Keynote speech: "The Problem of Change in the Eu politics"

Change comes in many areas of life and in many forms. Some are trivial, some are profound. Some can be understood straightaway, some become visible only after some time has elapsed. Not only that, but change in one area of life can have a far-reaching impact on others.

Technology is a good illustration of this — the Internet, for example, has radically brought down the cost of information and this has incalculable consequences for the control of information and thus for how public opinion understands political power. Or, the extraordinary rise in the standard of living in Europe has changed the nature of leisure; and the arrival of micro-technology has reduced the significance of physical strength and thereby transformed gender relations.

Change, therefore, is also about the capacity to understand and recognise the changes that we are experiencing, that we are in the midst of. This has yet further sociological and political implications. Mental map theory tells us that most people decode the world by means of a set of coherent cognitive rules that they construct over the years. These rules and frameworks constitute people's mental maps. When they encounter new ideas, new thoughts, they will unconsciously integrate them into their pre-existing mental map, regularly screening out the bits of the new set of ideas that do no fit. Furthermore, most people complete the construction of their mental maps by their mid-40s, which helps to explain why youth is generally more innovative and open to change. The older one is, the more change becomes threatening, because it devalues one's existing store of knowledge, one's cultural capital and affects the accuracy of one's mental maps.

To these factors and processes have to be added the obsolescence of knowledge and, even more seriously, the obsolescence of how to interpret information. We all know that generals tend to fight the previous war, but much the same is true of politics, economics and managing social change. We — all human beings — like stability and predictability, with the result that our cognitive categories grow outdated and, hence, our judgements lose their accuracy. The difficulty is further compounded by our loss of reliable yardsticks by which to measure the accuracy of our interpretation. Our processes of reasoning not infrequently operate by using flawed analogies and misleading metaphors, especially natural metaphors. Inevitably, by focusing on the wrong problem, we become a part of that problem and not the solution.

In targeting policy goals, we make certain assumptions about the behaviour of those to be affected by the new policy, that they will respond in a particular, predictable kind of way to what we do. Hence, if we define the problem correctly, design the policy to align with the expected response, the outcome will be as we would like it to be. This is an attractive proposition, it is quite logical and clear, but it reckons without the questions of the fallibility of information and of the uncertainty of future behaviour. I shall deal with these two issues separately.

When we process information, we cannot take everything — the totality of information — into account. We select, but the criteria of selection will import a certain bias, criteria like what we regard as salient or trivial, how we arrange our facts in a particular order and how much of the context we include in our identification of a fact. Hence our information is necessarily incomplete, marked by gaps and inadequacies. Nor can we foretell what will be significant in the future. Logic is no solution, because logic is linear and assumes that important facts, contexts and processes will remain the same.

Uncertainty refers to the future inter-action of factors, processes and features of human behaviour. We assume that they will remain broadly similar to those of the past and present, but this is a dangerous assumption. Human beings are invariably motivated by multiple, even contradictory or incommensurable impulses which affect what they do in the future, not to mention adaptive behaviour as a source of distortion.

Here is one example: both Anglo-Saxon radical individualism and post-communist cultures assume that human behaviour is motivated solely by material advantage — the pursuit of money — and that this explains everything about why people act in a particular way. A moment's thought will show that this is nonsense, indeed, it is profoundly reductionist. Status, the quest for power, excitement, idealism, friendship, family loyalty, ignorance, the constraints of collective identity, religious belief, even aesthetic considerations can and do affect human behaviour. So reducing one's assumptions to one single motive, predicting outcomes on that basis and constructing a strategy on that assumption will lead one into trouble.

To the foregoing has to be added the speed of change and the transformation of the institutions by which we seek to control that speed. Here three processes are of particular significance — the irreversibility of change, the propensity of systems to fail and the linear thinking that is so deeply encoded in European thinking.

