Keywords

In today’s European political discourse, ‘European values’ are often invoked by both defenders of the European project and its detractors. The European Union (EU) refers to European values to defend and legitimise its policies, while its critics likewise invoke these values (albeit often interpreted differently) to criticise these very same policies. In what follows I will critically examine who has used the term in European institutions, and when and for what purpose they have used it. I will also see how the use, content, and impact of the notion of ‘European values’ has changed over time. In so doing, I hope to shed some light, not just on their sometimes-forgotten origins and brief history, but also on their current predicaments.

This chapter is structured as follows. First, I will provide a brief word about the method. Second, I will look at the Cold War origins of the use of European values by a particular group of conservative politicians and the Council of Europe in the post-war years. And third, I will examine how, from the 1970s onwards, the European Community tried to legitimise its project by invoking a European identity and the ideal of a social Europe. Only after these notions proved less useful did the notion of ‘European values’ gradually begin to replace them. As European institutions and politicians increasingly used the term European values when legitimising the European project, these values became mainstream, albeit with a different meaning – more abstract, less partisan, and less religious – as I will explain in a fourth section. Fifth, and moving closer to the present, I will show how the history of European values that I traced can explain some of the tensions surrounding these values today. I will conclude this chapter by suggesting possible ways out of today’s predicament.

1 A Critical Approach

If scholars empirically examine ‘European values’, for example in the European Values Study (EVS), they study the degree to which certain values, attitudes, and norms are present at a European level (as opposed to a regional or national level only), which allows them to analyse complex evolutions, variations, and correlations. ‘European’ then mainly refers to the scope of analysis and does not imply a normative political agenda.Footnote 1 However, when politicians and institutions invoke values, there are invariably normative issues at play, as these values are meant to legitimise political projects (and delegitimise others), which means that values are ‘valued’ differently, depending on who invokes them. Although politicians, when legitimising their policies, arguably always – implicitly or explicitly – invoke certain values such as security, safety, or equality, they rarely explicitly refer to ‘values’ as such. (While British politicians, for example, increasingly speak about ‘British values’, Irish politicians rarely refer to ‘Irish values’.) Yet in what follows I will concentrate on this explicit (and not so obvious) use of a term such as ‘European values’. Why and when did European institutions, at some point in their history, start to explicitly invoke that term?

When focusing on this explicit political use of ‘European values’, I will critically examine not just what they mean (i.e. what does ‘European’ refer to in European values and what is it opposed to?), but also see how, when, and why – and in what contexts – the term is used. I will also look at rival concepts that they replaced, while assessing the price one must pay for using one concept rather than another. I thus presuppose that there are different definitions of what ‘European values’ mean – definitions that sometimes clash and are at times incompatible.

Such a critical approach requires both philosophy and history. Philosophy is required because a conceptual analysis will help in differentiating between different definitions of the concept of European values in political and ideological discourse. And history is needed because a historical awareness of the context and impact of values, as well as the different functions they serve, in turn helps us to stay mindful of the various constellations in which discourses operate. After all, terms such as values or human rights did not always have the same scope, salience, or impact they have today.

By adopting such a conceptual, historical, and critical approach, I follow Nietzsche when he wrote that ‘we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values should itself (...) be examined – and so we need to know about the conditions and circumstances under which the values grew up, developed and changed’ (Nietzsche 2007: 7). With Nietzsche and Foucault, one can call this a ‘genealogical approach’ (Foucault 1977). Rather than seeing values as naturally ‘good’ and their history as one of inevitable progress, such a critical perspective instead questions the use of values as well as the actual origins their defenders often look away from (Moyn 2010: 1–10). This critical approach can be contrasted with a more traditional teleological history of values that instead emphasises continuity (rather than shifts), historical necessity (instead of contingency), and a focus on the values themselves (and not on the wider context and impact they (fail to) have). Such a traditional approach mostly assumes that values are always a good thing (thus concealing their potential ideological side effects or costs) and that their history represents progress.Footnote 2

Although a critical approach implies that the scope of my analysis is already quite wide – focusing on the use of ‘European values’ in an 80-year period and also exploring the wider context – it nevertheless still has some important limitations. One limitation is that by ‘European values’ I mean values that European institutions use to define themselves. But, of course, ‘European values’ not only refer to the values that are invoked and promoted by European institutions, but also, in a much wider sense, to what European citizens value (Foret & Calligaro 2018: 5). Seen from the perspective of European citizens – as examined by the European Values Study or the Eurobarometer – European values can refer to the following four perspectives, each of which requires research that falls outside the scope of this chapter.

European values in this broader sense can first refer to values that Europeans share (the lowest common denominator) or to values that a majority of Europeans value more than others. Second, it can mean values that distinguish European citizens from those in other continents (when compared to the World Values Survey, for example). Third, the term can stand for values that Europeans believe their institutions should be embodying (which may be different from what Europeans personally believe to be important). One could further compare the values that Europeans believe in – or that they want their institutions to represent – with the values that these institutions say they represent, and highlight discrepancies between both (Frischhut 2019: 127). Another, more historical, approach would be to see to what extent the changing use of ‘European values’ by politicians follows the change in values of the citizens they are meant to represent (Foret 2014). These latter perspectives presuppose that European institutions invoke values as much as European citizens do. However, as we shall see in what follows, this has not always been the case.

2 The Conservative and Christian Cold War Origins of European Values

Although defenders of the European project today often portray it as the embodiment of (European) values such as dignity, human rights, and democracy, and suggest that this project finds its roots in the defence of these values, a quick look at the actual origins of the EU allows us to see that these values were not prevalent in the early days, contrary to what some EU officials would have us believe. In fact, ‘the 1951 Treaty of Paris establishing the European Coal and Steel Community (...) made no mention of “democracy” or “human rights,” and neither would the 1957 Treaty of Rome establishing the European Economic Community’ (Duranti 2017: 209). Until the 1990s, values were hardly invoked at all by European institutions, which instead kept their technocratic focus on the single market the Community was meant to create. If values were mentioned at all back then, they were mostly peace (think, for example, of Schuman’s famous declaration of 9 May 1950 (Schuman 1950; see also Dujardin 2016: 217)) or reconciliation rather than those invoked nowadays such as democracy or human rights, which were conspicuously absent in those early days.

All this is not to say that ‘European values’ such as democracy, the rule of law, and human rights were completely absent in Europe’s post-war years. They were explicitly invoked, not by the European Community (the EU’s predecessor), but by its less consequential sister institution, the Council of Europe (1949), and the European Convention on Human Rights it helped to create (in 1950) and defend through the European Court of Human Rights since 1959 in Strasbourg (Duranti 2017: 1–2). It was here that the language of European values and human rights was used, albeit in a very specific way, serving a particular conservative ideological agenda, attacking the left in general and communism in particular. As historians such as Samuel Moyn and Marco Duranti have recently shown, when the Cold War began in the post-war years, the European Convention on Human Rights was mainly concerned with ‘ideological signalling about the values on which Western European identity depended’, and it ‘emerged thanks to Britain’s commitment to the “spiritual union” of Western Europeans against communism’ (Moyn 2015: 94). This discourse was indeed used by conservative British politicians such as Winston Churchill and, later, Margaret Thatcher, amongst others.

This conservative vision of values – which survives in certain conservative circles today – is characterised by the following features. First, it sees European values as being embedded in a common civilisational or ‘spiritual’ foundation that is Europe’s Christian heritage. This echoes conservatism’s founding father, Edmund Burke, who had earlier emphasised the primacy of civilisation and religion – for example, when he wrote in 1790 that ‘our civilisation’ has, ‘in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon (...) the spirit of religion’, adding that ‘this mixed system of opinion and sentiment’ – the ‘superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination’ – what we would today call values – ‘has given its character to modern Europe’ (Burke 1999: 170–173). In the post-war years Churchill linked such existing conservative ideas with human rights in a Cold War context. In his view:

The European human rights system was directed at safeguarding those freedoms (...) derived from Western Europe’s premodern Christian and humanist heritage within the confines of what [he] termed ‘democratic European civilisation’. By this, he meant a bounded cultural space restricted to those nations who embraced a common set of ethical values derived from the shared history of their peoples. (Duranti 2017: 210)

In so doing, ‘conservatives enshrined human rights as European values in the service of a nostalgic Christian vision of the European legal order, not a liberal cosmopolitan one’ (Duranti 2017: 3).

