Abstract
In this commentary I argue that the European Union has been functioning as an insecure object of collective attachment for large parts of the European population for many years. According to attachment theory, in relationships of asymmetrical power insecure attachment is formed as the narrative constructed by the most powerful party overwrites the authentic experience of the weakest, generating conflicted representation of self and the attachment object. That attachment object may be interpersonal or collective. The EU narrative on how it safeguards democracy and citizen well-being contradicts the true experience of many Europeans who struggle to make ends meet in neoliberal Europe. On this basis, an insecure collective bond with the EU is established, as the latter fails to recognize and address the needs of many of its citizens.
Introduction
In this commentary I discuss some important issues that were either not addressed at all, or addressed implicitly or minimally in the Ezquerro’s article (Ezquerro, 2020). My main point is that the European Union has been functioning as an insecure object of collective attachment for large parts of the European population for many years. These of course include the large numbers of UK citizens who voted Leave in the 2016 referendum, but also significant segments of the population in Italy, France, Hungary, Poland, Greece, Spain and elsewhere. In recent years these European citizens have expressed their dissatisfaction with the EU, either explicitly in referenda and elections or through adopting an ambivalent stance.
Empirical studies have confirmed not only that the attachment system is involved when individuals form bonds with their social groups as wholes, but also that such bonds can be described as secure or insecure (Smith et al., 1999). Interestingly, in his discussion of attachment to the group, Bowlby (1982) uses the terms social groups and social institutions interchangeably, suggesting, in my view, that attachment to the group in effect refers to the sense of security group members derive (or fail to derive) from being agents operating within the particular institutional and ideological frameworks that define the identity of their group.
In previous work it has been suggested that the individual–group attachment should not be seen as a form of dyadic relationship simply informed by the individual’s past or current interpersonal experience, but as a set of complex psychosocial processes in which social institutions and their underlying ideological basis are collectively and historically constructed as attachment objects (Sochos, 2014).
According to attachment theorists, attachment insecurity is underlain by the operation of multiple, rather than singular, mental models of self and others (Main, 1991). For example, when a child experiences harsh parental treatment as unfair, threatening, and shaming but, according to the parent’s account, such treatment is an act of loving concern, the child unconsciously ‘overwrites’ their own authentic experience with the parental narrative. Children’s absolute dependency on the caregiver for survival and their need to retain an image of him/her as protective (powerful and wise) would demand the ‘sacrifice’ of their own experience and the adoption of the parental account as the correct representation of reality. Although overridden, authentic experience does not disappear, but continues to exert a powerful unconscious influence on how the world and the self are perceived. In the child’s mind, the parent will be represented at the same time as both loving and cruel and the self as both loved and unlovable. Such a defensive operation of maintaining proximity to the caregiver will only result in a fragile sense of safety, ridden with conflict, and unable to sustain reflection.
Of course, I am not suggesting in any way that adults or social groups behave like children. What I am suggesting, however, is that bonding in different types of relationship of asymmetrical power may follow common principles, which attachment research and its notions of security and representation can help us understand better. Although social institutions and ideological systems are collectively constructed, aiming to impose an order on the psychosocial world, not all members of the collective take part in that construction from an equal position of power. Dominant subgroups have much greater capacity to define how exactly these function as safety-providing collective objects and tend to impose their narrative on the rest of the large group. Created by the ruling elites of clearly unequal societies rather than popular democratic movements, the EU has had its master narrative on how it protects social life, identity, and European values constructed primarily by those elites. That narrative seems to contradict the lived experience of millions of ordinary citizens across the continent.
For brevity, here I will focus only on one major constituent of that narrative, the proclaimed dedication of the EU to democracy. Democracy is the most fundamental European political value—it is the idea that political power draws its legitimacy from ordinary citizens who make decisions either directly or through their elected representatives. In democracy the vote of every citizen counts exactly the same as that of any other, regardless of social class, level of education, critical capability, gender, ethnicity, age, or any other variable or circumstance (except in cases of criminal conviction). The underlying principle is that the right of ordinary people to decide about how they wish to live their lives—private and collective—is fundamental, intrinsically linked to the human right to life itself.
Although the official EU position is that it fully subscribes to this fundamental principle, the lived experience of millions of European citizens is very different. These citizens feel that far from listening and responding to concerns of ordinary people, the EU is run by a small circle of politicians and bureaucrats, whose main job is to safeguard their own interests and those of Europe’s economic elite (Streek, 2014). These citizens feel that their worlds, the struggling neighbourhoods of Doncaster and Middlesbrough, Marseille, Pecs, and Athens are too far away from the imperial Berlaymont building in Brussels, where the European Commission makes important decisions for their lives. They feel their voices are far too weak to be heard.
