How Can Europe Gain New Strength?

We’re used to moaning about Europe, just like kids do about school. We’re used to complaining about Brussels bureaucracy, its democratic deficits, the cost, the jumble of directives, the euro and the bailouts. All of these complaints are justified. But we have forgotten how to see the miracle. And Europe is a miracle.

This is the European paradox: the more this Parliament has grown in importance, and it truly has become more important (though still not important enough), the less seriously it is taken by Europeans. Ukrainians have taken to the streets for Europe, Latvia has adopted the euro, and Georgia and Moldova have signed association agreements with the EU, but meanwhile Euroscepticism is growing within the European Union. Of course, most people want Europe, but they want it to be different. The continent has to decide what another, more citizen-oriented EU could look like.

Europe needs more than just treaties and bailouts; it needs the trust of its citizens. Voter turnout in the 2019 European elections may have risen for the first time in 20 years, but years of indifference and mistrust have left many people refusing to vote. This sense of mistrust has surged into the Parliament with much Eurosceptic fanfare. Nationalism and nationalist movements have gained ground in the European Parliament. The election of critical Eurosceptic parties means Europe is being pushed back to an unpleasant past of fragmented small states that co-exist and oppose each other.

That’s why it is so important to build trust in a better, reformed EU. Europe has to be more social, closer to its citizens, more human. Europe has to become a home for its people. Europe has to be more than just an economic community; it has to be a community of citizens. It should be more than just a symbiotic community for businesses and banks and become a community that protects its people. This cannot be achieved through empty buzzwords but through solid social policy. We need this kind of concrete social policy.

Europe has to be more social, closer to its citizens, more human. Europe has to become a home for its people.

Families who can still afford it usually take a holiday. We go to Florence or Nice, Versailles or Venice, Paris, Rome, Prague or Athens, Cologne or Copenhagen, Bruges or Ghent. Wide-eyed, we walk through the great museums, the old castles, monasteries, palaces and gardens, cathedrals and temples and yet there is one thing we do not see: that all this history and tradition is contained in and built upon the European Union.

The Europhile writer Joseph Roth was born in 1894 in Brody, a small town in the easternmost reaches of what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire, and died in Paris in 1939. In 1932, in the foreword to his great novel Radetzky March, he bitterly lamented bitterly the decline of old Europe: ‘The cruel will of history destroyed my old fatherland, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. I loved this fatherland. It permitted me to be a patriot and a citizen of the world at the same time, among all the Austrian peoples also a German. I loved the virtues and merits of this fatherland and today, when it is dead and gone, I even love its flaws and weaknesses.’

How can Europe harness its strength? What does Europe need to be and become for people to love and appreciate it? What I wrote above in the introduction is so true: the European Union is the best thing that has ever happened to Germans, French, Italians, Czechs, Danes, Poles, Spaniards, Flemish and Walloons, the Dutch, Greeks, Bavarians, Basques and the Baltic peoples. Europe is the culmination of all the historic peace treaties that never actually brought peace. The European Union is the conclusion of an almost thousand-year war, waged by just about everyone against just about everyone else. It is an undeserved paradise for the people of an entire continent.

When you feel your country is your home, you don’t want to be driven out of it. If your home country becomes too weak, you want to feel Europe is your second home.

EU – these two letters stand for a golden age in European history. We write them down, we say them, and we are almost afraid because they are no longer in tune with the general mood. Fewer and fewer people believe in them because in daily life the European emphasis is being worn away and swamped by economic concerns and the social anxieties of its citizens. People are afraid, and many European politicians are responding to this fear by repeating the above accolades: the European Union is the best thing that has ever happened to Germans, French, etcetera, etcetera throughout their long history.

This is certainly true – and yet such solemn sentences become mere strings of sounds if, and as long as, people experience this EU only as a community that benefits business and banks rather than as a community that looks after its citizens. Social policy cannot be a mere appendix to economic policy. Social policy is policy that creates a home; it takes clever social policy to turn Europe’s state structure, the somewhat unwieldy EU that is still too much of an economic community, into a home for the people who live in it. When you feel your country is your home, you don’t want to be driven out of it. If your home country becomes too weak, you want to feel Europe is your second home.

