Understanding the Real Europe

Imagine for a moment what would happen if the European Union applied for membership in the European Union. Its application would be flatly rejected. Why? Because the European Union doesn’t live up to its own criteria of democracy, of Europeanness. As I have argued in these pages (“Democracy Beyond the Nation-State,” Winter 1999) and elsewhere, this paradox goes right to the heart of what’s wrong with the European Union. It isn’t European enough.

Europe has a novel and empirical reality that all its critics fundamentally skip over. The reason anti-Europeans can’t imagine a future for Europe is that they can’t imagine its present. They are trapped in the contradictions of EU member nations’ misunderstanding of themselves. And this false picture of Europe’s present is blocking its future development.

I think I can demonstrate that the Euroskeptics have it exactly backward. The solution to the EU’s problems is not more national realism. Rather, it is more Europe, more of the reality we are already experiencing-a cosmopolitan Europe. National categories of thought have created this impasse. National irrealism is Europe’s problem. I make my case with three theses.

1. The European Union is not a Christian club. As an empirical assertion this is so obvious it’s a wonder how the debate got started. To call Europe a Christian club is to talk as if “Londistan” did not exist-the capital city of Islam outside the Islamic world. To say the European Union is a Christian club is to elevate unreality into a theory, the propositions of which are radically wrong. The easiest example is the now ubiquitous idea that Europe is a great community of common descent.

Turkey is, of course, the looming question that has brought this long-buried discourse of origins out of hiding. People who want to keep the Turks out have suddenly discovered that the roots of Europe lie in its Christian heritage. Those who share our continent, but do not share this Christian heritage, are seen as Europe’s Other.

But this is to take the idea of an ethnic nation-that you have an identity you get from your parents, which can’t be learned or unlearned-and apply it at the level of Europe. It conceives national and cultural identities as so inherently and mutually exclusive that you can’t have two of them in the same logical space.

This is not only empirically wrong, it is totally at odds with the idea of Europe. If identities are mutually exclusive, Europe is an impossible project. The whole idea of the EU was based on the idea that one could be German and French or British and German at the same time.

Dangerous traces of this exclusivist idea exist even in the seemingly benign idea of cultural “dialogue.” The picture normally evoked by dialogue is of two separate entities, “Islam” and the “Wes...