“The greatest challenge of our times,” Donald Tusk declared in a speech a few days ago in Athens, “is how to make out of politics what it once was: acting and thinking for the common good.” At the moment, he continued, “politics is understood as war: even if shots are not fired everywhere, almost everywhere some part, some fragment of the whole, wants to destroy, invalidate or totally subordinate the others”.
One of the most unfortunate implications of Brexit is that we seem to have lost interest in discussing the visions for the European Union set out by its leaders. We focus mostly on their tweets, and indeed only the subset of tweets that is directly relevant to the fate of Brexit. And the more the public loses sight of what else goes on in the EU apart from Brexit, the fewer tools we have to engage with its politics in the future.
Tusk’s speech in Athens, ahead of a decisive meeting of the European council this week, deserved much more critical scrutiny. Tusk cited Thucydides and Cicero and referred to an ancient ideal of freedom that philosophers in the past have contrasted with “the freedom of the moderns”. The freedom of the ancients, it is often said, is characterised by shared commitment to the public good, equal laws and equal participation in public debate. The freedom of the moderns, on the other hand, is that of individuals pursuing their private interests, with the role of the state limited to guaranteeing their orderly interactions.
Tusk’s appeal to a robust, civic ideal of the common good is especially welcome if one contrasts his vision with the imperial one endorsed on multiple occasions by Guy Verhofstadt, another prominent EU politician whose Brexit tweets make news. Better the republic than the empire, of course. But it was more than a little ironic that Tusk criticised the modern politics of subordination: pontificating about respecting democratic participation and refraining from domination in a place like Greece, in the aftermath of the 2015 referendum, is like mentioning the rope in the house of the hanged, as the German saying goes.
Nor does the EU look like it has learned any lessons on how to treat all its partners as equals in the future. Just look at the way it is handling the process of enlargement in the western Balkans, an item high on the agenda of the council meeting. Countries such as Albania and North Macedonia, which are expecting to open accession negotiations, are effectively held hostage by a process where deadlines come and go between faint praise and serious warnings that “not enough progress has been done” to “fight corruption” and “strengthen the rule of law”.
Or consider how power politics and commercial interests shape the other issue that is likely to be debated in the meeting of the council this week: Turkey. The timidity of the European response to the butchering of civilians in north-east Syria is, as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s threat to “open the gates and send 3.6 million refugees” makes amply clear, a direct consequence of the EU’s purely self-interested border deals. The lives of millions of innocent people are traded for a few hundred votes in response to the “threat of migration” come the next round of elections. In this there is at least one aspect in common with the ancient world: the ancient Greeks were keen to distinguish between themselves and the inferior “barbarians”.
For the rest, the EU cannot refashion itself as a champion of the common good, of the freedom of the ancients, for the simple reason that it exists to promote the freedom of the moderns, commercial interests and market competition, private vices as public benefits. It cannot be kept together by civic patriotism because its political ends are set by market purposes. When these collide and fail to work for everyone, we get a distinctively modern version of stasis, characterised not only by the shortage of pragmatic solutions to problems that have in the meantime become existential but, more dramatically, by a shortage of vision.
Brexit is contributing to this shortage of vision. The idiosyncrasies of the process, the whims of the protagonists and the divisive passions of the public give the EU a veneer of calm, competence, and wisdom. The more recklessly Johnson and company act, the more responsible the EU looks. The more the UK government violates procedures, ignores institutional constraints, or tries to find ad hoc ways out of the process, the more the EU’s capacity to stick to rules and deliver by the deadlines appear like the highest political virtues. In all this we forget to ask who the rules benefit, and to what purpose deadlines are applied.
We should not be fooled by the EU rhetoric of the common good. Its domestic order is marred by injustices and asymmetries of power, and the implications of its international stance on questions including border control and harm to civilians (as in the recent case of Kurdish people in Syria) are nothing short of criminal.
Brexit will come to an end, one way or another – but the EU will continue to condition the debate and structure political relations for the foreseeable future. In trying to survive our extraordinary predicament, we should not neglect the ordinary delinquency of the EU, nor depoliticise its motives. We would be doing ourselves no favours in the long run.
• Lea Ypi is professor of political theory at the London School of Economics