Therefore, it is not unreasonable for protesters across Europe to repeatedly demand that their governments act with a certain degree of economic integrity in a globalised world. Internal peace is based on economic rules that are also socially responsible. There is a growing fear that the social base is being gradually eroded in this Europe of the economy and the euro. If there is this feeling – and there is indeed this feeling – then it is not enough to demand that citizens show gratitude for the fact that the European Union exists. Europe needs more than just treaties and a single currency; it also needs the trust of its citizens. At the moment, citizens don’t really know why they should want Europe. They are told that they need the EU as a powerful player on the world stage, but they don’t feel this power. The European nationstates are losing their shape, but the EU is not gaining it. It is growing in size but not in strength. This has to change.

In the past, the Greeks would consult the Oracle of Delphi. Today, Europe consults the financial markets. We can argue about which is better, but communication with the Oracle was undoubtedly easier. It was in one place and embodied by one person. The place was on the slopes of Parnassus and the person’s name was Pythia. So the Oracle was tangible. And when she refused to play ball, Alexander the Great simply dragged her into the temple by her hair. An inscription in the temple forecourt had the answer to every question: ‘Know thyself ’. Europe has been given more opportunities for selfknowledge than ever before thanks to the crises in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Cyprus (not to mention Brexit). These crises were and remain not just monetary and financial crises but also reveal an institutional crisis, a crisis of democracy. Apparently, the euro crisis was and is no different: it was simply a case of carry on regardless; the markets cannot wait. Everything has to be done at top speed; the executive has to take effective action; determination is the key.

So the first imperative of EU policy in times of crisis is: no time, no time. The second: spend even more billions even faster. The third: ignore parliaments. The fourth: markets first, people second. The fifth: the old democratic rules are unfit for the new Europe. ‘Democracy is too slow’, declared Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, in September 2011. No, Mr Barroso, you are too quick to criticise democracy; that is where you are fundamentally wrong. The accusation that democracy works too slowly is ‘an old topos from the arsenal of anti-democratic thinking’, according to German sociologist Karin Priester. The euro is certainly important, but democracy, the rule of law and the welfare state are even more so. Crisis is the hour of the executive – this has always been the reason given for the executive’s hectic pace during the euro crisis. That well may be true. But the problem is that the euro crisis has lasted for years, not just an hour. Dozens of EU summits, all of them so-called crisis summits, have left parliaments marginalised. Democracy has been displaced and gone mad.

The European Union is the conclusion of an almost thousand-year war, waged by just about everyone against just about everyone else. It is an undeserved paradise for the people of an entire continent.

It is incredible to see how parliaments, the hearts of democracy, have lost their influence. Parliamentary democracy in crisisridden Europe is in dire straits. The sovereignty of parliaments and the people must not be replaced by the sovereignty of real or supposed European experts. Democracy without demos is a contradiction in terms. The EU Parliament had no say on the euro bailouts; Europe’s representatives are mere spectators. The national parliaments are a little better off; after all, the people’s repre-sentatives there are allowed to approve their governments’ decisions. The Bundestag in Germany has always been free to say ‘that’s OK’ to things that really aren’t, to the deparliamentarisation of politics, which has moved from creeping to galloping in the course of the euro crisis. But parliaments are not beggars sitting beneath the European Council table waiting for crumbs to fall, and they should not be forced to adopt this role.

It is about trust in the democratic process, and parliaments are assets that build this trust. All too often, parliaments are derided in the media and public sphere as being argumentative places, but where else is one to argue about Europe? On the one hand, the crisis involves justified complaints about the castration of democracy and, on the other, a strong desire for ‘Alexander politics’ – the politics of the strong leader. These two things simply don’t go together. It is undemocratic to yearn for leaders who will cut the Gordian knot with a single blow.

Europe will never recover from two or three EU leaders with an autocratic bent. Anyone who constantly demands ‘hey presto’ answers shouldn’t be surprised when – hey presto! – democracy disappears. The European Citizens’ Initiative that was introduced with the Lisbon Treaty could provide hope of a new democratic awakening in Europe. The institutional hurdles are high, as an initiative requires the approval of one million citizens who are nationals of at least one quarter of the member states. The European Citizens’ Initiative is still not particularly satisfactory as its scope is limited to issues that fall under the remit of the EU Commission. And it is this Commission, which would hardly pass a democratic legitimacy test, that decides whether the citizens’ legislative proposal is admissible.

It is hoped that the House of Europe will also have overseers of its spirit and workmanship.

