Sovereignty Crises and EU’s Moral Challenge

The paper investigates the foundation of the European Union’s responsibility for the alleged ‘permanent’ state of crisis overwhelming it. To both (i) justify and (ii) answer this issue, this paper first draws upon insights from political philosophy on the notions of crisis and Europe and, second, upholds the need for reckoning the – currently neglected – centrality of the moral issue for a possible post-crisis EU politics. The state of crisis applies to the EU not simply as an institution but as a possible – and possibly credible – symbol of what else politics can/could be under the European aegis. Hence, a general crisis of contemporary politics and western political philosophy encounter and coexist in the EU’s crisis. The twofold aspects of this critical coexistence coagulate in the highly controversial narratives around the foundational concept of sovereignty. Empirically, the latter is nowadays associated with growing political demands and affirmation of ‘souverainism’. The latter expresses a reactionary dynamic towards the EU, frequently perceived as an obstacle to political autonomy. Indeed, this urgency for reaffirming state sovereignty is a comforting illusion, and such Euroscepticism looks somewhat optimistic regarding the possibility for states to be otherwise more sovereign. As per Jacques Derrida’s theory of sovereignty, this concept is impregnated with rhetoric as attractive as unlikely. Hence, the sovereigntist reactionary dynamic does not express the authentic need to re-appropriate sovereignty as such, but rather the lost benefits from its any longer credible narratives. This more profound need, or malaise, has its roots in a process that is here understood and portrayed through the cogent lenses of Rodolphe Gasché. Indeed, in the wake of Europe’s philosophical trajectory and history, the EU is necessarily called to embody a political sovereignty higher than sovereignty tout court, namely moral sovereignty. This does not lead to challenging the authority of the EU due to its possible inefficiency, but as an authority that seals the impossibility to provide something different from what states already (may lack to) supply. Indeed, no matter how historically rooted the distinction between politics and morals, the EU’s political task – and any possible post-crisis for the EU – finds itself right in the perhaps impossible but indeed inevitable need to justify its presence as a political authority that transcends the expectations brought about by the idea of state sovereignty, towards which the disenchantment is historically already widely acquired.