Who is the European Prince?: A More or Less Machiavellian Meditation on the European Union

The distinguished Italian economist and politician Tommaso Padoa Schioppa once spoke of European Monetary Union (EMU) as a “collective prince.” The essay takes this observation as starting point to reflect on princes not as individual leaders, but as institutions engaged in projects of political integration (which according to Machiavelli, could absorb collective wisdom over time and also prove more flexible than individuals). In particular, it is asked whether The Prince might shed light both on the history and the prospects of European polity-building. It is argued that the architects of Western European politics after 1945 prioritized vivere sicuro over any conception of vivere libero by institutionalizing a model of “constrained democracy.” Various “institutional princes,” the European Commission in particular, complemented this process at a European level. Finally, the article returns to the intriguing—and at first sight so counterintuitive—notion of a monetary system as Europe’s prince. Against the background of the Eurocrisis (generally considered an existential threat to the European Union as a whole), some possible Machiavellian futures will be sketched out, in particular a new version of a collective prince and, alternatively, a strategy that trusts what Machiavelli called tumulti—ongoing political conflict—ultimately to generate a more robust form of political unity. This latter strategy also puts its faith in popular judgment in a way that very much goes against the main currents of political developments in postwar Europe.