jan-werner müller_who is the european prince?

h th r p n Pr n : r r L h v ll nd t t n n th r p n n n

Jan-Werner Müller

Social Research: An International Quarterly, Volume 81, Number 1,Spring 2014, pp. 243-267 (Article)

P bl h d b Th J hn H p n n v r t PrDOI: 10.1353/sor.2014.0009

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social research Vol. 81 : No. 1 : Spring 2014 243

Jan-Werner MüllerWho Is the European Prince? A More or Less Machiavellian Meditation on the European Union

the distinguished italian economist and politician tommaso padoa schioppa

once spoke of European Monetary Union (EMU) as a “collective prince”

(Padoa Schioppa 2001).1 After ever so many years of “Eurocrisis,” this

notion might invite derision or perhaps outright ridicule. This partic-

ular prince, many observers would conclude today, has turned out to

have no clothes. Worse still, monetary union is feared because it leads

to the imposition of “austerity” and other forms of cruelty in the name

of fiscal rectitude, but there is also contempt for the whole construct

because European elites have seemed so incompetent in foreseeing and

handling the crisis. Nevertheless, Padoa Schioppa, one of the actual

architects of the euro during the 1990s, undoubtedly had an intriguing

thought when he described what is widely perceived to be just a kind of

monetary straightjacket as something like a conscious political actor.

Ever since another Italian, Antonio Gramsci, declared the Communist

Party a collective Machiavellian prince, there has been an important

discussion to be had about the prince not as an individual striving for

great things, but as a type of collective political intelligence, a “leading

institution” of sorts.2 Such an institutionalized prince clearly needs to be

based on rules (no institution without rules); its purpose might best be

described as the deployment of collective political judgment in confront-

ing changing constellations of political forces; its conduct one would

244 social research

expect to be dynamic and f lexible in responding to new constellations.

Such a collective, one could further imagine, combines the advantages

often expected from a single leader with the very attributes Machiavelli

ascribed to the people—collective wisdom as well as a capacity to be

f lexible denied to individuals (who are generally incapable of changing

their dispositions at will).

Reflecting from a perspective informed by The Prince on the pro-

cess of European integration might not be so ridiculous after all then.

What used to be known as the European Community but is now offi-

cially called the European Union (EU) constitutes the most complex and

ambitious project of political integration (or unification) of our time. In

fact, I would go further and argue that it represents the most important

political-institutional innovation since the creation of the democratic

welfare state. And what is The Prince if not a book about political integra-

tion, about maintaining and, sometimes, expanding the state? A book

of republicans, as Rousseau insisted? Maybe, maybe not. But, without

a doubt, a kind of crash course for anyone concerned about ensuring

political unity and stability, especially in newly “acquired” polities. So

reading Machiavelli in Brussels should, prima facie, not be considered

an antiquarian, let alone quixotic, occupation at all.

The purpose of my little capriccio on the 500th anniversary of

The Prince, however, is not mechanically to “apply” supposedly timeless

Machiavellian insights into “leadership”—a largely vacuous academic

subject—to the challenges of European integration, or to argue that

some European leaders have been truly “Machiavellian” (in the way

that the German sociologist Ulrich Beck recently described German

Chancellor Angela Merkel as “Merkiavelli,” a leader who cunningly

uses the Eurocrisis to increase German power [Beck 2013]). Rather, I

want specifically to explore Machiavelli’s claims about political in-

tegration and see whether they might shed some light both on the

history and the prospects of European polity-building. Some observ-

ers have argued that the latter is absolutely sui generis—something

unprecedented that should make us avoid the temptation of drawing

analogies with previous polities, such as certain forms of empire or

Who Is the European Prince? 245

federations. I have some sympathy for this claim. But it can plausibly

stand only at the end of a process of exploring possible political models

and legal precedents. Asserted a priori (as often happens), it can eas-

ily seem like a claim to shield the process of integration from critical

questions (and legitimate expectations), along the lines of “No, you

cannot compare this to a democratic nation-state and hence should

stop going on about democracy.”

I shall start this exploration of “Machiavelli in Brussels” with

some observations on political development in Western Europe after

1945 in general, to be followed by more specific claims about how a

European polity was imagined up until the mid-1980s or so—and what

role various “institutionalized princes,” the European Commission in

particular, played in this process. I shall then return to the intrigu-

ing—and at first sight so counterintuitive—notion of a monetary sys-

tem as Europe’s prince. Finally, against the background of the Eurocri-

sis (generally considered an existential threat to the European Union

as a whole), some possible Machiavellian futures will be sketched out,

in particular a new version of a collective prince and, alternatively, a

strategy that trusts what Machiavelli called tumulti—ongoing political

conflict—ultimately to generate a more robust form of political unity.

This latter strategy also puts its faith in popular judgment in a way

that very much goes against the main currents of political develop-

ments in postwar Europe—to a description of which I now turn.

EUroPE’s PostWAr ConstItUtIonAL sEttLEMEnt: thE PrIMACy of ViVere Sicuro

For Western Europe, the period after the fall of fascism is often described

as one that witnessed the “return of democracy” or “the return of parlia-

mentarism.”3 But that is only true at a very general, abstract level:

what is so distinctive about the postwar period is the fact that Western

European politics underwent a series of institutional innovations—even

if these innovations were often cloaked in highly traditional languages

of cultural conservatism and, in particular, religion (think of the conti-

nent-wide revival of Christianity after the war and natural law think-

246 social research

ing in particular). While it proved highly seductive (and, one might add,

effective) to present the postwar era not as the beginning of something

new, but as a moral and intellectual return to something safely known, in

fact no democracy as a known set of institutions in any way “returned”

and neither was “liberalism” in any nineteenth-century sense (as a

matter of ideas or in terms of any recognizable class base) revived after

1945. What emerged instead might best be described as a new balance

of, broadly speaking, popular-democratic and liberal principles (and

constitutionalism in particular), or, if one prefers, a kind of new mixed

regime (Gauchet 2007).

