to be published in: Katenhusen, Ines; Lamping, Wolfram: Demokratien in Europa. Euopäische Integration, Institutionenwandel und die Zukunft des demokratischen Verfassungsstaates. Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 2002 (Mai)

Claus Offe

Curiously enough, it is not easy to find social scientists who seem to know - and are ready to explain - what a "society" is. Yet it seems possible to put together a number of constituent notions that most authors, more or less implicitly, refer to when using the term. Among those notions, I submit, are the following.

(1) A society consists of individual actors, the number of which is relatively large (relative to members of families, business firms, or localities), yet relatively small relative to the global human population, or "mankind".

(2) These actors are related to each other through a greater density of interaction and functional interdependency than they are related to outsiders, or members of other societies.

(3) The internal density or cohesion of societies is generated by institutionalized rules which impose constraints upon the individually rational pursuit of gain (of power or wealth) or the avoidance of costs. Not everything is permitted, and living in a society means sacrificing some kind of (short term, individual) advantage.

(4) These constraining rules have the quality of trans-individual durability. They (are expected??) to last and stay valid for longer than the individuals who make up a society; some of them are typically still around when, after about three generations, the entire "personnel" of a society has been exchanged.

(5) Members of societies are reflexively aware of these rules as "social facts", and they are also aware of their durability (or rootedness in some historical tradition and the culture that is characteristic of the society); they are further aware of the contingency ("non-naturalness", and potential changeability) as well as distinctiveness (relative to other societies) of these rules.

(6) Given the inherent antagonism between these rules and individual self-interest and the temptations resulting from this antagonism, these rules (unlike pure coordination rules) are not self-executing through consensus, spontaneous sympathy, or solidarity. On the contrary, relationships of trust, cooperation, and the observance of traditional patterns depend upon the legal status und backing that the respective institutions enjoy. In modern, least of all "post-modern" societies, society-wide rules are not self-supporting. Therefore, the making, enforcement, and adjudication of these rules presuppose an apparatus of political rule and control. Thus, beyond very low levels of either size (as in tribes) or cohesion (as in empires), societies depend upon states and their making, adjudication and enforcement of binding rules. Societies (as opposed to tribes) have always extended beyond the number of people whom any of their members is likely to ever enter into direct interaction with. Yet in spite of the fact that most members of "our" society are bound to remain strangers to each of us forever, we still find relationships of trust, common attachment, toleration, understanding, and solidarity, as well as a sense of obligations to our "strange" fellow citizens. All of this is due to the recognition that "all of us" belong to some shared political community, the extent and content of which is defined by constituted state power. Even the ideally autonomous public sphere is a network of ideas and communications that is both guaranteed by and focused upon the constituted political authority of a state and its way of dealing with what we, due to this shared focus, think of as "our" common problems.

(7) "Princes" and other performers of these state functions have an intrinsic and private self-interest in providing and monopolizing the public good of rule.

(8) In order to be able to do so and to impose the rules (as well as to appropriate the benefits of rule to the rulers themselves), they have to make concessions to the ruled in order to secure their compliance/cooperation. This is what, from Hegel to Giddens, has been referred to as the "dialectics of control". If rulers want to impose duties upon society, they can do so only by granting rights to society, thereby binding/limiting themselves in the exercise of rule. If ruling elites want to extract support, taxes, and military resources, they must grant something in return, such as the effective protection of life, liberty, and property, or the credible representation of the society's "national" identity. The perfect equilibrium of rule from above and consent from below is reached when, as in all contractarian theories, the political regime can be thought of (or can present itself) as freely chosen by the enlightened will of the ruled. Military, legal, and social security, as well as concessions in terms of representative and constitutional government comprise the kinds of "services" and concessions that states must deliver to society in order to "earn" and preserve the privileges of rule and their capacity to impose duties such as, most importantly, the duty to pay taxes, to put one's life at the disposition of military, and the duty to comply with the curricular regime of public education. Through the use of their military, fiscal and educational powers, states shape societies to the same extent that they must concede the right to being shaped in their practice of governance by society.

(9) Not only do societies depend upon states and their capacity for making and enforcing rules. In providing that service, states endow societies with rights and thereby engage in market making and other forms of "society making". Societies and states cohere in the relationship of circular mutual determination within the framework of nationhood.

