Partha Dasgupta (2021), the economist who published the first full review of the economic importance of nature, stated that ‘nature is our home’. Good economics, he argued, requires that we manage it better. Long-term prosperity requires an assessment of what nature is capable of supplying and how this relates to human need. Extant economic models tend to value human prosperity and the generation of wealth. ‘Nature is a blindspot in economics that we ignore at our peril’, the review submitted. If nature is home, then home has neither been valued nor seen. Always there lurking in the background, nature needs to be brought into sight in order to save it – and us – from ourselves. Far from being in balance, the house is burning down, and radical global changes to production, consumption, finance and education are urgently needed.

The issue is not merely nature but also the possibility of further pandemics. The ongoing destruction of nature is a fundamental driver of diseases that cross from wildlife into humans. Biodiversity experts have argued that even more deadly pandemics are likely unless the destruction is halted (Carrington, 2020). In a guest article for IPBES,Settele et al (2020) stated that we are the problem. Pandemics are a direct consequence of human activity, and in particular of global financial and economic systems that value economic growth at any cost. ‘Rampant deforestation, uncontrolled expansion of agriculture intensive farming, mining and infrastructure development, as well as the exploitation of wild species have created a “perfect storm” for the spillover of disease’, they state. As the Buddha suggested, when the house is burning down, practice is more important than theorizing, for instance, about whether we are capable of action. While theory and practice are never entirely separate, the question here, in conclusion, is how to put the fire out and to find a home in nature and the universe, and what this means for who ‘we’ are and what we do.

The turning of a blind eye to nature and the human role in creating the conditions for pandemics is only one side of the problem. The pandemic has shone a light on the organization of the global house.

Interview Questions

1. There is currently a debate on the future institutional shape of the European Union. In your view, what institutional reforms, if any, are required?

2. In recent years, EU integration has become more and more flexible. Some countries have negotiated permanent optouts (for example Denmark). Others have been temporarily excluded from certain policies (for example the euro, Schengen). What are your views on this growing flexibility?

3. Do you think there are cases where flexibility is unacceptable? For example, do you think flexibility is more acceptable depending on whether it is temporary or permanent, or in certain policy areas?

4. What should happen with member states who do not wish to join compulsory policies?

5. Enhanced cooperation is a procedure where a minimum of nine EU countries are allowed to establish advanced integration or cooperation in an area within EU structures but without the other EU countries being involved. Do you think it is acceptable that some member states engage in enhanced cooperation when other member states prefer there to be no integration in that specific area?

6. How do you think your country would benefit from opting out of certain areas? How do you think it would benefit from being part of enhanced cooperation?

7. Some commentators have argued that flexible integration can be unfair. For example, some countries and citizens are accused of benefitting from EU projects without participating in them, while some countries and citizens cannot fully benefit from their EU membership because they are excluded from certain policies (for example Schengen, the euro). Does this criticism ring true to you? Why/why not?

8. Do you think a more flexible EU would be a good or a bad thing for democracy?

9. In a flexible Europe, do you think all member states in the Council should have a vote in decisions, or should only those states participating in a given policy area have a vote?

• • What if a state is affected by a policy even if it does not participate in it? For example the euro? Is there a difference between Denmark, that has opted out of the euro, and Croatia, that has simply yet to qualify to join, but will do in the future?

• • In a flexible Europe, do you think all MEPs should have a vote, or only the ones from countries taking part in a scheme?

This chapter addresses the substantive fairness of DI, that is, its ability to ensure a just distribution of social and economic goods. The substantive fairness of DI has been subject to some disagreement. While some scholars have noted that DI could have unfair redistributive effects by diminishing solidarity (Michailidou and Trenz, 2018) and creating opportunities for free riding (Adler-Nissen, 2016, p 242), others have argued it can also allow the EU to respond to growing socio-economic heterogeneity (Bellamy and Kröger, 2017) and provide opt-outs for those who would be most negatively affected by a policy or unable to comply with its demands.

To understand how political parties perceive of the substantive fairness of DI, we shall analyse their views on whether it is compatible with the principles of impartiality and reciprocity introduced in Chapter 1. We distinguish considerations of fairness that arise from DI that stems from widening the EU from those associated with its deepening. As we noted in the Introduction, the drivers for DI operate differently in each of these contexts, and create divergent incentives for rich and poor, established and new member states. Richer and more established member states are likely to seek exclusions for poorer new members in the context of widening, and exemptions for themselves in the context of deepening. By contrast, new – and especially poorer – member states aremore likely to seek exemptions for themselves and be more ambivalent about exclusions in the context of widening, while being concerned about exemptions for established states in the context of deepening. However, as Frank Schimmelfenig (2014) has shown, rational bargaining by member states in these contexts is constrained by normative concerns. Our findings add to this argument by showing how political actors have different normative perceptions of DI related to whether it stems from widening or deepening, and whether they come from a rich and established member state or a poor and new one.

