The irony of history

In all the thrilling acceleration of the present, it is wise to keep slower things in mind: the heritage of the past, the centuries-old interplay between states and peoples, the long-term nature of identities. A historical outlook turns the Union into the totality of individual and collective answers by the member states to questions asked again and again by time. The Union’s haphazard tangle then appears not as the result of political stupidity or bureaucratic short-sightedness (although these sometimes make things worse) but as the repercussion of Europe’s rich and divisive history – all those clashes of states and peoples between the Atlantic and the Urals that will always require relationships with each other and with the world. There is some comfort in this realization.

Doing nothing was not an option. Wars and calamities were ravaging the Italian peninsula. The invasion by the French king in 1494 had upset the balance of power between the Italian states. Niccolò Machiavelli, a senior civil servant in the Florentine Republic in the Renaissance years 1498–1512, writes of “the great changes in affairs which have been seen, and may still be seen, every day, beyond all human conjecture”. When new disasters are hitting your country daily, fate has to be kept in check. For that reason, in The Prince and Discourses on Livy Machiavelli investigated the most sensible courses of political action in any number of historical and contemporary situations: dictatorship and republic, war and peace, foundation and legislation. How to get a grip on historical reality?

The mere posing of the question signified an intellectual revolution, a break with the old world, a liberation of political time from eschatology. Medieval Christianity attributed no significance to earthly intercourse between people and rulers. What counted was the salvation of the soul by God. History with its chance events was subordinated to the divine plan of salvation. Although God’s plan, including the crucifixion of His son, was carried out in worldly time, God Himself stood outside it. In other words, “Secular time […] was the theater of redemption, but not its dimension”. Prophets who saw the hand of God in natural disasters or political calamities – such as the sack of Rome in 410 – were regarded as heretics. The most anyone could say was that divine providence bombarded human beings with disastrous happenings to test their faith. Those unconvinced by that saw only fate, the capricious Wheel of Fortune.

“Till death do us part”

The introduction of the right to divorce was never an innocent act. In England of all places this should come as no surprise. The country’s tumultuous first “exit” from a pan-European order, by means of the 1534 Act of Supremacy, was the result of a Tudor king’s wish to divorce his queen. It was Brexit avant la lettre. The political and legal order challenged by Henry VIII, the Church, was called “Rome”. Today’s second exit, Anno Domini 2019, will be from another order founded in “Rome”, the Rome of the Treaties.

In 1957, at that Roman founding moment, membership of the European Economic Community was entered into for an indefinite period. For eternity, in other words. The six founding states stepped into a new era. To celebrate the rite of passage, on 25 March all the bells of the Eternal City rang out. The perpetuity stipulation was exceptional. The coal and steel treaty signed by those same six states in Paris six years before was for a mere 50 years. This infinite duration was an invention of Belgian minister Paul-Henri Spaak, chair of the treaty negotiations. Lawyers protested, but Spaak stuck to his guns. Ties with the Community had to be irreversible and indissoluble, as in a marriage.

Conviction and responsibility

One and a quarter million refugees applied for asylum in the Union in 2015, twice as many as the year before. The images were dramatic: small boats on the Mediterranean, handcarts on Balkan roads, full trains stranded on the way to the rich North. The influx of people looked to many like a mass migration, almost an invasion; and the public, in fearful bewilderment, had the impression the authorities had lost control. Could Europe act? Was Europe authorized to act?

The demand for action had a different character from that which accompanied previous crises. The Ukraine crisis of 2014–15 was a matter of war and peace; the Union itself had hardly any resources or powers to bring the conflict under control, so active intervention by the member states jointly was an obvious necessity. Moreover, application of the magnetic forces provided by the Brussels diplomatic toolkit, the showpiece being the association agreement with Kiev, had worked out badly. No one at that point, therefore, disputed the primacy of events-politics. In the fields of asylum and migration, by contrast, the Union had quite a few competences and regulations. The situation became unmanageable because the regulatory framework collapsed under divergent strategic interests and because of the disruptive impact of the situation on public opinion. For a long time Brussels was blind to the gap between what was administratively possible and what, in this exceptional situation, was politically required. Engagement by the highest political authority needed for events-politics was even actively hindered by some institutions, reinforcing the impression of a loss of control, of powerlessness.

The contrast with the euro crisis of 2010–12 is illustrative as well. To steer their poorly equipped currency through the storm, the leaders, at gunpoint, had both to design new tools and to deploy them immediately.

Emancipation of executive power

Anyone who visits Washington and sees the magnificence of the legislative Congress, with its majestic dome on the axis of the city, and then looks at the White House, built for the president, small by comparison and off to one side, senses what the founders of the American republic at the end of the eighteenth century believed the relationship should be between the main powers: the legislators in charge and the executive power in second place. The 13 newly united states had thrown off the British king, their colonial sovereign, and did not want a citizen-king in his place. Something similar happened in France. After the revolution of 1789 and the fall of absolute monarch Louis XVI, the focus was on the impersonal and all-encompassing authority of the law. As Pierre Rosanvallon shows in Good Government (2018), primacy was given to parliament, as guardian of the sovereignty of the people. France went through a turbulent episode under Napoleon (and half a century later his nephew), but distrust of arbitrary leaders ultimately produced the parliamentarianism of the Third Republic. Like the Americans, the French kept the executive power small.

The founders of the Community similarly drew a line under the past. Just as the young American and French republics had put aside their king, so the new European Community excluded national governments as far as possible.