Fighting Sovereignism? European Solidarity Beyond the Nation-state

Céline Spector
Professor of Philosophy at the Paris-Sorbonne University

For at least thirty years, “left-wing” sovereignists have constantly denounced the imposture of social Europe. In their eyes, the European Union, as is, can only proceed by eroding redistributive policies and threatening public services. The cold monster in Brussels aims to dissolve the existing social protection systems and the bonds of solidarity; by prohibiting state aid and fetishizing free trade, it endangers the social model originated from the Liberation. If Jacques Delors praised “the competition which stimulates, the cooperation which strengthens and the solidarity which unites”, the wish to increase solidarity has been bogged down in the sand. Before the recovery plan after the health crisis sparked passionate debates, many sovereignists had condemned the neoliberal Union. Their argument is well-known: not only does social justice find its motivational roots within the nation-state, a source of loyalty, trust and reciprocity, but a post-national perspective would endanger the already-weakened structures of solidarity within the Member States.

Even more, “left-wing” sovereignists consider that the nation remains the privileged place for the enjoyment of social and also political rights. Against a federal approach in Europe, they put forward arguments in favour of the territorial circumscription of the principles of social justice. According to the philosopher David Miller, bonds of solidarity exist within various social groups, but the nation is the largest entity that still allows to build consent towards the sacrifices of redistribution. The financial sacrifice implied by solidarity supposes privileged links between citizens, a shared understanding of social goods and an agreement on the equitable principles of redistribution of relatively scarce resources. In this conception of social justice, the principles of justice must be rooted in a sense of belonging; a prior social bond is necessary to anchor solidarity. For D. Miller, European justice is therefore no more realistic than cosmopolitical justice. Emotional identification and the sense of belonging seem diluted here; the trust required for reciprocity to work is insufficient; consensus on the principles of justice does not exist.

Europe, Trojan Horse of neoliberalism?

This sovereignist criticism finds support in history: the Union is often described as the Trojan Horse of neoliberalism. In his lessons of February 7 to 14, 1979, at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault insisted on the important role of German ordo-liberalism from the 1930s to the 1950s. According to his supporters who have clear ideas on the flaws of the “invisible hand” of economic liberalism, politics must be interventionist in order to make competition effective and create the market society. However, for many authors such as François Denord and Antoine Schwartz, the European Union is burdened from the outset by the ordoliberal influence, which is why “social Europe will never take place”. The Single Act would only have made things worse: under the guise of cohesion, it would have promoted the only “free and undistorted” competition. The social market economy would be opposed, on principle, to the idea of a social state.

In the same spirit, Christian Laval and Pierre Dardot underlined to which extent the ordoliberal principles had been taken as sacred since the Treaty of Rome in an “economic Constitution” of Europe. History demystifies the golden legend opposing the European social model to Anglo-Saxon ultra-liberalism: in their view, from exorbitant power, the governing bodies of the EU allowed an actual conversion of the Member States to neoliberalism, just when the Gaullist or social-democratic alternatives were wearing out without return. Public transport, telecommunications and energy companies had to comply with the dictates of the Commission. If the democratic Europe is thus an “ultimate illusion”, it is because European politics are corrupt, subjected to corporate power and the game of lobbies – “systemic corruption” which would be accompanied by omertà by the media covering the embezzlement of the elite. On this account, we understand better how the ferocious blackmail done to the Greeks in 2015, conditioning the ECB’s support to the adoption of structural reforms, reveals the true neoliberal face of the European Union, subject to the dictatorship of financial capital and of his dubious hedge funds.

However, the supporters of this reading risk building up a grand monolithic narrative. It is true that a certain version of ordo-liberalism triumphed over other ideologies (planning policies, federalism) which were at the source of European construction; it is true that Walter Lippmann was a long-time friend of Jean Monnet and a fervent supporter of the construction of the common market; it is true that social Europe was often assimilated to a simple corollary of the area of ​​fair competition, especially since the jurisprudence of the CJEU ruled in favor of the primacy of economic freedoms over social rights. It is finally true that Germany has succeeded in imposing its ideological agenda, to the point that we are experiencing, for a period at least, a Europe under German lead. However, this is not an inevitable destiny: the teleological reading of the neoliberal Union omits the internal divergences between the ordoliberals and the contingencies of history.

Several nuances and reservations must therefore be introduced here. On the one hand, the ordoliberals coming from the Lippmann conference (1938) did not secretly prepare the supranational integration project that we will find formulated in extenso in the ECSC and EEC treaties. Initially, they were instead worried about the “supranational collectivism” detected behind the integration project negotiated by Monnet. Far from liberating the vital forces of Europe, the newly established “High Authority” was in their eyes the beginning of a new authoritarianism, that of the experts and the “econocrats”. Community supranationality could have served as an alibi for a “centralized European superstate,” which led Müller-Armack and Röpke to promote the loose coordination mode of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). Likewise, Ludwig Erhard, who submitted Müller-Armack’s ideas to Adenauer in the early 1950s, publicly opposed the signing of the ECSC treaty, whose “supranational dirigisme” he feared.

