Asks if Euro-patriotism is possible

...Success in these might eventually even serve as models for other parts of the world...

...What then of the official "constitution," which European leaders failed to agree on at their Brussels summit in December...

...In these circumstances—the lack of a proper constitution on the one hand and the lack of attachments on the other—constitutional patriotism is increasingly debated across Europe, even as its relevance is not always fully spelled out by its proponents...

...A "yes" to this question is not uncommon...

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...Well, no...

...The 14 n DISSENT / Spring 2004 legal community will soon stretch from the Canary Islands to the eastern border of Poland and from Malta to Lappland...

...This might be well done by existing nation-states or by more inclusive organizations such as the United Nations...

...There are no patois-speaking French, Greek, or Slovak peasants waiting to be turned into proper Euro-citizens through civic education and military service, as Nationbuilding 101 would suggest...

...Although the empirical evidence is still sketchy, it is safe to say that the nightmare of European social democrats— namely, that supranationalism would automatically erode national social democracy—has not come true...

...At the same time, Europeans are clearly not ready for continent-wide, fullfledged democracy...

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...Only with a proper constitution that clearly spells out national and union competences, so the argument goes, can the EU function properly with twenty-five members...

...It should be a critical, reflective attachment suited to the peculiar nature of the emerging EU...

...It has almost five hundred articles, with a preamble claiming that Europe brought forth "civilization...

...Which constitution should inspire patriotism...

...However, they certainly need the political, legal, and constitutional means to contest decisions made in Brussels and to protect themselves against bureaucratic domination, all while reaping and even relishing the benefits of an extraordinary political experiment...

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...On that day, millions marched on the streets in Rome, Madrid, Paris, Berlin, and London against the impending war with Iraq...

...BUT MANY Europeans are willing to engage in what—loosely following John Dewey—might be called supranational democratic experimentalism...

...Not surprisingly, this "confusion" flattered the German foreign minister...

...After all, during the mid1980s Fischer ran seminars with Germany's premier public philosopher...

...It is a critical (and self - critical) attachment that makes room for both passion and skepticism vis-a-vis a changeable and essentially open-ended political project...

...For Benda, far-reaching conclusions followed...

...Not a word was said about a more rational or even universalist Euro-patriotism...

...Arguably, the most important thing the EU could do for the globe at this point is to get rid of its agricultural policies, and that will happen only if Europeans care enough to fight the lobbies and national leaders who support them...

...But the Philadelphia analogy only raised the stakes for the governments of member states without mobilizing European citizens...

...JAN-WERNER MULLER is Fellow in Modern European Thought at St...

...Today's EU is far from some of the hopes of Euro-cheerleaders, but that reality should not prevent anybody from examining its potential...

...Julien Benda, the unflinching French rationalist, already argued in 1932 that "Europe will be serious or it will not be at all...

...Habermas and others have put great faith in such acts of symbolic politics, but they probably underestimated the more sober concerns of European citizens, who appear content with the symbols they have on national levels...

...At first sight, the vision of a European constitutional patriotism might seem absurd...

...Every Monday a motley crew of Green activists, Frankfurt School critical theorists, and journalists met in the backrooms of "Dionysos," a Frankfurt Greek restaurant...

...In short, European thinkers seem ready to formulate and fight for some new kind of "Euro-patriotism," Fischer, as well as Habermas and his many followers in both politics and political theory, has often appealed to the notion of "constitutional patriotism...

...So, in sum, constitutional patriotism ought to complement existing attachments...

...DISSENT / Spring 2004 n 17...

...There are certainly no large European conscript armies waiting to be mobilized by the idea that "dulce et decorum est pro Javier mori...

...Habermas's new role culminated in his controversial appeal for a "renewal of Europe" cosigned by Jacques Derrida, in May 2003...

...Fischer sparked a Europe-wide debate with his call for the full constitutionalization of the European Union in a speech at Berlin's Humboldt University in May 2000...

...In fact, some observers estimate that more than 50 percent of all laws in any given member state now originate with the EU...

...Complementing" may be the wrong word, though, as it suggests that "identity" is more or less a box of bricks...

...Should European citizens warm to the Euro-anthem...

...They have good reasons to care about the union and to promote the principles and practices of supranational toleration, muDISSENT / Spring 2004 n I 5 POLITICS ABROAD tual learning as well as contestation, which are often developed in very humdrum day-to-day politics and diplomacy...

...The supranational, it seems, is also suprapassionate...

...Did this apparent debacle demonstrate that the EU, finally, is merely an intergovernmental organization subject to various forms of national egotism...

...Yet, it was also conceived as an alternative both to liberal versions of nationalism and to a fullfledged cosmopolitanism concerned primarily with global justice...

