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Jan-Werner Müller - Who Is The European Prince?
Jan-Werner Müller - Who Is The European Prince?
Jan-Werner Müller - Who Is The European Prince?
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Jan-Werner Mller
Jan-Werner Mller
Who Is the European
Prince? A More or Less
Machiavellian Meditation
on the European Union
the distinguished italian economist and politician tommaso padoa schioppa
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federations. I have some sympathy for this claim. But it can plausibly
stand only at the end of a process of exploring possible political models
and legal precedents. Asserted a priori (as often happens), it can easily seem like a claim to shield the process of integration from critical
questions (and legitimate expectations), along the lines of No, you
cannot compare this to a democratic nation-state and hence should
stop going on about democracy.
I shall start this exploration of Machiavelli in Brussels with
some observations on political development in Western Europe after
1945 in general, to be followed by more specific claims about how a
European polity was imagined up until the mid-1980s or soand what
role various institutionalized princes, the European Commission in
particular, played in this process. I shall then return to the intriguingand at first sight so counterintuitivenotion of a monetary system as Europes prince. Finally, against the background of the Eurocrisis (generally considered an existential threat to the European Union
as a whole), some possible Machiavellian futures will be sketched out,
in particular a new version of a collective prince and, alternatively, a
strategy that trusts what Machiavelli called tumultiongoing political
conflictultimately to generate a more robust form of political unity.
This latter strategy also puts its faith in popular judgment in a way
that very much goes against the main currents of political developments in postwar Europeto a description of which I now turn.
ing in particular). While it proved highly seductive (and, one might add,
effective) to present the postwar era not as the beginning of something
new, but as a moral and intellectual return to something safely known, in
fact no democracy as a known set of institutions in any way returned
and neither was liberalism in any nineteenth-century sense (as a
matter of ideas or in terms of any recognizable class base) revived after
1945. What emerged instead might best be described as a new balance
of, broadly speaking, popular-democratic and liberal principles (and
constitutionalism in particular), or, if one prefers, a kind of new mixed
regime (Gauchet 2007).
Above all, postwar political thought and postwar political institutions were deeply imprinted with anti-totalitarianism. Political
leaders, no lessand quite possibly more sothan jurists and philosophers, sought to build an order designed to prevent a return to the totalitarian past. To be sure, lessons of the past were hardly unambiguous, and much postwar debate consisted precisely of contesting them.
What eventually prevailed in these intellectual battles was an image
of recent history as a chaotic, extremely violent era characterized by
limitless political dynamism, unbound masses and ruthless leaders
attempts to forge an entirely unconstrained political subjectsuch as
the ethnically purified German Volksgemeinschaft (Roberts 2006). The
underlying thought of these interpretations, one might say, was a profoundly un-Machiavellian one: political contention could only result
either in social disorder or extreme forms of authoritarianism; it could
never generate stability, let alone liberty.
This postwar perspective can only be fully understood if one
abandons a conception of totalitarianism as merely a Cold War slogan and instead recognizes that at least Nazi Germany and Stalins
Soviet Union did have totalitarian aspirations (the political reality is
another matter)and that such aspirations relied on the invocation
and attractiveness of principles and practices associated with democracy (though emphatically not liberal democracy): the formation of a
completely homogeneous people as a collective agent capable of mastering a collective fate (and of defending itself against perceived racial
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the making, has had to act somewhat like a prince confronted with
recently acquired lands: intent on creating de facto solidarity for the
project of European integration, sometimes with hope and sometimes
with fear, but always necessarily mindful of powerful existing national
loyalties, and, ideally, willing to follow Machiavellis advice of living
in the newly acquired lands (that is to say: demonstrate a European
presence and political commitment and engage in supervision of local
practices).