(10) There are three types of cases in which the precarious equilibrium of political regime and society can break down. For all of these cases, events in recent history can be invoked as illustrations. First, the regime fails to extract the societal resources of support and economic performance that it depends upon for its survival; this is the case of post-Communist and other post-authoritarian regime breakdown where the balance between the regimes’ claims on society and the concessions it grants to society is fatally upset, the result being the disintegration of the regime and the constitution of a new regime in place of the old. Second, a political regime fails to maintain the unity and integrity of society because "deep" (ethnic, religious, linguistic, or historical) divisions lead to the separation of parts of its territory and constituent population through secession; this amounts to an inward revision of the regime’s scope. Third, the congruence of regime and society is upset by an outward revision of the regime's scope, or the fusion of two or more regimes into a new and unified one. The latter case has occurred historically through military conquest and the imposition of foreign rule through occupation. In the more recent past, it has occurred through the fusion of regimes and the creation of a multi-layered pattern of governance consisting of national and supra-national regimes. The most interesting case in which such regime enlargement is currently taking place is (apart from German unification) the EU and European integration. The question that I want to address is this: What are the causes, consequences, and driving motives of the latter case of a disarticulation between societies and political regimes.

The constitutional regimes of European nation states, of which the citizenry as a whole (the "people") is thought of as the collective author, governs the scope and limits of the state's governance and at the same time creates and defines the society to which this governance applies. The problem of European political integration is that no such self-constitution of the citizenry through an act of constitution-making exists. While the German Constitution (the Grundgesetz) ascribes, in its preamble, to the "German people" the authorship of the document, nobody has ever claimed that the Treaties (of Rome, Maastricht, and Amsterdam) which quasi-constitutionalize EU governance originate from some "European people". In these contracts, societies, not a society with its specific historical entity and distinctiveness, are subsumed under a supranational regime that applies to all of them with "direct effects". This regime is rightly seen to disempower national political regimes and to render their autonomy increasingly nominal -- often to the point, as is perceived within EU 15 member states as well as the countries which are currently candidates for Eastern Enlargement, of exercising a mild form of foreign rule. At the same time, "Brussels" lacks the constitutional means and resources (as well as the mandate) to homogenize and "Europeanize" the constituent societies of the EU in the same way as political elites were able to unify national societies in the process of 19th century nation building. Short of a "constitution-building coup", "Brussels" lacks the capacities which have played a critical role in the formation of the societies of nation states, namely the capacity to impose military conscription and action, to impose educational standards and curricular powers, and to directly extract taxes from (what only then would be) a "European people".

While it is true that both economic transaction and the public sphere of communication are increasingly transnational ("globalized") in nature, each participant in these interactions is still enabled to participate in them by institutions and policies (ranging from corporate law to national educational systems) which are specific to and enforced by national state authorities. Even the most "global" players pick their place of location or incorporation according to the most favorable conditions as provided by the respective host state and its (for example tax) regime. This process has often and rightly been described as following a trajectory of "negative" integration. This pattern of negative - or commercial, financial, and monetary - integration of markets is designed to increase the options for economic "exit" and to debase the governing capacity of national governments and their supposedly protectionist inclinations. But the process has not been complemented by some supra-national "positive" integration, or the restoration of governing capacity at the European level. In fact, the residual elements of governing capacity that remain intact at the level of nation states are used by them to obstruct, in the name of the "national interest" and with the need of being (re)elected by a national constituency in view, the transfer of governance from the national to the European level. Thus negative integration both decimates national policy making capacity and induces national governments to cling to whatever remains of it, rather than sacrificing it for the sake of "positive" integration.

In fact, the prospects for uniting a "European" society, i. e. the supranational equivalent and extension of national societies, are exceedingly discouraging. People belonging to a society will typically communicate in one (or a small number of) idiom(s), and they will presuppose their mutual familiarity with esthetic and other forms of symbolic expression, ranging from styles and pieces of music to religious and national holidays. None of this is present – or could be created in any foreseeable future – at the European level. Within national societies, people will be shaped, both cognitively and motivationally, by a common cultural tradition which is reflexively known to them as being more or less different from the tradition of other societies and which is transmitted through schools, media, religious associations, and cultural institutions (such as museums). The most extensive and wide-ranging form in which social integration and cohesion has been developed is the framework of the nation state which, from the early 19th century on, has cultivated this distinctive type of societal integration and thus covered sizes of populations which never belonged, nor thought of themselves as belonging, to one and the same "society" before. Nation states "make" societies and build a demos by imposing upon some pre-existing patchwork of heterogeneous regional cultures and political units (such as kingdoms and principalities) clearly defined borders, as well as, within those borders, a relatively homogeneous military, fiscal, educational, economic, religious, and judicial regime and institutional order.

This process of state-initiated nation-building (or "society-building") does not have an equivalent at the European level. It has been studied in the case of France and this country's 19th century dynamic of transforming "peasants into Frenchmen" (E. Weber). It has also been proclaimed as a (eventually successful) project that inspired the leaders of Italian resorgimento: "After we now have made Italy, let us proceed to make Italians", meaning: people who feel and think of themselves as being tied to (and at the same time being the collective authors of) the encompassing political community of all other Italians, as defined by the scope of the Italian national state. Similarly, President Lincoln's Gettysburg address was part of an equally successful attempt to unite the population of a territorial state (that was torn by civil war) into a "people", thereby creating the social and political unity and cohesion of a demos and its recognition of itself. These historical examples are instances of how representative political elites and their constitutive and unifying policies have actually helped to accomplish the project of "e pluribus unum". But there are neither the incentives nor the resources available to accomplish a parallel process at the European level. (Note that virtually all types of collective and associative action, from the Red Cross to academic societies, from trade unions to business interest groups, adopt an organizational domain that coincides with the territory of a state or its sub-territories. The principle that international communication is international also applies to organizations such as the UN, or, for that matter, the EU, the members of which are member states, the governments, corporate actors, and citizens of which can then enter – by virtue of being constituted within the framework of a state – into transnational relations and activities, including the contractual formation of supranational institutions.)

