Neither a ‘super-government’ nor populism: the Christian path to a free and strong continent

On the sidelines of the conference held a few days ago in Ventotene on the role of Catholics in the process of European integration – organised by the Centesimus Annus Foundation in collaboration with the Archdiocese of Gaeta, the ‘Cardinal De Vio’ Study Centre, the Hanns Seidel Stiftung and ANCI Lazio – I would like to offer a brief reflection, inspired by a statement by John Paul II. “Europe, be yourself!” So said Pope Wojtyla in Santiago de Compostela in 1982, and Benedict XVI in 2005 echoed those words as a “solemn act of Europeanism”. He reminded us that the unity of the continent is not merely a political or economic practice: it is, to use the words of Stanislaw Grygiel, “a gift offered to those who make a pilgrimage towards the truth”. This is where I would like to begin, in the spirit of Laborem exercens: it is work, together with cultural reflection on its meaning, that tells us who we are. From the Benedictine ora et labora sprang the archetypes of the worker—who is not a servant—the entrepreneur—who is not a plunderer—and the saint—who is not a hero.

What, then, does European identity consist of? An answer comes from an author who is distant from the Christian tradition, yet mindful of its contribution. As Dario Antiseri points out, following Karl Popper, Europe’s strength lies in not having a single idea or a single faith: its history, scarred by errors and massacres, has been capable of critical reasoning, pluralism and tolerance – that is, of self-correction. Its roots lie in Greek culture, the Roman civitas and the Christian message which, through the principle ‘Caesar is not Lord’, desacralised power and reminded us that the state cannot be everything, giving rise to intermediate bodies – competing institutions that safeguard people’s freedom. Against this tradition have risen those who deny the person, whose ‘triple dispensation’, to use Revel’s phrase, justified the Lager and the Gulag.

The Catholics who built a united Europe drew upon this legacy, inspired by peace, the dignity of the person, subsidiarity, solidarity, private property and equality before the law. Following in the footsteps of Mounier, Maritain and Sturzo – who held that federations arise from moral and material interests rather than from a piece of paper – it was De Gasperi, Adenauer and Schuman, sons of borderlands, who sought to transform borders, once battlefields, into places of encounter. In Cologne in 1946, Adenauer spoke of a community of peoples, each making its own irreplaceable contribution: ‘I am German, but I have always been European’. At the Constituent Assembly, Einaudi set out the choice between the ‘sword of Satan’ and the ‘sword of God’, between domination and voluntary cooperation. On 9 May 1950, Schuman set out the method: concrete achievements and practical solidarity, starting with coal and steel, to make war between France and Germany materially impossible. Finally, in 1953, De Gasperi saw in the European Defence Community the seed of a political and economic community, a guarantee of peace, reaffirming that Atlanticist and pro-European policies go hand in hand. Schuman said of him that he had “the soul of an apostle, not of a sectarian”. Today, that project is undergoing a profound crisis, caught between populism, post-liberalism, nationalism and lobbying interests, often cloaked in noble ecological, pacifist and humanitarian causes. There is a lack of reflection on the very nature of the European experiment, which a certain Christian political culture—in the tradition of Sturz and Degasperi—interprets as lying between the monist and polyarchic poles of power distribution. This is where Benedict XVI’s ‘institutional path of charity’ comes in: ‘free and strong’ men, imperfect but capable of improvement, who build institutions capable of demonstrating the ‘fruitfulness of goodness’.

To reduce the democratic deficit, my friend and colleague Maurizio Serio and I proposed some time ago – and in these very columns – a Parliament divided into two chambers: a political chamber, elected in national constituencies, and a technical chamber dealing with economic and social matters, representing transnational interest groups registered in a specific register, intended to replace the Economic and Social Council. This would avoid a European ‘super-government’ with vast and undefined remit, following in the footsteps of Sturzo, De Gasperi and the social market economy of Eucken, Röpke, Müller-Armack and Einaudi. For peace, like freedom, demands daily commitment: we must defuse the siren calls of populism and nationalism, by harnessing the institutions’ capacity for innovation, as Nobel laureates Acemoglu and Robinson remind us, and, in the words of Pope Francis, ‘set processes in motion rather than occupy spaces’.