Abstract
The topic of this paper is a retrospective of the history of literary discourse on Europe, from the Vienna Congress to the present. The Congress of Vienna was seen as a step back for European cooperation by contemporary authors like Saint-Simon, Schmidt-Phiseldek, Goerres and Mazzini. They understood that a constitution was the precondition for the future unity of a European federation. Later, new voices were heard in which the debate about a common constitution for Europe played a dominating role, and writings on Europe were published by Richard Graf Couldenhove-Kalergi, Heinrich Mann and Jules Romains. After WWII writers like Ernst Jünger and Reinhold Schneider pleaded for a continental constitution. After the common constitution was rejected in 2005, the debate on Europe gave way to other topics. Today, Robert Menasse believes the European crisis can be overcome by using regions (instead of nations) as the building blocks of a united Europe.
Regarding the status of European cooperation everything looked much more promising a quarter of a century ago. In 1990, the Yalta Agreement on the division of the continent was being revised. Central European countries were able to emancipate themselves from the Soviet Union, a political construction that imploded soon afterwards, and it seemed we were witnessing the continent’s reunification. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Central European and the Baltic states became members of the European Union. The EU was unable to prevent the war in Yugoslavia, but after it had ended it did a lot to integrate the former antagonists within its association. The European Union remained attractive since it seemed to guarantee prosperity, the protection of human rights and democratic rules, and a continuation of modernization through its promotion of science and culture. The cooperation and consultation between European countries was continually increasing. The introduction of a common currency; the growing influence both of the European Parliament and the European Council; the expanding legal standardization; the development of a European university system through the Bologna Process; the opportunity for European cities to be named a continental cultural metropolis for a year: all of these things contributed to the unification of Europe, even though each of these measures and developments were discussed as controversial in the media. In each of the member states the European flag, with its twelve stars, fluttered next to national flags on government buildings. If statistics (a sort of Euro-Barometer) existed about the number of essays that European writers published about post-national developments over time, one could probably see that the curve peaked in the 1990s.
This is history. The Euro-Barometer now would show temperatures far below freezing. In the new millennium the first backlash was the rejection of the European constitution. The second blow – more catastrophic than the first – was Brexit. Opposition to the EU in the United Kingdom had grown over the years. In June 2016 a majority of British voters decided to reject what it understood as an intolerable limitation of its national sovereignty. Since the UK was one of the three most important EU member states, alongside France and Germany, Brexit threatens the biggest defeat the EU has suffered so far. Fear is spreading that other countries might follow the British example. Whether the euro will be able to survive as a common currency is an open question. The economic crisis in Greece could start again at any time. Furthermore, it looks as if prosperity is guaranteed only to members of the upper classes, and the drifting apart of the poor and the rich is nearing the proportions of wealth inequality seen in the US. In some member states right-wing tendencies within the governments themselves are so strong that it is questionable whether the democratic rules prescribed by Brussels are even still intact. In addition, millions of refugees from the Near East and Africa are streaming into Europe. As a consequence, the EU is confronted with open and hidden resistance regarding the quota system it established to overcome this crisis. National borders are back and the Schengen Treaty agreements are constantly being broken. To add insult to injury, the so-called Islamic State is terrorizing not only parts of the Near East but also citizens in European capitals. These criminal activities provoke the radicalization of Western chauvinistic and xenophobic parties and groups. Neither do military conflicts between Ukraine and Russia contribute to harmony on the continent.
One cannot expect writers to come up with solutions for all these disturbing conflicts and developments. Over the centuries, the literary discourse on Europe has dealt with the central issues of the changing crisis situations, i.e. with the topic of European values. In relation to these political, economic and cultural tensions, one question must be dealt with: what are the fundamental values of European culture on which a constitution for Europe can be based? We will keep this question in mind when looking at the crisis situations of 1814 and 1919. These were moments in history when intellectual visions of a new beginning in Europe were rejected by the politicians in power. This article will re-examine these rejected plans, which were authored by intellectual historians and writers of fiction and utopian visions.
