On European Citizenship

...Ernest Gellner was essentially correct in suggesting that the nation-state was the cultural and political container which allowed the development of commercial and industrial societies...

...Many fans in England, while supporting the English national team, were also celebrating the performances of the great footballers from rival European teams who now play for English Premier League clubs during the regular season...

...It is also true that liberals and the left have often sought to turn national identifications to the advantage of progressive concepts of citizenship...

...The union has sought to strengthen its own institutions by setting up bargaining relations with regional and city governments, which national governments have tolerated as the price for gaining access to these funding streams...

...The world has never before seen a democratic political federation on this scale...

...Indeed, the emerging European Union may enable us to break with the nation-state's typical equation of cultural identity with political citizenship...

...These complexities are not only evident in sports...

...These changes in the south have contributed greatly to the emerging peace settlement in Northern Ireland...

...The emergence of these different styles of national and European identification in the important symbolic space of sport make David Miller's equation of nation with the quest for democracy and social justice seem one-dimensional...

...The EU's sternest regulations are designed to enforce a competitive market economy across Europe and leave social policy and welfare largely to its national governments...

...Spain's democratic modernization since 1974 has been achieved on federalist principles...

...This does not require the development of a supra-European nationality, about which David Miller is right to be skeptical...

...His intuitions on this are prescient...

...The growing modernization and secularization in the Republic of Ireland has in part been made possible by its membership in the EU, which has helped Ireland attract both public and private investment and has given it a context in which it can escape its long relationship of simultaneous dependence on, and antagonism toward, the United Kingdom...

...It is even possible (though I think it's unlikely) that Scotland will be pushed by the Scottish Nationalists to opt for full national independence, but without this bringing about the grave crisis it would once have done...

...It is the European Union that now requires that nations must be political democracies as a condition of membership...

...Far-right political groups seemed to be the main inspiration of these rioters, as they were for the gangs of German fans engaged in more organized violence in Lens...

...Marshall predicted, have come wider claims to social and economic justice...

...This is because the significance of "independence" will already have been greatly diminished by common membership in the European Union...

...The cultural and linguistic diversity of Europe, and the European Union's doctrine of "subsidiarity" (powers must be devolved to the lowest feasible jurisdictional level) provide strong foundations for such a pluralist concept of citizenship and identity...

...Although the international community is far from being able to guarantee these rights of citizenship worldwide, it seems that it is becoming feasible, perhaps as the forerunner of a future international order, in the continent of Europe...

...We may be able to make history, but still not in circumstances of our own choosing...

...National identities within the British Isles are undergoing an even more important form of complication, made possible by the larger political containment that the European Union (EU) provides...

...Just as the question of the nation-state soon became, for liberals and the left, what kind of nation state, so the question of Europe is now not whether we are to have European integration, but European integration of what kind...

...It is true that democracy and social justice emerged, once nation-states were established, as the popular response to these new configurations of power...

...It seems that we can both be political citizens of the European Union (enjoying the right to work in any EU country, protection from the European Court, and so on), and also identify culturally with whatever national, regional, or ethnic community we please...

...But it seems unlikely that a fragmented Europe of nation-states, each separately vulnerable to attacks on its currency, is going to be better able to defend welfare regimes than states whose social commitments can be shored up by their membership in a powerful European Union...

...As the republic has become a more tolerant, and cosmopolitan society, its representation as a reactionary threat to Protestant freedoms has come to seem increasingly out of touch with reality...

...The European Union has been favorable to the relative autonomy of its regions, because it has encouraged flows of investment, which, though formally controlled by national governments, can only be won if regions are given some autonomous scope to bid for them...

...A subscription is U.S.$70 from Soundings, c/o Lawrence and Wishart, 99A Wallis Road, London E9 5LN, United Kingdom...

...That is why there is a single European market, why restraints on movements of capital and labor within Europe have been swept aside, why a single European currency is coming into existence, and why major corporations must now integrate their systems of production and marketing on a continental if not a transcontinental scale, if they are to thrive...

...He is co-editor of Soundings, whose issue on the European left was published in July 1998...

...Clinging to the residues of the British nationstate seems to be the most pessimistic and unimaginative of options, in this promising situation...

...This represents a Europe-wide commitment to what David Miller calls social justice, but what in the European Union these days is more often referred to as "social inclusion...

...There are, of course, no guarantees that the European Union will succeed in defending its "third way"—its mélange of social and Christian democracy— against these pressures...

...We can envisage, for the first time, a reasonable balance between universal guarantees and a creative cultural diversity...