I'll deal with these one by one. A great deal of politics is about managing change, whether this is acknowledged or not. The skilful politician tells the people that he or she can manage whatever change is needed. The trouble is that with globalisation, the politician's ability actually to do what he or she claims is far more restricted when global processes impact on domestic politics. Globalisation magnifies problems — we embark on a policy of change, let us call it "reform", and discover that there is no going back, the changes that we have launched have such far-reaching consequences that we cannot return to the status quo ante. In the fairly cohesive nation-state, this return, this remedying of error, was or at any rate seemed, feasible, so that, if nothing else, the damage caused by a flawed policy could be minimised.

Then, the systems that we set up to manage change no longer appear to work in the way in which they did when politics was largely confined within the ambit of a single state. The domestic interacts with the foreign and the reliability of systems is radically undermined. The third factor, that of linearity, is in many ways the most interesting and significant. It is a key aspect of the Enlightenment legacy to assume that the natural state of things is an equilibrium, that action and reaction are equal and opposite, that the consequences of one's action are broadly predictable. Globalisation raises huge question marks over all these three assumptions.

Let me offer some illustrations. We are all familiar with the policy of the United States in the Middle East and especially in Iraq. We can have our own opinions as to whether we approve of US action or not. But the key issue that intrigues me is what were the assumptions of American policy-makers, why did they assume that the removal Saddam Hussein would produce democracy and a peaceful transition in Iraq?

In simplified form, we can say that, above all, they acted because their thinking was linear and because they relied on the flawed analogy of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The argument goes like this. The intellectual underpinnings of Bush's foreign policy started from the untested belief that it was US pressure under Reagan that precipitated the end of the Soviet Union. In linear terms, this is seductive. Apply pressure of the right kind and all dictatorial regimes will fail. What this analysis failed to reckon with was that the Soviet Union failed not for one single reason, but because of a multiplicity of factors, some political, some economic, some social. US pressure was only one such factor.

Hence when it came to the war on terror, US policy-makers made a number of assumptions, which turned out to have wholly unintended consequences. They assumed that the war on terror would be something like the Cold War, that pressure on a single centre would deal with it and that, given the extraordinary military and technological superiority of the US, they had the means to destroy that centre cleanly and effectively. Hence the decision to remove Saddam Hussein would be followed somehow automatically by a democratic Iraq and that would end terrorism. We know what happened. Saddam was removed and the rest of the scenario failed — flawed assumptions, uncertainty, fallible information and linear thinking all combined to destroy the reasoning on which the US relied for its strategic thinking.

Let me move to my second case study, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the 50th anniversary of which falls on the 23 October. The Stalinist rulers of Hungary assumed that radical change from above, coupled with extraordinarily high levels of coercion and mass mobilisation, would transform society because society shared the assumptions of the rulers. Nothing could have been further from reality. Revolution from above against the will of society generated passive resistance, resentment and poor performance, which led the rulers to intensify the violence, thereby producing an escalating spiral. The project to enforce change of a particular kind — to create a narrowly defined perfect society — collided with the very different and varied aspirations of the people. By 1956, however, the communists had begun to question their own project and this generated uncertainty in the leadership, and this percolated downwards, raising hopes of a change, a change which would provide the political space for freedom. We know from Tocqueville that the most dangerous moment for a tyranny is when it starts depressurise. A small mistake can have devastating consequences.

In brief, the revolution — essentially the demand for total change coming from below — erupted when crowds took to the streets; the communist leadership had no idea how to manage this, to make the necessary concessions and when firing started, the Rubicon was crossed. The leadership continued to assume that coercion would work and that the presence of Soviet tanks on the streets would quieten the crowds. But society had changed far more than the leadership in a very short period of time — the result of the pent-up tension and the explosion of hope — so that violence produced a massive counter-reaction that simply swept the entire communist system away.