How is it possible to connect such different discourses? In part we can do so because literature and history have many things in common, including the aesthetic form of narration. In narratology, while some theoreticians have differentiated between the narrative modes in the two fields, others have shown how they conflate. For Aristotle (in Chapter 9 of the Poetics) the matter of the division of labour between the historiographer and the poet was easily decided: the historiographer relates ‘what has happened’ and the poet ‘what might happen’. In his eyes, literature dealt with problems of a more general and thus more significant nature, while the historian had to report about specific, and subsequently less important matters. Today the relationship between fiction and historiography poses a number of hermeneutic questions, and there is no modern Aristotle who might offer a simple and acceptable solution fitting for our time. Narration can be viewed as one of the primary tools of knowledge, and it determines the structure and aesthetic form in the presentation of a real or a fictional event: it makes the structure of both historical consciousness and fantasy tangible. Neither in historiographical nor in fictional narration are we dealing with a reproduction or duplication of events, but with a certain organization of actual or imaginary occurrences or experiences (see Lützeler, 2001).
The Congress of Vienna
To describe the Congress of Vienna as a peace congress would be a misnomer. The victorious powers, England, Prussia, Austria and Russia, soon fell out over the distribution of the spoils. It would not have taken much for the Congress to have ended with declarations of war instead of peace. The threat of war loomed as Prussia and Russia sought to incorporate Saxony and Poland into their respective states (see, for example, Lentz, 2014: 177–95; Duchhardt, 2013). It was Napoleon’s flight from Elba to Paris in early 1815 that brought unity to the negotiations. Suddenly a vocabulary of harmony emerged, designed to gloss over the opposing interests within the anti-Napoleonic front: talk was of the ‘balance of power’, ‘legitimacy’, ‘restoration’ and ‘solidarity’.
To start with the notion of the ‘balance of power’: when has a balance of power ever managed to guarantee peace? The more the great powers sought to assertively pursue their goals, the more complicated this arithmetic of balance became (Duchhardt, 1997). Since the sixteenth century, the idea of a ‘balance of power’ has been a popular concept: the idea was to ally with other states against any country that appeared to be striving for continental dominance. This was a situation that either contributed to maintaining the peace, or led to war. How, and at whose expense, was a balance created among the five powers, the Pentarchy, at the Congress of Vienna? In order to appear equally strong within the continental equilibrium, Russia drew large parts of Poland into its sphere of influence, and Austria annexed regions in northern Italy. Prussia received parts of Saxony and Poland. It also secured the provinces of the northern Rhine region and Westphalia, thus creating the preconditions for an expansion into the northern half of Germany. France did not forget the loss of the Rhineland. Twenty-five years later, in 1840, it was prepared to go to war with Prussia over it (Winkler, 2000: 86). Where did writers stand with regard to this conflict between the two countries? The great Victor Hugo, with his French-nationalist book Le Rhin (1842), claimed the Rhineland as part of France, ending his book with a political pamphlet that emphasized the Roman and Carolingian heritage of the region. The German-nationalist ‘Rheinlied’ (‘Rhine Song’) by Nikolaus Becker (1840) expressed the anti-French and pro-Prussian feelings of the Rhinelanders. Lyrics stating ‘Sie sollen ihn nicht haben, den freien, deutschen Rhein’ (‘they should not have it, the free German Rhine’) were welcomed by the King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who ruled over the region, and ‘Rheinlied’ became the most popular patriotic song in nineteenth-century Germany. France got the message and shied away from another war over this region. Ultimately, however, the exchange of blows between the two states was only postponed by three decades.
Balance of power had been established in Vienna at the cost of popular self-determination, and therefore contained too much explosive material to be able to secure peace on the continent. The national movements inscribed autonomy and popular sovereignty on their banners. These principles provided the tinder for a series of conflicts and wars in Poland, northern Italy, northern Germany and Austria’s non-German-speaking crown lands (Gall, 1997). In the long run, the dogma of balance failed to have a pacifying effect. It did not even work within the German Confederation that had also been a product of the Vienna Congress. Half a century later, war broke out between Prussia and Austria, the supposed guarantors of peace and equilibrium, thereby sealing the fate of the German Confederation (Müller, 2005). A dozen years earlier, in the 1850s, France and Britain had become embroiled in bloody, prolonged struggles with Russia over the Crimean Peninsula. But nevertheless, one could argue, three decades of peace within the nineteenth-century Pentarchy was a notable success. Yet this did not differ substantially from other comparably lengthy periods of peace between the European great powers in both earlier and later epochs.
