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Jan-Werner Mller

Social Research: An International Quarterly, Volume 81, Number 1,

Spring 2014, pp. 243-267 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/sor.2014.0009

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sor/summary/v081/81.1.muller.html

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Jan-Werner Mller
Who 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 particular 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 confronting changing constellations of political forces; its conduct one would

social research Vol. 81 : No. 1 : Spring 2014243

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 peoplecollective 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 process of European integration might not be so ridiculous after all then.
What used to be known as the European Community but is now officially 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 integration, 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 leadershipa largely vacuous academic
subjectto 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 Machiavellis claims about political integration and see whether they might shed some light both on the
history and the prospects of European polity-building. Some observers have argued that the latter is absolutely sui generissomething
unprecedented that should make us avoid the temptation of drawing
analogies with previous polities, such as certain forms of empire or

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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 easily 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 soand what
role various institutionalized princes, the European Commission in
particular, played in this process. I shall then return to the intriguingand at first sight so counterintuitivenotion of a monetary system as Europes prince. Finally, against the background of the Eurocrisis (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 tumultiongoing political
conflictultimately 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 developments in postwar Europeto a description of which I now turn.

Europes 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 parliamentarism.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 innovationseven
if these innovations were often cloaked in highly traditional languages
of cultural conservatism and, in particular, religion (think of the continent-wide revival of Christianity after the war and natural law think-

Who Is the European Prince?245

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 institutions were deeply imprinted with anti-totalitarianism. Political
leaders, no lessand quite possibly more sothan jurists and philosophers, sought to build an order designed to prevent a return to the totalitarian past. To be sure, lessons of the past were hardly unambiguous, 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 subjectsuch as
the ethnically purified German Volksgemeinschaft (Roberts 2006). The
underlying thought of these interpretations, one might say, was a profoundly 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 slogan and instead recognizes that at least Nazi Germany and Stalins
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 democracy (though emphatically not liberal democracy): the formation of a
completely homogeneous people as a collective agent capable of mastering a collective fate (and of defending itself against perceived racial

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

were promised by the Volksgemeinschaft no less than Stalins notion of
a properly Soviet people). To be sure, both participation and inclusion
were premised on total faith in the Fhrer 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 political 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 qualitative 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 actionand a form of unconstrained and unconditional 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 preceptsall without redeploying actual liberal
languages (Roberts 2006). In a sense, it was very muchas in Judith
Shklars seminal formulationa 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 associated with too much popular liberty (Shklar 1989).

We are (afraid of) the People4

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

Who Is the European Prince?247

liberalism expressed itself in concrete institutions and, in particular,

institutional innovations. Possibly one of the most important in twentieth-century Europe as a whole was the creation of constitutional courts,
designed not only to constrain popular sovereignty but also parliamentary 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) (hlinger 2003 and Paulson 2003).
Kelsen did not concede that a powerful constitutional court capable 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 reviewabove all, France, with its aversion to
gouvernement des jugesthe idea of testing for constitutionality by a specialized court was eventually accepted. Constitutional courts tasked
specialists with defending liberal democracy and individual rights in
particularneither 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 socalled militant democracya 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 authoritarian movements using democratic means to disable democracy (Loewenstein 1937a). Loewenstein had argued that democracies were incapable
of defending themselves against fascist movements if they continued to

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subscribe to democratic fundamentalism, legalistic blindness, and an

exaggerated formalism of the rule of law (424). Part of the new challenge was that, according to Loewenstein, fascism had no proper intellectual content, relying on a kind of emotionalism with which democracies
could never compete. Consequently, democracies had to find legislative
answers to antidemocratic forcessuch as banning parties and militias.
They should also restrict the rights to assembly and free speech (Loewenstein 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 (6567).
The idea of militant democracy subsequently became highly influential 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 measures against those guilty of (suspected) association with terrorists. Critics
charged from the beginning that this anti-extremism could easily be instrumentalized against legitimate opposition (especially left-wing opposition) while, at the same time, it did little to help deal with the Nazi past.
Militant democracy was most pronounced in West Germanybut
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
democracyuna democrazia protettathat 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 because the Vatican had an interest in preventing a ban on right-wing parties 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 fascism, established itself as a minor party with stable supportand eventually, 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