Above all, postwar political thought and postwar political in-

stitutions were deeply imprinted with anti-totalitarianism. Political

leaders, no less—and quite possibly more so—than jurists and philoso-

phers, sought to build an order designed to prevent a return to the to-

talitarian past. To be sure, “lessons of the past” were hardly unambigu-

ous, and much postwar debate consisted precisely of contesting them.

What eventually prevailed in these intellectual battles was an image

of recent history as a chaotic, extremely violent era characterized by

limitless political dynamism, unbound “masses” and ruthless leaders’

attempts to forge an entirely unconstrained political subject—such as

the ethnically purified German Volksgemeinschaft (Roberts 2006). The

underlying thought of these interpretations, one might say, was a pro-

foundly un-Machiavellian one: political contention could only result

either in social disorder or extreme forms of authoritarianism; it could

never generate stability, let alone liberty.

This postwar perspective can only be fully understood if one

abandons a conception of totalitarianism as merely a Cold War slo-

gan and instead recognizes that at least Nazi Germany and Stalin’s

Soviet Union did have totalitarian aspirations (the political reality is

another matter)—and that such aspirations relied on the invocation

and attractiveness of principles and practices associated with democ-

racy (though emphatically not liberal democracy): the formation of a

completely homogeneous people as a collective agent capable of mas-

tering a collective fate (and of defending itself against perceived racial


and class-based threats); political participation and inclusion (which

were promised by the Volksgemeinschaft no less than Stalin’s notion of

a properly Soviet people). To be sure, both participation and inclusion

were premised on total faith in the Führer or the leading Communist

Party, or, put differently, the full embodiment of a people, without any

oppositional remainder, in a single leader or political vanguard.

The architects of the postwar order did perceive a link between

totalitarianism and democracy; hence their eagerness to constrain both

electoral democracy and also, generally, to dampen any desire for politi-

cal participation beyond regular elections. Prominent observers saw the

dangers of the “age of the masses” continuing unabated. For instance,

the German historian Friedrich Meinecke, writing in 1946 about the

causes of the “German catastrophe,” claimed that the masses were still

“advancing” and that an increase in quantity had resulted in a qualita-

tive transformation of European societies; he also explicitly explained

“Hitlerism” as a form of “mass Machiavellianism” (Meinecke 1946, 21).

In short, totalitarian political theorists had sought mastery over

history through fashioning new collective agents and imagining new

modes of political action—and a form of unconstrained and uncondi-

tional politics; by contrast, the postwar anti-totalitarians attempted to

stabilize the political world by finding new institutional expressions of

inherited liberal principles (such as checks and balances, federalism,

and other means of fostering political moderation), or reviving older

moral and religious precepts—all without redeploying actual liberal

languages (Roberts 2006). In a sense, it was very much—as in Judith

Shklar’s seminal formulation—a “liberalism of fear,” aimed at “secure

living” (sometimes even commodious living), rather than promoting

positive visions or taking the risks that were perceived as being associ-

ated with too much popular liberty (Shklar 1989).

“WE ArE (AfrAId of) thE PEoPLE”4

The postwar European liberalism of fear might not have openly called

itself “liberal” since “liberalism” was at that time often perceived as a

form of relativism that had paved the road to totalitarianism. But this

248 social research

liberalism expressed itself in concrete institutions and, in particular,

institutional innovations. Possibly one of the most important in twen-

tieth-century Europe as a whole was the creation of constitutional courts,

designed not only to constrain popular sovereignty but also parliamen-

tary sovereignty. These courts were not simply a copy of the American

Supreme Court; rather, this particular conception of centralized judicial

review dated from 30 years earlier: the Austrian jurist Hans Kelsen had

included it in the Austrian constitution which he had crafted after the

First World War (he himself had served on the court until 1930, when

anti-Semitic attacks forced him out) (Öhlinger 2003 and Paulson 2003).

Kelsen did not concede that a powerful constitutional court ca-

pable of striking down legislation might be inherently undemocratic,

as many opponents of judicial review were to claim. In the early 1930s,

in a major controversy with the antiliberal legal theorist Carl Schmitt,

the Austrian jurist (by then teaching in Cologne) argued that only such

a court could be the ultimate “guardian” of a constitution; Schmitt, on

the other hand, assigned this role to the president (and, incidentally,

nobody assigned it to the people) (Kelsen 1931). At that time, German

political elites had gone with Schmitt, rather than Kelsen.

After 1945, even in countries that had traditionally been highly

suspicious of judicial review—above all, France, with its aversion to

gouvernement des juges—the idea of testing for constitutionality by a spe-

cialized court was eventually accepted. Constitutional courts tasked

specialists with defending liberal democracy and individual rights in

particular—neither the people, as a Machiavellian republican might

have thought, nor for that matter parliaments could be entrusted with

this function, or so the architects of the postwar order held.

Constitutional courts were also instrumental in the rise of so-

called militant democracy—a concept that had first been defined by the

German exile political scientist Karl Loewenstein in 1937, at a time when

one European country after the other had been taken over by authoritar-

ian movements using democratic means to disable democracy (Loewen-

stein 1937a). Loewenstein had argued that democracies were incapable

of defending themselves against fascist movements if they continued to


subscribe to “democratic fundamentalism,” “legalistic blindness,” and an

“exaggerated formalism of the rule of law” (424). Part of the new chal-

lenge was that, according to Loewenstein, fascism had no proper intellec-

tual content, relying on a kind of “emotionalism” with which democracies

could never compete. Consequently, democracies had to find legislative

answers to antidemocratic forces—such as banning parties and militias.

