other in their quest to become the executive and legislature of the Union. Yet though the Parliament has acquired more and more powers since 1979, it has not won the favour of voters, who have shown less and less interest in it. Bestowal on them of a ‘European citizenship’ which confers no new rights is little more than a marketing gimmick, he argues. The Parliament is not a tribune of the people; it acts like a court musician.

    The truth, van Middelaar confesses, is that European politics fail to excite: the public is bored by them. To become engaged, it needs conflict and drama, but the Union proceeds by consensus. In the past, de-dramatisation of the European project was a great merit of the Commission – Monnet’s ‘flight from history into bureaucracy’ was far-sighted, allowing Brussels to operate out of sight on economic issues after more ambitious schemes like the European Defence Community collapsed. Meetings of the Council are more visible, but in these too disagreements are muffled. So the public still has its doubts about the project. But it is necessary to be realistic. In an existing democracy, citizens come first, electing representatives who come into being at their decision. But the foundation of a democracy reverses this order: first come the representatives, who speak before they are appointed to be such, then come those whom they will represent in the polity they found, or as van Middelaar more expressively puts it, ‘first the players, then (if necessary) the chorus’. The parenthesis is a tribute to his candour. The upshot? ‘We could come straight out with it and call this second version the “coup sequence”. Every royal or imperial dynasty starts with a power grab; every founder is a usurper.’ Much energy is afterwards invested in smooth inheritance and cultivation of public goodwill, ‘but – as Lady Macbeth’s hands remind us – the founding act can never be completely expunged.’ Still, he continues imperturbably, ‘the legitimacy of power is not necessarily adversely affected by the fact that the public appears only afterwards – so long as it does appear.’ What might best conjure it into being? ‘The European political body,’ he concludes, ‘exists on condition that, in word and deed, it can thrill its manifold public for a moment.’ How might that occur? ‘Great events and crises sunder the closed horizon of waiting, sweeping away the boredom.’

    The​ Passage to Europe is, unquestionably, a tour de force. It unites an intricate conceptual structure with a set of provocative historical claims, and a wide command of the literature on the origins and vicissitudes of the Union, unfolded in an engaging register that moves fluently from the philosophical to the conversational. It is not difficult to see why it has met with such universal acclaim. Nor, given the pattern of European studies that have accreted round the institutions of the EU, why its tale of triumphant, if still incomplete progress towards the unity of the continent should have elicited so little critical scrutiny. One absence in it is so striking that it has occasionally been noticed. The book says virtually nothing about the economic record of European integration. The early rulings of the European Court, the Single European Act, the advent of Monetary Union, enter the narrative as juridical milestones on the road to union, but their economic outcomes receive no attention. The simple fact that what the Treaty of Rome created was a European Economic Community is whited out; the acronym EEC is nowhere to be found. This is not an oversight on van Middelaar’s part. It is a function of his insistence that the objectives of European integration – not a term he favours: he prefers ‘European project’ – were always political. Economic steps were a means to a political goal, not ends in themselves. In this he is certainly right. But, of course, since the overwhelming bulk of the activities and enactments of the Community that became a Union have always been, as they remain, economic in nature and in impact, the politics of integration cannot realistically be isolated from them.

    That said, the primacy of principle accorded to politics by van Middelaar is in itself an incontestable merit of his book. What becomes of politics in his hands is another matter, for a second striking feature of The Passage to Europe is the absence, not just of any substantive economic history, but of virtually any sense of the actual political landscape of Europe. A veil of abstraction falls over partisan identities and conflicts. To all intents and purposes, political parties join economic statistics in the oubliette of his retrospect. In three hundred pages, a single brief paragraph adverts to Christian and Social Democrats getting together at the beginnings of the story, before swiftly segueing to the more congenial topic of Charlemagne. The only time an election warrants mention is when de Gaulle is frustrated of a first-round victory by French farmers in 1965, preventing him from going too far in hostility to Brussels, though even then the identity of the party which forced him to a second round remains an anonym. If despite the book’s profession of its primacy, it is void of politics in its most commonly used sense, one of the reasons is certainly that at Euro level ‘parties’ are wraiths without substance: labels for legislators conglomerated out of disparate national outlooks and conditions, with no reality outside the chamber in which they sit, where a kind of permanent grand coalition – in effect, an institutional cartel – effaces even the formal distinctions between them, a residuum of pariahs aside.