The pillars of restoration and legitimacy rested on even weaker foundations. Talleyrand had made the monarchic principle of legitimacy the basis of the negotiations in Vienna (Fehrenbach, 2001). He insisted on this so strongly that the four victorious powers came to recognize defeated France as being on an equal footing. This was quite an achievement on the part of the French foreign minister (Lentz, 2014: 107–27). The Congress of Vienna meant turning back the wheel of history with respect to political authority and forms of government. Britain had a venerable parliamentary tradition (Maddicott, 2010), but the other four states of the Pentarchy wanted nothing to do with it. The founding of the North American republic was on the mind of many Europeans, and the French Revolution could not be erased from collective memory either. That became obvious during the European revolutions of 1830 and 1848 (Craig, 1995). These uprisings originated in Paris, where, shortly after 1815, the middle classes had come to find the absolutism of the restored Bourbon monarchy intolerable. Both revolutions were unsuccessful, causing waves of European emigration, especially to North and South America (Hoerder and Knauf, 1992). From the outset, restoration in Europe (Büssen, 1974) meant to suppress liberal and democratic movements (Menger, 2014).
Seldom had there been a more auspicious moment in the history of the continent than 1814. The main trends of the epoch could have come together in a new constellation that would promote peace. The defining features that characterized the age and pointed to a new order for Europe were national sovereignty, economic liberalization and the emancipation of the middle classes, as well as of the Jewish minority. These goals had penetrated the consciousness of Europeans via the French Revolution, and were, to some extent, spread by Napoleon. When choosing the model of the Carolingian Empire, Napoleon sought to force the unification of the continent under a single hegemonic state. In this regard, he stood in contrast to the proposals of French practitioners and thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Sully, Saint-Pierre and Rousseau (Lützeler, 1992: 9–32). They had envisioned the unification of Europe as a voluntary union of the individual states. Yet after Napoleon’s system had been shattered, the representatives of the Pentarchy could think of nothing other than reverting to the dynastic methods of the ancien régime instead of airing deliberations on a federation of European states. Those national movements that demanded constitutions were suppressed as a legacy of the French Revolution. At the same time, the political idea of a unified continent was also rejected, for this had been the hallmark of the Napoleonic dominion. At the Vienna Congress the representatives of the Pentarchy sought above all to further their own respective dynastic interests. In that process, none of the Napoleonic measures that served the dynasties’ interests were reversed (such as the promotion of German princes to kings), a contradiction that apparently troubled them very little.
During the seven years between 1814 and 1821, however, a series of writers who had different notions about the future of Europe spoke out (Lützeler, 1992: 72–104). Authors discussed the right of peoples to have their own nation-states, a European confederation, political codetermination for the middle classes and economic liberalization: these were the demands opposing the resolutions of the Vienna Congress. In the consciousness of these political publicists of the early nineteenth century, national and continental tendencies did not contradict each other. These critics considered the establishment of national, constitutional states to be the precondition for a confederated Europe.
Napoleon had only just been forced to abdicate as Emperor of the French, and the Congress of Vienna had barely begun when Henri de Saint-Simon published his book On Rebuilding the System of European States in both French and German in 1814 (see also Von Beyme, 2002: 638). Saint-Simon wrote his treatise together with his secretary, the historian Augustin Thierry. The two Frenchmen’s criticisms of the efforts of the Vienna Congress was as sharp as it was apt: ‘From all sides, private interests are touted as being the measure of the common interest . . . All that you are doing will merely serve to bring on war, you will in no way prevent it’ (Saint-Simon and Thierry, 1815: 30). Saint-Simon and Thierry regarded the end of absolutism and the introduction of parliamentary systems in the European states as necessary preconditions for peace. The national parliaments were to send delegates to a joint European parliament that would ‘decide on the collective interest of European society’ (1815: 49), and the European parliament was to resolve disputes among the individual countries (1815: 50). The development of a ‘European patriotism’ was seen as a requirement for the efficacy of a European parliament (1815: 51).
