German Europe by Beck Ulrich Livingstone Rodney

Author:Beck, Ulrich,Livingstone, Rodney.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2013-01-17T16:00:00+00:00

‘Merkiavelli’: hesitation as a means of coercion

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) was the first thinker to have identified a form of power that can be forged from the confusions of the age. He believed that profound crises that sow dissension and bring forth destructive conflicts are the driving force of history. Crises are invitations to the accumulation of power, but in certain circumstances they can also lead to its decline. This is the point at which Machiavelli’s theory of power intersects with the theory of the world risk society. Impending catastrophes throw up opportunities (Machiavelli used the term occasione) that can be seized by a man – or indeed a woman – with a talent for power (uomo virtuoso). That is precisely what Angela Merkel has done. She has seized the opportunity that presented itself to her to restructure power relations in Europe. How she achieved this will be analysed at greater length in the following pages.

We must begin by noting that the confusion that reigns at present in the crisis of Europe and the euro is significantly greater than the muddle facing Machiavelli when he wrote his Il Principe at the turn of the sixteenth century. As we know, his cynically realistic guide to the expansion and maintenance of power was dedicated to a single prince, Lorenzo II de’ Medici, the ruler of Florence. In the European Union, by contrast, there are many rulers, as befits its political architecture, and hence no one in overall command. After all, the EU is not a unified state with a single government, a parliament, a people and a constitution. It is based rather on an intentionally opaque set of power relations, in which European institutions exist in parallel and on a plane of equality with the governments, parliaments, etc., of the member states. It follows that the question of who possesses sovereignty can in principle never receive an unambiguous answer and that power has to be shared or renegotiated from one case to the next.26

The fundamental fuzziness of this dual existence on a national and a European plane is compounded by the additional opacity arising from the twofold crisis that has shaken the European Union to its foundations. Because of the weight of their debts, a number of individual member states are on the verge of bankruptcy. At the same time, these debts threaten the euro and, with it, the member states of the eurozone and ultimately also the EU. Whether or not all member states will be infected by the viral spread of the burden of debt, whether it calls for a joint response (‘if the euro fails, Europe fails’) or becomes the responsibility of the individual states, and, above all, who has the power to decide on behalf of everyone else – the consequence of the crisis is an increase in the self-destructive conflicts that, if anything, accelerate the threatened disintegration. The alarming novelty is not the fact that such fundamental conflicts have shaken the EU. The EU has always in principle functioned as an abbreviation for conflicts and crises.

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