Abstract
Asked by The Guardian (14 January 1997) to nominate a book which changed his life, Anthony Giddens volunteered instead Max Weber’s 1918 lecture ‘Politics as a Vocation’. The complementary ‘Science as a Vocation’ lecture is equally famous. Together they suggest that it is hard for any one person to succeed at both science and politics because whist science requires openness, a reason shot through with scepticism and inconclusiveness until evidence permits otherwise, politics demands closure, conviction and, where circumstances dictate, a decisiveness unwarranted by evidence. Notwithstanding Weber’s strictures, Giddens has been treading a path from the academy to the political arena for the past two decades. Beyond Left and Right (1994), The Third Way (1998), and Over to You, Mr Brown (2007) have marked the way. Given this context, is Turbulent and Mighty Continent a worthwhile contribution to social science and is it effective politics?
In a speech in Zurich in September 1946 on post-war reconstruction, Winston Churchill declared that ‘We must build a kind of United States of Europe . . . in this turbulent and mighty continent’. ‘We’ did not include ‘we British’ with ‘our Commonwealth of Nations’ (p. 2). Giddens is, by contrast, an advocate of an ever closer and more successful European Union that includes Britain, but for that to happen, big changes to the current union are necessary. Political scientists have written innumerable books on the structure and workings of the union and its multi-level governance. Giddens ignores them. Instead, he starts from the proposition that there are three different EUs which do not intermesh properly. EU1 consists of the Commission which develops policy proposals, the Council that formally takes the decisions, and the Parliament. Each has its own president. EU1 runs Europe de jure. EU2 is about how things really work, especially in crises. Currently, this often amounts to what the Troika of Angela Merkel and the heads of the European Central Bank and the IMF commit to. Then there is paper Europe which consists of the plans and roadmaps drawn up by the Commission and other EU agencies often in detachment from effective means of implementation. Giddens argues that the euro crisis has made the fundamental reform of the EU even more imperative. Establishment of a currency union succeeded in enhancing interdependence but unaccompanied by banking and fiscal unions it was also irresponsible. The euro crisis has made Europe a ‘community of fate’ insofar as citizens and leaders across Europe have woken up to realities of interdependence from which there is no simple escape.
Giddens insists that the EU can no longer ignore its lack of both democracy and effective leadership. It will have to move towards direct election of a president of a federal union of states and a collective subscription to mutuality within the Eurozone that includes Germany – or risk disintegration. Alongside this fundamental argument, there are analyses of the European economy, social model, and migration patterns that revise and update themes long familiar in Giddens’ writings: criticism of market fundamentalism, support for positive welfare and the social investment state, and endorsement of pluralism and cosmopolitanism. There is also a chapter on climate change and European energy security that calls to mind The Politics of Climate Change (2009) and another on European defence. New concepts include flexicurity (flexibility with security) and the cosmopolitan imperative (‘the exigency of learning to live in a globalized world, where the intersection of divergent beliefs and ways of life becomes an everyday occurrence’; p. 122).
The best future for Britain in Giddens’ judgment lies in a reformed EU with the Eurozone at its heart. He does not consider the position and prospects of EU members not committed to adopting the Euro. He does allow that there is a ‘not unattractive’ scenario in which Britain could survive and prosper outside the EU but it would be diminished in world terms – perhaps a sort of European Canada (p. 53).
Giddens argues with a passion and panache fortified by extensive use of researches, reports, statistics and documents. His book is recognizably that of a social scientist, but will it have the political impact he seeks? I have my doubts. He may influence opinion in elevated circles across the EU, but there is no common public sphere throughout the union which Giddens can inform and influence and no practical way of putting one in place. Nor are there Eurocivics lessons in all schools with a syllabus Giddens might hope to shape. Not so much ‘over to you, Presidents 1, 2 and 3’, then, as over to a community of fate without the means to articulate a common purpose.