by PERRY ANDERSON
Criticism is the oxygen of self-reflection for any writer, as time is a test of intellectual or political judgement. I will try to say something about each, in responding to this trio of assessments, all acute, of The New Old World. First, as to its form, about which Philippe Schmitter expresses a courteous puzzlement. How should the book be classified? Is it sufficiently coherent to admit of any proper classification? Concluding that it would perhaps be best to assign it to the category of theoretical works on European integration, he confesses incomprehension as to why, in that case, so much of the book should be taken up with studies of the recent histories of France, Germany, Italy, Cyprus and Turkey. [1] He is certainly right that the movement of analysis in The New Old World, which runs from the supranational to the national and back to the supranational, is staccato rather than legato. The different levels of enquiry are juxtaposed, not integrated. In that, however, they could be said to reflect the disjuncture between the two arenas of European politics in the period under consideration, between which there was little lived connexion, a gap now closing. But Schmitter’s question can still be asked: why, in a work on the history of the eu, descend from the all-Union level to deal with developments within particular countries at all?
The answer lies in the political purposes of the book. Most of the literature on the eu, as noted in its foreword, is highly technical, enjoying little currency among non-specialists; in addition much of it is so ideologically uniform as to stifle, rather than arouse, any interest in the variety of political conflicts and cultures across Europe. The result, reinforced by a widespread conformism of media opinion, remains a surprising intellectual parochialism—a lack of any genuinely European public sphere. This will only be remedied when political curiosity can cross national borders in a natural to-and-fro of the kind that marked the continent’s republic of letters in the time of Montesquieu or Hume, even that of Curtius or Benda, not to speak of its revolutionary versions in Trotsky or Gramsci. The aim of writing about the core countries of the Union, and its Eastern Question, on the plane where politics retains vastly greater popular meaning than in the rarefied machinery of Brussels, was to offer some reminder, however diminished, of this tradition.
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More arresting still is the theme of the essay. In 2008 Habermas had attacked the Lisbon Treaty for failing to make good the democratic deficit of the eu, or offer any moral-political horizon for it. The Treaty’s passage, he wrote, could only ‘cement the existing chasm between political elites and citizens’, without supplying any positive direction to Europe. Needed instead was a Europe-wide referendum to endow the Union with the social and fiscal harmonization, military capacity and—above all—directly elected Presidency that alone could save the continent from a future ‘settled along orthodox neo-liberal lines’. Noting how far from his traditional outlook was this enthusiasm for a democratic expression of popular will that he had never shown any sign of countenancing in his own country, [3] I commented that, once the Treaty was pushed through, Habermas would no doubt quietly pocket it after all.
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