Such an invocation of a Christian heritage may not have sounded all that strange in the post-war years, given that the European continent was by no means as secularised back then as it is today. As Duranti explains:

Churchill (…) did not demand that Europeans subscribe to a particular religious creed in order to be faithful to what he called ‘spiritual values’ of ‘democratic European civilisation’. One need not have been a Christian at that time to agree that the cultural inheritance of Western Christendom could provide a foundation for uniting the manifold communities in which Europeans formed their ethical obligations. (Duranti 2017: 403)

As late as 1988, Thatcher repeated this argument – of human rights being rooted in Christianity – when she asserted that ‘we still base our belief in personal liberty and other human rights’ on ‘that idea of Christendom (…) – Christendom for long synonymous with Europe – with its recognition of the unique and spiritual nature of the individual’ (Thatcher 2016: 216).

Another key feature of this discourse is that European values were regarded as Europe’s legacy to the world, in part through a process of colonisation and imperialism, with Churchill as its obvious defender. And while post-war Europe appeared as a peaceful endeavour that broke with a long tradition of European wars, it is worth noting that when the first European institutions emerged after the war, European nations still often brutally dominated large parts of the world through their colonies. So, while the brutalities on the continent had ceased, overseas they still continued in various forms, and were often committed in the name of (and legitimised by invoking) civilisational values (Fanon 2004). As late as 1988, Thatcher unapologetically talked about Europe (and its values) in this colonial sense when she declared that ‘the story of how Europeans explored and colonised – and yes, without apology – civilised much of the world is an extraordinary tale of talent, skill and courage’ (Thatcher 2016: 217). It was in that same sense that ‘European values’, associated with talk about Europe’s humanism, spirit, and civilisation, were denounced by anticolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon. Fanon stated in 1961 that ‘it is in the name of the Spirit, meaning the spirit of Europe, that Europe justified its crimes and legitimized the slavery in which it held four fifths of humanity’ (Fanon 2004: 237), and Sartre agreed when he declared that ‘our beloved values are losing their feathers; if you take a closer look there is not one that isn’t tainted with blood’ (Sartre 2004: lix).

European values were seen as European in that they originated in Europe but at the same time they were used by Europeans who saw it as their vocation to export these values to the world. By ‘European’ one did not mean that they were limited to Europe – other continents were welcome to adopt them too – but rather that Europe was referred to as their exclusive origin (rather than their exclusive destination). A successful example of the export of European values was the United States (US). Once more, Thatcher: ‘European values have helped to make the United States of America into the valiant defender of freedom which she has become’ (Thatcher 2016: 217). European values in this Cold War narrative were therefore often seen as synonymous with American, Western, or transatlantic values. Europe had the merit of being at the origin of these values (which were therefore called European). But, thanks to the successful propagation of these values, Europe gladly accepted that its own values had now become American or Western values too. In that sense this use of values was part of a larger ‘religion of universal progress’ (Mishra 2017: 37) – ‘the belief that Anglo-American institutions of the nation state and liberal democracy will be gradually generalized around the world’ (Mishra 2017: 37).

As to the content, in this conservative narrative European values were mainly linked with centrist values such as liberty or the rule of law rather than with left-of-centre values such as, say, solidarity or equality between men and women. Indeed, ‘for conservative Europeanists, to be a “good European” required committing oneself to respecting “human rights and fundamental freedoms”, understood as civil liberties rather than social rights’ (Duranti 2017: 9). The invocation of European values and human rights was more than just about words, as they were meant to have a real impact through the European Court of Human Rights that would favour conservatives at the expense of advocates of a powerful post-war welfare state. The supporters of the European Convention on Human Rights were, after all, mainly ‘interested in using Europeanization as a way to combat domestic socialism, in an era when the popular and ideological appeal of social democratic ideals and communist ones were rising to new heights’ (Moyn 2015: 159). For many among them ‘the objective of post-war European unification on the basis of human rights principles was to roll back the dramatically enhanced positive role of the nation-state in economic and social policy’ (Duranti 2017: 212). The creation of a European supreme court ‘was widely regarded as a mechanism for realizing what socialists described as a conservative agenda too unpopular to be enacted through democratic means’ (Duranti 2017: 7). When used in a specific and limited sense, human rights could serve the conservative agenda as conservatives ‘ensured that the right to property and the right of parents over the religious content of their children’s education would be codified in treaty law, while the rights to employment, health care, and social security would not’ (Duranti 2017: 5). Even more controversially, ‘human rights were also advanced by conservatives and reactionaries to avoid post-war repression of collaborators and, in France, Vichistes’ (Pasture 2018b: 492).

The first decades of the post-war European project were therefore characterised by some kind of division of labour. As Duranti explains:

The history of the European project featured dual post-war moments. One was the technocratic state-driven process of economic integration (…) [;] the other moment was a more holistic transnational process of envisioning the material aspect of European unification as indivisible from its ethical foundations. (Duranti 2017: 359)

While those engaged in the conservative ideological project around the Council of Europe explicitly used values to differentiate that project from Eastern European (and even Western European) communist ideologies, in the technocratic European Community the values it currently invokes, such as democracy and human rights, were notably absent in these post-war years.

Yet even when conservative or Christian values were not explicitly invoked in the technocratic project of a European Community, it is often suggested that this community too was nevertheless influenced by Christian, and especially Catholic (rather than Protestant), values, ideas, and actors. After all, the argument goes, ‘the founders of the European Community – Alcide De Gasperi, Konrad Adenauer, Robert Schuman – were all Christian Democrats’ (Müller 2013: 141). Moreover, it is further suggested that Christian democratic parties were inspired by Jacques Maritain’s personalist defence of values such as democracy and human rights. Although they did not explicitly invoke ‘European values’, it is undeniable that post-war Christian politicians were involved in a European transnational peace project that sought to limit state power and defend democracy and rights. Yet it is important to contextualise this involvement, see it for what it was, and not confuse it with later evolutions.

From a historical perspective, this involvement was quite new. Until the Second World War, Christianity broadly subscribed to an anti-modernist world view and had been suspicious of modern democracy and rights. It ‘had mostly stood for values inimical to those we now associate with human rights’, as ‘Christians and Christian thought were deeply entangled in the collapse of liberal democracy on the European continent between the wars’ (Moyn 2015: 6–7). This began to change in the mid 1930s, when Pope Pius XI realised ‘that totalitarian states of the left and even of the right threatened the moral community for which Jesus had long ago called’ (Moyn 2015: 15), and his successor Pope Pius XII started invoking the language of human rights founded on human dignity during the war (Moyn 2015: 1–3). Around the same time, the Catholic intellectual Jacques Maritain redefined rights and democracy as a Christian legacy, albeit in a neothomist and conservative sense (Moyn 2011: 91–97; 2015: 16, 82–83).

One could argue that, after experiencing first hand the evils a totalitarian state could inflict, Christian politicians too became keen on limiting state power both at a national level (think of Germany’s new federal structure) and internationally (hence their advocacy for a European Community that was in part meant to limit the power of nation states). As Müller explains, for Christian democratic politicians, ‘national sovereignty (…) was something to be feared. These leaders advocated subsidiarity and a Europe united in its “Christian-humanist” heritage (the particulars of which were not to be discussed all that much, as long as they added up to anti-Communism)’ (Müller 2013: 141). Christians were indeed not just suspicious of a state dominated by the totalitarian right, but also of a state that furthered the interests of the left. As already explained, the rise of a socialist (welfare) state made Christian democrats suspicious of a strong nation state, which was another reason why they supported transnational projects that limited the nation state at home and abroad.

