PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

415
guideposts for interpreting reality or else risk arbitrariness. Most importantly, we simply
cannot afford to forego judgment on the negative consequences of our current mode of
development. And one need not be an orthodox Marxist or an anti-modern ecologist to
understand that the consumption of finite natural resources, the loss of natural habitats
and the negative environmental externalities affecting humans across Europe, and across
the globe, are all largely a consequence of the integral developmental needs of modern
capitalism.
10.3.2 Legitimacy, Stakeholder Interests, and Mutually-Exclusive Objectives
The impossibility of developing universally acceptable discourses also has a
structuralist dimension, bringing us back to Foglesong’s capitalist-democracy
contradiction. In the end, the EU seeks to adopt mutually exclusive development
objectives (e.g. “cohesion” vs. “global competitiveness,” “environmental sustainability”
vs. “accelerated industrial growth”) in order to assuage adversarial constituents. Similar
to the national level, the EU’s legitimacy as a supra-national political institution is based
on Western conceptions of democracy and public interest politics operating under an
economic system of welfare capitalism. So like its member states, the EU faces the triple
challenge of successfully safeguarding market-oriented institutional structures that
encourage profit-making entrepreneurialism, guaranteeing the provision of the public
infrastructures necessary for such activity, and lastly, shielding its citizens and the
environment from the all-too-abusive tendencies of the system by performing
redistributive welfare and environmental protection functions. History-making decisions
concerning the Single Market and the (Treaty on) European Union were designed to