The Preamble to the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe contains the expressions ‘transcend’, ‘common destiny’, ‘rights of each individual’ and ‘responsibilities towards future generations and the Earth’, and these words are framed by a conception of Europe as a ‘great venture which makes of it a special area of human hope’. While this does not quite attain the exalted level of an American belief in a ‘manifest destiny’, the intentions of the Président de la Convention, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and his colleagues are nonetheless apparent. The ‘new Europe’ is not to be understood merely as bureaucracy or as an expanded market, but as a vital entity, the bearer of intellectual, cultural and spiritual continuities. In this chapter, I explore some of the dimensions that such aspirations touch upon, once they are emancipated from high-flown intention and anchored in the matrix of tensions and contradictions that afflict all efforts to define and defend identity in an era of globalisation and religiously inspired terror.

The enlargement of the European Union (EU) to include ten new states prompted an immediate debate centring on such questions as migration, border controls, labour regulation, the common agricultural policy, the costs of regional subsidies and defence. Such debates are as important as they are inevitable. But enlargement also raised issues that go beyond the agenda of economic, monetary and political integration, issues that concern the limits and integrity of European culture as such. While the accession of Finland, Sweden and Austria during the 1990s increased the size of the EU, membership for the new states which joined in 2004 and for those seeking membership in the future raises questions more profound and far-reaching than those concerning the feasibility of the EU's current decision-making procedures. For most of those new states, membership of the EU is at the same time part of a ‘return to Europe’ in a broader sense. The fact that some of these states have Slavic populations, that some have immature democratic polities, or large peasant populations, or populations which have for centuries been within the orbit of orthodox Christianity or Islam, raises questions about Europe's internal cultural identity. Such questions have become more sharply focused as a result of the larger geo-political and cultural realignments of which Europe is a part.

To be sure, there is no logical reason why debate about European culture and identity should be dependent upon shifts in geopolitics.

After having discussed the need for ‘normative impulses’ for effective social and political integration in Europe, impulses that can only come about ‘through overlapping projects for a common political culture’, Jürgen Habermas, in the title essay to The Postnational Constellation, immediately reassures his readers that such projects ‘can be constructed in the common historical horizon that the citizens of Europe already find themselves in’. And a moment later he indeed identifies an already existing ‘normative self-understanding of European modernity’. What, though, is this self-understanding of European modernity, and what is its specificity?

Some have objected to Habermas, or to all those who try to identify normative underpinnings for European political integration, that such European self-understanding is either entirely indistinct from the general self-understanding of the West, i.e. a commitment to human rights and liberal democracy, or highly problematic, because it makes overly ‘thick’ presuppositions, which are untenable against the background of European cultural diversity, and risks reviving non-liberal European political traditions. The proposition made in the following attempt to reconstruct the normative self-understanding of European political modernity is different. It suggests, on the one hand, that the general, universalist commitment to liberal democracy is insufficient to understand Western polities. The commitment to political modernity does not lead unequivocally to a certain institutional form of the polity. It is open to interpretation, and the existing polities that share this commitment are indeed based on a variety of such interpretations.

The shape of the new Europe is best appreciated through a particular understanding of the old Europe. My use of these terms does not coincide with Donald Rumsfeld's contrast – designed to divide so as to better control Europe – between the key pioneers of European integration and newer members from Central Europe. Attention focuses instead on the historical sociology of European territory and institutions over the last century. What matters most of all is the national question, for reasons so obvious that they can be stated immediately with both bluntness and force.

The central feature that differentiated the old Europe of a century ago from its contemporary variant was the presence of multinational empires, most notably those of the Habsburgs, Romanovs and Ottomans. These authoritarian regimes were faced with the challenge of modernity, that is, with the complex intertwining of nationalism, democratisation and industrialisation, the precise contours of which we still do not fully understand. None was able to meet this challenge intact; all fragmented into a series of separate nation-states, albeit dissolution in the Russian case was much delayed by the empire being placed under new management at the end of the First World War. The tectonic shift caused by the ending of imperial rule in the European heartland resulted in vicious practices of ethnic cleansing, population transfer and genocide, all carried out in the midst of the fog of world wars. Accordingly, it is entirely appropriate to call twentieth century Europe ‘the dark continent’.

