Analysts and observers of social and political change sometimes have difficulty separating enthusiasms from science. This has been particularly the case in the brief history of European integration. The high hopes of the initial common market years gave way to numerous worries in the 1970s. This moment was followed by renascent European energy, led by Commission activism, around the single market and Maastricht treaty. Many observers then concluded that Europe's growing pains had given way to forwards movement, a judgement that deeply marked scholarly thinking. By the mid-1990s, however, it seemed that this might not be the case. As time went on, it became clearer that what had been greeted as a golden age was really a moment of transition toward significant changes in the EU's constitution that brought their own problems. This essay briefly discusses the golden age and the less golden transition that followed.

From Eurosclerosis to Euro-optimism

By the late 1970s, many observers had written off the EC as a noble but stagnating experiment. Europe's postwar boom had ended in high inflation, low growth, and high unemployment, leading member states to protect their national interests in EC decision-making and erect non-tariff barriers threatening the common market. The European Monetary System (EMS), designed to align currencies and avoid competitive devaluations, had instead revealed the Deutschmark's power and spawned member state discontent. The early 1980s then brought “Eurosclerosis”, with the British blocking EC decision-making to win reductions in their budgetary contribution and France's “Mitterrand experiment” crashing and burning.

France's new-found desire for different EC directions and Helmut Kohl's ascension to the German chancellorship renewed Franco-German collaboration, however. The 1984 Fontainebleau European Council reduced the UK's budgetary contribution and brought the British back into the fold, agreed on enlarging to Spain and Portugal, and led to the appointment of Jacques Delors as president of the Commission.

Having been a Euro-parliamentarian and Mitterrand's minister of the economy after 1981, Delors had in-depth knowledge of the challenges. A progressive Catholic “social liberal,” he was familiar with the EC's many unenacted reform plans, aware of the changes underway in the global economy, in touch with progressive business interests, and, above all, convinced that the EC had to renew itself. In his initial speech to the European Parliament in January 1985, Delors proposed a new initiative to build a single market: a “space without borders.”

Cultural union, along with economic and political union, is one of the aspirations of the EU. From the first gatherings in Switzerland to the Cultural Resolution, with which the 1948 Congress of Europe in The Hague ended, discussions of cultural unity and cultural renewal dominated the postwar European project. In these considerations, the “founding fathers” of the EU were anything but the small-step bureaucrats they are often painted to be. In 1958, looking back on his first year as the first president of the Commission of the EEC, Walter Hallstein set forward his vision for the EC. In “The Unity of European Culture and the Policy of Uniting Europe”, he presented a clear statement on the role of culture in the European project, placing a commonality of culture as the foundation for political and economic aspirations.

In fact, Hallstein suggested that the question of culture is more important than the aspirations of the ECSC or Euratom, which had no possibility of inspiring the populace to commit to the common European project. He echoed in this speech ideas expressed similarly by Robert Schuman, Paul-Henri Spaak, Alcide de Gasperi, Altiero Spinelli, and Winston Churchill. Jacques Delors in 1985, following in Hallstein's footsteps, set forward a cultural policy agenda during his first speech as the head of the European Commission:

Yet culture, European culture, and the processes of European cultural unionization have received relatively little attention. The focus on European politics and economics has overshadowed research on European culture.

The importance of culture

A focus on culture is important at this moment during which the European project is fractured: the UK is heading out into the Atlantic, Turkey is aimed eastward, a Eurasian geopolitical trench opens up from the Baltics to the Bosporus, and an EU border regime turns the Mediterranean into a mass grave.

In the 2010s, as large numbers of asylum seekers arrived in Europe, anti-migrant discourses rose throughout the continent. Within this overwhelmingly xenophobic atmosphere, many migrants and members of minority groups did not accept their outsider status but showed that they belong to Europe in different ways. This chapter presents an example from Berlin, Germany which illustrates how minorities in Europe show their centrality to the working of their cities and receive support from different parts of their societies (Filiz 2018). The goal is to provide an example of minority agency and solidarity contributing to the scholarship on how immigrants respond to the emerging challenges they face in Europe.

