Institutions and inspirations: Europe's pressing needs

Citation

Bull, G. (1999), "Institutions and inspirations: Europe's pressing needs", European Business Review, Vol. 99 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.1999.05499fab.004

Institutions and inspirations: Europe's pressing needs

George Bull

Keywords European Union, Governance, National cultures, Politics, History

As well as giving his name to archetypes of the political schemers, Machiavelli, according to Professor Anthony Grafton (1998), "provided the core of the doctrines of 'reason of state' that became the basic political education of modern Europe". These doctrines were intended to help the ruler ensure the permanence and prosperity of the state. Among them was Machiavelli's insistence that when a new state was founded, the new ruler must confront the necessity of imposing new rules and ways, institutions and laws - nuovi ordini e modi - and must realise that "there is nothing more difficult to handle, more doubtful of success, and more dangerous to carry through than initiating changes in a state's constitution".

The makers of a new Europe, in Brussels and in the capitals of the European Union, need these Machiavellian insights. Another political thinker worth their attention is Ernest Renan, best known as the author of a controversial Life of Jesus. His prose was magnificent; his political views, like Machiavelli's, are now startingly topical.

Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? is the title of a little book, still in print, first published in 1869. The nation, Renan reflected (at a time when for Europe, in England and France at least, the nation had embodied the state for hundreds of years) could not be defined in terms of physical or social realities, geography, race, language, religion. Two elements were essential: the memory of a common past, of shared actions, of memorable deeds and works; the regular reaffirmation of a will to live together. The shared consciousness of past history must endure, Renan believed, but a nation must remember the glories and not the disgraces of the past. It was for the people to decide to what nation they belonged. So a nation's existence was relative and contingent.

After pointing out that ethnographic considerations were worthless for the definition of national unity ("truth to tell, there is no pure race") Renan, almost as an aside, remarked that the nation, though endowed with "a soul, a spiritual principle", was not eternal. Nations started and finished in Europe - the nations would probably be replaced by "La confédération européenne".

However far they may wish, publicly or privately, to travel along the road to a Confederation or Federation of Europe, political and other leaders in Europe must realise that changes already well under way in the institutions and laws of Europe's nation-states cry out for serious intellectual engagement and debate about the need and the ways by which, to retain the consent of the great majority of citizens and ensure the "regular reaffirmation of a will to live together".

"One change always leaves a toothing-stone for the next", Machiavelli wrote. Indeed, nothing in progression can rest on its original plan. To ensure the continuance of the "will to live together", where it still exists, as the relationships change in Europe between the nation and the community, so ever more urgent is the need to win acceptance for carefully and prudently prepared new rules and ways, institutions and laws. The UK is gradually realising its "relative and contingent nature" as a nation. Respect for, and an understanding of, the vital role of institutions have been remarkable for their absence in the UK for many years. The great publicly owned enterprise, the City of London, the long-established, world-renowned manufacturing companies, the trade union movement, the independent universities, the relatively uncorrupted and well-educated Civil Servants, the army regiments, the Church of England, the House of Lords et al., all have been, or are being, not altogther without plausible excuse, wrecked or almost casually refashioned by reformers spread across the Party system who often show scant awareness of the vital importance of strong and revered institutions in the fabric of a nation.

The direction in Europe may well be towards the development of a confederation of nations, assuming gradually the attributes of a state. In reaction to the fears this possibility promotes, there will be attempts to find an alternative to discredited nationalism through devolution in one form or another, most dangerously based on race or religion. Either way, as old institutions decline or experience metamorphosis (as through the commercialisation of sport) new institutions will have to be created and nurtured. Those who are desperate to retain the status quo - L'Europe des patries, for example - will also need nonetheless to devise new institutions or breathe new life into the old.

