A Kantian approach to the present crisis of authority in the EU
Intuitively, one associates modernity with progress and emancipation and in this view, all reforms are per definition prone to change things to the better. A challenging thought proposed by Poul F. Kjaer and Niklas Olsen, editors of Critical Theories of Crisis in Europe: From Weimar to the Euro invites you to question the linear understanding of time proposed by the modernist ideologies. The authors underline that these theories carry forward the promise that tomorrow we will be more emancipated, civilised, democratic and wealthier than we were yesterday. The Weimar republic like many other incipient nation-states failed to live up to its promises and succumbed to authoritarianism or totalitarianism.
“Institutions of public power and authority which no longer correspond to the reality they are based within therefore lose their capacity to bring about change” wrote the authors and then they continue with a quasi-positive tone that the Europe of today is not (yet) Weimar. The EU that we have now is the result of a constant negotiation in which the governments of the Member States have had an important say. The crisis of the EU cannot be distinguished from the crisis of the nation-state. It is one and the same thing or in other words the crisis of the EU reflects the inability to conceive theories and methods of governance that are appropriate for the society of today.
The EU is primarily a creature of law, that means a norm-based institutional construction. However, by its own existence, this abstract creature has changed the structural set-up of European society. In simple words, the constant application of the norms on which the EU is based has created a new concrete reality, which requires the recalibration of the institutions of public power and authority. The old authorities are no longer fully representative for today constituencies/structural set-up of the European society. The apparent discrepancies cannot be eliminated by turning back the clock (and reviving the romantic dream of nationalism). Discrepancies are only symptoms, the disease is the actual failure to promptly recondition the institutional body of the EU and rebuild coherence in a way consistent with the expectations of the European citizens. The nationalists define these discrepancies as a fundamental problem and surprisingly succeed in diverting the expectations of "normal" people of Europe into total nonsense.