Europe as Fact and Utopia

The union of Europe was an Enlightenment prophecy. “One day,” Victor Hugo declared to the old nations of Europe at the Peace Congress of 1849, “without losing your distinctive qualities or your glorious individuality, you will merge closely into a higher unity and form the European brotherhood.” The republican federalisation of Europe –the aspiration for a continental process of unity and pacification akin to what had gradually taken place within individual states– was also anticipated by Montesquieu and Voltaire, and is inseparable from Kant’s universalist ideal in Perpetual Peace: a free federation of republican states governed by public international law and a cosmopolitan law that guarantees citizens certain conditions of universal hospitality.

This Enlightenment prophecy of a united Europe was not to be realised at any cost or in any manner, but was bound to a utopian horizon. Between that prophecy and the actual formation of the Union, however, two European wars intervened. As the philosopher Francis Wolff recently wrote, born out of the filthy magma of genocide and totalitarianism, united Europe is not the fulfilment of a philosophical utopia but rather “a utopia in action,” emerging from chastening experience. A Hobbesian peace after a war of all against all that, in retrospect, allows us to view the two world wars as civil wars on a continental scale. “France and Germany are essentially Europe,” Hugo would affirm again. “They are brothers in the past, brothers in the present, brothers in the future.”

Considering its immediacy after such barbarism, it is hard to deny that the modest 1951 European Coal and Steel Community was already a monumental achievement, as the first expression and prelude to a new understanding of the sovereignty of the European peoples. And everything that followed, seen through the eyes of a European between two world wars, might well be described as a utopian, self-fulfilling prophecy. Yet the European Union seems unable to shed a certain existential aura. It is a political reality that has yet to find a sentimental mode of celebration. For many generations of Europeans, there has been no epic awareness of the construction of European unity, nor a perception of their legal community as the realisation of a cosmopolitan ideal. The two world wars are a distant memory, and in the process of building the Union, nothing has managed to replace the democratic myth of constituent power—frustrated by the French and Dutch “no” to the treaty establishing a Constitution. The succession of extraordinarily complex political and legal developments that brought about the transition from the Communities to today’s Union of 27 member states lacks sufficient symbolic weight to be perceived with the creative magnitude we assume should lie at the origin of a United States of Europe.

Moreover, the fact that the familiar image or archetype of the democratic state—its form of government, territoriality, and popular legitimacy—does not map easily onto the Union has, as we know, helped maintain scepticism, on all sides, about the legitimacy of European authority. The idea of the Union as a ULO (Unidentified Legal Object), or the evolutionary, autopoietic, or constructivist theories that invoke the concept of governance as a continuous process of reinterpretation and negotiation of the Union’s legal framework, may have intellectual appeal and descriptive power, but outside academic circles, they lack the persuasive strength to rebut the charge—often based on a mythical view of national democratic life—that the Union lacks a robust principle of legitimacy.

The milestones of integration and expansion might demonstrate momentum but do not exempt the Union from this democratic existentialism. As Professor Juan Luis Requejo has explained, the Union can be seen both as the achievement and the end of the constitutional dream. For if it spells the end of the state sovereignty paradigm, then old sovereigns, sheltered within the Union and stripped of democratic limits and obligations, may impose a regulatory will that is partially alien to their citizens.

Europe Without Europeans

In a recent lecture on Europe at the Collège de France, the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk pragmatically described the population of the Union—the average European—as “someone who consumes 11 litres of pure alcohol per year, 6.2 kilos of boiled sausages, 900 grams of honey, has an active working life of 35.9 years, travels 12,000 kilometres per year, and has between 0.75 and 0.85 children, a tenth of whom are conceived in Ikea beds.” This irony prefaced a harsher diagnosis: the European appears as “the reincarnation of ingratitude,” someone unwilling to engage with their existential roots. This ingratitude, then, stems from a lack of self-culture. The political identity of Europeans is thus amphibious or superficial—a mere cosmopolitan veneer over old national garb. This difficulty in recognising oneself as European also limits self-esteem in a globalised world.

At the Beijing Olympics, where China introduced itself as a global power by winning the most medals, Felipe González asked why, instead of merely watching in awe, we could not see that the European Union had won more medals than China, the United States, and Russia combined. The answer seems obvious: old national identities still prevail.