The idea of an unchanging, timeless East, whatever truth it contained, has been made obsolete by the spread of stern commercial values and technology. But there are still powerful psychological currents in the East, notably in Japan, that favour a return to ancient ways and customs. Correspondingly, in the West, despite the loss of faith there is still a general hope for constant renewal and reconstruction. Whether inspired by Europe's Greco-Roman legacy or Judaeo-Christian origins or a fusion of these, the yearning for a civilisation of perennial renewal still affects our history. It helped account for the Renaissance. It was evident most recently through the movement for European unity which began after 1945. This was fuelled by idealism, historical memory and pragmatic sense. But has it lost it bearings?

The great periods of renewal and creativity in European history were fed by both intellectual and spiritual appetite and achievement, from the rise of the Universities and the friars, to the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution. They were both earthly and visionary.

What has happened to the idealism of post-war Europe which largely through the Council of Europe sought to eradicate ultra-nationalistic prejudices? All the fervour seems with the nationalists, not with many who believe that Europe can create greater unity without losing its remarkable, iridescent diversity.

The lack of active idealism may be traced back to the Messina Conference, in 1955, when the European movement turned to economic rather than the then obstructed political routes to unity and in the 1957 Treaty of Rome agreed to the launch of the Economic Community in 1958. When the UK was admitted to the EC in 1973 the political and military potential of the group was further blocked; moreover, the British brought to the EC certainly the memory of a common past, but a past of bitterly disputed actions and memorable deeds from the Henrician Reformation to the Battle of Britain that helped justify the Gaullist belief that Britain's loyalties like its twentieth-century cultural attachments went to the west, the open seas, and the Atlantic and America rather than to the Continent of Europe.

Before evaluating and devising the institutions needed to ensure the permanence and prosperity of the state through processes of severe intellectual enquiry, analysis, reflection and debate in a Europe of equally unsettling centripetal and centrifugal forces, we need to re-invent the state. What sort and what size of state will be needed in Europe if Europe is to exert an influence in the world commensurate with its resources and consonant with its ideals? The challenge grows greater almost by the day, especially because of political fissures and economic failure in Russia and the brutalisation in the Balkans. In his magisterial and entertaining History of Europe after surveying great tracts of the rich diversity of Europe's past, Norman Davies warns us that "The old Europe ... has passed away ... The present 'Europe', a creature of the Cold War, is inadequate to its task. The moral and political vision of the Community's founding fathers has almost been forgotten."

Jean Monnet, I believe, towards the end of his life said that he wished he had formulated plans for an increasingly united Europe on cultural rather than economic lines. For a tangle of reasons contemporary Europe seems paradoxically to grow increasingly fragmented in its cultural practices and appreciations as it grows financially and industrially more integrated. When, as happens only too often nowadays, I hear crude disparagement of European identity by some fellow-Britons I groan inwardly at their apparent indifference to - perhaps ignorance of - the gloriously rich culture of Virgil and Dante and Milton and Goethe; of the classical orders, mediaeval foundations, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, of music and medicine, of architecture, sculpture and painting, of analytical and creative intelligence manifested in unique depth and variety in our shared European home since the fifth century BC.

In a useful if inelegant phrase, my friend the economist and journalist, Arthur Shoonfield, used to talk of trying "to grope for the shape of the future". The shape of our future Europe, as its nation states with, be it noted, the approbation of most outsiders, including the Americans and Japanese, pragmatically hand over to the authorities in Brussels or to fresh common institutions elsewhere co-ordinating roles for necessarily combined functions (as in the realms of foreign policy, defence, human rights), would be best appreciated and formed in cultural terms, I think. Young people across Europe, among many of whom there is a yearning for the elaboration and affirmation of a distinctly but not narrowly European culture, are like hungry sheep looking up and around and not, alas, being fed. There is among many middle-aged and old people a swelling chorus of partly nostalgic, partly prudent, pleading for more attention to be given to the Chestertonian ideals of smallness and local independencies in politics as in trade and industries. The nature of modern technology greatly encourages this. "Small is beautiful", "Passport to Pimlico", "Devolution", "Decentralisation". All the more reason to intensify our exploration of protean Europe's prolific culture. You could start with Renan's squib.

Reference

Grafton, A. (1998), "Introduction", in Bull, G. (trans.), The Prince, new ed., Penguin.