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Poetry was controlled in ancient Greece to prevent excessive emotions from corrupting the social order. Rhyming couplets have long since lost their ability to influence politics. And yet. On April 29, a small crowd turned out for a poetry slam in Aachen, a German city near the Belgian border, which asked amateur poets to talk about the European Union. A few dozen mostly gray-haired people, including Charlemagne (your columnist, not the medieval emperor who once ruled from the city), listened in awe as three young men cleverly rhymed one long compound word with another. Some light rapping was attempted. A local “TikTok political influencer” – not a profession Plato would have recognized – acted as host and made sure the social order was not actually corrupted (the risk seems low in hindsight). After the lyrical battle was settled amicably, the audience got to see another Greek civic art. The program, broadcast from the streets of Maastricht, saw eight politicians from Denmark, Luxembourg and other countries engage in a good old-fashioned rhetorical contest ahead of the upcoming European elections on June 6-9.
For a modern Aristotle, this half-filled theater on Monday night was a sign of another phenomenon with Greek roots: the emergence of a European demos, or common political culture. For centuries, in Germany and beyond, civic life has been the business of municipalities, provinces or nation-states. Yet power in Europe is increasingly being exercised by the institutions of the European Union in Brussels. Whether this centralized system can become something more than a compact intergovernmental body, a kind of regional United Nations on steroids, depends partly on whether the citizens of the EU countries feel intrinsically that they belong to the same polity. From such a unified demos could emerge a unified European democracy.
Euro-federalists have longed for such a pan-continental social contract since the days when the EU was a coal and steel club. They still do. In a speech on April 25, France’s Emmanuel Macron called for “the European demos to be given more vigour.” Even better, some see early signs of it. Some 446 million Europeans have lived through multiple crises in recent years, and they fear the same things: Russian aggression, an isolationist America, greedy Big Tech, climate change. Answers to these crises are largely crafted in Brussels, which makes most of the laws affecting EU citizens. Even if people don’t realize they should care, the argument goes, they will one day.
Demos, if it exists, should be most visible in the build-up to the bloc’s elections, which have had MEPs seated directly since 1979. Instead it is notably absent. European elections have a much lower turnout than national elections. Voting takes place simultaneously across the bloc, but it’s best to think of it as 27 concurrent national affairs. French voters will want to serve Mr Macron some humble pie, Polish voters will give their new government a first report card, and so on. If EU policies are discussed, it will be almost incidental.
The debate in Maastricht showed how thin the veil of pan-European politics really is. On stage were the leading candidates from political groups in parliament who aspire to replace Ursula von der Leyen as president of the European Commission, the bloc’s powerful executive branch. Yet in practice, who wins the election has little to do with who gets the job. Mrs von der Leyen’s centre-right bloc is far ahead in opinion polls anyway. While all Europeans can recognise their country’s president or prime minister, very few will know who this cadre of Commission leaders are, except possibly the current prime minister. To dismiss some of the debaters as second-rate would be an insult to the actual second-rate politicians. Most of them were little known within the Brussels bubble, much less outside it. What is striking is that the debate could only be watched via the internet, not on television.
Is that the case that the demos is either emerging or inevitable? “These days Europeans know more about each other because of crises,” says Bulgarian intellectual Ivan Krastev. From Athens to Dublin, most people will have felt the same shock when they open their heating bills in 2022; they worry that their children may face conscription or a boiling earth. When Covid-19 infected the bloc, they waited for vaccines, which were procured in Brussels for all Europeans. From such joint tribulations may emerge an “imagined community” that underlies national politics, as Benedict Anderson, a political theorist, once put it.
Bringing Democracy to a Democracy
But those who think Europeans need to do more together need not conclude that this requires a powerful, union-wide level of direct democracy. At the moment few citizens care about that. The direction of travel over the past decade has been toward deeper EU integration, but this has largely been guided by national governments working together, often under the auspices of the Commission (and through some oversight from a relatively weak parliament). The EU in its current less-than-centralised form is popular: recent polling shows that citizens in all 27 member states think positively of it, and want their country to remain in the club.
Federalists should be wary not of too few protests, but of too many. When common political themes emerge across the EU, they do not flatter Brussels. Migration, Ukraine and environmental protection are all areas in which the EU has been deeply involved – and which most voters say they are dissatisfied with. If a unified European civic culture emerges, it can be concluded that the Union will seek to adapt its institutions to its people, not its people to its institutions.
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© 2024, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under licence. Original content can be found at www.economist.com.
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