In 2015, code enforcement offices in certain neighborhoods in Berlin started to enforce a previously ignored law that forbade most shops from opening on Sundays. This law was enforced especially for spatis (corner shop-like businesses that are open late hours and on Sundays when most other shops are closed) in northern parts of Neukölln, a “hip” neighborhood known for sizable migrant populations. This sudden change affected many Turkish shopkeepers – where “Turkish” refers to individuals who migrated from Turkey or whose parents or grandparents came from Turkey, and not to an ethnic identity – who made up a large portion of spati owners and workers, especially in neighborhoods affected by this enforcement. Thus, members of the largest minority in this European capital experienced a bureaucratic dystopia that contradicted Berlin's permitting and diversity-friendly image. Turkish owners and workers did not simply accept this sudden change which threatened to bring an end to their operations. Instead, they responded to this bureaucratic dystopia by defining their businesses as indispensable for this cosmopolitan European city.

Responding to the Sunday bans

The law entitled “Berlin Shop Opening Law” (Berliner Ladenöffnungsgesetz) regulates businesses’ operating hours and states that shops are not allowed to open on Sundays. In response to the enforcement of this law, spati owners established a professional society under the name Berliner Späti e.V (Berlin Späti Organization). The group started their operations when the Sunday bans intensified in 2015 and had their official opening after the local elections in September 2016. Almost all the members were Turkish when the organization was founded.

It is no secret that European studies has suffered a setback in the academy. Maligned in some quarters as the superannuated practice of “Eurocentrism”, or glibly sidelined in others as mere “area studies”, the field has clearly slipped from its once prominent place among institutional priorities. How can we revive and sustain a vibrant interest in European societies among those in higher education who have, over time, succumbed to the notion that Europe is passé? The answer, in our opinion, lies not only in making the ongoing argument for the topicality of Europe – which is implicit in all our work – so much as in developing institutional strategies that provide concrete incentives for students and faculty to engage with it.

The “unexpected Europeanists” of our title are, on the one hand, faculty whose research interests include unlikely or unacknowledged investments in European studies, and on the other, students who may be eager to include European studies in their curriculum, but have not yet been offered flexible curricular options that draw meaningful connections to their primary disciplines. Thus, while we would always welcome new faculty hires and fully declared undergraduate majors in the area of European studies, we focus here upon raising interest in Europe among current colleagues and students whose primary interests lie – or appear to lie – elsewhere.

Recognizing that without students there is little point to an enhanced European studies faculty, we propose a two-pronged approach. To cultivate the undergraduate base at both Georgia and Notre Dame, we have in collaboration with other colleagues created new and flexible undergraduate curricula featuring “transnational European studies”. At the University of Georgia, Benjamin Ehlers and Martin Kagel introduced a transnational European studies minor; at the University of Notre Dame, Heather Stanfiel, and William Donahue have introduced a transnational European studies major with multiple points of entry. To foster broader-based faculty interest, we offer an annual interdisciplinary, Berlin-based seminar that convenes a vertically integrated group of scholars ranging from advanced graduate students to established senior scholars.

Crises of society, economy, and democracy are rocking the foundations of Europe. As Nathan Gardels writes in the Washington Post (21 September 2018): “Across Western democracies, the social cohesion that once sustained political consensus has severely eroded.” Social cohesion requires interdependent individuals to perceive societal well-being as crucial to peace and prosperity, and to cooperate for shared social goals (Council of Europe 2008: 7). Yet marginal groups are suffering in the contemporary political, economic, and social climate, and outsiders are increasingly vocal about their discontent. Right-oriented protest groups often concentrate their free-floating rage on border-crossing flows of refugees and workers. Yellow-vested protesters and neofascist memes more broadly signal malaise with state authority and with societies that forget the leftovers.

