The Community weakens the feeling that people may have of their own citizenship. Ordinary citizens are less and less sure of who makes decisions. They have no easy means to know if a specific decision was made in Brussels or in the capital of their country of origin. Even though the European Community tends to grant the same social and economic rights to all the citizens of the Member States, there is no such thing as a European citizen. There are only French, German or Italian citizens.

(Aron 1974: 638)

Introduction

Over the last three decades, French political doctrine has remained remarkably unchanged in its approach to the evolving European integration process. The institutional reforms undertaken since Raymond Aron wrote these lines have not in the least muted French critiques of the elitism of European construction, a ‘Europe for the peoples, without the peoples’ (Gauchet 2005a: 492). Aron had criticized the lack of parliamentary control over the European Community, given the purely advisory role of the Assembly in Strasbourg. While the European institutions may since then have acquired more formal legitimacy, not least with the Parliament’s direct election since 1979, radical criticism of the European model has, if anything, been on the rise among contemporary French political thinkers. In many respects, their striking disillusionment with the EU (p.106) mirrors the progressive disenchantment of French public opinion with Europe. The proportion of Frenchmen who view Europe as ‘a good thing’ dropped by 17 per cent between 1991 and 2004. In spring 2004, one year before the failed referendum on the European Constitution, the EU evoked ‘a positive image’ for only 44 per cent (Cautrès2005). Of course this does not necessarily imply outright opposition to the principle itself of integration between the nations of Europe. In its present form, however, the European Union is subject to severe and contradictory criticism, both among large segments of the French public and in the intellectual sphere.

A vast majority of those who have recently expressed an opinion on the European process are, or were, professors in political philosophy either in one of the Parisian universities, at Sciences‐Po or in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. This confirms the conclusions drawn by Tony Judt in his study of French intellectuals between 1944 and 1956. At the end of Past Imperfect, Judt underlines that the decline of the great public intellectuals – whose renown and income largely derived from their journalistic and book‐writing activities – coincides with the resurrection of the university professors. Whereas the former were free from any constraints whatsoever, the latter ‘may publish and appear in a variety of media, but their credibility (and initial status) remain firmly grounded in an academic discipline, its rule and its material’ (Judt 1992: 296). Consequently, ‘these figures enter the intellectual arena as experts, even if they are then free to express an opinion on matters well beyond their professional range, most commonly in the pages of Commentaire or Le Débat’ (Judt 1992: 296). This shift has in turn contributed to grounding French intellectual debates about Europe more firmly in the discipline of political theory.

An analysis of the various positions adopted on the European issue has the merit of qualifying some commonly held ideas about France’s recent intellectual history. Most observers, particularly British and American scholars, agree on two specific features of the French intellectual scene, namely a return to ‘liberalism’ since the 1980s (Lilla 1994; Wolin 2004) and a rejection of revolutionary utopianism along with a decline of the figure of the ‘intellectuel engagé’ (Drake 2002; Jennings 1993). The French theoretical debates on Europe reveal a more complex picture. In this chapter I show that the approach to political liberalism adopted by so‐called ‘liberal’ French intellectuals is much more ambivalent than is commonly thought, and that the figure of the ‘radical intellectual’, inspired by the emancipatory ideal, is still present.

Since the hard‐won ratification of the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992, the European issue has emerged as a bone of contention among French political thinkers. The French debate over the EU’s democratic legitimacy has revolved around the connection between rights and boundaries, and around the appropriate locus of democracy. As for the meaning attached to ‘rights’ in democratic politics, Europe is conceived either as the symptom of ‘a religion of law’, which (p.107) supposedly undermines democracy, or conversely blamed for its incapacity to effectively implement the human rights it endlessly claims to represent. To be sure, the different perceptions of Europe, seen either as an ‘undefined’ and ‘open’ space or an ‘exclusive’ entity centred on its own particularities, are in total contradiction. The title of this chapter, ‘Borderline Europe’,¹ refers to an object that lends itself to such starkly contrasting representations.

My main argument in this chapter is that the current French intellectual controversy over Europe is embedded in an even more salient debate on the very nature of democracy, and more specifically over the relationship between human rights and politics (Lacroix 2008). This controversy has spanned the last three decades. I proceed in three steps. First, after providing some basic historical context on the period before 1992, I analyse the debates that followed the ‘turning point’ of the Maastricht Treaty. In this first section I focus on representations of the relationship between human rights and politics. I then identify two main paradigms that structure current intellectual reflections on Europe: the ‘neo‐Tocquevillian’ paradigm, discussed in the second section of this chapter, and the ‘liberal‐revolutionary’ paradigm, discussed in the third section.

