The idea of Network Europe has resurfaced in public debate. You had explained the Network Europe idea in several interviews. But would it not perhaps be useful if at this juncture you gave a little more background about the idea before more of those responsible for public policy and debate turn their backs completely away from it?
The reading I would recommend to anyone who wishes to grasp the idea in the best possible manner is the book called The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler, professor of entrepreneurial legal studies at Harvard, (Yale University Press, 2006).
The book is published under the provisions of the Creative Commons Non-Commercial Sharealike Licence which allows the online version of the book to be downloaded free.
The title of the book plainly alludes to the work that is generally acknowledged to have laid the foundations of economics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, professor of philosophy at Edinburgh University at the time of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Authoritative reviewers of Benkler's book have, however, deemed its status to be basic in relation to the so-called Communitarian political tendency as The Idea of Justice by John Rawls is in relation to the neo-liberal political tendency.
As you can see from the date of publication of Benkler's book, I was canvassing the idea of Network Europe well before the Wealth of Networks appeared in print or online, but I think it is the best tool now available to help liberate the political imagination from the blinkers of conventional thinking. It may also save the idea of Network Europe from being shoved aside as "utopian" at this moment by some or at any other time by others.
Could you sum up very briefly the main components of Benkler's argument?
The first and basic part of it is economic. Benkler shows that there is a way in which productivity can continue to increase beyond the "limits to growth" that the Club of Rome and the Greens have been warning us about. It is through development of the information and culture-production sectors of the economy.
There is a corollary to the substitution of this "infinite potentiality" economic theory for that of "limited growth". It is that an appropriately structured "knowledge economy" will at the same time allow individuals to participate in many more diversely organised productive enterprises, both market-based and non market-based, than was possible in the pre-cyberspace economy, structured upon the machine-industrial matrix.
The second part considers the political arrangements that can enhance democracy in the situation in which the networked information economy does not limit practical possibilities because of productivity worries.
In crude terms Benkler holds that our mass-media dominated environment allows only a caricature of authentic democracy. He states that "today's society is a thoroughly unattractive system for democratic communication, where money talks and everybody who wants to speak must either raise vast sums of money or rely on a large endowment".
Benkler is here referring to the aspect of democracy that is not citizen participation in formal governance, but rather the extent to which the members of a society participate in making sense of their lives.
At present, he points out, "a small group of actors, focused on maintaining and shaping consumer demand, has tremendous power over the definition of meaning in society - what symbols are used and what they signify. Television sitcoms, Barbie Dolls and movies define the basic set of symbols with which most of us can work to understand our lives and our society."
On the contrary, Benkler argues in favour of "a pervasively networked environment, meaning one that can be produced collaboratively, by anyone, for anyone". Public political discourse will not remain reduced to soundbites. "This will result in a more complicated and variegated, perhaps less coherent story about how we should live together as constituents of society. But it will be a picture that we made... not one given to us pre-packaged and massively advertised as way cool."
How does this apply to Network Europe?
In the first place the beauty of the existing organisation of the European Union is that it is more truthfully described as a multi-level distributed network rather than in the conventional terms used to describe standard political entities such as federal states or nation states with more or less autonomous regions, etc.
Moreover, the changes proposed in the Constitution/Lisbon Treaty almost always tend to remove or reduce those institutional arrangements that were distinctive and original in Europe precisely because they reflected its network character, such as the unique role of the Commission and its exclusive law-initiating powers.
The attempts to convert these "strange" traits into more conventionally "democratic" mechanisms like transferring more legislative power to Parliament are in fact dismantling the European network mode of operation.
Fidelity to the Network Europe idea means resisting these threats to erode the uniqueness of the European model.
Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.