Happy Europe Day!

Happy Europe Day!

I confess that I hadn't realised until now that 9 May was celebrated as Europe Day (details here) in honour of the Schuman Declaration of 1950 (here)  proposing what became the European Coal and Steel Community and eventually the European Union.

The declaration is relatively dull (text here). But since Europe Day is apparently sometimes known as Schuman Day, it's perhaps worth exploring Robert Schuman's role a little more deeply. (The Wikipedia biography of him is here.) A rather fuller account of Schuman's ideals in promoting the EU can be found in his Strasbourg 1949 speech here:

We are carrying out a great experiment, the fulfillment of the same recurrent dream that for ten centuries has revisited the peoples of Europe: creating between them an organization putting an end to war and guaranteeing an eternal peace. The Roman church of the Middle Ages failed finally in its attempts that were inspired by humane and human preoccupations. Another idea, that of a world empire constituted under the auspices of German emperors was less disinterested; it already relied on the unacceptable pretensions of a ‘Führertum’ (domination by dictatorship) whose 'charms' we have all experienced.

Audacious minds, such as Dante, Erasmus, Abbé de St-Pierre, Rousseau, Kant and Proudhon, had created in the abstract the framework for systems that were both ingenious and generous. The title of one of these systems became the synonym of all that is impractical: Utopia, itself a work of genius, written by Thomas More, the Chancellor of Henry VIII, King of England.
...
Today,  the commencement {of the Council of Europe} is characterized by a timorousness which many people will find disappointing. In this period while our States have not yet consented to renouncing any part of their sovereignty, and, when they make international decisions, they do not submit themselves willingly to each other as an engagement that they are fully observing their decisions, the debates of the Parliamentary Assembly {of the Council of Europe} can still have a moral and psychological effect. At least I hope so. They can influence the Governments and national Parliaments but they will create by themselves neither rights nor obligations.  We are still at the start of things. We would do well to bridle our impatience. If not, we are likely to make the doubters more distrustful and what is more serious, endanger not only the experiment but also the whole idea of a united Europe.

As is probably obvious from that extract, Schuman was a devout Catholic and much influenced by the social teaching of the Church. (An article on the Catholic background to the EU is here.) He mentions Dante as one of his inspirations in that Strasbourg speech and Dante's De Monarchia (putting aside its other concern of the relative ranking of Papacy and Emperor) also envisages the merits of international government:

Wherever strife is a possibility, in that place must be judgment; otherwise imperfection would exist without its perfecting agent. This could not be, for God and Nature are not wanting in necessary things. It is self-evident that between any two princes, neither of whom owes allegiance to the other, controversy may arise either by their own fault or by the fault of their subjects. For such, judgment is necessary. And inasmuch as one owing no allegiance to the other can recognize no authority in him (for an equal cannot control an equal), there must be a third prince with more ample jurisdiction, who may govern both within the circle of his right. This prince will be or will not be a Monarch. If he is, our purpose is fulfilled; if not, he will again have a coequal beyond the circle of his jurisdiction, and again a third prince will be required. And thus either the process will be carried to infinity, which is impossible, or that primal and highest judge will be reached, by whose judgments all disputes are settled mediately or immediately. And this judge will be Monarch, or Emperor. Monarchy is therefore indispensable to the world, and this truth the Philosopher saw when he said, “Things have no desire to be wrongly ordered; inasmuch as a multitude of Princedoms is wrong, let there be one Prince.”

(Chapter X, Book I. Full text here.)

Bearing in mind the coming referendum, the general lines of a powerful argument in favour of European integration under one government can be seen here. But what might be the arguments against it? It strikes me that there are two paths here. First, and in principle, you might reject the very idea of the benefits of international institutions. (This might take a strong form (denial of the benefits of any international institutionalised order) or a weak form (denial of the benefits of any form of government beyond the nation). Whatever the merits of such an approach, it is relatively difficult to reconcile with Cathiolic social teaching and I therefore put it aside, at least for now. Secondly, you might argue that, in fact, this particular institution of the EU has turned out to be a counterproductive form of institutionalisation.  Again, this might take two forms: a denial of the effectiveness of the institutions; or a denial of the more concrete forms that the general principles have been realised by in the current EU. Questions of the effectiveness of institutions are rather tricky to deal with in a blog, but the often heard criticism that the EU's regulations dampen economic development would be an example of that line of criticism. Having noted the possibility, I again put it aside for now.

