All such plans are fraught with difficulties. Britain, among others, would never accept second-class citizenship, and instead might leave the EU altogether. The weaker states in the euro-core might choose to revert to their own currency rather than undergo radical economic and political surgery. But the greatest problem is that ordinary European citizens, unlike Americans in 1787, are not prepared to surrender their sovereignty to a federal government. European leaders once imagined that this shift in loyalties was almost inevitable. In 1948, Winston Churchill said, "We hope to see a Europe where every man of every country will think of being European as belonging to their native land...." But that has not come to pass. The cautious, step-wise process of European integration hit a roadblock with the effort to adopt a European constitution in 2005, which both the French and the Dutch rejected in a referendum.
Further movement toward integration -- which increasingly has meant building the capacity to hold laggard economies to account -- has thus been carried out quietly, by bureaucrats in Brussels rather than openly, through democratic means. And EU membership now comes not only with delightful opportunities, like passport-free travel, but with onerous (if often unenforced) obligations, like budgetary discipline. This has led to the current crisis in legitimacy. "As the EU matured as a political project," Mark Leonard writes, "its very success as a bureaucratic phenomenon fueled a populist backlash at a national level." The eurozone crisis has only accelerated this process. The new, Brussels-approved prime ministers in Italy and Greece have broad public support. But what happens when they begin to implement the painful austerity measures required to stave off default and meet the terms of bailout agreements? Even if voters conclude that deep cuts in public spending, pensions and wages are a price worth paying in order to remain in the eurozone, their resentment of the system will only grow.
There are two ways to view this populist alienation from Brussels: as a matter of culture and as a matter of politics. The former European Commissioner Chris Patten has suggested that the nation-state is "the largest unit, perhaps, to which people will willingly accord emotional allegiance." As David Brooks wrote in a recent New York Times column, West Germans were prepared to make major sacrifices to reunite with their eastern brethren, but Germans generally are not prepared to pay for the Greeks. Indeed, this popular antipathy has handcuffed German Chancellor Angela Merkel as she has tried to reach agreement with Europeans leaders on a solution to the euro crisis. The EU is thus a symptom of a larger crisis of liberalism, which once imagined that men would slough off their atavistic loyalties, whether to nation or to God, in the name of prosperity, efficiency, and rationality, with Greeks and Swedes alike becoming fresh-minted Europeans. The EU, Brooks writes, was only one of several ultimately failed post-World War II efforts -- the United Nations was another -- "to build governments that were transnational, passionless and safe."
All that may well be so; but the EU has exacerbated this intrinsic cultural problem by consistently choosing technocracy over democracy. You cannot move from an Articles of Confederation world to a United States of Europe by bureaucratic stealth, or by quiet agreements between political leaders. Joschka Fischer, the former German foreign minister and a leading proponent of a two-speed Europe, has argued that further integration can only be pursued "in the bright light of democratic politics." Fischer asserts that that European leaders must openly acknowledge that sovereignty is at issue here, and must respond to public concern by ensuring a strong role for national parliaments in any future settlement. Mark Leonard pointed out in a phone conversation that Europeans will only agree to the further surrender of sovereignty if the EU embraces issues that they, and not just their bankers, care about, such as immigration -- and if financial prescriptions are seen to promote growth, and not just austerity, the great German preoccupation. Absent pro-growth policies, the whole project may become irrelevant in any case, since the most endangered economies will never pay off their debt through cuts alone.
The cultural problem may be insuperable. It is, if anything, compounded by technology: The overall direction of the world is towards disaggregation, homemade networks of the likeminded, suspicion of distant authority. Perhaps the EU will come to be seen, in retrospect, as a quintessential product of the second half of the twentieth century. And yet the EU has not only brought immense prosperity to Europe but has helped foster Europe's collective identity as a place of peace, tolerance, and the good life. That's why my friend, Pierre, and so many others, believe that Europe must fall forwards. But it will never do so without broad political legitimacy; and that will require a very different EU from the one which has existed until now.
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