Conceptualizing Politics

ultilevel governance includes the permanent interplay of twenty-
eight (in 2016) national governments and parliaments and innumerable regional 
instances, represented in the Council of Regions. It is, in principle, necessary in 
order to regulate a single market, which requires a certain amount of uniform 
rules protecting everybody’s legitimate interest, though the Eurobureaucracy in 
Brussels sometimes indulges in pathological over-regulation. On the other hand, it 
determines a very slow process of legislation and regulation, with too much veto 
power given to single actors, in particular national governments, in matters requir-
ing unanimity and not legally entrusted to the EU by the Treaties such as foreign, 
defence, internal security and economic policy.
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 A shift from multilevel govern-
ance largely operated by diplomatic and bureaucratic actors to a more determinate 
political leadership is unlikely to be chosen by unanimous consent of the twenty-
eight member states, and could be obtained only by a coalition of the willing (for 
example, the six original founders: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg 
and the Netherlands), capable of enduring – even more after the English decided 
to walk out – an eventual paralysis or break-up of the Union.
Having given priority to the economy, the ‘peace through prosperity’ path cho-
sen for the pacification of Europe has left as structural legacy the tension between 
the market regulating function of the EC/EU (privileged by countries such as the 
UK and Denmark) and its inevitable development towards a post-national polity, 
supported by Germany, Italy, the Iberian countries and only half-heartedly France.
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This odd beast with two natures struggles to assume the full political actorness 
that the world, and in particular, neighbours would expect from an economic and 
cultural giant, often leaving a vacuum that is not favourable to keeping or restor-
ing peace to the world. A peace-setting function was still exerted by the EU in 
the 1990s, as after the collapse of the Soviet Empire the former satellite countries 
were prevented from entering into nationalistic clashes by the will to enter the EU 
having satisfied the Copenhagen accession criteria of 1993. The accession of ten 

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122  World politics and the future of politics
Eastern countries in 2004, which on the one hand watered down the cohesion of 
the Union, was, on the other hand, a successful case of ‘structural foreign policy’, 
the instrument mainly used by the EU, which lacks autonomous military power, for 
conflict prevention through integration of neighbouring and economic incentives 
to developing countries.
As early as 1946, Winston Churchill encouraged European leaders to ‘re-create 
the European family in a regional structure called, it may be, the United States 
of Europe’, however, not including the UK that had to remain the leader of the 
British Commonwealth.
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 This process has granted the continent seventy years of 
peace at the time of writing, with the appalling exception of the Yugoslav wars of 
1992–1995, as the EC/EU and its member states – along with the UN – proved 
unable to stand firm against murderous warlords, and the attempted genocide of 
Bosnian Muslims was stopped only by the military initiative taken by US President 
Bill Clinton in August 1995.
The ‘success story EU’, which is undeniable, has blind spots and – what is more – 
its future remains unpredictable in the midst of the revival of nationalism and pop-
ulism in several countries, first of all the now departing UK; this is aggravated by 
the lack of leadership and vision in Brussels as well as in the national capitals under 
post-recession problems, the pressure of mass migration from the failed or semi-failed 
states on the southern Mediterranean rim and Africa, lastly by the new role played by 
Russia and possibly the USA under the Trump presidency. Nonetheless, the European 
process remains to date the most advanced case of regionalism as continental pacifica-
tion via economic and political integration, which makes it an unprecedented quasi-
polity, far away from both world government and traditional local confederation. 
Even if the centre of world politics and economy has moved towards the east, the lot 
of the European Union in the coming years and decades, now endangered by a num-
ber of external and internal factors, will impact heavily – positively or negatively – on 
world peace and the shaping of political structures around the planet.
* * *
The European experiment is important also from a theoretical point of view. Along 
with other cases of institutionalised interstate cooperation, it disproves the neo-
realist fixation on the nation state as the sole substantial actor of international 
politics, to which alone human groups in search of protection and interest repre-
sentation can turn to; this actor, driven only by its momentary strategy of utility 
maximization and relying only on its own strength, makes anarchy the permanent 
axis of international relations. Others oppose that international anarchy is reduced, 
though not eliminated, by the frames of formal and informal cooperation rules 
(also called by some international regimes) on which states agree for the advantages 
deriving from it and to which they mostly stick to instead of constantly freeriding, 
because their expectations and action patterns are more and more shaped by those 
rules and institutions. This neo-institutionalism in international relations (some add 
‘liberal’, to mark its difference from realist foreign policy as exemplified by Henry 

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The states  123
Kissinger or, on a lower level, the neocons around George W. Bush) has been able 
to explain phenomena such as the European process or the spread of political 
and economic international institutions much better than classical realism or neo- 
realism did.
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 It is not a vindication of idealism, scil. of norm-driven behaviour for 
the sake of justice, in international politics, but it fosters understanding and stimu-
lates the forces that may shape state behaviour along lines of peace and cooperation 
to everyone’s advantage. While states are not on their way to becoming angels, they 
have made some progress in understanding that wars such as the Second World War, 
let alone nuclear war, are too costly, while regulated coexistence and cooperation 
bring more advantages than an unattainable military victory. Essential to this pos-
ture is the notion that world politics is not necessarily a zero-sum game, in which 
the gains of the winner are all made of the losses of the losers, because cooperative 
interaction can make all parties win something. States are not dropping self-interest 
as guidelines, they are reinterpreting it in a way adequate to the new circumstances 
of world politics, which will be further examined in the next chapter.
Notes
  1  Plural of polis.
  2  There is a nuance of complacency in the similar English saying ‘all is fair in love and war’. 
The panhellenic Olympic games however took place in any case, interrupting the state 
of war.
 3  Two later masterpieces of European literature contain vivid pictures of episodes from 
that Great War: Friedrich Schiller’s (1759–1805) Wallenstein trilogy (the political, reli-
gious and personal intrigues behind the battles) and Alessandro Manzoni’s (1785–1873)