MY THEME IS THE ‘STATE OF THE EU’ RATHER THAN THE ‘STATE OF EUROPE’. I AM GOING TO FOCUS MY REMARKS ON THE EUROPEAN UNION AS A POLITICAL INSTITUTION. I’M NOT GOING TO SAY MUCH ABOUT ‘EUROPE’ AS A CULTURE, A CIVILIZATION, OR A GEOGRAPHIC SPACE. AND, STRICTLY SPEAKING, WHEN WE SPEAK OF ‘EUROPE’ IN THOSE BROADER, COMPLEX AND MULTI-LAYERED SENSES, WE SHOULDN’T SPEAK OF ‘THE EUROPEAN PROJECT’. CULTURES OR CONTINENTS ARE TOO BIG, DIVERSE AND SPRAWLING TO HAVE ‘PROJECTS’. BUT WE CAN SPEAK SPECIFICALLY OF THE ‘PROJECT OF EUROPEAN POLITICAL INTEGRATION’. THAT IS WHAT THE EU IS AND THAT’S WHAT I WILL ADDRESS.

I want to begin by reminding us of the mounting crises the EU is facing. Then I’ll ask the core question what the EU as a political institution is actually for. I’ll conclude by turning to the theme of ‘the paradox of freedom’. I’ll propose that we get a better grasp of ‘the state of freedom’ in Europe and how it can be protected against its threats when we can give a clear answer to the question of what the EU is. My title speaks of ‘a’ Christian perspective. Of course there isn’t only one, but I hope many of you find echoes of what I say in your own traditions.

In 2004, the European Commission published a little-known 18-page document on the overall health of the EU, at the time when the accession of several east European countries was about to take place. It was called The Spiritual and Cultural Dimension of Europe and it was produced by a ‘Reflection Group’ of senior political and intellectual figures from across the EU.1 I would encourage everyone to read this short document. It was not an official statement of Commission views. Perhaps that is why it was so interesting. It offered a penetrating analysis of the crisis of identity and purpose facing the EU as it prepared for the immense challenge of embracing 10 new member states and 75 million new citizens bringing with them very different political, economic and cultural experiences and expectations to those of existing member states. You could say that the document was attempting to revive the discussion of a ‘soul for Europe’ launched by former Commission President Jacques Delors over a decade earlier but which had gone quiet. The document offered a careful diagnosis of the direction of European integration. The forces of economic integration that had been driving the EU, it said,

do nothing to bring Europeans any closer together. They do not and cannot
establish the internal cohesion that is necessary for the European Union; nor…
can [they] alone provide cohesion for any political identity. To function as a
viable and vital polity, the European Union needs a firmer foundation…..
Economic integration simply does not, of itself, lead to political integration
because markets cannot produce a politically resilient solidarity. Solidarity–a
genuine sense of civic community–is vital because the competition that
dominates the marketplace gives rise to powerful centrifugal forces. Markets
may create the economic basis of a polity and are thereby an indispensable
condition of its political constitution. But they cannot on their own produce
political integration…. The original expectation, that the political unity of the
EU would be a consequence of the European common market has proven to
be illusory.

That was remarkably candid admission and, I believe, a true one. But that was 2004. Even those wise authors could not then foresee that the prospects for a ‘politically resilient solidarity’ across the EU would be so much more precarious a mere 12 years later. They could not have anticipated the tumultuous shocks that lay ahead: the rise of nationalistic and xenophobic movements across many EU states, the global financial crisis, the Eurozone crisis and the prospect of a Grexit, the resurgence of Russian nationalism, the catastrophic refugee crisis–and, as we speak, the genuine possibility of a Brexit –opinion polls are currently divided very evenly – and the serious risk of a subsequent unravelling of the EU that could follow.

