Stefan Auer responds to the book reviews of his European Disunion. Democracy, Sovereignty and the Politics of Emergency.
This is a rejoinder that ends the RevDem book symposium. You can read three book reviews by Peter J. Verovšek, Gábor Halmai and Petr Agha.
I owe my reviewers a great deal of gratitude. I learned a lot from their close readings of my book, and their objections force me to clarify my positions further. They also strengthened my determination to continue debating the European project and its limitations. What I aim to do here is to address some of their concerns, well knowing that more is to be said and written about them (as I hope to do in a sequel of sorts to European Disunion, which Hurst kindly agreed to publish in 2025).
My book is irritating. Its critique of the European Union is grounded in political thoughts advanced by a thinker whose political choices I deplore: Carl Schmitt.
Yes, his ideas ‘were instrumental to horrible thoughts and deeds’, as Gabor Halmai put it. Clearly, Schmitt’s infamous defense of ‘the night of the long knives’, through which Hitler solidified his totalitarian rule, showed his appalling lack of political judgement. Schmitt was labelled a ‘crown jurist of the Third Reich’ for good reasons. But that doesn’t make the entirety of his scholarly output obsolete. Far from it. As one of his most prolific critics put it, ‘the political problems Schmitt raised transcend both his own answers and his own times’ (Müller 2003, 252). And no lesser proponent of liberal democracy than Jürgen Habermas thought it worthwhile to engage with Schmitt’s political thought, accepting that there is a kernel of truth in his concern about a moralizing approach to law and politics (Habermas 1996, 233). What’s good enough for Habermas is good enough for me. I am thus closer to Petr Agha’s view and am heartened by his support of my reliance on Schmitt.
European Disunion is a book about Democracy, Sovereignty and the Politics of Emergency (as the subheading stipulates). Schmitt wrote incisively about all these aspects a century ago, in turbulent times which seem increasingly relevant. Whether we label our current predicament a polycrisis (Adam Tooze), or permacrisis (Quinn Slobodian), there can be little doubt that old certainties and methodological assumptions have been challenged.
The European Union, which we currently have, was constructed for a world that no longer exists. It was a world in which economic interdependence would secure peace, prosperity, and political stability; a world in which boundaries of nation-states no longer seemed to matter; and a world in which the wars of territorial conquest were largely consigned to the dustbin of history.
The 1989 collapse of communism, marking the end of the Cold War, was meant to make it possible to live the dream of a post-national and post-sovereign Europe. Yet such a Europe, I argue in the book, is not only impossible, it is undesirable, for such a Europe would also be post-political and therefore no longer democratic.
As Halmai astutely observes, one of the concerns that drew me to Schmitt (as well as Arendt and Immanuel Kant) is his understanding of the threat of technocracy. I was not alone. It is worth remembering that thinkers as different as Hannah Arendt, Hans Morgenthau and Dieter Grimm found inspiration in Schmitt’s work. They had good reasons not to acknowledge that influence. I thought that many years later I could own up to it. I have no intention of ‘rehabilitating’ Schmitt, rather I urge my readers to think ‘with Schmitt against Schmitt’ (Mouffe 1993, 2). In a similar way, I can admire the lucidity of Yoram Hazony’s excellent scholarly work on conservatism, without endorsing his conservative political choices, including his support for Viktor Orbán’s ‘illiberal democracy’, which Halmai rightly criticizes. Yet,
I believe that if we cannot embrace nationalism as a counterforce against imperialism, as Hazony does, there is little chance for liberal nationalism in Europe, and thus little chance for liberal democracy.
