The European Dream (38 page)

The net result of the protracted struggle between the confederalists and federalists over pushing political authority further down into the states, or pushing it beyond national territorial boundaries to the Union itself, has been that neither the member states nor the Union has been strengthened. Rather, there has been a balkanization of authority, with the entrance of new players and a multiplication of competing agendas.

The EU has ended up becoming the rule-maker and gatekeeper. It establishes the directives that govern the play, brings together the players, and helps facilitate the political process among the parties. The EU is the first purely regulatory state whose function is to serve as an arbiter among contending forces.

It’s often said that the United States is unique among nations because it owes its existence to an idea—the belief in the inalienable rights of persons to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The EU is an even more ethereal political experiment. The U.S. government’s legitimacy is, at least, still grounded in the conventional notion of control over territory, the ability to tax, and the right to exercise force, if necessary, to assure obedience to its laws. The EU enjoys none of the conventional requisites of states. Its legitimacy is based exclusively on the continued trust and goodwill of the members who make it up and the treaties and directives—and soon a new constitution—they have pledged to uphold.

We are so used to thinking of citizenship as something that goes hand in hand with a territory and a nation that it is difficult to fathom the idea of also being a citizen of a transterritorial governing body bound not in traditional property relations but rather in universally accepted codes of human conduct. The late British sociologist Ernest Gellner captures the inherent difficulty of belonging to a shared ideal that transcends geography. He writes,

Some post-modern political theorists suggest that in the new world of dense, overlapping, and ever changing relationships, governance is really more about association and connectivity than about controlling a specific physical space.
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Scholars refer to the political reconfiguration of Europe as “the new medievalism,” a term coined by the late Hedley Bull of Oxford University in an essay he wrote back in 1977. Even then, Bull sensed the emergence of a new political landscape in Europe. He thought it “conceivable that sovereign states might disappear and be replaced not by a world government, but by a modern and secular equivalent of the kind of universal political organization that existed in Western Christendom in the Middle Ages.”
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Bull pointed out that “in that system no ruler or state was sovereign in the sense of being supreme over a given territory and a given segment of the Christian population; each had to share authority with vassals beneath, and with the Pope and (in Germany and Italy) the Holy Roman Emperor above.”
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Bull noted that “all authority in mediaeval Christendom was thought to derive ultimately from God.”
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He suggested that

Bull used his own country as a model. He wondered what would happen if the United Kingdom had to share its authority with the authority of Wales, Wessex, and Scotland at a subnational level, as well as with authority in Brussels and world bodies such as the United Nations in New York “to such an extent that the notion of its supremacy over the territory and people of the United Kingdom had no force.”
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Bull believed that reconfiguring the political world into “a structure of overlapping authorities and crisscrossing loyalties that hold all peoples together in a universal society”
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would be far superior either to the existing system of competing sovereign states with their propensity to war or to the prospect of a single world government whose monopoly over the means of coercion and violence would heighten repression and oppression on a grand scale.
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Bull’s thesis proved to be remarkably prescient.

What, then, is the EU? Sociologist Ulrich Beck says it is a “negotiation state, which arranges stages and conversations and directs the show.”
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The EU, then, is less a place than a process. While it maintains many of the fixed physical trappings of a state—an EU passport, a flag, a head-quarters—its genius is its indeterminacy. Unlike the traditional nation-state, whose purpose is to integrate, assimilate, and unify the diverse interests inside its borders, the EU has no such mission. To the contrary, its role is just the opposite of what nation-states do. The EU’s political cachet is bound up in facilitating and regulating a competing flow of divergent activities and interests.

The EU may appear to some as weak and vacillating and without sufficient coercive authority—the ability to tax and police. To others, however, it is the very model of a new kind of governing institution, suited to processing the multiple interests that proliferate and interconnect across every imaginable boundary in a globalized environment. Political scientist Tim Luke views the EU as

Despite its ephemeral nature, the EU packs a wallop. Its statutes and directives have untold impacts on its member countries. The U.K., for example, estimates that over 80 percent of the environmental legislation governing its citizenry comes from directives issued by the European Environmental Agency.
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Other EU statutes and directives governing such things as consumer product safety, drug testing, medical protocols, financial services, and competition, all flow from Brussels to the states. But the important thing to remember is that the regulatory decisions made in Brussels are themselves the result of a polycentric process of negotiation, compromise, and consensus, involving many parties at the regional, national, transnational, and global levels.

The whole process ultimately works because the people of Europe want “problems without frontiers” to be addressed by the whole European community. The questions of whether or not to introduce genetically modified (GM) food crops and label GM food products, develop guidelines for quarantining cattle to prevent the transmission of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), sign treaties to reduce global-warming gases and protect biodiversity, outlaw human cloning, and the consideration of countless other initiatives are best handled at the Europe-wide level because the very nature and consequences of such activities transcend national boundaries and can only be effectively addressed by the whole community working in concert.

