I originally intended Europe after Habermas and the Populist Surge, to be a stand alone post and did not have any thoughts about promoting my own tentative views of European politics, and the appropriate theoretical references for discussion. It was just intended to be a timely account of the limitation of one approach to Europe and an indication of the role of one kind of theory in that approach.
I have been challenged to put forward my own views on the political and theoretical issues, and I do not think I can decently fail to respond, as clearly it is easy to take shots at someone else's point of view that put forward an alternative, which might become a target itself, and might disappoint some people who agree with my critical remarks. Another aspect of putting forward your own views is that it requires more space then defining weaknesses in another point of view, and this process is going to take more than one post. The present post will set up an overview and will be followed by posts dealing with institutions, policies, and theory.
First the simple statement of positions. I am a European federalist in politics, but aiming for a reinvented federalism for the European Union, with limited but real powers for the centre, and a more explicit and regular way of addressing the duality of the European Union. That is, its duality as a union of nation states and a transnational political structure.
For theoretical references which emphasise, and even welcome politics as conflict, I favour Foucault and Arendt. Conveniently Foucault and Arendt also both addressed the history of political, and related, concepts back to classical antiquity, so the Greek and Roman origins of Europe and European political ideas. There are some Eurocentric dangers here, but we cannot address either the history of the idea of Europe or the history of political ideas of self-government and liberty without some reference to this convergence.
It is a very crude way of putting it, but one way of expressing my thoughts is to say that the European Union should become more like a bigger Switzerland and less like the United States of Europe as a replica of the United States of America. Switzerland is officially known as the Swiss Confederation, though it has 'federal' institituions for matters at the confederal rather than cantonal level. The cantons retain a high level of autonomy and have mixed histories, only unifying within the current boundaries in 1848 after growing out from a thirteenth century confederation of three cantons.
German is the majority language, but French is in a clear majority in some cantons, and has offiial status along with Italian and Romansch. The multilingingual nature of Switzerland and the relatively loose nature of te federation, which is also referred to as a confederation makes it to some degree a better model for the Europea Union, than the United States where English is clearly dominant as the only state language.
While both Swiss and American federations have become more centrasied over time, the Swiss Confederation is less so than the USA on at least some meaures. For example, public spending in Switzerland is about one third at the federal level, as opposed to about a half in the United States of America.
Given that Europe consists of nations with long histories, if often with shifting boundaries, and whole states the disappear and maybe 'reappear', Switzerand, a part of Europe though not at call close to joing the European Union seems a better model than a country with a shorter history, and whose component states go bck no further than the seventeenth century, and some have only existed as units within the union, and only recently.
Some thought should be given to India despite all the differences as a federal union covering a great variety of ethnicities and languages, with no integrated histor within current boundaries before 1948. Despite the enornous geograpical extent and diversity of the Indian union, differences of GDP per capita are still considerably less than between the constituent states of the Europe, which should gives some indication of the integrative limits of the European Union, particularly while the poorer states continue to be so far behind the richest.
Returning briefly to the issues of political theory, or philosophy, Foucaut and Arendt both have a strong sense of the ways in which modern democracy comes into tension with less formalised forms of autonomy, and that the tensions cannot be resolved through some reform of political institutions, or trying to spread 'rationality' about politics. Both have their more idealising moments, but both show a committment to understanding politics as a product and continuation of the conflicts that customs, norms,regulation, laws, institutions, and methods of economic appropriation, engender between individuals, and even within indivduals as inner individual consciousness encounters the external social world. Evasions and idealisations, which minimise the power of these tensions are particularly dangerous when trying to construct and develop a new polity, such as the emergent European polity.
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