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    Re: The European Coup Perry Anderson 3 Archived Message

    Posted by Keith-264 on December 14, 2020, 12:04 pm, in reply to "Re: The European Coup Perry Anderson 2"

    Logically,​ then, these are the two theatres of van Middelaar’s exposition, and encomium, of the ultimate secret of the construction of Europe, the key to understanding its success. That key lies in the term that recurs with compulsive insistence at the turning points of his story: the ‘coup’. The court’s decisions of 1963 and 1964 establishing the supremacy of Community over national legislation, without any warrant in the Treaty of Rome, were successive brilliant coups; the confection of the European Council was a coup; the imposition of a path to revising the treaty at the Council in Milan was a magnificent coup; the foundation of the Union itself was a coup. In each case, the definition of a coup is an action taken suddenly, by stealth, catching its victims unawares, and confronting them with a fait accompli that cannot be reversed. It is not a term associated with any form of democratic politics – just the opposite – and so finds no place, let alone celebration, in the polite vocabulary of liberal politics or jurisprudence. But its central role in van Middelaar’s thought is not a caprice. It can be traced to a significant passage in Ankersmit’s Political Representation, in which he observes of the notion of arcana imperii in early modern thought that illumination of it can be found in Gabriel Naudé’s ‘truly amazing book’, Considérations politiques sur les coups d’état, to which his attention had probably first been drawn by Meinecke’s Idee der Staatsräson, where it features as the most important 17th-century sequel to Machiavelli’s work.

    Linking the two thinkers was the belief that political action could not be judged by ordinary moral standards, since in Naudé’s words it required ‘bold and extraordinary deeds’ that ‘exceeded common law’ in the interests of ‘the public good’ – or, as Machiavelli had put it, a ruler should do good ‘where he could’, but ‘enter into evil, where he had to’. Heightening the contrast between them, Naudé radicalised the tension between the two codes of ethical and political conduct. But the more significant ways in which he differed from Machiavelli were historical and individual. Writing a century later, Naudé was living in a world from which the city-states of Renaissance Italy had, with the exception of Venice, vanished, overtaken by far more powerful absolutist monarchies whose invasions had made short work of Machiavelli’s dreams of a united peninsula; a world, too, now wracked by the wars of religion unleashed by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, forces beyond Machiavelli’s imagination. Naudé was not a diplomat or an office-holder, but a scholar given to acerbic demolitions of every kind of contemporary superstition – magic, astrology, prophecy. We owe to him and his friends perhaps the first version of our notion of what it is to demystify: in his vocabulary, ‘déniaiser’.

    Born in Paris to a modest family, Naudé was distinguished early on not just by exceptional intellectual gifts, but a keen and lifelong interest in politics, producing his first polemical pamphlet at the age of twenty, followed by a scalding text on the Rosicrucians when he was 22. Still in his twenties, he published a manifesto for a library that would include everything in print or in manuscript and be open to all, announcing what would become the principal passion of his life. Departing for Italy in 1631 as assistant to Cardinal di Bagno, the papal nuncio in Paris who had been reassigned to duties in Rome, Naudé got to know Poussin, corresponded with Mersenne and Grotius, Selden and Peiresc, and became an intimate of Campanella. A firm if unspoken atheist, apprehensive of the power of the Inquisition, he watched with concern the tribulations of Galileo, and read the early Hobbes with a mixture of admiration and alarm at his theological daring; an unrelenting foe of religious and every other sort of imposture, he extolled the intellectual and practical progress he thought the mark of the early 17th century.

    Machiavelli composed The Prince as a handbook of power in the hope of winning favour with Florence’s Medici rulers. Circulated only in manuscript during his life, once published posthumously it rapidly went through multiple editions. Naudé wrote Considérations politiques sur les coups d’état while in Rome as librarian for di Bagno. It begins – a literary unicum, Sainte-Beuve thought – with the word ‘But’. An identification with Lucretius follows on the opening page. Machiavelli had ‘broken the ice’ in treating mysteries of state, but he had made the mistake of revealing them to the world at large. Naudé had his work printed – ostensibly, perhaps actually – in just twelve copies, as too explosive for public consumption, and falsely as if produced in Rome, in fact probably in the safety of Leiden. Many of Machiavelli’s maxims are familiar worldwide, but his governing concepts – ‘virtue’ and ‘fortune’ – have lost currency. Naudé’s much more restricted focus gave the world a term that has lasted. His usage of it was wider than its current meaning, a coup d’état denoting not just the sudden overthrow of a regime, but any comparably unexpected action undertaken to found, preserve, alter or aggrandise a state. What defined such a stroke – here Naudé departed from Machiavelli – was always stealth. Ruthless, violent actions to seize or defend power – many are celebrated in The Prince – did not qualify, since they might be announced in advance, and conducted in broad daylight. Prior declaration or intimation was incompatible with a coup d’état, whose essence was not just suddenness, but secrecy. It must come as a complete surprise.

