The EU in search of its people

From an everyday conception of crisis to an analytical one

In everyday life, crisis equals social disorder. Social disorder is upsetting, mobilizing emotions, such as sentiments of desire for a return to the past of a stable social order. This everyday notion indicates the normal reaction of people to crisis. And if we are interested in nothing but popular reactions to crisis, such as measured attitudes and emotions of people, we will in fact not see more than upsets and the perception of bad news by people. A crisis certainly has effects on individuals; but it also has effects transcending the effects on individuals. A crisis can change social relations and collective sentiments.

Crisis is more than the discourse about it: it is a social process, the beginning of which and the outcome of which come as a surprise to people. People experience their world spontaneously; they do not see the tipping points in the evolution of a society. Only by relating an external ‘objectifying’ perspective to the discourse about crisis can the causality in the actual making of Europe be deciphered. Social relations change as a result of pressures from markets and states – they make some people richer, some poorer, some powerless, others more powerful. They produce shifts in power relations and inequality which bring about critical situations that force people to make sense of this situation. Normally, the experience of powerlessness and inequality produces meanings framed in terms of everyday private suffering and deception. Sometimes, interpretations arise that mobilize a critical discourse that fits the critical situation. ⁴ The idea of ‘fraternity/sorority’ among the people in Europe would be the case of an idea transforming the people in Europe from a bunch of people feeling exposed to neoliberal Europe into a ‘group’ through which expectations of reciprocity can flow. ⁵

Whose reciprocity?

The old idea of the plurality of nations as nations that equally recognize the other nations had, as historical experience has shown, its limits. Tolerance, implicit in this recognition idea, has rarely worked – war has been the dominant response to reciprocal recognition among nations.

The civilizing effect did not take place between nations; it succeeded more or less within nations. Its main promoter has been the modern welfare state, which, by taming capitalist markets, created social relations in which reciprocity among different groups was fostered by equalizing measures, the rich being forced to help the poor. Class compromise, the institutionalization of class conflict by turning classes into citizens (Marshall, 1950) shaped the semantics that circulated within nations and created a consensual map of meaning in the minds of people. A society emerged that kept the range of engagement for reciprocity within the limits of the nation, i.e. the society of the welfare state. Thus, the nation finally succeeded in becoming the ultimate reference for being a group in the making of the modern world.

Between nations, the state of nature continued. They were separated as equal nations; yet they lived together with an insufficient civilizing force built into their interrelations – they lacked strong moral constraints for their living together. This situation changed after the Great European Civil War: a European community emerged, which, while accepting the nation-state as its building block and even fostering the realization of the full nation-state before making it enter the Union, has been able to do away with war in Europe as a mode of relationship between nations. It derived its symbolic power from creating peace in Europe and added material power by producing a common market, in which men and goods could move freely. Yet it failed to realize its social basis – it did not break the idea that people are ‘in the last instance’ members of their national groups and only secondarily members of a European community.

This building of European integration upon nations as its social foundation produced an ambivalent effect: in the last instance, it blocked the making of a European society. A European society existed as a sum of people, but not as a people sharing an idea of themselves as a collective ‘we’. Attempts by social scientists to find and identify such a ‘we’ ended in an abstract universalism such as the fictive unity of the cosmopolitan peoples of Europe embedded in their nations. ⁶ European citizenship became an abstraction too: based on concrete group membership in a nation, the peoples in Europe were attributed a second mode of existence as Europeans. Europe is the sum of people deriving their commonality from an abstraction from national citizenship bonds: either towards a universalistic normative conception of general principles or towards an individualist conception of actorhood. The first idea remained a discursive event in Europe. The second became the social reality of Europe: the people in Europe as a sum of individuals, and European society as a statistical artifact.