Two million citizens can oppose the privatisation of the water supply – as with the Right2Water initiative – but the Commission can still simply sweep it off the table. That is neither good nor right. It is a serious mistake; it is anti-democratic. We love talking about the House of Europe. European houses have existed before, very special houses, holy houses: the cathedrals and minsters were once the houses, the trig points of Europe. This is where the whole of the continent’s art found its form, its shape, its home – in Brussels and Barcelona, Antwerp and Strasbourg, Vienna and London, Magdeburg and Uppsala, in Aachen, Kuttenberg, Burgos and Cluj-Napoca. It is said that the name ‘Parler’, which belonged to a family of master builders who erected cathedrals and minsters from Freiburg to Prague, is the root of the German word Polier, meaning a site overseer.

It is hoped that the House of Europe will also have overseers of its spirit and workmanship. I hope these builders and overseers will include trade unions in Europe. I hope they will be involved in planning the ongoing construction of the House of Europe. I hope the trade unions will make it clear to the EU Commission, the European Council and EU politicians that it is they who are the builders of the House of Europe. The builders are the citizens, the people, everyone who lives in this house.

Money is important in Europe. Money is a way to shape Europe, but also to disfigure and destroy it. There is a striking discrepancy between the hectic pace of the austerity policies imposed on the EU’s southern member states and the apathy that exists when it comes to taming financial capitalism. Europe is suffering the consequences of the aging and anti-aging excesses of capitalism. The banking crisis was managed and resolved by redefining it as a ‘sovereign debt crisis’: 90% of Greek debt was held by banks, hedge funds and other private creditors before 2010. From 2010, Greece received assistance loans amounting to 188 billion euros from the EU’s bailout fund and the IMF. By 2012, a major transformation had taken place: now only 10% of total debt was in the hands of private creditors. European taxpayers were now guaranteeing or (directly or indirectly) liable for 90% of what was previously private debt.

Europe has obviously been abused in the service of financial capitalists. In the Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare examined the archaic idea that one can settle debts with a part of one’s body. For generations, people have attempted to interpret this case, including members of the legal profession. The moneylender Shylock insists on his contractual right to take a pound of flesh from his defaulting debtor, the merchant Antonio. For decades, the lawyers’ guild has argued about the contract’s validity and the verdict.

In his famous 1868 paper ‘The Struggle for Law’, the eminent German legal expert Rudolf von Ihering argued that Shylock’s claim was invalid due to immorality. The exact justification has been discussed for many years, but it has generally been agreed that paying debts with a pound of flesh is intolerable. So if it is archaic and immoral for debts to be paid with a pound of flesh, what is to be made of the burdens, cuts and harsh austerity measures imposed on Greece and other southern EU states?

The severity of the austerity measures has had serious consequences for the population’s health. Many people find themselves without proper medical care, and suicide rates are rising. Is this a new way of demanding one’s pound of flesh? The EU troika decided that public spending on health should not exceed 6% of GDP – with the result that spending on medicines and health services has been cut by 25%. Greece now has fewer hospital beds, and no new doctors have been hired. Disease is once again spreading rapidly, with worrying increases in new HIV infections, tuberculosis and malaria. Infant mortality has increased by 43%. Greece always had problems caring for patients who needed blood transfusions after accidents or operations, but now the situation has moved from difficult to disastrous. The Greek people have paid for the debts of the Greek state – with their flesh and blood. Where is the ‘victory of the clear sense of right and wrong?’

There is no bailout for people. The bailout is for obligations, financial relations, power structures and economic systems – they have to survive.

Few hospitals in Greece meet Europe’s minimum standards. Greek TV regularly shows pictures of old people begging and pleading for help outside clinics and pharmacies in Athens and Thessaloniki. These were and are warning signs. The message? If you fall seriously ill in Greece, hard luck! Where is the wise Daniel, where is the Portia from Shakespeare’s play who will intervene and prevent the worst from happening? Everyone who sees the Merchant of Venice agrees that it is intolerable for debts to be paid with flesh. But where is this sense of justice when it comes to euro debts? Should they be paid for with one’s life and health? Protective screens have been put up for banks and euros. There is no bailout for people. The bailout is for obligations, financial relations, power structures and economic systems – they have to survive. Is it of secondary importance whether and how people survive?

However, amendments to treaties can and should also contribute to building this trust, particularly amendments to the Lisbon Treaty, which gives the principle of competition a quasi-constitutional status and establishes competition among the member states.