    Two further features follow, neither to be found in Machiavelli. The first and most conspicuous form taken by what the 18th-century English translation of Naudé called ‘masterstrokes of state’ was spectacularity. Where princes are forced to take extraordinary measures in ‘difficult and desperate circumstances’, there could be no ‘reasons, manifestos, declarations and all that might legitimate an action, precede its effects and operations’. For

    in coups d’état one sees the thunderbolt before one hears it growling in the clouds, it strikes before it flames forth, matins are said before the bells are rung, the execution precedes the sentence, everything is done à la judaique – he receives the stroke who thought to give it, dies who thought himself quite safe, suffers who never dreamed of pain; all is done at night, in obscurity, in fog and darkness.

    Such political bolts of lightning – the Sicilian Vespers, the massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day, the foundation of Islam – were comparable to those prodigies of nature that ‘do not show themselves every day – comets appear once a century, monsters, floods, eruptions of Vesuvius, earthquakes occur only rarely, and this rarity gives lustre and colour to many things that would lose them if used too frequently.’

    Terrifying, awesome, overpowering: such coups were a baroque version of classical kataplēxis. But coups could also take an opposite form: so inconspicuous as to be at first nearly invisible. The greatest enterprises or empires could be ‘brought to birth, or to ruin, by means that are of almost no consideration’, like ‘those great rivers that flow impetuously nearly from one end of the earth to the other, and are ordinarily so small at their source that a child can easily step across them’. Nature could produce from a tiny atom of semen an elephant or a whale. ‘It is the same in politics: a small neglected flicker often starts a great blaze.’ What else were ‘the extraordinary changes and revolutions in government and politics’ caused by ‘the spite of two monks armed only with their tongues and a pen’? Had Charles V acted in time, buying off or disposing of Luther, the spark could have been stamped out.

    Savonarola, another monk, had sought to bring a revolution to Florence, but in Machiavelli’s judgment, a ‘prophet without arms’ was fated to be destroyed. For Naudé, it was true that Campanella had failed to found a new faith in Calabria for want of arms, but the Reformation had shown that ideology could be a power stronger and more destructive than force:

    I hold discourse so powerful that till now I have found nothing that is exempt from its empire; for it is that which persuades and instils belief in the most fantastical religions, incites the most iniquitous wars, lends wings and colour to the blackest actions, calms and appeases the most violent seditions, excites rage and fury in the most peaceable souls, plants and cuts down heresies, instigates revolt in England, conversion in Japan.

    If a prince had a dozen preachers of eloquence at his disposition, ‘he would be better obeyed in his kingdom than if he had two powerful armies’. Naudé’s respect for ideology was founded on contempt for those swayed by it: the ‘populace’. Machiavelli had valued the plebs in Rome, seeing in the conflict with the patricians the source of the city’s dynamism, and attempted to reproduce an armed citizenry in Florence as the basis for its republic, if to no avail. For Naudé, society was divided intellectually, not politically. There were esprits forts, of whose number he was, an enlightened elite of free thinkers able to look steadily at the realities of the natural and social world without the delusions of religion or superstition (for him practically the same); and there were the ignorant, credulous, brutal, excitable masses, lower than beasts – who at least act by natural instinct – in their misuse of reason. Statecraft required that they be controlled by the very stigmata of their gullibility: the deceptions of superstition used to domesticate and bemuse them, as practised by the rulers of the ancient world proclaiming themselves gods, or the genius of Mohammed transcribing the words of God, or the sectaries of the present. ‘Since it is natural that most princes treat religion as charlatans and use it as a drug,’ he wrote, why should a clear mind be blamed for doing the same? That was why the thunderbolt of the coup d’état should resemble a supernatural event, a wonder petrifying those who witnessed it. Where for Machiavelli fortune was a river that might lead to inundation, but with prudence could be canalised, for Naudé the populace was a treacherous ocean – a recurrent image – swept by high winds and deadly tempests: it had simply to be navigated.