They should also restrict the rights to assembly and free speech (Loewen-

stein 1937b, 647). As Loewenstein put it, “fire should be fought with fire”

and that fire, in his view, could only be lit by a new, “disciplined,” or even

“authoritarian” democracy (656–7).

The idea of militant democracy subsequently became highly in-

fluential in the Federal Republic of Germany. It was used to justify the

banning of the Nazi Socialist Reich Party and the Communist Party by the

Constitutional Court in the 1950s, and, in the 1970s, the draconian mea-

sures against those guilty of (suspected) association with terrorists. Critics

charged from the beginning that this anti-extremism could easily be in-

strumentalized against legitimate opposition (especially left-wing opposi-

tion) while, at the same time, it did little to help deal with the Nazi past.

Militant democracy was most pronounced in West Germany—but

the imperative of democratic self-protection, if necessary in an aggressive

manner and never by the people, but always for the people, became pervasive

across Western Europe. In Italy the Christian Democrats, Prime Minister

Alcide de Gasperi in particular, sought to establish a form of “protected

democracy”—una democrazia protetta—that was to restrict civil liberties

but also justify electoral laws benefiting major parties (Ginsborg 1990,

142). This initiative failed in the Italian Senate, however, most likely be-

cause the Vatican had an interest in preventing a ban on right-wing par-

ties and thereby keeping its political options open.5 And while the Italian

constitution had explicitly prohibited the refounding of the fascist party,

the Italian Social Movement (MSI), which was a de facto successor to fas-

cism, established itself as a minor party with stable support—and eventu-

ally, after a name change, joined an actual government in the 1990s.

There emerged after the war a new constitutional settlement, with

what the American legal theorist Peter Lindseth has called a particular

250 social research

“constitutionalist ethos” (Lindseth 2004). It was informed by the “lessons”

of the interwar period, as perceived by postwar elites: whereas fascists

(and Stalin) had tried to create new peoples from above (the Volksgemein-

schaft or the new Soviet people), the point now was to constrain existing

ones. Concretely, this meant weakening parliaments and, in particular,

restricting the ability of legislatures to delegate power—preventing them,

so it was hoped, from the kind of democratic suicide the Weimar Republic

and the French Third Republic had committed. Never again should an

assembly abdicate in favor of a Hitler or a Marshall Pétain, the leader of

authoritarian Vichy France.

One important upshot of the postwar constitutional settlement,

then, was that outside Britain the legitimacy of unrestricted parliamen-

tary supremacy was effectively put into doubt. The flip side of the weak-

ening of parliaments was a strengthening of executives, a process that

went furthest under General Charles de Gaulle, who turned the Assem-

blée Nationale into the weakest legislature in the West. Justifications of

democracy centered less and less on having one’s views effectively repre-

sented in parliament, let alone empowering popular judgment—rather,

politics was about ensuring the accountability and regular turnover of

political elites through periodic elections.6 It was very much the notion

of democracy that the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter had put

forward at mid-century (Schumpeter 1942). Schumpeter had denied that

there was such a thing as a coherent popular will; he also rejected the idea

that participation in politics mattered in the least for ordinary people.

Many postwar thinkers shared such assumptions, with the leading British

socialist Tony Crosland, for instance, claiming that “all experience shows

that only a small minority of the population will wish to participate,”

while the majority would always “prefer to lead a full family life and culti-

vate their garden” (Crosland 1974, 65–66). It was not an attractive picture,

by any remotely republican standard, but it fit the notion that the people,

while certainly not wanting to be oppressed, also did not wish to spend

much energy on safeguarding their democracies from oppression—best,

then, to delegate that task to specialists.7


CrEAtIng EUroPEAn nECEssItIEs—by stEALth, If nECEssAryIt is crucial to understand that European integration was part and parcel

of the new postwar order and its particular “constitutionalist ethos,”

with its inbuilt distrust of both popular and parliamentary sovereignty

(Lindseth 2004). The purpose of integration, however, was less domes-

tic stability than international security. By making European states

profoundly dependent on each other (and, in particular, by placing coal

and steel production—essential for armed conflict—under a common

high authority), war was supposed to become not just unthinkable,

but practically impossible. Attempts actually to merge national armies

and create a genuine defense community failed in the early 1950s, but

the logic of increasing interdependence to avoid violent conflict on the

continent continued. Western Europe would not just hope for changed

mentalities after the horrors of the First and Second World Wars or disarm

its peoples; rather, it would create facts of mutual dependence such that

mortal enmity, between France and Germany in particular, was practi-

cally ruled out. To be sure, popular and elite celebrations of the newly

forged amitié franco-allemande mattered as well but, as a Machiavellian

might have said, the artificially created necessity of mutual dependence

was infinitely more important than friendship (which, after all, is not a

political category for a Machiavellian).

In short, elites sought to establish new constraints and necessi-

ties for European nation-states and, to do so, they relied less on hope

for any benefits in the future than on fear of what had gone before.

Again, the expression “liberalism of fear” would be appropriate here,

as would be the observation that new European necessities—involv-

ing “self-binding” and “other-binding” as forms of credible collective

commitment to certain types of future behavior (Elster 2000)—were

established under the overall security umbrella of the United States. It

might have been easier to give up some independence within Europe

once it was realized that, from a global perspective, even the strongest

West European nation-states, France and Britain, were sorely depen-

dent on Washington.

