European Exceptionalism
Mr. Trichet describes his modest proposal as “bold.” That is hardly adequate to convey how radical and troubling it really is. A brief consideration of the provenance of this appalling idea of government “by exception” will more fully illuminate its character and potential consequences. Whether or not Mr. Trichet is aware of it (and I hope he’s not), the notion of rule by exception is hardly new. In fact, it was central to the explicitly and unapologetically authoritarian political theory of Carl Schmitt. Notorious for his personal and intellectual support of German fascism, Schmitt famously asserted, “Sovereign is he who decides the exception” to positive law and normative constraint on the exercise of state power. Ultimately, rule by exception becomes unexceptional and the authoritarianism emerges from the ruins of democracy and the rule of law. Mr. Trichet’s “federation by exception” confers this authority on the EU—and even foresees its institutional entrenchment. This proposal is a not only an attack on the member states’ sovereignty (at least those within the Eurozone and albeit unequally), it is also profoundly anti-democratic. And what motivates this bureaucratic rolling back of the democratic nation state? It is all for the preservation of dysfunctional monetary union and the single market agenda. Mr. Trichet correctly criticizes EU-Eurozone institutions and governance as gravely dysfunctional, yet refuses to confront the monetary union’s fundamental structural flaws that made the Eurozone crisis both inevitable and intractable by eliminating both monetary and fiscal policy as effective adjustment mechanisms.
Leaving aside economic criticisms of the Euro regime, Mr. Trichet apparently fails to grasp the deeply disturbing political ramifications of “federation by exception.” Mr. Trichet’s proposal exemplifies the rigid commitment of the EU political class to a neo-liberal finance-centered vision of the EU and its imposition on recalcitrant member states. I do not think that Mr. Trichet seeks to establish the EU as a nascent authoritarian regime, but at the same time his proposal is symptomatic of an elite more than willing to subordinate or circumvent democratic politics whenever it poses a threat, or even an obstacle, to the market liberalism and economic financialization the EU has come to embody. The fig leaf of democratic accountability provided by the European Parliament in the Trichet proposal would hardly suffice to legitimate the reallocation of sovereign power to Brussels, or redress the democratic deficit of an emergent technocratic Eurocracy. Nor will it render economic and social impoverishment accompanying austerian fiscal policies more palatable to the increasingly resentful and dispirited citizens of the Eurozone’s member states.
Mr. Trichet’s “federation by exception” threatens a denigration of democratic rule that even Carl Schmitt wouldn’t like. This points to an even more disturbing implication of EU governance by exception. Schmitt envisioned the authoritarian state as embodying, and enforcing, the unity of the nation as a political community. Rather than pre-sage a pan-European democratic super-state, Mr. Trichet’s “federation by exception” likely would amplify the centrifugal forces threatening the EU by casting anti-EU sentiments and interests in national, and in the end anti-liberal nationalistic, terms. Given the current absence of a coherent and effective political left, right-wing nationalism is now the path of least resistance for political mobilization against the EU status quo. By valuing a common currency and market over democracy, he may have stumbled on a way to hasten the fracturing of the EU and resurrect, on the nationalist right, the specter of a pathological and atavistic form of politics that European integration was supposed to have eradicated.