Michele Marchi - 19/06/2013

Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s contribution to the process of European integration is a searing, blistering pamphlet full of cultured quotations yet tinged with melancholy irony (H. M. Enzensberger, Brussels, the Gentle Monster, 2013). This is a cosmopolitan intellectual’s howl of pain at the unacceptable course that European community-building has chosen to follow.

What Enzensberger calls “Brussels, the gentle monster” is the economic, political and above all institutional edifice that has striven doggedly to standardise a multi-faceted individualistic continent from the postwar years down to today’s globalization-dominated world.

The German intellectual levels two main charges at Europe’s misguided course. The first is a development of the classic lament by political analysts and jurists: the European institutions’ dearth of democracy. Enzensberger goes straight to the sore point of the community structure. The scanty, even non-existent, democratic legitimacy of the body that takes most of the legislatory initiative: the Brussels Commission. He has no hesitation in dubbing the “triad: Commission, European Council, Parliament” a “black hole of democracy”. Inevitably, the process of Europe-building as originally conceived by its best representative Jean Monnet has done a U-turn and ended in a kind of pre-constitutional phase. Enzensberger’s provocative conclusion is that this is “one of the most successful bids to turn our backs on the greatest invention of Europe: democracy”.

The other criticism is likewise classic, at least apparently, though it is approached from an original angle. He explores the full meaning of European “soft power”. Here again, Enzensberger goes to the heart of another wrong turn that Brussels has taken. Europe’s power is no doubt ‘soft’ but wielded through procedure, not command. Procedure boils down to thousands of directives stifling the legitimate democratic rights of the national Parliaments. They are devised by a ‘tribe’ of European civil servants in self-referential isolation, convinced that their own exercise in esprit de corps will safeguard an equally woolly “higher general interest”. The rest of his invective on ‘European soft power’ is reserved for national lobbies bullying Brussels and pressurising us into adopting senseless directives designed to impose some national ascendant on the whole common European area.

In concluding this ‘sounding of the alarm’, the German scholar sticks his neck out with a personal interpretation of the Eurozone’s current crisis. Paradoxically, the worst crisis has struck the economic front, just where the Union thought it was on home ground. But recent developments have been even more paradoxical, if that is possible. Faced with economic deadlock, politics has hoisted the white flag and left it once again to economists to try and bail us out. The cry of “there is no alternative” at the Greek situation or the Mediterranean countries’ crises (including Italy’s) is but the umpteenth declaration of surrender by politics before the might of finance and the economy.

The pamphlet closes on a note that is nigh on doom-laden. Brussels, thinks Enzensberger, is trying to standardise something whose individualistic features ought to have been highlighted. Hence the attempt to dress up imperial thinking in “non-violent” terms. As history has so often shown, empires are destined to founder, either by expanding unduly or upon the reef of internal contradiction. The present European Union, composed of mushrooming members and increasingly unable to halt the rot in the Old Continent, is depressingly close – one is forced to admit – to the scathing portrait that Enzensberger paints.

Michele Marchi
(University of Bologna)