The Eastern enlargement of the European Union (EU) has important implications for our understanding of the meaning of Europe. Although the precise nature of this process is uncertain, the very fact that it is underway is in itself of major significance. Indeed the very term integration may be inadequate when it comes to the current scale of Europeanisation, which consists not of one but several logics and not all of which can be understood in terms of integration. Europeanisation is not leading to a society, a state or a clearly definable geopolitical entity that rests on a cultural foundation, as is often assumed. Moreover, there is not one ‘Europe’, but several. In this respect, what is central is the question of modernity, or modernities and their civilisational forms.

The categories that are used to make sense of Europeanisation tend on the whole to be either descriptive or normative – ‘widening’, ‘deepening’, ‘integration’, ‘convergence’ – and thus fail to appreciate the dynamics of a multi-directional process. There is relatively little theoretical literature exploring the wider significance of the Eastern enlargement, which is generally seen only in terms of intergovernmentalism and of institutional design. The constitutional debate instigated by the Convention on the Future of Europe in February 2002 has, to a degree, opened a wider perspective on the emerging face of a bigger Europe, but the issues at stake go beyond what can be addressed by a constitution.

There is a remarkable contrast between the expectations and demands of those who pushed for European unification immediately after the Second World War, and those who contemplate the continuation of this project today – at the very least, a striking difference in rhetoric and ostensible aim. While the first generation advocates of European integration did not hesitate to speak of the project they had in mind as a ‘United States of Europe’, evoking the example of the USA, current discussion has moved away from the model of a federal state, avoiding even the term ‘federation’. Larry Siedentop's recent book Democracy in Europe expresses a more cautious mood:

Does this shift in climate reflect a sound realism, born of a learning-process of over four decades, or is it rather the sign of a mood of hesitance, if not outright defeatism?

The question of whether and, if so, when to constitutionalise the European Union (EU) entered serious public debate with the speech of Joschka Fischer at Humboldt University in 2000. In virtually all member states, prominent politicians subsequently felt compelled to express their opinion on this issue. Not surprisingly, they came up with very different versions of what such a European constitution should contain. Some wanted it in order to limit any further expansion of the competences of the EU; others wanted it in order to provide the EU with sufficient authority to cope with a wider agenda and a large number of members. But on two things there seemed to be general agreement: (1) the EU could not continue solely on the basis of treaties that have to be revised periodically and ratified by each member state – if only because this had already become much more difficult to do with fifteen members and even more so with twenty-five; and (2) this change in the fundamental institutional basis of European integration should happen sooner rather than later.

I remain convinced that both of these assumptions were (and still are) wrong. The EU does not need a constitution, not only because it has not done badly with a quasi-constitution based on successive treaties, but also because the flexibility provided by the lack of an agreed distribution of competences between it and its member states and, especially, the absence of a common definition of its political end-state (the so-called finalité politique) are precisely what the EU will need in the coming years when it will have to face the dual challenges of governing the effects of monetary unification and coping with the dislocations generated by enlargement.

There is a state of uncertainty, not about the desirability of a European civil society (as Gandhi said of Western civilisation, it sounds like a good idea) but about its reality. I have become, if anything, somewhat more tentative about the claims one can make for the existence of anything one might want to call civil society at a European or European Union (EU) level, as distinct from the several and sometimes overlapping civil societies located in the individual member states of the EU. The existence of a section called ‘civil society’ on an EU website publicising relevant conferences and so forth provides only limited reassurance here. There are of course numerous civil society organisations with a European/EU reference, ranging from the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) to more informal social movements and lobbying organisations representing the interests of consumers, cyclists and others. There is also of course the European Social Forum, emerging in 2002 out of the global social movement, the World Social Forum, and playing an equally prominent if occasional role. The question is whether all this amounts to something we might meaningfully call a European or EU civil society.

