He was. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the fifth annual Ralph Dondo Memorial Lecture.
I'm delighted to welcome several members of the Don to a family again to this event.
And I would also like to acknowledge the representatives of the Site Foundation, which generously supports this lecture and colloquium,
the Fred Ord Foundation and the Aurora Foundation, which supports the work of the Don of Program.
Rose Standoff was a German sociologist who went on to become a public intellectual, deeply engaged in both European and global debates.
So it's particularly fitting that our speaker today is a German sociologist who went on to become a public intellectual,
deeply engaged in European and global debates.
Professor Ulrich Beck is probably the Germany's leading sociologist today.
He holds positions at the University of Munich and at the LSC and in Paris.
He will forgive me, I'm sure, if I don't list all his publications, positions, titles and honours.
But he became best known originally for coining and defining the term risk society.
His work has covered topics such as reflexive modernisation,
as you will hear cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan ization and cosmopolitan risk communities.
But he particularly became.
The person to do this is John Dorf, lecturer, because of his engagement in the European debate,
notably with a book called Challenging Labour German Europe, published in Germany in 2012 and in England in English in 2013.
A notion, by the way, which he treats with some scepticism, I hasten to add,
he has been deeply engaged with a Spinelli group in mobilising support for the European Union,
and so it's particularly fitting that he should be our lecturer.
Just a few weeks before some highly contested elections to the European Parliament, our first respondent is our own Professor Kalypso Nicolaides,
Professor of International Relations, former director of the European Studies Centre here, director of the Centre for International Studies,
one of this country's leading experts on the European Union and federalism,
and in particular someone who has coined and advanced the notion of European democracy,
the more the plural of demos, something that she will explain more about and share in the discussion.
She was also a member of the Reflection Group chaired by Felipe Gonzalez, commissioned by the European Council to look at Europe 2030.
In English, we tend to tour such groups, groups of wise men, but that would not be entirely appropriate for calypso.
But the French wonder to say a group decide. So she is our sage for today.
And Lord Hannay, our second respondent, is one of Britain's most distinguished retired diplomats.
He was actually a first secretary on the negotiating team, which negotiated Britain's entry to work within the European communities.
He was Britain's permanent representative to the European communities in the late 1980s and to the UN in the early 1990s.
He has been extremely active in British European debates ever since.
He is a board member of the Centre for European Reform and very importantly, he's a member of the House of Lords EU Select Committee.
And while the House of Lords might possibly not be absolutely the most democratic of second chamber in the European Union,
it is actually one that does some of the most effective scrutiny of EU legislation.
And it's a committee, by the way, on which Ralph Randolph also sat for many years.
So he is a very close and supremely well qualified.
Respondent to Professor Beck. Professor Beck will speak for about 30 to 40 minutes or respondents will speak for about 5 to 8 minutes,
and then there'll be plenty of time for discussion.
So please join me in welcoming Ulrik back to deliver this year's Don Dorf lecture on the Cosmopolitan Outlook.
How the European Project Can Be Saved.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for this warm welcome.
It's quite an honour, an opportunity, a challenge,
maybe even a risk to talk to such a sophisticated audience and such a sophisticated building on the issue of Europe.
In honour of those times of in my standoff lecture,
I put centre stage the standoff question How can Europe ensure peace and freedom
for its citizens in the face of old and new threats in the 21st century?
And in this way? Or to win the support of the youth of Euro sceptical European citizens for a new European Dream.
To borrow Churchill's formula already years ago, Don of asked the question I'm going to discuss today here who actually speaks the language of Europe?
Who is the European weak? Blizzards, Strasbourg, Berlin or finally, the citizens of Europe, after all.
Europe is one thing for sure. It's a moving target.
Another change in priority is taking place as we speak.
It's the present historical moment. The defining issue in European politics is no longer the EU or bail out policy,
but instead the confrontation with a nuclear armed Russia and the upcoming European elections.
In May, the EU could once again appeal to the voters as a force for peace and not as a money guzzling bureaucratic monster.
At least so in the Eastern Post Soviet Union countries, and maybe in Finland and Sweden, for example, as well.
So let us start with the simple Dondo question.
Who speaks the language of Europe? My answer is I five SEISS.
First SEISS.
We have a huge problem in defining what Europe is actually about, and this is an embarrassing problem that so many years of talking about Europe.
Europe is essentially a moving target. It is not a fixed condition.
Europe is not a territorial unit. Europe is not a state.
Europe is not a nation writ large. Europe is not.
Not. Not actually. There isn't really Europe.
There's only Europeanisation. There's only a process, a process of ongoing transformation.
And even the term transformation maybe isn't quite right for it.
I'm in Germany. I would use the term for the Anglo Metamorphoses, which might be a better word as I define it with Europeanisation.
It metamorphoses, I mean a politics of scientific.
European politics and society did not emerge in an open stage in New York political act, but evolved as a regime of side effect.
The trademark of this trait side effects history of the EU is its fundamental ambivalence.
On the one hand, its reflects the least if anomalous.
Hegel would have called it a cunning of reason that enabled Europe to step out of the long, shadowy shadow cast by its bloody history.