Counting Europe: ‘die Vermessung Europas’

The statistical offices of the European Community have become the major instrument of making a European society. They do so by describing ‘real’ structures, such as structures of social inequality, mobility rates, demographic shifts, household composition, etc. This statistical measurement of Europe does not serve simply scientific curiosity. It is also more than just an information resource for policy-making. It is a construction produced through scientific self-observation. It becomes visible by statistical indicators such as welfare indicators, poverty indicators, environmental indicators, human rights indicators, etc. Given the implicit normative yardsticks of measurement, this counting of Europe helps to attribute legitimacy to the statistical construct such as the idea of the ‘normative power of Europe’ (Scheipers and Sicurelli, 2007).

The biggest problem for such an image, however, is the lack of a people who can assume the role of a European demos. This situation has been discussed widely as the lack of ‘democratic legitimacy’ of European institutions. This diagnosis falls short of pinpointing the causes. The cause is not a lack of the belief in the legitimacy of Europe; it is the lack of a people constituting a demos that can act against institutions (and markets). As long as European society is nothing but the sum of the people in Europe, there will not be a demos beyond the nation conceived as the only sovereign demos. ⁷

A second type of statistical constructions takes place via self-produced databases. The Eurobarometer data count bodies distributed in space and time across Europe, and then they count ideas linked to these bodies. Such measurements are guided by the idea that surveys will help to know more about the people and will generate knowledge which will trigger positive evaluations of Europe (Nissen, 2012). This makes data gathering in Europe into (as Bourdieu once said) an instrument of rational demagogy. The Eurobarometer turns out to be a mechanism to create a society out of counting people: it provides the illusion of a society. The famous results regarding a ‘European identity’ were taken from counting identifications with Europe relative to identifications with the nation (Bruter, 2005; Fuchs, 2011). The results were disappointing to those believing in the rationality of surveys as mechanisms of collective learning processes. These processes were expected by those knowing that people develop identifications with groups – and Europe never made it into a group to identify with. This has little to nothing to do with spatial extension or with the diversity of languages. Even the attempt to measure trust among the people in Europe did not produce any promising results (Delhey, 2007, 2012). Trust remains among ‘one’s people’, i.e. within nations, and trust in Europe should be a question that is better not to ask.

The hope in publishing such data and producing policies based upon such data was that this would trigger ‘European integration’. Yet good news from statistical offices decline in times of crisis. Identifications go down, inequalities rise, unemployment rates rise, and people start to be concerned with the well-being of their own group. The scientific lenses to measure the effects of European integration provide bad news in times of crisis. The paradoxical effect of the statistical construction of a European society is that a society in Europe is hard to see. The crisis of Europe corroborates this image: the only social container that works above individual interest is the bond generated and reproduced by the nation, by belonging to a national (or sometimes even subnational) group (Cram, 2009). The rest is ‘banal Europeanism’.

Thus, the notion of a European society identified with the sum of the people living there is in crisis – and it should have been clear that the crisis of Europe points to a deficit in social connection beyond the nation. This offers two outcomes: (1) regression to the past or (2) rupture with the past. Rupture is an opportunity to rectify the mode of the ‘Vergesellschaftung’ of Europe. It brings to the fore structural contradictions and related latent conflicts. Europe emerges as a contested social space in which people discover what they have in common and what they would like to have in common and what they do not want in common. European integration from above is interrupted and European integration from below opens ways to construct a different society for and in Europe. Yet the ‘organizing idea’ still is in the air. Telling Europeans that they are cosmopolitans remains an intellectual construction. Telling a people that it is sovereign has been a powerful idea (Sewell, Jr., 1996). Who will tell the peoples in Europe that they are one sovereign people? How can one circulate the idea of a sovereign people of Europe that transcends the national self-understanding of the peoples in Europe and makes one people, in Europe beyond the nation(s)? Or, in other words: makes a European demos.

The financial crisis triggering people-making in Europe

An alternative to the framework of society = sum of people is the one that is based on the assumption that commonality is not a given in a people: Such deconstruction forces us to understand the process of the permanent construction of commonality without a finalité built into it. As has been argued above, the statistical distribution of properties among this people makes patterns of power and inequality visible. But statistical constructions do not act; they do not exhibit social bonds, they do not define boundaries, and they do not have an idea of themselves.

