Jean Monnet and the ethics of ratcheting

It is now the season for the UK’s Party Conferences, and a couple of days I briefly attended the Labour conference, to a fringe meeting on Europe. The name Jean Monnet was mentioned, along with his ratcheting tactics, so I felt this was an interesting ethical issue to discuss.

Now the EU would say that it is committed to (a) democracy, (b) ending wars, (c) the market economy. But some would say that the priorities are the reverse of the above. Whatever we may think, all paths to Euro-federalism seem to originate with Jen Monnet (1888-1979), and Prof. Tim Congdon, in his review of Leach, Rodney (2004) A Concise Encyclopedia of the European Union. 4th edition, states:

"Leach favours the cooperative and democratic vision of Europe, but he believes that - at present - he is on the losing side. In his words, the federalists and bureaucrats have "won the upper hand", not because of the merits of their case than because of "the forethought and subtlety of the Common Market's architects". In particular, Jean Monnet is credited with the clever tactic of incrementalism, of never going backwards but always adding small, ratchet-like steps on the path to union."

Now this concept of ratcheting reminds me of the diagram in my last article on “Survival Society, Self-fulfilment Society and Quixotic Society” (Issue No 57):

The flow chart does in fact depict the interaction of survival society and self-fulfilment society: as with rock-climbing you ensure that each move across the rock-face is reversible. You only move to a new position if you are in a safe position already, and you only stay in the new position if it is safe. And this is clearly the opposite in principle to ratcheting: you make sure that when people advance there is no going back. Now the ‘ratcheteers’ would reply that we have a totally different situation: we are trying to move from a Quixotic Society to a Survival Society, where in the example of the EEC/EU, our first priority is that we wish to avoid wars.

Now this is to some extent understandable: Jean Monnet’s career dates back to 1916, when at the ‘ripe’ age of 26 he pressed on the French PM a scheme of war-time co-operation. Nowadays we think of the Nazis as the archetype warmongers, but in those days the French wanted a war – partly to avenge the 1871-2 Franco-Prussian War – as long as they didn’t start it. And in August 1943 Monnet declared to the French National Liberation Committee:

There will be no peace in Europe, if the states are reconstituted on the basis of national sovereignty... The countries of Europe are too small to guarantee their peoples the necessary prosperity and social development. The European states must constitute themselves into a federation...

But what becomes apparent is that in the early days, when France was much stronger than the defeated Germany, France wanted access to German resources. France initially wanted to detach the coal-rich Ruhr region, and in the face of American opposition to this, only consented to the establishment of the Federal Republic (West Germany) when they agreed to placing the Ruhr under allied control. And then they only stopped dismantling German industry when Germany agreed to the European Coal and Steel Industry.So when we view all this we realise that the Survival Society being created was very much French Survival Society before German ascendancy took effect.

But we now see that the quest for Survival Society, be it French, German, EEC or EU was in effect Quixotic Society: the measures to bypass or manipulate democracy meant that a bureaucracy was being built up which could impose its own agenda, and we certainly see this in the imposition of the prevailing neo-liberal policies: a philosophy of institutionalised Quixotry that fuelled Nazism during the depression, and now fuels neo-Nazism in Greece. In effect the attempts to bring in measures to avoid wars may well be counter-productive, and maybe Leach’s vision of a co-operative and democratic Europe is the right one after all. Indeed it is said that the only time two democratic countries have been at war was Britain and Finland.

Martin Prior

Survival Society, Self-Fulfilment Society and Quixotic Society

Well, I have just returned from a Linguistics Colloquium in Spain, where I gave a paper on Description Logic, at the University of Alcalà de Henares, the place of birth of Miguel Cervantes, author of Don Quixote. So why not talk about Quixotism or Quixoticism or perhaps Quixotry for this week’s Issue? Not least when I have only just come back, so having little time to prepare this paper.

Well, in my articles on Liberalism, I was working up to the issue of the freedom to do as one wishes, so long as nobody else suffers. This differs from economic liberalism, which in its extreme form justifies suffering at the altar of the market. In fact a society has to balance the interests of survival and self-fulfilment in an environment where one doesn’t necessarily know how much activities freely pursued causes suffering for others.

We might capture this uncertainty by a risk pyramid: here we show safe risks at the bottom and the more speculative at the top. Some people say that men are expected to take risks while women provide a more secure environment, perhaps a source of role differentiation, for better or worse:

Here we can see that survival will relate to a lower level of risk than self-fulfilment. A right-winger may look at this and say “doesn’t this prove that survival is more important than self-fulfilment?” Well, we might also say that we need security for the weak and vulnerable, not just for major investors.

But along with Tony Blair, we know that there can be a Third Way: and that is of course The Quixotic Society. This is the immediate reaction to events as you choose to see them. And of course this is what the market economy is all about: you are focused on the immediate equation of supply and demand, and for each of these you are free to act according to your whim, whether this is sound or not.

And by satisfying the immediate need to equate supply and demand, one can ignore how much one exhaust resources to extinction. In this regard, windmills need not be at all risky, since they use a renewable source.

Well, to balance all these factors, I shall post here a flow chart which I designed recently, which sort of marries all three considerations. At least, sticking to the flow-chart balances survival and self-fulfilment. And the Third Way tends to break the rule: represented mainly by the amber, it is not a happy medium: it is OUT!

The third choice also leads to the amber light: perhaps it is for those who tilt at windmills knowing they are windmills. They may or may not be Sancho Panzas.

But it is the essence of modern conservatism (and others) to create scapegoats. Tilting at windmills! As the great man himself said to Sancho Panza:

“Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless.”

My bold: in effect, Quixotic Society claims to be opposed to its enemies and what they stand for, but perhaps it is the contrary - it nevertheless needs them.

Martin Prior


From Philosophy Takeaway Newsletter - 57