Jürgen Habermas on European Integration: Which Europe Do We Want?

"Which Europe do we want? The question is hard to answer satisfactorily in the constitutional dimension alone, because the traditional concepts of the state (and of international law) cannot grasp it."

About the Author

Jürgen Habermas (1929– ) is one of the most important philosophers in Germany today and a central figure in the second generation of the Frankfurt School. He has taught at Heidelberg University and the University of Frankfurt, and has directed Frankfurt's Institute for Social Research as well as the Max Planck Society's Institute for Research on the Lifeworld. His thought is wide-ranging and deep, his system large and complete; he is widely regarded as "the most influential thinker of our time," and has been called "the Hegel of our age" and "the greatest philosopher of the post-industrial revolution." He holds a decisive place in Western scholarship.

Book Excerpt

Chapter 6: Is Establishing a European Identity Necessary and Possible? (Excerpt)

Europe's governments failed to agree at the Convention on the draft constitution, and the process of European unification has stalled. That failure shows the nations and member states do not trust one another, that Europe's citizens feel no political belonging, and that the member states have no appetite for common projects. In what follows I want to take up two questions: first, whether such a European identity is necessary (I); second, whether the corresponding extension of civic solidarity beyond the nation is possible (II).

I

Across nearly half a century of European unification, problems that seemed insoluble have kept coming back. There was no way to solve them, yet the integration process made progress all the same. The functionalists took this as proof of their assumption: politically, a unified economic and monetary area has to be built, so that effective constraints arise. Handle those constraints skillfully, they held, and other areas of society will generate from within themselves an ever tighter network across national borders. The "path dependency" argument about patterns of decision-making reaches a similar conclusion: the pattern steadily narrows the room for future alternatives. On this reading, political elites feel they have entered a process favorable to integration against their own will. Faced with a series of unintended results, they had no choice but to accept a decision-making pattern already accepted in the past and hardening ever since.

A spontaneous unification process moving toward an "ever closer" union not only explains that muddling-through style of policy, it also lightens the load on the actors — they adopt this view and duck the problems they cannot solve. On this account, elites stick to an intergovernmental model of decision-making balanced from within, without having to consider the normative integration of citizens. Yet only such integration can produce common goals beyond national borders. Conflating systemic integration with the elites' path-dependent decisions seems to make a shared European identity superfluous. Insofar as a social integration of values and norms remains necessary at bottom, it will simply appear of its own accord, like a by-product.

I want to show why this social-scientific assumption has exhausted its explanatory power (1), and why the unification process has stalled today for want of a European identity (2).

(1) The problems that must be solved today are political at bottom. They cannot be solved by the functional force of an integration driven indirectly by the common market and by decisions that pile up step by step. Three issues are now tangled together: (a) the immediate challenge of [EU] enlargement to the east; (b) the political consequences of the economic integration already achieved, especially for the eurozone countries; and (c) the changed configuration of world politics.

(a) EU enlargement to the east takes in ten countries, which means an increase in complexity that the existing structures and procedures of political management cannot bear. Unless the draft constitution is adjusted accordingly, EU governments will not have the capacity to guarantee even a weak level of coordination. Beyond the contested weighting of votes, it is also crucial to bring more policy areas under majority decision. Giving up the principle of unanimity means that the intergovernmental bargaining familiar from the parties to international treaties must yield to the deliberative procedure we already know from domestic politics. But that will raise the cost of legitimation sharply. A minority accepts being outvoted only where it trusts the majority. Only an awareness of shared membership produces the sense that neither side has gained at the other's expense.

So far, Europe's economic unification has not been a zero-sum game. Over the medium term everyone stands to gain from it. With a few exceptions — Norway and Sweden among them — Europe's peoples have therefore accepted the policies elites drew up from the top down. But once those policies stop spreading costs and benefits evenly, legitimation measured by "output" becomes unacceptable. The public needs to join the argument beforehand rather than take the punishment afterwards. After eastward enlargement this will happen often, because closing the gap in social and economic development between old and new member states will require active political intervention. Set against the EU's relatively small budget, conflicts over the distribution of scarce resources will sharpen: between net contributors and net recipients, between core and periphery, between southern Europe's traditional recipients of aid and eastern Europe's new ones, and between large and small member states.

(b) An active and effective policy of redistribution is by no means only a consequence of eastward enlargement. Enlargement will widen the existing gap in economic development again — between Sweden and Portugal, for instance — and coordination is already unavoidable among the EU's existing 15 member states, on the contested path of "negative integration" (Fritz Scharpf's phrase). Wherever equal market freedoms are to be institutionalized, governments have to abolish restrictions on competition — in other words, to hold back. Wherever a policy area stays under national administration, they have to act. Building a unified economic and monetary area produces a demand for harmonization (Harmonisierung), and since the Lisbon summit governments have been meeting that demand through informal coordination. These openly coordinated action plans and methods — peer review, benchmarking, policy learning — reach not only into policy areas such as the labor market and economic development, but into core areas of national policy such as immigration, the judiciary and criminal law. Claus Offe has even spoken of a "gradual Europeanization of social policy." The growing interconnection of national policies, especially inside the eurozone, calls for a democratic widening of this narrow basis of legitimation. Legitimation must move from outcomes to joint participation in shaping the political agenda; and even where the stakes of that agenda differ, citizens of every member state should take part on equal terms. That shift cannot happen unless people come to see themselves as belonging to one and the same political community beyond national borders.