Some elements of an alternative model of ‘Vergesellschaftung’ without a natural finalité have been developed out of an idea by Hirschman (Hirschman 1970). This idea departs from a simple model of the social organization of social relations. Organizations are structured by events of exit, voice and loyalty. This is not simply a device for ordering observations, but it allows ‘the social in the making’ to be observed, which defies naturalizing assumptions.

Voice focuses the emergence of conflicting claims about what the people in Europe should do together. Exit refers to the issue of leaving Europe by emigrating from it (including ‘psychic emigration’). Loyalty is what is left when the voices of those being present can be coordinated.

In Hirschman’s account, a naturalist assumption regarding social relations has survived: people are supposed to already be there. In his model, they either go (exit) or stay (loyalty) or make noise (voice). But before that, they have to enter (Fossum, 2012). In the model of the nation-state, this issue was downplayed by assuming that people live in a territory that is theirs. But entry was permanently contested, causing wars and displacing groups in the name of the natural unity of the people. Globalization has added another break with this assumption: emigration (i.e. exit) was complemented by immigration, legal and illegal, thus producing a space with people that continued to destroy the illusion of a natural people living in ‘its’ territory. Thus, entry has to be added to the triad of exit, voice and loyalty.

The concepts of entry and exit make the idea of a natural people of Europe obsolete. The people of Europe increasingly come and go; Europe is involved in permanent ‘people-making’. The boundaries of the people separating Europeans from non-Europeans are in principle not fixed, which is the opposite of the telos of national boundary-making: to find (better: to define) final boundaries for a people.

The concepts of voice and loyalty describe complementary mechanisms of structuring the social relations within the spatial boundaries at a given point in time. Voice is a mechanism of addressing others, thus establishing social relations based on communicating difference. Finally, loyalty is the outcome of coordinating voices, a temporary consensus that a people shares. Loyalty creates a sense of belonging, a sense of identity which provides the ground for further voicing.

The making of loyalty is the decisive moment in the process of the self-organization of a society. Hirschman’s analytical model allows assumptions about ‘normal’ or even ‘natural modes of the existence of societies (such as the nation-state) to be rectified and opens the empirical eye to the temporary status of the being of a society. It adds the shifting third to the state and the market, which are praised as the great inventions of modern society. This third, initially praised as the bürgerliche Gesellschaft, later as civil society, however, ended in the fusion of the social either with the state or with the market: It made society either into a sum of voters or a sum of consumers, in short, into a sum of individuals becoming clients of the state and the market. Thus, the sum of the people in Europe can be seen via this analytical grid as a deficient mode of the social – raising the issue of the people as a group in the making.

More than the sum of individuals: people-making in Europe

Using Hirschman’s analytical model, a society can be analyzed from a perspective that sees more than just a sum of its people. The first element, entry, is particularly interesting regarding Europe, since it has to do with the issue of inclusion into a European society. The entry of national societies into Europe is contingent upon the fulfilment of certain requirements regarding systemic parameters and some general universalistic standards. The inhabitants of Europe are defined as the citizens living in its member states – they enter European society as members of a nation-state. One cannot be European outside national citizenship. All this makes a European society an open territorial space with flexible boundaries that keeps intact national societies with their specific national power structures and class relations. The entry mechanism has left intact the mode of social integration of national societies.

Migrants pose a challenge to this European entity since they form groups across national frontiers and often develop life worlds different from the group of origin. Therefore, the analytical eye should focus on the effect of group building that takes place within nations as well as across nations, processes that can be subsumed under the heading of ‘transnationalization’. ⁸ Entry is also a mechanism for generating transnational groups.

To sum up: the entry conditions change social relations, yet the meaning attached to them is still strongly tied to the image of being primarily a member of a national group. A crisis provides the situation in which such emerging transnational structures of social relations present the channels for meanings that transcend national and ethnic boundary markers.