Economic malaise certainly contributes to the crisis of social cohesion. Postindustrial change, a jobless recovery from the financial and euro crises, and rising inequality threaten economic well-being, and citizens at the margins receive little from mainstream society. Child poverty rates are on the rise in two-thirds of OECD countries. Young people who are not in employment, education, or training constituted 14 per cent of 15–29 year olds within the OECD in 2016.

The crisis of social cohesion also reflects the deficit of democracy within the EU and receding agreement on the mission of the EU. Despite ardent efforts to construct a supranational Europe with symbols and narratives, a collective European social identity seems out of reach, as few consider the EU to be a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts. Mass voters fear that EU elite technocrats have little interest in respecting national political and cultural traditions. EU collective action is grounded in political or legal logic, rather than in cultural norms of cooperation. This democratic deficit contributes to a legitimation crisis of both national and supranational political authorities.

Varieties of society in a global context

Countries have historically built on diverse models to reconcile growth and social solidarity. These models make different assumptions about the importance of marginal groups to national growth projects and to the health of the polity. The social democratic model found in the Nordic countries posits that each individual should contribute to building a strong society and economy.

The place of European studies in the landscape of North American social sciences has faced serious challenges since the seventies (Lamont 2013). The general decline of area studies after the transition away from a colonial, and then Cold War-inspired, geographical organization of knowledge production has meant a redefinition of the position of European studies within the social sciences field over the past several decades. This trend has materialized in a highly regrettable decline in funding from some of the main American supporters of independent social science research on Europe, most notably the Ford Foundation and the German Marshall Fund (both following earlier signals from the Mellon Foundation).

Concomitantly, the Global South has come to exercise a growing and powerful attraction on our undergraduates, due to shifts in what it means to be progressive for today's young, the intensification of globalization, and the booming economic and political importance of countries like Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS). This trend is affecting academic hiring patterns, including the turn of history departments toward global history and the accelerated hiring of experts in areas other than Europe. Although itself a positive change, such a disciplinary shift is not without consequence for European studies.

Similar transformations operate in other disciplines (Lamont 2009). To simplify greatly, within political science, an American politics-based methodological push which went hand in hand with the adoption of economics as a reference point has transformed and challenged European comparative politics, a field with a long lineage of Weberian-inspired qualitative analysis. For its part, US-based anthropology of Europe prospered for a while, albeit just when the discipline itself went into a state of decline. At the same time, macroeconomics continued to veer away from country-based analyses, to focus more exclusively on theoretical innovation and modeling. As for sociology, research endeavors in my field were never firmly grounded in geographic divisions, and very few of my contemporaries have developed intellectual identities as proper “Europeanists”. Instead, while a number of sociologists are serious regional experts, it is not unusual that members of my tribe take on regional topics in a more superficial fashion: they aim to make theoretical or substantive contributions by drawing on evidence that “happened” to be gathered in Europe.

The EU's ongoing rule-of-law crisis, entailed by constitutional backsliding in some of its member states, and the fierce debate as to whether and how EU institutions should intervene, have grown into one of the core issues of the European project. Nowadays, it is generally accepted that the rule-of-law predicament undermines the European integration and, sooner or later, a solution needs to be found. But how can there be a rule-of-law crisis in the EU? Rule of law and human rights (hereafter collectively: rule of law) are said to be the fundamental values of Europe (Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union) and the EU has its own detailed bill of rights (EU Charter of Fundamental Rights).

The problem is that EU law has no doctrine of “diagonality”. This term refers to the application of EU rule of law against member states, as opposed to “straight application”, which refers to the application of EU law requirements against EU institutions, as well as the application of national constitutional requirements against member states. EU law contains a comprehensive set of rule-of-law requirements, which have a full application against EU institutions (“straight application”) but only a very limited one against member states. EU rule of law applies to member states when they implement EU law (“paradigm of scope”), however, notwithstanding its substantial spillover effects, this diagonality is false, as here member states act as the agents of the EU (“apparent diagonal application”), contrary to cases, where EU rule of law is applied to member states acting in their own field of operation (“genuine diagonal application”).

