The twin sister of the federalist illusion was the postnational illusion. The Germans destroyed their first nation-state, founded by Bismarck, on their own. After 1945 there was no arguing about that. But only a short time later, German politicians and journalists started making a virtue out of necessity. First, during the Adenauer era, it was Catholic conservatives who, referring to the supranational Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, claimed that Germans had a supranational mission. In 1956, the Bonn editor of the Rheinische Merkur, Paul Wilhelm Wenger, quoted a statement by Friedrich Gentz (who would later become the personal secretary of Austrian chancellor Prince Metternich) in the magazine Neues Abendland. The statement dated from 1806, the year marking the end of the Old Empire: “Europe has fallen because of Germany, and through Germany it must rise again.” Wenger’s lesson from history is: federalism instead of nation-states. He viewed the internal federalization of Germany as the “prerequisite for the only possible solution to the German question through the federalist integration of Germany with all of its neighbors.”
In the following decades, the idea of a German alternative to the nation-state gradually wandered from the right across the political center to the left. In 1976, Karl Dietrich Bracher, a contemporary historian in Bonn, referred to the Federal Republic as a “postnational democracy among nation-states” for the first time. It was a term that rose to prominence when the author repeated it in the fifth volume of Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland [The History of the Federal Republic of Germany] in 1986.
Two years later, Oskar Lafontaine, then minister president of the federal state of Saarland and deputy chairmain of the SPD, announced in his book Die Gesellschaft der Zukunft [The Society of the Future] that precisely because the Germans had had “the worst experiences with a perverted nationalism,” they were “virtually predestined to become a driving force in the process of the supranational integration of Europe.”
Predestination due to perversion: outside of the Federal Republic hardly anyone was inclined to applaud this bold dialectic about-face, a variation of the early Christian doctrine of felix culpa, the fortunate fall. The idea of merging the nation-states in Europe and declaring a postnational age was in fact just as apolitical as it was ahistorical. Historian Hermann Heimpel once remarked that “The fact that there are nations is, historically speaking, what’s European about Europe.” Perhaps one could put it better this way: the diversity of its nations is one of Europe’s most important characteristics. Consequently, it cannot be the goal of the European Union to overcome nations. It can only build arches over them.
The European Constitution was intended as a means of intensifying the process of integration. This means is no longer available, but the end goal remains. No matter what takes the place of the Constitution, further intensification will require much more than more effective institutions and more transparent development processes. Intensification can only be achieved if Europeans develop a clear awareness of what they can build upon and what they need to leave behind. There are common experiences and impressions that go much further back in history than most Europeans and many of their politicians are aware. The project of European integration will only succeed if it is supported by a sense of community: the recognition of a common bond and solidarity.
A Political Union that aims to speak with a single voice on important issues would have to get serious about the maxim, grandiosely proclaimed time and again, that the EU is not just a partnership of convenience but a community of shared values. A European Union that wishes to be a Political Union would have to answer the question that necessarily arises from its description of itself as a community of shared values: What are the values of the EU? Are they European, Western, or universal values?
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