Hegemony Critique and the Crisis of the European Union
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Hegemony Critique and the Crisis of the European Union Claudio Corradetti 1 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract
In the present essay, I argue that the current EU governance reflects a contradiction between the presumption of a European constitutional framework based on human rights, democracy and the rule of law and the recently adopted economic stability governance defined outside the horizon of the EU treaties. I propose to understand this scenario through the prism of two distinct and context-specific assumptions: a politicalsociological hypothesis for which internal contradictions of capitalism are thought to be capable of ‘self-displacing’ to other societal sectors (the ‘colonization thesis’) and a political-philosophical thesis for which EU governance is connected to a decrease in democratic legitimacy and right-standards due to hegemonic control by economic powers (the ‘hegemonic control’ thesis). Both hypotheses testify to the lowering of the standards of protection of fundamental rights and member states’ regulatory capacities as well as to an overall de-constitutionalization of the EU architecture. Keywords Hegemony . Contradiction . Immanent critique . EU crisis . Capitalism
1 Overview In this diagnostic paper, I investigate into the governance crisis of the European Union (EU) as it results from the sovereign debt crisis of 2010. I suggest to adopt a method of immanent critique, an approach familiar to the circle of critical theory.1 Critique is immanent insofar as its standards are embedded in the same social practices it aims to analyze. As a form of contextual analysis, it detects the contradictions between social facts and rational standards, ideology and democratic ideals.
1
See, among others, R.J. Antonio1981; T. Stahl 2013a; C. Browne 2008.
* Claudio Corradetti [email protected]
1
University of Rome Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy
Jus Cogens
Immanent critique takes different forms, some of which include hermeneutic and practicetheoretic approaches. All in all, immanent critique is a method of investigation for the detection of social contradictions following the Hegelian-Marxian tradition. According to immanent critique, forms of rationality are always situated and socially embedded. They are never ahistorical nor disembodied standards of social practices. In the manner proposed here, immanent critique does not postulate a final dialectical resolution of contradictions, either as a Hegelian speculative moment in the form of an Absolut Spirit or, following Marx, as a revolutionary act of the proletariat. Rather, critique here aims to defuse the inherent contradiction between a system of production and social forces with the normative presuppositions of constitutional justice. Human rights in the EU are deemed to play this normative function. The form of immanent critique adopted here concentrates accordingly on historicized forms of social rationality and, particularly, in a distinct ‘historical moment’ of the EU life.2 As a pragmatic form of justification, immanent cri
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