The dead end of the European rule-of-law debate

The ongoing rule-of-law crisis in Europe brought to the fore a fundamental contradiction of the EU's legal and institutional architecture. On the one hand, rule of law and human rights are (at least on the level of declaration) at the cornerstones of the EU: they are clearly recognized by the founding treaties, serve as non-negotiable preconditions for accession, and ensure that the various European mechanisms based on mutual trust and recognition are operational and effective. On the other hand, EU law has no doctrine of diagonality and appears to have very limited power when encountering recalcitrant member states who are contemptuous of the EU's fundamental values.

The EU is facing a critical moment in its history. The sustained growth of Euroskeptic and populist parties, the recent economic and financial crisis with its corollary of austerity, the never-ending soap opera of Brexit, the increase in terrorist attacks by Islamist radicals and far-right activists, the deaths of refugees in the Mediterranean, and the abandonment and repression of migrants in the north of Paris or in Calais, are only some of the critical issues challenging the EU. These problems are partly a consequence of EU politics and policies. They are also, in one way or another, all connected. More fundamentally, several of these problems challenge the very founding principles of the European project.

Europe's crisis of hospitality and solidarity

Traumatized by the horrors of World War II, the founders of the EU first aspired to lay the foundations for lasting peace. In this respect, their project has been incredibly successful. Europe has never enjoyed such a long period without wars (one could point out the wars that followed the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, but they were not within the borders of the EU). However, several other founding aspirations of the EU have not enjoyed such fortune. Article 1 of the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights states that human dignity is inviolable and must be respected and protected. The following articles go on to celebrate the right to life, the protection of human integrity, and the prohibition of degrading treatments. Similarly, the digital portal of the EU asserts that “The EU protects all minorities and vulnerable groups, and stands up for the oppressed. Regardless of a person's nationality, gender, language group, culture, profession, disability or sexuality, the EU insists on equal treatment for all.” Such noble principles are allegedly at the core of European values: “the EU values are common to the EU countries in a society in which inclusion, tolerance, justice, solidarity and non-discrimination prevail. These values are an integral part of our European way of life.”

These declarations sound great and should give rise to humane policies. But according to the Missing Migrants Project, between 2014 and 2018 about 18,000 refugees died in the Mediterranean.

The biggest issue confronting Europe today is moving forwards with the EU project. Studies focusing on the EU as well as public discourse concentrate disproportionately on the flaws of this supranational construct, giving the impression of constant crisis. This incentivizes the counterfactual reasoning that post-World War II social and economic progress would have been possible in the absence of the EU. What is worrying about our present situation is not the increased fragmentation of views on what Europe could become but the growing acceptance (and increasing familiarity) of things as they have always been. EU integration is a simultaneous process of creation and destruction that slowly erases the sovereignty of the nation state. This rattled the old European order and is met with resistance from the nation state. And yet twenty-first-century challenges cannot be addressed with nineteenth-century institutions, meaning nation states first and foremost. An increasingly complex global environment presses to stride forwards with the remodeling of the European institutional system.

The new prominence of the EU in political discourse seems to suggest that this is a project in peril of disintegration. The argument is that building a monetary system that makes sense in Finland just as much as it would in Greece is too difficult. It is that rule of law means different things in Hungary and in the Netherlands. And it is that “Russian connections” spell gas pipelines in Germany and existential threats in Estonia. However, the need to give some kind of unifying meaning to rules and concepts was always inevitable. It is fanciful to assume that there would be no resistance from national and local interpretations to unifying European rules. “Building Europe” can only happen at the expense of national sovereignty. Much like the popular movie line from Highlander: in the end, there can be only one. Either the EU or the nation state will predominate. My goal here is to sketch the opportunities for a more solidified EU offered by current challenges.

Embrace coalition building

The May 2019 European Parliament elections gave the EU a more fragmented legislative body. The center-right European People's Party (EPP) and the center-left Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D) lost their combined majority for the first time even if they remain the two largest parties.