In this chapter, we shall first discuss when different member states might be expected to consider DI substantively fair in the context of both EU widening and deepening. We then move on to the analysis of political parties’ views on the substantive fairness of DI in both these contexts to see how far they match these expectations. In the conclusion, we summarize the findings.

Initially, the coronavirus seemed to be an equalizer. It didn't recognize borders. It didn't distinguish between rich and poor. Everyone was equally vulnerable to the disease and could suffer from it or die. The unexpected and unusual susceptibility to suffering on the part of the wealthy created a new, if temporary, awareness of those who suffer daily, whether through illness, disability, poverty or homelessness. The sensitivity was elevated by the emergence of a medical frontier to tackle the virus. The frontline was occupied by many workers on the lower rungs of the economic ladder, now tasked with saving lives while potentially sacrificing their own. As time progressed, and demographics related to the disease came to light, the initial claim that the virus was an equalizer became suspect. Among the disparities, the old were more likely to die than the young, although the latter became more vulnerable as the virus mutated. But the most jarring reality related to the disproportionate number of fatalities within the US and UK who were of African, Latinx, Native American or Asian heritage. As the virus spread globally, poor countries were most vulnerable to the economic consequences of the pandemic, although many, not least in Asia and Africa, were, at least in the initial stages, more effective than the US or UK in managing the pandemic itself.

None of the societal or global divisions exposed by the virus were new. What was different, in the context of the pandemic, was the greater difficulty of pretending that the inequality of suffering wasn't there or of blaming the sufferers for their experience. The unusually large number of deaths within a short span of time highlighted the impermanence of life. As Hobbes ([1651] 1958: 185) famously said, life is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.’ Hobbes’ Leviathan ([1651] 1958) provides an important foundation of Western realist and liberal thought, and contains assumptions that stand in stark contrast to those of Buddhism. Hobbes and the Buddha would be considered very strange bedfellows.

Ceasing the proliferation of concepts is one objective of Buddhist meditation. Such a cessation is not purely mysticism; it is bound up with action in the world. The latter point is evident in the historical relationship between practices of meditation and war. Yoga, while not itself related to fighting, includes postures and breathing techniques that have been incorporated into the Indian martial arts (Kumar, 2017), both of which draw from the Vedas and are formed by the same basic principles. There is a long history of Buddhist monks who took up arms, including the warrior Shaolin monks, the Zen Buddhist warrior monks in Japan, who influenced Bushido culture, and in contemporary Southeast Asia, monks in the Theravada tradition (see, for instance, Jerryson and Juergensmeyer, 2010; Lehr, 2019). Meditation has an important place in ancient Daoist military practice (Meyer, 2012), and Tai Chi, a form of moving meditation, has its roots in the martial arts with foundations in Daoist teaching. As will be explored in Snapshot 4, ancient military strategy in China makes reference to practices of meditation in the context of battle. The historical relationship between the practice of war and of meditation is not obvious, but rests on a complex and paradoxical relationship between mind and ethics.

Meditation, as an ancient science of mind, seeks a greater understanding of an underlying reality and the realization of compassion on earth. Killing, except perhaps on compassionate grounds, would seem to be contrary to the latter objective. Nonviolence is at the heart of Buddhism in particular. The Buddhist warrior would thus appear to be a contradiction in terms. Within Buddhism, as Demieville (Jerryson and Juergensmeyer, 2010: 18) notes, ‘nothing is more worthy than not-killing.’ Murder is the first and most serious of ten major sins on what is referred to as ‘negative paths of karma’. Killing is a part of warfare.

Within Mahayana Buddhism in particular, murder, suicide, self-sacrifice or warfare can be justified in exceptional circumstances so long as carried out with the right intention and without generating a harmful attitude. A conception of mind is at the centre of this ethical paradox.

