How to approach the eve of the Dahrendorf Symposium when events of such moment are swirling all around it? There is certainly an irony in their being such a stark expression of his hopes and concerns for European integration.
If Dahrendorf advocated that borders should not obstruct the addressing of common problems then, barely noticed, something momentous has taken place. The battle is still ongoing but maybe, finally, a political entity has emerged with sufficient firepower to counter run-away financial capitalism. The spreads may have widened, but despite all the hysteria, the combined fire-power of the European Financial Stability Facility and ECB purchase of assets through the Securities Market Programme has countered financial speculative runs on a country’s economy.
He would also possibly have noted that his predictions of an à la carte European Union are being realised and in very dramatic ways! If it is fashionable to assume that countries using the euro will form part of a fiscal union with a very different political and legal settlement from others, there is a certain anorak-ish satisfaction in thinking about the different permutations.
There are the seventeen euro area States within the Union; States using the euro not within the Union; States within the Union who cannot conceive of using the euro; States within the Union committed to join the euro in the next years who are hesitating, and other States who are not.
Furthermore, if a Union State is outside this fiscal union does it have more in common with euro area States or with non- EU States with links to the Union? It is not clear in a few years time, irrespective of any future opt-outs, whether the legal obligations of the United Kingdom might not be more analogous to those of Norway than to those of France. It is an open question about whether that means more rethinking how the United Kingdom is identified with the Union or how Norway is identified with it.
However, recent events have grimly vindicated Dahrendorf’s concerns about the creation of a system with such a thin common identification between its citizens in which national representative institutions have been so strongly displaced and where agenda-setting is so dominated by supranational or transnational bureaus. Trust has corroded in public institutions during the crisis. Parliaments have been railroaded. Europe’s public sphere has given rise some of the most venomous and mutually belittling discourse during the crisis
Simply to dwell on this is to provide no more than a rhapsody of regret. Equally to promise institutional reforms with lots of jam tomorrow for national parliaments and civil society within the Union settlement is to play at the philosopher-king. It is also to make very problematic assumptions about their willingness to engage with such a project and their operative capacities within it, in particular their ability to mobilise their central constituencies to follow them.
Perhaps a new starting point for the Union is to centre itself less about recreating reality and more about reflecting upon the realities within which it must work.
In this, the epithet of the Greek tragedy, deployed as a cliché and a leitmotiv during the crisis, may have a powerful German twist. Few have made it as resonant for modern times as Friedrich Nietzsche.
His Birth of Tragedy argued that the Greek Tragedy brought together two traditions of belief: the Apollonian belief in illusion and the Dionysian in intoxication. The Apollonian illusion was the belief in the capacity to prophesy truth and in the possibility for an individual to perfect herself through reason. Illusion made life possible and bearing but it was, according to Nietzsche, highly individualising. Intoxication expressed, by contrast, our primal condition. It was the ineradicable and powerful presence and lust for pain and pleasure, which, if chaotic and destabilising, also brought humans together in its commonality.
The Greek Tragedy reminded its audience of the exceptionalism to reason in all human life; that reason had, therefore, many illusionary qualities; and that life was painful and limited. It did so moreover, Nietzsche noted, in vital and empirical ways. If the shared painful exposure to this brought the audience together, the Tragedy also had healing qualities. It created constructs, most notably the Sublime and the Comic, which made the painfulness of this more bearable.
So what lessons does this ancient institution hold for the modern crisis?
A feature of the crisis has been many narratives of suffering. There is the Greek and other debtor State suffering; the scapegoating of them as the new deserving European poor; money destined to alleviate the suffering of the sick, the old and the poor in Germany and other creditor States now signposted for other things; Central and East European States having to bankroll wealthier States the suffering of the truly marginalised whose representation is lost in world categorised into rich and poor States.
All these narratives are real, justified and, like the Greek Tragedy, have brought people together. But they are insulated from one another. Few of their exponents express little appreciation of the suffering and challenges of others. Instead, the alleviation of the suffering of others is simultaneously seen as a cause for one’s own suffering and therefore not an authentic issue of concern in its own right.
The Greek Tragedy might tell us therefore three things.
First, although solutions to the crisis must be sought there is no magic bullet. Results will be partial and responses ad hoc and contradictory. Almost certainly the genesis of the next crisis will be found in the ‘resolution’ of this one. Any careful reading of the European Economic Governance package, for example, suggests it is full of risks and tensions. This does not prevent this quest being worthless as the counterfactual might be something much worse. States without government are invariably worse than states of imperfect government.
Secondly, would it be beyond Europe’s leaders to show some common sense of the suffering and challenges taking place? Would it hurt for Merkel to visit places in Athens or other Greek cities which help the victims of the crisis? Or Papandreou to visit Slovakia to listen and experience the challenges confronting that State or to express greater acknowledgement of the needs of the German poor? Such acts might help change the wider terms of the debate. It would certainly be more uplifting if newspapers in different States focussed on the inspiring and multiple attempts in all European societies to overcome difficulty rather than lapsing into dehumanising stereotypes. Civil society might respond to its nobler traditions of ‘help thy neighbour’ in a manner not notable in any strong transnational sense during the crisis.
Thirdly, there needs to be a reassertion of the sublime in European lives. This can certainly not be done through some ghastly political or legal appropriation by Europe’s leaders – be it through some Action Plan or common statement. However, if the European Union were swept away in some popular revolution, there would still probably be a desire to retain the sport, music, cinema, art exhibitions, travel, religion or study that we associate and experience as coming from other parts of Europe, doing in other parts of Europe or doing with other European. It weakens and does not capture the heterogeneity of these experiences to identify them as ‘cultural’, ‘youth’ or ‘educational’ activities as the rubric of the Treaty on European Union does. Instead, their value lies in their taking us beyond ourselves and experiencing or doing something different that would not be possible alone. If many seem part of the local fabric of daily lives or seem universal rather than ‘European’. However, it is also true that many have a European genesis, and they all depend much on the activities of other Europeans. The development and worth of the European idea depends much upon its power to recreate and reinvent these forms of activity, experience and interaction. It is, of course, unknowable whether this will happen.