The authors designed a model for a European government and a European parliament. They oriented themselves to the English example with its royal house, upper house and lower house. An important task of the European parliament would be to create a system of laws that would be valid for all the states of the continent: A book of laws containing a general as well as national and individual system of ethics is to be drawn up under the oversight of the great parliament, in order that it may serve as a guide to all of Europe . . . The great parliament will permit complete freedom of conscience and the free exercise of all religions. (1815: 56)
Saint-Simon and Thierry were aware of the fact that they were presenting a design that could not yet be realized. They regarded the creation of national states under parliamentary government as the precondition of European unity. The authors maintained: That time when all European peoples will be governed by national parliaments is indisputably the point at which the joint parliament can be introduced without hindrance . . . Yet that point in time is still far away from us, and terrible wars, multifarious revolutions are still to scourge Europe during the interim that separates us from it. (1815: 57)
The two authors conceived of the building of a united Europe as a stepwise process. The first stage should be formed by a union of Britain and France, as these countries still – or at least at one time – had parliamentary governments. The second step would see their association with Germany. After the ‘accession of Germany’ the entry of ‘the remaining European states would proceed more quickly and more easily’ (1815: 84). The European government and the European parliament were not to replace the national governments and parliaments. The sovereignty of the national states would remain largely intact. The plan was not for a unitary European state, but rather for a confederation of individual states.
The pre-eminent tasks of the European government would consist of securing peace, equalizing the laws, guaranteeing religious tolerance, overseeing public education in the member countries, and the creation of an appropriate continental transportation system. In their conclusion, the authors stated: Doubtless there will come a time when all the peoples of Europe will feel that the points of common interest must be ordered before going over to the special interest of each nation, then there will begin to be a lessening of misery, unrest will subside, wars will be extinguished; that is the goal toward which we ceaselessly strive. (1815: 87)
Perhaps inspired by Saint-Simon and Thierry, seven years later the Danish writer and government official Conrad Friedrich von Schmidt-Phiseldek wrote his text Der europäische Bund (The European Union, 1821) (see also Cavallar, 2006: 49–55). He too presented his proposals in terms of a critique of Metternich’s policies. The construction of a united Europe was to begin with a ‘general congress’ (Schmidt-Phiseldek, 1821: 171) that would reverse the results of the Congress of Vienna. The new thinking on unity had to take the place of old notions about the balance of power. The politics of the ‘balance of power’ had ostensibly led to an ‘oligarchy of states’, and in case of conflicts, ‘their enormous mass would cave in, burying the general welfare under the ruins’ (1821: 117f). In order to avert the downfall of Europe, he proposed a ‘federal union of the European nations’ (1821: 41). It was to have a federal assembly and a federal court (1821: 287). A constitution of the ‘European union of states’ would be introduced (1821: 285), along with a European civil code (1821: 293), the establishment of a joint military known as the ‘union force’ (1821: 287), the removal of internal European tariffs, and the adoption of a common currency, the ‘European Dollar’ (1821: 317). Like the other strategists of unification, Schmidt-Phiseldek, too, was concerned above all with securing peace. Among the necessary limitations on the sovereignty of individual states he included, above all, the relinquishment of the right to declare war (1821: 84). Following the establishment of the ‘armed federal force’, standing armies of the member states would be dissolved. As Saint-Simon had done, Schmidt-Phiseldek envisioned a confederation of states in which the national governments would delegate parts of their sovereignty to the federal assembly. The justification for unification still resonates today: Europe as a civilized state of the peoples is so tied together and entangled in all its parts, that each individual entity can only thrive amid the welfare of all, and the suffering of any one part must sensibly affect all the others; a state of isolation is no longer conceivable for any state, and would throw us back into the original crude and uncultured condition. (1821: 138)
In 1821, the same year as Schmidt-Phiseldek’s book on Europe, Joseph von Görres’s Europa und die Revolution (Europe and the Revolution) also appeared (see also Habel, 1960; Lützeler, 1997: 41–61). During the wars of liberation against Napoleon, Görres had made his contribution as a publicist in the Rheinischer Merkur newspaper. Once it was no longer the French but the Prussians who had the say in the Rhineland, he noted that the region had gone from the Napoleonic frying-pan into the fire of Metternich’s restoration. Görres would not stop reiterating the demands from the wars of liberation in 1813 and 1814 (Daher, 2007). These were national unification, the restoration of German imperial rule and the introduction of constitutions into the German lands. In 1816 the Prussian government forbade him to continue publishing his newspaper. The rebellious Rhinelander, however, would not be silenced. In 1819 the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm III signed an order to arrest him.
