The Citizens’ Agenda for Europe
by Bernhard Schneider
“We are not making a coalition of states, but uniting people” (Jean Monnet, French entrepreneur and pioneer of European integration, 1952).
“I want my money back” (Margaret Thatcher, British Prime Minister, 1979 on)
Members of the European Parliament and government officials like to brag to their voters about what they are able to get for them “in Brussels”. Europe’s nations as competitors at the EU feeding trough: this is how politicians turn Europe’s citizens into consumers of politics as a commodity, per the motto “satisfied or get your money back”.
The risks and side effects of this kind of European politics include the cliched images of favouritism and discrimination that they generate in the national public debates and that can be easily and profitably reinforced in the media. Images of the self and the other that do not bring Europe’s citizens closer together, but rather turn them against one another. This can be clearly seen, for instance, in highly over- and underexposed images that serve as substrate for the relationship between Italians and Germans. Such distorted images can relativise the personal encounters between the people who it, first and foremost, has to be about: Europe’s citizens. Experiencing real differences helps to free us from distorted images and projections.
At the first Berlin conference of the “A Soul for Europe” initiative in 2004, The Romanian philosopher and former foreign minister, Andrei Pleşu, observed that the problem of European integration lies in “correctly interpreting the differences between us, standing by these differences and understanding them! … This is the “unification” we have to strive for. Everything else is mere administration.”
What is required is a Europe of citizens, the citizens’ Europe, in which Europeans appear not as competing consumers, but rather as co-responsible producers of the European Union in their home countries and across national borders. In the well-meaning, so-called Europe for citizens, they are, as the word “for” suggests, in the first place still addressees of the European project, of the rights and duties associated with it and of all its undeniable achievements. But the aim is for them to become themselves protagonists of the European project and to turn from addressees into co-responsible authors of it. The project has to come back to them, in order for Europeans to perceive it as their property and their very own project.
The Beginnings of Europe: Cities and Citizens
The project has to come back to the citizens and their cities from which it started historically. Cities, city states and regions gave rise to Europe’s political culture, to its public spaces, its legal and financial systems and trade, its languages and dialects, its sciences and its cuisine. But the bases of life on the Continent also include its national academies, public and private research and educational institutions, big and small festivals of music, theatre, dance, film and visual arts. The latter periodically make cities and regions into meeting points for Europeans and the world. And they are “nourished” in turn by the vitality of the art and culture that are at home in these venues. But the political and cultural tools required to make this diversity fruitful for the construction of the EU have still to be developed. The existing institutional structure is not able to do this. It does not dispose of any mechanism for allowing, besides national structures, also the European ambitions, talents and contributions of citizens and their cities to be used in constructing the union. Moreover — among other reasons, also on account of the nationally organised media — a European public sphere, in which citizens could move in a similar way as in their national public spheres, has yet to come into being. The form of democracy proper to the EU has still to be invented. Dealing productively with European diversity is evidently easier for a majority of citizens — who manage to do so bottom-up, decentrally and across national borders — than for their governments and the EU institutions dependent on the latter. The objective would be to enrich the European agenda of public officials by integrating the diverse agenda of citizens, to which the latter contribute their Europe-wide networks, their competence and their skills.
Referendums as a Substitute for Democracy
It is clear that referendums are not the way for Europeans to reclaim their ownership of the European project in a bottom-up manner. In After Europe (2017), Ivan Krastev shows how precisely the method of the referendum has been repeatedly used of late as a tool of populistically-manipulated top-down rule. All three kinds of referendums that Krastev identifies using the examples of Italy, the Netherlands and Hungary — “the brave”, “the mean” and “the ugly” — are liable “to empower a form of outright euro-pessimism that goes far beyond the Euroskepticism (sic.) of recent years”. This is a destructive effect that results to a large extent from the fact that a referendum reduces complex questions with major consequences to a simple pro or contra alternative, whose formulation rarely arises from public preparation and clarification of the matter to be decided, but rather from the agenda — often enough the hidden agenda — of the poser of the question. Citizens, on the other hand, find themselves put into the passive role of giving an answer. The debate is over. The essence of the democratic process is thus undermined: namely, elucidating the issue in the run-up to decisions by way of intensive public debate as well as a broad discussion of their consequences.
Europe Needs Them All
Standing by our differences and correctly interpreting them, as Andrei Pleşu recommended, is the starting point of the great cultural task that Europeans have to tackle, if they are to take the European project into their hands again. Europe’s culture is at home in its cities and regions and with the people, the Europeans, who live there. Everyone who has something to do with culture in a city or region, whether as individual citizen or public official, is thus fulfilling a European mission. Whether they know it or not, they are protagonists of bottom-up Europe. They have to gain greater awareness of the fact that they bear this responsibility.
This became particularly clear in the highly different ways of dealing with the increasing migration that played such a prominent role in the campaigns about the British referendum and in the call for further referendums. The migrants are arriving in Europe’s cities and regions, and it is in them, above all, that it will be decided whether foreigners become fellow citizens, immigrants become citizens of Europe, and whether a European problem becomes a gain for the people who live there and for Europe as a whole.
Make no mistake about it: Europeans will put their trust in the EU to the extent that the national and regional differences in their understanding of Europe do not get dissolved in a smallest common pan-European denominator, but rather each remain valid in their own proper sense: the Bulgarian Europe, the French, the Cypriot, the Dutch, Sicilian, Hanseatic, and so forth. If Europe is to become more than the sum of its parts, these parts have, first of all, to come into play in Europe. The “peripheries” of the eastern member states have a special role in this connection. Their accession in 2004 did not only increase the extent of Europe, but also the diversity of its cultural substance. This is too precious for it to continue to be drowned out by the noise of the disputes between governments and the EU.
The EU needs all of these different versions of being European; otherwise it will remain a fragment culturally. Every taxi driver in Prague is able to refute the Czech President Václav Klaus, who claimed that an integrated Europe is nothing for normal people, but only of interest for an elite minority that flies to London for dinner and goes shopping in Florence the next day. The taxi drivers could certainly not earn their living from just such jet-set tourism. Besides, more and more of the foreigners whom they drive live in Prague. No, Bohemian and Moravian Europe was always part of the cultural core of Europeans and of the world, and, conversely, the University of Prague was founded in 1347 on the model of Paris. It was at the time admittedly an extremely elitist institution; to this degree, Václav Klaus would not have been wrong if he had been talking about the European Middle Ages. But the Wenceslas Square of August 1968 and the German Embassy of September 1989 have become sites of pan-European memory. These lieux de mémoire do not only belong to Prague or the Czechs, just as Kafka’s castle never belonged solely to them.
This is an update of a text that was published by A Soul for Europe in 2016.
Bernhard Schneider is a co-founder and was the thematic co-ordinator of A Soul for Europe. He is a member of ASfE’s Strategy Group. The architect, planner, author and translator worked as a consultant to the Senate of Berlin and co-operator with Berlin Partners, the Capital City’s Marketing Company. From 1981 to 1989 he was executive planning officer with the Senators of Urban Development and of Cultural Affairs, Berlin and from 1991 to 1995 member of the steering committee of Stadtforum Berlin.
