Etienne Balibar announces the death of the European Project. Does anyone disagree?
Balibar’s pronouncement reminded me of a paragraph in Jean-Paul Sartre’s introduction to Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre (1961), Sarte writes:
“When a Frenchman, for example, says to another, Frenchman: “We’re finished” – which, to my knowledge, has occurred roughly every day since 1930 – it is a discourse burning with rage and love. The orator puts himself in the same boat as all his countrymen. And then he generally adds: “Unless…” […]. In short, it is a threat followed by a piece of advice, and such remarks shock even less because they spring from a national intersubjectivity. When Fanon, to the contrary, says that Europe is headed for ruin, far from uttering a cry of alarm he is uttering a diagnostic. This doctor does not claim it is a hopeless cause – there have been miracles – nor is he offering a cure: he is stating that it is in its death throes.”
The humour in the beginning of Sartre’s remark should not put us off from its seriousness, nor lead us to dismiss the discourse of rage and love as somehow unserious or unscientific. Yet, Balibar’s voice is I think neither that of a national intersubjectivity or the removed diagnostic of the post-colonial revolutionary (Fanon). The “unless…” that Sarte points to is the hope that we need but make an alteration of course, a few more or less radical changes (an austerity package or bank bailout?) and the European status quo can be maintained at least for some. What Balibar seems to propose here is something rather different (something I think also pointed out by Jan Patočka when he used the term post-european): If we wish to continue to speak of a European Project, the aims, means, and boundaries of this project must be radically re-thought.
Here is a excerpt from Balibar’s article:
In its current form, under the influence of the dominant social forces, the European construction may have produced some degree of institutional harmonisation, and generalised some fundamental rights, which is not negligible, but, contrary to the stated goals, it has not produced a convergent evolution of national economies, a zone of shared prosperity. Some countries are dominant, others are dominated. The peoples of Europe may not have antagonistic interests, but the nations increasingly do.
Second, any Keynesian strategy to generate public “trust” in the economy rests on three interdependent pillars: a stable currency, a rational system of taxes, but also a social policy, aiming at full employment. This third aspect is systematically ignored in most current commentaries.
I always feel sympathy to all the thinkers that try to develop an analysis of European cohesion because worried about it. I am too, but more optmistic. Balibar’s analysis is somehow a free interpretation of the EU history. EU hasn’t been “one” defined project but, at the contrary, a flexible process, which is by the way the only acceptable explanation to its hypercomplicated institutional architecture. During the “crisis of the empty seat” nobody would have bet on Europe, but so many times the project has re-emerged, and under so many different governments! I agree that the “social” pillar is the missing one, and not only that one, but it wasn’t previously a drive (= never been in the “acquis communautaire”), so it’s a little unfair to say that Europe is dead and gone. The need to broaden the number of the so-called “competencies” is a recent one, as the result of the unexpectedly fast, although limited, success of the EU construction. They made the customers, now they have to make the citizens, which is far less easy. (end, uhm, the dialectic “dominant/dominated” applied to the inter-EU dynamics is demagogic). Let’s say that Europe is not dying, just crossing a difficult puberty.