On the other hand, as Europe of Scientifics is something that nobody really intended and authorised,
but nevertheless turns people's life lives upside down and thus provokes national and ethnic resistance.
The development of the EU occurred through the transnational cooperation of elites with their own criteria of rationality,
largely independent of national politics, interests and political convictions.
Be Who is the actor of Europeanisation?
His transformation, the invention of Europe was a product not of the public deliberation and democratic procedures,
but of you would you would ditch your precepts, prescriptions and practices.
It was a European Court of Justice, which, in accordance was a self-definition,
elevated the European Founding Treaties to the Status of Constitutional Carta Charter in two leading decisions in 1963 and 64.
Consequently, a European law emerged that claims constitutional priority,
which it was duly accepted and acknowledged as such by the key actors in European public.
So if you are asked what actually is the core of Europe, it's a European law as in as an actor.
And to be sure, it is not the image of the bureaucracy which we are always talking this monster,
which everybody has in mind, because actually there is a very specific way of implementing those laws.
It's not implemented by Europe. It's implemented by the nation states himself.
This is a specific construction.
So we have to realise this structure and not not only have the often wrong image, which is so much in the public perception.
See where then did the power of transformation come from?
The power of European metathesis was and is an answer to the anthropological shock and horror of the Second World War.
Then, by a kind of normative horizon, emerged.
Never again. Holocaust. Sharp look at the history of world.
Which society demonstrates the power of this dynamics?
When Hiroshima happened, no one understood nuclear weapons.
But afterwards, the worldwide shock of the violation of ethical foundations of humanity has created a normative horizon and expectation.
Never again, Hiroshima, which till today, is the background for the politics of disarmament in all its conflicts and problematic.
In the meantime, there have many occasions like this came up.
Never again not be. Never Again 911 Never Again.
Fukushima Never Again. Global Financial Crisis Always this kind of anthropological shock,
which totally contradicts our expectations not only politically but theoretically as well,
and creates a normative horizon for changes and thereby pushing for regime change in national, international politics and law.
The latest example of this is the digital freedom risk,
which has only become public visible by the courage of one man at that photo, Snowden the whistleblower.
To me, this is an existential, self-inflicted threat to the Western idea of liberty, and I'm very much missing five kind of voice in this affair.
D We are now in a new stage of European metaphysics,
which the Financial Times two weeks ago celebrated on the front page with the headline Super Juiced Super Tuesday for EU Bank Regulation.
A bank regulation is an answer to a never again financial catastrophe.
I was taught I was using the term 999 and my book converter society.
I was using the term financial Chernobyl.
And when I when I used to write about conscience because I thought this is actually over estimating overstretching the point.
But what I had in mind is pretty much what what happened 2008 and and today.
The anticipation of another financial catastrophe is creating an enormous appetite for financial legislation.
Europe's banking union is a project of regime change, as the Financial Times has put it,
pooling power and money unmatched since the creation of the single currency, taxpayers no longer first in line to bail out banks.
Governments are no longer solely masters of their banks, etc., etc.
And by the way, Britain has already lost its way to power in Europe.
Second thesis, the anticipation of financial catastrophe changed the European landscape of power.
Fundamentally, we can observe three shifts in power.
First, it's a division between eurozone nations and EU nations.
Now all the politics because of the crisis, is concentrated in the eurozone nations,
and the prime ministers who are not part of the eurozone have to leave.
This is a very embarrassing situation. I have to leave the room when the real meat comes on the table.
And this is true for Cameroon as well.
So Britain. It's.
Actually maybe the country.
Which is the greatest victim. Of the division between the eurozone countries and countries that merely are members of the EU.
Thinking in terms of policy is toward the moment of decision.
In my mind, for Britain is not an in-out referendum in the relation to the European Union,
but a different kind of decision either regaining power by becoming a member of the eurozone or out.
The question then is what does it mean? And I think this is actually the Achilles heel of the US sceptic position.
I wonder if they have any plan A or B for the review of.
The total with to all from the EU entails departure from the world largest single market.
With Fatal Consequence. Nobody really can want this.
The model many Tories seem to have in mind.
Britain retaining access to internal market but being exempted from most of the EU laws, including free movement.
It's a political fantasy. To put it in ironical terms, it's very difficult for a German professor to be ironical.
Therefore, and therefore I'm mentioning it,
that to combat climate change and flooding of the British island by leaving the EU may not be the right answer.
And leaving the EU doesn't really fix the national health system either.
Along this line we have to realise saving the EU and saving Britain's future is intimately interconnected.
Second inside of the euro countries is a second division between creditor and debt generations.
This is a very important relationship and actually in social scientists didn't think much about this relationship,
which is getting such an important dynamic for social inequalities,
which you cannot think in class categories because it involves all kind of
countries and then even uprise and down grading of whole countries and classes.
So it's a completely new dynamic. It's not a new dynamic,
but it's not something which we actually have one on on this on on on us between
so far idiomatic of have opened up at the AP centre of the crisis crisis written
states of the eurozone in particular between those countries that are on the drip
provided by the rescue funds and those countries that are financing the bailout.