It is undeniable that ‘Christianity’s ascendancy both spiritually and politically after World War II’ contributed to ‘the move from a conservative maintenance of middle-class rule that was willing to give up democracy if necessary to one that embraced it at all cost’ (Moyn 2015: 171–172). Yet if Christian politicians discovered the value of democracy in those post-war years – they were called Christian democrats after all – theirs was still a specific conservative idea of democracy that was also deeply suspicious of popular sovereignty and saw true democracy (and the European project) as a way to limit the unbridled expression of the people’s will. For them, European integration was ‘a credible response to the dangers of popular sovereignty, of which Christian Democratic leaders, even as leaders of people’s parties, would remain particularly wary’ (Müller 2013: 142). Indeed, ‘European integration, it needs to be emphasized, was part and parcel of [a] comprehensive attempt to constrain popular will: it added supranational constraints to national ones’ (Müller 2017: 95).

Yet one should certainly not overstate the role Catholicism (or Maritain’s personalist ideas) played in the origins of the European Community. It is true that the Vatican, especially under the leadership of Pope Pius XII (1939–1958), was said to favour the European construction as a third force acting as a counterweight to Washington or Moscow (Chenaux 2007: 8–9). But the Vatican had little to no influence on the European Community (Dujardin 2016: 219). And when Catholic politicians cooperated at all in these post-war years, they were mainly motivated by their shared anti-communist stance rather than by ideals of European federalism, let alone values (other than perhaps peace) (Chenaux 2007: 87–88). So, just as the Council of Europe used ‘European values’ mainly as a tool against communism, so Catholic politicians from various European countries likewise cooperated in order to stop communism (and not to build a united Europe).

Moreover, many of Europe’s so-called founding fathers were not particularly Catholic (think of Paul-Henri Spaak or Jean Monnet), although admittedly they made occasional references to distinctly Christian values such as respect for the human person or a Christian civilisation (Dujardin 2016: 214–215), which was probably an illustration of the predominance of Christianity in the post-war years (making the absence of such references in the European Community treaties even more striking). And despite some post-war Christian democratic predominance, other non-Christian democratic political forces right of centre that had politically survived the war also remained powerful – think of de Gaulle who, after resisting Germany during the war, went on to oppose a supranational Europe after the war ended.

Lastly, Maritain’s personalist ideas in reality hardly found their way into post-war Christian democratic party programmes (Chenaux 2007: 90). This came as no surprise, as even Maritain himself was ‘unconvinced of the extent to which mere party politics could usher in the new kind of Christian civilization, based on human dignity’ (Moyn 2015: 16). Moreover, Maritain’s Catholic defence of values was not the only one on offer. During the war, other legitimations of human rights and democracy were developed, for example by the French Union Leader and intellectual Paul Vignaux (who was a Catholic but neither a Christian democrat nor a Gaullist and who was an important source of influence for the later European Commission president Jacques Delors). Unlike Maritain, who mainly drew on Thomas and Aristotle, Vignaux was inspired by the Protestant theologian Niebuhr and by the nominalism of Duns Scotus (Weymans 2018).

The conservative Christian Cold War defence of values that was meant to stop communism and differentiate Western Europe from the communist East was also popular in Central and Eastern Europe, where it resonated with Church leaders (think of Karol Wojtyła in Poland, the later Pope John Paul II) and intellectuals such as Milan Kundera. Ironically, conservatives in the West had been so successful in attacking communism that many in the West no longer saw Eastern Europe as part of European civilisation. As Kundera lamented, ‘in the eyes of its beloved Europe, Central Europe is just a part of the Soviet empire and nothing more’ (Kundera 1984: 37). This prompted Church leaders and intellectuals to stress that the East belonged to Europe rather than to Russia. The newly elected Polish pope, John Paul II, declared in 1982 that the ‘soul of Europe remains united because, beyond its common origin, it has similar Christian and human values’ (John Paul II 2017a: 35). He later referred to ‘the Slavic peoples’ as ‘the other “lung” of our common European homeland’ (John Paul II 2017b: 42). In a more secular vein Kundera reminded the West that people from Central Europe too were part of European civilisation: ‘for a Hungarian, a Czech, a Pole (...) the word “Europe” does not represent a phenomenon of geography but a spiritual notion synonymous with the word “West”’ (Kundera 1984: 33). He emphasised that Central Europe belonged culturally to Western Europe rather than to Russia and stressed that ‘nothing could be more foreign to Central Europe and its passion for variety than Russia: uniform, standardizing, centralizing’ (Kundera 1984: 33). Of course, Cold War warriors such as Thatcher agreed, which is why she emphasised in 1988 that ‘we must never forget that east of the Iron Curtain, people who once enjoyed a full share of European culture, freedom and identity have been cut off from their roots. We shall always look on Warsaw, Prague and Budapest as great European cities’ (Thatcher 2016: 217).

Although European values are today meant to appeal to everyone, from left to right, initially these values were thus especially invoked by a particular tradition – conservative, anti-communist, Christian, and (mainly) Western European – meant to exclude others (especially communists) and protect one’s own interests. This partisan appropriation of European values by conservative forces probably explains in part why these values were rarely explicitly used by the European Community to define itself, at least as long as the Cold War lasted. It also explains why, until the end of the Cold War, the European Community had to look for different, less partisan, concepts to legitimise its project, especially when that need for legitimacy increased from the 1970s onwards.

3 From a European Identity to a ‘Social Europe’ (1970s to Late 1990s)

It is fair to say that until the 1970s neither the European Community nor the Council of Europe and its human rights instruments amounted to much. As Moyn points out: ‘by the mid-1970s the European Court of Human Rights had decided only seventeen cases’, and it was only in the middle of the 1980s that the number ‘approved for court consideration skyrocketed’ (Moyn 2010: 80). Until then, the technocratic European Community in turn did not (yet) impact people’s daily lives and therefore still by and large enjoyed the passive and indifferent ‘support’ of the wider public (which would later be called a ‘permissive consensus’), and so it was not yet in need of much legitimation, let alone a discourse about values. Two shifts would slowly change that.

First, there was the enlargement of the European Community. It was no coincidence that one of the first official reflections about what Europe meant and stood for emerged in 1973 in the context of the first enlargement that welcomed Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. Back then, the foreign ministers drafted a now famous declaration in which they mused about Europe’s identity and its relationship with the wider world (Council 1973). In order to position themselves in the world, they arguably first needed to know what they stood for. Likewise, an enlargement of the club presupposes that one has an idea of what the club represents. In 1973 the foreign ministers saw much potential in the concept of a ‘European identity’, although they did mention in passing their ‘cherished values’ or ‘common values and principles’ (Council 1973: 119). As we now know, this would later change.

The second shift was the increasing necessity to establish a connection with the wider public and the need to legitimise the European project in order to convince voters of its merits. This need slowly emerged as that public was gradually discovered and given a voice at a European level. As early as 1974, the first Eurobarometer was launched (Schrag-Sternberg 2013: 83) (just a few years before the first European Values Study took place in 1981), and in 1979 the first elections for the European Parliament were organised. In order to enable participation in these elections, European political parties were created, such as the Christian Democratic European People’s Party in 1976. As part of its ideology, that party created the myth of the aforementioned Christian democratic ‘founding fathers’, whose work on the European project needed to be continued (Chenaux 2007: 95). Newly elected members of the European Parliament had work to do because ‘starting in the 1970s observations had emerged that the European integration actually prompted a “democratic deficit” – an expression that appeared in 1979’ (Vauchez 2016: 13). Moreover, after a long period of highly successful economic expansion, hitherto successful Western nation states were hit in the mid 1970s by a deep economic crisis, which meant that citizens and politicians increasingly looked to Europe for help and a way out of the crisis.