Two books have had a particular influence on my thinking. One is Michael Billig's Banal Nationalism, the other is Larry Siedentop's Democracy in Europe. Referring to such everyday examples as national flags outside public buildings, Billig points out the extent to which nation-state categories frame our social experience and our most basic assumptions:

Peace and prosperity in Europe: anyone who remembers the zero hour of 1945 and all that went before it feels grateful every day for these achievements. We also know who and what can take credit for the flourishing landscapes which have replaced trenches and ruins. Above all, it is the people of Europe who have learnt the lesson of history and worked vigorously to create a better world. But then there was also the USA, safeguarding and promoting the new opportunities of the postwar era. NATO and the Marshall Plan are code words for the commitment for which we Europeans are obliged to be eternally grateful. Both the actions of the people and the USA's assistance have now been strengthened and made lasting by the process of European unification, itself one of the remarkable achievements of recent decades.

And yet precisely this process has made headway only falteringly, subject to detours and prone to occasional accidents. Churchill's splendid vision of 1945 fell on ground on which, to be sure, some flowers bloomed but where no-one had the courage – or found the right conditions – to pave the way to this royal road. There has never been political union in Europe. Should there be? This is my question here. If we do not believe in a world spirit – a spirit which was expressed in Churchill's speeches in Strasbourg and Zurich and which, inevitably if not always recognisably, clears the way for a United States of Europe – then we must ask why we should aspire to the ‘ever closer union’ of Europe as set out in the Treaty of Rome which established the European Economic Community (EEC).

In the third millennium, postnationalism looks set to replace nationalism as the dominant political paradigm. The twentieth century witnessed the break-up of the great national empires – British, French, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian – as well as a number of devastating world wars resulting from the internecine rivalries between nation-states. The terminal death-rattles of nationalist belligerence (on the European scene at any rate) sounded on the streets of Belfast where republicans and loyalists fought their last battles before finally reaching peace in 1998, and in the villages of Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo where Balkan ethnicities clashed in genocidal hatred before an international accord was secured. Widening the focus, the events of 11 September 2001 made it dramatically clear that wars of the twenty-first century cannot be confined to specific nation-states, or national empires, but traverse boundaries and borders with disturbing ease. Al-Queda is as postnationalist as the American Way of Life it targets.

In several writings over the last two decades, the German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, argues for what he calls a ‘postnational constellation’ as a response to the current political situation in Europe. Noting the erosion of the territorial sovereignty of nation-states, Habermas expresses the hope that this may open up a new space for: (1) cultural hybridisation; (2) transnational mobility and emigration; (3) cosmopolitan solidarity, predicated on a neo-republican balance between private and civic liberties opposed to the neo-liberal disregard for social justice; and (4) constitutional patriotism (on a federal European scale inspired by principles of coordinated redistribution and egalitarian universalism).

INTRODUCTION

An essential ingredient of politics is winning. What counts in politics is the passing of a bill, the amendment of a proposal, getting a policy accepted, or the enforcement of a decision. However, in general, it is impossible to win by staying alone. In politics, including European politics, it is necessary to form winning coalitions in order to enforce decisions.

Surely, in any political system, individual preferences with respect to a decision-making problem will diverge. Consequently, conflict will be at the heart of politics. However, this does not mean that coalitions are not important. In order to resolve conflict in political decision-making processes, cooperation and hence coalition-formation is essential. Conflict and cooperation are different sides of the same coin. Indeed, even if conflict is so strong that no resolution is possible, coalition-formation is still essential: in the extreme, it is necessary in order to revolutionise the system itself.

Since cooperation is an essential ingredient of politics, coalition-building cannot be neglected in the modelling of political decision-making. A framework that explicitly deals with cooperation and coalitions is cooperative game theory. In this chapter, we will use cooperative game theory to analyse decision-making in European politics.

However, cooperative game theory has a serious drawback: it is mainly geared towards solving games in terms of payoff structures, not in terms of coalitions. For quite some time, political scientists have been aware of this fact (e.g. see Riker 1962).