Third, the consequence of this is the economically most powerful country.
Germany becomes a politically most powerful country.
This way, the kind of accidental empire of a German Europe has has emerged.
The German chancellor, Angela merkel, is practising a new style of politics, power, politics in Europe.
I call it naturalism. It's a combination of much heavily in macro.
My book is about this, by the way, that the Germans think Machiavelli is actually an insult to America.
And I gave a lecture in France last year here.
I learned that they see Machiavelli as an insight too much.
Thesis Europeanisation is politics of scientific has created a Europe without Europeans.
And to you a crisis has victimised the European citizens.
So now anti-European revolution is rocking Europe.
I Our findings in my research centre on Reflexive Modernisation five years ago already gave us this picture.
I didn't believe it. I didn't believe it. But they already found out that this is the case.
The anti-European movements instrumentalized the contradiction of Europeanisation
as politics of side effects and the new imperialistic power structure of the EU.
The US sentiment is not only directed against Muslims and other foreign elements, but against the so-called liberal elites.
They are the ones who, in the opinion of many, are destroying national identity.
These elites are also the ones who allowed the cities to be overflowed.
It was foreigners that are legal or illegal.
They are the ones who created the European Union.
This demonic, demonic abstraction, as well as the welfare state in which the outsiders are now making this selfish whole.
But in order to understand the move, the movements of anti-European sentiments, much differentiation is needed.
The research which has been conducted as well. My Centre uncovers the following paradox and that I find this very interesting.
EU scepticism grows with the Europeanisation of everyday life.
People are actually enjoying Europe, being mobile in Europe, taking the advantages of Europe, but at the same time vote against personnel in Europe.
This is, I think of quite an interesting result, which makes us think about fourth SEISS But how can you overcome this crisis of coexistence?
The empowerment of democratic institutions is necessary, but it's not a sufficient condition.
I think the question, which has not been really asked so far,
neither from from in the political discussion nor in the social sciences, what does it mean for the individual?
How does the individual profit from Europe?
What what more emancipation comes from Europe to the individual?
I actually discussed this in my in my book. So I'm not going to repeat it here.
The German doctor. Actually, the question is how does this metaphysics of national citizenship to a European.
Citizenship to self-understanding. Participation of the individual.
In Europe, hope becomes this possible. The German view of is counterproductive in this age, but perhaps a vision of a mediterranean Europe would work.
Or picking up on those question who is a European?
We not only of mainly the United States of Europe, but also of mainly the united regions of Europe or the United Cities of Europe.
A large proportion of the EU are critics and anti-Europeans who are now raising the voices of prisoners of the outdated national nostalgia.
This is how, for example, the French intellectual Alain to Alan Finkel, called Arduous Europe,
thought that it could constitute itself without or even against the nations it wanted.
It wanted to punish the nations for the horrors of the 20th century.
But there is no post-national democracy. Democracy is monolingual.
If it is to function, it needs a shared language and shared life responses and its shared project.
We do not come into the world as world citizens. Human communities have limits.
Europe does not take this into account. This is why the European public cannot work up any enthusiasm for the European Union.
This is how thinker, quote, argued in a discussion I had with him.
But this criticism of Europe is based on the National Delusion that a return to the nation state, a deal is possible in the world at risk.
It proves presupposes a national horizon as a diagnostic framework for Europe's present and future.
To this critics, I say broaden your outlook and then you will see that not only just in Europe but in the whole world is
a process of transition where the boundaries of European political thinking are no longer even real.
And this is relevant for the social sciences as well,
because the social scientists are to some extent prisoners of what I call methodological nationalism.
All the concepts, all our ideas of of unit, of research, all are defined nationally.
And when you have, for example, in the discussion with small.
Eizenstat a few years ago, you said, well, why are the social sciences so much fixed and so much occupied by this national perspective?
Because, you know, there has been all kind of plurality before.
It's only 150 years. And now there is a new plurality coming up.
How is it possible that science, with so much reflection, is only a mainly dominated by the national view?
We need a cosmopolitan outlook just to understand what is happening here now in in all kind of areas of of in Britain and in Germany,
in the cities, in in all in all the different issues,
all nations are faced with a new cultural plurality, not only as a result of migration,
but also of Internet communication, climate change, fuel crisis, digital threats to freedom, etc., etc.
People of the most diverse backgrounds with different languages, conceptions of values and religions are living and working alongside each other.
Their children are attending the same school and then trying to become established the same legal and political system.
This is what I call the fact of cosmopolitan zation in opposition to the you mentioned is already to the fullest philosophical norm,
a tradition of cosmopolitanism. It's difficult to to find the new words for those new situation.
We can, of course, talk about if this views it. This selection of work is a correct one, if it really works.
But important is to realise that we live in a world where the seemingly excluded other is included.
This cosmopolitan zation I define as an enforced inclusion of the excluded other.
And this is happening in relation to climate change because actors or who are producing this are in a completely different world.
But we and others are affected by it or it's with the financial crisis the same thing.
Migration, of course, was a good example. Households, if you look at non-U.S. working households, this is actually one of the main pictures of wealth.
