The European Council on Foreign Relations

Reinventing Europe: Dimitri A. Sotiropoulos

Date: 13th February 2012  |  Author: Dimitri A. Sotiropoulos,

Categories: Reinventing Europe,
Tags: , euroscepticism, greece, greece , identity, populism, eurocrisis

As part of ECFR's 'Reinvention of Europe' project, we are running a series of responses from leading thinkers and academics to Mark Leonard's recent paper, 'Four scenarios for the reinvention of Europe'. The paper outlined four possible routes towards solving Europe's current crisis, and argued that Europe's main challenge was to solve the acute euro crisis without exacerbating the chronic crisis of declining European power. In the eighth in this series of responses, we hear from Dimitri A. Sotiropoulos, an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration of the University of Athens.

Mark Leonard’s incisive article discusses critically the long-term tension between a technocratic vision of Europe and a lingering populist perception of it. This tension, however, should be put in the context of past inadequacies and temporal constraints of European integration.

In the past most of the steps to create the EU were taken by elites of politicians and administrators against a backdrop either of indifference or thinly veiled hostility on the part of citizens of EU Member States. Euroscepticism had subsided only temporarily after a few glorious moments of the process of European integration, and in fact was on the rise long before the current crisis. The process of European integration has taken place over the timescale of decades, while the current crisis obliges us to think about Europe in terms of months, if not weeks. 

There are two aspects hiding behind the technocracy versus populism contrast posed by Mark Leonard: first, the inadequate socialisation of European publics in the values, norms, requirements and obstacles related to European integration; and, second, differences between the timescale required to ‘build Europe’ and the timescale at which economic crises evolve in our times.

In order to shed light to the first aspect, take for instance the Lisbon Treaty. This treaty has not caught the attention of European publics, even though it has made some steps towards closing the gap separating European technocrats from national electorates, through instituting civic initiatives and enhancing the role of national parliaments. Mark Leonard would probably argue that the Treaty only provides loopholes for the solution of the on-going crisis and that the Treaty will remain irrelevant as long as European technocrats do not pose the right political questions for citizens to ponder. However, if our topic is how to reinvent Europe, is there a better start than inventing an imagined community of Europeans? This is a task which European technocrats and national elites have left unattended, as the distrust and tensions in the relations between the European core and the European periphery have amply shown since the onset of the crisis.

Research shows that although citizens of EU Member States may have multiple identities – for instance local (or regional), national and European – the latter is rarely upheld as the most significant of the three. If the quarter of the century that has passed since the Single European Act was not enough to foster a stronger sense of community among the citizens of EU Member States, no wonder that – at a time of crisis – populist anti-European discourse tends to become hegemonic within national political systems.

The second aspect, which is the time dimension of constructing and ‘deconstructing’ Europe, should be taken into account. The main point here is that all four scenarios for reinventing Europe, aptly put forward by Mark Leonard, need a long time to materialise. By contrast, the negative dynamics of EU’s economic crisis and the non-synchronised political electoral cycles of individual European democracies work on shorter time intervals.  Unavoidably, construction is a slow and uphill process, particularly if the architects cannot agree on a single plan, while deconstruction may take less time than one imagines.

The time dimension is also crucial to understand the crisis in Greece. What is distinct in the case of Greece is the overextension of public spending between 1981 and 2009, coupled with administrative incapacity to raise government revenue. Public spending was not channelled so much to welfare benefits as to defence expenditure (thanks to continued tensions with Turkey) and the wages and salaries of public sector workers as well as pensions. Successive governments recruited large numbers of employees to the public sector, while at the same time refraining from reforming an expensive and unfair pension system that favoured public sector pensioners and the retirees of liberal professions.

Greece borrowed money from abroad in order to finance the public sector and state-dependent business activity far beyond its means and for too long. The size of the public debt grew dramatically in 1981-1994, stabilised in the second half of the 1990s, but rose again after the early 2000s.Moreover, Greece has a negative balance of payments, as the value of its exports is small compared to its imports. This imbalance deteriorated tremendously in 2004-2009.

 All this would not have led to the current dramatic economic crisis in Greece, save that it coincided with the worldwide crisis that erupted in late 2008. In other words, the culmination of Greek economic problems in the late 2000s coincided with a very adverse global economic environment. In other words, the time factor is important for understanding the acuteness of the crisis in Greece.

To sum up, hopefully, today’s populists do not possess the corresponding skills to help demolish the EU. Still, the “marching towards disintegration” (as Jan Zielonka has put it) is a fifth scenario, which naturally the author of “Four Scenarios” does not consider an option, even though disintegration happens around us.  As the continuing emergence of new nation states across the globe (East Timor, Kosovo, South Sudan) and a multitude of secessionist movements indicate, we still live in an era in which the nationalist project is more seductive than any project of integration among nations. Moreover, around the world other projects of regional integration are still far behind the EU project.  In that respect, the experiment of European integration continues to go against the current and is worth cherishing by all those concerned, including technocrats oblivious to the need to mobilise publics around the cause of Europe and also publics periodically seduced by the sirens of populism.

Also in this series:

Harold James - 'The more Europe suffers, the more its people will see that a reform agenda that is just an exercise in incrementalism is also nothing more than an exercise in futility'.

Richard Rosecrance - 'if Greece or Spain did not exist, they would have to be invented. Their participation in the euro keeps the value of the currency down from $1.80 to $1.20 or $1.30 or so, thereby ensuring the success of German exports to the rest of the world.'

Brigid Laffan - 'as the Union intrudes more and more into domestic budgetary and public finance choices, can party politics in Europe adapt to a very different governance regime?'

Charles S. Maier - 'The British can imagine that their banks will suffice, the Germans their autos, but such comparative advantage can dissipate quickly. I’d as soon wager on Greek beaches.'

Georg Sørensen - 'a substantial part of the present euro crisis has less to do with European cooperation and more to do with member states that are fragile, ineffective, have serious corruption problems...'

Chris J. Bickerton - 'Populism, after all, is politics without policies; technocracy is policy without politics.'

Carlos Gaspar - 'In an enlarged “Euroland”, Germany’s pre-eminence could be balanced by a Catholic coalition led by France, Italy and Poland.'

Pawel Swieboda - 'no-one dares to ask the question if the euro is still a political project, as its founders tended to believe, or if it is today about nothing else than damage control'.

Claus Offe - 'Europe is not just needed as a defensive mechanism to prevent the weak being overpowered by the strong, who first administer an austerity cure without then providing the requisite support for recovery.'

Mario Teló - 'what is abusively decried by populist voices as a “German Europe” might in fact look a lot like the broadly endorsed “EU2020 strategy”. Input legitimacy may complement output legitimacy.'

Josep M. Colomer - 'For democracy to survive and retrieve in Europe, responsiveness and accountability of rulers should be moving from the state level to the EU level, where so many crucial decisions are already being made'

Marco de Andreis - 'a critical mass has been already assembled to make of Europe’s integration a possibility rather than an impossibility. And to at least consider the United States of Europe a fifth scenario for the reinvention of Europe.'

Miguel Maduro - 'the creation of European politics must go hand in hand with a change in the character of politics. For that, changes in policies may be even more important than changes in institutions.'

Narcís Serra - “If we wish to favour economic growth in European countries we must address income redistribution. This must not be done through fiscal measures alone but also by dealing with the heart of the productive structure itself.”

Brendan Simms: 'In 2020, President Radek Sikorski of the Democratic Union could long back at a turbulent, but successful first term in office...'

Christine Ockrent: 'In all the countries where people struggle with the economic crisis and fear for their children’s future, Europe has more than ever become the scapegoat'

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