Inspired by the necessity to define Europe vis-à-vis the world and its citizens, from the mid 1980s the newly installed European Commission – headed by its ambitious new president Jacques Delors – launched various initiatives to make Europe more visible by introducing symbols and to develop a sort of ‘nation building’ at a European level (Sierp 2019: 142–145; Shore 2000; van Middelaar 2013). Apart from reviving the original ideal of a ‘single market’ and the ideal of a European identity that had been emerging since the 1970s, the Delors Commission added a new term of its own, that of a ‘social Europe’, and this term became widely used from the mid 1980s onwards. The idea was that the economic benefits of the single market were meant to be redistributed amongst all Europeans (Dinan 2014: 215–216). At first, and probably in part as a result of these policies, things looked promising for the newly relaunched European project headed by Delors. Indeed, popular support for the European Community was arguably never higher than between the mid 1980s and 1992, in large part because of the 1992 target for launching the single market (Schrag-Sternberg 2013: 83–84; Dinan 2014: 207).

Until the 1990s, both the enlargement and ideas to increase public support were seen as compatible with ideals of constructing a strong, substantive European identity and the dream of a social Europe. But in the 1990s this slowly changed. When it came to enlargement after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, the European club was about to widen substantially eastward. The bigger the club became, the harder it would become to find a substantial common denominator. But also the relationship between the European Union (as it was now called) and the wider public changed. Permissive consensus and a brief period of ‘euro-enthusiasm’ was followed by a more (euro)sceptical attitude among the public and a so-called ‘constraining dissensus’ that lives on today, whereby the European peoples no longer automatically shared the more ambitious European projects and the references to a European identity that accompanied them.

The concept of a substantive cultural European identity that was still seen as useful until then now appeared less appropriate. In the context of enlargement, this made sense, as it was arguably harder to talk about a shared substantive identity when it involved imagining a club of more than 20 member states (from the 1990s onwards) instead of just nine (as in 1973). But also, when it comes to the relationship with the wider public, invoking a European identity proves tricky. The painstaking process of deciding what figures or objects to put on European banknotes was one concrete example that ‘demonstrated how hard it is to define a European identity’ and also illustrates ‘the fear that national identifications would prove more powerful than a European identity’ (van Middelaar 2013: 242) – which is why these banknotes were eventually stripped of any references to concrete people or objects. So even inside European institutions, bureaucrats had always liked abstractions and been wary of concrete identities. Apart from their fondness for abstract banknotes, there was also their predilection for abstract symbols such as a flag or anthem (Weymans 2020: 34–36) or for European educational or research schemes such as Erasmus or Marie Curie schemes that require people to leave their home countries (Weymans 2009: 272–273). Just as French revolutionaries before, eurocrats tend to identify the European project with these abstractions and oppose these to particular identities (as if they do not mutually presuppose each other) (Weymans 2020: 34–36). But it was especially outside ‘Brussels’ that the idea of a concrete European identity, history or civilisation was frowned upon. This comes as no surprise, given the vast diversity of Europe’s peoples. In Mak’s words:

There is no European people. There is no single, all-embracing community of culture and tradition (…) [T]here are at least four of them: the Northern-Protestant, the Latin-Catholic, the Greek-Orthodox and Muslim-Ottoman. There is not a single language, but dozens of them (…) And, above all: in Europe there is very little in the way of a shared historical experience. (Mak 2008: 828)

Indeed, Europe has always faced the ‘problem of finding memory frames that could appeal to all European societies’ (Littoz-Monnet 2012: 1197), and the enlargement only made that challenge more daunting. In short, as time went on, ‘the efforts to develop state-like symbolism and imagery (like the flag, a memory and cultural policy, a citizenship) (...) met strong limits, related both to the indifference of individuals and to the resistance of member states’ (Foret 2020: 24).

One can speculate as to why ‘the people’s own nation’ remained ‘overwhelmingly the strongest point of identity’ and why, ‘by contrast, emotional association with a European identity was extremely weak’ (Kershaw 2018: 482) despite repeated efforts to create such an identity. Was it because of the fact that Europe – unlike nation states (or the US), which constructed their identities more or less from scratch – had to deal with strong pre-existing national identities (van Middelaar 2013: 228)? Or was it because a ‘European identity’ – in the singular – was seen as referring to a single identity that can be seen as hard to reconcile with Europe’s motto ‘united in diversity’? Just as EU institutions try to avoid speaking about ‘the European people’ in the singular (van Middelaar 2013: 289), the use of a single European identity may likewise be seen as too risky.

All this may explain why in the early 1990s ‘the Twelve dispensed with the identity prose’, thus undermining ‘the rhetoric about a shared past or a common civilisation’ (van Middelaar 2013: 249). It is true that attempts to construct a more substantial European identity did in part continue beyond the 1990s. Think of the constitutional treaty in 2004 that contained plans to make the EU more like a state, including its own symbols and laws (van Middelaar 2013). Yet the rejection of this same constitutional treaty in 2005 by French and Dutch voters, which was at least in part attributed to these renewed efforts at European nation building, probably represents the provisional endpoint of serious attempts to build a cultural or substantive European identity, at least within the European institutions.

Given that for various reasons the idea of a cultural or substantial European identity was no longer seen as a suitable prospect for keeping Europe together, politicians had to turn to alternatives, such as the aforementioned ideal held by Delors of a social Europe. In 1988 Delors indeed talked about the creation of a ‘European social area’ (Delors 1988a: 139) and called for ‘a concrete and productive social dialogue at the European level’ (Delors 1988b: 5) as one example that clearly shows ‘the social dimension of the European construction’ (Delors 1988b: 9). In the wake of his social agenda of the 1980s, the idea(l) of a ‘social Europe’ or – from the 1990s onwards that of a ‘European social model’ – lived on and existed alongside the ideal of a cultural ‘European identity’, especially in the first decade after the turn of the century, when such notions were still widely invoked.

But the notion of a ‘European social model’ proved likewise problematic, if only because a welfare state at a European level is lacking (Bourdieu 2010: 136; Rosanvallon 2006: 229–231; Mazower 2012: 410) and because in reality there are multiple social models in Europe, not just one (Garton Ash 2009: 79). In addition, the newly arrived ‘Central and Eastern Europeans (...) after long years under communism, were dead opposed to excessive market regulation’ (Mak 2008: 821). Moreover, in the 1990s European countries reformed their welfare states, often in the name of policies that resulted from their membership of the European Union, which arguably became gradually more neoliberal, especially as a result of the constraints imposed by the creation of monetary union in the 1990s. The references that were made to Europe’s social model in the post-Cold War years thus increasingly rang hollow in a world where this social model came under pressure as a result of the rise of (transatlantic) post-Cold War neoliberal policies associated with globalisation and ‘third way’ or ‘new labour’ welfare state reforms represented by social democratic politicians such as Tony Blair (UK prime minister from 1997 to 2007) or Gerhard Schröder (German chancellor from 1998 to 2005), both preceded in the US by Bill Clinton (US president from 1993 to 2001). In Europe even these newly elected social democratic leaders appeared to further promote liberal policies (Denord & Schwartz 2009: 120), albeit not to the same extent as in the US. In a similar spirit Europe’s ‘Lisbon Strategy’, launched in 2000, was aimed at creating jobs by turning Europe into a competitive knowledge-based economy that, for example, required European universities to compete with each other (Weymans 2009).

References to a social Europe were thus now no longer perceived as a credible promise (as they still did in the second part of the 1980s), but as a hollow slogan that social democratic leaders appeared to use to embellish the de facto predominance of neoliberal policies. As a result of these and other factors (such as the fallout of the financial crisis of 2008), notions such as a ‘social Europe’ and a ‘European social model’ were used less and less after 2010, and a new term was thus called for. This is where ‘European values’ came in.