    Behind this difference of outlook was a distinctive philosophical vision and a determinate historical context. More radically than for Machiavelli, since not just politically but ontologically, for Naudé, mutability was the rule of all things: ‘Since it began its course, the great circle of the universe has never ceased to carry away kingdoms, religions, sects, towns, men, beasts, trees, stones and everything that is found and enclosed within this great machine; the heavens themselves are not exempt from change and corruption.’ Only ‘weak minds imagine that Rome will always be the seat of the Holy Fathers, and Paris that of the kings of France.’ In the face of such cosmic caducity, the mark of an esprit fort was ‘to see all things, hear all things, do all things, without being troubled, unbalanced, astonished’. Required for such a temper was an ability ‘to live in the world as if one were outside it, and below heaven as if one were above it’.

    That could seem especially necessary during the period when Naudé was writing, the bright impudence of La Mandragola long gone in the crepuscular world that would produce the Trauerspiel. By 1639, when he committed his work to print, the Thirty Years’ War had been tearing Europe apart and devastating Germany for twenty years. ‘If we consider well the state of Europe,’ he wrote in Considérations politiques, ‘it is not difficult to see that it will soon be the theatre of many tragedies.’ Two years later his cardinal-patron, who with French backing had high hopes of succeeding Urban VIII, expired and he returned to Paris to work with Richelieu, who died in turn a few months later, after which Naudé secured the post of librarian to Mazarin. He then spent the next seven years criss-crossing France, Germany, Switzerland, Flanders, Holland, Italy and England in pursuit of manuscripts and books for a library which came to hold around forty thousand texts, probably the largest collection in Europe.

    A few months later, the Parlement of Paris revolted against the fiscal costs of keeping French armies in the field in Germany and Spain, detonating the Fronde. The common people threw up barricades, driving Mazarin and the royal family out of the city, and to raise cash for its cause, the Parlement decreed that the library be auctioned off. The Peace of Westphalia, bringing the war in Germany to an end, enabled the royal army to retake Paris, suspending the sale. But in the second round of the Fronde, when Mazarin again had to flee Paris, the Parlement enforced the sale and dispersal of the library in 1652. As if he had foreseen it, everything Naudé had written of the savagery and ignorance of the populace came to life before his eyes, in bourgeois parlementaires and plebeian mobs alike. His life’s work ruined, he found a post with Queen Christina in Sweden. Like Descartes and Grotius, he did not last long in Stockholm, dying on a trip back to France in 1653. It was a typical 17th-century ending. A precursor of Bayle, who admired him, Naudé was judged by his successor too advanced for his time.

    The​ world of Naudé was already distant from that of Machiavelli. We live in a world much further away from Naudé’s. Militarised absolutism and religious fanaticism, princely generals, feudal estates and clerical ministers, civil wars and urban barricades, famines and witch trials: if we except plagues, what have they in common with a tranquil landscape of ballot-boxes and opinion polls, shopping malls and social media, product regulation and quantitative easing, vegan picnics and emancipated pronouns? Yet there is a connection between Considérations politiques sur les coups d’état and The Passage to Europe. Coups d’état, in the now received sense of a military putsch, have of course long since disappeared from the continent: the last came in Greece in 1967. But Naudé’s definition was ampler, and did not require violence. What links the two works is the celebration of a coup as the courageous founding act of a positive statecraft. For both authors, it is a stroke prepared out of sight, behind closed doors, whose blade precludes consent. What it depends on is surprise, of which a classic form – St Bartholomew’s Day – is the ambush. Craxi, conductor of the coup in Milan, vaunted his skills at this, adopting the name of Ghino di Tacco, a 13th-century brigand (one of his killings is recorded by Dante in Il Purgatorio), for the columns he wrote in the Italian Socialist Party newspaper. The coups of The Passage to Europe, by contrast, are not only bloodless, but their success – just as Naudé had envisaged in such cases – depended on being inconspicuous, even innocuous. What could be more banal than a procedural motion about yet another meeting, or more trivial than a judicial decision over the price of a resin? Yet, as at Wittenberg, so at Luxembourg, in the smallest beginnings were hidden the largest consequences: the division of a unitary faith that had lasted five hundred years; the abrogation of sovereignties that emerged in its wake.