The core problem of creating both a European governing capacity capable of overruling national regimes and of thereby creating a European society along the lines of national demoi were formed is not with?? the cooperation-averse incentive structure of national governments nor with inter-national diversities. The core problem is the absence of a potentially charismatic idea that could drive attempts to do so. For there is one categorical dis-analogy between the historical process of nation building and the hypothetical future process of building a European regime-cum-demos. Historically, nation states have come into being along two alternative trajectories, the fusion of small units into a bigger ones through national unification, or the splintering off of peripheries of empires (including colonial empires) in a process of national liberation and independence through separation. Unity and liberty are the two driving forces and guiding values on the two alternative pathways to national statehood. Apart from the case of military conquest accomplished by "outside" forces, all territorial reorganization (or redefinition of borders) that was initiated from within has been driven by the idea of "liberation" – be it liberation from the rule of oppressive or exploitative foreign (e. g., colonial) powers or liberation from princely particularism, arbitrariness, unjust oppression, and belligerent passions. Thus we can see that the idea of "unification" is originally not an alternative to liberation, but a sub-case of it, notwithstanding the fact that the appeal to "unity" can be used as a powerful device to constrain the liberty of individuals as well as of sub-collectivities. At the same time, "unity" can be an instrumental value that serves the maintenance of liberty in defense against some perceived external threat or enemy.

The core problem of European integration and political unity is not so much the extent of ethnic, historical, cultural, linguistic, and economic diversities and cleavages, in spite of the vast discrepancies in the size of member states and their level of economic development, but the total absence of an appeal of liberation in the service of which unity must be pursued. "Europe" does – perhaps! – yield a surplus value in terms of prosperity, but no such surplus value in terms of liberty. European states and their societies which have already adopted, recently or otherwise, a liberal democratic form of regime (and only such states are conceivable candidates for EU membership!) are, as it were, "saturated" concerning their quest for liberty; at the very least, "Europe", whatever else its finalité may be deemed to consist of in terms of prosperity and power, does not stand for an ambition of further liberation. (That is true, at least, if we pass over the calculus of various regionalist movements that "Europe" will weaken the nation state and hence assist them in the acquisition of sub-state "autonomy".) Europe does not hold the promise of liberation, certainly not the liberation from the fear of European international war (which has been made a practical impossibility by other, for example "Atlantic", means of supranational security policy) nor the fear of a loss of freedom (a motivation that informed much of the West European integration that occurred under Cold War conditions). To be sure, European integration along the lines envisaged by the Maastricht and Amsterdam treaties holds the great instrumental promise of reaping economies of scale, of global competitive advantage, of the pooling of civilian as well as military resources, etc.; these benefits, however, can also be supplied within the framework of tight intergovernmental arrangements, beginning with common markets. But the promise of – or demand for – any kind of "liberation" is not among the benefits a politically integrated Europe has to offer. Yet this promise is the only one which has historically driven (again, excepting international war, conquest, occupation, and peace treaties as happened in Central Eastern Europe in the wake of the two World Wars) the reorganization of regimes.

Many classical authors (such as Machiavelli and Rousseau) believed that states, in order to engender a strong spirit of solidarity and patriotic commitment among their citizenry, should be small, modeled after the Renaissance city republics. Others have argued that, in order to accumulate the critical mass of economic and military resources needed to prevail over rival states and to allow for a favorable size of internal markets, states, on the contrary, should be large in terms of their population and territory, and hence their overall resources, in spite of the internal diversity of populations that this may entail. There is no compelling calculus by which a compromise of these conflicting logics of political cohesion vs. economic diversification and military strength could possibly be devised. But there is an almost universal rule of state-building in the 20th century. All large states, or the largest states of their region or continent – be they large in terms of territory or in terms of population – are federated states, combining, as it were, the two virtues of smallness and largeness in an ingenious synthesis. This rule applies to North America (US, Canada), South America (Argentina, Brazil), Australia, Europe (Germany) and Asia (Russia, India). It does most conspicuously (and perhaps ominously) not apply to the PR of China, the largest of all.

What is Europe?

