The New Twenty Years' Crisis by Philip Cunliffe

Author:Philip Cunliffe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2020-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

3 Washed up on the Shores of Eutopia

Introduction

On 4 March 2019, the French president Emmanuel Macron published a letter in twenty-four languages across the European Union (EU) directly addressing himself to its many citizens in advance of the Union-wide elections to the European Parliament in May that year.1 In the letter, President Macron called for renewing the EU project. He did this by denouncing Brexit as built on lies, against which he asserted the continuing vitality and necessity of the EU, with a range of sweeping proposals for renewal. Nothing vindicates the EU, it seems, as much as the effort to leave it. The tortuous difficulty, long-term economic costs and political turmoil of extricating the rickety old British union from the newer continental one has seemed to help solidify the latter, as indicated in opinion polls across the continent. A YouGov Eurotrack poll published in April 2019 found that in countries across the Union, support for remaining in the EU had been significantly strengthened since 2016. Yet the same poll found that when asked about their views of the future of the EU, respondents were deeply pessimistic.2 This single poll contains within it perhaps the central contradictions of the EU: that it appears inescapable and yet at the same time is seen as unviable.

Brexit has been variously denounced either as a neo-imperial fantasy or as demonstrating the limits of autarky and sovereignty, expressing a wilful isolationism and refusal to engage the outside world. It is thus widely seen to exemplify political unrealism in world affairs today, as Britain’s aging voters are beguiled by the mirage of pristine isolation, imperial nostalgia and racial ressentiment. Adjudicating the origins and fate of Brexit is beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead what I want to argue here is that at least as many if not more fantastical premises are required to imagine that the EU can endure as a viable long-term political system. The EU is quite evidently a liberal utopian project, and to that end it can be usefully studied using the critical lenses provided by E.H. Carr – especially in identifying the storied harmony of interests that is required to sustain the fantasy of successful European integration. Thus, of all manifestations of the new forms of liberal utopianism in international affairs today, nowhere is it more entrenched and insidious than with regard to the EU.3 Eighty years after Carr charged liberal utopians with bringing Europe to the brink of war with their legalistic dogma, institutional rigidity and political infantilism, Europe is once again flirting with destructive forces, not only for having stumbled into a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, but also for having created debt-colonies throughout the Eurozone and for its the ruthless efforts to suppress democracy to preserve the Union, as seen in Greece, Ireland and Italy through technocratic usurpation, repeat referendums and external curbs on the fiscal autonomy of elected governments.

The EU has all the prototypical rigidity and brittleness of last utopias. Francis Fukuyama’s much maligned and misunderstood

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