    Van Middelaar situates his writing in the tradition of Machiavelli, and in the literature of the EU, not without reason. But in the structure of his argument, he is closer to Naudé. Machiavelli valued ‘tumult’ as the life blood of a flourishing republic, whose foundation was inconceivable without an active citizenship. Van Middelaar has no time for tumult, and had no hesitation in welcoming the foundation of a union in which citizens were all but passive, neither playing any significant role in its construction nor even taking much notice of it. But why should that matter? The constitution of the United States, after all, was born of a procedural coup, accepted after the fact by its citizens, long internalised as their own and today near worshipped by them. Why shouldn’t the European Union reproduce the same happy outcome? The answer should be plain enough. The Thirteen Colonies had fought a victorious revolutionary war and already declared themselves an independent nation. The colonists, united in the prospect of continental expansion, were of one language and origin. The constitution did not undercut such democracy as uniquely in that time each of the states possessed, but assembled and centralised it in a federation. The EU of today is neither the creation of a revolution, nor does it enjoy any homogeneity of culture or language, nor is it united by the intoxicating prospect of expansion. Moreover, and decisively, what degree of federation it has achieved has been bought by crippling rather than enhancing what democracy its constituent nations possess. Comparison with 1783 is a paralogism.

    That the EU has been unable to reproduce the bonds of identity and loyalty which tie Americans to the United States and Europeans to their nation-states van Middelaar readily acknowledges, and the memorable concluding meditation of his book has a taxonomy of approaches for overcoming this lack. Of the trio of strategies he sets out, the tenor is not quite even. All are approved, but the German and Roman lines of advance, ‘creating companions in destiny’ and ‘securing clients’, are treated more briefly and sceptically than the Greek, on which the final emphasis falls, under the aegis of a solemn epigraph from Hannah Arendt (already a heroine of Politicide) on the historically unique character of the polis (the other two have to make do with Julien Benda and Monty Python). Here, it could be thought, democracy would at last acquire its place, hitherto all but entirely absent, in the problematic of The Passage to Europe. What part does van Middelaar accord it? Since the Greek public was at once spectator and participant, its example offers two opportunities for a political body in search of an analogue today. ‘First, politics can give the public a say in decision-making. Second, politics can provide the public with drama, with onstage action that captivates it. The genius of Athens bound these two aspects together, inventing both democratic freedom and a public arena.’

    There follows a painstaking attempt to show how in various ways – notwithstanding the ‘calamity’ of the Danish utterance of a ‘no’ to Maastricht, happily finessed on the morrow – ‘Europe has made a huge effort to give the population a say in decision-making.’ That the adjective is risible hardly matters; it is the indefinite article and feeble monosyllable of the penultimate phrase, to which van Middelaar reduces Athenian democracy, that delivers the message of his Greek conclusion. The Assembly where all important political issues were directly debated and determined by citizens, which was most famously what Athens actually invented, is never so much as mentioned. Instead, what Athens gave the world was the chorus in Greek drama. That it observes and comments on, but plays no role in the action, is a detail that undermines his attempt to collapse voter into spectator as the higher truth of the polis. The title of his chapter is franker: ‘The Greek Strategy: Seducing the Chorus’. For a European public to come into being, what’s needed is not a democracy determined by citizens, but a drama that entrances – ‘thrills’ – them. Politics at its best, Ankersmit had argued, is an exercise in aesthetics.

    Why​ was Ankersmit so taken with Naudé? After citing the lightning-streaked sky in which one sees ‘the thunderbolt before one hears it growling in the clouds’, and ‘all is done at night, in obscurity, in fog and darkness,’ Ankersmit went on:

    The coup is a sudden disruption of, or infraction upon, the natural social and political order: effects precede their causes; everything takes place in obscurity and darkness and belies our natural expectations. In this way the coups d’état curiously seem to anticipate in the domain of history and politics the speculation of 18th-century philosophers on the sublime. We need only recall here how Kant related the sublime to what transcends the imagination’s application of categories of the understanding. For in a similar manner the coup d’état transgresses all our moral expectations: the moral world we are living in is shattered to dust, although a great collective good may have been served by the prince’s immoral behaviour. As the sublime transcends the apparently insurmountable opposition between pain and pleasure or delight, so do the arcana transcend the opposition between the moral and the immoral ... The well-being of society can sometimes only be achieved by crime.