    Since the European Parliament lacks any of the ordinary character of a legislature, van Middelaar is realistic in terming it essentially a court musician to the powers of the Union. But this does not, of course, mean that the political careers and affiliations of the actors involved in the events around which his narrative revolves can be bracketed as having no bearing. The effect of doing so is blandly apologetic. The background of the judges in Luxembourg, whose decisions made European history, is left a complete blank. As for statesmen, what innocent reader could guess that the hero of the drama at Milan on which van Middelaar dwells with such relish, Bettino Craxi, leader of the Italian Socialist Party, was the single most corrupt Italian politician of his time, a figure so odious to his compatriots that he was pelted by the public with coins of contempt and had to flee the police to Tunisia, living out his days in gilded exile on the proceeds of his extortion of corporate funds and theft of taxpayers’ money? Other than extolling Craxi’s ‘brilliant bluff’ in the European Council, van Middelaar breathes not a word about him. In the world of princes, lowly though a court musician may be, the part of a courtier can be more demeaning.

    Where politics does intermittently kick into the story, it is in the form of diplomacy, the relation between states as distinct from electoral fronts or social forces. There, The Passage to Europe takes transactions between France and Germany as its guiding thread, justly treating them as the decisive powers shaping the course of integration, and the Council devised by France as the controlling institution in the complex machinery of the Union. Though adding little to a familiar picture, van Middelaar depicts the skein of Franco-German relations well, without neglecting those moments when lesser contributors – principally Benelux – left a mark on events. What the dominance of Paris and Bonn/Berlin has meant for the nature of the Union, not episodically but structurally, he leaves aside. The great merit of his account – its central value – is that more clearly and emphatically than any previous writer, he puts the Council where it belongs, as not just the formal apex, but the overmastering instance of the EU, the last but one part of its architecture to come into being, but the most salient of all. In this he can legitimately claim a realism in the tradition of the raison d’état transmitted, as Ankersmit would have it, from Machiavelli through Meinecke. Van Middelaar leaves little doubt of the much lower regard in which he holds the Commission, a useful but humdrum factory of rules, and the Parliament, a windy cavern of words. The Council, by contrast, is the seat of authoritative decisions. The Commission and the Parliament are given to utopian temptations of European federalism, for which he barely hides his scorn. The Council is the vehicle of the true sense in which Europe has moved, and is continuing to move, towards ever great union, as a club of states bound together by a common project that does not extinguish their identities as nations, but joins them in a common destiny, a new form of Schicksalsgemeinschaft.

    How then does the Council reach its decisions? Behind closed doors, in deliberations of which no minutes are kept, that issue in announcements under the seal of consensus. Van Middelaar supplies a graphic, if tactful, description of the psychological and political mechanisms that generate such consensus. That it is reached far beyond any popular say in the matters so decided, in conclaves where no public gaze is admitted, is not cause for any particular complaint or criticism. What his admiration for the Council in effect delivers is a transposition of the ‘regent mentality’ etched by Daalder from a Dutch onto a European plane: the quiet settling of affairs between elites in camera, above the heads of an inert populace. Here van Middelaar departs in one critical respect from Ankersmit, for whom too the future of the Union lay in the sober statecraft of the Council, not the idle fancies of the Commission or Parliament, but who insisted on the difference between the principles of compromise, which he championed, and the vapours of consensus preached by Rawls. In a compromise, the parties reach an agreement without concealing or suppressing their differences. In a consensus, on the other hand, the differences are erased: the authority of the Council is monotone. In this, its pendant is the Court of Justice, which also deliberates in secret and forbids publication of any dissenting judgment, delivering its rulings as unanimous edicts. Ctd....

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