History, Democracy and the European Union

Luca Asmonti is a post-doctoral research fellow at the School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics at the University of Queensland, Australia. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the November 2012 conference, “Contemporary History: The Past That’s Still with Us”, organised by the Alfred Deakin Research Institute, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia.

I

n many debt-ridden European countries, the current financial crisis has forced national parliaments to pass harsh fiscal measures and welfare cuts to comply with the lending requirements laid out by the infamous troika—the European Union, International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank. No less importantly, this crisis is also raising, yet again, some serious questions about the democratic accountability of the European Union. According to a Eurobarometer/EU Parliament survey conducted in June 2012, 58 per cent of European citizens have a neutral or negative image of the European Union, and the fact that Brussels hailed this figure as a very positive result is perhaps more interesting than the figure itself.¹

This “existential crisis”² does not concern solely the realms of economy and governance. Besides hampering the Continent’s economy, the crisis has challenged the social and political model of European integration which was developed after the Second World War, while the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union in October 2012 sparked debate over the union’s ability to develop a cohesive foreign policy and to feature as a peace actor on the international stage.

The crisis of the European Union has been observed from a number of angles. If Jürgen Habermas still sees the integration process as “an important stage along the route to a politically constituted world society”,³ others have stressed the challenges faced by the welfare state, a pillar of Europe’s social and political identity, in an increasingly diverse Continent. When the 2007 subprime crisis in the United States spread to Europe, it evolved from financial to economic and political. “In a so-called global age, economic growth appears no longer to promote social inclusion, political consensus, or attachment to the values and principles of liberal democracy.”⁴ As Vivien Schmidt has observed, economy, democracy and identity are tightly intertwined, and in the European Union this linkage is inevitably more complex owing to the union’s “multi-level nature, split between national and EU levels”.⁵

But the complexity of the EU experiment does not pertain exclusively to its institutional structure. The project of creating a united Europe was an enormous political undertaking. It also entailed a complex historical and cultural operation which was meant to redefine the identity of the Continent, as well as the way in which Europeans looked at their past. This process began at the Hague Congress of May 1948, when Winston Churchill envisioned the “positive force” of a popular “movement for European Unity”, and of a common “European identity”, to be achieved by “forgetting the hatred of the past”.⁶ European unity could be attained only by moving beyond this “history of confrontation”. The peoples of Europe should instead relish their common cultural heritage in order to build a future of peace and unity.

This vision inspired the remarkable achievement of a shared European political and economic space, within which war has become unthinkable. In the early 1990s, joining the European Union appeared the obligatory haven for the states of the former communist bloc, hungry for Western democracy and prosperity. This enthusiasm now seems to have vanished. The European Union is failing to meet the demands of the peoples of Europe, while its democratic credentials are the object of incessant scrutiny. European identity lingers in a limbo between traditional national allegiances and a new, still incomplete, supranational dimension. Moving from an analysis of the cultural and historical repercussions of the EU crisis, this paper will enquire whether concealing national differences under the cloak of a vaguely defined common cultural heritage has in fact been detrimental to the development of a shared political culture and a European demos.⁷

History and the Vision of a Compassionate Europe

15 February 2003: millions of people “from Africa to Antarctica” take to the streets to protest against the imminent war in Iraq. The campaign originated with the European Social Forum of Florence (November 2002), and in succeeding months it spread to the four corners of the globe following the Cairo Anti-War Conference and the World Social Forum of Porto Alegre. The anti-war movement of 2003 was of an unprecedented scale: modern technologies, above all the World Wide Web, offered a common platform for a very diverse spectrum of political and social stances, thus enabling the “maturing of a global civic society”.⁸

In spite of the global temper of the anti-war campaign, some commentators argued that its underlying values were inspired by a culture of democracy, solidarity and human rights that was very European in spirit and that stemmed from the wounds and sufferings of the Second World War. On 31 May 2003, a number of prominent American and European intellectuals published a series of newspaper articles on the state of US–EU relations in the wake of the invasion of Iraq, which were later collected in a volume significantly entitled Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe. From the Franco-German pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Libération, Jürgen Habermas hailed the events of 15 February 2025 as “the sign of birth of a European public sphere”. (This was in stark contrast to Spanish prime minister José María Aznar’s request for an oath of loyalty from European leaders to US president George W. Bush.)

The February rallies, Habermas argued, marked the awakening of the people of Europe, but they were also a call to the political leaders of the “core” EU members. Those countries which were already prepared “to endow the EU with certain qualities of a state” had the duty to lead the way towards a common foreign policy, underpinned by the founding values of European identity: peace, democracy and co-operation.⁹ According to Zygmunt Bauman, the anti-war movement drew on the “shared historical memory of past sufferings and shared revulsion towards violence” of the people