4 The Rise of European Values (From the Late 1990s to the Present)

As the Cold War ended, the language of ‘European values’ was extracted from its particular conservative Cold War origins and recycled in a less particular and ideological sense in order to represent the European Union as a whole rather than just one of its more conservative ideological currents. In practice, European values could indeed only be useful as a political tool as long as they became secularised and were ‘extracted’ from their prior more ‘embodied’ or concrete civilisational and religious content. Unlike a European identity (or a ‘European social model’) used in the singular, European values were always (and conveniently) seen as many, as a list of values, where everyone could choose the value they liked the most.

Before they emerged as a term that was widely used in the European discourse after the turn of the century, European values appeared in the European treaties, starting with the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, when the European Community renamed itself the European Union. Values and principles gradually became the new minimalistic way to legitimise that new European Union and to provide it with a new juridical sense of commonality. This helps explain why, ‘although references to democracy and human rights were absent from the founding treaties of the European Communities, they have been ubiquitous in the treaty law of the European Union since its inception at Maastricht in 1992’ and why ‘these principles are said today to be at the heart of what it means to be a European’ (Duranti 2017: 359–360). Values were, for example, invoked in 1993 when defining the criteria new member states had to meet before they could join the European club. In the so-called Copenhagen criteria, values such as ‘democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities’ (European Council 1993: 13) now appeared to have replaced the ideal of ‘European identity’ that was still prevalent 20 years earlier when talking about the first enlargement (also in Copenhagen).

Interestingly, European values thus made their entrance in European documents in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and at the time of an ensuing ideological optimism that was exemplified by Fukuyama’s end of history thesis (which used Europe as an illustration). As long as the Cold War lasted, European values were used (by the Council of Europe and by conservatives) to differentiate between Christian Europe and its communist enemy. Once that Cold War ended, a secularised version of these values was now used to unify Europe and to define its identity, place, and mission in the world. All this happened at a point when ‘rival’ notions such as a ‘European identity’ or a ‘social Europe’ were still actively used. Just as the ideal of a European identity began to appear in official documents 10 years before it was deployed on a larger scale, so European values first appeared in the treaties before their use widened and they gradually replaced rival notions.

Apart from appearing in legal documents, European values were also invoked by philosophers. Already in the 1990s philosophers such as Habermas were pleading for a ‘constitutional patriotism’ and later even went on to invoke a ‘distinctive set of “European values”’ as a ‘definition of the moral foundations of Europe which puts social justice at the centre of a certain set of values, and defines Europe as the Not-America’ (Garton Ash 2009: 79).Footnote 3 Although that last claim arguably ‘does not hold up to closer empirical investigation’ (Garton Ash 2009: 79), it was still seen as useful, provided it was diluted. Politician-intellectuals from Central Europe, such as Václav Havel, echoed traditional appeals to values in the East when he declared that ‘Europe’s rich and spiritual history (...) has created a body of incontestable values’, adding the following rhetorical question: ‘is it not these values (...) which do matter first and foremost and is it not, on the contrary, these values which give direction to everything else?’ (Havel 2009).

Vaguely inspired by such philosophical ideas, ‘dominant official discourses on European identity have stressed abstract values, principles, and institutional features of the EU’s political system’ (Schrag-Sternberg 2013: 148), thereby in effect replacing and diluting identity or a social Europe with more abstract values. As a result, from the late 1990s onwards the term ‘European values’, which had until then mostly been used by a small group of legal scholars, Europhiles, or intellectuals, was now increasingly used in public debate. Moreover, this reflected a broader trend in European societies where politicians started invoking values more widely (Foret & Calligaro 2018: 1), also at a nation state level (Charlemagne 2006). But while values in national discourses were, as before, still mainly used by conservatives who continued to use it to define and exclude (this time not just communists but also Muslims),Footnote 4 at a European level minimalist values were now meant to include all Europeans, both left and right. In short, ‘the multiplication of references to “European values” has, since the 2000s, appeared as a new narrative claiming common normative roots but in a non-committal and flexible voice’ (Foret 2020: 24).

Values were increasingly mentioned in the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam, which ‘clearly stated what those values were’ and ‘included a provision to sanction member states that deviated from the EU’s core values’ (Dinan 2014: 298). They also appeared in the preamble of the 2000 Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (Schrag-Sternberg 2013: 149), which would later be incorporated into the Treaty of Lisbon in 2007. In the European convention that led to the constitutional treaty (which was eventually rejected by voters) values were also included. In those debates in 2003 ‘reaching agreement on the values and objectives of the EU was relatively easy, apart from an impassioned discussion about whether and how to recognize the EU’s religious heritage (…). [I]n the end, the preamble merely included a reference to Europe’s religious “inheritance”’ (Dinan 2014: 273). Although the constitutional treaty was rejected in 2005, it lived on in a less ambitious version in the Treaty of Lisbon of 2007, which also incorporated the Charter of Fundamental Rights. In that treaty, which preserved the discarded constitutional treaty, excluding the references to European symbols, European values were finally enshrined in the famous Article 2 that starts as follows: ‘The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights. (...)’. Unlike the post-war years, when European values were still closely linked with Christianity, ‘Christianity’ in the Lisbon Treaty is not named and is ‘thereby neutralised to become a religious tradition and permitted to serve purely as a source of inspiration for democratic political values’ (van Middelaar 2013: 249).

To be effective, European values indeed had to be secularised and stripped of their conservative and religious connotations, which they still had in the Cold War years.Footnote 5 After all, in an increasingly secularised Europe, ‘a self-definition of Europe as actively embodying the values of western Christendom is (...) now untenable’ (Garton Ash 2009: 76). When conservative Christians invoked European values in the post-war years, Western Europe was still a Christian region. But as Garton Ash points out, although it may be true that:

From the 1460s to the 1960s, this notion of western Christendom – Catholic or Protestant, but not Orthodox – was at the centre of a certain narrative and self-definition of the European project (...) it clearly will not do today. There is a serious question in what sense Europe is still a Christian continent (…) Europe is now probably the most secular continent on earth. (Garton Ash 2009: 75)

Stronger still, one could even say that we currently witness a ‘shocking secularization of the European continent a quarter century after the transwar era’ (Moyn 2015: 173; Moyn 2011: 105–106), when Christianity was still very influential in European society and politics. Of course, some nuance is in order. For even when ‘North-Western Europe is believed to be almost completely secularized, and many central European countries follow this example’, and ‘church-going has declined, particularly in Western Europe where many churches now stay empty’, it is also true that ‘most people find a religious service at special occasions important’. Nor does this mean ‘that people do not feel religious anymore or no longer believe in God’ (Halman, Sieben, & van Zundert 2012: 71–72). Still, it is fair to say that compared to the post-war years, in the last decades the societal influence of Christianity has diminished dramatically in Europe.

It was this potentially minimalistic and abstract feature of European values and human rights – what remained once one stripped them of their conservative ideological civilisational legacy – that made these values so appealing. Europeans cannot agree on a substantive European identity (let alone a common history or a common social model), but at the very least they can all try to share an allegiance to some minimal secular abstract principles. Or, as Ian Kershaw puts it, ‘perhaps the illusive search for a European identity is in any case unnecessary as long as citizens of Europe’s nation states are committed to upholding in individual countries the common key European principles of peace, freedom, pluralist democracy and the rule of law’ (Kershaw 2018: 546). The abstract language of values was not just a minimalist alternative for more demanding programmes, but it also connected well with the aforementioned traditional attachment in European institutions to ideas and actions that helped in abstracting from particular nation states and identities. Yet, as we shall see, erasing the religious conservative roots of these values may be easier said than done.

Since the end of the 1990s, values have thus been increasingly used in the public debate about Europe. When the European Union was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012, it described itself as ‘a community of values’ (Barroso 2012). In his project for a European renaissance, Macron emphasised that ‘a market is useful, but it should not detract from the need for borders that protect and values that unite’. He also referred to ‘the European civilisation that unites, frees and protects us’, which is why Europe is not just ‘a soulless market’ but ‘a project’ (Macron 2019). Values in a minimal and secular sense now appear to have become the leading legitimation of the European project and of initiatives to further that project. If Europe now talks about, for example, programmes to promote remembrance of its past, then it is with the aim of – in the words of the European Commission – ‘bringing Europe closer to its citizens by promoting Europe’s values and achievements, while preserving the memory of its past’ (Littoz-Monnet 2012: 1191). Also, any residual reference to the ‘European Model of Society’, for example by Barroso, then European Commission president, were framed in terms of values, as for him the financial crisis of 2008 was also first and foremost ‘a crisis of values’ (Barroso 2009: 4).

