International institutions are extremely complex, networked bureucracies that reflect negotiated settlments between diverse groups. So I came into studying them with an open mind. I have been studying the EU for some time now. I am far from an expert, but I am trying to build expertise. I was somewhat surprised that the underpinnings of the intellectual history of the EU have such a common an unlikely origin. In a way, the history starts around the 12th Century, in Tudor England, when our modern legal conceptions of individual property rights were being formed--because this set the foundation for markets. Another part of the history starts when the Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states first emerged in the 17th Century. The history of the great wars of Europe (WWI and WWII) also has its part. But the modern intellectual history of the European community as a political entity began in a prison camp on the island of Ventotene, when a group of men, most notably Altiero Spinelli, used bits of paper to smuggle out a manifesto which laid the groudwork for a federalist framework. That the international institutions of Europe in their contemporary form and their politics reflect the tensions between individualism and communalism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and technocracy and democracy was anticipated in the first half of the 20th Century by the leading federalist intellectuals of the time.
Europe is made up of IOs, and so is the world community (e.g. NATO, the UN, &c.). But these IOs are leading to greater integration, and are becoming independent legal entities and may become sovereign collective powers in their own right someday. What is striking about this is a possibility of a reversal of the current of history. In the past, sub-national organizations of people metastasized into larger and more complex social organisms, namely nations. This happened for strategic military, political, and economic reasons in many cases and was based on negotiations, treaties, and commitments. In other cases it was just some empire-builder who expanded his territory using force and domination. What is happening now is the opposite, a network of formal organizations and epistemic communities of the elite are breaking down into less global complexity--smaller, more concentrated groups that have a larger mandate and a broader area of legitimate power and authority. The same well-connected individuals snake their way through multiple institutions over time and space (and I do not mean to use "snake" in a pejorative sense here). This is not necessarily a more democratic process. But it has been a more peaceful and rapid process.
"One day, on the model of the United States of America, a United States of Europe will come into being."
-George Washington
In 1941, one of the Founding Fathers of Europe, Altiero Spinelli, along with Ernesto Rossi wrote the Ventotene Manifesto. The document was quite progressive for its time and its aim was to declare that a just and upright political goal for a modern European state was international integration. In this way, the project of European federalist internationalism rose from the ashes like a Phoenix.
Essentially, the problem these visionaries sought to address was the lack of integration of the European states. But more so than that, according to a biographer, “From
(the writings of contemporary advocates of world government), (Spinelli) developed a diagnosis and a prognosis: the nation-state as they existed was the problem, Europe was the solution” (Menéndez, 2007). Beginning first with a critique of the barbarous totalitarianism and bellicosity of state capitalism that plagued Europe during the Great Wars Period, the authors of the Ventotene Manifesto begin to explore the possibilities for progressive development and social movements in the post-war period (http://www.altierospinelli.org/...). They suppose that in the aftermath of the wars, being in such a condition as the breakup of the state, the democratic forces will shout with too many unfocused voices and descend into polemics ad infinitum, while the Communist parties will focus too provincially on the industrial proletariat and alienate themselves from other progressive forces. They fear that the rightist reactionaries will be able to restore the institutions of the state—the bastions of the old order—by appealing to the patriotic sentiments of the masses.
The antidote for this, according to the Ventotene Manifesto, is to inspire internationalist sentiment of such force as to overcome the atavistic patriotic longings for what we may call the Westphalian Order that lead to an all-encompassing militarism. They advocate this, not just in some lofty sense, but in the face of the very real political conditions of the time, to wit a Europe decimated by Hitler’s war machine with former nation-states that were no longer ossified based on distinct political structures, but were instead united against the common foe of Teutonic totalitarianism. The Manifesto seems to commit fully to the serious belief that the historical conditions of the time were rife for a constituted pan-European federation.