Some EU leaders are now acknowledging the depth of the crisis. At a panel in Rome on Thursday, three senior figures conceded that there had been a stark decline in EU-wide solidarity in recent years. Commission President Jean- Claude Juncker lamented that, “In former times we were working together … there was a shared sentiment that….we were in charge of a big piece of history. This has totally gone.” He went on: “We have full-time Europeans when it comes to taking and part-time Europeans when it comes to giving…. Now we have too many part-time Europeans.” These “part timers,” he said, were often those who received most from EU funds, by which he apparently meant new member states from the east.2 But he might as well have had Britain in mind, which I regret has often been a part-time member. Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament, put it more bluntly: “We have a lot of salesmen in the European Council and only a few statesmen.” Council President Donald Tusk went even further: “The idea of one EU state, one vision … was an illusion.”3

There is that word again: illusion. But now I want to remind you that the original Christian founders of the EU were not under any such illusions. Figures like Robert Schuman understood very well that the project of European integration was political before it was economic and that it would fail if the political ends of the project ever came to be dominated by the economic means. Schuman said that European integration “cannot and must not remain an economic and technical enterprise; it needs a soul, the conscience of its historical affinities and of its responsibilities in the present and in the future, and a political will at the service of the same human ideal.”4 The creation of the European Coal and Steel Community was not a mere industrial policy but a decisive political act of reconciliation – a truly visionary leap into a future where hostile nations would actually lay down the means of waging war against each other. For those Christian statesmen, perhaps it was also a glimpse through the eyes of faith of a future vision in which ‘swords would be beaten into ploughshares’. Indeed they held that not even political unity would be enough: such unity would have to be grounded in a common European heritage of Christian faith, the faith that had actually given ‘Europe’ its unique identity.

That was 66 years ago, when Europe was still overwhelmingly Christian – at least in profession, if not practice. Today we live in an extensively secularized Europe and increasingly pluralistic Europe – posing the questions whether and how the EU project can actually be sustained now that it has departed so far from its own heritage. I return to that question up in another session.

But this evening I want to ask the question: what is a non-illusory way to see the European Union? What is a clear-eyed, realistic vision of the EU? To answer that question we need to ask an even more basic one: what is the EU for? What type of entity is it? And what can we reasonably expect from this type of entity? I want to explore what it means to say that the EU is one type of political institution, acting with the instruments of law and policy, and reaching decisions through difficult, democratic compromises.

Now, by identifying the EU as a political institution, we are also saying that it is not some other type of thing, that some purposes do not belong to it. Political institutions do not include everything in society within them. States do not absorb ‘the nation’, but are one part of it, the part that serves the whole–as Jacques Maritain nicely put it. They are only one kind of social institution and not inherently more important than others. There is much they cannot do, much they should never attempt to do and much we should never empower them to do. They have an important job but it is a limited one. For example, political institutions like the EU are not essentially economic entities, like a market. This has great significance for the Brexit debate, which is overwhelmingly concentrated on economic benefit. For even if it could be demonstrated that membership of the EU will benefit Britain economically more than separation, that fact alone should not decide the issue. Evidently a certain level of secure economic resources is presupposed if a political community’s core political tasks are to be discharged. But, as the Reflection Group correctly saw, economic purposes should be kept subservient to political objectives.

This insight has long been central to Christian political thought, and we need to revive it and reaffirm it today. In the Christian tradition, political institutions do not exist to make their citizens rich, only to create conditions in which citizens can engage in their own economic activities. We can go further: nor do political institutions exist to defend the interests of an ethnic majority or a majority culture against minorities; to protect indigenous residents against foreigners; to create virtue in their citizens’ souls. Those and other tasks are all outside their authority. Rather, political institutions exist to establish a framework of justice, peace, solidarity and freedom in the public realm of society. They do that by establishing a just legal order within which all citizens and all other institutions – families, neighbourhoods, educational and cultural groups, economic organisations – the institutions of ‘civil society’ and the market – can be free to pursue their own responsibilities and purposes securely. These are the unique tasks of the institutions we call ‘political’. We might say these tasks are the specifically political components of ‘the common good’ of society. And they are not the whole of the common good – most of what falls under ‘common good’ is down to us.

