When Culture Becomes Politics. Thomas Pedersen

experiences”.²⁸ The study of cultural issues has normally been seen to involve a special hermeneutical methodology (“Verstehen”), but recent research has tended to challenge this view, arguing that cultural problems can be analyzed by means of empirical, even quantitative methods.

It would in my view be wrong to regard culture and religion as two separate worlds. Geertz usefully talks about religion as a cultural system, and from Max Weber he borrows the notion of “religious rationalization” to denote the specific development of religion in certain parts of the world.²⁹

The word culture can be used to refer to either high culture, mass culture or ethnic culture. Ethnic culture tends for better or worse to be more egalitarian and more group-oriented than high culture. Much of the high culture that national citizens in Europe enjoy is shared with other European citizens regardless of their national attachment. This is because it has a high “universality content”. This raises the wider question, how aesthetics and politics are related, a question to which I shall return later. The scientific approach to aesthetics is an interesting but also difficult field. Few scholars in Northern Europe have dared address the question.³⁰

      Latin is no longer a lingua franca in Europe, but a sort of “Europe of letters” must still be assumed to exist, and the fine arts can be argued to constitute a kind of universalizing language. Importantly, I shall argue that a more widespread aesthetic practice on the part of ordinary citizens is likely over time to have political repercussions.

      Mass culture is even less patient with national or regional borders than high culture. It is often global. One may prepare for river rafting in a seemingly remote Brazilian village and yet hear the sound of the melody one heard 6 months ago in one’s home town in Europe. Ethnic culture is more exclusive, introverted and dependent upon demarcation. Its originality typically depends upon its being delivered in the native language, which in itself erects barriers. Typically, each national culture is composed of several layers of culture, which to a varying extent are transnational.

      It is important to understand the changing relationship between culture and democracy. Increasingly, Western and perhaps even global culture is being democratized to the point of making the two concepts intimately related (see chapters 2 and 4). Individuals increasingly make conscious choices about personal identity; not only about their life-style, but also about their political values including their nationality.

So what about the elite? Two points seem pertinent: First, democracy and mass education has prompted the revolt of the cognitive elite, especially in the USA. Christopher Lasch has spoken with characteristic eloquence of the “dark night of the soul” in America.³¹ But his analysis of the professional elite is also likely to be relevant beyond the USA. Arguably, in other parts of the Western world – and not least in Europe – global mass culture has come to be regarded as a threat to the survival of what I shall call ‘constitutive culture’. Secondly, notwithstanding the general trend in the direction of democratization, the supranational level of governance in Europe displays a number of special features, amongst others a continuing dominance of a powerful elite. Although from a historical perspective EU-politics have probably in recent years become less elitist, it remains the case that European policy-making is highly centralized and complex with economic and political elite networks dominating decision making. It should be added that this elitism is largely the result of a deliberate choice on the part of the founders of the EU. The horrors of Nazism and Fascism understandably instilled a fear of unbridled populism in the European elite.

This elitism becomes evident already if one takes a quick look at the EU’s leadership structures: There is no direct election of the president of the European Commission and the chairman of the European Council does not have a popular mandate. It is also a view shared by many scholars and political practitioners. Describing European politics in the 1980s, former French foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine called EU-politics a case of “enlightened despotism”.³² This does not seem a world apart from what was described by Glenda Rosenthal, when in 1976 she referred to … “the important part played by elite networks of all kinds”.³³

We know from the literature on nation-building and cultural communities that state elites play a crucial role in diffusing and reproducing ideas about a common national identity. Therefore the ideas of the EU elite are obviously of considerable interest. The European elite in the sense of the persons taking the most important political decisions over a considerable period of time is a multi-faceted phenomenon. It has various layers, economic and political as well as cultural, and is not always confined to the European territory. Transatlantic networks remain of importance, though less so at the cultural level. The elite-data analyzed in this study centres upon the political elite layer and i.a. examines the attitudes of the members of the EU constitutional convention as an instance of critically important, political elite attitudes in the EU.³⁴ The broad composition of the convention spanning both national and European parliamentarians as well as members of national governments makes this body reasonably representative of the EU political elite.

The book thus relies in part on a survey of the members of the European convention undertaken in the final months of its work. While the results of this survey should be treated with care given the limited response rate, they do shed some light upon the attitudes of key sections within the EU political elite.³⁵

The European Constitutional Convention was convened in 2002 with a view to revising and consolidating existing European treaties. The convention was a departure from the traditional way of revising the EU treaties through intergovernmental conferences.³⁶ Thus the composition of the convention was unusual. It consisted of altogether 105 members. Most of them were delegates from national parliaments (56 members including opposition and anti-EU parties); and representatives from member state governments themselves (28 members); other members included a delegation from the European Parliament (16 members) and the European Commission (2 members). A limited number of seats were also allocated to representatives from the candidate countries. The convention was headed by a president (the former French president, Giscard D’Estaing), a presidency and a praesidium. One notes that despite its limited size the convention can be said to reflect quite well the span of opinion in the European political elite. However, it cannot be said to be fully representative. Transnational actors were absent; and so were influential personalities in public opinion. In addition, European countries that at the time of convening the convention had not applied for EU membership – such as Norway, Iceland and Switzerland – were not represented.³⁷ Nor were countries in the EU’s neighbourhood with a reasonable claim to European status (e.g. Croatia). The qualitative part of the survey, in which respondents answered open questions is particularly interesting in that it adds depth to the survey to some extent transforming it into a series of case-studies.

In a sense, testing the existence or not of a common identity within the EU political elite is a “critical test”. After all, if one is to take seriously the goal of a European federation and a common European identity, then at least the governing elite in Europe must display such an identity. This makes the EU constitutional convention an interesting case.³⁸ The major part of the study will however, in keeping with my epistemological assumptions, draw upon qualitative sources including speeches by politicians, contributions by European intellectuals and classics within European philosophy and literature.

      The structure