Year LXVI, 2024, Single Issue
Constituent War and the Role of Politiques*
GIORGIO ANSELMI
‘And it should be considered that nothing is more difficult to handle, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than to put oneself at the head of introducing new orders. For the introducer has all those who benefit from the old orders as enemies, and he has lukewarm defenders in all those who might benefit from the new orders. This lukewarmness arises partly from fear of adversaries who have the laws on their side and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not truly believe in new things unless they come to have a firm experience of them. Consequently, whenever those who are enemies have opportunity to attack, they do so with partisan zeal, and the others defend lukewarmly so that one is in peril along with them. It is however necessary, if one wants to discuss this aspect well, to examine whether these innovators stand by themselves or depend on others; that is, whether to carry out their deed they must beg or indeed can use force. In the first case they always come to ill and never accomplish anything; but when they depend on their own and are able to use force, then it is that they are rarely in peril. From this it arises that all the armed prophets conquered and the unarmed ones were ruined. For, besides the things that have been said, the nature of peoples is variable; and it is easy to persuade them of something, but difficult to keep them in that persuasion. And thus things must be ordered in such a mode that when they no longer believe, one can make them believe by force.’ (Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter VI).
For Altiero Spinelli, the above considerations prompted deep reflection both before and after the drafting of the Ventotene Manifesto. They may even have made him consider abandoning the fight for the United States of Europe when, contrary to his predictions, the period after the end of the Second World War brought a rebirth of the nation states. It was only the Marshall Plan, with the USA in the role of external federator, that convinced him to resume the fight.
The historical premise that allowed this great plan to take shape and develop was the irreversible crisis of the nation states, something that the most enlightened minds had already been predicting several decades before, i.e., in the period between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, when the splendours of the Belle Époque and the colonial domination of other continents were concealing the fact that the second industrial revolution was unfolding not in Europe, but in the USA, a state of continental dimensions that, in the space of a few decades, would become the world’s leading economic and financial power. Already anticipated by some, then, this crisis was laid bare to all in the first half of the 20th century with the outbreak of the two world wars, and it ended with the splitting of continental Europe into two blocs, a development that had hugely significant consequences. Whereas the Soviet Union brought the states of Eastern Europe under its iron fist, depriving them of all autonomy, the USA endeavoured, through the Marshall Plan, to get those of Western Europe back on their feet again and, through a far-sighted and enlightened policy, pushed for their integration. Although Europe’s process of integration has had numerous setbacks along the way, America’s hegemony in the region is precisely the reason why, for a long time, none of them proved really destructive or capable of seriously undermining the process as a whole.
However, this situation also created contradictions, which remained hidden for a long time and only became apparent in their disruptive power in recent decades. On the one hand, for example, it left Europeans feeling that they could afford to advance by small steps, and even throw out their most ambitious projects (as they did in 1954, for example, when the EDC was abandoned following its rejection by the French National Assembly). At the same time, Europe’s gradually deepening integration had the effect of strengthening the single states, illuding them that they would always be able to get by without having to swallow the bitter pill of relinquishing their sovereignty, even though in many areas it has actually become sovereignty in name only.
With the end of the bipolar balance, the situation began to change. Although monetary unification allowed the collapse of the Eastern bloc to be countered with growing integration, the European Community, and subsequently the European Union, proved unable either to prevent, or subsequently to intervene in, the highly explosive situation in the Balkan region, a tinderbox that the collapse of Yugoslavia had once again rendered highly volatile. Accession of the countries freed from the Soviet yoke remained the only instrument Brussels had. Let it be said quite clearly: enlargement allowed the rule of law, democracy and the market economy to be extended first to three countries that had emerged from authoritarian regimes (Greece, Spain and Portugal), and then to the ex-communist world. And it is certainly no coincidence that the Western Balkan states still excluded from the European ‘club’ see EU membership as an anchor for their stability and economic development. And today, of course, there are other countries, like Ukraine, Moldova and even Georgia, a Caucasian republic, that are more than happy to be on course to become part of the European convoy.