But Christianity does not see political institutions as a necessary evil, as secular libertarians suggest. Nor are they the solution to all social problems, as secular social democrats sometimes imply. They are, as the apostle Paul says in Romans chapter 13, “servants of God for your good.” In that short phrase, Paul both affirms the legitimacy of political institutions against those who see them as hopelessly corrupt, while also debunking the imperial claims of the pagan Roman state. Most of us have little problem recognising these purposes – public justice, peace, solidarity and freedom – at the level of our nationstates. We can probably also grasp that it’s true of our local and regional governments, even in very mundane pragmatic matters like – as, in my own village, whether speed bumps on the road work or not: that is protecting local justice, the rights of residents to safe public space. But it’s vital that we also see international and trans-national institutions as called to these noble tasks – the UN, the WTO, NATO, and, indeed, the EU – however poorly they sometimes perform them. We need to see that each of these bodies has been established to make a specific contribution to securing justice, peace, solidarity or freedom, but now in public space beyond the borders of any one nation state. That is their raison d’être, and that is the benchmark by which their performance should be critically assessed.

For universal norms of justice, peace, solidarity and freedom are God’s will for all humanity and their claims do not stop at national borders – indeed sometime they stand in judgment over those borders, as Palestinians rightly insist. In addition to governments’ first responsibilities for their own citizens, they also hold responsibilities for citizens and nations elsewhere, especially those who are most at risk of injustice or whose peace, solidarity or freedom are threatened. Thus some of us in the UK are urging our fellow citizens – indeed our fellow Christians – not to view EU membership primarily in the narrow, shrivelled language of the ‘British national interest’. But this, I regret is entirely how the government wants them to see it, as is seen from their official leaflet that was recently posted to every household in Britain.5

Christians must rise above those narrow horizons. We reject the secularist liberal assumption of the primacy of individual self-interest in national politics. We should reject the equivalent assumption in international politics – and urge our fellow citizens to reject it as well. There should be no automatic primacy of one’s own ‘national interest’ over the interests of other nations: this is precisely what is blocking a just resolution of the EU response to the refugee crisis. Indeed Christians should be prepared to argue for positions which advance the international common good even at the apparent expense of their national interests – as the statesmen who launched the project of European integration did with such courage and foresight.

We should view the EU, then, as an institution with a necessary, honourable and demanding moral vocation: to promote conditions of justice, peace, solidarity and freedom across European public space. I am convinced that the crises facing Europe, and the world, demand such an institution: the refugee crisis; threats to national security such as jihadist terrorism; technological threats to human personhood; structural deprivation; environmental degradation; regional and global peace-making, and many more.

But in case you think I am a hopeless Europhile, let me make one critical observation on the early language of the founders–the aspiration of ‘ever closer union’. We can easily see why, in the aftermath of terrible war, this language was used. I suspect it was inspired by an awareness of the depth of the challenge of reconciliation that lay ahead. But it has now become counter-productive. Actually, the phrase has no special legal force. No extension of EU competence has ever been justified simply because the EU is committed to ‘ever closer union’ – so the British Prime Minister’s ‘victory’ in his recent negotiations is only symbolic. But the phrase has become the focus of anxiety for those who worry about the loss of ‘sovereignty’ of member states. What can we say in response? We can rightly speak about the ‘sharing’ or ‘pooling’ of sovereignty – that certainly sounds less worrying than ‘loss’. But it is the case that membership of the EU does involve a ‘loss’ of sovereignty in the sense of national legislative autonomy in those areas where the EU has legal competence. But national politicians and EU elites have not always been sufficiently honest about this. I think this is because they have lost confidence in the larger moral vision which alone justifies the transfer of aspects of national sovereignty to a body like the EU. We urgently need to regain clarity about and confidence in that vision. Only then can we compellingly show how membership of the EU also confers an immense ‘gain’, in the capacity to exercise effective collective political responsibility for public justice, peace, solidarity and freedom in the face of the challenges that confront us.

We should not defend ‘national sovereignty’ for its own sake, as if it were self-justifying. Such sovereignty has, in any case, always been limited and today is greatly restricted by many international obligations, as well as by empirical factors such as economic globalization or the rise of ‘global civil society’. Rather we should frame the question this way: what distribution of (many kinds of) legal competence, across all tiers of political community, best enables governments and citizens to discharge their various duties of justice, peace, solidarity and freedom in the face of the compelling challenges of our times? Even the Reflection Group document I mentioned earlier does not pose that question sharply enough. The question can only be answered on a case by case basis – not by operating with the default assumption that more integration is always better, and still
less by appealing to the vague idea of ‘ever closer union’. In some cases we will need to argue for more EU powers – I think that is the case in the refugee crisis, environmental policy and aspects of foreign policy. In other cases we will need to argue for more subsidiarity: that might be the case as regards the protection of essential national industries.