The Manifesto was incredibly progressive in a genuine way and even contains George Washington’s phrase “the United States of Europe”. It is a concrete expression of the goal of creating a “solid international State” out of Old Europe. It sets forth the conditions for a constituted federal organization of European states, what we might call the elements of the fundamental theorem of Europe:
and the constitution of a steady federal State, that will have an European armed service instead of national armies at its disposal; that will break decisively economic autarchies, the backbone of totalitarian regimes; that will have sufficient means to see that its deliberations for the maintenance of common order are executed in the single federal States, while each State will retain the autonomy it needs for a plastic articulation and development of a political life according to the particular characteristics of the various people.
We will revisit these basic conditions later, as they reveal the thinking on the right and proper conditions in which European solidarity can exist, even in the contemporary thought of major public intellectuals who are members of Spinellist organizations. But what is important to note is that, from a meso-theoretical level,
(the European Union project) has exemplified both functionalism and neofunctionalism. It encompassed aspects of both supranationalism (sometimes also referred to as federalism) and intergovernmentalism. (Mingst, 2010)
The functionalist logic runs on the hypothesis that greater political integration will result from basic cooperation on the practical affairs of economic and commercial life, and concerns for the same. The Ventotene Manifesto reflects this line of liberal thought and speaks in some detail of these economic concerns. This hypothesis did receive some support, as part of the impetus to improve economic cooperation was to overcome autarkic tendencies and benefit from the economic gains of trade and capital flows. Yet, in its early iterations functionalism failed to predict the difficulties in securing formal defense cooperation after early in-roads were made in economic integration.
Spinelli, a Communist Party activist, has been an instrumental figure in the development of tran-European federalism since that time. The Manifesto di Ventotene that he helped author “was adopted as the programme of the European Federalist Movement, which Spinelli was instrumental in founding in 1943” (Menéndez, 2007). Thus, the significance of the Manifesto and, even more so, Spinelli’s thought is that they solved the problem of giving the European federalists an intellectual base and a positive program and were reified into an organization (though the ultimate way they could be realized and made manifest is of course through an United States of Europa). Spinelli sought to transmogrify political conflict from the left versus the right to anti-Federalists versus pro-Federalists, and to reject the identify politics of early European internationalists and in its stead substitute a critique of and concern for extant socioeconomic conditions of all major European classes.
The Spinelli Organizations Evolution
The European Federalist Movement (EFM) of the 1940s was an influential vehicle for promulgating notions about the internationalist project throughout Europe. In the early years of this ideal, the historical purpose of the project was a federation which would reflect such close integration of European powers that it would prevent war from breaking out again. But for the leftists at the time the movement represented a means for combating nationalism, which was perceived as a tool for rightists to gain power. Both the reduction of nationalism and the use of integration as a practical means for overcoming wars on the European continent were important parts of the beliefs of the so-called “father of Europe” Jean Monnet (Mingst, 2010).
After abandoning domestic Italian politics, he became secretary general of the EFM and while serving in this role he eschewed involvement with the Council of Europe. One of the ways that Spinelli began to exert influence on the formal organs of European governance was as “key political advisor to Alcide di Gasperi in the early stages of European
integration (and very significantly, during the negotiation of the failed Defence Treaty of 1954)” (Menéndez, 2007). His efforts along these lines are credited with influencing the drafting of the first European Constitution in 1954. However, the functionalist program of liberal federalism was flawed in the corollary that federalism in the domain of security, among other political integration, would follow from economic and commercial cooperation that formally began with the Schuman declaration in 1950 and the forming of the European Coal and Steel Community the following year. The French Parliament, by a coalition of Gaullist chauvinists and Communist partisans, obstructed the Defence Treaty by refusing to ratify it. The Communist Party members throughout Europe were skeptical of liberal supranationalism because of their concerns that it was a mechanism for U.S. hegemony. The United States planners had used the Marshall Plan as a means for forcing economic integration on European nations, though mostly for strategic reasons and as an example of early Cold War planning (Mingst, 2010).
Setbacks aside, the Communist Party of Italy proved to be the vehicle through which Spinelli became a member of the European Parliament in 1976 (ironically, in the year of America’s bicentennial). This was the first universal suffrage election of the European Parliament, a fact which Spinelli viewed favorably because of his commitment to democracy and belief that expanded European democracy would be a vehicle for further federalist integration. This was also a period in which there were a number of entrées into the European Union through accession agreements.
