French-German leadership during the euro crisis has been fraught with tension. It’s not so much the case that Germany is abandoning its European responsibilities, more that the crisis emphasizes differences in political culture. While Germany may seem dilatory, French resolve forfeits democratic deliberation.
It is not capitalism that has come to an end but a mode of politics that seeks to guarantee market stability, argues economic historian Werner Plumpe. The crisis must be allowed to serve its cyclical function, the state limiting itself to compensating for the social consequences of structural economic transformation.
The Ukraine-European Union summit, originally planned for 19 December, was to have brought talks on an Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU to a conclusion. However the conflict over the prosecution of Yuliya Tymoshenko has endangered the process, raising serious doubts about the European aspirations of the current Ukrainian leadership. The country’s future hangs in the balance, writes Tatiana Zhurzhenko.
The thirty-year long experiment in market capitalism has failed to unleash a new era of enterprise, entrepreneurialism and dynamism, argues Stewart Lansley. Examining key areas in which the market model was supposed to deliver, he finds that, on almost every count, post-war “managed capitalism” outperformed it successor.
By the end of 2011, European member states are expected to have demonstrated their fulfilment of the requirements of the EU Framework Programme for the integration of Roma. But what are the chances of the programme succeeding if structural anti-Roma racism exists within European institutions themselves? Valeriu Nicolae is founder and president of the Policy Centre for Roma and Minorities in Bucharest, an NGO that works directly with young Roma. At a conference in Berlin in November, he talked about the discrepancy between European rhetoric and institutional reality.
Russia’s democratic inertia results from the dominance of private over universal values, writes writes Samuel A. Greene. But what are the factors that could lead to change? While pressure from below is likely to provoke consolidation of the elites, long-term economic decline might encourage greater European integration and reform of the country’s institutions.
Is the monetary union worth preserving if it means the virtual colonization of the weakest member economies? Assessing responses to the euro crisis, John Grahl argues that the real cause – private sector deficits across the periphery – remains unaddressed. Instead, a regime is emerging in which EU creditor authorities override national decision-making in every aspect of public policy.
European leaders’ unwavering commitment to ever closer union is causing more harm than good, argues Stefan Auer. Europe doesn’t need more integration; it needs more democracy to enable its nations to regain control over their destiny. Partial and well-managed disintegration may be preferable to a chaotic implosion.
While democracy evaporates on a national level, it doesn’t reappear anywhere else, least of all in Europe. Maintaining the democratic nature of our societies depends on the rules of the game we impose on ourselves at the European level, argues José Ignacio Torreblanca.
The discrediting of the category of race in post-war European societies did not abolish racism: officially endorsed cultural relativism perpetuated Eurocentricism while dismissing racism as the pathology of the individual. Critique of culturalism is, however, to be distinguished from the new wave of anti-multiculturalism, argues Alana Lentin. Ostensibly aimed at the illiberalism of multiculturalism’s “beneficiaries”, the latter expresses intolerance of “bad diversity”.
“Narrative tolerance” has encouraged an historiographic preference for witness accounts within European cultural institutions. Often, however, narrative authority continues to work beneath a blandly affirmative surface. Questions of reliability aside, is a witness-based history even able to fulfil the necessary task of narrating Europe’s political identity?
The positivist tradition of nineteenth century history, dominated by the idea of the nation and based on the archive, began in the 1970s to give way to a concern with recent history, in which the historical witness became paramount. With the past ceasing to be a body of knowledge and becoming a public issue, a new form of political influence has exerted itself upon historians. In the French case, the subject of colonialism is particularly controversial. Now more than ever it is crucial historians retain critical distance.
Germany’s politicians lack deep European convictions yet are susceptible to calls for a more strident role in Europe; and while the mainstream is unlikely to give up what it sees as the recipe for German success, “constitutional patriotism” could allow for greater Europeanization. Jan-Werner Müller talks to Esprit about German contradictions.
The challenge for a liberal democracy is to remain as such, argues Charles Taylor in conversation with Slawomir Sierakowski. Western democracies suffer two types deterioration: a misperception of really existing problems and a lack of vital tension between the demos and the government.