‘Crisis, What Crisis?’ On the Virtues of Muddling Through in European Politics

By Henry Radice

As a Europe on tenterhooks awaits the next development in the Cypriot crisis this weekend, the sense of popular disenchantment with the European project across much of the continent seems to echo a famous passage by Antonio Gramsci:

“If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e., is no longer ‘leading’ but only ‘dominant’, exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies…. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” [1]

Current public discourse across Europe would seem, to a sometimes surprising extent, to be Gramscian, at least in terms of applying the diagnosis above to the current euro crisis. Such voices take for granted that we are in the midst of a euro crisis that is not just a crisis of the euro currency, but also a profound existential crisis of the European Union as a political construct. But is this really the case? While the indicators of economic crisis are relatively easy to grasp, the indicators of political crisis are harder to decipher. What does it mean to say that the EU is in crisis, rather than just facing a crisis or crises?

Barack Obama made the obvious, but often forgotten point last year that the issues that reach his desk tend to be unsolvable, because otherwise they would already have been solved. This reminds us both that all political institutions worth their salt are to a great extent crisis management mechanisms, and that where we turn to in times of crisis, however resentfully, is actually a rather good indicator of political significance. Up to a certain point, some unpredictable tipping point of illegitimacy, a good test of a political institution’s resilience is not whether it acts to the satisfaction of all, but whether it continues to be invoked as a source of authority or as an appropriate forum for decision-making in the face of the most intractable of problems. For example, the manifold failings of the United Nations Security Council have understandably led to numerous calls for its reform, but still it looms large in the political imaginary, and it is almost impossible to imagine the international political landscape without it anytime soon.

Continue reading “‘Crisis, What Crisis?’ On the Virtues of Muddling Through in European Politics”

The Politics of Blame

By Max Hänska

When things go wrong someone is blamed. Throughout the current crisis there have been several convenient scapegoats: the EU itself, southern European countries and Germany, among others. Passing the buck is an all too familiar rhetorical strategy, but it is not constructive. It is not conducive to the diplomacy that a collective response requires, nor does it elevate the public’s understanding of the challenges faced.

During the first act of the sovereign debt crisis in 2010, the German news magazine Focus famously titled that the Greeks were “Cheats in the Euro Family.” The Bild Zeitung reproduced the discourse of Greeks as dishonest and feckless people, by coining the neologism ‘Pleite-Griechen’ (bankrupt Greeks). Bild went on to demand that president Samaras issues his guarantee ‘that Greece will repay all its debt’ in writing. The subtext was unmistakable: they cheated once, that’s what caused the mess, we should never trust them again.

The EU itself has also been blamed time and again for imposing harsh measures on debtor states. Reading some of the press in the UK one would believe the EU is responsible for everything, from sluggish economies, unwelcome immigration as well as the inability to deal adequately with people wanted on terrorism charges. In a recent article Martin Schulz, president of the European Parliament, lamented what he called a ‘blame game’: a state of affairs in which problems or unpopular issues are presented as European failures, and policies that are popular and successful are presented as the success of national governments (even if they were developed by European institutions).

Continue reading “The Politics of Blame”

What Language for What Europe?

By Roberto Orsi

In his discourse about Europe and the European project pronounced on 22nd February 2013 at the Bellevue Palace in Berlin, German Bundespräsident Joachim Gauck has articulated his view on the future development of the European polity, reinstating the idea of a public sphere extended to all member states and their populations. As already noted by Maria Kyriakidou in an earlier post on this blog, this call for a European public sphere is not a particularly new, nor original idea. It has already been explored, both in intellectual debates and in some practical applications (e.g. the TV channels Euronews and partially ARTE), at least from the 1990s. Many will remember the article “After the War: the Rebirth of Europe” (Nach dem Krige: Der Wiedergeburt Europas) by Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, published ten years ago in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In that contribution, Habermas and Derrida celebrated the birth of a European public sphere (Öffentlichkeit), and advanced a series of proposals for the accelerated integration of a core of European countries (Kerneuropa), which should have effectively amounted to the creation of a European federal state. Ten years on, it is impossible not to read that article as overly optimistic not only about the process of European integration as carried out by political leaders, but also with reference to the existence of a European public sphere. Gauck’s speech is in this sense the admission that little progress was made during the last decade in the direction which was predicted then, and that we are effectively back to square one with regard to an enhanced process of European unification.

Continue reading “What Language for What Europe?”