Although government policy networks share many attributes with commercial networks, there are differences in their goals. Commercial networks are dedicated to optimizing the income stream of their players. Public networks have a different purpose—to propose and deliberate on legislative initiatives and help implement policy decisions made in the political arena.

To some extent, the proliferation of public networks has been largely defensive in nature. The public’s increasingly negative opinion of government effectiveness in delivering services helped spawn the move to deregulation, privatization, and decentralization of public activity. There is, however, another side to this story. Some argue that the private sector played an up-front role in fanning the flames of citizen discontent—even to the point of creating a crisis of public confidence that was not entirely justified—in order to capture enormous new commercial opportunities that came with the privatization of large swaths of vital human services.

Motivations aside, public policy networks have been introduced as a way to stop the hemorrhaging that was leading to a wholesale deconstruction of government-related activity. There was a real sense of dread among policy leaders in the 1980s and 1990s that government was quickly imploding and that the capitalist marketplace might eventually end up as the unchallenged arbiter of human relationships. Many warned that the notion of democracy was being upended and that political choices that used to be made by citizens at the ballot box were increasingly being made by consumers in the marketplace. Neoliberals and libertarians favored just such a course, arguing that the market mechanism was far superior to the political process as a way of representing the collective will of the people and assuring the future well-being of society.

Government policy networks were seen as a means to meet the criticism halfway. Governments everywhere sensed the real need to reach out and involve both the private sector and the civil society in the initiation as well as the implementation of government policy. That recognition represented a revolution in political thinking. Up until the advent of public policy networks, the political arena had been divided into two separate realms. The citizenry voted for their elected leaders who, in turn, passed legislation reflecting the will of their constituents. Government bureaucracies, in turn, were responsible for implementing the political will. Their role was considered to be neutral and purely administrative in nature. The establishment of public policy networks was an admission, of sorts, that the politics of representative democracy doesn’t begin and end with the election of officials and the passage of legislation and that the question of advocacy and implementation is as politically charged and in need of active involvement as the question of voting for leaders and passing bills.

Public policy networks became a way for government to jump back in and re-invigorate the political process before devolution shifted too much activity to the marketplace. The reasoning behind such networks was Whiteheadian. The social environment is continually in flux and often changes considerably at every stage of the political process. Nor are the interests of the affected constituencies frozen in time. Their priorities and goals are also continually shifting as they anticipate and adjust to changes in their environment. Public policy networks are a way for the government to keep political deliberation, decision-making, and implementation alive and relevant by ongoing dialogue and negotiation between all the affected constituencies. Governance is no longer divided into discrete and separate stages but becomes a “continuous process” of engagement.

Realizing that government would no longer be able to monopolize the governing process, public officials urged a compromise—a joint sharing of the political domain with both the commercial and civil society sectors. Henceforth, the government would be a facilitator of the political process rather than an overseer. The hope was that a more open communication between all the players and a willingness to search for common ground would deepen the democratic process, expedite consensus-building, and streamline the implementation of political decisions. Public policy networks, it was argued, would create a new win-win politics as opposed to the win-lose outcome of more traditional adversary-based politics. Public policy networks would also provide an organizational means of handling the quickening pace of change and the growing density of exchange in a globally connected world.

Sociologist Andrew Barry makes the point that the network, in the European Union, has become

It should be added that public policy networks are also a way of ensuring that unbridled market forces don’t gain inordinate sway over the affairs of society.

With public policy networks, politics becomes a 24/7 affair, just like commerce. In the new world of instantaneous information and communications and continuous feedback loops, there are no longer beginnings or endings to political engagement, but only relentless political discourse. The density of exchange and the multiplicity of interests mitigate against any downtime. Governance ceases to be a bounded activity and metamorphoses into an open-ended process. Politics, in the new European sense of the term, has come to mean all of the purposeful activity that people and organizations engage in, through either formal or informal networks, to effect their interests and goals. Participatory democracy migrates to the far edges of space and envelops duration, becoming an all-consuming human endeavor. Everything in society becomes politicized, and anyone left out of the governing networks risks falling far behind the political process, with little chance of catching up to the flow of the game.

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OLITICS IN the nation-state era operates along two poles—market and government. EU politics, by contrast, operates between three nodes—commerce, government, and civil society. The shift from two-sector to three-sector politics represents a radical progression in the evolution of political life, with profound import for how we human beings organize our future. If two-sector politics made the Enlightenment vision viable, three-sector politics makes the new European Dream realizable.