A Deleuzian Reading of EU's Enlargement

Deterritorialization and Europeanization: a Deleuzian Reading of EU’s Enlargement Paper prepared for the 2nd annual ICPP conference, Milan Friday, July 3rd, “International relations meeting Critical Policy Studies” By Marie-Eve BELANGER PhD [email protected] Visiting researcher GSI – Université de Genève Visiting Fellow – ETH Zurich DRAFT, 1st version Comments and suggestions welcomed 1 Introduction Despite appearances, territorial enlargement of the European Union is not circumstantial. Widening is not merely the result of the socialisation of elites, nor is it only the outcome of a successful political strategy: expansion is the geographical motion of generating the postwar European political space. For the European community, enlargement is neither optional nor conditional; it’s a necessity. Embedded in the European discursive system, the concept of territorial inclusion can be traced back to the Schuman declaration. This discourse constructs the community as “an organisation open to the participation of the other countries of Europe” (Schuman, 1950). In the contemporary international system, the European order stands out, for it is shaping a political space beyond the paradigm of borders. The Schuman declaration represents the point of bifurcation – the singularity – from which the political community can peacefully expand beyond its borders; something unthinkable until then. In this narrative, the expansion is the celebration of the emancipation of politics from its dependence towards borders. Over and over again. This is what Gilles Deleuze refers to as a repetition: not adding “a second and a third time to the first”, but carrying “the first time to the ’nth’ power” (DR, 81). In this contribution, a critical analysis of the phenomenon of European territorial expansion will be performed through a deleuzian reading of the enlargement. This will be done in two separate and complementary parts. First, the Schuman declaration will be analysed as a rupture point, a singularity. The declaration is the moment of the deterritorialization of politics: by providing grounds for the obsolescence of borders, it liberates the European political space from its dialectical relation to a geographical limit. Simultaneously, the Schuman declaration reterritorializes this political space within the discursive structure of Europeanity. The Schuman declaration will thus be studied as the singularity territorializing the European political space, ordering it within the discourse. Second, the enlargement will be defined as the repetition of this Europeanity discourse as constructed within the Schuman declaration. Here, the enlargement is understood as the celebration of the 1 Note on titles abbreviations : DR: Différence et Répétition; MP: Mille Plateaux, AO: Anti-Œdipe. 2 Schuman declaration, that is to say, the rupture with the state order. The enlargement is understood as the repetition of the singularity of border transgression, the actualization of what Hannah Arendt calls a “miracle2”. The repetition of this movement creates an excess: an increasingly broadened and deepened European political space performed by a growing number of European political actors, in other words, the European Union. In the end, this means that the EU is not reducible neither to an unfinished political project nor a distorted state; its autonomous form must be recognized in order to be theorized. How it all began This Europe is set in motion by a promise made at the end of the Second World War. “Never again!” pledged the leaders of national failing institutions across Europe. Origin of the Europeanity discourse and symbol of the European will to restore peace on the continent, the “never again” vow holds a rather puzzling ellipsis: it is missing an object. This absence illustrates the emptiness of the political space in the postwar period. “Never again that”, four (unsaid) letters to hold absolutely everything unspeakable about the Second World War; that, the largest black hole ever invented in language, the end of the vocabulary, the smallest, the most indefinite of all signs to summarize the whole extent of a nameless horror, worse than war, worse than suffering, worse than death. That: something we dodged, something to prevent at any price. “World peace cannot be safeguarded without the making of creative efforts proportionate to the dangers which threaten it”, (Schuman, 1950, §1). That: a threat to Europe, a point beyond which there is no words. And if the discursive construction of the common, the surplus of meaning created by the intersubjective process where actors act and speak together in a common political space, then that represents the edge of this shared space. And precisely, one of the main characteristics of the Second World War is its complete negation of otherness: that is the place where neither common nor political space can exist, and where a systematic destruction of the other, the self, and the 2 The advent of the new, the unique, the different. “…each man is unique and with each birth, something uniquely new reaches the world” (Arendt, 1983, 234) 3 language occurs. Thus, that, the unspeakable, is the only excess generated by the Holocaust, and its only possible name. “Never again” then, no more war. In the interstates’ system, war between states is more often than not linked to border transgressions3. War is incumbent to the state structure itself. In the Westphalian order a state’s first act is to “draw borders” (Schmitt, 1950) to create an exclusion nexus that clearly divides land and beings. The nation-state is the product of the desire to converge formal state building with a national “living space” (Ratzel, 1988). The idea of finding the Lebensraum borders – as if they objectively existed – is indeed a strong motivation at the heart of the Second World War. It lead to the violent conquest of territories considered as necessary to national construction; war’s end marked the sudden halting of the nation’s spatial expansion. Altogether, a nationalist narrative started to fade: “the European never again fits into a supranational construction of normative acts based on universal principles (...) on a continent that resolutely turned the page on “national destiny” (Pinto, 2010, 145). “Never again” encompasses the possibility of a common world beyond and in spite of the state; the Schuman declaration designs it. The Schuman declaration as a singularity Deleuze imagined the concept of singularity as central to the process of individuation, by opposition to that of representation (DR, 228). If representation is the static mediation system by which the world is accessed, singularity unveils the flow, the movement creating the infinite possibilities of alternate becomings. To the fixed account of dichotomies organising the world into a stable number of antagonistic categories, singularity opposes the potential of a fortuitous combination to deviate and create a new course of things. Singularities are immanent: their materialization is contingent on intersectionality between flow-production within the system. The movement instilled by the transformation of a singularity into a production machine is the coding of a new flow, from then on intertwined with other flows creating and organising this system. All singularities are possible at any given time, and they all remain possible through time. The storyline of an event is not straight, it constantly bifurcates on singularities, creating a specific path through the maze of becomings. 3 In the XXe century: First and Second World War 4 Neither circular nor linear, the spacio-temporality of events is constructed towards the future; it is the action of becoming, in this case a “becoming-European4” (see Mille Plateaux, 284 and following). The Schuman declaration is a singularity insofar as it gives rise to the European machine. Machines are coding flow, that is to say, producing meaning (AO, 166). In this particular instance, the European machine produces the Europeanity discourse, creating the European community by way of recoding the common. Europeanity discourse is the flow encoding the common as a denationalized form of collective political identification. This discourse’s possibility arouses at the end of the Second World War, when legitimacy of the state and its ability to regulate the collectivity failed to reproduce. In the aftermath of a war characterized by massive shock between nationalist agendas, the recoding of the common provided the necessary political space for social flow to be reinstated. To create this community, the rise of actors able to implement a political project, that is to say, to reactivate the possibility to share a common political narrative, was absolutely necessary on a literally speechless European continent. And if this political project could no longer be achieved through state mediation, it is not because the state was failing or losing its legitimacy, although both were in progress; it was actually a physical impossibility. State reification became temporarily unenforceable because the use of state-related vocabulary was momentarily prohibited in the public space. This does not mean that people were forbidden to use words like “state”, “country”, “nation” and “flag” on the European territory. Simply, that these words carried less and less potential for excess creation: their flows were fading. Little by little, state-centered terms gave way to signs that, shared across a new European intersubjective space, were gaining significance, generating a new

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