No doubt, this particular kind of collective prince has also had
unusual room for creativity (and self-aggrandizement: after all, maintaining the state meant expanding the state). Not having to follow a
single plan is also liberating; what ultimately would always have to
be integration through law and regulations (as opposed to military
force, for instance, or economic imperialism) could still take many
forms and sometimes make the commission appear more like a prince
with its private dominium rather than the temporary ruler of an independently existing public power; and the commission kept refining its many ways of retaining bureaucratic autonomy vis--vis the
nation-states (Elinas and Suleiman 2012).9 Not least, many essential
legal-political functionsensuring compliance on the part of citizens
in particularkept being exercised by nation-states, whose legitimacy
was not nearly as precarious as that of a new supranational community. In that sense, the commission would never directly have to face
questions of civil obedience and disobedience.
To be sure, the commission has not been the only body that
could deepen integration while also augmenting its own powerothers also proved what one might call normative entrepreneurs capable of
creating new necessities and, indirectly, opportunities. The best example is the European Court of Justice, initially set up with a very limited
mandate to check on the implementation of the treaties on integration.
But two decisions by the European Court of Justice effectively created a
new form of supranational constitutionalism and reinforced the sense
of Europe as another set of de facto liberal constraints on electoral
democracy in the postwar period: landmark cases in 1963 and in 1964
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liticized (and also disarmed) European peoples had not even so much
as consciously delegated the task of popular self-defense to particular
institutions; rather, benevolent elites had found a way to balance the
interests of powerful groupsbusiness intent on market-making and
market-maintenance, above all, a kind of oligarchy, from a Machiavellian perspectivewith a concern that the peoples of Europe should
continue at least tacitly to support both the domestic constitutional
settlements and evolving forms of supranational constitutionalism.
2004 when no fewer than 10 countries joined the polity. Such an enlargement seemed directly to contradict the goal of deepening the union
through a common currency and common policies (for instance in foreign
affairs) since it made the EU far more heterogeneous. One response to increased heterogeneity was the emergence of what in EU jargon came to be
known as variable geometry: EU countries were no longer marching in
step to an ever closer union; instead, some countries were forging ahead
with ambitious plans like the euro, while others reserved the right to opt
out from closer cooperation. Yet this new method of accommodating
differences by moving at multiple speeds also multiplied the concerns
about the endpoint of integrationwhat is sometimes called Europes
finality, or finalit. Was the union already truly unified; if not yet, would
full unity ever materialize and what precisely would it mean? Did the EU
constitute a coherent new political formor had there emerged, partly
by design and partly by accident, an entity that would easily fit Samuel
Pufendorfs famous description of the Holy Roman Empire: simile monstro;
in other words, something that looked like a monstrosity, incoherent in
its policies, incapable of finding a stable constitutional settlement, and,
not least, incomprehensible to ordinary citizens?
So the legitimacy of European integration is now much more contested. Both those sympathetic to integration and those opposed to the
process of achieving ever closer union have argued that the limits of
integration by stealth, have been reached; apparently, practical achievements are insufficiently obvious and, in particular, not so clearly universal that they would create de facto solidarity. No wonder, then, that the
apocryphal words If I had to do it all again, I would start with culture
came to be attributed to no less a figure than Jean Monnet.
But creating a new European culture from scratch is clearly not a
possibility; no illiterate masses are waiting to be Europeanized along the
lines of classic nineteenth-century nation-building projects. Some parts of
the European elite (and certainly many in the European Commission) may
well think we have made Europe, now we need to make Europeans
but at least for the moment, such people-making seems neither realistic
nor desirable. But then all of this might be just another way of saying
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that European elites are facing at least some of the problems of a newly
acquired commonwealth that Machiavelli analyzes in The Prince. So what
can they do? Here are two thoughts:
European Monetary Union has indeed been a bold experiment in
what Padoa Schioppa was apparently the first to call a currency without
a state. It was conceived as rule-based, with strict limits on public debt
and punishments for those breaking the rules. In that sense it was a depersonalized and, in the eyes of its architects, depoliticized collective prince. It
was not obviously foolish to think that it could take the lead in achieving
European unity as a lived experience: making the euro not just a convenience (no more need to exchange currencies for ordinary citizens and
companies), but a powerful symbol of unity across at least parts of the
European continent, something literally felt in ones hands and pockets
every day. Such lived experience might make it then legitimate to take political integration further, with ever tighter coordination of fiscal policies
and more redistribution of resources across national borders to rectify
economic imbalances.