Europe, the nation, and the nature of democracy

Thinking about Europe is not everybody’s favourite pastime (Díez Medrano 2003: 22). This also holds for contemporary intellectuals, and is especially true in France, where most authors turned their attention to this topic only recently (in particular after the referenda of 1992 and 2005). This is quite a paradox given that, as shown in the introduction to this volume, French thinkers significantly contributed in the past to reflection on European political identity. Between 1919 and 1939, two‐thirds of the writings published on the unification of Europe were written in French (Chabot 2005). After the Second World War, a number of highly considered French intellectuals participated directly in the European construct, but they did so as French civil servants or as advisors to the European Communities’ founding fathers. An example is the philosopher Alexandre Kojève, whose Hegel seminar of the 1930s had influenced Sartre, Aron, Bataille, and Lacan. In 1945 he joined the French Ministry of Economics, where he was involved in designing the ECSC and later the launch of GATT. Another French intellectual, François Duchêne, whose academic career developed in Britain, was Jean Monnet’s advisor in the ECSC from 1952 to 1955, before chairing the Action Committee of the United States of Europe. Nevertheless, in the intellectual sphere in the narrow sense of the term, the great figures of French political thought hardly ever commented on (p.108) European integration in the period between the Treaty of Rome in 1957 and the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992. Three explanations can be advanced for this indifference towards Europe among French intellectuals in the post‐war period.

First, after the defeat in France in 1940, some of the former French ‘Europeists’ of the 1920/30s – such as Gaston Riou, Francis Delaisi, Georges Suarez, Drieu la Rochelle – had drifted into ‘collaborationism’, thinking that Hitler could achieve the unity of Europe (Frank 2002: 318). Consequently, many French intellectuals in the post‐war period were suspicious of an idea of Europe that seemed contaminated by collaboration with the Nazis.

Second, at the time of the East–West conflict and of decolonization, many intellectuals of the left identified Europe with the scourge of colonial oppression, or considered it a simple vassal of American interests. Jean Paul Sartre’s example is telling. In his 1961 preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre goes as far as to say of Europe that ‘she’s done for’ (Sartre 1978: 8). Europe, to Sartre’s mind, was ‘at death’s door’ as she was facing the ‘strip‐tease’ of her humanism, which had been nothing but an ideology of lies, ‘a perfect justification for pillage’ (Sartre 1978: 21). This is also the reason the sociologist Edgar Morin gives for having long been an ‘anti‐European’. To Morin, who had participated in the resistance as a communist, Europe in the wake of the war was ‘a word that lied’ (Morin 1987: 9). He perceived Europe as the home of imperialism and domination rather than democracy and liberty.

In addition to these explanations, which may also apply to other European countries, the indifference of French intellectuals towards European integration has to do with a more fundamental feature of the French political imaginary: the incapacity to accept that there might be politics beyond the nation‐state. This ‘mimetic obsession’ (Nicolaïdis 2005: 502) boils down to the notion that politics could only happen at the European level if there were a European federal state. It is the origin of an almost systematic underestimation of the truly political importance of the European Community’s economic and legal advances. In this regard, the example of Raymond Aron, and his well‐known reservations about European integration, is revealing. According to Pierre Kende, Aron’s sceptical position was probably only ‘the expression of [his] disappointment, the consequence of [his] immense emotional investment’ (Kende 2001). This interpretation is confirmed by Aron’s profession of faith in a speech delivered to German students in 1952: ‘the European Community cannot be a short‐lived source of enthusiasm, it is the completion of a long process which gives meaning to life or sets an objective for a whole generation’ (Aron, quoted in Kende 2001). Aron’s initial affective commitment may explain why the history of European institutions, which during Aron’s life took a mainly economic turn, could only lead to ‘furthering his scepticism’. It eluded what he regarded as essential, i.e. the ‘political and military dimension’ (Kende 2001: 214).

