The creation of the European Union refers back to the process of ensuring peace after centuries of turmoil and barbarous wars. Trade instead of war was the fundamental motivation of its founders. However, the establishment of institutions failed to transform the military fight adequately into political antagonism. According to Chantal Mouffe, every kind of fight needs fronts or contrary parties that put their opinion at stake in order to negotiate visions, and for absorbing people’s emotions politically. Democracy as the evolutionary winning model deals with the distinction of government and opposition. The difference guarantees that not voted parties can be elected in a forthcoming procedure – enabling that possibly disappointed decisions can be made in a different way; it is just a matter of time. And it is a modern tragedy that ideas being ahead of the times often have to wait until outworn opinions and habits die out before social progress unfolds.
How does the European Union try to compensate the lack of agonistic pluralism? Even though the European Union has institutionalized a parliament and even though it describes itself as democratic, it lacks the constitutive distinction between government and opposition. Given the divergence between democratic semantics and structure, there is no consistent attribution of political subject, politicians and voting. Nobody wins or loses a European election. Instead, the outcome fixes the relative weights of the biggest political blocks, which range from a mushy centre-right to a squishy centre-left, with a woolly Liberal coalition in the middle. Due to this voting paradox, there is no real political fight, hence no European mass media, and no European political public. The parliament rather consists of a corporatist assembly, in which big parties rule by consensus and horse-trading, finally resulting in a lack of political trust.
The building of trust is crucial because it serves as a mechanism to reduce social complexity. In trusting, one engages in acting as if there were only certain possibilities in the future: a common future which does not emerge directly from the past but which contains something new. Trying to compensate the absence of political trust and participation, the European Union remains dependent on other fields of action, namely on alleged security fields as spare mechanism. The function of applying security semantics is based on its tendency to politicize every aspect of life in order to absorb emotions, for instance in form of financial, military, social or even ecological security – ironically following a dangerous path.
References
Dog Eat Dog 1994: No fronts. Track 3 from the album All Boro Kings.
Mouffe, Chantal 2005: On the political. London: New York: Routledge.
Luhmann, Niklas 1979: Trust and Power. 2 works. Chichester [u.a.]: Wiley.
King, Michael & Thornhill, Chris 2006: Luhmann on law and politics: critical appraisals and applications. Oxford; Portland Or. : Hart.
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