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.