Europe is not a state and hence not a society. The building of European statehood and, by implication, the emergence of a "European society" is not a goal that societies within Europe could credibly and plausibly pursue in the name of some notion of "liberation" (as opposed to market liberalization which, however, does not presuppose a common statehood.) But there is certainly a type of European society. These national societies share, to a lesser or greater extent, numerous affinities, similarities, and common features. These common features are most clearly visible in regional clusters of national societies and their historical experience and cultural (including religious) profiles. Such partly overlapping clusters include the Scandinavian countries, the Baltic states, the Central European countries, the Mediterranean countries, the German speaking countries, the "Orthodox" countries, and so on. But there are a number of features which are virtually shared by all of them, such as their being liberal democratic by regime type, or their being both enabled and constrained by their (anticipated) membership in the supranational regime of the European Union. But it is exactly because European societies are so similar already that their fusion into a "unitary" socio-political arrangement of a "European" society is unlikely to occur, as little is to be gained, as well as much to be lost, from such a fusion. It is simply a non sequitur to deduce from the similarity of European societies the desirability and/or probability of their eventually becoming "one" society. Let me briefly review an (incomplete list of) seven of those similarities.

(1) The circular interaction of "national" society shaping its state, with this state in turn shaping the institutional setup of its society, is a peculiar European invention which was, to be sure, transferred and copied to other parts of the world (such as the USA) in characteristically modified versions. Societies, as I have argued, are arrangements of state-sponsored civility, with the state in turn being shaped and reshaped by representative collective actors. In contrast, state-building in most of the former colonies was accomplished, as far as the territorial shape of the new states as well as their regime form are concerned, not by local populations, but either by (former) colonial powers or autocratic/military elites, if not warlords or big owners of land. But in Europe too, the supranational institutions that exist are not made by, cannot be ascribed to, and hence do not lead to the self-recognition of a "European people", but are contracted by the governments of member states. As a consequence, the EU populations in total see themselves as affected by, but not the joint authors of, EU policies and programs.

(2) Prior to modern nation states, there emerged another peculiar form of territorial regime in Europe, the city. Cities often formed the nucleus of a future state of which many of them became, or strove to become, capital cities (in political terms) or dominant centers of regions (in economic terms). The city (Stadt) with its spatial coexistence and condensation of production and commerce, residence and consumption, associative life and political self-government, religious, esthetic, educational, and intellectual institutions is a uniquely European evolutionary accomplishment. Partly due to the dense population of Europe and the European history of outward (mostly trans-Atlantic) rather than internal migration, these cities tend to be medium sized, with none of the world's 20 biggest cities being located in Europe (Istanbul being the telling exception to this rule). The city was similar to the state in that it was the result of the desires of city-dwellers for liberty (from princely rule) and unity (of its citizenry); it differed from states in its greater openness to inward migration, as well as in its institutionalized relations with other cities and the countryside. It was also similar to the state in that it provided the seedbed of diversity (of trades, of commodities, of ethnic and religious background of its citizens, of opportunities to enter into contractual relations). Only states and cities have "citizens", whereas tribes have members and empires have subjects and estates, as well as centers and peripheries as constituent social entities.

(3) Throughout modern European history, stateness was precarious and vulnerable. This is so because states have been threatened by other states which were intent upon the project of empire building through the submission or occupation of other states. Such imperialist ambitions were executed, in a sequence that is both chronological and geographically clockwise, by the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the French Empire, the imperialist ambitions of Nazi Germany, and the Soviet empire. Partly in addition and partly alternatively, the imperialist temptations of European states were directed at territories overseas, as in the cases of Denmark, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, and (first of all) Portugal. The nature of European states is that they are unsettled, precarious, threatened or threatening states in their relation with other states. This world of threatened and threatening states has come to an end, as far as Western Europe is concerned, with the end of World War II, the first steps towards international cooperation and the subsequently completed process of decolonization; as far as Central and Eastern Europe is concerned, with the end of the Cold War, the Iron Curtain, and the Soviet Union.

(4) Since that time, however, stateness is threatened, as it were, from the opposite direction in many places. The dangerous dynamic is no longer the expansion of states at the expense of other states, but the implosion of states which are challenged by internal ethno-territorial cleavages. The most horrifying example of the dynamic of such cleavages is the process of disintegration of Yugoslavia. More benign forms of analogous processes have occurred, or are presently under way, in France, Belgium, Spain, Great Britain, Denmark, and arguably Italy. The state-seeking ethnic and sub-nationalist groups that are now emerging are not, as their predecessors in the 19th century, splitting off from empires, but from (multi-national) states. Also, an increasingly prominent cleavage occurs between national populations, on the one hand, and non-territorial (migrant) minorities of "extracommunitari" within member states.