...These empires were not that interested in what customs their citizens practiced, so long as they obeyed the law and did not resist or rebel against central political authority...

...Unitary nation-states were the reverse: they sometimes defended individual political rights but were usually hostile to local cultural traditions...

...Most on the left now accept the inevitability of economic integration, and opposition to the EU is now mainly the cause ARGUMENT of the flag-waving nationalist right...

...I N ON TOLERATION, Michael Walzer discussed a paradoxical virtue of multinational empires: although they provided few political rights, they tolerated cultural diversity...

...Just as Michael Walzer has usefully distinguished between the ideas of simple and complex equality, so in Europe we now need concepts of simple and complex nationality to enable us to work out what identifications we should support...

...In most of Western Europe, nationstates preceded mass democracy, sometimes by centuries, and certainly they long predated 0 n DISSENT / Fa/11998 any concerted pursuit of social justice...

...The key circumstance in this case is that the optimum political container for modern capitalist economies is now considerably larger in geographic and demographic scale than the nationstate...

...Just as the second stage of the European nation-state saw the struggle for political democracy and social and economic rights, so the second phase of the European Union, which has the great advantage of having begun on a democratic political basis, must be the struggle for Europe-wide guarantees of social and economic rights...

...It is a strength, not a weakness, of the European Union, that geographical mobility within Europe is limited by linguistic and cultural differences: it is good fortune for a continent to embody such diversity within so small a space...

...Walzer briefly discussed the European Union as perhaps the prototype of a new way of combining cultural tolerance with political citizenship...

...Postwar West Germany was constructed under American constitutional influence as a federal state, and has remained so...

...The devolution of power to Scotland and Wales has had a similar significance in dismantling, or pluralizing, a unitary British national identity that in fact has amounted chiefly to the imposition of a southern English hegemony on everyone else in these islands...

...David Miller is right to predict that the Conservatives will eventuallly be forced by big business to abate their little-Englander hostility to Europe...

...This spectacle offered the choice of two different kinds of national identification...

...They tolerated collective cultural diversity while doing little to enforce individual freedoms against local constraints...

...Even if one once believed in the historic mission of the nation-state to be the container of political and social democracy, it is hard to envisage this as a practical political option today...

...Although these cultural differences are slowly diminishing under the impact of consumer culture, mass tourism, and so on, they are likely to remain substantial for the foreseeable future, and new forms of differentiation are likely to emerge as the European Union on the one hand expands its boundaries, and on the other hand gives ethnic minorities (from Asia, North Africa, and the Caribbean) the space to evolve their DISSENT / Fall 1998 n I1 1I1I ARGUMENT own forms of identity...

...With democracy, as T.H...

...MICHAEL RUSTIN teaches at the University of East London...

...The implicit antagonist of this concept of a "social Europe" is an unregulated global capitalism, dominated by the United States, and ideologically reinforced by Thatcherism...

...It was becoming absurd to conduct a latent civil war over the question of Irish citizenship when it was highly probable that within five years everyone within the DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 109 ARGUMENTS British Isles would be paying their bills in Euros...

...In Eastern Europe, post-1918, there was a brief convergence of nationalist and democratic impulses, but it was short-lived, and the era of interwar nationalism was notably authoritarian and undemocratic in most nations, with Czechoslovakia as the principal exception...

...Glasgow's modern revival was given a large boost when it was designated "European City of Culture" for 1990 and received EU funding to promote its unexpected cultural role...

...Many on the left support greater integration because they see hopes of institutionalizing the various postwar European national systems of social protection as a generic European model, through such devices as the European Social Charter and the European Convention on Human Rights...

...But at the same time, some Englishmen were in Marseilles for the match between England and Tunisia, waving the Union Jack and beating the hell out of any Tunisians they could find, as well as battling with the French riot police...

...OR IS THIS erosion of national identities occurring only within the British _ Isles...

...The European Union has the chance of becoming the equivalent of a democratic multinational state, ruled not by a dynasty like the empires, but by a constitutional settlement that establishes basic rules of political and economic practice, while also allowing considerable devolution of powers to member nations and to regions or cities within them...

...European nation-states were not created for the purpose of pursuing the goals of democracy and social justice...

...Travel around the continent has greatly increased, and European nationals, especially the young, now feel more comfortable in each other's cities...

...They were initially the creations of the bourgeoisie, which wanted to establish the conditions for free-market economies and to sweep away the trade restraints that dynastic political boundaries imposed...

...and France and Italy have also been moving toward more regionalized political arrangements...

...But in central and eastern Europe, subsequent to the fall of the Berlin Wall, nationalism has been no guarantee of democracy...