Görres escaped and fled to Strasbourg. He spent most of 1821 in exile in Switzerland, where he wrote Europe and the Revolution. As in the cases of Saint-Simon and Schmidt-Phiseldek, Görres’s report began with a vehement criticism of the Congress of Vienna. ‘Wherever one’s gaze falls as one looks around’, he wrote, ‘everywhere there is only unrest, hatred, and shifting feuds among irreconcilable elements’ (Görres, 1821: 339). After the fall of Napoleon, Görres maintained that Metternich had missed the opportunity to build the ‘great European republic’ (1821: 272). He was repelled by the way in which Napoleon’s concept of Europe sought to imitate the Carolingian Roman Empire. While Charlemagne had been able to create a centralized European empire, a comparable possibility did not exist for Napoleon a thousand years later. Görres warned that individual countries such as France or Germany should not seek to lead the process of unification. Unity could only be attained through the simultaneous cooperation of all the European nations. In order not to remain an impediment to the unification process, Germany needed to unite into a single state. Like Saint-Simon and Schmidt-Phiseldek, Görres did not believe that a rapid unification of the continent was possible. He was sure that the resolutions made at the Vienna Congress were blocking the unification process. His major concern in Europe and the Revolution was to point to ‘the new order’ of the future continent (1821: 275).
According to Görres, ‘European freedom’ should stand at the centre of the new continental order (1821: 7). He argued that its manifestations could already be observed. He saw a threefold process taking place all over Europe: in constitutional strivings, in the longing for peace, and in efforts to liberalize trade. Around 1814, constitutions had been introduced or promised in a series of states, but the policy of restoration meant that these developments would be abrogated or weakened. Regarding the Europeans’ will to peace, the author recalled the ‘horrors’ of the Napoleonic wars that for ‘nearly a generation’ had struck ‘every corner of Europe’ (1821: 341). The scourge of war was, for the moment, being held at bay, but with their unrestrained stockpiling of arms the restoration-minded politicians were once again steering a course towards another great war. ‘The whole of Europe’, Görres wrote, ‘is covered with standing armies’. Everywhere these military expenditures were ‘piling up gigantic masses of debt’, leading to poverty in peacetime (1821: 341). The unification of Europe would render this excessive arms build-up superfluous. Görres considered raising tariffs to be as disastrous as military spending. He continued: ‘at every border highwaymen’ (his term for customs officials) are charged with binding ‘all the members of the great body of Europe’ so tightly that ‘circulation is everywhere blocked, and every part is in a state of local inflammation’. ‘These symptoms’, he continued, ‘should fairly frighten governments far more severely, than any secretive political movements’ (1821: 345).
In the period around 1830 voices that clamoured for a constitutional order and freedom of opinion in the European lands were strengthened. They judged the build-up of armaments along with customs barriers to be uncivilized atavisms (Lützeler, 1992: 105–43). Included among these voices were Karl Postl from Bohemia (see Lützeler, 1997: 63–85), Giuseppe Mazzini from Italy, Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Börne from Germany. These writers soon found themselves exiled to America, Britain or France, states where the process of democratization was more advanced than in the Austrian or Prussian spheres of control (see Lützeler, 2007).
The years after the First World War
It is difficult to compare the final resolution of the Vienna Congress (see Lentz, 2014: 333–60) with the treaties that marked the end of the First World War in 1919. Surely the thinking in 1918–19 in Paris operated within the categories of a European equilibrium. There was general agreement that the central powers, Germany and Austria, must be weakened if the goal was to restore the balance between the great powers. Through the Treaty of St Germain (Ackerl and Neck, 1989), Austria was reduced to a petty state that would barely have any future role to play as an autonomous entity in foreign policy. The Austrian Empire was dissolved due to the demand for national self-determination, a right that the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, had insisted upon in his ‘Fourteen Points’. This principle, however, was not applied in a consistent manner (Fisch, 2010; Krähnke, 2007). In contrast to Austria, Germany’s status as a great power was preserved, yet the hostile provisions of the Treaty of Versailles weighed heavily upon the German Reich: psychologically, by the imputation of primary responsibility for the war; economically, by the reparations that had been imposed; and politically, by the shrinking of its territory. In Vienna in 1814–15, France had been treated with far more fairness than Germany was in 1918–19 at Versailles (Boemeke et al., 1998; Niedhart, 2013). The lands conquered in the course of the wars undertaken by Revolutionary and Napoleonic France had to be relinquished in 1814. These regions had been such recent acquisitions that France found little difficulty in returning to the borders of the kingdom of 1789. It was a great advantage for the nation to have a new start again under Louis XVIII, free of the oppressive weight of reparations. In 1919, in the German Reich, on the other hand, a clamour for revenge soon erupted on the part of the radical right, along with polemics for a revision of the Treaty by the extreme left. When the National Socialists came to power in 1933, it was predictable that they would seek dominance in Europe using military means.
