The Failed Europeanization of the Masses

A politically integrated Europe, a continent finally united in spite of its diversity and of the internecine wars of the past, was – and continues to be – an elitist project. Unless this point is clearly understood and constantly kept in mind, the development of European integration – from the founding treaties in the 1950s to the Irish No to the Lisbon Treaty in 2008, only three years after the French and Dutch rejections of the Constitutional Treaty – remains largely unintelligible. Of course all key ideas of modern history, from popular sovereignty to the ideas of nation, nation state, and citizenship, were initially advanced by intellectual and political elites – were ‘invented’, in the terminology used by Edmund Morgan in his classic study of the rise of popular sovereignty in England and America. Thus, James Madison's ‘invention’ of an American People distinct from, and superior to, the peoples of the thirteen former colonies turned out to be a decisive move in the struggle to replace the Articles of Confederation by a strong federal constitution. To quote Morgan: ‘As the English House of Commons in the 1640s had invented a sovereign people to overcome a sovereign king, Madison was inventing a sovereign American people to overcome the sovereign states. It was not one of those inventions for which the world was unprepared, but an invention crying out for realization’ (1988: 267). Such timely conceptual inventions prove their vitality by their ability to mobilize the people and push them to political action.