Who Is the European Prince?249

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 Volksgemeinschaft 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 powerpreventing 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 Ptain, the leader of
authoritarian Vichy France.
One important upshot of the postwar constitutional settlement,
then, was that outside Britain the legitimacy of unrestricted parliamentary supremacy was effectively put into doubt. The flip side of the weakening of parliaments was a strengthening of executives, a process that
went furthest under General Charles de Gaulle, who turned the Assemble Nationale into the weakest legislature in the West. Justifications of
democracy centered less and less on having ones views effectively represented in parliament, let alone empowering popular judgmentrather,
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 cultivate their garden (Crosland 1974, 6566). 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 oppressionbest,
then, to delegate that task to specialists.7

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Creating European Necessitiesby Stealth,

if Necessary
It 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 domestic stability than international security. By making European states
profoundly dependent on each other (and, in particular, by placing coal
and steel productionessential for armed conf lictunder 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 conf lict 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 practically ruled out. To be sure, popular and elite celebrations of the newly
forged amiti 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 necessities 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 necessitiesinvolving 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 dependent on Washington.

Who Is the European Prince?251

There has been much mythmaking to the contrary, not least

by EU representatives themselvesbut 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 constrainingand, 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 Community 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 return 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
Schumanoften presented by EU institutions as the true founding
document of European integrationannounced: 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

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cooperation, until high politics itself would eventually become integrated

and make an ever closer Union (as the Founding Treaty of the European 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 politely, mass deception. The fact that national parliaments had officially
signed up for this processhence 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 European 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 benefitsand 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 addition, a council of national ministers. However, this impression of a
traditional division of powers and of checks and balances was somewhat 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.

Who Is the European Prince?253

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 attributed to republics, as opposed to a single prince: there would be diversity of political judgment, mutual learning, a capacity to change an
overall disposition, and, not least, a kind of accumulation of collective wisdomwhere 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-Frdric Amiel (as was PadoaSchioppa, incidentally); Amiel had claimed that each mans experience 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 intelligence not just in maintaining the state of integration as it had already been achievedmantenere lo stato, in Machiavellis 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 Schumanns implicit warning and instead pursued a single, inflexible plan (of a European federal
state, for instance), usually failed; those willing to be flexible in adapting 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, advocate of a European federal state, Commission President Walter Hallstein, 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

254social research

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 Machiavellis 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, maintaining 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 independently existing public power; and the commission kept refining its many ways of retaining bureaucratic autonomy vis--vis the
nation-states (Elinas and Suleiman 2012).9 Not least, many essential
legal-political functionsensuring compliance on the part of citizens
in particularkept being exercised by nation-states, whose legitimacy
was not nearly as precarious as that of a new supranational community. 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 powerothers also proved what one might call normative entrepreneurs capable of
creating new necessities and, indirectly, opportunities. The best example 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

Who Is the European Prince?255

established that European Community law was to have supremacy over

national laws and that it took direct effect in member statesthat is,
European Community legislation could be invoked by individual citizens in national courts and enforced against member states.
In the famous Costa v. E.N.E.L. ruling in 1964, the court confidently announced that by creating a Community of unlimited duration . . . 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 Courtwhen in
fact the original treaties had made no mention of such rights. This discoveryor, rather, inventionof 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 bootstrapped itself into a position of extraordinary judicial powerand
was, for the most part, accepted as possessing that power both by national courts and by national governments. Just as with European integration 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 affairswhich only
broke down sometime in the 1990sin 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 EUEurope resembled Machiavellis portrait of the French monarchy. The
people were reasonably secure because some institutionsparlements
in the case of France, institutions like the court and, to a lesser extent, the European Parliament, in the case of the EUdefended their
fundamental interests, often in highly paternalistic fashion. But this
was vivere sicuro at bestand in no way any form of vivere libero: depo-

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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 groupsbusiness intent on market-making and
market-maintenance, above all, a kind of oligarchy, from a Machiavellian perspectivewith 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 Europe had come closer to the people or, rather, the peoples of the continentbut the peoples response was far from uniformly enthusiastic.
Put differently: for the first time, Europe was becoming truly politicized 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

