Towards a progressive peace in Europe

The fact that the idea of Angela Merkel declaring war on François Hollande is today so unthinkable, so ridiculous, is testimony to the remarkable success of the post-war European project.

So tormented has its recent past been that the pairing of ‘Europe’ and ‘success’ in the same sentence seems to ring hollow. And yet, when one tries to imagine the sense of pain and bitterness that must have been still raw when the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1950, not only the visionary power of Europe’s original architects but the sheer triumphant success of their achievement overwhelms.

That this vision and achievement were first and foremost moral must not be overlooked. The Europe of Brexit, Grexit, deficit, and austerity is one that is understood in primarily economic terms; the Union is one whose raison d’être is the continual advance of GDP. That being so, it should be of little surprise that it comes under stress when GDPs shrink or when faced with humanitarian crises, such as mass migration and refugee movements, which cannot be solved by more money. To be clear: such challenges would test any polity, no matter how politically integrated or morally assured. But a Union that has lost it moral moorings is liable to be especially at sea.

The early Union, especially as evidenced in the Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community in 1958, was hardly indifferent to prosperity. But this prosperity was conceived as more than national economic growth and was, in any case, subservient to the supreme objective of securing peace.

But peace, in Pope Paul VI’s words from his 1967 encyclical letter, Populorum Progressio, “is not simply the absence of warfare.” Rather, “it is fashioned by efforts directed day after day toward the establishment of the ordered universe willed by God, with a more perfect form of justice among men [sic].” It is achieved and secured only by a willingness to forgive the sins inflicted in the past and to be reconciled in spite of on-going differences. Difficult in any individual’s life, this is a monumental challenge on a national scale, hardly made easier by the sheer scale of the violence and political disorder that covered Europe during its second ‘Thirty Years War’.

It is this vision of development based on peace (Populorum Progressio specifically called development “the New Name for Peace”), itself based on reconciliation and forgiveness that is needed today. No-one should imagine the eye-watering debts of the southern European states can be swept under the continental carpet, or that they are anything but the result of sin, of states who borrowed too much, and banks that lent too readily.

But nor should we imagine that Europe will be able trace a path to the future that eschews any form of forgiveness and reconciliation in this area. That needn’t mean a wholesale write-down, but it does gesture towards the kind of far-sighted renegotiation that was present in Europe’s earlier years.

About the authors

Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos. He is the author of several Theos reports and a number of books, including Darwin and God (SPCK, 2009) and Freedom and Order: History, Politics and the English Bible (Hodder and Stoughton, 2011) and most recently Atheists: The Origin of the Species (Bloomsbury). He is Visiting Research Fellow at the Faiths and Civil Society Unit, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Ben Ryan is a Researcher at Theos. He first joined Theos as an intern in September 2013 and graduated to a researcher in early 2014. He read Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Cambridge and also has an MSc in European Studies from the LSE European Institute. He is the author of A Very Modern Ministry: Chaplaincy in the UK.

The Theos report A Soul for the Union will be published later this year