IN SEARCH OF AN EUROPEAN IDENTITY
Europe’s greatest weakness may lie in its institutional architecture
During recent times the European project has become the preferred target of many new political forces, which started to gain media attention since the astonishing Brexit result and has promptly been categorized in the fields of “populism” and “Euroscepticism”, although such categorizations lack a deep understanding of the forces at work behind them.
In the same way the journalistic narrative of the political struggle between European and anti-European parties wants to resemble some romantic duel fought through ballots. This description could be perfect for the incipit of the classic good versus evil novel but it is a rather poor and simplified analysis. Macron’s election was possible only thanks to the French electoral system, it has costed the extinction of socialists and by the way Macron could not avoid to take some Gaullist behaviors and actions, while his German neighbors were able to form a government only after having persuaded the reluctant SPD to join again in a coalition with Merkel’s party, a really perilous alliance for German socialists in electoral terms. Not to talk about Italian elections where we can see maybe the first evident differentiation within “populist” forces.
The causes of such political turmoil are both endogenous and exogenous, indeed the timing of the latter were not particularly favorable in the last decade: on one hand the dramatic economic effects related to the Great Recession, which painfully stroke the Union in its most exposed point, account imbalances, and on the other hand the security issues and social tensions related to the migration flows and their flawed management. The former economic troubles made border issues more difficult to solve in this historic moment rather than in the past: in the 1990s European Union has proved to be able to admirably handle the transition to democracy of the post-communist East Europe, greatly improving its economic and political stability and thus avoiding mass migration. However, it appears reasonable to direct this brief analysis to those aspects which are intrinsically influenced by the way the European integration program was carried out.
Therefore, putting aside the fact that politicians love to blame Europe for almost everything and they hardly realized how crucial is EU for preserving the current welfare state in this ruthless competitive world, the very basis of European weakness stands in the lack of effectiveness of its institutions.
The main representative body, the European Parliament, has mainly a symbolic function and no real powers in the process of decision-making, which is quite contradictory for the great emphasis on democracy proclaimed by European institutions. This emptiness of action translated into an alienation of the European citizens from the European institutions.
The effects of this growing distance between citizens and European institutions were underestimated: the perception, especially the perception of the social classes most badly affected by the financial crisis, by the following austerity policies and, more generally, by the globalization and by the digital revolution, was that Europe was ruled by a restricted and relentless elite too occupied in a perpetual examination of balance sheets and interest rates for listening their anxieties and worries. What it has been described as the “populist wave”, at least in its Eurosceptic declination, has its roots in this feeling of not being represented by the current establishment, in this sense the definition “anti-establishment forces” sounds more precise. Obviously, this demand was met by a great array of political entities, whose merits and deficiencies should be analysed separately and singularly.
In second place, the commitment to the rule of the law, which represents the cornerstone of the European building, runs the risk of being meaningless in practice: countries without a strong democratic tradition, like Poland and Hungary, have recently enacted laws which could undermine the independence of judiciary. The European Commission has opened an infringement procedure against Poland in December, however there is not much faith in such punitive measures, since they have demonstrated practical limitations in imposing their will against member states, as in the case of the controversial question of the refugee relocation policies among member states. A solution is necessary to overcome similar stalemates, in particular when the founding values of the European Union are at stake.
Finally the literature of regional integrations offers to this analysis a great spectrum of examples about the internal contradictions of the European integration process, the most visible is the lack of willingness for the provision of a common defense self-sufficient and autonomous from the US. EU is conceived mainly as an economic unit, with effective jurisdiction only over economic matters; when it comes to diplomatic and foreign policies, member states tend to act unilaterally, as demonstrated by the 2011 military intervention in Libya, capable of generating nothing but chaos.
Maybe the worst is behind for the EU, but after 60 years of European cooperation its institutions needs to be further adjusted to ultimately achieve the aim of building a meaningful European identity, in which European citizens could regard the European flag on the same level of the one of their own nations.
