European Union and the End of Politics

That is what Italian Minister Guido Cali meant when he said that ‘the European Union represented an alternative path for the solution of problems which we were not managing to handle through the normal channels of government and parliament’.

Not just Italy or Greece, but Britain and Germany sought again and again to ‘tie’ or ‘bind’ themselves into European Union rules that would limit the political temptations of excessive spending. Quite why sovereign states should choose to bind themselves and their successors in obligations that they cannot change or renegotiate is a conundrum for students of international relations. The answer to the puzzle is that these elites no longer derive the same authority that they used to from national electorates or constituent assemblies that once they did. Instead it is in the international summits, most notably the European summits that leaders feel secure, bound together in their mutual fear of the unruly electorates.

The argument that the European Economic Community was created to constrain war-like nation-states after the learning experience of the Second World War, then, is hard to justify, not least because it is a consideration that was by no means important at the time. Rather, the argument that the Community was a reaction against World War is at best a retrospective judgement, or even a post festum construction, an origin myth fo

In the end it was neither the Second World War, nor indeed the global market, that created the need for the European Union. Rather it is the perceived decline in state sovereignty that creates the need for a set of trans-national and pan-European institutions that supervene over national sovereignty. As we shall see, the member states of the European Union, as represented in the European Council, continue to be the source of its authority. Still the curious need for those European states to slough off responsibility for monetary and trade policy, environmental and technical regulation and a whole host of other government competences drives the Union forward.