Rupture by Manuel Castells

Author:Manuel Castells [Castells Manuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2018-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

The European Disunion

Building a united Europe with a shared economy and institutions has been the most ambitious and visionary political project of the last five decades. Following centuries of enmity, conflicts and atrocious wars, the majority of European countries came together in search of lasting peace and economic prosperity through an alignment of interests within a complex and fragile institutional architecture. It began as a doubly defensive project: against the internal demons that had led to two world wars, and against the Soviet threat, in this case through a strengthening of the Atlantic alliance with the United States. The project was originally posed as a gradual development of synergy between markets and then economies, starting with France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux, and was later expanded step by step until it encompassed 28 countries from every corner of the continent. In reality, at least for those who started it, it was always a political project, which utilized the economy in order to create an irreversible new continental dynamic that would transcend borders and overcome nationalism. This was the central idea shared by Monnet, Adenauer, Schuman, Mendès-France, De Gasperi and, subsequently, Jacques Delors, Helmut Kohl, Felipe González, Romano Prodi and latterly Angela Merkel. I have not mentioned any English names here, for although Blair was openly pro-European, the United Kingdom always made it clear that it was interested in an economic community, rather than a political one. Historically, its most important relationship was with the United States, and it responded coolly to the hostility of De Gaulle, who saw Europe as an extension of French grandeur. Germany meanwhile, divided and weakened, could only return to the fold of the community of nations through a fervent pro-Europeanism that would eclipse its record of violent nationalism. Paradoxically, Germany’s federalist project and British reticence towards the idea of the European Union came together to facilitate, albeit for entirely opposite reasons, the union’s decisive expansion to include Eastern European nations. Germany’s intention was to recreate its traditional sphere of influence, while the UK correctly calculated that the more countries that joined the EU, the less chance it would have of effective co-governance as a single entity, thus reinforcing each country’s national sovereignty. Nonetheless, the Europeanists did manage to achieve increasing economic integration, captured in the Maastricht Treaty and which culminated with the creation of the Euro in 1999, a unique currency considered anomalous by many economists in that it does not fit into a community without a single fiscal policy and without a common banking policy – a high-risk strategy. Federalism’s apparent triumph (although the federal project was never made explicit) did have its limits. Only 17 countries adopted the Euro, some refusing it in order to maintain their own monetary sovereignty (UK, Sweden, Denmark), and others because the weakness of their economies wouldn’t let them into the club in the first place. The process of political integration, however, did not follow the same pace. When the EU tried to formalize its institutional nature through

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