The COVID-19 pandemic gave rise to stark contrasts and reversals. The mass encounter with impermanence and loss of life went hand in hand with an appreciation of life and the importance of loved ones, now separated by lockdown restrictions, even at the moment of death. Images of overflowing hospitals and mortuaries were juxtaposed with protestors demanding the freedom to ignore restrictions necessary to defeat the virus, including the wearing of facemasks. With the US elections in 2020, the outgoing president spoke of having made America great again while claiming that the election had been stolen; the incoming president spoke of grief and the importance of compassion and the need for unity, not only at home but abroad. The new year saw a largely white and male mob, incited by a Trump rally, storm the US Capitol Building, threatening senators and representatives, desecrating its premises and leaving six dead, while threatening a new civil war. The small number of police contrasted starkly with their strong presence during the earlier Black Lives Matter protests in Washington DC, once again highlighting racial inequality in America. The stark contrasts were also evident in the environment. On the one hand, fires raged in California and Australia and hurricanes in the US, Caribbean and Pacific, among others. Populations were faced with the task of both protecting or escaping their homes and fending off disease. On the other hand, the global lockdown due to the pandemic brought an emptiness and calm to the experience of nature, as well as a greater ability to breathe.

The previous snapshot explored the inseparability of emptiness of mind and action for the Buddhist warrior, a concept that would appear to be a contradiction in terms. A similar problem is at the heart of this snapshot, but we reposition the apparatus slightly to zoom out to the larger environment, both as context and natural phenomenon, to gain some understanding of the stark contrasts and reversals that characterized the pandemic.

The previous snapshot zoomed in on Gandhi's efforts to navigate the universe without doing damage. The question of what ultimately constitutes damage is not straightforward, and can look quite different depending on one's perspective. When protests erupted in Minneapolis following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, and initially turned into riots, some observers focused on the damage to property. The point of the protests was to highlight damage of a more profound kind: the murder of a Black man under the knee of a White police officer as part of a legacy of damage to African Americans not only in the present but since 1619, when the first Africans arrived in English North America. Likewise, the protesters who somewhat later toppled the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol, UK, were making a point about the damage done by the transatlantic slave trade to generations of Africans and their descendants, and about the hypocrisy of British society for celebrating those who pursued the trade. Others highlighted the damage done by the protesters to the statue as an historical object. The contested attributions of damage, that is, to property, inanimate objects or human beings who breathe and suffer, contained a measurement of value. That the humans in question had themselves been property, often of those whose lives were celebrated in the statues, only highlights the conundrum.

George Floyd's last words as he lay dying, “I can't breathe”, brought his humanity into view, and with it the legacy of a history of American enslavement and the transatlantic slave trade. The moment of seeing Floyd's death as a part of this history contains a number of puzzles. The first regards the ethical justification, in the context of the slave trade, for bringing concepts of property and of human life together in the phenomenon of the chattel slave. The second regards the karmic resonance of the historical practice. ‘What goes around comes around’ suggests that we reap what we sow, whether in this life or another.

We have argued that differentiated integration provides a mechanism for combining the demands for European integration with the recognition of national diversity. However, to do so we contend that DI must be understood not simply as strategically beneficial or expedient but also as ethically desirable and constrained. DI would prove objectionable and divisive, liable to undermine rather than to facilitate European integration, if it served simply to allow states to cherry-pick those policies they considered to be in their national interest narrowly conceived. As a result, we have sought to identify the conditions under which DI is necessary for and supports a just and democratically legitimate scheme of cooperation, and is recognized as such by political party actors.

To support a fair scheme of cooperation between EU member states, we have argued that DI must fulfil certain normative criteria. Procedurally, it should ensure that all member states and their peoples remain equal and have access to similar basic liberties. Both exclusions and exemptions should be agreed either unanimously by representatives of all member states when negotiating the accession of new members or amending the Treaties, or result from a member state choosing not to participate in an enhanced cooperation supported by at least nine member states. Moreover, participants must consult non-participants on the conduct of the policy area, which should remain subject to common Treaty provisions, and provide those excluded or exempted with the prospect of joining in the future. Substantively, DI must reflect norms of impartiality and reciprocity. On the one hand, it must take into account the different capacities member states may have for producing a given collective good, and the different stakes and interests they may have in it. On the other hand, no member state should be excluded from a policy if they would become worse off than they currently are as a result, nor should a state be allowed to opt out of a policy or be exempted from meeting certain standards if that would render the participating or complying states worse off than they are. Moreover, the conditions governing both exclusions and optouts/exemptions should ensure public goods, such as a clean environment, and common resource pools, such as fish stocks, are not eroded as a result.

Survey Questions

1. In your view, are some EU governments failing to uphold fully the Rule of Law and democratic principles such as free and fair elections, basic civic and political rights and judicial independence? Yes/No

2. Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union states that ‘the Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail’.