To be fair, some of the architects of the euro had wanted both coordination and compensation for economic shocks from the very start:
they thought a common currency could not function without them
(James 2012). In the eyes of othersbut this is more speculationthe fact
that the euro could not work without them would become obvious at the
first major crisis, and such a crisis would then create its own new necessities. Ideally, proponents of such an integration by emergency necessities
might have hoped, a crisis would afford an occasione to make monetary
union into proper political union.
From a perspective informed by The Prince, it seems clear enough
that this particular collective prince suffered from some design flaws: in
the eyes of many Europeans, it promised prosperityand indeed initially
delivered a certain kind of what Machiavelli called liberality (or generosity): a flood of cheap money that seemed to make everyone better off,
certainly in many of the southern members of the Eurozone. But the retrenchment that followed had the very effect that Machiavelli described
when it came to the prince who tries to make himself popular with liber-
ality: someone eventually has to pay; and miserliness (or, put differently,
austerity) ends up calling into question the very legitimacy of the individual or collective prince. From a Machiavellian point of view, a modest miserliness would have been better in the first placeand this, arguably, is
what at least some of the architects of monetary union had in fact wished
for. Instead, design flaws, and unforeseen popular expectations, would
eventually turn the Euro into a force for disintegration.
These same factors have also led to what one might call a re-
personalization of the prince. It was not faceless central bankers in a sleek
tower in Frankfurt (the seat of the European Central Bank) who were initially seen as the main actors in the unfolding drama of the Eurocrisis,
but the princess of Europes most powerful state: Angela Merkel, the
chancellor of Germany. For some she utterly failed to follow the Machiavellian rulebook in confronting a modern variant of fortuna, namely the
seemingly capricious financial markets (Mnkler 2011). Instead of facing
them down with fierce political determination and overwhelming financial force, the supposedly neo-Stoic Merkel proved a ditherer, a cunctator (or cunctatora), waiting out the crisis, surviving from one day to the
next (or from much publicized European summit meeting to the next),
but never conclusively sending the forces of fortuna a signal that the EUs
most powerful country would indeed use all its might to keep the union
together. For others, however, hesitation and waiting were precisely a Machiavellian strategy: waiting would enfeeble the weaker members of the
Eurozone further, making it necessary to subject them to an economic
diktat, blame for which could partly be deflected because it was formulated by yet other seemingly depoliticized and hence neutral institutions
like the International Monetary Fund. In this view, Germany would centralize power and permanently assure its domination over the continent
precisely by prolonging the crisis as an occasione (Beck 2013). The powerful northern European states would turn out to be what in Machiavellis
language would be the grandi, or nobility, of the new Europe, driven by
a desiderio to oppress the southerners. To be sure, very few northerners
would have recognized themselves in this imagebut in the south, where
posters of Merkel as Hitler became ever more prominent, it seemed plau-
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sible enough (with the dangers that such popular umori, or dispositions,
would become deeply ingrained, and eventually prove forces for European
disintegration).
What has happened since such theoriesconspiracy theories, critics would legitimately saywere first been formulated, suggests that taming fortuna, as represented by the financial markets, did require a decisive
stance after all. It was the prominently displayed determination of an Italian, the head of the European Central Bank Mario Draghi, that calmed
the markets, at least for the moment: in July 2012, he spoke what, in
the eyes of the markets turned out to be the decisive, almost magic,
words: Within our mandate, the ECB [European Central Bank] is ready
to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will
be enough. But this story also seems to confirm that a depoliticized,
depersonalized prince as a force for political integration was an illusion
all alongit took a credible individual with visible political backing from
economically powerful states to tame fortuna. And as always with fortuna,
it was mostly about psychology and the qualit de tempi, as opposed to
anything like indisputable economic facts.
