Jan Zielonka (Czarnowasy, Poland, 1955), professor at Oxford and Venice of European studies, publishes The Lost Future (Yale), and attends to La Vanguardia from his home in Tuscany, his “base”, speaking in English, although he speaks English. all the languages of the places where he has lived: Dutch, Italian, English, Polish. “I speak everything badly, including my native language,” he jokes. He clearly draws, however, a European future at the pace of WhatsApp that sometimes seems like a nightmare.
The elections to the European Parliament are in June and it seems to be chosen between liberals and illiberals rather than between left-right, etc. Is it the new European dilemma?
Well, I believe that the main political division today is between sovereignists and liberals, although there are still many other divisions in nation-states by gender, class, etc. But when it comes to European politics, I fear that the choice is between hard sovereignists and soft sovereignists, because we are prisoners of pacts in which national states have an important voice.
Doesn't that fundamentally break the European project in advance?
The entire European integration project had the objective of rescuing national states after the Second World War, and today the emphasis is on sovereignty, on the fact that they are not going to dictate to us what to do, as [Hungarian Prime Minister] Orbán exemplifies well. But you cannot be a little sovereign. Others have a more open approach and are usually identified with people like Macron. Make no mistake: Macron will be the last to renounce French sovereignty. In fact, France, as a State, has a more deeply rooted sovereign tradition even than the British.
What consequences does it have?
It means that we will not follow the European Parliament's recommendations to abolish the veto in 65 decision-making areas. We are not going to move soon from national states to European states because at the table it is not Parliament that decides, but the sovereignists. If you look at the European integration that we have had for decades, we see a proliferation of common rules, for example the fiscal pact. But we have barely had a significant transfer of powers to the European center. This is the system. And now the drama is that if European integration was supposed to put an end to the ghosts of nationalism, after seven decades of integration, Europe is experiencing the greatest nationalism since the war.
Is it Europe's fault?
No, I'm not saying it's their fault, but it's a paradox. Sovereignty, which is based on nationalism and not just on recovering the State, basically means that national identity is superior to any other, and is winning elections in Europe. I speak to you from Italy, but I lived through Brexit in Great Britain and I am of Polish nationality. I can tell it. The second paradox is that as time passes we become more interdependent.
Are these two paradoxes doomed to conflict?
The nation-state cannot perform its basic functions because its space does not correspond to the problems we face in markets, climate, pandemics, migrations, etc. Most of them are transnational or local and only some national, and the sovereignists not only want to limit the EU to a money-making machine, but also reduce regional and municipal autonomies. They go in both directions. On the other hand, technology drives interdependence. But the more interdependent we are, the more resistance there is. Now, masks can be produced in Spain and not depend on China, but reduce financial transactions on the Internet to the national level...
And yet sovereigntists are growing everywhere.
Brexit was a cold shower for people like [Italian Prime Minister] Meloni. They realized the price of departure. So they changed tactics dramatically: they don't want to abandon the Union, they want to take control of the Union and make it their way.
And how is it possible to make an EU to the taste of 27 sovereignists?
Exactly. The notion of a sovereign international is like that of an illiberal democracy: it simply does not exist, it is a contradiction in terms. And we see it all the time. Meloni and Orbán may be ideologically on the same line and try to reach an agreement on migration, but they want the opposite. Meloni wants countries to take care of migrants arriving on Italian shores and Orbán will say no way. Kaczynski in Poland can try to create a Budapest-Warsaw entente, but regarding Russia and Ukraine they are completely on the opposite side.
There are those who attribute the problem to being 27, so different, especially after the expansion to the East.
It's nonsense. In fact the expansions have revitalized the project time and time again. It was the case with the south, with Spain, Portugal, Greece. And it was the case of the expansion towards the East. Even if you look at Ukraine and how many millions of Ukrainians we have on our borders, you can say that they are already inside. The interesting thing about European decision-making is that after Brexit we don't have any other countries trying to leave, but a lot of money is paid to Orbán to stay. The decision to give him millions of euros to vote in favor of starting negotiations with Ukraine shows how crazy the system is.
We are governed by 'WhatsApp governments' of short and fast, immediate messages. There is a lack of governments with a long-term vision, he defends in his book.
Democracy is about slowing things down, not speeding them up. But if you don't, forget it. The European Parliament demanded records of Brussels' negotiations with big pharmaceutical companies in the pandemic and Von der Leyen said that he did it all on WhatsApp and deleted it. Can you blame her? If it was delayed two weeks, how many would die? Switzerland holds referendums on whether you can cross the street, but state regulators and banks organized the merger of UBS and Credit Suisse in one weekend and billions changed hands because they knew they would lose billions if they didn't. No referendum or anything. And I can continue.
In the 'WhatsApp world', is democracy at risk?
Democracy is dominated by partisan politics, where leaders basically make decisions on the fly, and as we see in Britain, for example, when there is this investigation into the pandemic, it is seen to be run by idiots. And I'm not going to talk about your government or mine. We have not yet done this investigation carefully enough, but the Brit is transparent and shows it. Now, should they enter into parliamentary deliberation when thousands of people are dying? This is the world we live in.
It is criticized that there is a democratic deficit in the EU.
Does the only democratic legitimacy come from the nation-state? This is increasingly problematic, but we have not found any alternative, because at the table those 27 states would have to commit collective suicide and transform themselves into a local government. And if Madrid is not very happy with the Basques or the Catalans, will they do it here?
And what to do to get out of the current impasse?
As Haas and others said already in the 1950s, integration has its dimension: there is pressure to integrate a field and since the fields are interconnected, it goes further and further. The pressure leads to abandoning the veto of the European Federation, but the system does not allow it because everyone is worried about losing power. And it's not just that we can't go up, we can't go down either because if the United Kingdom, powerful, with enormous human capital and interests throughout the world, suffers like hell after Brexit with a sovereign promise to return power to Westminster which has been ridiculous, problems in Northern Ireland or Scotland, inability to stop migrations in the Channel...
We are stagnant, and also condemned to stagnation?
We are stuck. But Capek said that if you can't go up and you can't go down, you go to one side, which means that you simply move away from the dilemma between national states and European states and give power between different actors and levels. The EU, in a way, is one of different states. Who was the biggest beneficiary of the Internet revolution? The networks. His compatriot, Castells, wrote it 30 years ago.