252 social research

There has been much mythmaking to the contrary, not least

by EU representatives themselves—but European integration was not

designed to create or solidify democracies as such. However, together

with the Council of Europe and, in particular, the European Court of

Human Rights, the then European Community also ended up serving

a function of further constraining—and, in the eyes of the architects

of the project, thereby also stabilizing— European democracies (in a

sense that is not reducible to international security). The founding

members of the Council of Europe as well as the European Commu-

nity delegated powers to unelected institutions domestically as well as

supranational bodies such as the European Court of Human Rights in

order to “lock in” liberal-democratic arrangements and to prevent a re-

turn to authoritarianism (Moravcsik 2000). In short, “Europe,” rather

than evolving into a powerful federal state, as some enthusiasts for a

pan-European polity had hoped after the war, was supposed further

to constrain national democracies, not to supersede them. Even more

than at the national level, no particular value was placed on political

participation.

In fact, popular participation was limited as much as possible:

interdependence was to be created and “deepened” by benevolent elites

cooperating across national borders; it was not based on anything like

movements from below. Whatever elites achieved would of course

eventually require some acceptance by the peoples of Europe; but here

the main idea was that the practical benefits of integration would be

so obvious (and obviously desirable) that at least something like tacit

consent on the part of the peoples of Europe could be presumed over

time. As the famous declaration by French Foreign Minister Robert

Schuman—often presented by EU institutions as the true founding

document of European integration—announced: “Europe will not be

made all at once, or according to a single plan. It will be built through

concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity.” Petits

pas and grands effets: apparently low-level technocratic measures, initially

hardly visible for the peoples in the founding countries, were supposed

eventually to “spill over” into ever more policy areas, requiring ever more


cooperation, until high politics itself would eventually become integrated

and make an “ever closer Union” (as the Founding Treaty of the Euro-

pean Community put it) effectively irreversible. Or, as Walter Hallstein,

the first president of the European Commission, the institution charged

with taking petits pas forward, put it: Sachlogik (literally a “logic inherent

in things themselves”) would lead to a “psychological chain reaction of

integration.” In the eyes of critics, of course, it looked from the very

beginning very much like integration by stealth, or, put even less po-

litely, mass deception. The fact that national parliaments had officially

signed up for this process—hence its claim to democratic legitimacy—

made no difference, according to such critics then (and now). After all,

the process was itself designed to operate behind the backs of the Eu-

ropean peoples, so to speak, and only ever be ratified by retrospective

popular judgment: citizens, so a further criticism would run (then and

now), thought they were joining a peace league or a common market

designed to produce economic benefits—and all of a sudden would

find themselves part of a novel kind of polity.

The institutional configuration of the European Community

might have appeared familiar at first sight, but in fact it presented

another important political innovation in postwar Europe. Already the

Coal and Steel Community had something like a parliament (called

the Assembly), something like an executive (the High Authority; what

eventually became the European Commission), and something like a

constitutional court (the European Court of Justice), and then, in ad-

dition, a council of national ministers. However, this impression of a

traditional division of powers and of checks and balances was some-

what deceptive: in actual fact, the Commission was supposed to be

the true innovator in European integration, taking the project forward

through time, the real legislator, and the ultimate “guardian of the

treaties” that had created the community among states in the first

place. With what eventually came to be known as the “Community

method,” the Commission would take the lead in crafting proposals

for further integration, and the assembly and the representatives of

the national governments would consent to them.

254 social research

It takes little imagination to think that at least initially the

Commission was in the position of something like a European prince—

except that it was a collegiate body, not a single individual. It might

therefore also have had some of the advantages Machiavelli attribut-

ed to republics, as opposed to a single prince: there would be diver-

sity of political judgment, mutual learning, a capacity to change an

overall disposition, and, not least, a kind of accumulation of collec-

tive wisdom—where an individual could hardly ever be able willingly

to change disposition or pass down wisdom to others. In fact, Jean

Monnet, one of the “founding fathers” of the Community, was fond

of quoting the Swiss philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel (as was Padoa-

Schioppa, incidentally); Amiel had claimed that “each man’s experi-

ence starts again from the beginning. Only institutions grow wiser:

They accumulate collective experience; and, owing to this experience

and this wisdom, men subject to the same rules will not see their own

nature changing, but their behavior gradually transformed.”8

The collective body was supposed to exhibit political intel-

ligence not just in maintaining the state of integration as it had al-

ready been achieved—mantenere lo stato, in Machiavelli’s language—

but above all in pushing it further and further, creating necessities,

constraints, and, of course, visible benefits. A skillful European prince

would use opportunities offered by political and economic fortuna for

these purposes. Those princes who ignored Schumann’s implicit warn-

ing and instead pursued a single, inflexible plan (of a European federal

state, for instance), usually failed; those willing to be flexible in adapt-

ing to a highly complex constellation of national and supranational

political forces were often able to exploit opportunities for pushing

integration further. The well-meaning, but ultimately ineffective, ad-

vocate of a European federal state, Commission President Walter Hall-

stein, might be the best example of the former; the crafty Commission

President Jacques Delors, father both of the euro and of the project

of “completing the European single market” (by removing remaining

obstacles to free trade), might be the best example of the latter. In

all cases, the Commission, a political body in a polity permanently in


the making, has had to act somewhat like a prince confronted with

recently acquired lands: intent on creating “de facto solidarity” for the

project of European integration, sometimes with hope and sometimes

with fear, but always necessarily mindful of powerful existing national

loyalties, and, ideally, willing to follow Machiavelli’s advice of “living

in the newly acquired lands” (that is to say: demonstrate a European

presence and political commitment and engage in supervision of local

practices).