(5) European societies are specific in that they share a long history of international wars and attempts, frequently failed attempts, to neutralize the potential for international warfare. These wars, hot as well as "cold" ones, were, as far as the history of the 20th century is concerned, driven by ideologies which we have come to speak of as "totalitarian" belief systems and practices of domination. The crimes of these totalitarian regimes as well as their repressive, aggressive, and genocidal conduct of rule were rooted in ideas, it must be said, that were exclusively European in origin. But it can also be said that the standards by which they are to be judged and recognized as horrendous aberrations are also European by background. These standards derive from the intellectual legacies of Greek and Roman antiquity, Christianity, the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment with its offshoots of both liberal and socialist ideas. The European history of ideas can be described as the coincidence in space of the worst crimes and the most elaborate and explicit standards of condemnation of those crimes. Throughout its history, Europe has supplied itself with objects of its self-critical scrutiny. Due to this perplexing coincidence of opposites, the self-critical appreciation of the wrongs that have been committed by Europeans in their own history is something specifically European. This inclination for self-revision and self-doubt has no parallel, as far as I can see, in any of the non-European civilization, e. g. that of the United States or Japan.

(6) The territorial and demographic situation of Europe did not, at the time of its breakthrough to economic and political modernization in the 19th century, allow for the benefit of nearby "empty space" into which relative surplus populations could be "exported". To be sure, this was partly compensated for by populations threatened by immiseration transferring to the Americas. But the strategy of "going West" to a "new frontier" was not available within Europe itself. Hence in Europe, at an earlier point and to a larger extent than elsewhere, institutional arrangements of social and political conflict resolution came to be adopted. As explosive social conflict could not be dealt with through "exit" or expulsion, provisions were invented (partly for the sake of preparing populations for international war, according to the "welfare-warfare state" pattern) for the provision of "voice", or the sharing of political power and, through it, economic resources. These arrangements of internal conflict resolution were premised upon the formation of strong intermediate and corporatist collective actors and forms of representation, the installation of which was in turn facilitated by the remnants of feudalism and a strong state apparatus. (Crouch 1999) Reconciliation through compromise and gradual inclusion of social categories was the prevailing European pattern, while elsewhere the maintenance of hierarchies of domination or unmediated class, ethnic, and religious conflict and disparity remained in place, leading to the pattern of "deeply divided societies". European societies are privileged by the absence of two types of populations that make for deep divides in "new world" settler societies, namely an indigenous population and the descendants of former slaves. But it remains to be seen how well "old world" societies will be able to integrate two other types of populations, migrant labor and refugees (in addition to sub-national minorities). Note, however, that the European capacity for reconciliation and institutionalized conflict resolution is not just a matter of industrial relations, codetermination, and social security policies. It is also evident in the abolition of capital punishment and the virtual absence of urban ghettoization, as well as an effective enforcement of human and social citizenship rights.

(7) To conclude this list of admittedly rather daring generalizations about European societies, let us look at the distribution of states in space. Inbetween the two largest states, Russia and Germany, there is a strip of (mostly, with the exception of Poland) comparatively small countries, ranging from Finland to Cyprus, whose recent history is shaped by the threatening shadow or actual presence of imperial rule. These "central" European states are now in the process of "returning" to Europe, whereas "eastern" Europe (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus) are currently, and are likely to remain for the foreseeable future, outside of the discourse of European identity and institutional belonging. With the exception of some still unsettled territorial issues of state-building in former Yugoslavia (and arguably the Basque Country and Northern Ireland), all states have now consolidated external borders. None of them, excepting to an extent the regional cases just mentioned, can rightfully be described as a "deeply divided society". If new borders are drawn, these will be "inward" redefinitions accomplished through peaceful means (of granting of autonomy rights or "velvet divorce", not civil war, as in the case of the Czech and Slovak Republics), not "outward" redefinition through military aggression and imperial ambition. The possibility of both international war and intra-national civil war is effectively warded off by a set of effective supranational regimes, such as the Council of Europe, OSCE, NATO, and the emerging framework of the EU's Common Foreign, Defense and Security Policy.

Passports of EU countries identify their bearers first as EU citizens and second as citizens of a member country. Yet few (except for the residents of Luxemburg, 28 per cent of whom are non-nationals) would spontaneously respond to the question as to which political community they are citizens of in terms of "European Union" citizenship. The predominant sense of belonging on the part of Europeans (except, perhaps, for members of the European elite who are asked this question in places like Hong Kong) is attached to countries (if not regions), not the EU. (Kohli 2000) The awareness of both similarities and interdependencies within the framework of the EU's supranational institutions does not erode, but if anything strengthens, national frames of thought, action, and the pursuit of interest and identity. This is entirely unsurprising. Why?

