Strategic Narrative

English political theorist and former Labor Party MP David Marquand’s recently published The End of the West: the Once and Future Europe, comes at an opportune moment. The Greek financial crisis, U.S. jibes at NATO, and the suggestion by disgruntled British conservative party members that the UK quit the EU foretells a continental reckoning at hand.

Marquand’s thesis is that changing global circumstances press into relief both unresolved ambiguities that now must be resolved if the European Union is to continue as a viable institution. The creators of the European Community were eager to forge the organization, and to feel they were beginning to put the outrages of hyper-nationalism, in Nazism and fascism, and the ethnic hatreds exemplified by the Holocaust behind them. These terrible events stood in sharp contrast to the modern Western self-ideal: rational, egalitarian, and humanist, rather than racially minded, and the European Community was a way to return Europe to that better model of itself.

As a result of this fervor to move beyond the horrors of World War II, the founders of the European Community (later the European Union) never explored ambiguities regarding the implications of being “European.” These included complex issues of ethnic identity vis-à-vis national and European identity, the degree to which supranational governance would override the national sovereignty of member countries, and basic questions about geography—what are the territorial boundaries of Europe, and are they identical with some sort of defining quality of Europeanness? Continue reading