Lacking a common ethos, the failure to forge a *demos* —a true European people—condemns our identity to scepticism or nihilism. It weakens the social contract’s reach. And yet, in the absence of such ethos and with an awareness of our flawed political people, reality has stubbornly reminded us—from the debt crisis to the present—that we face common problems as Europeans, and that only within this political association can we hope to defend our prosperity. The average European, though unaware of how much Greece, Rome, and Jerusalem live within him and bind him to his neighbours, sees, like them, Europe as a necessity.

Europe as Necessity

In 2015, Spanish jurist Pedro Cruz Villalón, trained as a constitutional scholar in Germany during the Franco dictatorship, delivered his opinion as Advocate General at the Court of Justice of the European Union in response to a preliminary ruling referred by Germany’s Constitutional Court—its first ever—on the legality of the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) programme announced by the European Central Bank. The programme involved the purchase of sovereign debt on secondary markets to stabilise national financial systems. The Court’s response, as you may recall, was that the ECB programme did not violate the EU treaty’s prohibition on monetary financing of member states. The OMT gave concrete form to the now-famous statement by then ECB President Mario Draghi that the Bank would do “whatever it takes” to save the euro. At the time, this was seen as a “Hamiltonian moment,” echoing the action by the first U.S. Treasury Secretary to unify state debt after the War of Independence.

This idea has since gained greater traction with the launch of the NextGenerationEU recovery programme, through which the EU mobilised over €800 billion in loans and grants to member states in response to the pandemic. Although the “Hamiltonian moment” remains a somewhat imprecise analogy—since the original also expanded the federation’s tax capacity, which the EU has not done—it is undeniable that the past decade, Brexit notwithstanding, has seen a federalising trajectory driven by historical necessity. The comparison with the U.S. federal process is not misplaced: not just its Hamiltonian phase but also the New Deal as a centralising constitutional moment amid crisis and uncertainty.

We might also say that the need for a formal constitution, or for invoking the myth of constituent power, has given way to a more immediate imperative: defending the material constitution embodied in the Union’s treaties. And in this defensive context—all the more evident since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—the sweeping claims about the Union’s lack of legitimacy appear particularly shallow. Not only because they underestimate the hybrid, sui generis form of European democratic legitimacy, but because, in an era of political irrationality and populism, they overlook the legitimacy provided by the much-maligned supranational technocracy, which, as Pierre Rosanvallon taught us, commits itself to impartiality.

Europe as Nemesis

At that 1849 Peace Congress, Victor Hugo also prophesied: “A day will come when the United States of America and the United States of Europe, placed face to face, will reach out their hands across the seas, exchanging products, commerce, industry, arts, and genius.” Needless to say, these are not auspicious times for the fulfilment of that vision. The rupture of liberal, cosmopolitan, and even economic and geopolitical ties with the United States has acquired an existential dimension for Europe. And yet, when facing an anti-cosmopolitan project divorced from any ideal of public reason, it becomes easier to perceive the depth of our shared political identity, even as we grow more aware of its fragility.

Shortly after the First World War, the poet Paul Valéry wrote *The Crisis of the Mind*, a political meditation on Europe that began, “We civilizations now know ourselves to be mortal.” Given that this insight is now over a century old, we might apply the line often attributed to Mark Twain: the rumours of Europe’s death have been greatly exaggerated. What faces a survival crisis today is not European civilisation in the abstract but its concrete form as a political and legal union. What is new is that Europe, as a Union, is no longer an ally but the nemesis of the first constitutional democracy. Europe is, more and more—as Sloterdijk insists—the other world, the rest of the world, to the disillusionment of its cosmopolitan utopia.

This sobering truth nonetheless revives a European interest in itself and exposes the banality of those, left and right, who claim to want to make Europe great again by selling it to the highest bidder. When Europe is perceived as a nemesis from outside, internal anti-Europeanism reveals its profoundly servile character. The sovereignty and identity of Europe’s states –their very capacity to decide– are now clearly tied to the affirmation of the Union’s own sovereignty. Europe’s current trial is severe, but it teaches us something crucial: that European patriotism is also a way to defend our small homeland.