    This wasn’t an aside. In an aesthetic politics, the sublime logically occupies the place of an idée maîtresse, and Ankersmit devoted his longest work, Sublime Historical Experience, to it. Breaking our normal epistemological framework, the sublime is the experience of an overwhelming reality connected with trauma, a compound of majesty and terror, fear and rapture, taking historical form in such great collective ruptures as 1494, 1789, 1861, 1917 or 1989, and to which Tocqueville’s response to the French Revolution stands as the classic reaction. The same kind of experience, a sudden heightened apprehension of another more intense reality could also, as Huizinga had shown, be aroused in the eyes of the historian by simple everyday objects of the past. Ankersmit thought that an uncanny elision of the two registers of the sublime, the monumental and the microscopic, was underway in an invisible revolution. Out of sight, a huge number of small-scale changes in daily life were so altering our world that their ‘sum may amount to little less than a permanent French Revolution’. But there was a crucial difference. ‘We live, as it were, in the negative’ of the sublime of 1789: ‘a revolution of the same scale, without ideals’. The state was being demolished and the market worshipped, and we were left to float rudderless with flapping sails on a windless sea, where it was only a matter of time before a storm broke and we might be lost. If a Hobbesian war of all against all was not to ensue, the state – the indispensable modern vector of collective self-awareness and self-determination – must be capable of imposing its order once again.

    Van Middelaar, early exposed to his teacher’s conception of the sublime as a paradoxical experience of the transcendent in this-worldly form, and of the new ways in which it was taking shape, saluted it. ‘We seem to be in control of the world more than ever, but we can see the consequences of it less than ever – ecology, nuclear bomb, genetic engineering,’ he remarked. ‘The paradox is therefore an extreme polarisation of certainty and uncertainty, of satisfaction about that certainty and of fear of that uncertainty – that is, the kind of paradox in which the sublime typically manifests itself.’ But van Middelaar had another view of the market. If an example of Ankersmit’s case were to be sought, there was, he wrote in Trouw,

    no finer microcosm of sublime unintended consequences than the bourse. All its traders have the same goal, to get richer, but at times the paradoxical result of this joint endeavour is that they all lose a great deal of money in one fell swoop. That was not their intention. But it is exciting. Last Monday, the impending stock market crash in Amsterdam was definitely a sublime spectacle: the animal roar of the traders and the delighted smile of the red-headed AEX director George Moller, who thought it ‘beautiful’, remarking: ‘We’re now waiting for Wall Street to open this afternoon.’

    Longinus may have held that ‘slaves of money’ were insensible to the sublime. But today Mammon itself is an important source of the sublime. Pessimists may think their view that the chances of moral elevation by the sublime are smaller than ever. They are wrong. The first-century rhetorician and the 21st-century stockbroker learn the same lesson from the sublime: respect for indomitable reality.

    That was in 2000, fresh from Politicide. When van Middelaar returned to Ankersmit’s work after his time in Brussels and The Hague, he was characteristically no less upbeat, but now the object of his admiration, and his difference with Ankersmit, had altered. The fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11 had changed international relations, permanently. They were ruptures of the kind Ankersmit had written about. Did that mean the state was on the way out? Far from it. Before these great events, Europe had become a mere marketplace between East and West. Now, however, states were taking more collective responsibility for the destiny of the continent than ever before. ‘The flight from politics and history that Europe represented for so long is over.’ The sublime was reverting to a more traditional décor.

    Published​ in Dutch in 2009, The Passage to Europe had a triumphant local reception. Though it was still unknown to a wider European public, its success in the Netherlands was enough to secure van Middelaar the post of speechwriter and special adviser to Herman Van Rompuy when this Belgian prime minister took office as the first full-time president of the European Council, a position created by the Treaty of Lisbon. Van Middelaar would now step onto the stage where the great events to which he had looked forward at the end of his book took place.

    Earlier that year, hailing Obama’s inauguration in Washington in the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, he set out the global context, updating his conception of the Modern Man’s Burden:

    Obama makes America more powerful. The ability to cast the national interest in terms of a universal mission is deeply embedded in American consciousness. America is a force for good. That is its imperial trump card. Anyone who can credibly identify power with virtue is strong. The president himself knows this very well, and spoke to it in his masterly inaugural speech. Why did he move hundreds of millions? Certainly, because of the colour of his face, the sound of his voice, the moment in time. But also because he said that America, ‘the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth’ is and will remain a beacon of light and freedom, a country that is ‘a friend of every nation’ and ‘willing to lead again’. Obama’s audience, inside and outside America, yearned for this message.

