(Re)birth of European power
Europe is born! Well, reborn, or perhaps reincarnated would be more appropriate to say, January 1. The New Europe, the Europe of Lisbon, the Europe of consensus, or referenda, is born. After an extraordinary, or perhaps quite practicable, Irish volte face, the European plebiscite is a fact. What is new? And what is old?
Herman Van Rompuy is the name of the self-effacing, nearly invisible Flemish bureaucrat (‘…my personal views are irrelevant, my role is to find consensus…’) whole fill the role as the first President of the European Council. Ground-breaking and epoch-making.
As La Repubblica lamented in its leader on 20 November, just after the closed doors meeting leading to Van Rompuy nomination along side Lady Catherine Ashton as High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Henry Kissinger is still without a telephone number for Europe.
The process and rationale behind Van Rompuy’s nomination are at first glance as little remarkable as his uncommon non-imposture. Yet the closed-door cocktail and handshake that led to the opening of a new era in European politics has a number uncanny of elements:
The ‘kingmakers’, Germany and France clearly sought a weak Eu leader who lead competently while still leaving maneuvering room for their national geopolitical and economic interests. In the same moment that the positions of presidency and foreign policy leadership is determined, the ‘real’ economic and (national) foreign policy issues are de facto played out elsewhere.
Thus these same representatives of the main axes of European power could maneuver toward more intensively critical posts in the Commission designate, such as Internal Market (Michel Barnier), Energy (Günther Oettinger) and Industry (Antonio Tajani).
At the Council table, Van Rompuy will take his place in a never-before seen power constellation of the new postmodern Europe. In this Europe, the power embedded in leader positions is of a special sort.
It is nothing new that a legally appointed leader is not particularly interesting, lacking charisma, etc. What is however interesting about the new European Man-who-wasn’t-there is that he will play an essential place-holding position. In the age of politics-that-weren’t-there, the man-who-wasn’t-there is particular salient.
It is not simply that era of European politics is somehow past, annihilated by something other, better or worse, driven away in the dust a value-less present. That would be just another version of is high modern nostalgia for a kind of centralized and concentrated sovereign power that probably never existed. Rather, there is a kind of necessity about the new structure of power installing itself in Europe. In Europe today, power is expressed as a kind of stand-in for power, as a place-holder for the power that has authentic traction in the EU, finance, agriculture, and industry, etc.
Yet this core structure of European commerce would not be possible without the parallel power of the Council and the Commission. Van Rompuy is both a distraction and an indispensable vector toward something else, something more, some which in absolute terms spells more power, more presence, more meaning, more legitimacy, and perhaps something less in formal terms.
This paradox has much to teach us about the evolution o the notion of legitimacy in our time. And perhaps Legitimacy is not a pillar standing on a solid foundation, bricks and mortar all the way down: stability, legitimacy, reference.
Legitimacy is a performance, and a dramatic and serious one at that. Van Rompuy is a man to follow. But most importantly it will be interesting and important to take not of where he is not going to do, to what he says by not saying it, what conspicuously will not, cannot, does not do.