Cosmopolitan is Asian because mothers from different countries are working at the same time here and there.
And football today, a match, maybe some of you, not between Bayern Munich and Real Madrid during the time we have this discussion.
And of course by invention would not be by a mention of all the people come from by on and mentioned,
you know, they are coming from all over the world. And the same is true was Real Madrid.
I sometimes think, you know, in all the world this is watching it here.
It's a really. Huge Cosmo political event.
I called it the banner of cosmopolitanism, but we shouldn't underestimate it, because if you would be organised like,
like a champion European championship, you know, we would be in a better, better position.
So we maybe could even learn from this kind of cosmopolitan.
But on the other hand, this means cosmopolitanism does not produce cosmopolitans.
It does not produce well citizens. Often the opposite is the case because it's enforced.
Nobody voted on it. It just happens. We seem to be threatened by by all kinds of strangers in all kinds of ways.
People are just doing the opposite. They are redefining the national and the ethnic identity as something in which they find secure.
So actually, you couldn't understand even the anti cosmopolitan movement and sentiments.
Just from a national point of view. Formative.
If you if you talk about it in epistemological terms, factually,
you need a different perspective of of book, of observation, of observer perspective in order to analyse.
Well, I actually was trying to discuss the relationship to to the intervention of of Russia into Ukraine in this direction.
Because the interesting point is actually that I think in this situation add to that see a clash of two understandings of nationhood.
Happens in in in Europe maybe in other parts of the country as well this ethnic territorial definition of of the nation.
Where were the motto? The background motto is where Russians live.
There is Russia. That's a Russian state, but it's just an ethnic, territorial definition.
And I think in in the West, we have a different not so much reflected way of of, let's say, of of a cosmopolitan nationhood,
of a nationhood which understands itself not by closure, not by ethnic definition,
but by plurality at the same time, struggles for some kind of of identity.
And in in. I would say there are two different principle for declarations here in this clash of of nation understanding of nations.
One is the Declaration of Independence, which is actually still if you listen to all the discussion,
for example, in Turkey and in Russia, in in in many other parts of the world, this is the big issue.
But on the other hand, we have the declaration of interdependence,
which says all to to cope with the challenges of of of of the global age and all the problems we have of interconnected.
This interdependence is a condition for redefining sovereignty and redefining nationhood.
Well, time is running.
Well, we had we talked so much about the German Europe, but and of course, there's lots of discussion to to the Brussels Europe.
But what is actually the antidote? What is the counter perspective at all to those visions of the future of Europe?
It could be the united regions of Europe or to be more specific,
the vision of a Southern Europe, for example, the dream of a mediterranean wedding bit,
as Michel Chevalier named it, already in the 19th century, in which north and south and east and west would make love.
As he said, the seemingly necessary link between the state, nation, national identity and a single language would be dissolved.
The union, the member state and the regions consume themselves at different levels with the welfare of the citizens.
They lend to citizens on the one hand to voice in the globalised world.
Why giving them on the other a sense of regional security and identity this way?
Their most creative. Put is becoming a demo.
Crazy as he was, as he would say. I think this is a beautiful way of putting it.
The multi-level, pluralist, pluralistic affair to define democracy Mediterranean culture is Savio.
LEEB It is a world of contradictory certainties, indifference, despair, distrust, beauty and hope.
That's a mixture that we, northern Europeans romanticise as the gardens of the souls.
Body tone in bloom, where lemon trees bloom and corruption to some extent.
But isn't it true that nevertheless, if the Germans had gone to school with ball players of the South,
they would never have plunged the world into the Second World War.
Fifth thesis. Why should the European project being saved in the first place?
What is the purpose of the European Union in the 21st century?
Is there any purpose? Why you would.
Why not? The whole world. Why not do it alone in Germany, the UK or France?
There are three answers. In this respect, summarising my lecture first the success story of the European Union.
If you asked what is actually the success of the European Union, it's about how enemies become nature, become neighbours.
Navies, not French neighbours, were all neighbours who dislike each other or kind of naval ships.
But they are not enemies. And I think this is in the in the background of the history.
Unbelievable. It's a miracle, actually. And it's we thought this is already something which we can count on.
But now we see even the aggression, the Russian aggression makes us realise how fragile even this idea could become.
As I sit here comes up the clash of of two understandings of of nation, the cosmopolitan nation,
the European nation, the nation which is in many ways related to the outside world and the ethnic nation.
And actually the notion of the cosmopolitan nation is related to what the American intellectual and of Bern envisioned as early as 1918,
that the American nationalism would become, by necessity,
something very different from the ethnic nationalism of the 20th century Europe by building up what he called the first international nation.
The second purpose is that European modernity, which has been disseminated all over the world, is a suicidal project.
It is actually climate change, financial crisis.
All those things are systematically part of of our modernisation project and are actually threatening the basis of it.
So so actually it's a bit like a car company created a car without any brakes and it started to cause multiple accidents.
The company would take these cars back to redesign them.
And this is exactly what the what you should do with modernity.
We design, we inventing. Modernity could be a specific task for Europe in the 21st century, of course, not only for Europe.