The EU has achieved a great union of the private economy, but little union of the public sector. The paradox is that European public finances are so scant that the EU has to intervene, control, and eventually bail out the public finances of its member states, a process that many regard as undemocratic. The EU is too interventionist because it is too weak. The alternative is for the Union to bolster public resources for large-scale initiatives, stop controlling and interfering in domestic policy-making, and return more fiscal autonomy to the member states.

We need to discontinue the idea of a “fiscal union” between member states and, instead, provide the European Commission with more fiscal resources. The fiscal autonomy of each of the levels of government, both the member states and the Union, as well as the local and regional governments, is the best formula for efficient public management and democratic accountability.

Comparing Europe and America

Some inspiration can be taken from the process of building the first modern union of states in a great continental area and inspired by democratic principles: the United States of America. The lengthy process of building the American Union, which was gradual, conflictive, and asymmetric, might be reminiscent of the process currently under way in the EU. It took close to 125 years from the initial undertaking to form the Union, the ratification of the US Constitution toward the end of the eighteenth century, to the point that the United States achieved solid federal institutions. From this standpoint, the EU, which has lasted to date around half this time, has made greater progress in many fields than the United States had halfway through its construction process. However, the EU's principal hurdle lies in its public finance sector.

At the very start of its existence, the US federal government was extremely weak, as weak as the EU is now in terms of financial resources. The majority of its expenditure, including that on the wars against the British, came from the individual states, which had proclaimed their sovereignty before accepting the US Constitution.

The world is a European invention, and Europe's task in the twenty-first century is to take responsibility for it. It is true that every large cultural unit, now or in the historical past, can be said to have a “world” of its own. It is perhaps even true that every human individual has his or her own “world”, in the sense of a particular way of organizing the data of experience. But the world, the familiar globular entity, both physical and intellectual, which ever-increasing numbers of people, over the past six or seven centuries, have been persuaded to accept as a universal human environment, was invented (although we still say “discovered”) by European explorers, experimenters, and thinkers.

A principal characteristic of this world is that it is not organized, that it always turns out to be more than we thought it was, more than we can fit under the dominion of God or Fate in any form, that it always turns out, paradoxically, to be different from itself. Indeed, the inventors of this world, and we in their wake, set a positive value on its infinite elusiveness. We insist on respecting hard facts, which always means new facts, since old facts by definition are soft, corrupted by the devices we have applied in understanding them. We insist on the uncharted, the unknown, even the unimaginable, as a field for our activity. In other words, this new world – which we thus follow those European pioneers in recreating – is designed to be out of control. Its whole character – as world, as “reality”, as fact, as a field for activity – is always to be at least one step beyond all our abilities to control it.

Out of control

If you want a world of infinite possibility, therefore presumably of infinite promise, you have to accept a world out of control. It took until the twentieth century for the second half of this bargain to become fully clear to us. The world has been out of control ever since its invention; but only recently have the most disastrous consequences of this condition forced themselves on our awareness.

Most people studying Europe in 1970, when the CES was founded, would be amazed at the progress of European integration since then. Of course, the Schuman Declaration was 20 years old in 1970, and the ECSC had been supplemented by the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) and the much broader EEC. But these Communities included only the original six member states (France, West Germany, Italy, and the Benelux), with the first enlargement still three years in the future, and Community institutions were generally quite hesitant to take any actions not supported by the member states. True, the European Court of Justice had promulgated the principles of the supremacy of Community law, and of its direct effect. Even so, the number and importance of instances where member states were obliged to change their policies remained quite restricted.

Federal aspirations

Perhaps the quality of the change at work was more important than the quantity. Former Commission president Walter Hallstein observed in 1969 that individual Europeans were being affected by the Community's legal system “more strongly and more directly with every day that passes”. He went on to point out that Europeans were “subject in varying degrees to two legal systems – as a citizen of one of the Community's member-states to [the] national legal system, and as a member of the Community to the Community's legal system”. This was a new experience for many Europeans, but it was “not a new experience for citizens of countries with federal constitutions” (Maas 2007: 21).