It took the far greater violence of the second Soviet invasion to suppress the revolution, but the clock could not be put back to before the 23 October. Much had changed in Hungary as the result of a suppressed revolution. There were now limits that the communists had to observe, for fear of renewed loss of control. The outcome was a kind of equilibrium between rulers and ruled. Certain concessions, mostly of a consumerist kind, were made and could not be withdrawn. But popular aspirations had to be scaled down. The problem was that the equilibrium, though stable, was also a dead-end. It could not develop any further, it functioned as a closed system. And it was increasingly hollowed out from within, so that when various external developments, like the technological superiority of the West and higher energy prices, impacted on Hungary in the 1980s, the system was too weak to respond and fairly quickly unravelled. The revolution of 1956 failed, but in the long term it made any serious change by the communists impossible, because of the limits that it set to communist political initiatives.

My third case study is that of European integration, as an example of successful change that, 55 years on, is nevertheless clearly in need of new ideas. My first proposition is that, regardless of how history seems when read backwards, there was nothing inevitable about the integration of Europe. It could only have happened when it did at that very particular juncture of history, when all the states of Europe were exhausted from the Second World War, were fearful of the future, were open, therefore, to the lessons of the past, had an elite that took these ideas on board and was able to come up with a radically new way of securing their project. This was helped by something else — democracy was understood as far more of an elite project then, than it is now, so that societies were ready to follow their leaders, sometimes even against their inner doubts.

Of the various factors that ensured the success of the project, its open-ended quality was vital. There was no clear goal — the contrast with the Americans in Iraq and the communists in Hungary is very striking — the founding fathers left a great deal undefined, like where Europe ends and where the balance between political and economic regulation should lie; equally, they left it open as to whether Europe should become a federal entity or something sui generis, something not seen hitherto. Certain propositions were, however, built into the machine code. Europe must be democratic, must accept the market, must recognise a degree of social welfare provision and the elites must learn to work together. In all of these, the founding fathers — Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer, Alcide de Gasperi — were able to transfer enough of domestic power to the European level to ensure that there could be no return to the status quo ante, that of isolated, sovereign nation-states.

The mechanisms of change were also a relevant factor. Energy, coal and steel would be removed from state control and given to a supra-state body, because without them, war would be impossible. But this proposition, again open-ended, was underpinned by another, that integration in one field would necessarily suck in others, given economic and through that political interdependence. This proposition was less well founded and functionalism runs out when the political will to integrate is no longer there. This was the heart of the crisis of the mid-1960s, when under President de Gaulle, France began to reassert its state interests.

However, the tide had gone too far to be undone, there could be no going back to 1948-1950, that is, to fully sovereign states, and the ideal of integration as an open-ended commitment did not disappear. It might have done, had there not been an elite committed to the ideal. State-national interest would not have been sufficient to keep integration going. What the European Community, eventually the European Union, achieved was a balance between European and state interests and could ensure that to some degree, state interests would be understood as a European interest. Environmental protection, food safety, the regulation of chemicals and, of course, the single market, are all illustrations.

But there is also an unintended or, better, barely formulated consequence of European integration. The existence and operation of autonomous European institutions have given rise to an autonomous European-level political field, with its own formal and informal rules, its own interests and ideals that are separate from those of the member states. The outcome is something that remains open-ended, it remains elite-driven, it is neither inter-state nor federal, but — as suggested before — sui generis, hard to characterise and unique to the circumstances of Europe.

Having said that, Europe now does face a legitimation crisis in the aftermath of the defeat of the Constitution in the French and Dutch referenda. European societies have changed, but the legitimation of the European project remained stuck in the past. The EU was legitimated by success, by the member states and by the elites. That is no longer sufficient. So the time has come to find new instruments of legitimation, to take these changes into account. The difficulty is that the old methods have become deeply entrenched in the minds of the elites, EU regulation is an obstacle to change, the institutional structure of the EU operates along lines that go against innovation. The question is whether there is new thinking and whether that new thinking can capture both elites and people. Indeed, the question is whether the continued necessity for the further integration of Europe is recognized by the citizens of Europe, for without their consent, change will fail. For my part, I believe that the open-endedness of Europe is a feature that will allow for a radical opening to the people, but for it to succeed, both people and the member states must recognize this change as necessary. And that's where we are at now.