• 2a. To what extent do you agree or disagree that a commitment on the part of all member states to the principles of Article 2 is necessary for the EU to effectively implement its policies? Strongly disagree/disagree/neither agree nor disagree/agree/strongly agree

• 2b. To what extent do you agree or disagree that a commitment on the part of all member states to the principles of Article 2 is necessary for the democratic legitimacy of the EU? Strongly disagree/disagree/neither agree nor disagree/agree/strongly agree

3. To what extent do you agree or disagree that it is the role of the EU (through the Council, Commission, and Court of Justice) to take measures against member states that do not uphold the Rule of Law and respect fundamental rights? Strongly disagree/ disagree/neither agree nor disagree/agree/ strongly agree

• 3a. (If agree/strongly agree) Please use this space to state what measures you believe the EU should take to enforce compliance.

• 3b. (If disagree/strongly disagree) If not the EU, then please use this space to state which institutions and bodies you believe should be responsible for ensuring member states uphold the Rule of Law and respect fundamental rights.

4. Flexible integration allows some member states to opt out or get exemptions from agreed policies. Please select which of the following statements about flexible integration in the EU you agree with.

• a) Flexible integration should be permitted in all EU policy areas.

• b) Flexible integration should not be permitted in certain EU policy areas.

• c) Flexible integration should not be permitted in any EU policy area.

This chapter addresses the concern that DI might undermine political equality among member states, thereby creating the possibility for some member states to dominate others. We relate this concern to what Max Heermann and Dirk Leuffen identify as a gap in the literature on DI – namely, the degree to which it has ‘remained remarkably silent with respect to questions of institutional design’ (Heermann and Leuffen, 2020, p 2). This silence is surprising given that DI can impact the institutional structure and decision-making processes at the EU level, potentially impairing their democratic character. We explored these issues through an analysis of the views political party actors have of DI's dominating potential. We asked whether they perceive DI as creating domination, and how they consider its dominating potential might be mitigated through appropriate forms of governance for differentiated policy areas.

The text unfolds as follows. We start by setting out the democratic dilemmas of DI from a theoretical perspective. The ensuing empirical analysis engages with party actors’ views in regard to the institutional impact and governance structures of DI. The conclusion discusses the findings’ wider implications for the institutional design of DI.

The democratic dilemmas of differentiated integration

How does DI relate to domination? Following Philip Pettit, we define domination as the capacity of an agent or agency to arbitrarily impose or influence another agent(s) or agency(s) to do their will, without having to deliberatively engage with or consider the reasons and interests of the dominated (Pettit, 2010, pp 73– 5, 77– 9). The potential for such domination arises from the conjunction of three circumstances – an imbalance of power, dependency, and the unconstrained or discretionary rule of an agent or agency (Lovett, 2010, pp 119– 20). By implication, a condition of non-domination involves a democratic community in which each member – in the case of the EU either an individual citizen or member state – has an equal status in determining its collective policies and common rules and must involve the others when formulating them, none is dependent on any of the others, and all are equally affected by the overall package of rules and policies, if not necessarily by every single one of them (Bellamy, 2019, pp 69, 90– 3).

The fundamental shift that emerges from the snapshots thus far is from ‘being’ or ‘thing-ness’ and the pursuit of truth (indebted to Newtonian science) to ‘doing’, which relates to experience and action in the world. The latter is more characteristic of quantum theory, Buddhism and Daoism. Buddhism and the Daoist ‘acosmos’ do not rely on divisions into ‘levels of analysis’. The latter practice has played an important role in the constitution of international relations as a separate field of study. In its place we see a holographic relationship between parts and wholes, with overlapping and extending circles in continuous motion, where self, mind, body, language, sentience and emotions all matter, not only for humans but for all life. While not constituting a theory of everything, the snapshots do suggest that everything is ‘in the soup’ (Ling, 2013: 99). The world is in motion. Things are always happening. Change and impermanence are the norm rather than the exception. As Ames and Hall (2003: 13) state, the Daoist correlative cosmology begins with the assumption that ‘the endless stream of always novel yet still continuous situations we encounter are real, and hence, that there is ontological parity among the things and events that constitute our lives.’ Buddhism and Daoism provide insight into how the actant might, in the midst of swirling motion, act from a place of calm while maximizing the potentials of a situation. The Daodejing advises against trying to impose control over the motion as the result will be a loss of control. Nature will, on its own, re-establish a balance if humans would only stop inundating it with toxins.

A particular type of human artefact, which emerged with the industrial revolution and the development of science, sought control over nature to the end of allowing human flourishing and progress. With the emergence of the Anthropocene, this control is almost complete. Control of nature, as Cheng (2018) argues, goes hand in hand with the political domination of human beings.