Raising the idea of federalism suggests that some people might be less surprised at the progress of European integration. Federalists like Altiero Spinelli and Ursula Hirschmann had proposed as early as 1943 a European “continental” citizenship alongside national citizenship. In the aftermath of World War II most European political leaders supported creating a common European legal status for individual citizens. Thus Winston Churchill in 1948 called for “a European group which could give a sense of enlarged patriotism and common citizenship” and hoped “to see a Europe where men of every country will think as much of being a European as of belonging to their native land” (Maas 2017).

At the heart of the challenges facing modern governments are the intertwined tasks of devising policies to deliver economic prosperity and of mobilizing popular consent for them. The importance of economic policy was noted in the nineteenth century by William Gladstone, the British prime minister renowned for his fiscal acumen, who observed that “budgets are not merely matters of arithmetic, but in a thousand ways go to the root of prosperity of individuals, and relations of classes, and the strength of Kingdoms”. The importance of mobilization is manifest in democracies, where economic policy-making is always also coalition building.

Few can doubt the magnitude of those challenges in Europe today. Many countries that could once reliably command 3 per cent rates of annual economic growth now struggle to secure 1 per cent. More than 15 per cent of young people in the EU are unemployed, and the vast majority who do find work are being forced into temporary jobs lasting only months if not weeks. Moreover, the adjustment of most European countries to a technological revolution marked by the advance of digital technologies lags well behind parallel movements in the US and even China. To cope with the technological revolution of the twenty-first century, the nations of Europe need new modernization strategies.

Political will

Part of the challenge, of course, is to identify such strategies. Finding an effective strategy is not a simple task because every country starts with a different set of institutional endowments. Thus, approaches that might work in one will not necessarily succeed in others. There are no magic bullets here. However, the process of implementing new economic strategies has also been complicated by the disintegration of longstanding electoral alignments and the fragmentation of European party systems. There is some truth to the old saying that “where there is a will there is a way”, but in democracies the relevant “will” emerges out of party politics and it is uncertain whether partisan competition in Europe today is capable of generating the will to implement policies that will promote prosperity in the coming years. Why not?

If we ask a political economist, “what is the biggest issue confronting Europe today?” the likely answer we will get is: “where should I start!?” Indeed, there is no shortage of candidates: the macroeconomic divergence of the EU's member states, the conflicts about EMU, the powder keg of immigration policy, the growing concentration of wealth and political power, the wave of populist mobilization after the Great Recession, and, on the horizon, technological changes with unforeseeable implications for the structure of European economies. One could add the (real or self-imposed) limitations in fiscal capacities of many welfare states to deal with future challenges (an ability that I would nominate, without expecting much disagreement, as a “significant achievement from Europe's past”).

Many of these problems can be linked to the question of what happens to Europe's middle classes – as workers, consumers, and citizens. This does not mean that we should stop being interested in, concerned about, and solidaristic with Europe's “precariat” or “outsiders”. But in terms of sheer numbers, it should be clear that Europe's societies will look very different if they fail at the political integration of its middle classes. Much research suggests that this political integration is inextricably tied to labor market experiences and consumption opportunities. In the light of growing economic inequalities and their social repercussions, it is this link that begins to appear precarious to many contemporary observers.

Admittedly, the fate of the middle class has not only to do with economic facts and measurable insecurities but also with psychology. To appreciate the problem, we have to move from an individualistic to a relational perspective. Economists still sometimes pretend that people care about money per se. Empirically and theoretically, it is more plausible to assume that people are primarily motivated to feel included in groups and to get as high a status in

these group as possible (Marx 2019a, 2019b). In capitalist societies, money is an important material and symbolic resource to acquire status. A wealth of evidence in psychology, sociology, and biology shows that humans are incredibly sensitive to even subtle social cues signaling inclusion or exclusion.