Were hopeful beginnings present in the peace treaties of 1815 and 1919? Surely they were, for at Vienna (under pressure from the British) slavery was proscribed (Delacampagne, 2004). And in Paris the right of popular self-determination was at least partially applied. But the Treaties of Versailles and St Germain did not contribute to a peaceful unification of the continent. On the contrary, the hatred between nations, already manifest in the First World War, was further increased.
As in 1815, there were intellectuals in 1919 who understood the political constellation of the time. National enmity, they realized, would only lead to the continent becoming involved in new wars. Saint-Simon and Thierry had presented a farsighted plan for the unification of the continent in 1814. And in 1919, there was an intellectual who used the moment of kairos, or crisis, to reveal new paths toward cooperation between the European states. It was Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi who in 1922–3 founded the pan-European movement (Saint-Gille, 2003; Ziegerhofer-Prettenthaler, 2004; Lützeler, 1992: 312–64). From his office in the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, his efforts were aimed above all at supporters in Germany and France. Without reconciliation between these two countries, any project of European unity would have been doomed to failure. Among German and French politicians, Paul Loebe and Aristide Briand must be mentioned as his supporters. Coudenhove-Kalergi developed a graduated plan for the unification of the continent from a customs union to a political confederation with the ultimate goal of a federated European state. Authors who shared his ideas included Heinrich Mann and his nephew Klaus Mann in Germany, as well as, on the French side, a group of writers and scholars who advocated for French–German rapprochement in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française: these included François Mauriac, Jules Romains and Félix Berteau. Couldenhove-Kalergi’s commitment to the realization of European unification cannot be said to have been without success. After the Second World War, politicians such as Konrad Adenauer, Alcide de Gasperi, Paul Henri Spaak and Robert Schuman took up Couldenhove-Kalergi’s ideas and made use of his vocabulary of integration.
From 1945 to the present
The circle of intellectuals that were interested in the development of a European economic community after 1945 was rather limited. As early as 1957, when the Treaties of Rome were signed (Loth, 1996), a dissenting voice was heard from Reinhold Schneider. For his whole life, Schneider had been occupied with the study of European cultural history, especially with the Western conflict between political power and its intellectual critique (Koepcke, 1993). In his 1957 essay, ‘Europe as a way of life’ (Schneider, 1994: 406–27; see also Lützeler, 2007: 26–48), he comments on the new European Economic Community. Schneider complains about the displacement of the name of Europe by the terms ‘Euratom’ and ‘Euromarket’, writing that an assurance must remain ‘that the stock market of the controversial European market will not count for more than its heart, Euromarket not for more than Europe’ (1994: 408). ‘The mythic name’ and the naming of the European Economic Community (EEC) led Schneider to make ‘a distinction’ that in his view could ‘hardly be sharper’. That is to say, the EEC is aimed at an economic or ‘political goal’ (1994: 407), whereas the name of ‘Europe’ evokes the concept of ‘a way of life, a particular way of being and thinking’, and thus represents something that is all-encompassing (1994: 408). ‘Europe is a bundle of contradictory forces’, Schneider notes: one in which ‘the tie that binds must be stronger than [any] antagonism’ (1994: 408). This ‘binding tie’ is, above all, the ‘right to freedom’. As it was for Goerres, for Schneider too freedom is the basic element of European culture. It is a legacy of democratic Athens, republican Rome and the Rome of Christianity. With regard to thinking on freedom, European cultural history offers, according to Schneider, a ‘genuine relationship between the ancient world and that of Christianity’ (1994: 413). In controversies between freedom and tyranny, in the conflict between absolute power and the individual, the verdict of European history has always come down on the side of mind and personal freedom, citing the deadly antagonism between Nero and Seneca as well as that between Theoderich and Boethius (1994). Schneider’s sympathies lay with the republican constitution of Rome. Here, ‘conflict and harmony’ complemented one another: ‘every right’ stood ‘opposed by another right’, so that, under this constitution ‘composed of manifold contradictions, ‘it was always possible to achieve a ‘correction’ (1994: 412).