In short, the idea of a substantial common history, civilisation, culture, or identity has been replaced by rather vague common democratic ‘values’ (which proved hard to enforce). The European club is now ‘not a Catholic, not a Christian, not even a post-Christian club, but a club of European parliamentary democracies’ (van Middelaar 2013: 249). Although the ideal of a common cultural identity or of a social Europe was replaced by that of shared abstract values, the aim still remained to create some commonality of sorts, which is why ‘the official declaration and codification of rights and of common “European” values underlying the EU’s political life and system’ can still be seen as an instrument to create a sense of a shared European community (‘a deliberate demos-building tool’) (Schrag-Sternberg 2013: 149). Once one looks at ‘European values’ mainly as a more suitable minimalist substitute for a ‘European identity’ or ‘a social Europe’ as tools to create common ground, they then appear in a different light: less as a timeless bedrock of European civilisation and more as a ‘second best option’, a ‘consolation prize’ after the prior failure of the more ambitious idea of a substantive European identity or of a social Europe.

It is ironic that countries from Central and Eastern Europe finally joined the European Union precisely at a time when that union had already minimised or ditched the language of identity, civilisation, and culture to which many in these countries had been so attached as a way to define their identity and to differentiate themselves from Russian occupation. Already in 1984 Kundera lamented that ‘Europe itself is in the process of losing its own cultural identity’ (Kundera 1984: 37) and that ‘Europe no longer perceives its unity as a cultural unity’ (Kundera 1984: 36). Kundera instead yearned for an ‘era in which culture still represented the realization of supreme values’ (Kundera 1984: 37) and observed that ‘culture no longer existed as a realm in which supreme values were enacted’ (Kundera 1984: 36). While a few decades later Europe did start invoking values as part of its identity, these were probably not the cultural or civilisational values that Kundera had longed for, but their more abstract substitute.

As the discourse of values became more universal and inclusive – and the left now also started adopting it – it also became more abstract and less associated with a conservative Christian ideology. And while Europe still has a long way to go in terms of dealing with its colonial past (Müller 2013: 238; Pasture 2015: 197–198; Pasture 2018a), that colonial past finally started to haunt Europe’s present, which means it has now become harder to unapologetically praise European values, and the imperialism and colonisation they once legitimised, unless those using these values first distance themselves from their conservative colonial past and are shown to have a more universal self-critical future. So, like their conservative predecessors, values are still meant to be promoted around the world, but this time without the concrete civilisational or cultural content associated with their post-war colonial predecessors. In that sense, values are not just a tool to speak to European citizens, or to new member states (in the context of the enlargement), but to the entire world. Barroso, for example, declared that the Europe he believes in is ‘a Europe that puts its values at the heart of the relations with the rest of the world’ (Barroso 2009: 5). Yet, as this increasing abstractness and universality of values solved many of the problems of the past, it also created new ones, as the past haunts the present.

5 The Return of the Past: A Clash Between European Values and Their Origins

In more recent years, we can witness tensions between the new, more abstract version of European values and their conservative origins. A first tension has to do with borders. Although the new abstract definition of European values in terms of human rights and the rule of law was supposed to be more inclusive and universal than its more substantive conservative predecessor, in both cases values served the same goal, namely to define, limit, and exclude. This was clear in the Copenhagen criteria of 1993 and reiterated in the Laeken Declaration of 2001, where European leaders stated that ‘the European Union’s one boundary is democracy and human rights. The Union is open to countries which uphold basic values such as free elections, respect for minorities and respect for the rule of law’ (European Council 2001: 20).

As Duranti explains:

The European unity movements envisioned the creation of the European human rights system as a means of facilitating the inclusion of certain states into European organizations and the exclusion of others. (...) The language of human rights and democracy served the same function with regard to the southward enlargement of the European Communities, the admission of former communist states into the European Union, and opposition to Turkish accession. (Duranti 2017: 359)

Indeed, once the EU started talking about values it became clear that values could also become conservative ammunition, for example against the accession of Turkey to the EU. During the campaign in France against the failed constitution in 2005, ‘Chirac (...) distanced himself from Turkish accession’ and ‘stated that Turkish traditions were “incompatible with Europe’s values”’ (Schrag-Sternberg 2013: 165). All this highlights that values, just as Christian human rights, ‘have been not so much about the inclusion of the other as about policing the borders and boundaries on which threatening enemies loom’ (Moyn 2015: 24).

The migration crisis that has haunted Europe since 2015 showed that European values often did not apply to the treatment of refugees who appeared at Europe’s increasingly fortified external borders. Although Macron declared in 2019 that he believes in ‘a Europe that protects both its values and its borders’ (Macron 2019), in reality borders often trump liberal values. The debate in 2019 surrounding the new von der Leyen Commission about the protection or promotion of the European way of life showed that values can easily be interpreted in a more substantial sense that is partly akin to its original conservative meaning in the post-war years.

A second tension is even more fundamental. As European values became more abstract and more universal and were also embraced by the left, they were now opposed by conservative forces inside Europe, and by governments in Central and Eastern Europe in particular. This rift between the West and the ‘new member states’ in Central and Eastern Europe is very complex, and one needs to be careful not to essentialise ‘the West’ or ‘Central and Eastern Europe’ (as if ‘Western Europe’ didn’t have any issues with populists) (Charlemagne 2019; Garton Ash 2019: 171). But at the same time, it is hard to deny that ‘these countries had some specific features common to post-communist societies’ (Garton Ash 2019: 172) and that some populist politicians in those countries invoke European values in a specific way that is reminiscent of their ‘original’ conservative meaning.

Over the past years, Polish and Hungarian leaders especially have increasingly portrayed themselves as the true defenders of European values and European civilisation – in a conservative Christian sense – arguing that ‘Brussels’ had forgotten and betrayed these values by diluting them when it embraced liberal values instead. As the rule of law or the rights of women or sexual minorities (for example) came under pressure in countries such as Hungary or Poland (Rupnik 2018), many in the West saw this as a decline of the East that had become increasingly illiberal. In the East, conservative politicians retorted that they were just defending European values in their original and true conservative and Christian sense. In Poland, for example, ‘there are nationalists and conservatives, mainly of Catholic denomination, for whom Europe only makes sense when it is Catholic, or at least Christian, and for whom liberal values and the legacy of the Enlightenment mean danger and destruction for Europe and for Poland’ (Góra & Mach 2010: 240). And in Hungary Viktor Orbán states that a (Christian) ‘national-cultural identity’ and its values come first. For him, European values are to be derived from this national identity or values. As he explains: ‘We are not Europeans because we have “common European values”[;] this is a misunderstanding. We are Europeans because we have [a] national, cultural heritage and values and we can harmonise those values in a common alliance’ (Orbán 2016). And later he declared that ‘we believe Poles and Hungarians have a common path, common fight and common goal: to build and defend our homeland in the form that we want… Christian and with national values’ (Foster 2018). Elsewhere, ‘Orbán defends his hardline positions as not merely consistent with the EU’s fundamental values, but as their true embodiment’ (Mos 2020: 10). One could even say that ‘Orbán (...) styles himself as a pro-European statesman who is ready to steer the Union back to its moral roots’ (Mos 2020: 14). However it is important to add that ‘populist movements and the conservative right (...) champion Europe’s “Christian identity” in order to counter Islam. Such groups view this identity as a matter of culture rather than faith; few populists attend mass, and (...) the large majority of today’s right are religiously indifferent’ (Roy 2019: 4). For them, ‘Christianity is bound up with Europe’s identity, just as long as it does not interfere with their daily life, lecture them on loving their neighbour or preach to them about ethics and values.’ (Roy 2019: 125).

