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”