This leaves us with the criticism that the EU as it has developed, has adopted concrete principles that are damaging either specifically to the UK or more generally to European countries. One example of this criticism is contained in the interview linked previously with Alan Fimister (here) :

However, its [ie the EU's] embracing of the culture of death would have appalled him. Schuman’s slightly more ambitious goals also led him to appreciate more vividly than Maritain the possible consequences of the corruption of his vision. “An anti-Christian democracy,” he said, “would be a caricature ending in anarchy or tyranny.”


Another criticism would be that the form of international government actually realised by the EU is antithetical to the principles of subsidiarity and nationhood envisaged by the Church:

The rights of nations are nothing but “‘human rights' fostered at the specific level of community life”. A nation has a “fundamental right to existence”, to “its own language and culture, through which a people expresses and promotes ... its fundamental spiritual ‘sovereignty”', to “shape its life according to its own traditions, excluding, of course, every abuse of basic human rights and in particular the oppression of minorities”, to “build its future by providing an appropriate education for the younger generation”. The international order requires a balance between particularity and universality, which all nations are called to bring about, for their primary duty is to live in a posture of peace, respect and solidarity with other nations.

[From section 157, Compendium of Social Doctrine here]

Finally, in view of the rather secularised environment we now inhabit, Schuman's reflections on Christianity and democracy make rather interesting reading:

This is where the Christian doctrine comes in. Democracy owes its existence to Christianity. It was born the day that man was called to realise in this temporary life, the dignity of each human person, in his individual liberty in the respect of the rights of each and by the practice of brotherly love to all. Never before Christ were such ideas formulated. Democracy is therefore bound to Christianity, doctrinally and chronologically. It took shape with it by stages and with periods of stumbling, sometimes at the price of errors and falling back into barbarism.
[Full piece here.]


[Image details: here]

Christian Human Rights

Samuel Moyn's book on the development of human rights in the twentieth century has been on my 'to read' list for a while now.

His thesis seems to be that modern human rights represents a very recent secular takeover (roughly 1970s onwards) of a Christian movement which arose in the 1930s as a response to the encroachment upon Christianity of totalitarian regimes. A key figure in this Christian movement was Jacques Maritain. If he's right in this historical analysis, human rights owes far more to Christianity (and in particular Catholicism) than it does to the Enlightenment. On the other hand, Moyn celebrates the 'capture' of the concept of human rights by secularism and its broadening to concerns wider than the essentially defence of subsidiarity that was key to the original Catholic position.

I still haven't read the book! (I have, however, finally bought a copy so I guess that's progress!) There's a very helpful podcast of an interview with Samuel Moyn here. There's also a series of papers on The Immanent Frame website discussing his thesis here.

My hunch would be that he's right to emphasize the role of Catholic thinkers such as Maritain in the development of modern human rights, but wrong to regard its post-Christian development with favour. Not much of a surprise there perhaps! But apart from the kneejerk reaction resulting from personal prejudices, I am for many reasons philosophically suspicious of recent developments in the understanding of human dignity, the concept which in Moyn's view (rightly, I think) underpins modern human rights, and view with favour an understanding of government which allows and indeeds encourages the subsidiarity of the little platoons of society. Anway, we'll see...

Here's a taster from Moyn's introductory essay on the book from The Immanent Frame discussion:

The essay on so-called “personalism” under scrutiny here deals heavily with Catholic publicist Jacques Maritain, certainly the most prominent philosophical defender of universal human rights in the 1940s, and a pivotal player in the political transformation of Christianity across the transwar divide. The other chapters in Christian Human Rights, when it appears, will start with the history of human dignity in constitutions: the first of this sort was Ireland’s 1937 document, not coincidentally perhaps also the first Christian Democratic constitution in history; then there was Marshal Philippe Pétain’s abortive 1944 French constitution; and only later the postwar West European constitutions. The book looks at Protestant versions of Christian human rights, notably in the work of Gerhard Ritter, the dean of German historians of the period. If Maritain was the leading theoretician of human rights then, Ritter was their preeminent historian. Finally, the book concludes with an account that offers some inking of the legacy of Christian human rights today, in European Court of Human Rights cases about the Muslim headscarf and the meaning of religious freedom.

In the 1940s, as much as in and through some of their legacies today, Christian human rights have not so much been about the inclusion of the other, but about policing the borders and boundaries at which threatening enemies loom. Human rights have a complex history, and it is—like all inheritances—worth tough criticism, not subservient adulation.