...This constitution (in reality a treaty) set out to bring "Europe closer to the people...

...Yet only a minority of citizens seems to find the union a genuine moral community, an entity that inspires any feelings of belonging...

...Or would it be better to choose the document produced recently by the "constitutional convention" that former French president Valêry Giscard d'Estaing, its chair, called "our Philadelphia...

...If the real litmus test of European unity is the willingness "to die for Javier Solana" (the EU's foreign affairs representative), as the British Times once put it, then perhaps reasoned patriotism is simply not enough...

...The impending enlargement of the EU in May 2004—an unprecedented inclusion of ten countries at once—has increased calls for a thorough constitutional revision of the EU...

...More important, Europeans have reason to care about (and resist) some of the EU's deeply problematic principles and practices or, put differently, European experiments that have simply gone wrong...

...This explains the European opposition to capital punishment...

...The relevant experiments include sharing sovereignty, mutual learning, creating freedoms, and tolerating (and trusting) diversity...

...The supranational, in contrast, stands for "civilization...

...The process of European integration sped up remarkably in the 1980s and especially the 1990s...

...And if such attachments are rejected, would becoming post-national not amount to becoming "post-emotional...

...Habermas claimed this was the moment when a common European consciousness came into focus...

...Above all, it DISSENT / Spring 2004 • 13 POLITICS ABROAD explains why the continent's problematic past may now, paradoxically, allow the European Union to be a "civilizing" counterpart to the United States...

...Rather, it is its peculiar nature as an evolving polity that does not seek to rely on one demos, but on multiple demoi moving closer together without becoming one...

...What is special about the EU—and what creates a political and moral surplus value for Europeans— is not that it promotes universalist democratic principles...

...He used the concept to designate a form of "post-national" democratic loyalty...

...Habermas did not invent this term, as is often claimed, but adopted it from the political theorist Dolf Sternberger, a civic republican student of Hannah Arendt, and then popularized it in the late 1980s...

...Above all, it presents a rather modest emotional proposal for a limited form of caring, which loses sight neither of the actual achievements nor the limits of the world's most successful experiment in regional cooperation...

...Do ostensibly soft concepts such as "caring" not prove right those Kaganesque critics who argue that Venutian Europeans—in contrast to Martian Americans—are too weak-willed and self-centered to take on global challenges...

...His recent publications include A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought and, as editor, Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past...

...Should one look to more concrete political symbols...

...In fact, it does offer a political attachment that might be well suited for the kind of political entity that the EU could become...

...It is easy to condemn constitutional patriotism as too "abstract," too "thin," or even too "bloodless" (a particularly inappropriate metaphor), as so many critics do...

...The word "ideal" needs to be stressed...

...But the European self is not a house (let alone a fortress) with a beautiful terrace on which one can breathe freer cosmopolitan air, all while nationalist demons remain buried in the basement...

...Instead of being a means to whip up (largely undefined and probably indefinable) "Euro-passions," constitutional patriotism should be understood as a certain level of care and concern about European affairs in addition to national polities...

...In addition, the history of intraEuropean conflicts (and their eventual resolution) has given Europeans a peculiar capacity for recognizing—and accepting—differences today...

...Although it is too early to tell, there is some hope that Britain, France, and Germany might move in this direction...

...Well, for a start, there is the issue of whether the European Union ought to have a proper constitution...

...If anything, it shows the limits of Euro-nation-building...

...And that potential does not lie in becoming a kind of Euro-nation, based on the supposed European similarities identified by Habermas and Derrida, with the United States as the big "Other...

...Rather than focusing on the ingenious mechanisms that the European demoi-cracy has developed, Giscard and his supporters sought to dignify the EU with some of the trappings of a proper state...

...Must this vision disappoint American leftists, who hope Europe might be a counterweight to American "empire" or hegemony...

...Antony's College, Oxford...

...Constitutional patriotism," as political theorist Patchen Markell points out, "can best be understood not as a safe and reliable identification with some pure set of already available universals, but rather as a political practice of refusing or resisting particular identifications— of insisting on and making manifest this failure of equivalence—for the sake of the ongoing, always incomplete, and often unpredictable project of universalization...

...But it failed to stimulate a continent-wide discussion as hoped...

...The notion of constitutional patriotism is attractive because of the genuinely novel nature of EU constitutionalism, in particular the ideal of Europe as an open-ended and contestable project of tolerating and to some extent sharing identities within a common political and socioeconomic space...

...Having long been one of the most influential voices in the seemingly interminable debates about "German identity," Habermas recently took to the European stage...