I realise that what I’ve said doesn’t specify any particular policy outcomes, but it does suggest a way of framing the debate about European integration – and the very purpose of the EU – in clearer moral and political terms: terms which, we might add, while rooted in Christian faith are fully intelligible in public debate. And this was part of the genius of the Schuman Declaration.

To conclude, how does this all relate to ‘the paradox of freedom’? I suggest that, from a Christian perspective, there is no inherent paradox of freedom.

Understood in Christian terms, ‘freedom’ is first of all space for responsible mutual service – a field for the exercise of solidarity. It not firstly about stopping others from interfering with our choices, although it includes that in some important cases (we don’t want governments telling us how to exercise our freedom of religion or freedom of movement). But we are most deeply ‘free’ when we enjoy secure public space to pursue our diverse responsibilities: for our own good, for the good of our family, friends and the institutions of which we are members, and for the common good. Freedom in the Christian tradition is not merely setting boundaries around the pursuit of private, self-chosen interests. It seeks those chiefly to make possible that mutual service through which alone human fulfillment is realised. It is to this vision of freedom that we as Christian should witness, and to which we should call the EU.

Now freedom requires many things not provided by political institutions: adequate levels of personal morality, a sufficient degree of relational and social stability, a reasonable amount of civic pride, mutual respect, forbearance, trust, and other public virtues. These are the moral and cultural conditions of freedom. Such conditions are undergoing serious erosion across much of Europe, due to moral disorientation, individualism, consumerism, xenophobia, and relational breakdown across many fronts. But political institutions, whether nation-states or transnational bodies like the EU, cannot be mainly responsible for repairing these conditions. If we look first to them to fix these problems, we shall be disappointed, and we’ll direct our energies in the wrong places.

Like the common good, nurturing the conditions of freedom is mostly down to us: to persons, to families, to civil society, to faith communities. But political institutions do play an indispensable role in maintaining the freedom both of individual citizens and of the many social institutions needed for a healthy society. Their unique role is to establish the secure, enforceable, impartial legal infrastructure which enables the free pursuit of other personal and social goods. The special responsibility of the EU for European freedom is to attend to the transnational conditions required to protect and promote that freedom. Most of what makes for freedom across European nations is actually outside the competence of the EU, and of its member states. Our task is to identify what is the unique if limited contribution of the EU to that larger goal and to urge it to make that contribution.

Finally, freedom is not the first or the most important goal of political institutions – you may have noticed I put it last in the list of political tasks: justice, peace, solidarity and freedom. If freedom is divorced from those other goals, it becomes merely the self-interested grasping for individual autonomy and then, certainly, it becomes paradoxical and self-defeating. If it is embedded in them, pursued alongside them, it will contribute decisively to
personal, social and political flourishing across European society.

May that be our goal as we engage as Christian citizens, as European citizens, with the risky, faltering, dysfunctional but necessary and visionary project that is the European Union.

1 https://cordis.europa.eu/pub/citizens/docs/citizens_michalski_091104_report_annexes_en.pdf

2 http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-16-1673_en.htm

3 http://tvnewsroom.consilium.europa.eu/event/panel-discussion-in-rome-on-the-future-of-theeuropean-union-5732ecd213ff0/president-tusk-at-the-state-of-the-european-union-paneldisc-572b981ce3a5b#/gallery/0

4 Robert Schuman, For Europe, p58 (Foundation Robert Schuman, English edition 2010), quoted in Jeff Fountain, Deeply Rooted: The Forgotten Legacy of Robert Schuman, p83 (Schuman Centre for European Studies, 2010)

5 https://www.eureferendum.gov.uk/why-the-government-believes-we-should-remain/eureferendum-
leaflet/