The “acquis communautaire” has now reached 90,000 pages, i.e. the set of regulations produced by the European Unification process, constituting the most impressive “monument of bureaucratic expansion in human history”, to use Perry Anderson’s formulation, from book by Ever Closer Union. Europe in the West (“An Ever Closer Union? The West in Europe”) released in 2021 by Verso. Essentially a sequel to Anderson’s previous book on the history of the EU (The New Old World, Verso 2009), it borrows its title from the preamble of the Treaty of Rome (“Determined to lay the foundations of an ever closer union of the European peoples”), with the necessary addition of a question mark that summarizes all the contradictions and problems that pervade the “European edifice” today.
Based on the characteristic long articles he writes for the New Left Review and the London Review of Books, this particular book offers the possibility of a critical reflection on the major crises faced by the European Union in the previous decade, from the “Greek crisis” and the crisis of the euro, to Brexit and the confrontation with the pandemic, offering, in the final analysis, an assessment of the very crisis that permeates the European edifice. As a guide, he has books by authors who have dealt systematically with European things, mainly by Adam Tooze and Luuk van Middellaar.
The European “coups”
A history of the Union emerges from the book that is quite different from the “official” one. For example, he traces the way the history of the Union was marked by various “coups”, from the way already in 1963 and 1964 the European Court of Justice imposed the priority of European law over national legislation – perhaps the biggest institutional revolution in its history Union – although this was not expressly provided for in the founding treaty, until the very emergence of the European Council as the main decision-making body in the 1970s and the procedural coup – at the hands of the later corruption symbol Bettino Craxi – at the European Council in Milan in 1985, which paved the way for the Maastricht Treaty. Lest we forget, as Anderson points out, there was a period in the first half of the 2010s when one could hear officials in Berlin boasting that “we do regime change better than the Americans.”
In any case, the EU avoids making assessments, even of its recent past, to the same extent that it avoids having a really serious discussion about its future. It is enough to reflect on the systemic violence that unfolded against Greece in the period of the Memoranda, when an arrogant effort of “social engineering” unfolded on the part of European institutions that thought it could completely “reform” a country and a society that were treated roughly as ” delinquent”. Not to mention the crushing demands for exorbitant primary surpluses that were forgotten when the entire European Union was faced with the great recession due to the pandemic and the consequent need for a large increase in public spending. However, all of these reflect the problems created by the way the European Union and especially the architecture of the Eurozone summarize the real hegemony of financial capital and its logic.
The real reckoning
Anderson notes that there can hardly be a positive account of the European Union’s progress from Maastricht onwards if we talk about key parameters such as international peace, social solidarity and economic development. One could add the very fact that the EU could not prevent a G7 member country from leaving the Union, however difficult and problematic the relationship with Britain has been over the years. Brexit has shown that exit and rupture are within the bounds of the possible, albeit with much greater political and technical difficulties than those who envisioned it had calculated, but at the same time the deepest embarrassment of post-Brexit Britain also shows the difficulty of drawing strategy outside the European framework.
The developments that are subsequent to the writing of the book probably justify those who insist that the crisis of the European edifice is deepening. It is enough to consider that the timing of the war in Ukraine also marked the definitive failure of the EU to constitute what was supposed to be one of the main reasons for which the process of unification began: to prevent the European continent from becoming the territory of a yet another great war and the “ground zero” of a new world division.
The moral deficit
The revelation of what appears to be quite widespread corrupt practices reflects a moral deficit that is actually a political and democratic deficit. An association of states that is unable to produce programs and strategies that really change people’s lives and that largely just manages the demands of the big interests that through lobbying have colonized the European institutions is in the end much more vulnerable to endemic corruption.