The third point is there's not only the necessity to introduce Demo cratic architecture.
There's an urgent need for Europeanisation from below.
For the creation of a European civil society, internal and external, to the EU, including Russia.
There is no native European citizens citizen.
There is only born national citizens.
So we could create the most beautiful democratic institutions for Europe,
and they will still empty if we don't find a way to change the Europe of side effects into a Europe of the citizen.
This Europeanisation from below has to be empowered by a European by European of the cities.
If you if you once notice the political landscape in Europe, maybe not only in Europe,
but in other parts of the world as well, you find that the nations, to put it directly, mostly black, political conservative.
But the cities are different. They are red, green in in their political perspective, or they do have this more progressive point of view.
And it's interesting to connect the cities as European actors, maybe as global actors as well.
Let me finish by going to implications for social and political theory and research.
In order to understand the transformation, the metaphor for this metaphor,
the safe haven law I'm talking about, which we are experiencing in the world.
We have to make a distinction between two types of social and political feelings.
Those theories will concentrate and focus on the reproduction of social and political
order from those CEOs who focus on the transformation of the political and social order.
And it's amazing, if you look at the basic social and political theories,
all the important ones, they are mainly concentrated on the reproduction of content.
Take, for example, Bourdieu, this theory of class.
Of course he is demonstrating that the variations of class in the 20th century.
But actually his main theory is class society is reproduced even if there have been political changes for all the century or the 20th century.
And we have evidence now that even the 21st century is still a class society in the old sense.
Take for Cool a wonderful, challenging, amazing theoretical system.
But if you look at this point, it's always power.
We can do whatever we want. Power is always there already.
And whatever happens, it's a reproduction of power.
You can even have counterpart reproduction of power. This is his group Luminous, saying that systems are reproduction.
They are not even individuals anymore. They are just systems are reproducing systems.
And you can go on all the big theories about reproduction of all that we don't have many
theories of transformation of for some examples is is for example is especially in Britain,
you could follow Anthony Giddens and others as well, including myself.
In order to understand what is in the kind of dynamics we are in,
we have to we define the basic concepts of social sciences in a frame of reference of transformation and a second consequence.
We need a cosmopolitan turn in the social sciences.
We need to distinguish, as I said before, between cosmopolitanism as a philosophical norm and cosmopolitan position,
as a fact, as a research program in the social and political thought that goes beyond methodological nationalism.
The national outlook is not not only misunderstands the reality of Europeanisation,
etc., but it obscures how breathtaking, exciting social sciences could become again.
The classics we are fascinated by the newly discovered continent called society and reflection of this fascination for which we appear.
If you call your city of exploring,
the unexplored landscape created by the ongoing transformation of the social and political order was to revive the
sociological imagination making sociology and social sciences once again interesting to sociologists and selves.
To other disciplines and to the public and the politics.
Thank you for your. Thank you very much.
Or have a very substantial and wide ranging lecture, I think particularly challenging to Britain, quite apart from the prospect of being flooded.
And to Manchester United, of course, collapsing. Can I go?
Well, Rick, thank you. Thank you for sharing these extremely inspiring ideas with us today.
Europe needs them. But more to the point, we need them.
Ever since Ralph left us, brilliant,
UK friendly pro-EU German intellectuals intimately familiar with both sides of the channels have become an endangered species.
And you are to be nurtured on these eyes.
And I know you've been at LSC, but we are here today to express this this feeling,
and not only by the likes of Clegg, who for whom Continentals with a human face is very precious,
but by all of us EU expats living in the fear of 2017 and who are here in this room and thank God for friends like David and Tim here.
So you will not be surprised that I was particularly intrigued in listening to
you by your desire to win the support of the Euro sceptical European citizens.
Who are these Eurosceptics that you would like to appeal to?
They could be us, of course, because after all, as academics and scholars, we should all be sceptical.
That's our job. But perhaps, perhaps you're thinking about the 350 million or so Europeans who are going to the
polls in three weeks and who might return a partially self-hating European Parliament,
or at least those among the voters and the MEPs who are rational Eurosceptics amenable to the giving of reasons,
the kind of things we do in Oxford and you do in Munich and at LSC.
So I would like to use my full back moment right now, if I may,
to take you up on how your cosmopolitan vision can be soluble in this Europe Eurosceptic ethos of our age.
That's the challenge you've set yourself. If we start with theses number one,
which encapsulate your important credo that you were reminding us at the end that the social science
should resultantly turn their gaze from patterns of reproduction to dynamics of transformation.
Isn't telling the story of European transformation over the last half centuries,
as led by courts and judge and judges, ground to the mill of Eurosceptics?
Isn't it in fact, the case that the European Union has always been a not only since Merkozy, the affair of its democratic government,
and that, as many legal theorists argue, the Luxembourg judges have simply helped write the blueprint from time to time.
Law is politics and through politics. Right?
And then in the story of transformation, can we really say that no one authorised this Europe of side effects,
as you call it, as you so rightly call it? European messianic elites have always believed that they were authorised by their sacred peace mission.
That's what they believe. And problematically, maybe for you.
They often call themselves cosmopolitan.
