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The European referendum debate has been of an atrociously low standard. Intellectual debate on the EU has been limited almost entirely to political economics. More philosophical debate has largely been sidelined or simply silent. From a Christian point of view, political theology has been particularly poor. Despite many books in British political theology focusing on the role of government, the state, policy and economics there is almost nothing that has been written on political theology as it relates to the EU.
This is an oddity when EU legislation and policy has an enormous impact on Europe’s citizens. It is also an oddity because the EU represents a fascinating study in many of the political theories over statehood, legitimacy, democracy and power with which political theology is often so concerned. The lack of good political theology perhaps in turn goes some way to explaining the relatively poor standard of Christian discourse on Europe – which tends either to ignore political theology or else reach for fairly simplistic approaches to the idea of peace and a loose conception of solidarity.
God and the EU represents a worthy attempt at rectifying this failure on the part of political theologians. Fourteen separate essays examine different aspects of political theology as they relate to the European project, ranging through history, law, economics, the environment, science policy and others. Some of the content will be more familiar to those with a background in European politics and theology than other parts.
Inevitably not all areas of European policy can be covered in a volume of fewer than 300 pages. Nonetheless refugees and migration are an unfortunate absence given the recent high profile crisis and accompanying debate. Similarly the absence of more material on the future place of other faiths – notably Islam, given the prospect of Turkish, Bosnian or Albanian accession (to say nothing of the significant minority populations in several member states) – is a missed opportunity.
In terms of what is included, however, there is an impressive breadth of topic and depth of analysis. The first part of the book looks at the historic and present Christian inspiration of the European project. Several of these essays pick up themes that have gradually been becoming more prominent in academic literature – if not yet the public imagination. John Loughlin’s chapter on Catholicism, for example, follows an increasingly accepted historiography and Catholic political theology model – including the excellent work of Wolfram Kaiser on Christian Democrat parties and networks.
More unusual is Peter Petkoff’s essay which looks at the Orthodox Church – a relative newcomer to the European project and one which has an often less explored historical relationship with European political ideas. Petkoff looks at the growing sense of a pan–Orthodox movement and the awkward matching of that idea with the “absent” political theology of Orthodoxy. This relationship – one that looks set to remain relevant given the prominence of Greece in current EU policy making and the potential accession of Serbia – is an important and often overlooked element in talking about Christian interaction with the EU.
The second part of the book deals with current EU policy areas, moving beyond theory and history to practical expressions of the interaction between Christianity and the EU. Essays cover religious freedom, representation, the debate over whether God should have been included in the proposed EU constitution, economics, the environment, and science policy.
Of these the most striking is Johan Graafland’s essay that proposes a “Grexit” (removal of Greece from the Eurozone, though not the EU). This, for Graafland, would make the best economic sense, but perhaps more fundamentally, he argues, would be the truest example of the principle of solidarity. This is a bold argument, and one that flies in the face of the more usual pleas for solidarity in relation to Greece (such as the Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann, whose vision of solidarity with Greece on the Euro amounted to nothing more than a differently structured bailout deal).
That this argument should be considered novel in a sense proves the point of the whole book. Christian, indeed any intellectual responses to the Eurozone crisis (and to Greece’s position in particular) were noticeably limited. With the exception of political economists, the responses mostly amounted to little more than simple sympathy or confusion. There was not much by way of strong Christian political theology to respond to the crisis.
In fact, there is something of that trend in the structure of the book as a whole. In moving from history to policy it is interesting to note an apparent reduction in the power of ideas, personalities and religiously inspired structures. The writers of the essays in the first part chart trajectories of motivating ideas, personalities and values, whether they were drawn from Christian Democracy, ORDO–Liberalism, or other movements. The writers in the second, in responding to policy areas, by contrast, seem more wont to lament the lack of motivating value structures (and, presumably therefore, the civil society actors that ought to be policy drivers in different policy areas). Diana Beech’s excellent essay on science funding argues, for example, that “a vacuum of values has opened up in the way in which science and research policy is discussed”. An essay on environmental policies from Weatherley–Singh, Branco and Felgueiras notes the increasing dominance of little more than economic utilitarianism as the last value standing in that policy area.
This shift between chapters would seem to bear out the argument made in Adrian Pabst’s chapter that European integration has taken the form of a secular market state – prioritising economic integration at the cost of divorcing itself from society. There is, for Pabst, a lack of a “social imaginary” in Europe. This, I would argue, has been the greatest failing of the European project as a whole – that it has managed to empty itself of what it had in its origins – an authentically powerful unifying moral mission. The very fact that the later essays of this book devote so much attention to lamenting the emptying of values is illustrative of that failure.
It is also, of course, illustrative of the failure in political theology to properly confront and engage with the European project – allowing a strange technocratic economic orthodoxy to take hold. For far too long Europe has been ignored in political theology – this book represents an extremely important attempt to fill that gap. If the EU is to survive its current malaise and thrive it will need more constructive intellectual efforts to develop a ‘social imaginary’ and understanding of its underpinning values. Political theology has a critical role to play and one can only hope that this book might inspire others to come forward and help in the cause.
Ben Ryan is a Researcher at Theos | @BenedictWRyan
Image by moritz320 from pixabay.com available in the public domain, cropped from top.
