Joining the eurozone may have been a giant step for Malta but it was also another significant small step for Europe. And that is not Euronews talking. It is my reading of a major recent attempt to make sense of what the European Union, and Europe, are becoming.
The attempt is made by Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande, respectively a sociologist and a political scientist, in their recent book, Cosmopolitan Europe (Polity). Their aim is to make sense of Europe and how it actually works. Beck and Grande argue that, trying to understand the EU as a fledgling super-state, or simply as an inter-governmental network, or a cabal of elites, is useless. Not only will we not understand what is going on, we will not even be able to shape events.
Their suggestion is that we understand the EU as a "post-imperial empire" - or an empire that has a taboo on the use of force within it. Imperial empires had centres that got their way by militarily-backed coercion; the EU moves forward by peaceful, non-aggressive, win-win integration.
The authors recognise that "empire" is bound to cause difficulty. They think they need the word to indicate pluralism, in fact, not central control - a differentiated integration. That is where the eurozone, for example, comes in: With the membership of Cyprus and Malta, the members still only add up to 15 out of 27. However, the same notion of variable geometry can be conveyed by the notion of a "multi-level network", a pair of concepts that the authors do insist should be considered together.
What the book explains is the workings of a set of societies in which cultural identity has to be part of the analysis of risk and security. Of course, identity upends the way risk and security are usually approached: Identity is grassroots, mobile and shifting; risk and security are usually matters for experts focusing on stability. The book suggests a framework for understanding the ensuing complexities.
This framework has implications not just for how we understand the unfolding of events but also for how we Europeans might seek to shape them. Take educational and cultural policies. They remain, rightly, essentially a matter for national competence. Unfortunately, that delineation of responsibilities is often taken to mean that education and cultural policies are supposed to form "national citizens"; too strong a European dimension would somehow weaken identity.
However, Beck and Grande indicate how a "European" identity does not compete with a national one. Others have done so, too; but what this reader, at least, got from the book is a more urgent sense that we can no longer even produce good nationals without forming them as good Europeans.
A framework as ambitious as this is bound to have important gaps. The authors admit as much in their concluding pages. They even point out five dilemmas that "cosmopolitan Europe" has to live with and which their own framework cannot resolve.
Of course, this framework is both a description of how Europe is actually supposed to work and an outline for a research project. In this light, even some of the surprising omissions can be made up for. Economy and demography do not receive nearly enough attention. They are discussed largely in terms of immigration, with a little attention devoted to risk and the globalisation of capital. But Beck and Grande can argue that they have laid the foundations for a truly European economic sociology, not blinded by national boundaries.
True, but arguably they may not have laid down enough markers. And this is partly because they did not more thoroughly follow their own idea of focusing on "doing Europe" or "Europe in motion". Had they paid more attention to demographic movements they would have noted a historic shift of European peoples towards the coasts: With some half the European population now living near to a coast, Europe has a claim to being a maritime "empire". They would have also given more attention to European tourism as an expression of movement of peoples - travel, rather than migration - since it is both an important industry and perhaps the most significant way in which North-South intercultural dialogue (as distinct from South-North and East-West) takes place.
Such a focus, I think, would have enabled them to make more headway in exploring (though not, perhaps, resolving) some of the dilemmas of cosmopolitan Europe. Security, peace, integration and boundaries all take on a different light when marine and maritime challenges are taken into account - whether one is looking at Europe's Baltic boundary with Russia or its boundary with North Africa and the Middle East, where the ecological challenges throw the very notion of "boundaries" under question.
Unfortunately, the authors discuss the Euro-Mediterranean process in largely hackneyed terms.
But it is not the fault of their framework as such, which is an important stimulus to how Europeans can seek to understand critically what will happen to them in 2008 and beyond.
ranierfsadni@europe.com