Myths call themselves cosmopolitan, as I witnessed extensively when I was neither wise nor men of Tim was alluding to earlier.
So and these messianic elites call for cosmopolitanism as a fig leaf to do their own thing, their mission.
So if there is a cunning of reason, as you were saying,
does it not operate precisely through the anti-politics of the European Union's founders and elites,
which have led us the cunning of reason to the inescapable party of what we could call the third transformation of democracy a la Robert Doyle.
And if that's the case, then shouldn't Eurosceptics not rejoice for this cunning of reason?
Which then leads me to your very important changing landscape of power.
Just two quick points. You say Britain is the greater victim of the division between the euro have and have nots.
You were saying this a moment ago, but what do you think of the fact that perhaps a majority of people in this country do not see it that way?
Even there, even if they're pro-EU, they think they have the best of all worlds, the EU and not just the single market minus the euro.
That's brilliant. That is that this attractiveness is the real Achilles heel of proponents of the no is what Clegg means when he tries out,
when he cries out that leaving the EU would amount to monumental economic vandalism.
That's what he means. So. That's the real question.
The constructive Eurosceptics that you want to appeal to and not just in Britain,
by the way, you might want to ask you is can your cosmopolitan vision accommodate support?
Very pragmatically, this is politics for this for a minimal version of reform and repatriate agenda.
When you go back and speak in Berlin, or is that giving too much to Cameron and the Tories,
is it really giving too much to acknowledge that European federalism, and we can call it that way, ought to be about cycles of federalism?
That's what federalism always has been about. Aren't the Eurosceptics the real federalist?
Oh, my God. And my answer to all this is yes.
But we can have a conversation. You can accommodate this Eurosceptic vision.
Which brings us to the second point on the changing of power,
the German question and indeed today and in this wonderful little book, which I really recommend to all of you,
your German Europe, you have denounced courageously Germany's neo hegemony in our new accidental empire,
and you have been admired all over Europe for doing so.
Indeed, we do admire in general Germans. Often you'll see an, you know, self-restraint, restraint by our hands.
Please take me to the mast. But can we not grant more cleverly, as you beautifully put it, a nod to her own Eurosceptics,
that responsibility to others across Europe cannot be detached to responsiveness to the self and therefore a respectful yes,
but a dual guy into Greek finance.
Sorry your son and other in the room and link to this point use you speak eloquently of the obfuscation of European interests,
but couldn't we argue that if the solutions to the crisis are to be democratically sustainable on the creditor front and debit or front,
should there be such a thing as a European interest that is distinct from enlightened national interest?
After all, when sugar and an example you give in your book advocates raising German workers wages.
Is this not simply good for them? You know,
they can spend the extra time off and the extra money on southern beaches and the Southerners will spend more buying German goodies in return.
So it's all about national interest, isn't it?
Or is it? But if it is or is to grant me this, then Eurosceptics might not be that unhappy with your cosmopolitanism.
And to be sure, to be sure, we do need to fend together in the world risk society that you have so cogently analysed, you know, for, for so long.
But if Europe as a community of destiny has its role to play in this global risk game,
how can cosmopolitan institution counter the continued tendencies of of of their role to socialise, risk and privatise benefit?
Can cosmopolitan institution do all that work and should facing risk together as Europeans preclude us from going bankrupt alone?
Should it? I don't know. Which brings me to our shared bed noire, and I completely agree with you.
Mythological nationalism, as you reminded everyone earlier,
the tendency we have in the social science to analyse all political forms in the modern world through the prism of the nation state.
Yes, but the question becomes, can cosmopolitanism really avoid the risk of cloning the state at the European level?
And I know you say yes, but despite your best intention, can it do that?
Cannot avoid state writ large at the European level without accepting that mythological nationalisms still belong to nation state,
that they have a role to play in our world. Isn't it the case that in the age of crowdfunding and distributed networked intelligence,
large scale phenomena often do not go for large scale governance.
And that's your Europe as emancipation, obviously. But but at the same time,
it it may be the case that your version of Cosmopolitan may escape the Eurosceptic
legitimate fear of loss of local control if they don't control national politics.
In other words, you do call a Europe from for a Europe from below.
I think many of us in this room will agree with you and call for that.
Europe for below. From below. But why should it express yourself only through itself, only through cities?
And I love the point that cities are more progressive than countries or regional politics,
but not above all, through national politics at the end of the day.
Should we not instead recognise in a cosmopolitan way the primacy of national politics and European
democracy and simply wish for a union of peoples both as free as possible from each others,
interference or interference from Brussels and Berlin, while at the same time radically open to each other,
as you said, the forced inclusion of the excluded others.
So the idea of democracy is not just a kind of like a mild, benign sovereign, this kind of thing, because it's all about enforcing that,
trying to say that Europe should empower national democracies and make them healthy, fight against the democratisation as we see it so often.
But at the same time that these are not good old national democracies, they should be radically open to each other.
And if we say that, then how much do we really need the cosmopolitan superstructure or what kind of cosmopolitan superstructure do we really need?
And if we if that brings us to the identity front and your call for the metamorphosis of the national citizen into a European citizen.
