JCMS Annual Review Lecture: Imagining Europe: The Cultural Foundations of EU Governance

On 18 March 2015, more than ten thousand people from all corners of Europe crowded Frankfurt’s Römerberg Square, chanting and waving handmade banners. Although the demonstration was peaceful, earlier in the day multiple police cars had been set on fire, and fights had broken out between activists and police. The occasion? The official inauguration of the long delayed, hideously expensive new European Central Bank building. Representatives of the Spanish political party Podemos and Greece’s Syriza joined the anti-austerity protests, calling for an end, as one sign put it, to ‘ECB Monetary Fascism’. Protesters were quoted as not just protesting against the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Union’s (EU) specific policies, however, but also asserting the need for just and fair treatment for their larger European community. One 30-year-old protester said: ‘We can’t always make cuts at poor people’s expense and call them lazy Greeks, but we need to stand by in solidarity with them’. For those of us who have studied the European Union for decades, the visibility of the protests, the violence, the protester’s explicit talk of European solidarity and the intense scrutiny of the actors being pilloried signals a startling change in the politics of the EU. In the past, EU governance unfolded largely insulated from mass politics, marked by elite discussion rather than popular protests. Today, a profound transformation is at work. The opening of EU politics to public scrutiny and awareness is necessary for the EU to be a mature and legitimate political entity, but the supporting social foundation for EU governance will also need to change for this transformation to hold. Scholars have long probed into how material and functional elements matter for the evolution of the EU, be they formal institutions, national preferences or economic forces. But we have spent much less time examining the cultural underpinnings of the EU’s governance. A literature on identity and socialization has moved forward our understanding of individual conceptions of political identity. But we need to look to how broader cultural dynamics have shaped the EU’s basic construction as legitimate political authority in order to fully understand the challenges the EU faces today.