Two Remedies
Still, one might ask: will it actually be enough? Fundamentally, the crisis
remains unsolved, even if there has been some real economic convergence, which, when all is said and done, is the precondition for a lasting
currency union. Cheap money cannot last forever; either the collective
prince will have to be put together again as it was, or European elites will
need to think of something else. The former strategy consists of betting
that a stricter regime of rules can be made to work. After all, the collective
prince has already forced its subjects the member states of the Eurozone
to constitutionalize debt brakes, which is to say: constitutional limits
on public debt at national level. Practically, the two collective princes of
the EU the Commission and EMUwill now firmly act as one when it
comes to supervision of national budgets and punishments for spendthrift
parliaments. And the prince will live in the newly acquired principalities, so to speakhere I am alluding to The Prince againby looking very
closely at local practices (and numbers). It also might increase its powers
of punishment: as one recent proposal to address the crisis states, sovereignty ends when solvency ends. It will probably be best for the custodians of the common currency to be feared (where purveyors of cheap
money can be loved, but not for long).
In one sense this approach is all about multiplying constraints
and therefore might be seen as continuing the developments in postwar Europe sketched earlier in this essay. But in another sense, it also
constitutes a break with them: these financial constraints have nothing directly to do with strengthening democracy and individual rights
(which, after all, was the justification of something like militant democracy and of empowering constitutional courts in postwar Europe).
Moreover, given widespread Euro-fatigue, it seems hardly credible to
say that the collective princes are still leading a political project they
are just consolidating the power of individual and, above all, institutional debt-holders, who perhaps really represent the grandi of our day.
What is another possible remedy, an alternative to a model
which one might reasonably point out has failed once already and which
might finally falter completely under even stronger blows from fortuna?
A strategy that would take more political courage and that would go
against the main currents of postwar political development in Europe
might be to accept some of Machiavellis fundamental insights on popular
judgment: namely that the people are best at providing constraints on
power holders behavior and that contained conflict, or tumulti, remains
the most plausible hope for assuring a free way of life (McCormick 2011).
The modo di procedere is far from obvious here. First, carefully introducing politicization from above in the name of democracy can seem like
an incoherent enterpriseexcept that it is not clear who other than elites
could modify the political architecture of the EU such that conflicts and
cleavages could be more clearly expressed. Movements from below could
support such a processalthough one might well find that many EU citizens feel that so many initiatives from above have seemed more like propaganda exercises for the union, or are fed up with referenda that were
simply about popularly ratifying decisions not truly up for debate.11
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the truth of what it hears. One could well imagine speakers of equal
skill advocating, lets say, on the one hand more Keynesian and on
the other hand more neoliberal programs for the EUand the people
making a choice as to what constitutes the better view.
Empowering popular judgment is a risk, for the simple reason
that elites in democracies cannot know beforehand what it will turn
out to be. It would also constitute somewhat of a novelty in the kind
of Europe that was created after the Second World War. But it might
be still less of a risk than trying to recreate a collective prince who has
failed once already and where the verit effettuale della cosa could turn
out to be that one is not so much faced with a naked emperor as a figure from quite a different classic tale: Humpty-Dumpty.
Notes
1. Padoa Schioppa was fond of sprinkling his writings with quotes from
Machiavelli. But one should be careful not to attribute to him a wholesale neo-Machiavellian strategy in thinking about EMU, as Bonefeld
(2012) does, for instance. After all, his book The Road to Monetary Union
does not mention Machiavelli once (which, to be sure, is not decisive
evidence either way).
2. This notion has been widely discredited by the fact that many state
socialist constitutions in Central and Eastern Europe fixed such a
leading role for the state socialist partythereby rendering elections largely meaningless.
3. The following is adapted from Mller (2011, 2013).
4. I borrow this formula from the title of Christoph Mllers brilliant
2008 piece on postwar German constitutionalism.
5. I am grateful to Giovanni Cappoccia for this point.
6. Of course, this kind of accountability on some level would still require
popular judgment, however primitivea point often overlooked in
Schumpeterian accounts of democracy.
7. Wolfgang Streeck has summed up the particular formula as follows:
the organized working classes accepted capitalist markets and property rights in exchange for political democracy, which enabled them
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