While serving as a member of the European Parliament in 1980, Spinelli founded the Crocodile Club, a collection of committed European federalists who were also European Parliamentarians. This was part of the “federalist intergroups” that Spinelli so heavily influenced (http://www.altierospinelli.org/...). The Crocodile Club populates the intersection between an independent international non-governmental organization (INGO) and a part of a formal international organization (IO). The Crocodile Club functioned as a sort of ad hoc committee of the European Parliament and by 1981 resolutions were constructed out of the Club and presented before the body of the Parliament (http://www.radioradicale.it/...). The Club functioned as a springboard for institutional reform of the EU. In a 1981 speech to the Parliament, Spinelli showed the remarkable continuity of his thought, and advocated for institutional reforms that improved the structure of the EU, made it more democratically responsive, and more concern with the socioeconomic conditions of the people of Europe expressed in the common policy. He also continued to express aspirations for political union. His central focus was on the institutional strength and legitimation of the European Community institutions. He was aware of the narrow confines in which the debate about Europe as a political idea was occurring, and wanted this debate to permeate the whole of the public sphere.
Altiero Spinelli died without seeing his vision come to life. But in September 2010, the Spinelli Group was founded in order to carry on his legacy (http://www.spinelligroup.eu/...). The Spinelli Group is the apotheosis of the Spinelli organizations. The steering committee consists of, among others, Jacques Delors, Amartya Sen, and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, whose ideas we will explore later in order to see how the functionalism of European federalism and the ideas of Spinelli continue to influence the way important intellectuals and intelligentsia frame the problem of Europe. The Spinelli Group appears to be funded by its high-level supporters, namely luminaries from European politics (though it has some institutional partners who provide support). It consists of a network of epistemic community members and representatives from various pro-federalist NGOs. It mission is quite simple: to inject federalist ideology in European governance. It is the INGO which is carrying the torch passed by Spinelli and earlier organizations that he supported/developed. It released a manifesto, a la Spinelli himself, which talks in a laudatory sense about what the EU has become but still demands collective action on common socioeconomic and environmental problems (http://www.spinelligroup.eu/...). The relationship of the organization to the EU is multi-faceted, but the closest categorical analogue would be the prestigious think-tank, a label under which we can cautiously subsume this organization. Its organizational ties to the EU governance institutions come through members who are officials or influential former officials. Members are often called on by the mainstream press and media to talk on the subject of Europe, and high-profile discussions about Europe frequently contain its members.
Contemporary Perspectives of Associated Intellectuals and Intelligentsia
The intellectual foundations laid by the Spinelli organizations, which are, broadly speaking, the core of the European federalist movement, are the products of sustained professional activism and hand-in-hand with the formal institutions of the European Union and its early iterations as a community. This thinking is still influential in the ways the many of Europe’s most influential city fathers (many of whom are official members of the current Spinelli Group) address the contemporary problems of the euro financial crisis and the prospects of further fiscal and political integration of the EU. Let us explore the positions of some eminent Spinelli Group members regarding the current political and economic crisis of European integration.