No doubt, this particular kind of collective prince has also had

unusual room for creativity (and self-aggrandizement: after all, main-

taining the state meant expanding the state). Not having to follow a

“single plan” is also liberating; what ultimately would always have to

be integration through law and regulations (as opposed to military

force, for instance, or economic imperialism) could still take many

forms and sometimes make the Commission appear more like a prince

with its private dominium rather than the temporary ruler of an in-

dependently existing public power; and the Commission kept refin-

ing its many ways of retaining bureaucratic autonomy vis-à-vis the

nation-states (Elinas and Suleiman 2012).9 Not least, many essential

legal-political functions—ensuring compliance on the part of citizens

in particular—kept being exercised by nation-states, whose legitimacy

was not nearly as precarious as that of a new supranational commu-

nity. In that sense, the commission would never directly have to face

questions of civil obedience and disobedience.

To be sure, the Commission has not been the only body that

could deepen integration while also augmenting its own power—oth-

ers also proved what one might call normative entrepreneurs capable of

creating new necessities and, indirectly, opportunities. The best exam-

ple is the European Court of Justice, initially set up with a very limited

mandate to check on the implementation of the treaties on integration.

But two decisions by the European Court of Justice effectively created a

new form of supranational constitutionalism and reinforced the sense

of “Europe” as another set of de facto liberal constraints on electoral

democracy in the postwar period: landmark cases in 1963 and in 1964

256 social research

established that European Community law was to have supremacy over

national laws and that it took direct effect in member states—that is,

European Community legislation could be invoked by individual citi-

zens in national courts and enforced against member states.

In the famous Costa v. E.N.E.L. ruling in 1964, the court confi-

dently announced that “by creating a Community of unlimited dura-

tion . . . the Member States have limited their sovereign rights, albeit

in limited fields, and thus created a body of law which binds both their

nationals and themselves.” In 1969 the judges even added the opinion

that fundamental human rights were in fact “enshrined in the general

principles of Community law and protected by the Court”—when in

fact the original treaties had made no mention of such rights. This dis-

covery—or, rather, invention—of rights was prompted by the fear that

the German and Italian constitutional courts could oppose European

law in the name of basic rights contained in national constitutions.

Thus, in line with the general West European trend toward review by

a special court, the European Court of Justice had more or less boot-

strapped itself into a position of extraordinary judicial power—and

was, for the most part, accepted as possessing that power both by na-

tional courts and by national governments. Just as with European inte-

gration as a whole, there reigned what political scientists were to call

“permissive consensus”: nobody loved the European Community, but

nobody really resisted its creation either.

Of course, one could describe this state of affairs—which only

broke down sometime in the 1990s—in less sanguine terms. Especially

those who have always suspected that the real business of Brussels

is business might interpret what looked at least like tacit consent in

Machiavellian terms drawn from the Discorsi: they could say that EU-

Europe resembled Machiavelli’s portrait of the French monarchy. The

people were reasonably secure because some institutions—parlements

in the case of France, institutions like the court and, to a lesser ex-

tent, the European Parliament, in the case of the EU—defended their

fundamental interests, often in highly paternalistic fashion. But this

was vivere sicuro at best—and in no way any form of vivere libero: depo-


liticized (and also disarmed) European peoples had not even so much

as consciously delegated the task of popular self-defense to particular

institutions; rather, benevolent elites had found a way to balance the

interests of powerful groups—business intent on market-making and

market-maintenance, above all, a kind of oligarchy, from a Machiavel-

lian perspective—with a concern that the peoples of Europe should

continue at least tacitly to support both the domestic constitutional

settlements and evolving forms of supranational constitutionalism.

In sEArCh of A nEW PrInCE (or PrInCEss) For decades, the European Community appeared to have enjoyed what

political scientists call “diffuse” support or “permissive consensus”—

as opposed to specific, actively expressed support. However, in the late

1980s and 1990s, under the inspired leadership of Delors, the process of

European integration gathered momentum —but the consequence was,

for the first time, something like outright rejection (or at least a great deal

of skepticism) on the part of various European peoples. Especially with

the negotiations of the Maastricht Treaty in late 1991, which introduced

a common currency, and the completion of the Single European Market

(that is, the common market) in 1992, “Europe” gathered unprecedented

salience in public (and, for the most part, national) debates. In June 1992,

a majority of citizens in Denmark voted against the Maastricht Treaty; a

little later, French citizens adopted it by only the narrowest of margins.

“Europe” came to have more and more effects on daily life: the

abolition of passport controls among a group of countries was a most

prominent example. More abstractly, there was the introduction of a

common European citizenship, which, however, has remained based

on citizenship in a member state of the union. In various ways “Eu-

rope” had come closer to the people or, rather, the peoples of the conti-

nent—but the people’s response was far from uniformly enthusiastic.

Put differently: for the first time, Europe was becoming truly politi-

cized in popular consciousness.

Something else changed: the very shape of the polity was being

transformed dramatically. The union expanded in 1995 and then again in

258 social research

2004 when no fewer than 10 countries joined the polity. Such an enlarge-

ment seemed directly to contradict the goal of “deepening” the union

through a common currency and common policies (for instance in foreign

affairs) since it made the EU far more heterogeneous. One response to in-

creased heterogeneity was the emergence of what in EU jargon came to be

known as “variable geometry:” EU countries were no longer marching in

step to an “ever closer union”; instead, some countries were forging ahead

with ambitious plans like the euro, while others reserved the right to “opt

out” from closer cooperation. Yet this new method of accommodating

differences by moving at multiple speeds also multiplied the concerns

about the endpoint of integration—what is sometimes called “Europe’s

finality,” or finalité. Was the union already truly unified; if not yet, would

full unity ever materialize and what precisely would it mean? Did the EU

constitute a coherent new political form—or had there emerged, partly

by design and partly by accident, an entity that would easily fit Samuel

Pufendorf’s famous description of the Holy Roman Empire: simile monstro;

in other words, something that looked like a monstrosity, incoherent in

its policies, incapable of finding a stable constitutional settlement, and,

not least, incomprehensible to ordinary citizens?

