Europeans lack visceral attachment to the EU. Does it matter?

In ancient Greece poetry was regulated so as to prevent excessive passions from corrupting the social order. Rhyming couplets have long since lost their ability to sway politics. And yet. On April 29th a small crowd in Aachen, a German town near the Belgian border, turned out for ein Poetry Slam in which amateur bards were asked to riff on, of all things, the European Union. A few dozen mostly grey-haired types, including Charlemagne (your columnist, not the medieval emperor who once ruled from the city), listened tactfully as a trio of youngsters rhymed one elongated compound word with another. Some light rapping was attempted. A local “TikTok political influencer”—not a profession Plato would have recognised—served as host and ensured the social order was indeed not corrupted (the risk seemed slim in retrospect). The lyrical battle having been settled amicably, the audience was treated to another Greek civic art. Streamed from down the road in Maastricht, eight politicians from Denmark, Luxembourg and beyond engaged in an old-fashioned contest of rhetoric ahead of the upcoming European elections on June 6th-9th.

To latter-day Aristotles, this half-filled theatre on a Monday night was a sign of another phenomenon with Greek roots: the emergence of a European demos, or common political culture. For centuries in Germany and beyond, civic life has been the stuff of municipalities, provinces or nation-states. Yet in Europe power is increasingly wielded by EU institutions in Brussels. Whether this centralising arrangement can be anything more than a souped-up intergovernmental body, a sort of regional UN on steroids, depends in part on whether citizens of countries across the EU viscerally feel they belong to the same polity. From such a unified demos might emerge a unified European democracy.

Euro-federalists have craved such a pan-continental social contract since the days when the EU was a coal-and-steel club. They still do. France’s Emmanuel Macron, in a rambling speech on April 25th, called for “more vigour to be given to a European demos”. Better yet, some see early signs of one. Some 446m Europeans have been through a slew of crises in recent years, and have come to fear the same things: Russian aggression, an isolationist America, rapacious Big Tech, climate change. Responses to these crises are largely devised in Brussels, which crafts most of the laws that affect EU citizens. Even if people do not realise they should care, the argument goes, they one day realise they must. Those who give up their Monday night to watch EU debates (the first of a series) are but the vanguard of an inevitable broader movement.

The demos, if it exists, should be most visible in the run-up to the bloc’s elections, which have directly seated MEPs since 1979. Instead it is notably absent. European elections have far lower turnouts than national ones. The balloting takes place simultaneously across the bloc, but it is best thought of as 27 concurrent national affairs. French voters will want to serve Mr Macron some humble pie, Polish ones will give their newish government a first report card, and so on. If EU policies are discussed, it will be almost incidental.

The debate in Maastricht showed how thin the veneer of a pan-European polity really is. On stage were the lead candidates of the political groups in parliament, who aspire to replace Ursula von der Leyen as president of the European Commission, the bloc’s powerful executive arm. Yet in practice, who wins the election is only slightly related to who gets the job. Mrs von der Leyen’s centre-right faction is far ahead in the opinion polls anyway. Whereas all Europeans can recognise their country’s president or prime minister, few would have any idea who this cadre of aspiring commission leaders were, with the possible exception of the incumbent. To dismiss some of the debaters as second-tier would be an insult to actual second-tier politicos. Most were little known within the Brussels bubble, let alone outside it. Tellingly, the debate was viewable only via internet, not on television.

What of the case that a demos is either emerging or inevitable? “Europeans these days know about each other much more because of crises,” says Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian intellectual. From Athens to Dublin, most will have felt the same shock on opening their heating bills in 2022; they worry that their children may face conscription or a boiling planet. When covid-19 infected the bloc, they waited for vaccines whose purchase was handled for all Europeans in Brussels. From such joint tribulations might emerge the “imagined community” that underpins national polities, as Benedict Anderson, a political theorist, once put it.

Putting the demo in democracy

But even those who think Europeans are destined to do more together need not conclude that this requires a powerful, union-wide tier of direct democracy. At the moment few citizens seem to care about it. The direction of travel in the past decade or so has been towards deeper EU integration, but one largely guided by national governments working together, often through the auspices of the commission (and some oversight from the relatively weak parliament). The EU in its current not-very-centralised guise is popular: recent polling suggests citizens in all 27 member states think of it positively, and want their country to remain in the club.

Federalists should be careful not of too little demos, but of too much. When common political themes emerge across the EU, they tend not to flatter Brussels. Migration, Ukraine and environmental protection are all areas in which the EU has been deeply involved—and which most voters say they are dissatisfied with. If a unified European civic culture were to emerge, it might conclude that it would rather the union adapts its institutions to its people, and not its people to its institutions.

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