The European Dream (44 page)

The old conventional idea of swearing exclusive allegiance to one’s new land becomes increasingly problematic in a world of cultural diasporas. Can Americans or, for that matter, French, German, or British citizens, ever feel really comfortable sharing their land with people whose allegiances are split? In a world where people take their culture with them, don’t expect immigrants to be readily disposed to make the ultimate sacrifice expected by nation-states—to bear arms in defense of the state and be willing to give one’s life to one’s country.

But absent this kind of unswerving loyalty to a territorially anchored nation-state, bound by a commonly accepted meta-narrative and ideology to live by, how do disparate peoples get along? What unites them, if not shared territory, loyalty to the state, and a common ideology?

The answer to the question begins with a willingness to rethink our notion of political space and time in a globalized world. While we’ve discussed various aspects of the spatial and temporal re-orientation occurring in the wake of globalization, two further considerations warrant discussion.

For starters, in a world increasingly made up of cultural diasporas, political space is more complex. Borrowing from Hedley Bull’s idea of a neo-medieval political arrangement, theologian John Milbank of the Univesity of Virginia argues that the idea of “enlightenment simple space” is too limited a notion in a dense, layered, and highly embedded world of contending and overlapping lived realities.
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The space of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on abstract measurement, location, extension, and boundaries, is unable to accommodate the crosscutting loyalties and competing agendas of real communities bumping up against one another in lived spaces. Milbank suggests that the older idea of “gothic complex space” might be a more appropriate metaphor for rethinking spatial categories.
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In the medieval world, space was more relational than territorial, and boundaries were less fixed and more porous. There were fewer borders separating public and private lives, and human activity was entangled in a complex set of stories that overlapped. Michel Foucault explained the medieval sense of space this way:

Cultural diasporas, because they are lived simultaneously both “here and there,” are attached in time, not in space, and are therefore not containable by geography. With people increasingly living in multiple places, with multiple loyalties, political space needs to be redefined in a way that loosens up the old rigidity of bounded territory. Some scholars talk about introducing the idea of Maze Europe, suggesting that fixed borders give way to zones of interactivity, fuzzy or rolling borders held together by multilevel regulatory arrangements.
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That’s beginning to happen in the EU as regions, CSOs, and cultural diasporas interact across traditional nation-state boundaries. It’s also happening at the periphery of the EU. Many countries bordering the EU and even those somewhat removed have entered into various “associational arrangements” with the EU. As commercial, political, and cultural exchanges between the EU and its neighbors increase in density, borders become even fuzzier. Harvard’s John Gerard Ruggie argues that the EU’s very mission, at least in the past, is to unbundle territory.
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On the other hand, the EU is taking strong measures to ensure its borders against the illegal flow of immigration into the community. The earlier mentioned Schengen Agreement, to develop a unified approach to policing the EU borders and to block the flow of illegal immigration, is being zealously pursued. If it all sounds a bit contradictory, it is. The EU is caught between the old politics of bounded territory and the new politics of global space. It’s trying to accommodate emergent global, political, and commercial realities within the constraints imposed by its members, whose authority and legitimacy are attached to territoriality. It’s no wonder that Jacques Delors, the former European Commission president, referred to the EU as “an unidentified political object.”
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The EU’s confusion about what constitutes geography in an era of cultural diasporas and globalized commercial flows becomes all the more obvious when the question of bringing new members into the fold is raised. Some of the EU’s architects remember back to their student days in the spring of 1968 when French radicals declared “to hell with borders.”
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The EU claims to be inclusive and says that membership ought to be based on shared universal principles, which leads some observers to suggest a “Europe without shores.”
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While no one seriously entertains the idea of a Europe that potentially envelops the globe, there is a growing recognition that the EU “represents a break with the modern conception of political territoriality.”
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The most difficult point of trying to establish a politics that transcends territoriality is figuring out how to unite all of the contending forces in a new sense of shared purpose that is as powerful as the age-old territorial imperative. Jean-Marie Guéhenno, the former under-secretary-general for Peacekeeping Operations at the United Nations, put it best: “Having lost the comfort of our geographical boundaries, we must in effect rediscover what creates the bond between humans that constitute a community.”
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If the new spatial reality is far more complex than the simple geometry of the Enlightenment permits, the changing temporal reference is equally complicated. While the temporality of the older American Dream is all future-directed, the temporality of the emergent European Dream combines all three temporal domains—past, present, and future—in a single gestalt. For Americans, the only real consideration was how to improve one’s lot by making something out of oneself. Striving for a better future, both material and emotional, has been at the root of the American Dream. Most American immigrants chose to forget their past and sacrifice their present for future rewards. The European Dream, by contrast, is far more ambitious. Europeans want to preserve and nurture their cultural heritage, enjoy a good quality of life in the here and now, and create a sustainable world of peace in the near or not too distant future. And, on top of all this, they seek to establish a politics based on inclusivity—that is, honoring everyone’s individual dream equally—a difficult challenge by any stretch of the imagination.