From a more progressive side of the political spectrum, Ivan Krastev made a similar argument:
Liberals may dream of defeating nationalism just as nationalism itself helped defeat communism. But that hope is fast turning into political tragedy – because while communism was a radical political experiment based on abolishing private property, nationalism – in one form or another – is an organic part of any democratic political scene. (Krastev 2018)
It is for liberals then to ensure that their version of nationalism prevails. Liberal nationalism is emphatically not compatible with the concept of a homogenous, racially defined Volksgemeinschaft, which underpinned Nazi rule and its völkisch legal order both in theory and practice, which again Halmai rightly criticizes. But while doing so, he presents a caricature of Schmitt’s constitutional theory, and even more so of the key arguments advanced in my book. (In fact, at times I wondered whether most of Halmai’s incisive critique is directed against Schmitt, rather than me). As I discussed in my book, Schmitt’s conception of demos articulated in his 1928 Constitutional Theory should not be reduced to the ideal of ethnic, or racial purity, as he explicitly lists a number of elements, which can bring about and sustain political unity, including ‘common political goals and hopes’ (cited in Auer 2022, 46) — an ideal that’s compatible with Habermas’ conception of ‘constitutional patriotism’, Angela Merkel’s desire to bring about a Europe ‘capable of great things’ (Ibid), or Emmanuel Macron’s advocacy of a ‘sovereign Europe’.
This takes me to the second major criticism raised in this symposium, Peter Verovšek’s all too understandable objection to my use of Arendt as a proponent of liberal nationalism. Petr Agha echoes Verovšek’s concern, urging us to ‘exercise great caution when regarding nation-states as the main center of legitimate political authority which are able to counterbalance the shortcomings of the European project’. To be sure, there is plentiful textual evidence to challenge my reading of Arendt on nationalism, and yet there is more to this story, as Margaret Canovan convincingly argued a couple of decades ago. To do justice to Arendt’s political thinking it is vital to examine political developments, not just abstract ideals. As she put it, ‘events, past and present … are the true, the only reliable teachers of political scientists’ (Arendt 1958, 482).
In times of radical transformations of the kind Europe experienced over the last three decades, ‘every policy, theory, and forecast of future potentialities needs re-examination’.
This is what I call for, challenging those who are keen to hold on to their cherished, cosmopolitan convictions (including, perhaps, Halmai and Verovšek). Here too, Arendt has useful counterarguments. As my former teacher of political theory at the University of Cologne, the late Ernst Vollrath, argued:
What distinguishes her [Arendt’s] thinking from that of others is an uncommon degree of theoretical unprejudice. The prejudices of theory are less corrigible and far more dangerous than our personal penchants and antipathies. They block access to phenomena even more effectively than our idiosyncrasies, for bias within theory cannot be nullified by means of theory. Rather, such bias mimics objective validity while distorting the political realm. (Vollrath 1977, 161)
The dominant theoretical bias within EU studies is that the age of nation-states is over, and that in its attempt to overcome the constraints of national sovereignty, the Union represents a successful political experiment that prefigures a world that is yet to come, a world, in which nations and nationalisms no longer have much political salience. My book attempts to expose this view as a fallacy — a fallacy that is dangerous to democracy in Europe. With Margaret Canovan (1999), I believe that there is ‘an Arendtian case for the nation-state’, notwithstanding Arendt’s explicit hostility towards various aspects of nationalism. In fact, like Hazony, Arendt viewed nationalism and imperialism as opposites, contrasting ‘localized, limited and therefore predictable goals of national interest’ with those that are limitless in their ‘pursuit of power after power that could roam and lay waste the whole globe’ (Arendt 1973, xiii). In this account, the nation-state can serve as a fortress, protecting democracy against tribal, inward looking nationalism on the one hand and imperial excesses on the other. As Canovan surmised, Arendt ‘saw nation-states and their accompanying nationalism as barriers against proto-totalitarian forces’ (Canovan 1999, 106). This is related to the way, in which Arendt conceptualised political power as ‘an energy generated when people act in concert and dissipated when they cease to do so’ (Canovan 1999, 107).
The power of states thus depends on the support they enjoy by their citizens.
Whether we like it or not, the principle of nationality — however broadly defined — remains one of the most powerful sources of shared allegiance that can nurture and sustain a political community in a way that a commitment to abstract ideals of universal human rights cannot.
