4 - Beyond exceptionalism in European studies

Summary

Political understanding, which Hannah Arendt defined as the attempt to make oneself at home in the world, has a foundational role for the health of democratic political orders. Being at home in the EU appears a far-fetched idea today. One reason, I argue, is that the EU has experienced multiple founding moments since 1952, reflecting contradictory and ambiguous impulses. Such tensions have not been fully faced even by the founders, hence their inability to explain them.

The field of European studies could do a better a job in helping EU citizens feel at home in the world by drawing from comparative politics and historical approaches. Comparing the EU with other large polities across time and space more systematically would show that setbacks, contradictory moves, and ambiguities are part of political development, and thus need not provoke the castigation of the European project, nor portend its imminent demise. In order to make my case, I need to provide a brief review of European constitutional history before I give a few examples of the comparative approach in this essay's third part.

Historical ambiguities

The 1958 Treaties of Rome establishing the European Economic Community (EEC) and Euratom are regarded as the founding documents of the European integration process. However, little notice is taken of the extent to which these treaties diverge from the principles of the first European Treaty on the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) ratified six years earlier. Robert Marjolin, the senior French negotiator of the Rome Treaties, stressed his agnosticism regarding the tension between intergovernmentalism and the so-called Community method, which prioritized shared European interests in the ECSC treaty. The European founders had not been quite as agnostic a few years before.

The 1950 Schuman Declaration proposed that French-German production of coal and steel be placed under a common High Authority, within the framework of an organization open to the participation of the other countries of Europe. On specific policy areas, the ECSC High Authority's decisions would “bind France and Germany and other member countries”. In the 1950s, ECSC member states, from France to Italy, were willing to limit their sovereignty in their national constitutions in favor of the Community in order to protect peace.