Enlargement, therefore, having allowed our continent to be reunified in the wake of almost half a century of division and conflict, is a success story. But the price paid has been a growing inability of the European institutions to respond to the challenges of the new millennium. This problem was well known, so much so that from the second half of the 1980s, various reforms were undertaken, in part following the indications of the Spinelli Project approved by the first elected European Parliament, which led in rapid succession to the approval of the Single European Act, the Treaty of Maastricht, the Treaty of Amsterdam, the Treaty of Nice, and finally the proposal for a European Constitution put forward by the Convention on the Future of Europe chaired by Giscard d’Estaing. However, it was not the new members that rejected the latter, but rather the referendums held in France and the Netherlands, two founding member states. This brings us, after much discussion and recriminations, to the Treaty of Lisbon, which has governed the life of the Union since 1 December 2009.
Even before this Treaty came into force, the system of the single currency, and with it the entire European edifice, had been put to the test by the cataclysmic economic and financial events that erupted in the United States. ‘Those who go against the wind or swim against the tide’ is the meaning of the word Omaha, the name of a small Indian tribe inhabiting the central plains of the United States. Notwithstanding defeats, setbacks and the contradictions of the European integration process, European federalists were, for a long time, able to march with the wind. While they cannot be said to have had the wind at their backs — that was never the case —, they were able to move within an overall direction of travel that was the one they desired. The official texts bear this out, from the Schuman Declaration, which defined the ECSC as ‘les premières assises concrètes d’une fédération européenne’, to the Treaty of Lisbon itself, which commits the states to the pursuit of ‘an ever closer union’ and to taking ‘further steps […] in order to advance European integration’.
Precisely in the years around the difficult ratification of this latter treaty, the wind changed and began to blow against us. Now we have enemies who attack with ‘partisan zeal’, and friends who defend ‘lukewarmly’. Two factors, reinforcing each other, contributed to this state of affairs. First of all, the economic and financial crisis that erupted in the United States caught the European Union and its institutions unprepared to deal with it, which is precisely why Europe is where its effects have been most serious and most long lasting. The second factor is the changing geopolitical scenario, characterised by the retreat of the United States, the migration crisis, the emergence of new powers, and the search for delicate new balances.
The European states have responded to these challenges by increasingly resorting to intergovernmental methods and instruments, to the detriment of supranational bodies such as the Parliament and the Commission. In so doing, they have saved the Union and the euro, but also fuelled distrust among citizens and favoured the rise of populist and nationalist movements. The EU has increasingly looked like a fortress under siege, from both the inside and the outside. At times, only the ECB, under the wise leadership of Mario Draghi, has proven capable of preparing packages of measures to shore up the eurozone and prevent it from falling apart. All this has resulted in growing divergences between North and South and between East and West regarding, respectively, attitudes to the economy and the issues of immigration and foreign policy. It should be added that the globalisation of markets, financial turbocapitalism, new technologies, and the impetuous growth of emerging powers have ended up aggravating (even within single states) the differences between the social groups that are able to withstand the competition and those that instead find themselves increasingly marginalised, as well as the divide between the various areas and regions (such as between central-northern and southern Italy). The birth of nationalist and populist movements can certainly be attributed, at least in part, to these situations of hardship and uncertainty.