(c) The third challenge comes from outside. Since the end of the bipolar world order, Europe has found it necessary to redefine its global role, and above all its relationship with the United States. The modest attempts at a common European security and defense policy may help show where the unification process has stalled today. Without a Europe-wide formation of democratic opinion and will, no common policy carried by all EU member states will emerge in the field of symbolic and effective integration. Opinion and will are formed within the individual nations, but they must also stand up to examination in the discourse of the others.

(2) The initiative for a constitutional process can be read as an answer to these challenges. The new constitution is meant to deepen integration, strengthen the EU's capacity to act collectively, and reduce the "democratic deficit" (Demokratiedefizit) criticized again and again. Should governments want to transform the political style they have practiced so far — a transformation not without risk and time-consuming in any case — and even carry the constitutional process through citizens' referenda, then within such a project they could use the constitution itself as an instrument for building a European identity; that much is conceivable. And because the debate over the new constitution has put on the agenda the exclusionary question of the "final purpose" (Finalität) that the unification process itself could never settle, this thorny question about the telos of the whole project has two sides. First, the political structure of the EU: which Europe do we want? Second, geographic identity: where does the EU's final border lie? The draft constitution answers neither.

Which Europe do we want? The question is hard to answer satisfactorily in the constitutional dimension alone, because the traditional concepts of the state (and of international law) cannot grasp it. A loose confederation of states — able perhaps only to supply a political framework for a common market and a common currency — has already been overtaken by the tight network of supranational institutions running out of Brussels and Luxembourg. On the other side, the EU remains far from the idea of a multinational state (Nationalitätenstaat) organized along feudal lines, one able to coordinate the fiscal and economic policies of its members. The draft constitution tacitly concedes that nation-states are the subjects of the treaty — they keep the option of withdrawal — yet the treaty's member states drafted a "constitution" "in the name of the citizens and the states." Its Article I, paragraph 1 opens with a Solomonic formulation: "Reflecting the will of the citizens and states of Europe, to build the common future of Europe, the Union hereby establishes this Constitution…" The Convention named the draft the "Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe," and so escaped the conceptual opposition by which constitutional experts have until now decided questions of sovereignty. In purely legal terms, the question is settled by giving European law precedence over national law. That works against the nation-state, but politically these matters are not so simple.

The border question, by contrast, could have been settled in the constitution. For political reasons it was left open. There seems to be a tacit understanding that the EU may extend eastward and to the remaining Balkan states, and that all further relationships are to be regulated by agreement. In practice, then, the border question has grown sharp over Turkey's accession [to the EU]. Ever since Atatürk, Turkey has counted itself part of modern Europe. Under the relevant Copenhagen resolutions and the normal accession procedure, the question remains to be settled.

This much is certain: on the question of the final purpose, the constitutional process always reaches a point at which the latent, entangled legacy issues press harder and harder, even if they have not yet produced catastrophic results. The Convention may discuss political structure and the EU's future borders, but this kind of closed-door elite negotiation finds no echo outside Brussels, and it does not clarify the underlying positions — the real motives stay hidden behind the mute opposition between the pro-EU camp and the EU-skeptic camp. Everyone knows this; nobody says it, for fear of putting a foot wrong on European questions. The EU's founding member states are on the whole well disposed toward integrationism (Berlusconi excepted), while Britain, the Scandinavian countries and the eastern European states about to join [the EU] — all proud of a national independence that cost them dearly — lean instead toward keeping powers divided among governments.

The quarrel between integrationists and the advocates of divided intergovernmental powers gets settled in the daily work of the EU's expert circles; it never becomes an argument about goals and principles in the wider political public sphere. On how power and responsibility are divided between the EU and its member states, and between Parliament, the Council and the [European] Commission, two motives seem to be doing the real work in the background: one is a historical conception of what the nation-state means today; the other is a conception of economic and political order, above all of the relationship between politics and the market.

Those who think in the old diplomatic categories treat nation-states as the principal actors capable of acting internationally. On that view the EU is basically an international organization. As an institution and a network of economic governance it is plainly an important unit, but it cannot and should not be allowed a political mission of its own. The political will expressed in EU institutions is then aimed mainly inward. Whoever, by contrast, sees economic globalization and the configuration of world politics since 9/11 as a challenge, and wants to develop a model of "governance beyond the nation-state," will see the EU rather as a strategic actor on the global stage. That plainly requires strengthening Europe's capacity to act collectively as a whole.

These opposing readings of international events usually come paired with correspondingly different explanations of the welfare state's crisis. Facing this task, the countries of Western Europe are making their cherished systems of social protection fit changed demographics and the boundary conditions of the global economy. Each rebuilds its welfare state in its own way, but the reasons for reform do not always come from within. What is at stake is not only home-made problems — those still lie within reach of national policy. Hence the question: must governments simply adapt to the changed boundary conditions, or are they willing to work through the institutions of global economic governance — and, where possible, in competition with the United States — to shape economic globalization itself? A government that practices intervention rather than neoliberalism can deliver the "European social model" only with an EU able to act internationally.

Diplomatic and military action will force these two contradictory experiences to a head and sharpen the polarization, in a world political order growing less stable. The policy of the current US administration — and presumably of the next one too — is oriented toward a unipolar world: the hegemony of a single superpower is held to be enough on its own to ward off the risks of fundamentalism (and of weapons of mass destruction), and to bring about political and economic modernization worldwide. Europe's countries must decide whether to rely on Washington as allies within a "coalition of the willing," or whether they would rather strengthen a Europe capable of acting collectively, and so pursue a "reconstruction of the West" on relatively autonomous terms.

Cover image from: pixabay