Exiting the Union is a formal opportunity for member states. Threatening partial or full exit is a way of bargaining in order to maximize (mostly national) group interest. Exit then becomes a struggle about boundaries – it forces those involved to define the boundaries of the overarching group. It becomes a battle over being in Europe or outside Europe. In attributing to each other the role of the villain, these groups are caught up into a performative bond: they share the narrative in which the roles of the good heroes and the bad villains are reciprocally contested.

Threatening with exit is a practice that raises strong emotional reactions about the ‘we’ that is questioned and the ‘we’ that is sought. Right-wing populism and left-wing populism propose exit options that look for replacements for the ‘monster’ Europe. Subsumed under the rubric of ‘Euroscepticism’, a series of ideas has spread from the left to the right looking for the national past as a better alternative to the European Union. Those who intend to stay make these populists the villains that are to be kicked out of Europe. The more exit threats by populists there are, the stronger the perception of non-indifference towards Europe becomes. And those exiting have to provide a substitute: the return to local, ethnic or national ties. Exit thus fosters the sense of a ‘we’ of the nationals opposed to a ‘we’ of Europeans. Exit is a mechanism which puts the meaning of boundaries on the table. It is a mechanism for defining what is to be excluded, what is inside the boundary and what is outside. ⁹

To sum up: exit threats change social relations among the groups involved as well as the social relations between an imagined higher-level group (Europe) and the lower-level groups (nations or ethnic communities). This ‘critical’ situation can be resolved in different ways. Adding external moments of crisis, i.e. crises that undermine the regulatory function of the state and the market, the structure of social relations between the groups can either regress to the situation of a state of nature between nations or it can transform the hierarchical relations of these groups to a central position in terms of transforming the social ties among these groups, providing a counter-power which re-embeds states and markets in social relations.

Voice is the third element in the structuring of social relations in a social space. Protest as the loudest form of voicing is increasingly playing an important role in the making of a European society. ¹⁰ Since the beginning of the financial crisis, protest addressing the European Union has generated transnational social relations that cross-cut national belonging. It is often a class-based protest, which makes visible the double option: either solidarity between social classes across Europe or class solidarity restricted to the national group.

European class relations are one venue for generating transnational social relations in Europe. An alternative to this focus on the distributional issue is to raise the issue of recognition. This identity-related venue has become a central concern within Europe since it equally fosters the competition of national sentiments, which again produces more intense social relations among national societies as well as the mobilization of sub-national sentiments that undermine national sentiments and create interregional social relations. What has appeared as secessionist activities in Europe (such as the voice of Scots, Catalans and others) turns into a mode of rearranging social relations between groups in Europe in terms of maximizing reciprocal recognition of particular groups. Voicing distributional and recognition issues in Europe raises the issue of the ‘we’ that is protesting, thus offering opportunities to redefine the group that constitutes the people of Europe.

To sum up: voice, fostered by external events such as the repercussions of the global financial crisis upon Europe, scales up the space of social relations towards more encompassing groups, and thus modifies the social relations between existing groups (national, sub-national, local) within the European Union. It also offers divergent meanings to make sense of this emerging entity that range from the return to a glorified national past (populism) to the idea of an inclusive Europe (cosmopolitanism). In the situation of a social crisis triggered by systemic dysfunctionalities, opportunities to ‘invent’ a European society increase.

The litmus test for identifying a society is finally the loyalty of the members of the group towards the group. As Hirschman argues, the probability of voice increases with the degree of loyalty (1970: 77). Or the other way around: the less voice, the lower the degree of loyalty. This gives a first hint about clarifying the conditions for constructing a European society out of the elements that the evolution of social relations in Europe has generated. But the outcome is still hard to see. There are emerging social relations, yet the ‘ideas’ (or the semantics) that flow through these relations and that would give meaning to these relations are still unclear. There are ideas that are produce contested identities, and there are ideas that produce mere indifference. The emerging group that is to become a European society is still unclear. On the contrary, this European society produces paradoxes that seem hard to resolve. The social crisis of Europe, triggered by financial dysfunctionalities and the bureaucratization of politics, is heading towards a new society, but in order to grasp the outcome that is still unclear, further analytical steps for the understanding of the dynamics of ‘people-making’ beyond the national container are needed.

