Trans-national Politics and Global Responsibility

The only substantive political questions are now at a level beyond the nation state. It is only in a trans-national arena that real decisions will become apparent. The European Union, and the search for more satisfactory ways to make it work, must represent a foremost hope in finding new ways to formulate and address these questions.

There are at least two reasons why politics must now be trans-national. Firstly, increased interrelations between peoples mean that any national event can easily have a global audience and rapid global impacts. Europe inherits the role as a crucible of this new interconnectedness, both from the proximity of difference between its internal neighbours and from its colonial past.

Secondly, the global movement of capital and the increasing power of corporations imply that decisions of fundamental importance for the evolution of our societies occur well beyond national politics. These have gone hand in hand with the exponential increase of the gap between global rich and poor.

The implication of these two facts is that real choices which concern more than merely administrative matters of governance, political choices between ways of living, choices that truly aim to make history, can only be taken in a trans-national context. Politics must, as Habermas has said, catch up with global markets. But politics must also begin to take a role in shaping global markets, in fostering global justice and creating a truly trans-national democratic practice.

Democratic disengagement is the bigger problem lying behind the much touted 'democratic deficit'. People no longer see the possibility in formal politics. The new trans-nationalism of political issues suggests that this problem can only be addressed simultaneously at the national and international level. It is the huge failure of the present European Union to have not successfully articulated a sense of global responsibility and possibility.

Lucien Febvre, in a famous course at the Collége de France in 1945, rhetorically asked whether a Europe united as a new super-state would truly be able to halt the wars, factionalisms, and miseries of all sort that burden humanity, and would instead not merely replicate – at the global level – the tragic actions that marked the first part of the twentieth century. Europe must not think of creating a new “global power” capable of standing up to the rising Asian countries or the USA. Instead, Europe should open itself to the possibility of generating a new political constellation. In doing this it need only be guided by its founding mission: to be a motor of peace and reconciliation. The challenge must not be to replace 'the glory of the nation' with 'the glory of Europe', but to attempt the creation of a novel political system that makes of tolerance for difference, respect for justice and equality, and a multilateral approach its prime characteristics.

Political alternatives can be glimpsed through the cracked glass of Europe. In bringing them into focus, the role of cultural actors in Europe cannot be underestimated. Febvre's doubts about a new European political entity were motivated by his post-war pessimism about the maturity of the European peoples: about whether they were capable for the task of generating peaceful global solutions. It is the inalienable responsibility of cultural practitioners to ensure the European peoples do live up to this, that they have both the vision and the ambition to demand these solutions and create them. It is a responsibility that has only been taken up patchily in contemporary Europe, and yet one that can no longer be escaped.

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