If Western values and the political culture of the West are – and must be – constitutive of a European sense of community, then it is also obvious at which point one must start talking about the overextension of the European Union. The EU enters the phase of overextension when it encompasses large regions that have not yet embraced the political culture of the West and where there is no basis for a felt European community. At the moment, it is hard to imagine a community stretching from Lapland to Kurdistan. Many great empires have fallen due to overextension. But history can offer no example of a great power that was created through it.
[ . . . ]
Though some of them might be in denial, the members of the EU are no longer classical nation-states. They are post-classical nation-states that exercise part of their sovereignty jointly or have transferred it to EU institutions. If they want to maintain the goal of a Political Union, they need to know what unites and binds them. Parties, parliaments, and governments can promote the emergence and strengthening of this awareness.
The decisive effort, however, must come from the civil societies and namely from intellectuals. Only when politics and society face this challenge will the words uttered by former chancellor Willy Brandt on November 10, 1989, one day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, become a reality. He expressly wanted his words to be understood in reference not only to Germany but to Europe as a whole when he said: “What belongs together now grows together.”
[This is an abridged version of a talk given by the author on November 10, 2005, at the Robert Bosch Foundation in Stuttgart.]
Source: Heinrich August Winkler, “Überdehntes Wir-Gefühl” [“An Overstretched Sense of Community”], Die Welt, no. 303/2005, December 28, 2005, p. 25.
Translation: Allison Brown
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