that should underpin what I call Europe 3.0, it should be based on the Community method as the system of checks, balances and equity between the institutions and the Member States that offers the best starting point for further supranational democracy.”5 The “community method” is a way of making policy that gives prominent roles to EU-level institutions, as opposed to the “intergovernmental method,” in which the governments of the member states play the leading part. Barroso’s use of the term “community method” underscores his view of the EU as a “supranational democracy,” a “political union” of the EU member states under the umbrella of the EU institutions.
Tony Blair, the British prime minister from 1997 to 2007, was one of many representatives of the intermediate position. As a Labourite, Blair was relatively pro-EU in comparison with his Conservative Party compatriots, but he wanted the elected heads of member-state governments to rein in the unelected European Commission. He called for the European Council, representing the heads of government, “to set out a clear, focused and strong platform of change for Europe. I mean a proper programme – almost like a manifesto for change – that is sufficiently precise that afterwards the commission knows exactly what it is supposed to do and has the full support of the council in executing it.”6
So there has always been serious divergence of opinion – even diametric opposition – regarding what the EU should be trying to achieve, as well as what path it should take to reach its goal. Charles de Gaulle wanted a Europe of sovereign nations coming together to form a bloc large enough to fend off the Soviet Union on the one hand and counter the domination of the United States on the other. Margaret Thatcher wanted willing cooperation between sovereign member states in order to advance prosperity and liberty in a Europe of related but distinct peoples. Helmut Kohl wanted a United States of Europe and set about trying to achieve it as one of the principal architects of the Maastricht Treaty on European Union. José Manuel Barroso wanted a “perfected political union,” a supranational democracy with the community method somehow functioning to provide checks and balances between the member states and the EU institutions. Tony Blair wanted an efficient European Commission carrying out the agenda given to it by the member states. These widely differing visions explain why a serious observer of the EU has to admit that it is impossible to establish with certainty what the EU is.
The disagreement on the question “What do we want the EU to be?” renders unanswerable the next question, “How do we achieve what we want to achieve?” How, then, has the EU been so successful in maintaining its seemingly inexorable forward movement toward a supranational dream? How has it escaped the paralysis that typically comes with uncertainty and division over goals?
One of the answers is that the EU – despite the well-known fact that it sometimes does seem nearly paralyzed in its slowness – can be exceedingly pragmatic. If the question “What do we want to achieve?” pertains to an easily identifiable and relatively urgent short-term or medium-term goal, the EU often does well. An EU statement, policy paper, even EU treaties can go forward without consensus among the parties through the pragmatic use of constructive ambiguity – by phrasing the controversial parts in such a way that each party can interpret them according to individual preference. When it comes to policy implementation, skillful, persistent pragmatism has led to many successes. The EU has accomplished major things – for example, developing an EU-wide single market, promoting trade, introducing the euro, and growing from six to twenty-eight member states – via pragmatic pursuit of specific ends.
At the same time, these specific accomplishments through short-term pragmatism cannot occur without somehow affecting the overall trajectory of the EU toward either the supranational or the sovereigntist pole. And here, the cards are stacked against the sovereigntists. With each agreement on a short-term goal, the sovereigntists lose a bit more ground to the supranationalists. In fact, the supranationalists have already rigged the game. Within the supranational institutional context of the EU, pragmatic cooperation – whenever it occurs and regardless of the short-term end – can be sold to the public as visionary. The integrationists can claim each accomplishment achieved by means of cooperation among member states, within the institutionally supranational EU, as proof of the validity of the supranational vision. With each example of cooperation, the achievement of the vision appears closer and becomes more plausible.
THE EU ENIGMA
Here again is Alcide De Gasperi’s opaque question: “Which road are we to choose if we are to preserve all that is noble and humane within these national forces, while co-ordinating them to build a supranational civilisation which can give them balance, absorb them, and harmonise them in one irresistible drive towards progress?” He gave an answer, of sorts:
This can only be done by infusing new life into the separate national forces, through the common ideals of our history, and offering them the field of action of the varied and magnificent experiences of our common European civilisation. It can only be done by establishing a meeting-point where those experiences can assemble, unite by affinity, and thus engender new forms of solidarity based on increased freedom and greater social justice. It is within an association of national sovereignties based on democratic, constitutional organisations that these new forms can flourish.7
What does this mean? What is an “association of national sovereignties?” It is unclear. In answering his own question, De Gasperi in reality left it unanswered. At any rate, one somehow gets the sense that a clearly defined forum for cooperation of sovereign nation-states is not what he had in mind. A garden-variety international organization just does not seem to encompass his grandiose vision of world-historical change, emanating from Europe. Yet De Gasperi does not seem to have been advocating the abolition of the European nations and the formation of a single European nation-state, a United States of Europe. He wanted it both ways.
If one observes the European Union today, it appears that De Gasperi got his wish. And that is a key to unlock the meaning of the European Union: it is two different things. It is a group of distinct and independent states that work together yet retain their national sovereignty; and it is a supranational entity that absorbs and integrates the member states. It can’t be both, but it is both. And it maintains a certain balance, remaining enough of everything to enough of everybody to keep the momentum going toward the soft utopia of supranationalist governance.
Even practitioners, not just out-of-touch philosophical dreamers, often refer to this “bothness” of the EU. Wolfgang Schäuble, currently the German minister of finance and long an establishment figure in the supposedly staid, gray-suited German center-right, writes of his vision for the future of the EU:
To describe it technically, Europe would be something like a “multi-level democracy,” not a federal state whose focus would be centered in a body politic that was basically like a nation-state. At the same time, though, it would be much more than a federation of independent states whose connecting element would remain tenuous and weak. No, Europe would be a mutually complementing, intermeshing system of democracies of varied scope and jurisdiction: a “national-European double democracy.”8
A “national-European double democracy” built from “mutually complementing, intermeshing democracies of varied scope and jurisdiction”? Schäuble may be a practitioner rather than an abstract philosopher, but you can tell he was reared in a culture that lives and breathes the impenetrable “thought-edifices” of philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Habermas. In the original German, moreover, the entire quotation is in the subjunctive mood, which usually expresses something counterfactual – and which here betrays the unreality that surrounds so much of the foundational thinking about the EU.
Maybe, then, the great unanswered question is unanswerable. Maybe the EU really is best understood as a postmodern, quintessentially European mind game. And maybe its inscrutability is the key to the EU’s success. Never answering the most basic question – while hiding what one is doing behind a smokescreen of unintelligibility – may be what makes the EU a largely unnoticed and thus acceptably soft utopia, rather than a blatantly oppressive and unacceptably hard utopia. In an interview with the German weekly Der Spiegel in 1999 (when he was prime minister of Luxembourg), Jean-Claude Juncker, now the president of the European Commission, spoke of how European integration was being pushed