Supposing what I said before about the enormous achievement where Europeans live today in countries between which war (and within which civil war) is a virtual impossibility, supposing that this is not only true, but also known to be true by those to whom it applies, that still does not make them "Europeans". To the contrary, and as far as the former Comecon countries are concerned, the pride and pleasure people take in their national statehood that is, for the first time in at least two generations, not threatened by imperial ambitions by great European powers to the West or to the East, adds a special emphasis to their adherence to nation state principles. For sacrificing part of or even abandoning these principles in favor of some European identity, those memories, fears, and the sense of distrust inherited from the past are much too strong and too widely shared, and very understandably so. Also, people in EU countries (again with the exception of English-speaking elites) cannot communicate with most other Europeans. Pattern of religious affiliation and national cultures differ and are mutually perceived as constituting significant differences of collective identity, not as minor diversities within a cultural heritage that Europeans basically own in common. As there is no European idiom, there is no European public sphere that would have to be constituted by Europe-wide media and audiences, not just remote elite discourses and negotiations.

Furthermore, the national publics are strongly aware of political differences between their countries: different constitutions, parties, forms of government and welfare state regimes. They are further aware of the vast differences of size (the sizes of the biggest and the smallest, Germany and Luxemburg, are in a ratio of 204 : 1) and territorial location between countries (proximity vs. remoteness), as well as of the substantial differences in wealth and productivity, in spite of the fact that all current and prospective member states are industrial societies with the institutions of liberal democracy in place. Most importantly, citizens of European countries form beliefs, accurate ones or otherwise, about how the interested behavior of other European actors will affect "our" or "my" well-being and prospects. In this calculus, six concerns stand out. Taken together, they suggest the perception of the game of the European political economy as one of multidimensional rivalry clouded in deep uncertainties. Let us briefly remind ourselves of the nature of these concerns and fears.

(1) The concern with inward migration of labor (from current as well as prospective member states) with all its ramifications in terms of loss of jobs, decline of wages in the rich countries, ethnic conflict, and political backlash.

(2) The outward flow of investment to EU countries with lower costs of employment, and hence the loss of employment and prosperity on a national scale.

(3) The fiscal redistribution within the EU (and, in particular, a larger EU), consisting not only in a net transfer of funds from the rich to the less prosperous countries and regions, but also in the relative deprivation that the previous net receivers (say, of the Mediterranean countries) will suffer as a consequence of the access of new and even poorer and therefore even more "deserving" claimants from new member countries in the east and south-east of Europe.

(4) The competition in markets for goods and services which is likely to (and indeed is intended to) drive productivity laggards in their respective industries out of business, thereby adding to the persistently high level of unemployment in most current member countries.

(5) The disadvantages imposed upon newly acceding countries by their being forced to adopt the entire acquis communeautaire as a precondition of their access; the disadvantages of current member countries suffered in terms of the loss of protection as a consequence of ECJ rulings; and the disadvantages that "minorities" of one or more countries fear to result from majority decisions within the Council of Ministers which are contrary to their majoritarian national preferences – all of which gives rise to the fear of "Europe" becoming a new form of foreign rule.

(6) Finally, the fear that the intensification of cross-national interaction on all of these levels will seriously curtail the remaining capacity for national policy making, and in particular so in policy areas of social protection (which is nominally – in the name of a characteristically one-sided reading of the "subsidiarity" principle – left to the national governments to design and adjust, but which may be factually largely paralyzed by the imperatives of competitiveness).

Taken together, these concerns have a corrosive impact precisely because it is so difficult to predict to what extent they will become reality and who is most likely to be negatively affected by them. These concerns are widely seen to have the potential to give rise to anti-European political forces, leading to an electoral backlash (particularly in countries providing for referenda in EU questions), and blocking if not obstructing the process of the further political integration of Europe. Pro-European enthusiasm is vanishing everywhere, on current as well as in prospective member countries. Moreover, Eurobarometer findings on support for European integration provide a far too optimistic measure, as indicated by the actual voting behavior of the very same constituencies’ majorities, of which many still pay lip service to the standards of European political correctness in surveys, but behave differently?? in the voting booth (where concrete steps such as admitting new countries or adoption of the Euro are at issue).

These six concerns apply to different current and prospective member countries to different extents. They are also controversial in terms of realism vs. paranoia, as well as long term vs. short term effects. Even if it were generally agreed (again, both by political elites and national publics) that in the long run the game will turn out to be a strong positive-sum game, the usual "valley of transition" scenario applies, with the two obvious questions of how wide the valley will turn out to be, and how deep?

The most interesting feature of these concerns is that they do not add up to a well-organized conflict that would divide current and prospective member countries along some clear-cut cleavage line. On the contrary, nobody is currently able to predict with any measure of certainty or authority who is going to win and who to lose, how much and for how long. It is not a game of small against large, rich against relatively backward, central vs. peripheral, old vs. new member countries. The conflict of interest is amorphous and poorly structured. Nor is it clear that the parties to the conflict are actually countries, as opposed to social classes, consumers vs. producers, regions, sectors of industry, age groups, or in fact time slices. Not is the metric clear by which one would have to balance gains against losses. There are?? unanswerable questions such as how much gain from international trade five years from now is worth how much increase in regional unemployment now, or how much polarization in political conflict and the subsequent potential for government instability for the next two years. This lack of structure is exactly the problem, for well-structured conflicts can be embedded in an institutional bargaining framework in which demands, threats and promises can be exchanged and the losers can force the winners to compensate them by sharing part of their gains. This is how societies cohere, and this is why Europe is not a "society": the authoritatively imposed institutional setting is lacking that would be able to transform the diffuse precariousness of a "state of nature" into clear-cut social conflict and the rules for compromise.