    This was all the more important since anti-Americanism had been gaining ground worldwide. ‘The Statue of Liberty was no longer the symbol of America, but Guantánamo Bay. That’s why Obama decided to remove that blemish immediately. Symbolism is power politics.’ That the Netherlands, which had relied on America for its safety since 1945, should ‘refuse to help polish up the American blazon by accepting a few Guantánamo prisoners’ was ‘completely incomprehensible’. It was in the Dutch interest ‘to strengthen our military protector against rivals like China or Russia’. But there was more to US paramountcy than simple might. Just as barbarians had been attracted to Rome by its aqueducts, villas with underfloor heating, and fine wines, so

    besides its military and economic superiority, America’s power lies in the global appeal of its lifestyle, racial equality and education. In this sense, Obama won on 4 November not only because he was able to promise a New Deal-like break with a deep crisis. It was striking that not only the poorest but the wealthiest voted for him. For in the long run the richest too served the cause by the display of their lifestyle.

    Equipped with these convictions, van Middelaar made his way to Van Rompuy’s cabinet, and the four years spent with him resulted in Alarums and Excursions: Improvising Politics on the European Stage. Reception has matched that of The Passage to Europe – some thirty dithyrambs posted on his website; pre-publication superlatives galore, this time topped by Donald Tusk, the incumbent president of the European Council (‘quite simply the most insightful book on Europe’s politics today’), and Britain’s former ambassador to the EU, Sir Ivan Rogers (‘brilliant’ – the sixth award of this epithet). But the two books are not on the same level. The Passage to Europe could legitimately claim to be a work of political realism. It laid bare central arcana imperii of European integration, as Naudé reproached Machiavelli for having done of princely practice – not all of them, of course, and not with any of his predecessors’ sense of moral ambiguity, but as no other of the plethora of eulogies, official or academic, of the Union had ever done. Alarums and Excursions, though awash with many of the same tropes, is a different kind of exercise.

    ‘During seventy years,’ the book begins, ‘the preconditions of the miracle play that is a free society disappeared from view’, while talk in Europe was all of growth, education, healthcare and suchlike, with little care for the overarching questions of ‘state and authority, strategy and war, security and the border, citizenship and opposition’. Then suddenly, crises came one after another: ‘banks collapsed, the euro wobbled, Russia attacked Ukraine and annexed Crimea, vast numbers of desperate people attempted to cross into Europe, and Donald Trump pulled the US security rug from underneath the European continent.’ Faced with this political cataract, new qualities were required to save the Union: ‘speed and determination, a keen judgment of the situation, visible gestures and authoritative words: leadership’. After some missteps, these were forthcoming. ‘The Brussels backroom rule-making factory is giving way to political drama on a continent-wide stage,’ just as van Middelaar had hoped would occur in The Passage to Europe. The title of its sequel, an Elizabethan stage direction indicating tumult and clamour, captured the nature of the spectacle which this kind of drama offered its audience. No longer Sophocles: Shakespeare. ‘Conveying the feverish mood when action becomes imminent, Alarums and Excursions tells the inside story of Europe’s political metamorphoses and deciphers its consequences for political actors and the public alike.’ Happily, all would end well, as through its ordeals the Union reached political maturity. By 2017 ‘we saw Europe’s new politics rise to its full height, not just improvising and taking shape despite itself but acquiring self-knowledge and vitality.’

    First had come the troubles of the single currency. There Merkel’s declaration that ‘if the euro fails, Europe fails’ was decisive, heralding the rise of Germany’s power in the Union. Did the measures that followed respect the Treaty of Maastricht? No, and so much the better. ‘“Europe” trumped Maastricht.’ For Merkel’s ‘seemingly naive’ words concealed a rarely noticed truth: ‘the states had committed themselves at the Union’s foundation not only to adherence to Union law but to the continued existence of the Union as such. In emergency situations, therefore, breaking with the rules could actually equate to being true to the contract.’ The same held good, van Middelaar argued, for the tough financial and political measures taken by Berlin, Frankfurt and Brussels to oust weak governments in Southern Europe, crack down on the gambler Varoufakis, and circumvent the blackmail of Britain’s opposition to the Fiscal Compact. Responsibility and solidarity were ‘the root melodies of the Union’ in conducting Europe away from the ‘incalculable risks’ of a Greek exit from the euro, while Tsipras’s acceptance of medicine harsher even than that just rejected by voters was true to their deeper desire, which was not for a return to the drachma, but for the preservation of their dignity. The green light for banking union won in 2012 was ‘miraculous’. Draghi’s bond-purchasing programme to prop up the euro was ‘likewise a miraculous mixture of solidarity and responsibility’. Even if it was a bit above their heads, ‘the “Save the Euro” show captivated the public’ and ‘got the very best out of the players’. Ctd....

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