| Review of: | The Idea of a European Superstate: Public Justification and European Integration by Glyn Morgan |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Rainer Schmalz-Bruns |
| Reviewed in: | Constellations |
| Date accepted online: | 10/04/2008 |
| Published in print: | Volume 14, Issue 04, Pages 661-670 |
Book Reviews
Glyn Morgan has written a disputatious, audacious, highly intelligent and thought-provoking book that challenges the intellectual orientations and the mood of much of the academic literature on the European Union for what he regards as its main failure, i.e. its exclusive focus on the democratic deficit of the existing institutional architecture. This tendency prematurely forecloses a debate over the more substantial reasons that might give normative credit to the project of European integration as such and, connected to that, would also help to settle the essentially contested issue of which type of polity Europeans should strive for - a Europe of nation-states, a post-national and post-sovereign entity of a condominio-type or a sovereign European superstate (23). As far as this issue is concerned, Glyn Morgan is unmistakably clear in his conviction that much more than most people recognize can be said in favour of a unitary European state and that its conceptual rivals are, by the same token, much less desirable than is commonly believed (
This attempt of making things explicit and forcefully recommending the issue of European statehood to the more or less exclusive centre of attention of the academic debate more generally and normative political theory in particular also seems to be very much in line with recent theorizing for example in International Relations or in Political Theory and Philosophy, where the state has regained prominence by the sometimes dire consequences it shows with respect to the realization of some of the most important and commonly cherished public values such as liberty, equality, solidarity and security, which are endangered by either its absence (at the global level) or its failure (at the local level) or its erosion and fragmentation (at the national and regional level). Nonetheless, by this move Morgan not only (quite consciously and rightfully) challenges an important aspect of
These are reasons to suspect that Morgan's resolute attempt to break the (albeit noisy) silence around the issue of European statehood and provide a complex and intricate, very densely and straightforwardly argued basis for the justification of his claim for a European superstate will not find the uncontroversial support neither of his academic colleagues nor of the European citizens to whom it is finally directed. In fact, one may even wonder whether he himself is not completely right in admitting that "[...] this argument will not persuade everyone (or even anyone)" (
What may even worsen the prospects of his attempt is the fact that the change of the normative perspective on the EU polity is accompanied by a complementary change of the level of analysis from which justification shall be derived: As the subsequent realisation of this line of argumentation especially in chapters four and five reveal that, although the aim remains the justification of fundamental constitutional transformations (cf., for example, 38), Morgan wants to start justification from the level of (albeit structurally important) policies and policy analysis (cf. 164). Now, it is true that there exists an important functional link between a "relational" concept of policies (as exemplified in the chapter on "security" where security issues gain their normative significance from the relation in which they stand to public values such as individual autonomy or democratic self-determination: cf. 101-104) and the choice of a type of polity (i.e. political institutions and the institutional order as a whole should be able to meet and realise the structural demands that are connected to successful goal attainment at the policy level). Yet it remains at least an open question which degree policy-based arguments for a transformative polity change may even in principle meet the rather demanding requirements that are connected to what Morgan himself calls the type of a "transformative justification" (28-29) where a change in basic rules and in the boundaries, membership, and identity of a polity is involved. If the problem of the political debates over the European project is that "they suffer from a lack - or even minimal understanding of - the type of arguments that are relevant in thinking about this issue" (41) and if justification is expected to provide a solution to this filtering problem, then you do not only need to have a normative standard which can derive at least formal characteristics that must be met by any argument designed to serve a justificatory function, but you have to overcome the additional problem of problem sorting, i.e. the problem of disagreement about the type of justification needed in a specific situation and the problem of disagreement and even "genuine uncertainty" (29) about the current nature of the European Union. Against such a background it is hard to imagine how policy-based arguments can be conducive to this end. This is because this kind of argument typically involves all sorts of normative, empirical and analytical claims (mostly in combination) which in turn very often must be derived from a rather insecure, incomplete and rapidly changing knowledge. Thus, only in rare cases are you in a position to sort out some of these arguments for being simply false or weak, as Morgan's justificatory "requirement of sufficiency" would tell us (38).