Who Is the European Prince?257

2004 when no fewer than 10 countries joined the polity. Such an enlargement 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 increased 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 integrationwhat is sometimes called Europes
finality, or finalit. 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 formor had there emerged, partly
by design and partly by accident, an entity that would easily fit Samuel
Pufendorfs 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 contested. 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 achievements are insufficiently obvious and, in particular, not so clearly universal 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

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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 depersonalized 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 convenience (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 ones hands and pockets
every day. Such lived experience might make it then legitimate to take political 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 coordination 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 othersbut this is more speculationthe 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 necessities. 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 prosperityand indeed initially
delivered a certain kind of what Machiavelli called liberality (or generosity): a flood of cheap money that seemed to make everyone better off,
certainly in many of the southern members of the Eurozone. But the retrenchment that followed had the very effect that Machiavelli described
when it came to the prince who tries to make himself popular with liber-

Who Is the European Prince?259

ality: someone eventually has to pay; and miserliness (or, put differently,
austerity) ends up calling into question the very legitimacy of the individual or collective prince. From a Machiavellian point of view, a modest miserliness would have been better in the first placeand 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 initially seen as the main actors in the unfolding drama of the Eurocrisis,
but the princess of Europes most powerful state: Angela Merkel, the
chancellor of Germany. For some she utterly failed to follow the Machiavellian rulebook in confronting a modern variant of fortuna, namely the
seemingly capricious financial markets (Mnkler 2011). Instead of facing
them down with fierce political determination and overwhelming financial force, the supposedly neo-Stoic Merkel proved a ditherer, a cunctator (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 EUs
most powerful country would indeed use all its might to keep the union
together. For others, however, hesitation and waiting were precisely a Machiavellian 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 formulated by yet other seemingly depoliticized and hence neutral institutions
like the International Monetary Fund. In this view, Germany would centralize power and permanently assure its domination over the continent
precisely by prolonging the crisis as an occasione (Beck 2013). The powerful northern European states would turn out to be what in Machiavellis
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 imagebut in the south, where
posters of Merkel as Hitler became ever more prominent, it seemed plau-

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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 theoriesconspiracy theories, critics would legitimately saywere first been formulated, suggests that taming fortuna, as represented by the financial markets, did require a decisive
stance after all. It was the prominently displayed determination of an Italian, 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 alongit 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 qualit de tempi, as opposed to
anything like indisputable economic facts.

Two Remedies
Still, one might ask: will it actually be enough? Fundamentally, the crisis
remains unsolved, even if there has been some real economic convergence, 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 EMUwill 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 principalities, so to speakhere I am alluding to The Prince againby looking very

Who Is the European Prince?261

closely at local practices (and numbers). It also might increase its powers
of punishment: as one recent proposal to address the crisis states, sovereignty ends when solvency ends. It will probably be best for the custodians 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 postwar Europe sketched earlier in this essay. But in another sense, it also
constitutes a break with them: these financial constraints have nothing directly to do with strengthening democracy and individual rights
(which, after all, was the justification of something like militant democracy 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, institutional 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 Machiavellis 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 introducing politicization from above in the name of democracy can seem like
an incoherent enterpriseexcept 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 processalthough one might well find that many EU citizens feel that so many initiatives from above have seemed more like propaganda exercises for the union, or are fed up with referenda that were
simply about popularly ratifying decisions not truly up for debate.11

262social research

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 timebut 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 contentionit 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-peoplethat 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 compromises that do not easily lend themselves to politicization and personalization. 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 direction. 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 European offices could not only make the various European collective princes 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 theory 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

Who Is the European Prince?263

the truth of what it hears. One could well imagine speakers of equal
skill advocating, lets say, on the one hand more Keynesian and on
the other hand more neoliberal programs for the EUand 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 verit effettuale della cosa could turn
out to be that one is not so much faced with a naked emperor as a figure 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 wholesale 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 partythereby rendering elections largely meaningless.
3. The following is adapted from Mller (2011, 2013).
4. I borrow this formula from the title of Christoph Mllers 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 primitivea 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 property rights in exchange for political democracy, which enabled them

264social research

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 Mller (2007).
11. At the time of writing it is simply too early for judgments on the
European Citizens Initiativea quite Machiavellian institution, in
theory.
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