The ‘third’ beyond state and market: people-making in Europe

It has been argued that the debate on the crisis in Europe is shaped by a conceptual lens which sees people as a statistically identified source to make governance and capitalism work. This is the idea of the people of Europe as the sum of individuals who are represented by political representatives and whose representatives listen (more or less) to what those represented feel and say, or a sum of clients who buy from market actors who in turn orient their action towards consumer preferences. This world of subjects and consumers dominates the conceptual scheme – yet even this abstract world does not escape the world of meaningful social relations. These worlds of voters and consumers need a semantic representation that makes them appear legitimate and good. Voters are represented as the incarnation of the democratic will of the people. This is the idea of a sovereign people against the state. Consumers are represented as autonomous entities with the freedom of choice. This is built into the idea of the market as the mechanism that best serves the realization of the individual preferences of free people.

The normative content carried in these semantic representations of the people as voters and as consumers moves between the two ends of the semantic universe: sometimes more towards the voters protected by the (welfare) state, sometimes more towards the consumers in a (neoliberal) world of freedom from the state. Historically speaking, we observe shifting relations between the two, sometimes seeing democracy, sometimes seeing the market as the normative force providing the ideological legitimation of the processes going on. With state and market dominating the perception of social reality, the social disappears behind an ideology that does away with the social: the ideology of individualization which provides the semantic space for the end of the social.

This makes clear that the crisis of Europe is more than a crisis of its state–market configuration. The crisis of Europe makes visible that there is no coherent meaningful organization of social relations that connect the people in Europe, which is saying that there is no European society. And it makes visible that there is at the same time a space for a meaningful organization of such relations. The crisis triggered by the failures of the state–market configuration that has developed in Europe in the last two decades points to possibilities of repair: there are niches where social relations are linked with meanings that oppose the dominant discourse of a neoliberal Europe. There are points indicating an emerging capacity of collective action and its related capacity of critique. But where do we find such capacities linking (critical) action and (critical) meaning in the ongoing processes of transnationalization of social relations in Europe? An alternative container to the national container for such a self-governing people is not in sight. To replace the national demos by a transnational demos therefore runs into the problem of building the ship while sailing on the sea.

The social relations for such self-governance of the people in Europe do exist – there is a demos on paper as data on the increasing interconnectedness of the people in Europe show. But there is no demos capable of action and critique. The explanation is simple: there are no ideas that flow through these emerging social relations that could provide the sense of togetherness of a highly diverse people. The discovery of such ideas will no longer be – as in the case of nation-building – the result of intellectual efforts to discover some hidden roots in a people. The making of the new demos is not only transnational, but also postnational – to be situated in a web of social relations in which postnational semantics will shape the capacity of action and critique. The question finally is: what is the substance of the postnational semantics (the semantic container) that binds people in an emerging European society to each other?

Between renationalization and cosmopolitanism: identity politics in Europe

The model of the nineteenth century, when an intellectual avant-garde detected in a common past or experience the hidden meaning shared by a group of people, no longer works. There is nothing to detect in the peoples of Europe which is equivalent to such a hidden calling of a people. Such naturalistic identity construction has been extremely successful in the last two centuries when national identities were invented all over the world. National identities became the dominant frame of reference for the social identities of individuals. ¹¹ The national frames of reference for social identities lost their exclusive grip on the people: national identities are ‘transnationalizing’, meaning that national identities are losing the primacy and exclusiveness for the social identity that people develop in the course of their life.

Such shifts in collective identity frames indicate ruptures in ongoing social processes – they come to the fore in times of crisis. They indicate the end of a given order while provoking the experimentation with alternative frames, constituting groups in which people redefine or reconstruct their social identities. Giving up collective identities is an often traumatic and convulsive event – national identities are defended in a situation where social identities have already given up the exclusive reference to the national collective identity frame. This is the case in crisis-ridden Europe. Social identities become variable, they cross-cut established groups, produce ‘hybrid’ social identities; they multiply particularly in urban areas where they produce local identities that no longer fit the dominant collective identity frame, which is still the national one. Yet national identities do not disappear. But collective identities and social identities are no longer in alignment – the persistence of national identities runs counter to the increasing diversity of social identities in Europe.