More precisely, sociological considerations seem to account for Aron’s sceptical stance on the European issue. As early as 1962, he wrote in Peace and War (p.109) that the creation of a Common Market would not lead, either by juridical or historical necessity, to an authentic federation (see English translation, Aron 1966: 746). In his view, the idea that economic integration would give birth to a European federation ‘by the tap of a magic wand’ was based either on the assumption that economics controls and encompasses politics, or the assumption that the fall of tariff barriers would, in and of itself, cause the fall of political and military ones. For Aron, these ‘two suppositions [were] false’ (Aron 1966: 747). The hypothesis of a ‘clandestine federalism’ or a ‘federalism without tears’ disregarded something essential, namely ‘the community power animated by a community of desire, the state and the nation, the human collectivity, conscious of its uniqueness and determined to assert it and to affirm it in face of other collectivities’ (Aron 1966: 747). In other words, the ‘system of obligations’ established by European institutions was not sufficient to create, among the French, the Germans, and the Italians, a shared sense that they were ‘autonomous as Europeans and no longer as members of historical nations’ (Aron 1966: 748).

A few years later, Aron enriched his initial sociological analysis and adopted a normative perspective to address the necessary conditions for the emergence of multinational citizenship. In an article originally published in English (Aron 1974), Aron doubted the potential advent of a form of citizenship that would extend beyond the borders of the nation‐state. In his view, the full exercise of citizenship implied the existence of an institution endowed with all the necessary means to assert its authority over all the actors concerned. As a result, he argued, the potential extension of such a political authority would only lead to a transfer, not a transformation, of citizenship. There were thus only two logical alternatives: the emergence of a new federal state in Europe or the persistence of some basic form of functional cooperation without any real political dimension. In many respects, this analytical dichotomy still prevails in France today, some thirty years later. Many French thinkers still struggle to wrap their mind around what Olivier Beaud calls the ‘dualism of political existence’: the simultaneous presence of a new political form and sovereign states (Beaud 2007).

Since Aron’s death in 1983, the referenda on Maastricht (1992) and the Constitutional Treaty (2005) reignited the normative controversies about Europe among French political thinkers. Two different periods should be distinguished. Following the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, the European issue served as a catalyst for the rehabilitation of cultural nationalism in republican discourse (Laborde 2001; Lacroix 2004b). Authors who defined themselves as ‘republicans’ reinvested the concept of ‘nation’, which had been left to the conservatives since the end of the nineteenth century (Debray 1999; Taguieff 2001; Thibaud 1992, 2006; Todd 1995).² These ‘national‐republicans’ (p.110) opposed both the political liberalism of left‐ and right‐wing démocrates and the ‘closed’ nationalism of the extreme right, which reneges on republican values (Winock 1982: 11–40). The label ‘national‐republicans’ harks back to the ‘first’ nationalism, which emerged at the end of the eighteenth century in close connection with republican ideals.³

The national‐republican argument is twofold. First, its proponents hold that the democratic ideal cannot be disentangled from national identity, as suggested by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, the best‐known proponent of constitutional patriotism on a European scale. Second, national‐republicans maintain that the move towards a post‐national entity is undermining democracy within the borders of existing nation‐states. For it exacerbates the twin dangers facing contemporary democracies: the growing autonomy of individuals and their disinterest in public affairs (Lacroix 2002 and 2004b). In this perspective, every nation is characterized by a tension between the rational, formal, and abstract principles of citizenship on the one hand, and on the other the communitarian and ethnic reality of civil society. Consequently, national‐republicans claim, universal principles alone cannot sustain a particular polity. If democracy is to survive, it needs to be reinforced with the strong feelings and emotions involved in a national tradition.

This tension between the universal and the particular already marks the classical French republican model. While its ambition is universal and it conceives of the national as political, it also confines the Republic to the territory of the French nation‐state (Schrag 2008: 115). Granting the active and passive vote in municipal and European elections to European Union nationals in their country of residence, as foreseen by the Maastricht Treaty, clearly works against the grain of the French conception of citizenship. As Pierre Rosanvallon points out, giving non‐nationals the vote in local elections is coherent with the ‘civil’ conception of municipal administration as it prevails in the United Kingdom and Northern Europe. In contrast, ‘a universalism of the French type can envisage citizenship only in the form of one bloc’ (Rosanvallon 1992: 441). Consequently, to many French thinkers the creation of a European citizenship would only make sense if it went hand in hand with the creation of a real federal state. If no European nation comes into existence, the European political project will never lead to a European democratic state, and therefore one need not speak of European citizenship (Dimier 2004: 895).

However, if the national‐republicans were relatively active during the 1990s, they had almost vanished from the heart of the intellectual debate by the mid‐2000s, when the referendum on the Constitutional Treaty took place. While (p.111)