Table of Contents

Cover

Dedication

Title page

Copyright page

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 How the Euro Crisis is both Tearing Europe Apart and Uniting It

How German austerity policies are dividing Europe – the governments are for it, the peoples are against

The achievements of the European Union

The blindness of economics

European domestic politics: the national concept of politics is outmoded

The EU crisis is not a debt crisis

2 Europe’s New Power Coordinates: The Path to a German Europe

Europe under threat and the crisis of politics

The new landscape of European power

‘Merkiavelli’: hesitation as a means of coercion

3 A Social Contract for Europe

More freedom through more Europe

More social security through more Europe

More democracy through more Europe

The question of power: who will enforce the social contract?

A European spring?

For Elisabeth

First published in German as Deutsches Europa © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2012

This English edition © Polity Press, 2013

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Will the Greeks have returned to the drachma or the Germans to the D-Mark by the time readers pick up this book? Or will they simply laugh the idea out of court because the crisis will have long since been overcome and Europe will have emerged from it strengthened? The fact that we even ask such questions and that we seem to be stumbling around in a fog of uncertainty tells us a lot about the elusive state of affairs in Europe and the risk involved in attempting to capture it in words.

Everyone knows what that risk is but to utter it is to violate a taboo. The fact is that Europe has become German. Nobody intended this to happen, but, in the light of the possible collapse of the euro, Germany has ‘slipped’ into the role of the decisive political power in Europe. Timothy Garton Ash summed up the situation in February 2012. ‘In 1953 the novelist Thomas Mann appealed to an audience of students in Hamburg to strive for “not a German Europe but a European Germany”. This stirring pledge was endlessly repeated at the time of German unification. Today we have a variation that few foresaw: a European Germany in a German Europe.’¹

How could this come to pass? What might its consequences be? What threats does the future hold? What are its attractions? These are the questions I propose to address in this essay.

At the present time, public debate on the subject is dominated almost exclusively by its implications for the economy. There is an irony here when we recall how the crisis took the economists by surprise. The problem created by a purely economic analysis is that it overlooks the fact that the crisis is not purely a matter of the economy (and of thinking about the economy) but is also one of society and politics and our prevailing ways of thinking about them. It is not that I am venturing onto the alien terrain of economics but that economics has lost sight of the society it is analysing.

My intention in this essay is to put forward a new interpretation of the crisis. I should like to try to get to the bottom of the announcements in the daily press or on TV and to set them in a broader context. The reading I offer is based on my theory of the risk society. The vision of a modernity that has gone out of control as I have presented it in a number of books is one I shall develop further here with reference to the crisis of Europe and the euro.

There is a widespread view that what we need to overcome this crisis is more Europe. But we find less and less assent to the idea of ‘more Europe’ among the people of the member states. Given this situation, is it even possible to conceive of the completion of a European political union? Of a common taxation system and a common economic and social policy? Or is it not the reality that the preoccupation with a political union has obscured the crucial question, that of a European society, for so long that we have ended up leaving the most important factor out of the reckoning altogether? That factor is the sovereign people, the citizens of Europe. So let us put society back in. What needs to be done in the midst of this financial crisis is to shed light on the power shifts in Europe and to delineate the new landscape of power. That is the goal of this essay.

Ulrich Beck
August 2012

Note

1 Timothy Garton Ash, ‘Angela Merkel needs all the help she can get’, The Guardian (8 February 2012); available at www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/08/angela-merkel-all-help-can-get?INTCMP=SRCH (accessed September 2012).

I dedicate this little book to Elisabeth, my beloved wife, also known as Professor Beck-Gernsheim, for discussing its intellectual architecture with me sentence by sentence, and for her unpretentious sensibility to the way that words and sentences have a life of their own. Without John Thompson, my great colleague and dear friend, this book would never have been written. His power of inspiration made me do it. Rodney Livingstone, who loves and lives German and English literature, gave his imagination as a present and reinvented my argument for the English-speaking world, lending it a classical note, the aesthetics of truth.

Nevertheless, all that is wrong or missing is, of course, my responsibility entirely.