Many first-generation ordoliberals therefore perceived the European construction as a state machine hostile to the free market. Wishing to contain certain perverse effects of democracy and its capacity to harm the owners of capital, they have sometimes fought against the European construction, seeing in it a possible drift towards social democracy. On the other hand, the trajectory of the European Communities and the Union itself is not linear. If we can make distinctions, since the end of the Thirty Glorious Years, between policies with social, neo-mercantilist and neoliberal orientations, the latter only really imposed itself from the 1990s and was never carried out as the only one: the victory of the Directorate General for Competition over that of Industrial Affairs, more neo-mercantilist, and that of the Internal Market over Social Affairs, less neoliberal, are related to the reconfiguration of the balance of power between Germany, France and the United Kingdom. Moreover, Europe’s institutional shift towards neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s was driven by certain countries such as the Netherlands and Luxembourg, then maintained both by certain Nordic countries such as Finland and by the former popular democracies (later united within the Visegrád group), who defended the market.

Finally, we must return to a historical injustice: the Commission’s “Delors moment” was an attempt to create a Europe based on social dialogue – which certain national leaders (notably British) strove, not without success, to disrupt. By siding the unions’ demand for a European-wide negotiation area, Jacques Delors managed to unblock the negotiations between social partners which were then at a standstill, and to relaunch discussions on working time or on information and consultation in multinational companies, particularly in terms of the introduction of new technologies – as demonstrated, from 1985, by the Val Duchesse meetings. In 1988 in Stockholm, Jacques Delors was committed to the creation of a base of guaranteed social rights, to the recognition of the right to continuing training for each worker, to the creation of a European business law reconciling the imperatives of the economy and the deepening of industrial democracy. The economic and social cohesion of the internal market was then his priority, accompanied by proposals on improving working conditions and employee protection. Subsequently, from the Community Charter of Fundamental Social Rights of Workers of 1989 to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of 2000, various initiatives were able to rely on these canonical texts, even if the balance of power remained unfavorable to workers and to an effective regulation of capital.

Other arguments deserve to be invoked against the Manichean reading of the Eurosceptic sovereignists. Beyond the cohesion funds which have greatly benefited Southern and Eastern Europe, several initiatives can be credited for a rebalancing towards a social Europe. The European social fund responsible for promoting employment and integration created by the Treaty of Rome has been supplemented by numerous initiatives, even though the Union is devoid of “social competences”: weekly working hours limited to 48 hours, minimum legal age at 15, maternity leave of at least 14 weeks. Such “social acquis” (acquisitions) already obtained in Western Europe have not been insignificant in advancing the condition of workers in Eastern or Southern Europe. To the ambitious objectives of the Lisbon Treaty (social protection, full employment, inclusion and non-discrimination, social justice, gender equality, solidarity between generations, economic, social and territorial cohesion between Member States) were added the objectives adopted during the summits in Göteborg (2017) and in Porto (2021), or during the recent initiatives of the Commission and the European Parliament (European Pillar of Social Rights of 2017, Social Fairness Package of March 2018, adoption of the report on the coordination of social protection systems in the Union, or even the creation of a “European Solidarity Corps” intended to supervise the volunteering of young Europeans).

The unanimous adoption of a European pillar of social rights, leading to renounce the classic interpretation according to which the principle of subsidiarity leaves full social competence to the States, is not just an illusion intended to conceal the continuity of a policy of liberalization, deregulation and privatization unfavorable to the interests of workers. It all depends on its application. In 2020, the decisions taken to support the European economy during the crisis prove it: most European leaders have shown themselves ready to change line in order to save their threatened economies. Since 2019, the creation of the Just Transition Fund and especially the Social Climate Fund as part of the “Green Deal” demonstrate real efforts to ensure that solidarity is exercised at the European level in favor of the regions most affected by the exit from coal or in favor of vulnerable households and businesses affected by the establishment of the second European carbon market.

Reversing sovereignism: the nation as prison?

David Miller’s pessimism about the possible extension of solidarity beyond the nation-state, therefore, faces robust objections: bonds of solidarity can be based on the sharing of common values or beliefs (religious or political solidarity, for example). Recent social psychology has refuted “nationalist” claims about trust and the need to restrict solidarity within the boundaries of nationality. The thesis according to which national identity is the condition for the support by the majority of citizens to redistribution, cannot be supported by empirical evidence; social determinants or partisan beliefs are more relevant variables.

Finally, the historical argument invoked by the sovereignists is not more convincing: far from attesting to the existence of a national feeling of solidarity or consensus, the emergence of the Welfare State rather relies on the class struggle. In France, it was the desire to mutualize the risks according to a contractual and insurance-type mechanism that gave rise to the first collective solidarity practices in the 19th century. Subsequently, the two world wars and the invocation of a debt of the State towards its former soldiers played a major role. Whether in France, England or Germany, the nationalization of social protection systems results more from social conflicts than from a cultural consensus anchored in the national imaginary. The adoption of demanding redistribution principles has rarely been based on the desire to participate in solidarity mechanisms; it was formed on the basis of a social truce following devastating tragedies.

The conclusion is obvious: we must fight within institutions like the European Parliament to rebalance the European construction in the direction of a social Europe. Solidarity must be conceived on the scale of the European Federative Republic: while we must remedy the perverse effects of the opening of markets and societies in Europe and in the world, the production of certain public goods and the protection of certain social rights are more relevant and more just at that scale. The new social and environmental threats require us to go beyond the traditional boundaries of solidarity and to devise a form of extended justice within the Union. Without advocating a social superstate that would replace the current welfare states in Europe, the point is to fight against the risks created by globalization and Europeanization. Ultimately, the sovereignist argument can be turned around: nation-states can also be considered prisons, locking individuals within a life context that they have not chosen. Choosing solidarity as the new telos of the European Union, therefore, means nourishing the hope that, if circumstances become favorable, a more demanding model for applying social and environmental rights could spread across Europe. More than an abstract restoration of popular sovereignty, it is this European New Deal that we are calling for.