...Subsequent to such theoretical (and, presumably, Apollonian) exercises, Fischer went on his astonishing journey from down-and-out left-wing radical to European statesman...

...Europeans—as citizens and consumers—are ever more frequently affected by decisions taken in Brussels...

...It lacks what Justine Lacroix has called an "identification mechanism for the civic body as a whole...

...This European Union should, in Habermas's view, act as a counterweight to the United States, which Habermas calls a "callous superpower...

...Although Benda's Cartesian construction was stillborn, the distinction between supranational reason and national passion often reappears in the most sophisticated accounts of the EU as an emerging polity...

...International legal expert Joseph Weiler, for instance, claims that "the national is Eros: reaching back to the pre-modern, appealing to the heart with a grasp on our emotions, and evocative of the romantic vision of creative social organization as well as responding to our existential yearning for a meaning located in time and pace...

...Habermas became a leading advocate for a genuine European-wide democracy, as one step toward establishing a just cosmopolitan world order...

...The joint appeal with Derrida emphasized "the power of sentiments" in mobilizing European citizens against the war in Iraq...

...He also claimed that there could never be poets of European unification, because poPOLITICS ABROAD ets always remained attached to the emotional and the concrete...

...It is "confidently modernist, appealing to the rational within us and to Enlightenment neoclassical humanism, taming that Eros...

...And it is a project that, as Joseph Weiler points out, needs a great deal of trust and tolerance, not least constitutional tolerance, because difference and identity must be constantly negotiated and renegotiated...

...Should Europeans—many of whom tend to be bewildered by manifestations of American patriotism—pledge allegiance to the star-spangled blue banner and other pan-European symbols notorious for their artificiality...

...According to Habermas and Derrida, the "rebirth of Europe"—its Fourth of July, so to speak— occurred on February 15, 2003...

...Europeans, he thought, ought to develop a hatred for the passions as such...

...He now calls ever more incisively for a European constitution to create a novel European "state of nation-states...

...Finally, according to Habermas (and, for that matter, political analyst Robert Kagan), Europeans have become much more sensitive to violence...

...Although there remains wide disagreement about the nature of an "unidentified political object" (as former president of the European Commission Jacques Delors once called it), only few dispute that the EU now faces an increasing gap between moral and legal communities...

...Apart from that, his proposal for continental integration was not helped when his reply to the question of what the supranational language would be was "French...

...Should one pick the eighty thousand pages of the EU's bureaucratic rules and regulations...

...If it is a kind of attachment or care that does not automatically point toward ever more integration, it might also be more attractive to Euro-skeptics...

...This consciousness is supposedly based on shared, and for the most part painful, historical memories of violence and atrocity sparked by past national rivalries...

...Habermas has demanded that Europeans ought to "build another (European) storey" to their national identities, or enlarge them with a "European dimension...

...Against the background of the experience of totalitarianism and the Holocaust, they are said to have developed a stronger awareness of threats to personal and bodily integrity...

...It is, to use a concept coined by the French-Greek scholar Kalypso Nicolaidis, a "demoi-cracy," rather than a democracy...

...Constitutional patriotism does not prevent coalitions of the willing within Europe from developing, say, more coherent European POLITICS ABROAD defense capacities...

...Or, put differently, he sought a form of political attachment that was based primarily on the universalist moral principles contained in Western constitutions rather than particular national histories and cultural traditions...

...From this "constitutional patriotic" perspective, there is nothing wrong with a Europe composed of a plurality of peoples—a Europe in which some experiment in some policy areas and others remain reluctant...

...If architectural metaphors are a must, it is probably a Frank Gehry or Daniel Libeskind building...

...Not necessarily...

...Fischer and Habermas often appear to act in political-philosophical tandem...

...In many policy areas such as health and safety regulations, the EU has made for a "race to the top," rather than the much-feared "race to the bottom...

...WHAT HAS A "thought born in a seminar," as one of Habermas's German critics once put it, got to do with Europe's actual problems...

...In short, "Achieving our (European) Union" is (and ought to be) more a matter of establishing a "thin," liberal community characterized by a certain amount of civic concern, rather than a full-fledged "imagined community...

...Anything that smacks of nineteenthcentury nation-building processes will fail in today's Europe...

...Constitutional patriotism was thus explicitly opposed to "traditional nationalism," and to unquestioning endorsements of national histories...

...In other words, constitutional patriotism is not about a "heroism of reason" or a simple "passion for democracy...

...Box 3000 Denville, NJ 07834-3000 16 n DISSENT / Spring 2004 WHAT ROLE might there be for constitutional patriotism...

...In fact, even Habermas, as a seeming archrationalist, appears to have lost faith in his own post-national proposals...