Jacques Delors. Jacques Delors is a Spinelli Group leader and was thrice president of the European Commission. Based on this, it is assumed that he is the least specialized of the European bureaucrats and technicians presented, and his voice is probably the most eminent and most reflective of mainstream opinion amongst European directors. Jacques Delors was interviewed by Eurozine. He was specifically asked about his opinion on the European crisis. Delors believes that European society as such exists as a matter of intellectual history (Delors et al., 2011). For Delors, this tradition creates an amorphous entity with undefined borders that he refers to as a “Europe of values”. So, Delors’ perspective on European society is that it is an intellectual construct based on common values. He sees a tension between this intellectual tradition of a European society, with very real values that do indeed exist in Europe, and the realities of a European Union populated by nationalistic elements (realities which were a theme of the original Ventotene Manifesto). Delors views the cultural and self-conscious national independence of national peoples as an impediment to universalization of the European body politic. Delors believes that an effective pro-European politician can tap these values through an appeal to a shared intellectual history and what he believes is a unique European political philosophy. Delors asserts that Europe as it is ideally, is “a social democratic and Christian democratic construct“ based on reconciliation of antagonisms. Let us call this the idealist liberal position (a position which Spinelli criticized during his life). It is worth notices that there is a distinct neofunctionalist strain to Delors‘ thought as well. Delors is still capable of sounding like a pragmatic technocrat, and expresses the belief the the roots of a European Union sovereignty lie in the technical matter of a common „aegis of law“ which enabled the management of sovereignty. That is not to mention Delors‘ belief that the the foundational elements of pan-European solidarity are individual economic factors—which is classical functionalist reasoning. Delors is skeptical that the nation-state will give way to a political union, in spite of economic and monetary integration. He believes in European integration through federalism, much like his contemporary Jurgen Habermas. As a necessary condition he is for the overcoming of dissolution into microcommunities of ethno-cultural difference by more or less rational appeals to the public, but believes this must be balanced against the need for some semblance of national identity—so at least in this regard he distinguishes himself from the early federalists, the cultural federalists who were decried by Spinelli. This end is, of course, to be accomplished through Franco-German leadership.To summarize, Delors believes in technocrat management of the economic and monetary union and the political management of Europe utilizing appeals to a shared history which gave rise to shared values. However, he is not firmly committed to political or fiscal integration and seems satisfied with a common European society being relegated to the realm of intellectual construct. This is the modesty and moderation of a neofunctionalist, and is contrary to Spinelli’s vision, which had the full ambition of the functionalist hypothesis.
Amartya Sen. Amartya Sen is a Nobel Prize-winning welfare economist and moral theorist who is now anchored to the U.S. but is considered as a pre-eminent global public intellectual. He is basically a liberal capitalist (it is hard to imagine how someone who is not could be a mainstream American intellectual) but he cannot be neatly subsumed under this category because of his complex position on social justice. The People’s Republic of Cambridge, MA resident weighed in on the issue in The New Republic (Sen, 2012). Sen’s analysis is three-dimensional, specifically “the challenge of European unity; the requirements of democracy; and the demands of sound economic policy”. Like Pakistani-American intellectual Fareed Zakaria, Sen is quite comfortable with the descent of the west and the ascendancy of the rest. He views Europe’s present malaise as an historical outlier. He also points out that historically the aspiration of pan-European unification was motivated by a desire for political union as a conflict resolution strategy rather than financial practicalities such as monetary unification. This sets his historical analysis apart from that of the mainstream liberal theorists but is quite consistent with early beliefs about European integration. Sen notes that the original architects of the European project intended to erect a “united democratic Europe”. In this he could well be referencing the EFM and other Spinellist organizations. Authentic democracy, where by authentic democracy let us say we mean “giving each person not only a vote but also a voice”, itself was the goal and the mishandling of Eurozone financial policy has threatened the prospects for unification on a democratic basis by exacerbating national tensions within the EU. This would be a rejection of the hypothesis of early liberalist functionalism.