The crisis in Europe therefore indicates a situation for a potential rupture in the ongoing process of transnationalization of the collective identity of its people. The brute fact is that the transnationalization of social relations in Europe fosters imaginaries either of a return to national identities or a move towards the cosmopolitan collective identity frame. Both imaginaries intensify the crisis of Europe: Europe is entering the stage of identity politics in which established interests and their equilibration no longer contain the dynamics triggered by ruptures in collective identities.

The voices which give identity-generating meaning to Europe, as it is torn between renationalization and cosmopolitan utopia, cannot return to a natural consensus supporting the ontological nationalism of the last two centuries. The alternative is to call upon a cosmopolitan people in Europe which paves the way for another ontological world: the utopia of boundary-free people. In-between these two semantic options, Europe is left with the collective identity frame of a ‘sum of people’ developing a web of transnational social relations with flexible boundaries searching for something that makes it identifiable to them and to others. Europe in crisis raises the critical issue of a postnational identity providing a semantic container and reference for the pluralization of social identities in Europe.

The resolution of the present crisis of Europe does not consist of a better design for the management of the effects of global economic processes. It consists of making the national peoples in Europe co-exist in a meaningful network of transnational social relations. It is up to history when the rupture will take place, when the implosion of national identities and the search for a postnational identity of the national peoples in Europe will happen. There is no law telling us when the contradiction between the transnationalization of social relations in Europe and the reference to the nation as the exclusive reference for making sense of social relations among people will become so strong that it ‘must’ explode. But we can describe the increasing tensions that will accompany the construction of a postnational collective identity frame that fits the development of transnational social relations in Europe. ¹²

The crisis of Europe increases the visibility of the tensions between national sentiments and transnational connectedness. These tensions are perceived by some people as a threat, as a dangerous event provoked by villains outside one’s own nation. They are perceived by others as an opportunity to experiment with the options of postnational people-making in Europe. This situation can be read as alternative paths for the evolution of Europe: one is continuing the primacy of a nationally conceived demos; the other is the path of developing a Europe based on a demos beyond nationally defined people, i.e. the path towards postnational identity constructions in Europe.

Here is an interesting proposal to think about a European demos: Europe conceived as a container for a plurality of ‘demoi’ (Van Parijs, 1998; Cheneval and Schimmelfennig, 2013). This option leaves intact the primacy of national bonds. Conceiving the European demos as the sum of national demoi, however, runs up against two irresolvable paradoxes.

The first paradox is that the principle of all-subjected and the principle of all-affected (Näsström, 2011) no longer overlap – they are increasingly decoupled. Decisions made by European institutions are based on the ‘principle of all-affected’, but the demoi in Europe are based on the reciprocally exclusive ‘principle of all-subjected’. These two principles no longer fit. The social crisis of Europe points out this lack of fit: the more the principle of all-affected is called for, the less the principle of all-subjected can be applied (and vice versa). As long the European demos is made up of the sum of national demoi claiming a foundational sovereignty vis-à-vis the European Union, the coherence between the principle of all-affected and the principle of all-subjected no longer works.

This incompatibility has become increasingly clear in the reactions of ‘the people’ to the crisis of Europe. People are affected in different ways by the repair of systemic dysfunctionalities. Some nations are more affected by the systemic crisis (such as the increase in the North–South difference in Europe), others less. The people in Europe are equal citizens of Europe, yet they have quite different stakes in Europe. Some demoi protest; others remain silent. This makes visible the illusions linked to the idea of a European demos as the sum of demoi in Europe.