What we have, then, is a radical new spatial and temporal orientation and a new European Dream that is emerging out of it. Still, missing from the equation is a new social glue that’s powerful enough to bind 455 million people together in common cause. That glue has to be even stronger and more cohesive than the existing social glue that binds people to territorial and nation-state loyalty, if the European Dream is to become a reality.

T
HE EUROPEAN DREAM is compelling but seems a bit utopian and out of reach. It’s hard to imagine hundreds of millions of people coalescing around such a grand vision. But, then, the idea that people might come together around democratic values and nation-state ideology would probably have seemed equally fanciful and far-fetched in the late medieval era. The question is, What kind of new-shared bond would propel people to transcend their old loyalties and make the European Dream a viable universal dream? Put simply, although it’s no simple task, we’d have to be willing to broaden our sense of attachment from property rights and obligations grounded in territory to universal human rights and obligations grounded in our collective participation on a shared Earth.

Before the skeptics and cynics dismiss such notions as utterly unachievable, let me say that globalizing forces make such a prospect less unlikely now than in any other period of human history.

First, the increasing mobility of the human race and the de-spatialization of culture in the form of dispersed cultural diasporas as well as the emergence of a global public square make property rights and narrow territorial interests at least less important in human affairs than in the past.

Second, the contours of vulnerability have changed dramatically for the human race. In ancient times, when life was lived in local space and time, vulnerability of all kinds was similarly local. Threats to one’s survival and security were generated close to home. The surrounding wild, warring lords, and disease and pestilence rarely had effects beyond the region. For this reason, the political institutions needed to provide a sense of security were local and regional. In the modern era, when improvements in communication and transportation brought people together across greater distances and in more dense patterns of activity, threats to one’s survival and security also expanded. Commercial activity extended to broader geographic markets, human mobility increased dramatically over far greater distances, and the pace and flow of human activity quickened. Vulnerability, in turn, expanded in direct proportion to the compression of space and time and the acceleration of human interactivity. Local principalities and city-states were too parochial and narrow in their reach to protect their subjects. The result was the formation of nation-states.

Today, the compression of space and time is giving rise to a global flow of human activity. The dramatic increase in the density of human exchange, in turn, is creating new threats to security whose effects are often immediate and global in scale. Terrorism, the threat of nuclear war, global warming, computer viruses, the cloning of human beings, the death of the oceans, the loss of biodiversity, the growing ozone tear, a scandal in regional trading markets, and any number of other events can tip the world into chaos.

Nation-states are too geographically constrained to effectively deal with global threats and risks. Moreover, nation-states are designed to protect property and defend territory. They are exclusive, not inclusive, governing institutions. They were never conceived of as vehicles to manage global risks and threats.

What would happen, however, if millions—even billions—of human beings were to really believe that global threats to their security were at least as real and dangerous as the more localized threats that they face each day? Addressing these threats would require a new covenant among human beings that extended their commitment and allegiances, as well as their sense of security, beyond the narrow limits of territory, and the more limited protection afforded by property rights and civil rights.

Universal human rights is the next political chapter in the evolving history of our species. Some champions of universal human rights mistakenly believe that support of human rights ultimately stems from altruism and is motivated by goodwill alone. While altruism and goodwill play a role, there is another side to human rights—one that finds cause in a sense of vulnerability and the need for security. David Beetham writes that “it is as much the exposure to common threats as the sharing in a common humanity that justifies the claim that the human rights agenda is universal.”
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The first real awareness of humanity’s shared vulnerability came with the dropping of the atomic bombs on the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945. We quickly came to realize that our common humanity was at risk in the event of an all-out nuclear war. Ulrich Beck writes that “with nuclear . . . contamination, we experience the ‘end of “the other.” ’ ”
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Today, we are subject to a host of global problems that affect all of humanity. Solutions, in turn, require a collective effort.

Cambridge University political scientist Bryan Turner argues that the notion of “human frailty” and “vulnerability” and the accompanying feeling of sympathy are the only universally shared emotions that have the power to unite humanity and provide a foundation for acceptance of universal human rights.
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Turner notes that rights have traditionally been tied to Lockean notions of property. These kinds of rights, by their very nature, cannot be regarded as universal, because they establish, from the get-go, the idea of “mine vs. thine.” Individual property rights and, by extension, the territorial rights of nation-states are meant to be exclusionary. While one might make the case that everyone has the right to acquire property, it’s not the kind of right that brings all of humanity together in some deep, fundamental way.
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On the contrary, the struggle between the possessed and the dispossessed over property rights has probably done more to divide our species than any other socially constructed phenomenon. Even the more vague right espoused by Thomas Jefferson in our Declaration of Independence, the right to pursue happiness, is “notable for its cultural diversity,” observes Harvard sociologist Barrington Moore. “Only misery,” notes Moore, “is characterized by its unity.”
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Borrowing from the earlier works of Arnold Gehlen and Helmut Plessner, Turner makes the point that “human beings are ontologically frail, and . . . that social arrangements, or social institutions, are precarious.”
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People are subject to natural disasters, hunger and disease, the wrath of their fellow human beings, and natural decay and death. Now these frailties are compounded by the unpredictability brought about by the increased density of human exchange and the introduction of powerful new technologies whose negative impacts can be felt quickly and on a global scale.