Following the liberal tradition of John Stuart Mills and Walter Bagehot, Sen refuses to allow economic and financial policymakers to escape the fundamental questions of democratic process—a process of public deliberation. Spinelli organizations are credited with making the importance, if not primacy, of democracy and public debate mainstream in the European public sphere. In a scintillating bit of prose which gets to the heart of the issue for liberal democrats, Sen explains the “requirements of (liberal) democracy”:
Some of the policies that were chosen by the financial leaders and economic powers of Europe were certainly mistimed, if not downright mistaken; but even if the policy decisions taken by the financial experts were exactly correct and rightly timed, an important question of democratic process would have remained. The decimation of something as fundamental as the public services that are essential pillars of the European welfare state could not be appropriately left to the unilateral judgments of central bankers and financial experts (not to mention the error-prone rating agencies), without public reasoning and the informed consent of the people of the countries involved. It is true, of course, that financial institutions are extremely important for the success and failure of economies, but if their views are to have democratic legitimacy, and not amount to technocratic rule, then they must be subject to a process of evolving public discussion and persuasion, involving arguments, counter-arguments, and counter-counter-arguments. (Sen, 2012)
While laboring in the European Parliament, the Crocodile Club members were anticipating this very point about the problematic dominance of the institutional technocracy in the European Community institutions while they were calling for serious reforms. Sen, perhaps planet Earth’s most prominent welfare economist, seems to imply a not yet fully-articulated connection, strong or weak, between democracy and social welfare programs. But his commitment to social welfare is not absolute. Screwing his ideological commitments to the contemporary liberal sticking post (to paraphrase the Immortal Bard), he states that if the decimation of the social welfare state apparatus must occur, it at least should occur through the process of democratic deliberation. As a good liberal, Sen’s commitment to deliberative democracy of the overt variety is also not unqualified. Sen laments that in the absence of true deliberative democracy in the European public sphere, there is not even at least the presence of public institutions of representative democracy. This point is curious. It is hard to tease out of Sen’s remarks whether or not his primary commitment is to deliberative democracy or the public legitimation of liberal institutions. Perhaps this ambiguity is the central immanent contradiction of contemporary Western liberalism.
To be fair, Sen does say,
Public reasoning is not only crucial for democratic legitimacy, it is essential for a better public epistemology that would allow the consideration of divergent perspectives. It is also required for more effective practical reasoning. It can bring out what particular demands and protests can be restrained in interactive public reasoning, in line with scrutinized priorities between a cluster of quite distinct demands. (Sen, 2012)
So to question Sen’s commitment to publicly shared epistemic values is somewhat cynical; however, nested in that concern is a clear concern for the maintenance of democratic legitimacy, by one form of democracy or another, rather than rationally picking the best form of democracy based on democratic deliberation.
Sen goes on into a discussion of the problems with austerity. He explains the basic insight of Keynes about the effects of austere recessionary policy and supports Keynes as a theorist. He gives a tip of the hat to Paul Krugman for “propagating” this theoretical perspective. Suffice it to say that Sen maintains a basic commitment to the liberal antidote recession and antipode to austerity: Keynesian intervention. He does wish to signal a desire to go Keynesian intervention to stimulate effective demand. To his great credit he wishes consider the essential purpose of public expenditures, including addressing problems in poverty, inequality, externalities, and environmental degradation as a matter of social justice. In this part of the discussion he is more reminiscent of modern liberal John Rawls than of John Stuart Mills or John Maynard Keynes.
Sen says,
Finally, and very importantly, the cause of necessary economic reforms has not been served by confounding that necessity with the policy of austerity. Indeed, serious consideration of the kinds of reform that are needed has been hampered, rather than aided, by the loss of clarity about the distinction between reform of bad administrative arrangements (such as people evading taxes, government servants using favoritism, banks being exempt from necessary discipline, or—for that matter—preserving a nonviable system of early retiring ages), and austerity in the form of ruthless cuts in public services and basic social security. The requirements for alleged financial discipline have tended to amalgamate the two, even though any analysis of social justice would view policies for necessary reform in an altogether different way from drastic cuts in important public services. (Sen, 2010)
It seems fairly straightforward that Sen is insinuating that the current politics of austerity are ideological rather than pragmatic. But austerity politics are also contrary to the spirit of federalism embodied in the Spinelli organization, which from the very beginning was based on the belief that public institutions have a primary responsibility to alleviate broad socioeconomic burdens to the extent they are capable.