‘A new form of political science is needed for a brand-new world. But this is what we think of least: afloat in the middle of a fast-flowing river, we obstinately fix our eyes on a few pieces of debris still visible on the shore, while the current sweeps us along and drags us backwards towards the abyss.’ Altiero Spinelli placed this insight by Tocqueville, at the start of his Manifesto of the European Federalists (Parma, 1957), which, less known than the Ventotene Manifesto, was deeply influenced by the failure of the first attempt to found a European federation in the first half of the 1950s. If a new form of political science was needed then, in a world that had found, in the bipolar US-USSR system, a stability and order that would last for almost half a century, how much more do we need one today, finding ourselves, as we do, in the midst of an epochal transition still difficult to decipher? Unfortunately, categories linked to that completely superseded historical context are still used to indicate the complex phase of world history we are living through today. Thus, it is argued that the current US-China confrontation can be defined as a new cold war. Clearing the field of such ‘debris’ is, then, the first task facing those who do not want to be dragged ‘towards the abyss.’
First of all, the USA-USSR rivalry that characterised the second half of the twentieth century existed only on the political-military level. Indeed, there was no competition in the economic-financial sphere since the Western model’s superiority in providing goods and services through the market was indisputable. When Khrushchev threw down the gauntlet, insisting that centralised planning would provide even better living conditions, he unwittingly set himself up to be the prophet of the end of the command economy should the model fail. Moreover, in those same years, the erection of the Berlin Wall, designed to stop people from fleeing en masse to the West, provided the clearest possible proof of which of the two models of economy and society the citizens of the East deemed preferable. The Wall was the physical expression of the division between the First and Second Worlds that would last until 1989, while the rest of the planet formed what became known as the Third World.
Today, that impetuous movement of people, goods and technologies that we collectively refer to as globalisation has brought about a previously unimaginable degree of integration between continents. And it is in this one world, which must now be considered a community of common destiny (a fact confirmed in the space of months by the COVID-19 pandemic), that the confrontation between China and the USA is taking place. It is an inherently systemic confrontation, given that China, starting from Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, has made and is continuing to make giant strides in all areas. At the same time, the two powers are, at once, opposed to each other but also linked by a very strong interdependence, especially in the economic and financial sphere. Consider, for example, the American trade imbalances, partially offset by a balance of payments that sees China among the main buyers of US public debt securities; the competition in the field of technology, with the new Chinese champions (Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei, Tencent) challenging the big American corporations (collectively referred to using the acronym GAFAM); the hoarding of raw materials; and the value chains that link global but also smaller companies, as the case of chip production shows. In 2018, the then US president Trump declared that trade wars are ‘easy to win’, which is easy to say in words, it is tempting to add, given what happened in the years that followed. To cite a recent figure, in May 2024 China recorded a trade surplus of 82.62 billion dollars, up from 65.55 billion in the same month of 2023.
Finally, the USA and China are also engaged in a clash of ideologies, and are indeed portrayed in the West as the champions of, respectively, liberal democracies and despotic autocracies. It is in this regard that this confrontation can perhaps be likened to the Cold War, but it should not be forgotten that, since the times of Athens and Sparta, every bipolar order has inevitably turned into an ideological conflict.
So, what can reasonably be said about what the current pontiff has called the ‘Third World War fought piecemeal’? Scholars of international relations and also many historians use the ideal type concept of ‘constituent war’ to refer to those great epochal conflicts that put an end to one order and establish another. Examples include the Thirty Years’ War of the 17th century, which gave birth to the system that is still called Westphalian today, after the name of the German region where the peace agreements were concluded, and the Thirty Years’ War of the 20th century (1914–45), which put an end to the European system of states and gave rise to the bipolar world order. Now that the latter is gone, and with it the illusion that the United States alone can guarantee order in the world has been lost(Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’), it is perhaps already possible to make out some outlines of the new global picture that is emerging. Let us say, first of all, that we cannot afford a war between great powers as a way to establish the new global power structure, because that would spell the end of the human race. Second, it needs to be recognised that some problems, starting with the fight against climate change, can be solved only through international collaboration. Unfortunately, however, almost all the international institutions created after the Second World War, primarily the UN, have not been adapted to the new global balances and are therefore afflicted by a serious crisis of legitimacy — two problems that explain the creation of informal groups of states, the most famous being the G20, which aim to address the thorniest global issues and thus make up for the shortcomings of multilateral organisations. If you then look at the states invited to the latest summits of the G7, which is the oldest, most homogeneous and aligned of these ‘clubs’, you discover that it remains a group of seven in name only. The most recent one, held in Puglia, was in fact attended not only by the presidents of Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, the United Arab Emirates, Kenya, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine and the African Union, but also by the King of Jordan, the prime minister of India and even the Pope.
