The Idea of Supremacy – EU, Politics and The Moral Challenge

This paper emphasises the moral issue as central to the reflection on the European Union’s political crisis. Such crisis applies to the EU institution as the symbol of an idea of Europe and politics tout court. As such, it fits into a more profound crisis concerning, first, politics and, second, Western political thought. The two aspects coexistence is here exemplified in the concept of sovereignty associated with growing political demands asserting the so-called ‘souverainism’. Regarding the affirmation of the latter, the EU is perceived as a possible obstacle. However, limited support for the EU does not derive so much from a need to reaffirm state sovereignty, but from a deeper problem that affects politics in terms of availability of contemporary political thoughts and meta-narratives. This problem results in the crisis of the moral meaning, justification, and acceptability of political choices, especially when unpopular. In this perspective, the apparent urgency for the reaffirmation of state sovereignty is a palliative illusion. As for Derrida’s theory of sovereignty, this political concept deploys as attractive as unlikely rhetoric. Challenging the EU because it threatens member states’ sovereignty is very optimistic regarding the alternative possibility for states of being otherwise more substantially sovereign. Instead, the opposition against the EU masks a deeper unease about the moral justification for the use, and limits, of political power. As if hostility towards the EU, at the same time, catalysed and masked deeper malaise about the prior incapacity and limits of contemporary politics and political thoughts. Challenges to EU authority do not primarily depend on policy inefficiency but on the provision of nothing politically different from what states already (may lack to) supply. This typically applies to Brexit. Adding Gasché’s reflections on the idea of Europe to Derrida’s on sovereignty, the paper affirms that, no matter how historically rooted the distinction between politics and morals, EU’s political task finds itself right in the perhaps impossible but indeed inevitable need to justify its presence as a moral authority that transcends the expectations brought about by the idea of state sovereignty. The EU is indeed called to embody a political idea of sovereignty higher than state sovereignty, or moral supremacy. The EU’s exit from the current crisis depends on its ability, and will, to build a bridge between the political and the moral. The EU’s emphasis on the latter, hitherto unfulfilled or timidly expressed, though present, is fundamental to justify the EU’s original contribution to politics.