The second paradox is the inherent contradiction in European boundary construction. In a demos-like entity such as the nation in the nation-state, boundaries can be easily drawn. We then ‘objectively’ know who belongs to the nation = nation-state and who doesn’t. Yet exactly this objective of knowing the boundary of Europe does not work. Europe has been enlarged and is enlarging, and there is no telos to this enlargement process since we do not know where the natural Europeans end. Some people have become Europeans that many do not accept as their fellow Europeans (see the debate on the Bulgarians and Romanians making use of their right of free movement in Europe). In the course of the crisis, the feeling is growing that some should leave the Union since they are not really Europeans. Boundary issues come up constantly, contesting the rights that some people of Europe have in Europe. Given such debates on who is part of us and who isn’t explains the backlash of national boundaries claiming the nation as the exclusive container for solidarity and legitimacy of being European together with the other Europeans. The second paradox of the idea of Europe as the sum of demoi is clear: the unity of the people in Europe cannot be grounded on quasi-natural boundaries. National sentiments do not provide the cement of a European demos. There is no container defining the boundaries of a European ‘we’.

Thus, there are two arguments against the idea of a Europe consisting of demoi: a normative argument which points out the incompatibility of the two principles making a people into a demos; the other an empirical argument pointing out the fluidity of the boundaries of a European demos. Thus, we are confronted with an ‘impossible’ European demos. This impossible demos has produced voices that are heard in times of crisis. But these voices remain scattered. They sometimes refer to a common concern such as the environment or gender equality or other policy issues. But this is not sufficient to scale up such voices to an identitarian voice of the peoples in Europe. The crisis of Europe fosters even the deconstruction of some essentialist readings of the ‘identity’, seeing Europe as a quasi-natural result of its past. ¹³ The crisis fosters the communication of stories that say that Europeanness is an empty signifier.

The birth of a European demos out of the crisis of Europe

The construction of semantics filling this empty signifier requires the destruction of the identitarian meaning attached to the demoi in Europe. There is a mechanism which works in this direction: European demoi conceived as national communities of fate are increasingly disenchanted as communities of interest. Nations within the European Community no longer defend an idea of a ‘we’; they defend the interests of national groups. The social identities linked to national communities becoming interest groups within the European Community are then folklorized: the staging of the national community increasingly fills leisure times.

This fosters the re-construction of nations as communities of interest. Nations turn into a particular type of interest group, and as such they have to compete and co-exist with interest groups such as groups that have a stake in environmental problems or in transport or in genetic research. The outcome of this evolution is a plurality of public and private interest groups that cross-cut nations as interest groups. This is exactly what we observe in Europe as an outcome of the crisis. Europe is evolving towards a system of interest groups, which contains nations in the same way as it contains any kind of associations of people having some interest or interests in common. In this sense, Europe fosters the multiplication of groups which stand for group interests, in which the interest of a nation competes with groups interested in alleviating climate change or poverty or gender gaps. The citizens in Europe, by belonging to such groups, become stakeholders of interest groups. ¹⁴

In such a plurality of ‘stakeholder groups’ notions of national identity are turned into functional assets of staging interests. This has characterized the normal times of Europe. The times of crisis interrupt this smooth transformation. External dysfunctionalities (for which, with more or less empirical support, capitalists, bankers or neoliberal policy-makers are made responsible) trigger a social crisis which makes this latent issue a manifest one. It provokes the question whether there is some more meaning to Europe than being a club of interest groups. It asks for some kind of normative upgrading of stakeholder citizenship. The idea of cosmopolitan citizenship would be such an upgrading – yet there is no world society that would provide the communicative space to circulate such an idea as a collective identity frame. Cosmopolitan citizenship does not provide the analytical leverage to think of a demos that is able to act in the name of all the disenchanted demoi in Europe. The democratic legitimacy in Europe hinges upon the conception of a demos that transcends the nation and that civilizes the evolving stakeholder citizenship in Europe.

The disenchantment of the national demoi and the emergence of many and cross-cutting interest groups in Europe call for a European demos that can create those reciprocal obligations that bind and constrain groups into a more encompassing ‘we’. There is a ‘normative hole’ in the image of a Europe of cross-cutting interest groups. This normative ‘hole’ is normally filled with references to universal values and general moral principles that are said to be constitutive of human social action. Filling the hole, undoing the emptiness of Europe is the aim of some intellectual constructions of normatively appealing worlds in Europe, such as the theory of a cosmopolitan Europe (Beck and Grande, 2007). ¹⁵ If these intellectual constructions remain semantic noise in the network of transnational relations, some other mechanism has to be identified that works towards filling this emptiness of the empty signifier of Europe mentioned above. How to fill the normative hole undermining people-making in Europe?