Given these complications, what should make us believe in the merits of the move from procedure to substance or (democratic) legitimacy to justification when there are important justificatory thresholds that have to be overcome - thresholds that not only mark the challenge of a transformative justification, but also require that the justification should be "strong" (in the sense that "a policy, law or institutional arrangement [is justified] when it appeals to values, interests or normative principles which [...] require that policy, law or institutional arrangement": 39) or at least "specific" (in the sense that a policy, law or institutional arrangement effectively and efficiently protects the values, interests or institutional arrangements it appeals to: 39)? Morgan's answer to this question is basically threefold: One part of his argument is conceptual or methodological and states that "the EU cannot vindicate its own claims to 'polity legitimacy' without delegitimating its conceptual rivals" (22) - an argument which alludes to the impossibility of legitimising the polity in question as the adequate unit of legitimation by democratic means. While this argument rightly points to the fact that in transformative legitimation we have to anticipate the future will of the future members of a polity which is not unanimously willed by its constituent parts (a problem that might be overcome once we think of regime and polity transformation as a self-correcting democratic learning process), it underscores the problems of its conceptual rival. That is, justification is on the one hand open to the same sort of criticism, and on the other hand, in politics it cannot be thought of independently of legitimation, whether or not it initially is arrived at in a freestanding way. The second argument then is from the inconclusiveness of the standard of democracy with respect to the justificatory goal and reads as follows: "Democracy is a component of any modern, legitimate political system [...] and is a necessary requirement of political institutions, whether they are located at the local, national or European levels. Since
Now, in order to counter these series of possible objections to his project, Morgan rightly and self-consciously puts much emphasis on and spends much effort in the justification of his justificatory approach. And this is the main content of the first chapter which introduces and defends what he terms a "democratic standard of justification," comprising three fundamental requirements of publicity, accessibility and sufficiency" (33). The requirement of publicity then tries to specify the conditions of the reasonable acceptability of a reason for the European project (in his words "to identify a justification that people in Europe could accept" in contradistinction to the demand of "reasonable non-rejectability": 44). This corresponds to the normative dimension of justification (33). A public justification in this sense is one that an individual who embraces some basic values derived from essential presuppositions of social cooperation (including moral equality, personal security, personal and political liberty, and material prosperity: cf. 34) could accept. While this first requirement is obviously designed to establish the normativity of a hypothetical consensus beyond legitimation, the second requirement is mainly meant to make justification safe for democracy in that it filters out "a certain class of justificatory argument that cannot be grasped by people who lack training and expertise" (36). It may also be understood as a kind of compensation for bypassing the idea of democratic legitimacy and its procedural implications. The third requirement of "sufficiency" spells out what Morgan calls a "strong" (or at least "specific") justification for a European project which establishes a connection between a project (policy, law or institutional arrangement) and justifying basic values (p. 40) in the sense that it must be shown that these values require or are at least effectively and efficiently protected by a certain project (policy, law or institutional arrangement).
One way to evaluate his idea of justification is to self-reflectively apply the publicity requirement to the tripartite standard itself - and it would, as I tried to indicate, soon turn out that the presumption of its acceptability does not only rest on its relation to some of the basic values mentioned earlier, but to an important degree on a number of contestable assumptions concerning the account of the process, product and project of European integration given here. The conclusion would be that it might fail the test of publicity because Europeans might have at least equally good reasons to deny the assumptions on which the shift from legitimacy to justification is premised. It might also fail the test of sufficiency because the empirical evidence for the strong relation between the already mentioned basic values on the one hand and a policy (here: security) or an institutional arrangement (here: the European Superstate) on the other are at best scattered or weak or inconclusive. The other way would be to evaluate his approach by its results, and this is the way Morgan himself invites us to follow (43) in the subsequent chapters of the book. These later chapters first address the most prominent forms of euroscepticism and its intellectual foundations in sociological, conservative and liberal forms of nationalism (chapters 2 and 3). The remaining four chapters then first consider policy based arguments that might be advanced in the justification of the European project (chapters 4 and 5) and finally try to establish the justificatory link between the winning policy-candidate (i.e. security) and the choice of the institutional arrangement (chapters 6 and 7). Regarding the results of this exploration, not surprisingly nationality proves unable to pass the test of sufficiency because there is no sound empirical and historical evidence that nation building should not be possible in the future while it has been possible and successful in the past (55), and euroscepticism in its conservative brand does not stand the test of publicity (62-64) while in its social democratic variant fails the sufficiency requirement (66-68). This allows me in my concluding remarks to address only two questions which refer to his preference of security over welfare and his attempt to justify and build a European Superstate on a moving target such as the security issue.
Firstly, as regards the welfare issue, there are indeed a number of good reasons provided mainly by institutional approaches of welfare research that seem to support the conclusion Morgan derives from his discussion of Habermas's and Hayek's welfare based arguments for either a sovereignist (in the case of Hayek) or a postsovereignist (in the case of Habermas) answer to the question of the
And this is of course important because changing the policy base of justification might have seriously altered the subsequent choice of the adequate type of polity and thus severely affect his overall contention that "there is much more to be said in favour of a unitary European state [...] than most people recognise" (
Thus, Morgan's final choice of his preferred type of polity deserves our special attention for two reasons: His filtering out of alternative conceptions is very often based on a contestable description of the "