The conflicts that we experience – and are likely to experience even more as eastern expansion takes its course – are not those among players in a game which can be adjudicated by neutral and recognized judges, assisted by the testimony of trustworthy experts. Instead, the scenery bears more resemblance to a mine field rather than a courtroom or, for that matter, a government.

Yet there is the opposite risk as well -- the largely economic risk of individual countries "missing" European integration or staying behind. The logic is simple and compelling: The more countries joining the EMU, the less the remaining countries, for reasons of their economic prosperity, can afford not to join. A country must be uniquely rich in natural resources (such as Norway and its oil) to afford the outsider status, but even then it will find it prudent to follow the regime of EU standards out of its own long term considerations (as Norway in fact does) in order not to foreclose the option of joining at a later point. At any rate, the definitive decision not to join is seen by all parties involved as a relative loss in prosperity for the country that decides to do so. Which does not imply that there may not be non-economic reasons for a negative decision on joining, but these are largely, as the campaign preceding the Danish referendum of 2000 demonstrated, of a sinister and xenophobic nature and imply the deliberate forgoing of economic gain for the sake of asserting an exclusionary version of nationhood and the national interest. Confronted with the choice between two options, both of which involve substantial risks, European member state constituencies, both within current member countries and countries in the process of acceding, show declining enthusiasm (to put it mildly) and partly majoritarian opposition to their respective country's EU membership. To make things worse, countries which are in the process of becoming members and try to negotiate a relatively safe and painless mode of access are in a structurally weak bargaining position, since they cannot credibly threaten to actually stay out for good, as this would arguably hurt themselves more than others. For substantial parts of the populations of countries in Europe, and to an extent also for their political elites, Europe is a matter of deep uncertainty, fear, and distrust.

Is the European Union, then, experiencing?? a relapse into the state of nature? It is most certainly not, as Europe's great asset after the end of the Cold War which is owing to the supranational security structures in place is the effective ban on inter-state violence that Europeans enjoy at the turn of the millennium. (Military violence, that is, and only if we optimistically disregard for the moment the still unfinished task of completing the civilization of the European system of states in the Balkans. Which is not meant to belittle ongoing problems concerning the micro-violence of terrorism, on the one hand, and xenophobic aggressiveness on the other.) But, arguably, Europe is in the somewhat oxymoronic situation of being in a "peaceful state of nature". If that were true, the task ahead is the building of a European regime that eventually might facilitate the rise of something that could seriously be called a " European society", whose rationale would be?? analogous to the logic according to which the uniquely European process of organizing civility through state building has taken place historically.

To be sure, and for the reasons conditioning a strong and legitimate attachment to nation states mentioned above, this cannot possibly take place in the form of one European state emerging from the fusion of all existing European states. Part of the historical legacy of all European states is a strong sense of the precariousness and vulnerability of their statehood – something that was, by comparison, entirely absent when the component proto-states of what became the United States decided to merge. At the time of the federation, none of the states had ever waged war against any of the other states! European states are "too old", burdened with too much history and endowed with their own specific accomplishments achieved in the course of that history, to be plausible candidates for some outright fusion. (The only place where a fusion of states has taken place, namely the country that I come from, has not experienced this merger as an unqualified success story, the celebratory pronouncements on the 10th anniversary of German unification in October 2000 notwithstanding.) Nowhere would European societies be prepared to sacrifice their statehood as the institutional form by which they organize – and by which they have defended, if often unsuccessfully so – their civility. (The only country whose political elites have occasionally gestured in this direction, namely Germany, has done so for the transparent goal of appeasing the concerns of its neighbors; which often enough has not actually put these concerns to rest, but exacerbated them by raising suspicions as to why a state should do such "unnatural" things for reasons other than those of deceiving its neighbors.) Europeans have a lot in common, including a history that inspired them with some very rational reluctance to give up the stateness on which the coherence of their societies critically depends.

Yet still the uncertain outcomes of the European integration of markets and countries do call for some kind of organizing capacity that is able to impose rules (voluntarily and rationally adopted rules, that is!) upon the partial European state of nature. Such rules are the means for alleviating fear, generating certainties, and engendering mutual trust. Again, the task of organizing civility is put on the agenda. This organizing capacity must be capable of not just making markets (through "negative integration") but of beginning to build the rudimentary foundations of a European society (through "positive integration"). This organizing capacity cannot be a state, as states are in place already and statehood is sacrosanct to the societies shaped by these states. National statehood is simply not seen by citizens as something they want to be "liberated" from, but as something they depend upon for the sake of their protection and liberty. Hence this organizing capacity must respect and indeed strengthen national statehood. It must respect it in leaving a substantial scope for national policy making capacity in the hands of national (and even subnational and regional) governments, which are and will remain accountable to and elected by national constituencies. It must strengthen and positively empower national governments so that these policy making capacities are not rendered nominal, as in much of the field of social security, through the facts of competition, interdependence, and interpenetration.