Yes. Yeah, but yes and no. As we commemorate World War One, you know, turning French peasant into Frenchmen.
Well, that didn't only bring good stuff. But then what should we necessarily want to turn them into?
Euro men? As a French woman, I have my doubts, but.
And in fact, as a Franco Greek citizen married to a Brit, I'm also for your own version of this Mediterranean wedding bed.
But. But why a single wedding bed rather than wedding bells all around Europe?
You know, we should take romantic pluralism seriously. I don't want to go too far down this metaphor here.
I'm in a bit in trouble. But my basic point is, why should we need one story for Europe?
Even a cosmopolitan story isn't rather the combination of the diversity of European stories into a grand and extravagant polyphony,
even cacophony that is the ultimate European story.
Or in Umberto Eco, those term is in translation.
The only common language of Europe. Cool.
Indeed. I do believe your call for Germans and Greeks to share bull rather than bullets.
Isn't that cool? More consistent indeed.
Sharing boule rather than bullet with we the peoples of Europe rather than a European.
We more consistent with an ethos of mutual recognition and an engagement.
Then a European demos and that. And I know that you share this belief.
And can we not therefore say that if we can articulate this vision,
these these Eurosceptics of the constructive kind you want to appeal to, indeed might might have a chance in the story.
So to conclude two thoughts on connecting the internal and the external ambition for a cosmopolitan Europe that you have shared with us.
First thought you call for reinventing modernity in Europe, and to be sure, if this is about reflexive modernisation of you,
as you've discussed brilliantly in your work, and I am all for it, but even so,
should we not be wary of epistemological and ontological risk in reinventing a
kind of new standards of of civilisation under the guise of European modernity,
which we will claim to be perhaps a bit a kind of experimental model for the rest of the world.
Isn't it time to let go of any kind of Eurocentric civilizational conceits, universalism, and embrace Europe as really an evanescent,
cosmopolitan idea and evanescent mediator, happy with its humble contribution to global reinvention?
And secondly, second, closing thought. And lastly, Tim, och, I agree with you that we should all be European cosmopolitan, I grant you that,
and that we should be able to tell Ukrainians we want our boots on the ground and Russians who who actually don't,
that we are not tension as Europe because we are weak.
We are weak because we are Kantian. Yes, we can't.
Oh, but but would you not then agree with me that to be faithful to Kant's cosmopolitan conditional hospitality,
we need our good old nation states to provide love and care to the Ukrainian refugees when if they come, hopefully they won't.
And to. Grab Russian assets when they tried to leave ours.
In other words, that what we need in Europe is state cosmopolitanism or rooted cosmopolitanism,
the kind that starts with selling cosmopolitan zation at home and which may be
mature Euroskeptics might come to accept and therefore embrace your vision.
Thank you very much, Calypso, for a splendid challenge. David.
Well, it is really a great privilege to have been asked to come here to respond to this.
Fifth down law Fletcher I worked with Ralph in the commission in Brussels and in the House of Lords,
and I admired his intellect enormously and above all his skill at bringing out into the open,
often complex and contradictory tendencies in society and politics.
It's a privilege to to follow Professor Beck, whose fascinating and thought provoking lecture we've just heard.
And I'm not in agreement with every word he said.
Tim, you did tell me. I was meant to be a bit controversial, but I would very much strongly agree with his view that recent Russian actions in
Crimea and Ukraine do pose a fundamental challenge to European solidarity and to our
attachment to a rules based and human rights based international order a challenge to
which our response will be central to the future development of the European Union.
But if I could, having agreed with that, take issue with another point.
I would really question a bit the way in which the outcry that has arisen over the
US National Security Agency's activities and the whole issue of data protection,
whether it is not being addressed in a rather one sided way.
In my analysis, the communication revolution of recent years the Internet, mobile phones, digital applications,
all that has brought with it a massive positive boost to individual freedoms and opportunities,
an enlargement of them far beyond our imagining when they were first being developed.
But it has had its dark side to think only of transnational child pornography or the scope for
terrorists and religious fundamentalists to ply their trades in dealing with these challenges.
State institutions need to find a new balance between protecting their citizens and protecting their citizens privacy.
And that's not proving easy or straightforward.
It would be surprising if it was.
But it is a balance, I would argue, that needs to be struck both at the national the European and the international level.
And then a brief disclaimer, the remarks I'm going to make in response to today's lecture.
We'll be those of a practitioner and not an academic, and they will reflect a British mindset, albeit the mindset of a Briton,
much of whose professional life has been devoted to Britain's participation in the European cause,
over which the possibility of any referendum in 2017 now casts a deep and baleful shadow.
Now. I would agree. There is no doubt whatsoever that the European project needs urgently needs resuscitation.
European elections at the end of May are likely to lead to a sharp increase in votes for
anti-EU or anti euro parties and in the number of seats they hold in the European Parliament.
That, in parenthesis, may not much change the European Parliament's ability to operate and take decisions.
If, as I believe will be the case, the three main groups the Socialists,
the Christians and the Liberals work more closely together in the future than they've done in the past.