In the end, a new order will have to be reached, which cannot be anything other than global. In short, the main powers will inevitably have to sit around a single table, and probably undertake a profound restructuring of the international organisations that, still based on the Cold War balances, are now completely obsolete, starting with the UN. No new cold war is under way between the USA and China, or between democracies and autocracies, even if it is convenient to make people believe this to be the case. US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, after years of talk of reshoring and friendshoring programmes, had the honesty to acknowledge that a ‘full separation of [the American and Chinese] economies would be disastrous for both countries [and] destabilising for the rest of the world.’ (remarks given on 20 April, 2023 at the Johns Hopkins University). Protectionism and the renationalisation of the economy are not ‘free lunches’, on either the purely economic or the political-military level. When the US passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930, more than a thousand economists signed an open a letter to President Hoover that concluded with these bitter predictions: ‘The higher duties proposed in our pending legislation [...] plainly invite other nations to compete with us in raising further barriers to trade. A tariff war does not furnish good soil for the growth of world peace.’
While it would be unfair to say that the EU has done nothing in the last fifteen years, a clear difference can be observed between the measures taken in the decade 2009-19 and those adopted during the legislature that has just ended. In 2016 (a quarter of a century after the turning point brought about by Thatcher and Reagan in 1979-80), the victory of the Leave campaign in the referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the EU, followed by Trump’s unexpected victory in the American presidential elections, appeared to mark another epochal transition, with the Anglo-Saxon powers seemingly still capable of setting, for the West and perhaps even the world, a path to follow. But this is not the way things turned out. With the 2019 European elections, which confirmed a large pro-European majority and led to Ursula von der Leyen’s appointment as president of the Commission, the Union equipped itself to give unitary and coordinated responses to the new emergencies that, from the outset, characterised the last parliamentary term. The toughest test was dealing with the pandemic and the very serious economic crisis that followed it. Following the EU’s successful implementation of its joint vaccine procurement plan, in the space of just three months a 750-billion-euro investment plan was adopted, to be funded through joint European borrowing. In this way, the taboo of European public debt, which had never been addressed since the birth of the common currency, was overcome, and, through NextGenerationEU, the countries hardest hit were provided with the resources they needed to put national recovery plans into action.
Many commentators are quick to say that it needed a traumatic event like Russia’s aggression against Ukraine to snap us out of the illusion that we can be, on a grand scale, what Switzerland has been for centuries in Europe: an area of stability, peace and prosperity in a world devastated by conflicts. And we certainly have to be honest and acknowledge that the offensive launched by Putin on 24 February, 2022 has finally opened our eyes. Despite some uncertainty and internal division, the EU has largely freed itself from its dependence on Russian gas, has approved 14 packages of sanctions against Russia, and, with its latest decisions, has clearly surpassed the United States in providing economic and financial support to Ukraine. If we also consider that Europe has even gone so far as to accept the candidacy of a state attacked and at war, something that has never happened or even been hypothesised before, we can conclude that the Europeans have finally understood what is at stake and have no intention of abdicating their responsibilities.
Furthermore, there should be no underestimating the efforts that European institutions, particularly the Commission, have been making to respond to the growth of global competition: these range from the revision of state aid regulations to the proposal for a European sovereign fund; from the European Chips Act to the Critical Raw Materials Act; from battery gigafactories to the Gaia-X project and the Digital Compass 2030 programme.
