Barack Obama and the Lefty Atlantic

It is nearly impossible to do anything but laugh and cry at Barack Obama's victory. All sorts of things now seem to be possible as the necessary nation has a President who is not a committed nationalist. He and the people around him are going to need partners, and not just well-wishers. If we are interested in moving the rules of the international order to make less dependent on military intervention, if we think that globalization does not entail massive concentrations of wealth and power and if we want to embed the values of the Enlightenment in that order then Europeans are going to have to start making some suggestions and offering the internationalists in the US some cover. If we rest on a critique of American imperialism we make it more difficult for political actors who want the US to avoid the pathologies of empire. This is a moment to cash in some capital in the Middle East or to broker a deal with Russia about the former soviet republics, or even to make a big effort in the Isreali/Palestinian conflict. We need to give the good guys a win, or the default position of exceptionalism backed up with preponderant military force will re-emerge. Let's help our friends.

Al Gore and European Social Democracy

Al Gore's speech envisioning a totally transformed US energy system crystallizes the challenge posed by US politics to European progressives. In the US politics really matter and the area of contingent decision-making is so open, that the speech cannot be rejected as airy utopianism but has at least some chance of structuring policy. Given that the US sets the terms of much of international life such a transformation in the domestic US political economy would have enormous consequences for everyone else. So this call to collective action to address a common problem should be embraced. The devil, as always, is in the detail. Gore's speech was framed within a very simple model of the American national interest. This is perfectly understandable as that is the constituency he is trying to move, but it is a premonition of how this debate and the political movement it mobilises is likely to go. Europe, among others, will again be in the position of a client, reacting to the changes in the imperial centre, but not shaping the future. The current spate of Europeans gazing adoringly through the window at the Barack Obama phenomenon is a good illustration of this tendency. The real frustration at the Gore speech is that for all practical purposes Europe is far in advance of the US in adapting itself to a post-carbon future, but this is invisible. Gore's move was to promise that American national greatness will be amplified by a national movement to a post-carbon society.  He has made up his mind about what will work to effect change, and that is American nationalism.

Complaining about American nationalism would not be an adequate response to this disappointing frame for such an important movement, but that has become the default position for the European left. If European progressives want to have weight in the solution of international problems then we are going to have to come up with an international vision, and in particular with a progressive vision for the Atlantic. Gore can't cite the positive elements of Europe because they are framed in terms of the European social contract, and while this is the common ground for the European centre-left it is completely inadequate as a context or vision for a cosmopolitan response to international challenges. As so often the fundamental problem is political; without a European vision that does not reduce to a defense of the welfare state or an ambition to limit American power, the European left cannot act politically.  The fault lies not in our cousins, but in ourselves.

With Friends Like These

Truly depressing opinion piece by Roger Cohen in the New York Times today (link here http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/opinion/19cohen.html?_r=1&oref=slogin ). Leaving aside Cohen's misapprehensions about Ireland, which I'm sure will be picked up elsewhere, what is most striking is the model of Europe he works with. For Cohen, and I assume quite a few liberal Atlanticists in the US, the elites who they see pursuing the European project are akin to the Federalists in the early republic, wise legislators crafting a political machinery that will sustain the new entity. The Irish rejection, and my thanks to Jim Kloppenberg for this idea, is akin to some kind of anti-Federalist, conservative political fantasy, effectively irresponsible. Outside the halls of Sciences Po, the EUI or LSE (and not even on every hall there) this notion of Europe would be hard to find among Europeans. Instead the eighteenth-century analogy that would work best is between Jacobins and Enlightened Absolutists. Both are agreed on the extension of rights, the creation of more efficent political institutions and economic reform, but there are very different models at stake. The pro-Lisbon argument was that efficiency was neutral, the neo-Jacobin response was that anything that embedded legal despotism was a constitutive political decision. This was not a nationalist rejection of liberalism but a neo-Jacobin defence of the demos.
The depressing thing is that Cohen is an Atlanticist and no neo-conservative, but even to him the popular social democratic universalism that animates actual pro-European sentiment is invisible. The two most concrete expressions of European citizenship are the Socrates programme and the Form EU 101. The first allows undergraduates to spedn a year in another European university and the other transfers all your social rights to the country of reception. These experiences are and will be the real ground from which a debate on European citizenship will occur, because they create new kinds of rights and new kinds of experiences that are genuinely European rather than extensions or defences of the nation state and its political forms. The experience of the Great Republic will offer a wonderful point of contrast for that debate, but the kind of formalism that Cohen offers doesn't help at all.

Ireland and the Lisbon Vote

The bulk of the critical reaction to the Irish rejection of the Lisbon treaty falls into two camps, criticising the referendum process as inappropriate in addressing a complex reform measure or expressing frustration with the lack of attention to the actual issues in hand on the part of the Irish electorate. Fintan O'Toole's editorial in The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/14/ireland.eu) summarises both and then throws its hands up in despair at the inability of the people to recognise what it good for them. For all his despair though he underlines that the anti-treaty alliance was heterogeneous and held together by fear. What he does not do is ask what gave an opening to such an odd alliance. If the treaty had a strong political ideal mobilising it then fear would not have had such power.
If you are in favour of democracy as a form of political life and adhere to the ideal of a European Union neither legalism nor frustration is analytically sharp enough as a response to the loss; it needs to be analysed politically. It is easy to get distracted since there are so many interesting and important political elements to the vote. To take the American funding for Libertas as just one example, it is a clear sign that the policy positions of Condoleezza Rice and Robert Kagan, who see Europe as a long-term ally only if European Social Democracy can be undermined, is now guiding policy. Atlanticists of all colours have a new reality to deal with. Such tactical thinking, fascinating as it is, should not get in the way of a more profound critique of the pro-Lisbon case. If it really was such a good idea I find it hard to believe it would have been rejected.
The case for Lisbon was always hollow. It addresses problems in the structures and organisation of the expanded Union cleverly, but refuses to postulate a political vision for the Union. Pro-Union sentiment is animated by cosmopolitanism, but this moral ideal cannot respond to political problems about citizenship and rights. The Union is a fascinating experiment in confederation, it has built a substantial international rights jurisprudence that genuinely protects citizens and shapes the actions of states. It has the cultural and political resources from which a concrete vision of European citizenship could be generated. Instead we have relied on a fuzzy utilitarianism and this is not a compelling vision of a shared life to a community as politically-mobilised as Ireland. The vacuum that exists where an authentically political landscape should be found allows fear to govern decisions.
In the long run Ireland may have done the European Union a favour. The political base of the Union is too weak to carry the structures that have been built on it. We need to have the debate on shared visions of forms of life and the tragic choices between moral visions of the good life that constitutes modern politics. Postponing that debate by building a more efficient Union will ultimately destroy the entire project.