Abstract
Denouncing the persistence of nationalist reflexes in order to explain the crisis of European integration is much too simple, as is the critique of a mercantile Europe deprived of solid social and moral foundations. Yet, these interpretations, oversimplified as they are, do point to some aspects of our liberal civilisation, which are under pressure in the current trajectory of developments shaping Europe. Seen as symptoms of a widespread malaise, these perspectives should be taken seriously.
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Notes
To use the expression of Gauchet (2005: 501).
Cf. the still very stimulating historiographic work of Milward (1992).
Fernand Braudel only devoted a few pages of his Grammaire des civilisations to the construction of Europe. In it he said he was ‘fascinated by the continuity of the problems with which we are confronted. As if there was a race being run between the economy and the State, in which the former, threatened with being caught up at any moment, has to date always managed – and no doubt, as far as we can see, more than ever – to win back the advantage’ (Braudel, 1963: 463).
For an updated version of this socio-historical reading of European integration, see Stefano Bartolini (2005).
Norbert Elias saw in this a sign of a transition: ‘The central problem lies, as can be seen, in the specific nature of the passage from one level of integration to another. In the transition period, an often quite prolonged development phase is gone through, during which the lower-ranking group loses in the eyes of its members a large part of its value as an “us unit”, without the higher-ranking group yet being able to take over the function of us unit or carrying with it an equivalent justification on an emotional level’ (Elias, 1991: 292).
Raymond Aron, ‘L'Europe face à la crise des sociétés industrielles’, Lecture to the Institut d'études européennes of the l'Université libre de Bruxelles, 28–30 April 1975, quoted in Ory (1998: 896).
To use the expression of Andrew Moravcsik, ‘The Quiet Superpower’, Newsweek, 17 June 2002.
This is, as we know, the famous thesis of Robert Kagan (Kagan, 2003).
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Magnette, P. The Fragility of Liberal Europe. Eur Polit Sci 8, 190–200 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2008.29
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2008.29