Schneider also touches on the topic of an overarching European constitution. His observations on the Roman constitution should have been revisited when the European Union sought, well over a decade ago, to work up a constitution for itself. The project failed for many reasons. In the final analysis it was rejected because the result of the committee’s effort had the character not of a constitution, but of a treaty. Following the collapse of this juridical initiative, at the end of 2007 the EU accepted a ‘basic agreement’ known as the Treaty of Lisbon (Leiße, 2010; Hellmann, 2009). Among the peculiarities of this accommodation is the strengthening of the position of the European Council (the group of governmental leaders of the member states).
This provoked an objection from the committed European Robert Menasse, one of Austria’s leading authors. He would have been deeply satisfied if the ‘basic agreement’ of Lisbon had reduced the influence of the national heads of government to zero. In his 2012 book The European Messenger, Menasse prefers to leave the work on the unification of Europe to the officials of the EU Commission. Menasse’s wish is that parliamentarians act not as representatives of national interests, but instead as delegates for particular regions (Menasse, 2012; see also Menasse, 2014; Büssgen, 2013). He calls for the abolition of the nation-state altogether, and believes that he can base this demand on the principle of subsidiarity (Hrbek, 1995), which, since the Treaty of Maastricht (Pöttering, 1992; Lenz and Borchardt, 2010: 5), has been an official guideline of the European Union. But here we see one of the many contradictions in Menasse’s reasoning: according to the principle of subsidiarity, all local affairs should be dealt with locally, all regional affairs at a regional level, all national affairs nationally, and everything of a continental nature should be discussed and decided on a continental level. Thus, whatever cannot be dealt with locally must be ordered on a regional level, anything exceeding regional competencies should be handled nationally, and the EU would be responsible for anything that transcends national borders and horizons. In other words, the European Council, that is, the European heads of government, continue to be among the most important groups in Brussels. The stages of unification from the European Coal and Steel Community to the EEC and from the European Communities to the European Union were only possible because of the engaged participation of the national governments. Europe was built not in opposition to the nations, but with them, and over time they voluntarily delegated several parts of their sovereignty to the European level. At this moment in time, however, in some member countries, the delegation of sovereignty that was agreed upon is being revoked – a clear symptom of crisis.
In describing the arc from the Congress of Vienna to the Treaty of Lisbon, it is – even after Brexit – striking to note how much stronger the awareness of continental dependencies has become in the European nations. Saint-Simon, Schmidt-Phiseldek, Görres and even Coudenhove-Kalergi still needed to remind those in power that such things as economic, political, legal and cultural continental interests in fact existed, and that there might be a common interest of the peoples of Europe that stood over against the claims of governments of individual nation-states. The EEC reduced its objectives to encompass only the economic, and therefore only a partial aspect of European civilization. This one-sidedness is still, to a high degree, characteristic of the European Union today. The controversies of recent months have centred on the euro, on debt and debt relief, on a potential Grexit and an actual Brexit, on immigration, on streams of refugees from outside Europe, and on the granting of asylum. The pan-economics that have, meanwhile, consistently emerged from the discussions of politicians can scarcely be reconciled with the freedom-oriented European way of life recalled by Reinhold Schneider and more recently by Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Adolf Muschg (see Lützeler, 2007: 26–48).
It is not a matter of recklessly disparaging all that is economic in nature, but rather of rejecting pan-economics as dogma. The commonalities of the continent have to do with cultural institutions that have prevailed through the centuries by having recourse to ancient models. These are the temple, the academy, the theatre, the market place and the gymnasium. The defining character of these institutions is their dialogic interplay, meaning that, in the long run, none of them is able to dominate the others, and no single one is able to answer the questions posed by the others alone. Within European civilization, the economy should not control either religion or science, nor should it dominate the political sphere. In order to ensure this, the process of continental unification cannot possibly, in the long run, succeed without a constitution, i.e. without the formulation of a freedom-based fundamental law for the European Union. The conditions for establishment of this European constitution are excellent in so far as the Human Rights Convention of the EU is already in place.
At the same time, we should not forget that writers are not lawyers. The writer can only demand a constitution for Europe in which the idea of freedom plays the central role. Let me thus close with an example of an author who did just that, defending freedom in his public statements at a time when fundamental European values were threatened. In 1935, Thomas Mann published his essay ‘Europe beware’. In it, he pleaded for a ‘militant humanism’ that should fight totalitarian ideologies. He warned: If the idea of European humanism cannot be born anew through struggle, if the soul of humanism cannot recapture its militant youth, it will be destroyed; and a Europe will be born of which only the name will be preserved, and from which it would be better to seek refuge. (Mann, 1942 [1935]: 82)