What states have historically done to the citizens of their societies, namely civilize and regularize their common life so that they can live in a "society", a constitutionalized European governing capacity must do to the multitude of member countries. The task is state building, but one level up, and without the template of the nation state. We are now living through the fascinating and unprecedented period when Europe applies to itself the logic of the circular creation of state and society that shaped the modern history of European countries. To reiterate, the agency which will eventually accomplish a regime of "organized civility" governing the entire European space will not itself be a state, but a "union". It will have to leave existing states in place. But it will also have to conform to two criteria which all European states have now come to establish (accept??) as the standards of acceptable political rule, legitimacy and effectiveness.

By "legitimacy" we mean a fair and impartial way in which societies create their political authority (which, as a legitimate one, enjoys the compliance and support of members), and by "effectiveness" we mean the capacity of political authorities to actually achieve their goals and impose their rules. There is little controversy today that the EU in its current institutional state is lacking both. This is the rational core of the skeptical attitudes that are displayed by citizens, media, and voters. It can be summarized in the question: "As Europe ("Brussels") evidently does not owe much of value to us, what do we owe to Europe?"

The holders of union powers must be legitimate. This is a simple thing that is hard to accomplish. Through die European institutions of governance, Europeans must be seen, and must be able to see themselves, as governing themselves. This is to say, no group of some European avant-garde countries (presumably consisting of countries which pride themselves as being more advanced and Europe-minded than others) should be seen as governing other European countries in devising a system of governance that is good for all. There is a disparity between "founding members" and "late comers" anyway, and that should not be exacerbated by some core countries assuming pioneering roles and setting rules for the rest. Nor is some "neutral" committee of benevolent experts, judges or Commissioners good enough to decree the rules and institutions of European governance. In either of these two cases, the resulting regime would be insufficiently good due to the paternalist mode by which it is brought into being, simply because opposition to such paternalism provides ample reasons to defect or to disobey what actually would have to function as a European constitution. Only if the regime can be robustly presented as a regime of self-governance and "self-binding" (rather than "other-binding") does it have a chance of winning the loyalty of all of its citizens. Furthermore, the regime would have to be compatible with the major ideas and principles that are enshrined in existing constitutions of European states (Abromeit 1998), most notably the democratic principle that whoever wields governmental powers must be accountable to those over whom they are wielded. There is currently no convergent view, to the best of my knowledge, as to how this task of European constitution-making could be accomplished. The tendency in this situation would be to use gag rules, i.e. to start with the little that is relatively uncontroversial and leave the rest to later debates, foreclosing its discussion for the moment.

However, this "wait-and-see" approach collides with rather urgent requirements of effectiveness. In order to overcome the market-driven European state of nature and create Europe-wide institutions of bargaining and the settlement of conflict, the European governing capacity that is to be created on top of nation states must be a highly potent one, for it must basically be able to accomplish two things. First, it must have at its disposal credible devices to reduce both the depth and the width of the valley of transition. Only if European citizens have strong reason to believe that the pains that the Common Market inflicts upon them, if only (and hopefully) for a limited period of time, will be equitably compensated for and distributed fairly, will they become prepared to surrender some of their (increasingly nominal) reserved domains of national policy making. That is to say, Europe must become more than the framework of military security of states; it must become the source and active promoter of social and economic security of its citizens. And such security must come as a right attached to European citizenship, not as a set of discretionary programs tabled (or withdrawn) by the Commission, as is the case with structural funds programs.

Secondly, and as an obvious consequence of the first, the holders of European governing capacity need, in order to honor European citizenship rights, the authority to tax and to extract the resources that are needed to finance programs of meaningful burden-sharing and compensation. To be sure, it is the undebatable virtue of markets to posit challenges for adjustment, learning, and innovation. But it is equally undebatable that some challenges are too demanding to be met, without substantial assistance, by those (individuals, countries, sectors, regions, occupations, generations) who are affected by them, while still other challenges resulting from the Commission and ECJ's quest for negative integration (e.g. concerning the way in which countries run their pension system, electronic media, or alcohol regime) can be rejected as inappropriate and illegitimate. The question is obvious: Which challenges belong to which of these three categories? Which pains can we be expected to live with, which call for pain relief to be administered, and which are simply unacceptable in the first place? We can begin to speak of the reality of a European society only after bargaining tables are set up by European authorities which allow for the answering of these and related questions.

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