The West divided: Populism versus liberalism in the 21st century
by Peter Franklin, UnHerd:
The European Union has a flag, an anthem, a parliament, a civil service and, for the most part, a single currency. What it doesn’t have, however, is a constitution. That’s not for want of trying. In the early part of the last decade, the institutions of the European Union poured all their efforts into the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe.
Things started to go wrong quite early on in the process, with an almighty backlash against the draft constitution. But it wasn’t the practical provisions of the draft – such as the expansion of qualified majority voting – that caused the biggest outcry, but the preamble.
Preambles matter. The US constitution wouldn’t be the same without “We the people…” or the Declaration of Independence without “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” The most resonant phrase in the Treaty of Rome (and subsequent EU treaties) is “ever closer union among the peoples of Europe” – which echoes the US constitution’s reference to “a more perfect Union”.
And so a great deal of thought was put into the preamble to the EU constitution. What was required was so much more than a few warm words before the legally-enforceable stuff; rather, here was an opportunity to encapsulate the shared identity of Europe itself – and, by extension, the democratic legitimacy of the whole constitution. Unfortunately, what they came up with was a travesty:1
“Drawing inspiration from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, which, nourished first by the civilisations of Greece and Rome, characterised by spiritual impulse always present in its heritage and later by the philosophical currents of the Enlightenment, has embedded within the life of society its perception of the central role of the human person and his inviolable and inalienable rights, and of respect for law.”
Do you notice the gaping hole in this account of Europe’s origins? The narrative leaps in one bound from ancient Greece and Rome to the Enlightenment with no acknowledgement of what happened in between – i.e. more than a thousand years in which Christianity didn’t just come to define Europe, but, more than anything else, brought the very concept of Europe into being.
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