The New Totalitarian Temptation. Todd Huizinga
big howls of protest and no uprisings, because most people don’t even understand what was decided, then we just go on – step by step, until there is no turning back.”9
In other words, the EU is process. It is constantly evolving into something new – something that no one clearly understands; something about which every point of view is right, and wrong. As Juncker revealed in his statement to Der Spiegel, the EU’s impenetrability is also intentional. Subterfuge is a central component of its modus operandi. Being unknowable has always been an aspect of the EU. That attribute might be good in a poem or a work of art, but not in a polity, which cannot be democratically accountable to its citizens unless they understand it.
By the process of developing an undefinable supranationality, De Gasperi and the other founding fathers of the European project – like Barroso and Juncker in our own day – wanted to achieve a soft utopia that would be a regional model for what we now call global governance. In the next chapter, we will examine the utopian ideology of global governance and how it grounds the EU.
THE UTOPIAN DREAM OF WORLD PEACE
The European dream of a supranational paradise of peace, prosperity and amity has gone global. As we have seen, the founding fathers of European integration already had this idea in mind. The opening words of the Schuman Declaration, proposing the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1950, were not limited to Europe. Summing up the purpose of the first truly supranational undertaking in modern history, Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister and probably the primary founder of the European Union, declared: “World peace cannot be safeguarded without the making of creative efforts proportionate to the dangers which threaten it.”1 Jean Monnet, the principal intellectual architect of the European project and Schuman’s close associate, also revealed his global perspective early in the process of European integration: “The sovereign nations of the past can no longer provide a framework for the resolution of our present problems. And the European Community itself is no more than a step toward the organizational forms of tomorrow’s world.”2
With the end of the Cold War, the vague aspirations of the EU’s first-generation fathers have become a full-fledged ideology of global governance, although still an amorphous one, both strategically and intellectually.
A NEW WORLD ORDER
Among high-level EU officials, Pascal Lamy is one of the more articulate advocates of global governance. A Frenchman, he served as the European commissioner for trade from 1999 to 2004, and as secretary general of the World Trade Organization from 2005 to 2013. In a speech on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Lamy said that the Cold War’s ending had “caught everyone by surprise,” suddenly presenting the world with new challenges that hadn’t been prepared for: “A new world order was being born. And yet there was not enough thinking and discussion about its governance structures. . . . Global challenges need global solutions and these can only come with the right global governance . . . .”3
The statement “global challenges need global solutions” is key. The global governancers base their entire case on the assertion that a globalized world requires a globalized form of governance. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, a leading proponent of global supranational governance, puts the argument as well as anyone, with a dash of Germanic fogginess. The processes of globalization, he writes,
enmesh nation-states in the dependencies of an increasingly interconnected world society whose functional differentiation effortlessly bypasses territorial boundaries. . . . Nation-states can no longer secure the boundaries of their own territories, the vital necessities of their populations, and the material preconditions for the reproduction of their societies by their own efforts. . . . Hence, states cannot escape the need for regulation and coordination in the expanding horizon of a world society . . . . 4
The EU, according to Habermas, “already represents a form of ‘government beyond the nation-state’ that could serve as an example to be emulated in the postnational constellation.”5
Habermas and Lamy both exemplify the foundational consensus of European elites that the EU is the model for the governance of a future world in which unrestricted national sovereignty will have become a thing of the past. In the speech quoted above, Lamy purports to establish the post–Cold War need for global governance and then goes on to tout the European Union as the prototype, “the most ambitious experiment to date in supranational governance. It is the story of a desired, defined and organized interdependence between its member states.” The EU is “the laboratory of international governance – the place where the new technological frontier of international governance is being tested.”6
Another longtime member of the EU governing elite, the previously cited German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble, also illustrates how the view of the EU as a model for global governance is shared across nations and along the political spectrum. A center-right establishment figure, Schäuble agrees with Lamy, a mainstay of the French center-left, in the belief that people beyond Europe could take inspiration from “a national-and-European ‘double-democracy’ as a model for global governance in the twenty-first century.”7
What exactly is global governance, then? There is a plethora of definitions, including several helpful ones on the Wikipedia page for the term. They range from the purely descriptive and technical, to characterizations that give more sense of both the ideological purposes and the real-world implications of the global governance movement.
To start with the technical, Adil Najam, dean of the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, defines global governance very broadly as “the management of global processes in the absence of global government.”8 Another technocratic definition comes from Thomas G. Weiss, director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY: “‘Global governance’ – which can be good, bad, or indifferent – refers to concrete cooperative problem-solving arrangements, many of which increasingly involve not only the United Nations of states but also ‘other UNs,’ namely international secretariats and other non-state actors.”9 In The UN and Global Governance: An Idea and Its Prospects, Weiss and his co-author, Ramesh Thakur, offer a slightly more elaborate definition: “the complex of formal and informal institutions, mechanisms, relationships, and processes between and among states, markets, citizens and organizations, both inter- and non-governmental, through which collective interests on the global plane are articulated, duties, obligations and privileges are established, and differences are mediated through educated professionals.”10 Notice who is doing this very comprehensive governancing, so comprehensive that it sounds like governing the world: “educated professionals,” not elected officials.
A shorter definition that captures the central idea is this: “Global governance or world governance is a movement towards political integration of transnational actors aimed at negotiating responses to problems that affect more than one state or region.”11 The key words here are “political integration of transnational actors.” But the chief merit of this definition is that it describes global governance accurately as a “movement,” rather than focusing, misleadingly, on the innocuous-sounding mechanics of “cooperative problem-solving arrangements.”
GLOBAL GOVERNANCE IS SUI GENERIS – JUST LIKE THE EU
As the definitions above imply, global governance does not mean world government to the great majority of its advocates. For instance, Habermas writes, “The democratic federal state writ large – the global state of nations or world republic – is the wrong model.”12 Rather, he envisions a “politically constituted global society that reserves institutions and procedures of global governance for states at both the supra- and transnational levels.”13 Habermas explains, “one can construe the political constitution of a decentered world society as a multilevel system” in which a “world organization” such as a “suitably reformed” UN could secure