The refugee crisis in particular ‘has made it clear that eastern Europe views the very cosmopolitan values on which the European Union is based as a threat, while for many in the West it is precisely those cosmopolitan values that are the core of the new European identity’ (Krastev 2017: 47). In particular, the actions by Angela Merkel, who was accused of ‘the admission of migrants without limit in the name of “European values”’ (Rupnik 2018: 33), were perceived by some Eastern European leaders as a betrayal of what they see as Europe’s Christian values and roots. Ever since, leaders such as Orbán have been ‘attacking Brussels for enabling what he called an “invasion” of refugees that threatened to “cast aside” the bloc’s Christian culture’ (Foster 2018). Yet it is worth underlining that the Catholic Church itself ‘does not, at least in principle, reject immigration; on the contrary, we know how much Pope Francis insists on welcoming immigrants’ (Roy 2019: 105–106).

Through their recent defence of ‘European values’, populist Eastern European leaders in Hungary and Poland appear to remind their Western European counterparts of the original meaning of European values as a Christian conservative language. The original conservative roots of European values, which were forgotten when these values were recycled by the European Union in a secular, more inclusive sense after the end of the Cold War, have now returned with a vengeance – a kind of ‘return of the repressed’.

This proves a particular challenge for the Christian democratic family, and especially its European People’s Party, which has recently been divided over the issue of European values, when it was asked, both internally and externally, to take a stance against Orbán’s illiberal policies. While this quarrel (which eventually led to Orbán resigning from the party in March 2021) is often explained in strategic terms (focusing on the workings behind how the European People’s Party dealt with Orbán), it also lays bare a fundamental conflict between the two meanings of European values: the original conservative Christian version (which the European People’s Party in the past defended and which Orbán now invokes) and its post-Cold War secularised version that Western European countries in particular now use to condemn Orbán. Of course, many actions by Orbán – e.g. actively undermining the rule of law – were never part of the original conservative definition of European values and can indeed be said to breach and undermine those values. Moreover, Christian democrats had historically defended the very rights and the rule of law that Orbán violates, just as they saw Europe as a way to limit the popular will (unlike Orbán’s populism, which instead attacks Europe by invoking an unbridled popular national will). And yet, despite these fundamental differences, Orbán’s appeal to Christianity and European civilisation does in part still appear to have resonated with the original (particular) meaning of European values that some parts of the European People’s Party – essentially a conservative party – still adhere to, and not just in the East. After all, conservative groups lobby in Brussels on behalf of the religious right in general, and not just from Eastern Europe, by arguing ‘that contemporary policymaking ought to reflect the fact that European values have historically been Christian values’ (Mos 2018: 331). The case of Orbán and the European People’s Party thus highlights in part the tension between two definitions of European values: their original conservative, Cold War sense and their secular, ‘liberal’, post-Cold War successors, a tension that may be linked to the identity crisis surrounding Christian Democracy. All this probably also reveals how ‘Christian Democracy, though institutionally going strong, has been shaken everywhere (...) and its ideology is no longer the same—for some observers, no longer identifiably Christian—in our day’ (Moyn 2015: 172).

The specific anti-communist context – so important for understanding the origins of European values in the Cold War years – also explains why these values are used in their original sense in countries that had actually suffered from communist rule and Soviet imperialism. For Rupnik, ‘we can observe in these countries the return in a new (or wayward) form of a discourse about defending national culture and European civilization – today against Islamism coming from the South, as yesterday it has been against Sovietism coming from the East’ (Rupnik 2018: 33). The fact that, as we have seen, many in Central and Eastern Europe during the Soviet occupation (think of Kundera) owed a sense of identity to ‘thick’, substantial concepts such as ‘European civilisation’, ‘European culture’, ‘European identity’, or ‘European values’ (in the initial conservative meaning of the word), meant that they were attached to these Cold War concepts, unlike the European Union, which in its post-Cold War years replaced such substantive (or ‘thick’) concepts by more abstract legal (or ‘thin’) concepts such as ‘European values’ (as detached from any substantive ideas of civilisation, identity, culture, or religion).

European values are often seen as ‘liberal’ values, in both meanings of the word ‘liberal’: not just its political definition – as furthering values such as freedom and democracy – but also ‘liberal’ in the economic sense, as defending ‘neoliberal’ policies and interests, a defence that ironically often arises in the name of noble liberal (political) values such as freedom. On the left, thinkers such as Bourdieu remarked that in the end Europe essentially prioritises economic values such as liberty and ‘a whole set of unquestioned ends – maximum growth, competitiveness, productivity’ (Bourdieu 2010: 125). For him, this is a betrayal of the true (political) value of liberty because, by ‘drawing shamelessly on the lexicon of liberty, liberalism and deregulation’, neoliberal policies ‘obtain the submission of citizens and governments to the economic and social forces thus “liberated”’ (Bourdieu 2010: 200).

In this context, Eastern Europeans invoke a critique of colonialism to remind Western Europeans of the ‘sins’ they committed in colonising not just the developing world but Eastern Europe as well. To take the case of East Germany, Garton Ash notes that ‘accompanying the economic largesse from west to east in Germany had been elements of what might be called colonialism in one country, with second-rate West Germans lording it over Easterners’ (Garton Ash 2019: 178). And just as European colonisation explains resentment in former colonies, likewise new member states in Central and Eastern Europe resent having to comply with the demands of the ‘old’ member states during the asymmetrical process of accession (which was also legitimised in the name of values). As Krastev explains, ‘the new generation of leaders experiences the constant pressure to adopt European norms and institutions as a humiliation and build their legitimacy around the idea of a national identity in opposition to Brussels’ (Krastev 2017: 58). Müller adds that ‘critics of developments in Hungary and Poland (...) should face up to the fact that “liberalism” has often been experienced not just as cutthroat market competition but as powerful (Western European) interests getting their way’ (Müller 2017: 59). In Garton Ash’s diagnosis:

All current European populisms feed off an anger at the way in which liberalism was reduced after 1989 to one rather extreme version of a purely economic liberalism (...) [,] but the impact of this one-dimensional liberalism was particularly acute in post-communist Europe, with its raw advent of capitalism, sense of historic injustice and societies unused to high levels of visible inequality. (Garton Ash 2019: 175)

Seen from a global perspective, this clash between abstract liberal values and their conservative critics resembles a wider conflict between a liberal belief in progress and a populist backlash fuelled by resentment and anger (Mishra 2017).

Unlike their Western counterparts, Central and Eastern European countries – which were part of an empire but never had an empire of their own and thus lacked postcolonial guilt – could see themselves as victims of imperialism or colonisation, first by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and now by Western Europe, legitimised in the name of noble values. Interestingly, anti-communists in Central and Eastern Europe now unwittingly use Marx’s critique of values against Western liberals. They denounce Western liberals who use seemingly universal and abstract values to legitimise and conceal that they in fact further their own particularly ‘liberal’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ way of life (or even worse, their own Western economic interests). As Kopeček explains: ‘in a manner that is ironically similar to earlier Marxist criticisms, many populists (...) oppose a mystified neutrality that supposedly masks the will and interests of a domestic liberal minority elite or the Brussels diktat’ (Kopeček 2019: 75).

The traditional Marxist accusation of hypocrisy – whereby seemingly universal values are said to mask and (thus) further particular interests – did not just come from certain populists in Central and Eastern Europe. Using moral language in politics has always been tricky. At least the post-war conservative Christians who used values were more or less clear about the particular agenda they served. But once terms such as values or rights are used in a properly universalist or moral sense, with the pretence that they are detached from particular interests, those who use them become vulnerable to accusations of ‘hypocrisy’ or ‘ideology’. One could indeed argue that abstract values are meant to distract from the de facto predominance of a neoliberal agenda that fails to distribute wealth or protect the less well off. Was it a coincidence that ‘solidarity’ and ‘social justice’ were not listed as official values in Article 2 of the Treaty of Lisbon? Perhaps European values, despite their ‘secularisation’, in fact still served conservative interests similar to those present during the Cold War. True, many on the left now also defended liberal European values against conservative illiberal populists, but they could at the same time be accused of hypocrisy by defending European neoliberal policies that protect markets rather than people (e.g. during the Eurozone crisis). Not for the first time, Europe divides political families, on the left as on the right.