Sen, the evolved liberal, has gotten beyond liberal capitalist technocratic policy consideration and has developed a concern for ethics and justice of late. This is a sort of anti-postmodern liberal position, one which is a return to the reasoning of moral sentiments (to borrow phraseology from Adam Smith to describe Rawls). Sen’s analysis clarifies two important points: 1) the historical pattern of monetary unionism strictly dominating political unionism is a contemporary one, and 2) this is a case where sequence of events matters greatly, and political unification could rightly have preceded currency homogenization. The first point is actually inconsistent with some contemporary literature about the historical development of the EU (see Karns & Mingst, 2010). But Sen wishes to stress another point, namely the,
integration of currency and a monetary union without the prior supportive presence of a closer political union and a fiscal union extend well beyond economic mishaps into social adversities in the relations between people in different European countries. (Sen, 2010)
Getting the sequencing wrong and imposing a money union before a political-fiscal union not only caused the potentially terminal financial pathology but also has created intra-European tensions which undermine the very historical vision of the European project. This may very well be the “real challenge of European unity”.
To summarize, Sen believes that for the EU project the sequence of events matters. His position is that political and fiscal integration should have come first, followed by economic and monetary integration, a reversal of the functionalist hypothesis. His position on the second question is complex, but he basically believes in an EU democratic social welfare state which was Spinelli’s belief throughout his public career.
CONCLUSION
Perhaps what the Spinelli organizations provide is a normative foundation for European federalism; a foundation which must evolve to remain current and in line with contemporary debates about the future of Europe. In just such a debate, Daniel Cohn-Bendit (perhaps the closest successor to the legacy of Spinelli) defended the EU and defined European integration in grandiose terms as a “big civilizational step” (The Munk Debate, 2012). In defending the EU, Cohn-Bendit integrates the Ventotene Spinelli, in supply the rationale for Europe integration as a means of preventing another great war and being a means for greater commercial and intellectual flow and exchange, and the contemporary Spinelli Group manifesto, in speaking about modern European federalism in a laudatory way and explaining it as an umbrella arm through which Europe can collectively deal with socioeconomic and environmental problems with more efficacious force than as small nation-states. This is a summary of the normative foundations that the Spinelli organizations have supplied for the architects of formal EU institutions to deal with the problems of Europe.
The Spinelli organizations have succeeded in large measure in achieving European integration, though a United States of Europe is still and elusive vision. Now that a history of successive concrete steps have led to the evolution of formal European Union institutions with real political significance, the pressing questions is how to maintain the legitimacy of European-level governance and regional organization in light of a recent history of technocratic mismanagement and creeping nationalist sentiment. Some authors suggest that the existing European Union as a nascent federation is rooted in legitimation, for instance, “Even though the European polity has not become a federation, as it is based on a dual principle of legitimation and as the states control the most powerful body of the Union – the Council, it is nevertheless a supranational entity in its own right” (Menéndez, 2007). This principle of legitimation is important, as is the question of legitimacy.
The European Union is an expanding global bureaucracy. To some extent the EU’s authority is rooted in its technical expertise and rational-legal form of organization. In order to solve problems through this lens or framework, the EU technocracy has expanded, and its democratic character, the character that Spinelli and his acolytes sought to inculcate, has been called into question. The technocracy is also very much engaged in the work of preserving and perpetuating markets (especially capital markets) and the market form, which the early functionalists viewed as a means to an end. This combination of rationalism and “undemocratic liberalism” can cause problems of legitimacy (Finnemore, 2004). The Spinelli Group continues the work of Spinelli in trying to help the EU maintain procedural legitimacy through the mechanics of democracy and democratic deliberation. The appearance of forgetting the public is causing legitimacy problems for the EU and “opinion polls consistently show that publics believe the Union is an elite project and are deeply skeptical about it virtues” (Finnemore, 2004, p. 168). There is, however, some significant variation in the extent to which EU institutions are democratic. The EU is still pursuing liberal goals, but the greatest contribution that the Spinelli Group as an INGO can make is not just furthering the goal of economic integration as such but continuing the Spinelli legacy of pursuing it always through democratic means. This is complicated by the problem of national sentiment driving the vehicles through which publics participate through the state apparatus, a problem which Spinelli acknowledged and managed to work around both through INGOs and as a member of the formal European Parliament. Time will reveal how this problem is reconciled. The common policy can be an effective means of solving collective action problems, but the value of this liberal goal does not need to be pursued undemocratically if the continued legitimacy that the Spinelli organizations worked so hard to garner for the EU is to continue.
References
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