The most important challenge has just begun and will occupy the EU for the next few years. Despite the compromises needed to enable the European Parliament to adopt, in plenary, the proposals for amending the Treaties put forward by the European Parliament’s Committee on Constitutional Affairs, the resolution of 22 November marked a turning point and the start of a serious discussion on the future of the European Union. The obstacles now come from the Commission, and especially from the Council. While Ursula von der Leyen initially praised the parliament in Strasbourg for having ‘put forward bold ideas for a reform of our Treaties’ and undertook to present a package of proposals to ‘prepare for a Union of 30 plus member states’, the ideas put forward since have been truly disappointing. More disheartening still is the picture offered by the national governments. While nine states have already proposed abolishing unanimity in the Council, a procedure that condemns Europe to suffer all kinds of vetoes and blackmail, rendering it impotent and allowing it to be ridiculed by the enemies of democracy, the EU heads of state and government have thus far failed to find a majority to convene, in accordance with the terms of Article 48 of the Lisbon Treaty, a Convention for the reform of the Treaties. This brings us back to the teaching of the Florentine diplomat. Although the EU, over the past five years, has successfully addressed the crises it has been caught up in, ‘the nature of peoples is variable; and it is easy to persuade them of something, but difficult to keep them in that persuasion.’ A profound reform of the Treaties is needed to ensure ‘that when they no longer believe, [they can be made to] believe by force.’
If it was the crisis of the European nation states that caused the catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century, today it is the crisis of the continental powers that is pushing the world towards the abyss of an increasingly bitter confrontation whose outcomes are unpredictable and could even include the end of humankind. The inadequacy of large states in the face of the challenges of our time can be seen at different levels, political, ideological and economic. Perhaps never before has there been so much talk of blocs, alignments and coalitions, in the midst of a sometimes-bewildering proliferation of acronyms and abbreviations. The most recent and most striking development in this sense is the enlargement of the BRICS to include six more full members: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Thus, a set of countries first grouped together by a Goldman Sachs economist now aims to represent the global South, accounting for 36 per cent of global GDP and 47 per cent of the world’s population. The bloc’s ambitions for the future are even greater, with talk of possible further enlargements, and even the adoption of a common unit of account, if not an actual currency. In truth, the only glue holding this highly heterogeneous group together seems to be a strong opposition to the so-called West or, to be more precise, to the United States and the hegemony of the dollar. This is borne out by the way in which the election of a pro-US candidate, Milei, as president of Argentina has proved sufficient to change the geopolitical orientation of this important South American country. Another divide, highlighted in particular by the USA, is the one between democracies and autocracies. However, a closer analysis of the situation reveals that states in competition with one another do not always align along exactly the same lines, and can actually belong to several different groups. This is the new world disorder, due to the already mentioned marginality, and even irrelevance, of multilateral organisations. The way in which the large and medium powers group together, in variable geometries, is a demonstration of the fact that, despite their strong declarations, none of them can aspire to world supremacy.
Another dimension in which the identity crisis afflicting even the largest states can clearly be seen is one we define as ideological. As is well known, the modern state became established in Europe by taking on pre-existing feudal powers, including the power of the Church. It was a long process that culminated in the French Revolution and the formation of Europe’s nation states. The European experience was then replicated in other parts of the world. The so-called Meiji Restoration in Japan and the Young Turk Revolution can be cited as just two examples. Today, though, we are witnessing the rediscovery of religion as a source of supreme legitimation of the state. Enzo Paci, in just a few lines, described this phenomenon extremely effectively: ‘The re-emergence, today, of the arrogance of empires and nations is concealing the vertical crisis of the great narratives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The elites in power are once again looking to religions in the same way a sick person gasping for breath clings to an oxygen tank.’
