To my UK friends who voted for remaining in the EU…..
All Europeans should cry out with Apollinaire: «Finally you are weary of this ancient world». Like the «Eiffel Tower, the shepherdess of the bridges», they should have had «enough of living in ancient Greece and Rome». That is to say, both nostalgia for the nation state as well as the dream of recreating a new European and purportedly federal empire, a new Rome.
The first has greater chances of success than the second in reality, but they are both fatal. It is a choice between the graveyard and the hospice. These two concepts emanate from our «Greek and Roman heritage». They exalt an improbable democracy, that of the ephemeral Greek societies. They purport to overcome conflict and rivalry between individuals in the search for a necessarily totalitarian unanimity demanding the reabsorption of differences between individuals.
The nationalist illusion hastens us towards the graveyard of civilisations, the federal illusion pushes us towards narrowing into the bureaucratic, private European rump State of the British. Yet without the United Kingdom, we would lose a better part of ourselves. What authentic European could envisage doing without the inheritors of the Magna Carta, habeas corpus, Shakespeare, their legal imagination and their sense of compromise? The United Kingdom is an integral part of Europe and, whatever annoyance they may sometimes generate through their cynical stance, they are also as indivisible from the European idea as France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain or Portugal. Imagining a separation is a crime against the European idea.
The only new European project that respects the diversity of the Union can be found in the conceptual advances of the ECSC Treaty and of the Treaty of Rome in as much as they enable the implementation of the principle of competition through merit. We must therefore learn to love this principle, to approve of free and fair competition through merit, just as we must love the jumble of beams and steel which was the Eiffel Tower at the entrance to the World’s Fair: an intrinsic beauty because the talent of the engineer is not hidden but displayed.
The Treaty of Rome is therefore the equivalent to the poet’s Eiffel Tower. It remains the most modern, the most youthful thing in Europe. It has opened up a new phase of democratic modernity, surpassing the frontiers of the nation state, not to fuse them into a new version of a federation-cartel or federation-empire, but within an open space of civilised competitiveness of multi-century social models such as those of Netherland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy and Spain.
The European Union does not seek to establish a single European society, the famous E pluribus unum on the Great Seal of the United States, but to maintain an open plurality that welcomes other societies to become «European» through the simple fact of their full acceptance of the establishment of a regime of free and fair competition between all its constituents, peoples, companies and communities.
The principle of free and fair competition through merit therefore offers the possibility of conceiving a non-imperial political domain, without synthesis, a zone in which the confrontation of ideas, the rivalry of ambitions are permitted, unless they purport to create «power» or «coalitions», the authoritarian unification of individuals.
(Translation of the postface of my book “la concurrence est toujours une idée neuve et en Europe”, ODILE JACOB Octobre 2015)
