8 - Building Trust

Summary

Social Capital

Member states share common political objectives. They are steered by analogous interests and policies. They operate at approximately the same economic level with a comparable standard of living.

Experience suggests that common values and a common history are useful elements to keep the integration together and even more so to deepen and strengthen it.

But at the end of the day mutual trust is what keeps the integration together.

The agonizing experience from two world wars and the Great Depression in the 1930s stimulated mutual trust among the six founding member states of the original European Union. It speaks mountains about the solidity of the construction and the idea of Europe that mutual trust continues to pull the enterprise together after fifty years, with twenty-seven instead of six member states.

The notion of social capital is often used to describe what keeps a nation state together. It is not a perfect comparison, but probably the nearest thing at hand.

Citizens and corporations act inside the nation state in accordance with unwritten rules — social capital — telling them what is right and what is wrong. Legislation codifies this social capital — common set of values, common behaviour. The stronger the social capital, the less cumbersome and less detailed the legislation needs to be — everyone knows how to behave. Legislation and the legal system are brought into action only in cases where this common behaviour is not respected and/or questions of interpretations arise. Trust between citizens and corporations make the daily functioning of society smooth, precisely because the common and accepted set of values is respected and adhered to.

In an international integration the same principle is valid. The more member states share a common set of values telling them how to behave vis-à-vis each other, the smoother the daily functioning of the integration becomes.

Most of the European nation states do have a common cultural background, which for many, goes back to the Roman Empire, which was succeeded by Christianity with the Roman Catholic Church1 as a force shaping a common cultural background for more than a thousand years. They united many European nations culturally until the Reformation. There may be discrepancies in identities, principles governing the legal system, forms of government, parliamentary traditions — the list is long. But all these discrepancies play out inside the same box; they are not fundamental in character.