But what is the nature of these perceptions? Is there any dose of reality in them or they are phantasies stirred-up by the deceptive campaigns of right-wing demagogues? We could have a look at some facts. The European Commission (EC), the most powerful EU institution and equivalent to the government at the nation state level, is entirely unelected—commissioners, the equivalent of secretaries of state, are appointed and so is the President of the EC. The other two major sources of power that determine how the European economy is run, the President of the Central European Bank and the judges of the European Court of Justice are also unelected. All three of the EU most powerful institutions, therefore, are run by officials who are unaccountable to and out of the control of the voting citizens. Although (or, one could say, precisely because) it is elected directly by the citizens of member states, the European Parliament (EP) is the weakest of all EU institutions. It has no powers to propose legislation or hold commissioners to account while it only confirms the appointment of the EC president in a ceremonial process with no candidates to choose from other than the pre-selected appointee. The very low turnout in the European elections across Europe, below 48% on average in the past 25 years (Mair, 2013) clearly reflects the citizen’s conviction that whoever is elected as EP member, they will make little difference.
Moreover, when well-functioning liberal democracies are faced with major political decisions involving constitutional or other fundamental changes in how society is governed, it has been good democratic practice that citizens are asked for their opinion directly, usually in the form of a referendum. This has rarely been the case with the EU. The three historical moments of the outmost significance for the evolution of the EU that have taken place in recent decades—the treaty of Maastricht, the treaty of Lisbon, and the creation of the Euro—all have been marked by the absence of citizens’ explicit consent.
Only three EU countries held a referendum on the treaty of Maastricht (Denmark, Ireland, and France) and one on the treaty of Lisbon (Ireland), despite the fact that an earlier draft of the treaty of Lisbon had been rejected in three countries out of the five in which it had been put to a vote (Beach, 2018). Although the Euro fundamentally changed the economic governance of the member states and many renowned economists have blamed it for the recent economic crisis in the continent (Stinglitz, 2016), only the citizens of two EU countries were allowed to vote on Euro membership (Denmark and Sweden) and both rejected the idea. More recently in the UK, in coordination with the EU leadership, pro-EU political forces went to great lengths trying to discredit and overturn the result of the 2016 EU referendum, the electoral event with the highest voter turnout in the UK political history.
A number of influential social scientists claim that the EU is not simply neglecting democracy, one of its fundamental objectives is to actively curtail it (Streek, 2014; Tuck, 2020). These theorists argue that the main aim of the EU is to deepen and widen the hold of neoliberalism over Europe, that is, to create what Hayek (1960) envisaged in the first half of the 20th-century—a transnational market place free of political interference. In other words, the EU seeks to ensure that control of the economy and other critical spheres of social life is transferred from the democratically accountable national state to transnational bodies of unelected officials, technocrats, and judges. According to the neoliberal phantasy, almost every human need and every aspect of social life should gradually be integrated and become part of that free market, as social justice is being replaced by market justice. Those of us who work in health, social care, or higher education, have witnessed in recent years what such an integration to the free market feels like.
It is therefore clear that the EU narrative about safeguarding the fundamental right of European citizens to determine their own economic, social, and political lives contradicts the lived experience of millions across the continent. Fearing that an attempt to directly challenge it would most likely lead to further pain and disadvantage, many working people in Europe appear to adopt the EU narrative, allowing it to overwrite their own experience. In the midst of the Greek economic crisis, when the country’s economy had lost a third of its volume, unemployment had soared to 28%, and only 34% of the population had thought EU membership was a good thing (European Commission, 2013), only a minority were prepared to support a Grexit. This was not a stance that recognized EU’s commitment to democracy, economic fairness and the well-being of ordinary folk, it was a stance based on fear. Similarly, the main arguments of the pro-EU campaign before and after the 2016 referendum in the UK did not focus on all the wonderful things the EU stands for, but on how catastrophic it would be to leave it—a campaign based on fear that did manage to convince a significant number of sceptical voters, particularly among the left.
The sense of protection the EU currently provides to its citizens is, therefore, precarious, underlain by conflict, ambivalence, and mistrust. If an institutional structure based on equality, mutual respect, and solidarity is not established within and between national states, one that is freely determined by citizens themselves, individuals and social groups may once again plead for safety with the dark forces that reigned over the continent in the past.