So the legitimacy of European integration is now much more con-

tested. Both those sympathetic to integration and those opposed to the

process of achieving “ever closer union” have argued that the limits of

integration by stealth, have been reached; apparently, “practical achieve-

ments” are insufficiently obvious and, in particular, not so clearly univer-

sal that they would create “de facto solidarity.” No wonder, then, that the

apocryphal words “If I had to do it all again, I would start with culture”

came to be attributed to no less a figure than Jean Monnet.

But creating a new European culture from scratch is clearly not a

possibility; no illiterate masses are waiting to be “Europeanized” along the

lines of classic nineteenth-century nation-building projects. Some parts of

the European elite (and certainly many in the European Commission) may

well think “we have made Europe, now we need to make Europeans”—

but at least for the moment, such people-making seems neither realistic

nor desirable. But then all of this might be just another way of saying


that European elites are facing at least some of the problems of a newly

acquired commonwealth that Machiavelli analyzes in The Prince. So what

can they do? Here are two thoughts:

European Monetary Union has indeed been a bold experiment in

what Padoa Schioppa was apparently the first to call a “currency without

a state.” It was conceived as rule-based, with strict limits on public debt

and punishments for those breaking the rules. In that sense it was a deper-

sonalized and, in the eyes of its architects, depoliticized collective prince. It

was not obviously foolish to think that it could take the lead in achieving

European unity as a lived experience: making the euro not just a conve-

nience (no more need to exchange currencies for ordinary citizens and

companies), but a powerful symbol of unity across at least parts of the

European continent, something literally felt in one’s hands and pockets

every day. Such lived experience might make it then legitimate to take po-

litical integration further, with ever tighter coordination of fiscal policies

and more redistribution of resources across national borders to rectify

economic imbalances.

To be fair, some of the architects of the euro had wanted both co-

ordination and compensation for economic shocks from the very start:

they thought a common currency could not function without them

(James 2012). In the eyes of others—but this is more speculation—the fact

that the euro could not work without them would become obvious at the

first major crisis, and such a crisis would then create its own new neces-

sities. Ideally, proponents of such an integration by emergency necessities

might have hoped, a crisis would afford an occasione to make monetary

union into proper political union.

From a perspective informed by The Prince, it seems clear enough

that this particular collective prince suffered from some design flaws: in

the eyes of many Europeans, it promised prosperity—and indeed initially

delivered a certain kind of what Machiavelli called “liberality” (or gener-

osity): a flood of cheap money that seemed to make everyone better off,

certainly in many of the southern members of the Eurozone. But the re-

trenchment that followed had the very effect that Machiavelli described

when it came to the prince who tries to make himself popular with liber-

260 social research

ality: someone eventually has to pay; and miserliness (or, put differently,

austerity) ends up calling into question the very legitimacy of the individ-

ual or collective prince. From a Machiavellian point of view, a modest mi-

serliness would have been better in the first place—and this, arguably, is

what at least some of the architects of monetary union had in fact wished

for. Instead, design flaws, and unforeseen popular expectations, would

eventually turn the Euro into a force for disintegration.

These same factors have also led to what one might call a re-

personalization of the prince. It was not faceless central bankers in a sleek

tower in Frankfurt (the seat of the European Central Bank) who were ini-

tially seen as the main actors in the unfolding drama of the Eurocrisis,

but the “princess” of Europe’s most powerful state: Angela Merkel, the

chancellor of Germany. For some she utterly failed to follow the Machia-

vellian rulebook in confronting a modern variant of fortuna, namely the

seemingly capricious financial markets (Münkler 2011). Instead of facing

them down with fierce political determination and overwhelming finan-

cial force, the supposedly “neo-Stoic” Merkel proved a ditherer, a cuncta-

tor (or cunctatora), waiting out the crisis, surviving from one day to the

next (or from much publicized European summit meeting to the next),

but never conclusively sending the forces of fortuna a signal that the EU’s

most powerful country would indeed use all its might to keep the Union

together. For others, however, hesitation and waiting were precisely a Ma-

chiavellian strategy: waiting would enfeeble the weaker members of the

Eurozone further, making it necessary to subject them to an economic

diktat, blame for which could partly be deflected because it was formulat-

ed by yet other seemingly depoliticized and hence “neutral” institutions

like the International Monetary Fund. In this view, Germany would cen-

tralize power and permanently assure its domination over the continent

precisely by prolonging the crisis as an occasione (Beck 2013). The power-

ful northern European states would turn out to be what in Machiavelli’s

language would be the grandi, or nobility, of the new Europe, driven by

a desiderio to oppress the southerners. To be sure, very few northerners

would have recognized themselves in this image—but in the south, where

posters of Merkel as Hitler became ever more prominent, it seemed plau-


sible enough (with the dangers that such popular umori, or dispositions,

would become deeply ingrained, and eventually prove forces for European

disintegration).

