The philosophy of "Europe."

• Author: Laughland, John

"The rational organization, at the global level, of human existence...is clearly an absolute necessity."

- Eduard Shevardnadze, 1992

There are moments when the swirling mists in which modern European political speech seems deliberately to envelop itself are dissipated by sudden, perhaps unintended, flashes of linguistic clarity. Two remarks made in 1994 have illuminated, if only in silhouette, the broad outlines of current European geopolitics and political culture.

The first came in May, when Boris Yeltsin paid a state visit to Germany. The theme of his visit was the entry of Russia into all European organizations, ultimately including NATO and the European Union. As a priority, though, Yeltsin concentrated on a theme dear to the Russian heart, the strengthening of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, to which Moscow would like NATO to be subordinate. The Russian president declared to an eager audience - using words that would have been music to the ears of the former Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, as well as to many contemporary politicians - that he wanted a "politically, economically and spiritually unified architecture for our continent, which must not isolate countries or groups of countries or separate them according to the criteria of friend or enemy..." [emphasis added].

The second came in November. A few months previously, the ruling Christian Democratic parliamentary group in Germany had published a policy document entitled "Reflections on European Policy," which contained striking proposals for the future political architecture of the European Union. It called for the federal political union of a hard core of five countries in the European Union (France, Germany, Benelux). The document, which Chancellor Kohl has welcomed and defended, and perhaps even surreptitiously encouraged, threatens that if political union does not occur on its own terms, Germany might go it alone in Europe, overturning the whole apple cart of postwar European cooperation. According to this scheme, otherwise known as the "concentric circles plan," all European Union policy would be made by the hard core - or more precisely, by the hard core of the hard core, France and Germany - and followed in variable participatory arrangements by other member states. On a tour of European capitals to peddle the plan, the CDU's foreign policy spokesman, Karl Lamers, expressed the regret that many people in Europe were reluctant to take such a bold leap toward political union, because they experienced "the emotional difficulty of abandoning revered and cherished institutions and notions even if, like the concept of national sovereignty, they have long since become an illusion" [emphasis added].

What do these remarks tell us about the likely evolution of Europe's political architecture after the end of the Cold War? One thing is immediately clear: Germany and Russia are the two largest and most powerful countries in Europe. If there is to be a truly united Europe, and not just a united Western Europe, then one of the most important axes along which it will develop will be Berlin-Moscow. The Germans, more than any other Western Europeans, are aware of this. Indeed, the CDU document emphasizes that the European Union's primary foreign policy objective must be to ensure stability in Eastern Europe by constructing an "all-encompassing partnership with Russia." Similarly, Mr. Kozyrev, the Russian foreign minister, has often spoken of the "special relationship" between Germany and Russia.

It is preoccupying, therefore, to observe in these remarks by political representatives of both countries a clutch of ideas which displays a striking contempt for the philosophical bases of democracy and the rule of law. It is even more preoccupying to realize that these remarks are utterly typical of contemporary European political discourse. Indeed, they have become its common currency. Slogans such as "United Europe," "failing borders," "convergence" and "integration" trip lightly off the lips of all post-Cold War European leaders. They are the foreign policy counterparts of similar slogans about "protection" and "social security" which have become the staple diet fed to voters at home. These cliches are disturbing because they are manifestations of the extent to which European politicians have lost a sense of the true meaning of politics itself.

Friends and Enemies

Politics is the necessary prerequisite for democracy because it is only within a certain polity, a state, where the rules of the game and the common reference points are understood, that democratic debate and democratic accountability can be assured. Democracy inevitably presupposes constitutional independence or national statehood because, before the democratic mechanisms of control over political power - a legislature, an independent judiciary, a free press - can be put in place, the basic right of the state to rule - its authority - must first be recognized. It is only from this fundamental recognition of legitimacy that the rule of law can flow. If a people agrees that the state has the right to rule, then that people is constituted as a political entity. Without politics, therefore, there can be no statehood, and if politics and statehood disintegrate, as they are doing in Europe, then democracy will disintegrate too. Politics is the realm of human freedom.

Yeltsin's proclaimed desire not to separate countries according to the criterion of friend and enemy recalls the famous definition of politics made by the right-wing German jurist, Carl Schmitt. According to Schmitt, writing in 1932, areas of human activity like morality, aesthetics, and economics each have their own criteria: good and evil, beautiful and ugly, profitable and damaging. Politics, he insists, is an area of human activity distinct from the others, and its criterion is the distinction between friend and enemy. Anyone who tries to overcome that distinction, as Yeltsin is, is trying to overcome politics itself. Yeltsin is not saying, "I was your enemy, now I am your friend," he is saying that the distinction itself should no longer apply.

What does Schmitt mean? First, he does not mean that a state always has enemies, although this may be so, but that politics only exists where there is conflict, and that both foreign and domestic politics consist in making the distinction between friend and enemy. An enemy need not be evil or ugly or economically damaging: he does not have to be hated or despised. The distinction between friend and enemy in this sense is merely intended to indicate the difference between association (with a friend) or dissociation (from an enemy). This is not a bellicose or aggressive way of defining politics, it is a factual one: where there is no conflict there is no politics, only management. The term enemy is by no means limited to the military sense, nor is the definition intended to assimilate politics to war. On the contrary, war is not the continuation of politics by other means, but something different from politics, with its own separate set of rules.(1)

Nor does this definition rule out peace between peoples or states, or even neutrality. The decisive issue is that political life is the domain in which the possibility of making the distinction obtains. Indeed, far from peace being the absence of an enemy, one can make peace only with an enemy. Just as there is no peace without an enemy, there is no politics without the possibility of knowing who one's (political) enemies are.

Indeed, peace is not the absence of antagonism or conflict, but the absence of war. This fact underlines the essential difference between politics and war: it would clearly be contrary to the essence of politics as such to want to suppress one's enemies, or to dissipate the distinction between friend and enemy into obscurity. This is precisely because politics lives off enmity, the opposition between parties and interests and ideologies, the antagonism between different opinions, values and goals, as well as the divergence between different solutions which are proposed in order to attain the common good. In a European continent...