In addition, we hardly need recall the way religion is politicised in some EU countries, including Italy. It is enough to cite the cutting remark made by Olivier Roy, professor at the European University Institute in Florence: ‘Never has the Christian identity of Europe, and Europe’s Christian roots, been more talked about than since Europeans gradually stopped practising [the religion]’. The weakness, insignificance even, of the current European states is so evident that it somehow justifies their recourse to the oxygen tank of religion. Far more significant, for the thesis we are trying to argue here, are the attempts by continental powers to recover religious traditions. The aggression against Ukraine, for example, has led the Russian Federation to demand, and obtain, the unconditional support of Patriarch Kirill and the Orthodox hierarchy, giving rise to the kind of caesaropapism that was thought to have been consigned to the history books. Even in the USA, the historical adversary first of the USSR and now of Putin’s Russia, evangelical nationalism has lent powerful legitimacy to the white supremacism of Trump and the American right. When Biden came to power, a conflict arose between the US episcopate and the current pontiff, who was accused of tolerating the new president’s defence of certain civil rights. Moving on to the two main Asian powers, it is remarkable how Narendra Modi and his party, in the space of a few short years, have managed to turn Hinduism from what Ali Raja Saleem described as ‘one of the most open and inclusive religions’ into a tool for imposing a nationalism that discriminates against minorities, particularly Muslims. Perhaps more remarkable still is the rediscovery of Confucianism by Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party, who are nevertheless ready to subjugate this cultural heritage to the reasons of state and of party without worrying too much about historical simplifications and falsifications. The most dramatic case, however, remains that of many Muslim-majority countries, where the elites in power have ended up imposing Shari’a as the law of the state.
On the economic level, finally, there is the growing inability of states to control the major economic power centres. In the West, this is illustrated by investigations into the monopolistic practices of the Big Tech companies. Even more disturbing are episodes such as the negotiations between Elon Musk and the Pentagon to provide Ukraine with information from the Starlink satellite system, or Musk’s demand that the German government justify the assistance provided to the NGOs operating in the Mediterranean, which he followed up by urging voters in Hesse and Bavaria to vote for AfD. Moreover, the fact that this gentleman is often received by the highest government authorities as though he were also a head of state speaks volumes about the power to condition, and even blackmail, wielded by people like him. The relationship between political power and economic power in autocratic regimes on the other hand is more opaque, but just as worrying, as shown by the Evergrande case in China.
Earlier, we said that eventually, at the end of the ongoing constituent war, the main powers will have to sit around a table to define the new world order. At the present time it is not possible to say who will sit at that table, because the clash is ongoing and the hierarchies have yet to be established. But as Europeans we can both count on a certainty and rise to a challenge. The certainty is that no European state is strong enough to be able to claim to be, by itself, a protagonist of the new world balance. It has already been remarked, aptly, that European countries fall into only two categories: those that know they are small, and those that still have to realise that they are. But they can all rise to the challenge of sharing sovereignty in areas, such as foreign policy, defence, energy and industrial policy, where singly they no longer count for anything.
Every constituent war is also fought in the name of principles and values. Two logics are in competition today: the imperial logic and the federal logic. The conflict is being played out above all in the world’s soft underbellies, regions marked by division and firmly in the sights of the great powers: Africa first and foremost, but also Latin America, the Middle East and South-East Asia. And Europe, too, which could become the most coveted prey if it fails to take decisive steps towards its own unification. Looking at the global picture, the imperial logic seems to have already won. The results of the recent European elections, particularly in France and Germany, left many convinced that there is nothing more that can be done. France in the second half of the sixteenth century, devastated by the civil war between the Catholics and the Huguenots, experienced a similar situation. Then, it was only a group of statesmen and intellectuals who found the courage to set aside their religious affiliations and declare the need for a secular state and an end to wars of religion. They were the Politiques. Today it is up to the federalists, aware that the fate of the world is being played out here in Europe, to play this same role, opposing all forms of imperialism. And they must do this without false fears. Prudently, but also vehemently, if necessary. Using the force of reason and not the reasons of force.
[*] This text is based on, and reproduces extracts from, articles published in L’Unità Europea.
