Jan Zielonka: Europe Returns to Empire

Jan Zielonka is Professor of European Politics at the University of Oxford and author of Europe as Empire (Oxford University Press, 2006).

The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas called the first official proposal to create common economic governance for Eurozone countries “undemocratic and likely to stir up social resentments”. His speech, published in April in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, accused politicians of ceding power to the financial markets and allowing the EU to dictate the social and economic policies of sovereign countries. The financial markets were clearly unimpressed and continued to batter the euro and related economies.

French and German leaders took the idea of European economic governance a step further at their summit in August. This prompted Simon Heffer to announce the rise of the Fourth Reich in Europe in the Daily Mail: “Every spending department in every government in the Eurozone would have its policy made in the old capital of Prussia…Where Hitler failed by military means to conquer Europe, modern Germans are succeeding through trade and financial discipline. Welcome to the Fourth Reich.”

Comparing Habermas to Heffer is like comparing stones to monkeys, to borrow from Giovanni Sartori. One is sophisticated and cautious, the other crude and provocative. Yet both see the prospect of economic governance in Europe as the end of sovereign states, in the Eurozone at least, with serious implications for democracy and international order. They both see Europe returning to imperial politics with stronger actors controlling if not bullying weaker ones.

In this sense, they could be right...