Jonathan Todd

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former French finance minister, argued that “on Saturday 15 February (2003), a new nation was born on the street. This new nation is the European nation”.  This conclusion was drawn, notes Timothy Garton Ash, “from the simultaneous demonstrations across Europe on 15 February 2003, protesting against the Bush administration’s advance to war with Iraq … That summer there (also) appeared in many European newspapers an appeal for ‘the rebirth of Europe’, co-signed by Jacques Derrida and Jurgen Habermas, two of the continent’s most famous living philosophers”.

“What Habermas argues with philosophical density”, Garton Ash went on to note, “and Strauss-Kahn with eloquent political hyperbole, is that Europe is different from the United States, that in these differences Europe, is on the whole, better than the United States, and that a European identity can and should be built upon these differences – or superiorities. Europe, in short, is the Not-America”, as the David Bowie below song almost goes.

However, a new book by Peter Baldwin provides plenty of quantitative evidence for ”the way in which the presumed chasm dividing the Atlantic is not, in fact, nearly as deep as opinion among the chattering classes and their mouthpieces believes”. So, to be European is to be Not-American, which is hardly a positive sense of identity and isn’t even one based in fact. Why does Europe seem more comfortable with a negative sense of identity? And what might a more positive sense involve?

Baldwin provides something of an answer to the first of these questions: “Europe’s various cultures are ones still steeped in the lore of national stereotypes and quite happy to wring whatever elixir can be had from them … Having a transatlantic whipping boy is convenient and serves politically useful purposes, especially if there is little else that you can agree on. The purveyors of anti-Americanism in Europe appear to have rediscovered the truism that nothing unites like a common enemy. And the Bush administration played into their hands by serving up caricatures by the spadeful. It will be interesting to see how the European pundits deal with Obama once he does something they do not like. While Bush could be portrayed as an ignorant cowboy, which of the available stereotypes will they dare lambast Obama with?”

It was clear when Obama visited Europe in March that European governments did not give him the help he came looking for on troops in Afghanistan and co-ordinated fiscal policy. Obama may have been the change that Europeans wanted to see in the world but Europeans still ask what America can do for them, not what they can do for Obama. This was an attitude that Charles Clarke touched upon in a lecture to the Fabian Society last night.

It seems odd and unsatisfactory that Europe should both free ride on the back of America and seeks to be Not-America. It is welcome, then, that Clarke’s lecture pointed towards the stuff of a more positive future and identity for Europe. In 5 policy areas – financial regulation; justice and crime; migration; climate change and energy security; peace and security – Clarke argued that the EU’s policy interventions could be improved. These improvements would, he argued, make it easier for pro-Europeans to make their case in the UK. These are improvements that will produce an EU with what Roger Liddle, in a question from the floor, described as output legitimacy – which, it is said, “ is satisfied when the Union delivers what people expect from it”. These outputs will not be gained, however, denying British citizens the associated benefits, if the UK were to follow Eurosceptic strategy of David Cameron, claimed Clarke.

This is a strategy that has been widely criticised across the EU and certainly, it seems odd – but so does the persistent coolness of British voters towards the EU – when the case for further EU co-operation was made so convincingly by Clarke in respect of each of his chosen policy areas. His focus upon output legitimacy reminded me of the thinking behind a pamphlet by Mark Leonard. Liddle queried, however, whether pro-Europeans should be making a “bigger argument” than this.

He seems to hanker after an account of the philosophical underpinnings of the European project in an era of continued globalisation. Pro-Europeans will wonder whether this approach or an approach based upon outcome legitimacy will bring them most joy in the UK – and, incidentally, Clarke seems to think that neither will gain much traction in this country until the “boil is lanced” and a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU is held and won – but the approach of Liddle seems more likely to lead to the stuff of a positive sense of Europe, at least. Somewhat similarly, Roger Casale, formerly Labour MP for Wimbledon, asked us to reflect upon the EU “not from inside but from outside”. He would seem to want us to consider what kind of world we would like to create and what role the EU might have in this. How might the EU, in other words, be the change that we want to see in the world?

I suspect that Clarke and Casale are approaching things from different ends of the same pro-EU telescope. Casale’s vantage point is the macro, global one, while Clarke’s is the micro, British street level upwards perspective. Both of their visions, however, are far more coloured, as the evolving realities of globalisation dictate, by the fusion of issues that were previously considered “domestic” and those that were once seen as “foreign” than a little-Englander view like Cameron’s would ever allow. The EU, I am sure, will be considered by both Clarke and Casale to be a key institution in terms of managing the globalising forces that drive these visions in a more humane and better way than can be the case at present.

However, Europeans will lack a real compass with which to address this task and a sense of identity that is more positive than being Not-America until it addresses the question posed by Casale. The EU’s history as a great liberating force in formerly fascist southern Europe and formerly communist central and eastern Europe should be a rich source of inspiration in tackling this question. This is the kind of answer – grounded in the Copenhagen criteria of institutions that guarantee democracy, the rule of law, human rights, the protection of minorities and a functioning market economy – that Mark Leonard put forward in Why Europe will run the 21st Century. It seems hard, nonetheless, to imagine that the prophecy of Leonard’s book will come true without some of the nuts and bolts policy revision that Clarke so well argued for - There certainly seems much scope for improvement in this respect as Wolfgang Münchau recently concluded that the EU, like a fish, is rotting from the head and Helmut Schmidt, the former German chancellor, laments that: ”The European Central Bank is the only institution in Europe that works well”.

These policy revisions may be undertaken a bit more speedily and efficiently if powered by the inspiring vision set out by Leonard – And it would be wonderful if in this vision Europe’s leaders can find more to agree upon than Baldwin notes they do at the moment. May be, then, I will know what it means to be European. It won’t be until this point that European cultures will really escape “the lore of national stereotypes” that Baldwin rightly argues they remain ”steeped in” and which Cameron is keen to give in to and which our present Not-America identity is more a symptom of than an escape from.