Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

Illusions of European integration 45
In reality, European Community politics is driven by the national interest of the
larger states, notably France and Germany, and this was reflected in the structure
of power: the centre was the Council of Ministers, the Commission was weakened
by having a tiny bureaucratic staff, and the Parliament was little more than a talking
shop. Even the dramatic ‘deepening’ represented by Maastricht, it can be argued,
was dictated by the interests of the European nation-states, recognising that the
sudden collapse of Communism could result in a return to the politics of the 1930s
with a re-unified Germany, an unstable Eastern Europe of economically distressed
states trying to establish democratic traditions, but with problematic national
minorities, and further east an insecure and bellicose Russia. Strengthening
the European Union arose from the French desire to constrain a re-united Germany
within a ‘European’ set of economic institutions and the German willingness to
offer up its economic autonomy in return for movement towards Political Union
(and perhaps admission of the former communist states, and thereby stabilising its
eastern borders and extending its influence) (Anderson 1997).
Nonetheless, the EU has a supranational as well as an intergovernmental
character, and its range of regulatory functions, now including monetary policy, is
steadily increasing. This suggests a European-wide federation might arise as an
indirect effect of the competitive goals and fears of the European nation-states, just
as before the nations of Europe formed as an unintended consequence of the
competition of dynastic states. The question is then: can the European dimension
co-exist with the national dimension, and on what basis?
Can a European identity be found that will eventually transcend national loyalties
and underpin a European state? Or is the emerging EU sui generis, a novel entity
recognising the multiple sovereignties of post modernity? Or again, is the future to
be a European order acknowledging the primacy of nation-states in a constitution
that regulates the respective powers of supranational and national institutions?
I will explore each of these possibilities in the context of the problems facing the
Union, including eastern enlargement.
The introduction of symbols such as an EC flag and anthem and the preoccupation
with a European demos suggests the desire to create a European national
community. But symbols in themselves have no efficacy unless they evoke a
sense of a concrete collectivity, and even the outstanding civic nation, France,
I have argued, is founded on an ethnic substratum – a historic political capital,
Paris, the prestige of French language and culture, a history of ‘gloire’, and clear
boundaries ‘naturalised’ by war and physical barriers. Whereas nations evoke
heroic images of collective will, a concrete cultural community and a sacred homeland,
the ‘European’ identity the EU wishes to create is vague and contested.
As political centres, Brussels and Strasbourg, evoke no sacral aura, and the EU
lacks unifying cultural sites, and clear geographic boundaries. It offers no equivalence
to national commemorations (e.g. Remembrance of the Fallen) that have
a such a powerful popular resonance. The European project is articulated by
reference to a indefinite future-oriented telos (the image of a moving train towards
ever closer union that one must get on) that represents a rejection of the past
of national rivalries.