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Democracy a challenge to the European project

The EU is a doomed empire

European tensions are growing. There is Brexit, a Germany without direction, and nationalist forces that aim to bend the EU to serve their own project.

by Wolfgang Streeck 
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‘Confronting the Sphinx, Napoleon thought he heard it murmur the word: immortality!’

What is the European Union? The closest concept I can come up with is a liberal empire, or better, a neoliberal one. An empire is a hierarchically structured block of nominally sovereign states held together by a gradient of power from a centre to a periphery.

At the centre of the EU is Germany, trying more or less successfully to hide inside a core Europe (Kerneuropa) formed together with France. Germany doesn’t want to be seen as what the British used to call a continental unifier, even if this is what it is. That it likes to hide behind France is a source of power for France; I’ll say more on this crucial relationship later.

Germany, like other imperial countries, most recently the US, conceives of itself, and wants others to do the same, as a benevolent hegemon spreading common sense and moral virtues to its neighbours, at a cost to itself worth bearing for the sake of humanity.

In the German-cum-European case, the values used to legitimise empire are those of political liberalism: liberal democracy, constitutional government and individual liberty. Wrapped within them, to be shown when expedient, are free markets and free competition (that is, economic liberalism and, in the present case, neoliberalism). The hegemonic centre has the prerogative of determining the exact composition and the deeper meaning of the imperial value package, and how it is to be applied in specific situations — so it can extract political seigniorage from its periphery, in return for its benevolence.

Preserving imperial asymmetries among nominally sovereign nations requires complicated political and institutional arrangements. Non-hegemonic peripheral states must be ruled by elites that consider the centre and its structures and values as a model for their own country, or must be willing to organise their internal social, political and economic order to make it compatible with the interests of the centre in holding its empire together. Keeping such (...)

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Wolfgang Streeck

Wolfgang Streeck is emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. A previous version of this article was published by the London School of Economics on 6 March 2019.
Original text in English

(1The patronym is a reference to the Quraysh, the group of Arab clans who historically inhabited Mecca of which the Prophet Muhammad was a member.

(2See Adel Bakawan, ‘In Iraq, the Hashd calls the shots’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, October 2023.

(3See Laurent Perpigna Iban, ‘In Iraq, ISIS is back in business’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, December 2021.

(5République démocratique du Congo, l’avenir incertain. Provinces de l’Est, la prolifération des groupes armés’ (DRC’s uncertain future: Armed groups proliferate in eastern provinces), France Culture, 12 December 2023.

(6Human Rights Watch, ‘Cameroon: Boko Haram attacks escalate in far north’, 5 April 2021, www.hrw.org/.

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