How can the EU be re-membered?

If the European Union (EU) is to flourish as a credible actor in the twenty-first century it must learn to “re-member” its future – to integrate the plural memories of its diverse populations into a coherent political project of which all feel themselves to be members.

This will involve a difficult balancing act: rejuvenating the founding cultural memories which first gave it its identity and still sustain its moral priorities, while simultaneously incorporating the very different cultural memories brought to it by its newer, often non-European arrivals.

In the 1990s as economic integration increasingly dominated the EU’s agenda, Jacques Delors, then President of the European Commission, led calls for a revival of the “soul of Europe” – a renewal of its spiritual energies. His call was echoed a decade later by a “Reflection Group” of senior EU figures who warned, in the wake of the 2004 enlargement, that economic harmonisation alone could not produce a “politically resilient solidarity” sufficient to keep an expanded EU together and urged a revitalisation of the “spiritual and cultural dimension of Europe.”

Since then, the current crisis of the Eurozone has stretched that solidarity almost to breaking point.

How can the EU be “re-membered”?

Here are three tasks facing Christians as they seek to join others in making their contribution to that question.

First, Christians should disavow any claim to public privilege in the EU. A rejuvenation of the “soul of Europe” cannot proceed by giving official constitutional pre-eminence to just one of its communities of memory.

Christians may assert, as Pope John Paul II did in an important 2003 intervention, that “the Christian faith belongs, in a radical and decisive way, to the foundations of European culture.” But modern Europe, and the EU, have also been formed decisively by Judaism and secular humanism, and are now being refashioned by the presence of Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism and many other smaller but growing communities of conviction, including, of course, various secular ones. Each brings with it distinctive “memories” that inform its current participation in European public spaces, and each needs to be respectfully attended to and critically engaged as the EU charts its future path.

Second, the EU now contains official channels whereby such engagement can take place.

While the EU is often thought to be a thoroughly “secular” entity, the Lisbon Treaty (2009) included an important new provision for an “open, transparent and regular” dialogue between EU institutions and religious and philosophical communities. Christians should seize this opportunity to bring to bear Christian insights (and not only Christian interests) on a wide range of public issues.

Third, as they do so, they will in the first instance need to acquire a much deeper awareness of their own distinctive “memories” – their rich, indigenous resources of public theology – and a capacity to put them creatively to work on matters of EU concern. This will involve mastering the discursive – and aural – skills necessary to engage constructively in highly pluralistic debates about the public good of the EU.

If Christians can take up these challenges they will be well equipped to make a distinctive contribution to the urgent challenge of “re-membering” of the EU.

About the author

Jonathan Chaplin is Director of the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics (KLICE), Cambridge, a member of the Cambridge University Divinity Faculty and a Senior Fellow of Cardus. He is a specialist in Christian political thought. His latest book, co-edited with Gary Wilton, is God and the EU: Faith in the European Project (Routledge, forthcoming).