To make this point, Canovan cites Edmund Burke (just as Arendt did before her) and his conception of liberty not as an abstract principle, but ‘an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers’. In other words, nationals are being kept together not by certain in-born attributes, let alone race, but rather a shared inheritance, which they treasure and pass on their successors. ‘This is true even if our common inheritance is something of which we are ashamed: it is still our shame, not someone else’s’ (Canovan 1999, 108). And whether we like it or not, nationalist mobilisation has been deployed by both democratic and authoritarian nation-states. The US and China are powerful because ‘they can count on the support of the people for whom’ their states represent their heritage (Canovan 1999, 110). By contrast, Canovan noted,
The supra-national structures of the European Union … are weak not just for lack of institutions, but because very few people so far think of the EU as ‘our’ polity. The power that the EU does have is lent to it by its core of nation-states. (Canovan 1999, 110)
Clearly, EU institutions and its policies might enjoy more public support today than Canovan imagined possible a quarter of a century ago, but is anyone willing to die for Europe? The EU Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, praising Ukrainian sacrifices for Europe may well believe so, but I think she is mistaken. Ukrainians fight for freedom and national self-determination, the future of which they want to see safeguarded by Europe. Whether the EU will live up to these expectations is an open question. So far the European Union (alongside NATO and its key members such as the United States and the United Kingdom) has done enough to enable Ukrainians to defend themselves against the Russian aggression, but not enough to win.
At any rate, what the (relative) success of Ukrainians demonstrates is not the power of supranationalism, but of liberal nationalism (Fukuyama 2022). Conversely, Russia’s descent to Putin’s autocracy was made possible by the failure of Russian liberals to garner enough support for their more palatable and democratic alternative vision (Snegovaya, Kimmage, and McGlynn 2023). In contrast to Russia and Orban’s Hungary, Poland’s latest political developments offer some hope to those who believe that you can be both a liberal nationalist and a good European. It was noticeable that the leader of the liberal and pro-European opposition, Donald Tusk, sought to downplay his role as the former President of the EU Council. Instead he successfully reclaimed the nationalist card, winning the elections ‘with an appeal to true patriotic values rooted in democratic participation’ (Rubin 2023).
To be sure, democracy is not endangered merely by revisionist powers like Russia, and certainly not just by supranational political projects, like the European Union. As Verovšek argues, ‘the rise of international governance and the loss of democratic control is not just a problem in the EU’. It was globalisation, Verovšek observes, that ‘has robbed states of their capacity to act in the first place’. It might also be true that the EU is not ‘the primary cause of the state’s decreased capacity for action’. But it is a major contributor, making a bad situation worse. Both Europeanisation and globalization are man-made and thus could and should be constrained. If my call for a return to ‘a traditional political order based around popular sovereignty’ appears ‘quixotic’ (Verovšek), so be it. There is nothing fundamentally illegitimate about the question as to how much globalization and Europeanisation we need. To revive democracy in Europe, I argue, we need once again The European rescue of the nation-state (Milward 1992).
Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Cleveland, Ohio Meridian Books.
Arendt, Hannah. 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego: Harcourt.
Auer, Stefan. 2022. European Disunion: Democracy, Sovereignty and the Politics of Emergency. London / New York: Hurst / OUP.
Canovan, Margaret. 1999. “Is there an Arendtian case for the nation-state?” Contemporary Politics 5 (2): 103-119.
Fukuyama, Francis. 2022. “A Country of Their Own: Liberalism Needs the Nation.” Foreign Affairs 101 (3): 80-91
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Krastev, Ivan. 2018. “Central Europe is a lesson to liberals: don’t be anti-nationalist.” The Guardian, 11 July. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/11/central-europe-lesson-liberals-anti-nationalist-yugoslavia-poland-hungary.
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Rubin, Jennifer. 2023. “Poland offers hope for reclaiming democracy.” Washington Post, 19 October. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/19/democracy-poland-elections/.
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