Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

46 John Hutchinson
Cannot a European constitutional patriotism guaranteeing civil rights and
progress be realised subjectively as an act of faith in the future? The model of the
USA is often invoked as a successful ideological project to found a new society based
on universal enlightenment principles and on a deliberate rejection of the
(European) past. Like the architects of the USA, European federalists veer between
conceiving of the project as a heroic act of will and as following a telos. The USA,
however, can plausibly differentiate itself from the past because it is a ‘New
World’ nation of emigrants who have consciously left their place of origins
and gained self-definition through the myth of a popular war of liberation against
European imperialism, revolutionary heroes and sacred texts (the Declaration of
Independence and its Constitution) that inspire allegiance. Moreover, the USA
was built on English cultural values and the only pre-existing ethno-territorial
identities it faced were pulverised by war and expropriation. In contrast, the EU was
founded by the elites of defeated nation-states and has at best a pragmatic rationale,
administered by bureaucrats.
John Pocock (1997) maintains that this trauma of defeat both created the European
Community and crippled it. The ideology of Europeanism on which it rests is
postmodernist, directed against moral absolutism and the grand narratives of
European nation-states. It is largely deconstructionist in character, retaining for itself
an essential lack of identity. It offers no synthetic or universal history to replace
that of the nation-states. The very indeterminacy of ‘Europe’ presents tactical
advantages, since like a text it can be ‘read’ in very different ways by the different
constituent nationalities, and its borders can be extended elastically to fit the needs
of a developing project. But this lack of clear criteria of membership enhances the
manipulative capacity of powerful states in what is essentially a pragmatic imperial
project, seeking to override the resistance of routinised national identities.
Postmodernists might reply that the European Union neither can nor should
attempt to be a supernation, because in a global age the idea of a territoriallybounded
sovereign actor is obsolete and dangerous. The EU is based on a
consciousness of the catastrophic consequences of national rivalries in Europe and
the vital need to discipline them within a political framework that would also
recognise transnational (or subcontinental) and regional identities and interests.
What holds it together is not just the rational advantages perceived by elites in pooling
sovereignty, but a deeper moral revulsion of peoples against nationalism, combined
with a sense that national identities are more securely preserved by detaching
them from nation-states. The European Union thus does not need to be conceived
as a surrogate nation-state with all the absolutisms that implies, including a moral
messianism (pace USA). Its justification is as a pioneer of a new form of democratic
political community, acknowledging that there are now multiple and overlapping
centres of power and that authority is to be located appropriately to the problem
at hand. The European Union liberates both dominant and minority nations
from their fetish of the nation-state, and this is reflected in the trend to regional
devolution. Moreover, a citizenship conceived in European terms because of its
thinness would be less exclusive of immigrant minorities and compatible with the
multicultural realities of contemporary industrial societies.