Last week’s European Summit in Brussels has become a pale afterthought in record time. The reasons are threefold. First, the summit has been overshadowed by other events, not least in Egypt, but also those surrounding the Snowden affair. Second, expectations were low to being with, since the summit preceded politically pregnant elections in Germany this fall. Third, expectations that the results of the meeting would be underwhelming have been richly rewarded by another failure of EU leadership.
The European Council certainly did not disappoint those now grown used to its meekness. Other than a vague pledge to address youth unemployment, the Council’s outcome document is largely filled with generalities about Europe’s way forward. Here is the key official summary statement from the European Council: “This June summit was mainly devoted to youth employment, strengthening competitiveness, growth and jobs, and completing the economic and monetary union.” That doesn’t sound too bad, but in truth the summit kicked every hard decision about economic and monetary union it could identify further down the road.
So why bother writing about it? Precisely because the utter banality of it all is deeply significant. The summit not only feeds the general perception of the European Union as a bloodless and at times purposeless endeavor, but it attaches real evidence to buttress that perception.
It would be a mistake, however, to haul out the same old cure-all in response. Whenever EU summits flop and its leadership goes into a familiar somnambulistic state, the tendency has been to blame a “democratic deficit” for the problem. In the aftermath of the failed European Constitution and now in the midst of a protracted financial crisis, the focus on narrowing Europe’s participatory gap has taken on new importance for many. Rightly so, for the EU has layered one form of lethargy on top of another, proving itself unable to apply its own preferred democracy-enhancing solutions to its problems. The Lisbon Treaty included a raft of measures aimed at amplifying the voice of the people, from strengthening the role of the Parliament in Strasbourg to the creation of the much-discussed but mostly unused European Citizens’ Initiative. There are now calls for newer measures, such as the direct election of the Commission President. If the recent past is any guide, that too will lead nowhere.
These efforts, important as they may be, tend to obscure other, perhaps more important deficits. One of these is an efficiency deficit. Beyond the critique that the European Union focuses its attention on the wrong things, it simply does not do enough about anything. Take the internal market. Three years after the Monti Report, the creation of a full single market still remains an aspiration, and the general sense among those who follow such matters is that reform is slowing down rather than speeding up. We may soon be hearing recycled wry Stalinist-era jokes, with “internal market” substituting for “Communism”, about the meaning of the word horizon: a far-away place that continues to recede as you approach it.
A second deficit applies to foreign policy. As foreign policy becomes an area of prime concern for the citizens of Europe, the lackluster performance of the European External Action Service (EEAS) and the High Representative for Foreign Affairs marks another zone of inefficiency. The High Representative position was established to create cohesiveness in the EU’s external action and to act as a focal point for decision-making and public diplomacy in foreign affairs. Along with this increased responsibility, the EEAS was provided with a healthy budget (€509 million in 2013) and staff (currently numbering around 3,400). Yet despite this bountiful institutional support, with the notable exception of the recent Serbia-Kosovo Agreement, there have been few achievements. Epitomized by the muddled European response to the ongoing conflict in Syria, the High Representative is manifestly following rather than leading policy developments, thus failing to generate coherence in European foreign affairs. The distinct sense is that the EU, having seized greater authority, is now doing less with more.
Europe also suffers from a trust deficit. According to Eurobarometer, between 2007 and 2012 the percentage of Europeans who said they tended not to trust the European Union rose from 36 to 57 percent. Similar rises in popular mistrust of the European Council, Parliament and Commission are also well documented. Underlying this general phenomenon is a growing lack of trust among Europe’s member states. The North-South divide continues, with Germanophobia matched by disdain for the supposed irresponsibility and laziness of Europe’s Southern periphery folk. April’s tit-for-tat name-calling between France in Germany alarmingly punctuates the point.
There is honest disagreement about the utility and good policy sense of austerity, for example, just as there is a similar disagreement about the relative dangers of deficits in the United States and Japan. But honest disagreements about policy alone cannot account for the vitriol recently on display in Europe. Rather, a lack of any sense of common purpose, and the absence of any narrative conducing to the achievement of greater unity, have created a vacuum into which the demons of the past have stealthily crept.
Above all, it is the de facto abolition of the future in the minds of the EU elite that has opened the door for the bad habits of the past to inhabit the present. Since the days of Monnet and Schuman, the European project depended for its successes on the longing for a better future to displace the misanthropies of the past. It aimed to create “de facto solidarity” through “concrete achievements”, yet this primarily technical approach always kept close company with a solidifying forward-looking narrative, whether that narrative was about postwar reconstruction, prevailing in the Cold War, achieving further democratization and expansion, or launching a new, groundbreaking institution. Ironically, now that the past has largely been overcome, European leaders seem unable to generate a new future-leaning vision. They seem unable to explain why there should even be a European Union, and they appear relieved if they get through a public event without anyone daring to ask. They sometimes seem intent on achieving a come-from-ahead defeat.
Unless a new and compelling vision of the future can be generated, the democracy, efficiency, foreign policy and trust deficits will all worsen. If they do, the inherent unsustainability of the current European model will explode what EU solidarity remains. As noted by Angela Merkel back in December, Europe currently comprises 7 percent of the world’s population, produces 25 percent of world GDP and accounts for 50 percent of global social spending. As Europe’s population ages and its relative economic strength declines, this already difficult equation will become impossible to maintain. There is thus already a pressing need to change the conversation, for this is not a dilemma that can be solved on its own terms; it must instead be transcended.
Alas, however, Europe suffers from a fifth deficit: a deficit of courage. In 1946, as Europe lay in shambles, a few audacious voices joined together to call on the continent to boldly move forward together toward a federal “United States of Europe.” For too long now, Europeans have been afraid of the very goal that once set them on an historically revolutionary and successful course. Now European leaders avoid the word “federalism” at all costs, and the result is the unbalanced construction we have today that cannot move forward but that doesn’t dare go back.
Though one certainly would not guess it from the stultifying boredom of the June European Summit, Europe stands again at a make-it-or-break-it juncture. We need full-throated, pulse-raising calls for change, not eminently forgettable communiqués written with ice water. We need to look beyond the smokescreen of the democratic deficit and boldly address the other deficits from which we suffer. Above all, however, we need to rediscover the power of an imagined future. We need a new imperative that will breathe life into Europe by giving us all something new and grand and worthy to build. We need to reimagine the United States of Europe in a way that vibrates with the possibilities of the 21st century.
We should not kid ourselves about what will happen if we fail. Our American friends, given their mostly buoyant but still adolescent-scale history, may lack a deep appreciation for the tragic in history. But we Europeans do not. We have run out of excuses in illusion. We know that civilization can decay. We know how centers do not hold, how things can fall apart, how the refined achievements of generations can perish. We know the true stakes. The only question that matters in the face of that hard-earned knowledge is this: What are we going to do about it?