May 1999
Europe searches for unity with multiple identities
Review by John Palmer
Teija Tiilikainen, Europe and Finland : Defining the Political Identity of Finland in Western Europe.
Ashgate Publishing Ltd 1998.Teija Tiilikainen asks a question which lies at the heart of the project of closer European integration: "How is it possible to become united and still keep a necessary level of political cultural separateness...?" It is good question for a Finn in particular to attempt to answer. For, as Tiilikainen notes in her study of the cultural roots of European identities, "Finland (is now) among the supreme advocates of European unification despite the lack of federalist elements in its political culture." A few pages later, however, the writer acknowledges that "...the European Union is still approached mainly as an inter-governmental organisation and its activities evaluated in nationalist terms. The limits of Finnish policy come out in regard to projects that cannot be legitimised by nationalist values."
This may appear like a contradiction but it is a contradiction in the political realities which have brought Finland into the heart of the European Union. It is a contradiction with which most of those who wrestle with the challenges posed by closer European Union at the end of the 20th century necessarily have to grapple. They are to be found, for example, within the Irish debate on European integration. Interestingly Ireland shares with Finland a history of being overshadowed by a 'big brother' (although perhaps Finland had two big brothers to contend with). Coming into Europe has been for the Irish a dramatic (and mostly creative) way of leaving the psychological/political shadow of that brother and, therefore, of a history of limited and distorted development.
Most of Teija Tiilikainen's book is devoted to an analysis of the historical/cultural roots of the European idea. Predictably she identifies Catholicism (but, interestingly, specifically late 19th century Catholic socialism) as the main source of the federal European ideal. From Lutheranism and Calvinism came the dialectically opposed traditions of the enlightenment and nationalism. Much of this approach has been well rehearsed by other writers and it would have been interesting if Tiilikainen had looked in a little more detail at how, historically, these traditions intersected with and were in large measure moulded by economic, social and political developments. To assert the autonomy of the cultural sphere in the history of ideas is surely not to deny some relationship with material, even economic, developments.
One more cavil. Tiilikainen does not acknowledge the relevance of leftist traditions (such as those represented by the wartime Communist resistance leader Alitiero Spinelli) to the process out of which the modern European Union arose. A generation earlier not only liberal federalists canvassed the ideas of a federal united states of Europe but so too did internationalist socialists such as Leon Trotsky. The actual emergence of the European Community (as it then was) in the 1950s would have been unimaginable without a large measures of ideological convergence between the post-war generation of European Christian Democrat and Social Democrat leaders.
Teija Tiilikainen deals in passing with the issues of closer European integration which generated a succession of new European Union treaties (Single Act, Maastricht, Amsterdam) in the past 15 years.
She is right to ask whether there is not a paradox within those, faltering moves, towards a federalising Europe. She puts it like this: "The paradox of the situation is the creation of a citizenry and a common political identity, which are assumed to contribute to the democratisation of the Union in the longer term, are in the short term being challenged by the yawning gap of a democratic deficit making itself painfully evident here and now. Democracy, once one of the constitutive forces of European integration, has suddenly turned into its fateful problem."
This is fair comment. But it does rather ignore some other developments in the integration process which put a new perspective on the 'federal' debate. One of the most important is the emergence within the national member states of powerful and increasingly influential regional identities. Look only at the impact of Scots and Welsh devolution to perceptions of the European Union in those countries, compared with 'middle England'. Ironically the UK may prove to be involved in the most radical federal experiment of any EU member state. In the Nordic countries, perhaps the Sámi people are beginning to understand something of this dynamic.
Perhaps we are indeed moving to a society where the idea of living with multiple identities will be far more the norm than is evident within the traditions of the 19th century nation state discourse. This is a theme which has recently been brilliantly developed by Paul Gillespie of the Irish Institute for European Affairs. He cites the answer of one Catalan Spanish intellectual as typical of a coming trend: "I am a European of Catalan culture holding a Spanish passport."
The best testimony to the fascinating book which Teija Tiilikainen has written is that it has whetted one's appetite for something more; something which is hinted at but not developed in her concluding chapter of Finland's mission within the European Union. She rightly insists that Finland must have a goal for Europe not just be restricted to a debate about what Europe's goal for Finland might be. This should, as she says, mean the Finns (and the other Nordics) play their strongest political cards in the future EU debates about institutional reform (and, hopefully, the making of a constitution). Examples of this include the Nordic push for a European system of governance based far more of openness and transparency. In my view it means holding on to and adapting to the European dimension the best in the Nordic traditions of social solidarity and environmental standards. The Finns may also help the other Nordics better understand that with economic and political union comes responsibilities for wider international issues of peace, stability and democracy which demand a serious European commitment for foreign, security and defence policy.
John Palmer is the director of the European Policy Centre, a Brussels based think tank. Between 1975 and 1997 he was the European Editor of The Guardian.
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