‘Today the German Bundestag will decide the fate of Greece.’ That was the announcement I heard on the radio at the end of February 2012. That was the day of decision on the second rescue package, which was tied to additional austerity measures as well as to the condition that Greece should accept a further loss of control over its own budget. ‘Of course’, I heard a voice in me saying, ‘that’s the way it is.’ The other voice in me asked – incredulously – how was that possible? What does it mean for one democratic state to decide the destiny of another democratic state? I understand that the Greeks need German taxpayers’ money, but the proposed cuts amount to an assault on the autonomy of the Greek nation.

What I found irritating at the time was not simply the substance of the announcement but also the fact that it was accepted in Germany as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Just listen to it again. The German parliament – not the Greek parliament – will decide the fate of Greece. How can that statement have any meaning at all?

Let us perform a small thought-experiment. Let’s assume that the Germans were to hold a referendum on whether the Greeks should leave the euro now (i.e., the summer of 2012). The probable result would be ‘Bye-bye, Acropolis’.¹ Let us assume further that the Greeks were to hold a referendum on the same question. The probable result would be a clear majority in favour of retaining the euro (with roughly 85 per cent in favour, according to opinion polls of May 2012).²

How are we to go about resolving disagreements between national democracies? Which democracy should prevail? By what right? With what democratic legitimation? Or is the coercive might of the economy to play the key role? Should the withholding of credit be the ultimate decisive factor? Or should Greece, the original home of democracy, be shorn of its right to democratic self-determination because of its debt burden? What sort of country, what sort of world, what sort of crisis are we living in, if we can stand by and watch one democracy emasculated by another without its provoking any feeling of outrage? Moreover, the assertion that ‘the German Bundestag will decide the fate of Greece’ understates the situation. It is Europe that is at stake here. The statement ‘Today it is Germany that will decide on the existence or non-existence of Europe’ sums up the intellectual and political dilemma.

The European Union has twenty-seven member states, governments and parliaments; it has its own Parliament, a Commission, a Court, a High Representative for Foreign Affairs, a Commission President, a Council President, etc., etc. But, thanks to its economic might, Germany has been catapulted by the financial crisis and the crisis of the euro into the position of the undisputed great power in Europe as a whole. After the Second World War and the Holocaust, Germany lay in ruins both morally and physically. Now, after barely seventy years, it has advanced from the status of eager pupil to that of schoolmaster of Europe. In the Germans’; conception of themselves the word ‘power’ is still a dirty word, one that they like to replace with the word ‘responsibility’. National interests are discreetly concealed behind such grandiose terms as ‘Europe’, ‘peace’, ‘collaboration’ or ‘economic stability’. To utter the words ‘a German Europe’ is to break a taboo. To say that ‘Germany will assume the “Führung” [leadership] of Europe’ would be even more offensive.³ We could say, however, that Germany assumes ‘responsibility’ for Europe.

But the European crisis is coming to a head, and Germany finds itself faced with a historic decision. It must attempt either to revive the vision of a political Europe in the teeth of every obstacle or to stick with a policy of muddling through and of using hesitation as a means of coercion – until the euro do us part. Germany has become too powerful to be able to afford the luxury of indecision.

The fact that the moment of decision is now upon us is rarely stated in so many words in the German media. But it is frequently referred to in the commentaries of foreign observers. Here for instance is the view of Eugenio Scalfari, the Italian journalist and writer: ‘If Germany continues to pursue a financial policy that leads to a collapse of the euro, then the Germans would be responsible for the collapse of the European project. That would be its fourth crime after the two world wars and the Holocaust. Germany must now accept its responsibility for Europe.’⁴

No one should be in the least doubt. In a German Europe, Germany would be made to bear the responsibility for the failure of the euro and the EU.

Notes

1 ‘Akropolis Adieu!’ This was the title of an article in Der Spiegel (14 May 2012).

2 See ‘Griechische Spargegner führen in Umfrage zur Wahl’, Zeit online (25 May 2012), www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2012-05/griechenland-wahl-syriza (accessed August 2012).

3 One could use the English word ‘leadership’ even in German, whereas the German word ‘Führung’ is still contaminated by its association with Hitler, Der Führer, and the National Socialists.

4 Birgit Schönau, ‘Das wäre die vierte Schuld’, interview with Eugenio Scalfari, Die Zeit (15 March 2012), 7.