In that context it is interesting to look at which policies and values are really enforced, as one could argue that it is these values that in the end matter most. It is striking that ‘the well-developed system of enforcement, which conventionally undergirds policymaking in the EU, does not extend to the fundamental values’ (Mos 2020: 7). Critics who see values as a mere ideological embellishment (or concealment) of neoliberal policies could argue that this is perhaps no coincidence. Indeed, if governments in Poland or Hungary violate the rule of law, hardly any effective sanctions are taken, yet if the Greek government dared to challenge austerity policies in 2015, Europe did have both the means and the resolve to act decisively and punish those who dared to step out of line (van Middelaar 2019: 233–234).

Moreover, in the case of the use of values in politics, the European Union is accused of ‘double standards’: preaching in the name of values (typically abroad) while violating these same values (typically at home). One example is ‘the EU’s defense of human dignity worldwide, and the criticisms of its neoliberal and austerity policies that violate the human dignity of low-income workers or the unemployed’ (Foret 2020: 29). And obviously the way Europe chooses to deal with the migration crisis (e.g. through its coastguard agency Frontex that is accused of illegal pushbacks that violate human rights) presents a huge challenge for an institution that claims to defend human dignity. The more institutions identify themselves with moral values, the easier it becomes to accuse these institutions of hypocrisy. These critical observations about ideology, hypocrisy, or double standards could be further complemented by a sociological or anthropological investigation into the values that policymakers in these institutions hold and the extent to which this influences their decisions (Foret 2014).Footnote 6

The original conservative definition of values that was used to defend European ideals in the post-war years has now arguably come back to haunt those in Europe who believed that they could simply forget these origins. These origins also returned home in yet another sense. Initially, European values were seen as European mainly because they had originated in Europe rather than that they were applicable only to Europe. In today’s increasingly illiberal world, the self-confident, outward-looking perspective that had characterised both the conservative Cold War language of European values and its optimistic liberal successor at the end of the Cold War (think of Fukuyama) has changed. Officially, Brussels still promotes values worldwide, but it does so with less self-confidence than in the aftermath of 1989 when, for a brief time, many in the West truly believed that the entire world would subscribe to its values.

If European values are now seen as European values, it is not so much in reference to their past (their origins) as to their present (regarding their preservation and future). As ‘liberal’ enlightenment values that were once seen as conquering the world are now in retreat around the globe, in an era of authoritarian leaders such as Xi, Putin, Trump, Bolsonaro or Erdoğan, these values at times appear to find a safe harbour only in the Europe from which they came. European values that used to be seen by many as values that originated in Europe and would go on to conquer the world are now seen as European values, not because of the Europe from which they came but because of the Europe in which they still have a future. In other words, ‘where European leaders once spoke of “Western” values, increasingly they speak of European ones. (...) Limiting “universal” values to the European sphere shows a dearth of ambition but a practical admission of the EU’s place in an increasingly illiberal world order dominated by America and China’ (Charlemagne 2020: 24). Since the increased use of European values may thus correspond to a diminished importance for Western or transatlantic values, it may signal an overall decline of liberal values. Just as illiberal forces are governed by the fear of losing their traditional way of life (associated by some with conservative Christian values), European liberal elites are likewise fearful of losing their values in an increasingly illiberal world (especially since the Trump election). Conversely, populists who now claim to be the true defenders of European values in their conservative illiberal sense no longer want to conquer the world, but rather to just preserve what is left (Krastev 2017: 27, 33–39).

6 Contesting Values

The critical historical approach that was adopted in this chapter has revealed that the use of European values originated in conservative Cold War Christian circles. By secularising these values after the end of the Cold War, European policymakers tried to transcend and forget these particular origins. The fact that populist forces invoke values that come close to their original sense (albeit this time to attack rather than to unify Europe) shows that it may perhaps be wise to acknowledge the conservative origins of these values and the many political meanings that such a contested term can have.

Given this tension between European liberal secular values and their more substantial conservative origins, what, then, would be an appropriate way to talk about ‘European values’ today? To many, the abstractness of those values implies an increased risk of confusion, as these values could now mean different things to different actors. As Duranti puts it: ‘EU officials (...) increasingly resort to describing Europe as a “community of values,” but they seldom provide a vivid portrait’ (Duranti 2017: 409). Also, Mos suggests that the fact that ‘the EU does not offer any definitions of its core principles’ (Mos 2018: 326) is a problem that is cunningly exploited by the religious conservative right. In short, for many, European values are problematic because they are too vague and lack a clear definition (even though it is arguably this vagueness that explains their popularity).

Yet I believe that this vagueness need not in itself be a problem. After all, in nation states too, principles, norms and values are subject to debate and open to contestation. In democracies all politicians invoke the ‘common good’, ‘the nation’, or values such as liberty, equality, solidarity, and security, yet the majority and opposition each define them very differently. Indeed, when used in the domain of politics, perhaps values need to be considered not as objects that can be measured and defined, but instead as abstract formal principles that we can all invoke precisely because no one can ever fully grasp and define them (just as in democracies no one can ever pretend to know what ‘the people’ truly want). About political values, ideals, principles, and goals, one can say that ‘by their nature, these goals cannot fully be attained (there is no perfect peace or freedom, on earth at least), but a shared striving towards them can itself bind together a political community’ (Garton Ash 2009: 127). Following a thinker such as Claude Lefort, one could say that it is precisely this indeterminacy that enables democracies to be ‘united in diversity’ and that allows them to criticise dangerous attempts to appropriate values and endanger the rule of law (Weymans 2012).

The problem in today’s Europe may not be that values are too vague and too much subject to debate but rather that they are still too much shielded from a proper political debate at a European level. If one sees values as principles that resist any final determination, it becomes easy to see why both European technocrats and their populist opponents misinterpret them, as both limit the options for debate by appropriating values that ultimately resist such appropriation. For Müller, ‘for neither technocrats nor populists is there any need for democratic debate. In a sense, both are curiously apolitical. (...) [E]ach holds that there is only one correct policy solution and only one authentic popular will respectively’ (Müller 2017: 97). Too often, both European institutions and their populist detractors claim to be the only true defenders of these values, making a democratic political debate even harder. If one instead sees values as indeterminate and thus subject to lively political debate, one can criticise both groups. Self-righteous and at times moralising liberals or eurofederalists can be criticised when they are limiting debate, pretending to be the only ones who know what these values stand for. Populists (from Orbán to Wilders) can likewise be criticised when they, in turn, claim to be the only true embodiment of these values, thus depriving others of the right to invoke them, and thereby betraying them by making an independent judiciary, press, civil society, and free debate impossible.

All this presupposes that at a European level a proper stage and culture for political debate be created (van Middelaar 2019: 266–267), and this is currently lacking. When it comes to democratic values, Europe in many respects still has a long way to go in order to start practising what it preaches (a fact that Brexiteers handily exploited). One can debate what the most suitable forum could be – the European Parliament or the European Council (van Middelaar 2019: 250–254) – but in order to function properly, a democracy arguably does need a stage where the peoples of Europe can represent and debate their values, norms, and principles (Mak 2008: 829, 834; Weymans 2020). Initiatives to stimulate political debate at a European level may also be an antidote to a moralising use of these values whereby believers of the European project in particular tend to cast aside opponents as not respecting European values (van Middelaar 2019). A political use of these values may instead see these values as ideals that one invokes and strives for, but which no one can ever hope to fully grasp, which thus guarantees a healthy political debate.