And also, given the remarkably vociferous and nationalistic nature of the anti euro anti-EU parties.
Moreover, these protest movements, which is what they are, are more widespread than ever before in UK.
You have UKIP in France, the Foreign Minister, now in Holland you have little does is Peavey.
You have true Finns, true Swedes. In Italy you have five star Greece, you have Golden Dawn, in Hungary you have Jobbik.
So we must not think that these can simply be wished away.
But how best are we to respond? I doubt very much myself the viability of a great grassroots movement from below.
I would be staked with reasonable certainty that it wouldn't work in this country.
It could actually widen the gap between Britain and some others.
The gap between Britain on one side and, say, the Scandinavian countries and some East Europeans on the one hand,
and more integrationist federalist member states on the other.
And if I could be allowed a short digression on semantics.
After all, in Oxford with certainty, when I was here, the School of Philosophy spent a lot of its time talking about semantics.
The capacity of the British to misunderstand certain words is highly developed.
Take federalism. Federalism, which we honestly believe to be a centralising proposition based on, of course,
the American example and ignore totally the German example, which is exactly the opposite.
Take the word intellectual. In France, to be called a public intellectual is a compliment.
In this country, it is an insult to give and take.
And here I forgive hope. I may be forgiven if I could pick up the word cosmopolitan, a very dangerous word in this country, I have to say.
One of our junior ministers recently managed to insult the prime minister inadvertently, of course,
by saying that those who were in favour of migration were mainly in favour in order to have foreign nannies.
Having forgotten that the Prime Minister had one, but he did not use the word cosmopolitan elite as a compliment.
And so I think there is a risk in that word.
In this country, not in the concept, but in the world of risk.
Now, such an approach, if we are, how should we respond?
Then I would argue myself that it is better to fight emotional appeals to the past with rational appeals to the future.
Such an approach would need to combine positive aspects clearly a broad policy reform agenda,
and it would combine that with negative aspects the absence and the unconvincing nature of the alternatives available to all Europeans.
If I was asked what that positive reform agenda would consist of, I would put forward roughly the following.
And it would be a positive policy reform agenda.
It would involve, of course, completing the single market in services.
In particular, it would involve creating a level playing field for digital.
It would involve an energy single market and much greater effective energy security.
And the Ukraine issue has put the spotlight back on that very happily, in my view.
It would involve a common foreign and security policy which could really deal
with the problems being posed by President Putin's newly developed theses,
which, alas, bear all too close resemblance to others we have heard earlier in the last century.
We I would include in my list of policy areas much greater defence cooperation in order to cope with the problems of austerity budgets.
We need free and fair trade on a worldwide basis, which would involve reviving the World Trade Organisation,
which made a little bit of progress in Bali to try and complete the Doha round and also to
complete the set of free trade agreements which are being negotiated by Europe with Canada,
Japan, the United States and perhaps Brazil. I would look to see a renewed leadership by Europe on climate change.
The completion of Balkan enlargement and an item that's often overlooked and I think here meets a point the
Calypso is making a more a more structured role for national parliaments in the shaping of European legislation.
The European Union Select Committee, which Tim made a reference,
has just written a report on that and how you could enhance the role of national parliaments without treaty change.
There are a lot of things you could do, and I believe that that is a way of reinforcing not the only way,
but part of the way of reinforcing what is called the dealing with the democratic deficit, but in a way that is less sweeping than some of the others.
I would not, therefore in my list include a sweeping treaty change,
although there may need to be one or two tweaks to the present treaties for the eurozone members.
I suspect that will be the case. I don't think there is really an appetite for sweeping treaty change across Europe and the
referendum's likely to be triggered by any treaty that contained that could very well fail.
And it would be pretty disastrous, frankly,
if Europe spent the next few years negotiating such changes and then the years following that in failing to ratify them.
There have actually been far too many institutional based reforms, treaties in the last 20 years.
If you look at the list, it's a bit terrifying, really.
The Single European Act. Maastricht, Amsterdam knees.
The Constitutional Treaty. Lisbon I reckon we could have done with at least two or three of those, but they.
The key thing is that that institutional approach, as opposed to the policy based approach to reform,
which I would suggest is the right one, that institution based approach hasn't mustered support for the European Union.
If anything, the contrary, as we're seeing with the voting next month.
And in the end, I would suggest that the success of the European project depends on building
across many historical faultlines and many cultural and political differences.
It cannot be done by trying to eliminate those we have to construct across those fault lines,
which means that you need solid foundations on both sides of the fault lines and not too ambitious a structure on top.
I don't myself think that there is any future or any sense in what is called a two speed Europe,
but we will, I am convinced, need a good deal of variable geometry.
Europe has already been pretty good at defining variable geometry both in the membership and non membership of the euro in the Schengen area,
in the Justice and Home Affairs area, and now emerging on banking union.
And I don't think that there is any reason to believe that the concept of variable geometry couldn't be developed further.
So last word.
Just remember, I would suggest that the lamented constitutional treaty which was defeated, opposed as the motto of Europe unity in diversity.
And perhaps we should always look at Europe as one of these cases where the best is frequently the enemy of the good.