THE EU: THE COMMUNITARIAN DEFICIT

ABSTRACT

The integration and centralization of the European Union (EU) has thus far proceeded without the level of community building necessary to sustain a full-fledged fiscal union. At issue is not the absence of a political union or a ‘democratic deficit’ but the very limited post-national community building, a communitarian deficit. The insufficient sharing of values and bonds – not the poor representative mechanisms – is a major cause of alienation from ‘Brussels’ and limits the normative commitment to make sacrifices for the common good. Major community building measures, in normative intensive areas, such as education and language must take place if the proposed steps towards significantly greater economic unity are to succeed. But, it is precisely these areas where community building is most absent. Hence it is likely that the current crisis will lead to a scaling back of the EU as administrative state rather than to ever higher levels of integration.

Keywords:

• European integration
• community building
• communitarian
• moral dialogue
• fiscal union
• political union

Acknowledgement

I am indebted to Ashley McKinless for extensive research assistance on this paper.

Notes

¹Erik Jones writes that as a result of the current crisis, ‘Politically, there is more concern with fending off the anti-European agendas of the new radical right than with fostering a common European identity’. Jones, E. (2012) ‘The JCMS Annual Review Lecture: European crisis, European solidarity’, Journal of Common Market Studies 50: 53–67, 54.

²In contrast, other scholars argue that while the crisis has sharpened nationalist identities, ‘the EU can build and sustain a high level of integration without deep citizen identification with Europe’ though ‘the lack of European identity will prevent governments from stepping too far beyond public opinion’. Fligstein, N., Polyakova, A. and Sandholtz, W. (2012) ‘European integration, nationalism and European identity’, Journal of Common Market Studies 50: 106–22. doi:10.1111/j.1468-5965.2011.02230.x

³Thomas Diez questions the ‘normative power’ of Europe as the basis of integration. Common values such as ‘democracy and justice’ involve ‘fundamental tensions’ which prevent them from serving as sufficient grounds for coherent EU-wide positions and actions, especially in terms of its engagement in the realm of international relations. See Diez, T. (2012) ‘Not quite “sui generis” enough,’ European Societies 14(4): 522–39.

⁴Craig Calhoun raises a similar criticism of Habermas: ‘The notion of constitution as legal framework thus needs to be complemented by the notion of constitution as the creation of concrete social relationships: of bonds of mutual commitment forged in shared action, of institutions, and of shared modalities of practical action’. See Calhoun, C. (2002) ‘Imagining solidarity: Cosmopolitanism, constitutional patriotism, and the public sphere’, Public Culture 14(1), 147–71.

⁵Therborn suggests that ‘the future of the Europe is dependent upon an adequate historical consciousness among European citizens’ and ‘that the European union is a project of learning from history, of learning not from oppression or injustice, but from errors and crimes’. Therborn, G. (2001) ‘Europe's breaks with itself. The history, modernity, and the world future of Europe’, in F. Cerutti and E. Rudolph (eds), A Soul for Europe, vol II, On the Cultural and Political Identity of the Europeans. An Essay Collection, Leuven: Peeters, pp. 73–94.

⁶A study in the UK found that while education OMC was ‘passively accepted,’ ‘research suggests that it does not seem to have any discernible impact on the content of UK education policy’, and that ‘the Eurosceptic UK is not the only member state that deflects OMC measures’. See Alexiadou, N. and Lange, B. (2013) ‘Deflecting European Union influence on national education policy-making: The case of the United Kingdom’, Journal of European Integration 35: 1.

⁷For an overview of the EU's current language policy, see Gerhards, J. (2012) From Babel to Brussels: European Integration and the Importance of Transnational Linguistic Capital, Berlin: The Berlin Studies on the Sociology of Europe, Vol. 28. pp. 97–104.

⁸Nicolas Ostler (2010) suggests that new language translation technologies will soon make it unnecessary for people to learn new languages to communicate across borders, that English was will be ‘the last lingua franca’. While this observation may hold true in terms of the economic function of language (employability, international mobility and access to information), language is likely to remain a barrier to creating the types of communal and affective ties that are the concern of this paper – until there is a shared one (Maxwell 2012: 559 61).