What has happened since such theories—conspiracy theories, crit-

ics would legitimately say—were first been formulated, suggests that tam-

ing fortuna, as represented by the financial markets, did require a decisive

stance after all. It was the prominently displayed determination of an Ital-

ian, the head of the European Central Bank Mario Draghi, that “calmed

the markets,” at least for the moment: in July 2012, he spoke what, in

the eyes of “the markets” turned out to be the decisive, almost magic,

words: “Within our mandate, the ECB [European Central Bank] is ready

to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will

be enough.” But this story also seems to confirm that a depoliticized,

depersonalized prince as a force for political integration was an illusion

all along—it took a credible individual with visible political backing from

economically powerful states to tame fortuna. And as always with fortuna,

it was mostly about psychology and the qualità de’ tempi, as opposed to

anything like indisputable economic “facts.”

tWo rEMEdIEsStill, one might ask: will it actually be enough? Fundamentally, the crisis

remains unsolved, even if there has been some real economic conver-

gence, which, when all is said and done, is the precondition for a lasting

currency union. Cheap money cannot last forever; either the collective

prince will have to be put together again as it was, or European elites will

need to think of something else. The former strategy consists of betting

that a stricter regime of rules can be made to work. After all, the collective

prince has already forced its subjects— the member states of the Eurozone

—to constitutionalize “debt brakes,” which is to say: constitutional limits

on public debt at national level. Practically, the two collective princes of

the EU— the Commission and EMU—will now firmly act as one when it

comes to supervision of national budgets and punishments for spendthrift

parliaments. And the prince will live in the newly acquired principali-

ties, so to speak—here I am alluding to The Prince again—by looking very

262 social research

closely at local practices (and numbers). It also might increase its powers

of punishment: as one recent proposal to address the crisis states, “sover-

eignty ends when solvency ends.” It will probably be best for the custo-

dians of the common currency to be feared (where purveyors of cheap

money can be loved, but not for long).

In one sense this approach is all about multiplying constraints

and therefore might be seen as continuing the developments in post-

war Europe sketched earlier in this essay. But in another sense, it also

constitutes a break with them: these financial constraints have noth-

ing directly to do with strengthening democracy and individual rights

(which, after all, was the justification of something like militant de-

mocracy and of empowering constitutional courts in postwar Europe).

Moreover, given widespread Euro-fatigue, it seems hardly credible to

say that the collective princes are still leading a political project— they

are just consolidating the power of individual and, above all, institu-

tional debt-holders, who perhaps really represent the grandi of our day.

What is another possible “remedy,” an alternative to a model

which one might reasonably point out has failed once already and which

might finally falter completely under even stronger blows from fortuna?

A strategy that would take more political courage —and that would go

against the main currents of postwar political development in Europe –

might be to accept some of Machiavelli’s fundamental insights on popular

judgment: namely that the people are best at providing constraints on

power holders’ behavior and that contained conflict, or tumulti, remains

the most plausible hope for assuring a free way of life (McCormick 2011).

The modo di procedere is far from obvious here. First, carefully intro-

ducing politicization from above in the name of democracy can seem like

an incoherent enterprise—except that it is not clear who other than elites

could modify the political architecture of the EU such that conflicts and

cleavages could be more clearly expressed. Movements from below could

support such a process—although one might well find that many EU citi-

zens feel that so many initiatives from above have seemed more like pro-

paganda exercises for the Union, or are fed up with referenda that were

simply about “popularly ratifying” decisions not truly up for debate.11


This leads to a second concern: what can conflict legitimately be

about? Would the euro itself ever be on the ballot? Again, it is unrealistic

to think that everything can be politicized all of the time—but an overly

controlled process of “conflict creation” can seem like a charade. Third,

the EU does not appear to have an easily legible class structure. It is not

just that the question of what more contention should look like is itself a

matter of contention—it is that in as complex a polity as the EU, groups

do not line up in such a way that they can provide a mutual check on

each other. For sure, things are not as simple as an opposition between

the “people of democratic citizens” and the “market-people”—that is to

say, the actors on the financial markets, as the German social scientist

Wolfgang Streeck suggests in an otherwise excellent book on the financial

crisis (Streeck 2013).

Finally, both the procedures and the products of EU legislation are

complex and, more important, based on very carefully crafted compro-

mises that do not easily lend themselves to politicization and personal-

ization. The very fact that things stay behind closed doors or in other

ways anonymous makes compromise possible; it might be difficult to put

clear-cut proposals in front of a electorate and expect the people to offer a

popular judgment in order to provide the union with some overall direc-

tion. And finally: meaningful contained tumulti presume that EU citizens

want to continue to share one polity, which might or might not be the

case. But even if it is the case: tumulti would create risks and necessarily

result, at least initially, in what “the markets” abhor most: uncertainty.

Still, introducing popular judgment as expressed in elections to Eu-

ropean offices could not only make the various European collective princ-

es “more legitimate,” as the routine demand of political scientists goes; it

could also result in better outcomes, in at least two senses: more effective

constraints on elite behavior and, contrary to received public choice theo-

ry wisdom, improved policies. After all, Machiavelli himself was confident

that “public opinion is remarkably accurate in its prognostications

. . . . With regard to its judgment, when two speakers of equal skill are

heard advocating different alternatives, very rarely does one find the

people failing to adopt the better view or incapable of appreciating

264 social research

the truth of what it hears.” One could well imagine “speakers of equal

skill” advocating, let’s say, on the one hand more Keynesian and on

the other hand more neoliberal programs for the EU—and the people

making a choice as to what constitutes “the better view.”