There has been a thesis implicit in the argument put forward above, namely, that we can observe a decoupling of the all-subjected principle and the all-affected principle. This mechanism that can be identified here is that a European demos emerges to the extent that it succeeds in re-establishing the fit between the all-subjected principle and the all-affected principle. Demoi in Europe take care of the substantive interests of the people, from nation-states through big corporations to civil society actors. Holding these groups together requires a realignment of the all-subjected principle and the all-affected principle.

As soon as decisions in Europe affect all Europeans equally, the control of these decisions can no longer be left to units that are smaller than those affected. This means that the sovereignty of the demos embodied in the nation no longer can be the legitimate basis for making decisions that affect all in Europe. What is at stake is the idea of the sovereignty of the demos from which the nation-state derives its legitimacy. The sovereignty of a European demos consists in bringing together again the all-subjected principle and the all-affected principle. This implies that the demoi in Europe accept the sovereignty of a demos that transcends the boundaries of the groups defined as nations.

The crisis of Europe will further dissolve the national ontology justifying the idea of national sovereignty despite regressions that are normal in such processes and foster the process of ‘becoming a stakeholder’ in Europe. The normative gap will become ever more obvious. But the problem is not re-inventing the normative framework of universal principles that has shaped the Western world and which is spreading across the globe and has become part of world culture (Meyer, 2010). Giving the people of Europe a constitution emphasizing again these universal normative commitments as they are laid down in the catalogues of human rights and the ultimate value of human dignity will not provide a way to resolve the identitarian problem of Europe that has become obvious in its crisis. Constitutions have been arrangements set against a traditional hierarchical order. The constitution of a European demos does not have to overcome the social order of estates – it has to overcome the natural state of nations living as sovereign entities side by side. It has to deconstruct sovereignty as something that is built into a nation and has to invent a different model for people living in transnational social relations.

The crisis of Europe triggered by a systemic crisis of its governance and market structures makes visible the increasing interconnectedness of the peoples in Europe. Transnational relations undermine the dominant national ontology and make visible an even more critical situation: there is no substitute for this national ontology. There is only becoming a stakeholder, kept under control by some minimal institutional procedures that cannot even compete in normative terms with the democratic institutions that nation-states have realized in Europe.

A people is therefore needed that can do better than national demoi and national democracies. Transnational relations and networks grow, yet the evolution of transnational relations is a crisis-ridden process fostered by insensitive governance and brutal markets. What kind of meaning can people involved increasingly in transnational relations detect in such critical situations? It is not abstract moral principles, but a sense of responsibility accompanying the application of cherished and collectively shared moral principles. It is the wish to tame Leviathan and Behemoth, of a state decoupled from the people and a market decoupled from the people and turning in the eyes of those subject to them into monsters.

How to tame the monsters? By re-appropriating the social space for developing the social bonds defining a group to which everybody can be equally subject and by which everybody can be equally affected. But somebody has to tell the people who this group is. Since there is no longer religious or intellectual authority, it can be only the people who tell this to themselves. They have to tell new stories of who ‘we’ are in Europe. These stories are stories on how solidarity emerges among groups of free and equal individuals. Such solidarity among groups is not a natural outcome of the principles of freedom and equality of individuals. The story of the Enlightenment no longer fills this need of imagining a people beyond being equal and free individuals bound together as national brothers and sisters. Such a ‘new’ story emerged when Marx criticized the blind spot of the Enlightenment story. It is the story of a solidary people capable of taming Leviathan and Behemoth. This story still is waiting in the wings of history. And the old gods lurk in the back, like the polytheistic gods that Max Weber already conjured up a century ago, who come back and block the chances that times of crisis offer.