It’s the potentially enormously important political news that no one is talking about. At a conference in Dublin last week the European People’s Party, currently the largest single party in the European Parliament, has chosen Jean-Claude Juncker as its candidate for the President of the European Commission.

This European election will be the first time that the way people vote will have any impact on who the President of the Commission will be. The biggest party after the election will be able to nominate its candidate as the President. Fans of making the EU more accountable have been calling for such a move for decades – an effort to make the Commission, which is the leading force in driving European legislation, more democratically accountable.

Juncker for his part brings an impressive CV to his candidature. He was Prime Minister of Luxembourg for an astonishing 18 years, making him one of the longest serving democratically elected leaders in world history. He was twice President of the European Council and spent eight years as head of the Eurogroup, the meeting of finance ministers of Eurozone countries. No one can doubt, in other words, his appropriateness for the role.

Juncker also represents the Christian Social People’s Party, a centre-right Luxembourgish political party deeply influenced by the traditions of Catholic social thought and Christian Democracy. In sitting within that tradition he marks the latest embodiment of a long-standing and deeply inter-twined relationship between a Catholic-inspired politics and the development of the European project. One would expect, as a result, to hear plenty about solidarity and subsidiarity, the great buzzwords of Catholic approaches to European politics, and indeed there was plenty of lip-service paid to both.

Yet, in another respect, Juncker’s speech marked the nadir of that same tradition. In a single sentence Juncker highlighted exactly where today’s EPP and their Christian forebears radically disagree and perhaps pointed to a reason for the deeper malaise in European politics:

“We are a community based on rights.”

In many ways this came as a throwaway comment, the sort of platitudinous statement that EU politicians make all the time. But in others it is deeply worrying. To be clear, the EU commitment to certain rights and their enshrinement in European law is extremely admirable. Yet is that really all that the European community is based on? The Catholic politicians who grafted the early European project certainly would not have argued so.

Rights are an odd basis for a community, not least because they are inherently individualistic in nature. They are about defending certain things from the point of view of the individual.  They are not about fostering a sense of community, or solidarity, so much as a defence to individual privilege without an equivalent expectation of individual duties. Without a proper conception of what each individual ought to owe to one another there will never be any true sense of European solidarity and further, no real community at all.

The European project of the 1950’s, which included Juncker’s own party and other Catholic Christian Democrats, recognised this. It did not base anything on rights but focused a great deal of attention on subsidiarity and solidarity – believing that it was through that commitment and through a relational model of society that a European community might be forged. Rights were only mentioned in the more collective sense of improving living conditions for all workers – part of a broader commitment to a supportive welfare state.

The failure of Juncker to recognise any such bold basis speaks volumes for how far the decline in the vision for a European future has fallen. When even the proposed candidate for Commission President of the EPP, the party most closely associated with the history of the European project, today sees the basis of the community as no more than a community based on rights that speaks volumes for where visions of Europe are today. No wonder the EU response to Ukraine has been so limited – Europe can no longer even identify the basis of its own existing community!

Ben Ryan is a researcher at Theos. 

Image from flikr.com by Einnob Schnapple under the Creative Commons Licence