Empowering popular judgment is a risk, for the simple reason

that elites in democracies cannot know beforehand what it will turn

out to be. It would also constitute somewhat of a novelty in the kind

of Europe that was created after the Second World War. But it might

be still less of a risk than trying to recreate a collective prince who has

failed once already and where the verità effettuale della cosa could turn

out to be that one is not so much faced with a naked emperor as a fig-

ure from quite a different classic tale: Humpty-Dumpty.

notEs

1. Padoa Schioppa was fond of sprinkling his writings with quotes from

Machiavelli. But one should be careful not to attribute to him a whole-

sale “neo-Machiavellian” strategy in thinking about EMU, as Bonefeld

(2012) does, for instance. After all, his book The Road to Monetary Union

does not mention Machiavelli once (which, to be sure, is not decisive

evidence either way).

2. This notion has been widely discredited by the fact that many state

socialist constitutions in Central and Eastern Europe fixed such a

“leading role” for the state socialist party—thereby rendering elec-

tions largely meaningless.

3. The following is adapted from Müller (2011, 2013).

4. I borrow this formula from the title of Christoph Möllers’ brilliant

2008 piece on postwar German constitutionalism.

5. I am grateful to Giovanni Cappoccia for this point.

6. Of course, this kind of accountability on some level would still require

popular judgment, however primitive—a point often overlooked in

Schumpeterian accounts of democracy.

7. Wolfgang Streeck has summed up the particular “formula” as follows:

the organized working classes accepted “capitalist markets and prop-

erty rights in exchange for political democracy, which enabled them


to achieve social security and a steadily rising standard of living”

(Streeck 2011, 10).

8. As Monnet also put it: “nothing is created without men, nothing is

lasting without institutions.”

9. The EU has also created its own civil “militia,” so to speak: its proper

bureaucracy (as opposed to “mercenaries”) of civil servants seconded

from national administrations.

10. The following three paragraphs draw on Müller (2007).

11. At the time of writing it is simply too early for judgments on the

“European Citizens’ Initiative”—a quite Machiavellian institution, in

theory.

rEfErEnCEs

Beck, Ulrich. 2013. German Europe. Translated by Rodney Livingston.

Cambridge: Polity.

Bonefeld, Werner. 2012. “Neo-liberal Europe and the Transformation

of Democracy: On the State of Money and Law,” in Globalisation

and European Integration: Critical Approaches to Regional Order and

International Relations, edited by Petros Nousios et al., 51–69. New

York: Routledge.

Elinas, Anonis and Ezra Suleiman. 2012. The European Commission and

Bureaucratic Autonomy: Europe’s Custodians. New York: Cambridge

University Press.

Elster, Jon. 2000. Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and

Constraints. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Gauchet, Marcel. 2007 and 2010. L’avènement de la démocratie, Vols. 1–2.

Paris: Gallimard.

Ginsborg, Paul. 1990. A History of Contemporary Italy. London: Penguin.

James, Harold. 2012. Making the European Monetary Union. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press.

Kelsen, Hans. 1931. “Wer soll der Hüter der Verfassung sein?” Die Justiz 6:

576–628.

Lindseth, Peter. 2004. “The Paradox of Parliamentary Supremacy:

Delegation, Democracy, and Dictatorship in Germany and France,

1920–1950s.” Yale Law Journal: 1341–1415.

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Loewenstein, Karl. 1937a. “Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights I.”

American Political Science Review 31: 417–432.

———. 1937b. “Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights II.” American

Political Science Review 31: 638–658.

McCormick, John P. 2011. Machiavellian Democracy. New York: Cambridge

University Press.

Meinecke, Friedrich. 1946. Die deutsche Katastrophe: Betrachtungen und

Erinnerungen. Wiesbaden: Eberhard Brockhaus.

Möllers, Christoph. 2008. “We Are (Afraid of) the People: Constituent

Power in German Constitutionalism,” in The Paradox of Constit-

utionalism: Constituent Power and Constitutional Form, edited by Martin

Loughlin and Neil Walker. New York: Oxford University Press.

Moravcsik, Andrew. 2000. “The Origins of Human Rights Regimes:

Democratic Delegation in Postwar Europe.” International Organization

54: 217–252.

Müller, Jan-Werner. 2007. Constitutional Patriotism. Princeton: Princeton

University Press.

———. 2011. Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe.

London: Yale University Press.

———. 2013. “A Post-Post-Liberal Order: How Western Europe Emerged

from Its Thirty-Year Crisis.” European Self-Reflection between Politics and

Religion: The Crisis of Europe in the 20th Century, edited by Lars K. Bruun

et al. New York: Palgrave.

Münkler, Herfried. 2011. “Der erste Politiker. Ein Gespräch über Niccolò

Machiavelli.” Hohe Luft: Philosophie-Magazin 1: 48–52.

Öhlinger, Theo. 2003. “The Genesis of the Austrian Model of Constit-

utional Review of Legislation.” Ratio Juris 16: 206–222.

Padoa Schioppa, Tommaso. 2001. The Road to Monetary Union in Europe: The

Emperor, the Kings, and the Genies. New York: Oxford University Press.

Paulson, Stanley. 2003. “Constitutional Review in America and Austria:

Notes on the Beginnings.” Ratio Juris 16: 223–239.

Roberts, David. D. 2000. The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth-Century

Europe: Understanding the Poverty of Great Politics. New York: Routledge.


Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1942. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy New York:

Harper.

Shklar, Judith. 1989. “The Liberalism of Fear,” in Liberalism and the Moral

Life, edited by Nancy L. Rosenblum. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.

Streeck, Wolfgang. 2011. “The Crises of Democratic Capitalism.” New Left

Review 71: 5–29.

———. 2013. Gekaufte Zeit: Die vertagte Krise des demokratischen Kapitalismus.

Berlin: Suhrkamp.

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