Market-State or Commonwealth? Europe’s Christian heritage and the future of the European polity

The euro crisis is changing the foundations and finalities of the European Union. Amidst the combined banking and sovereign debt crisis, eurozone members have begun to put in place a banking and a fiscal union that will increasingly fuse centralised state power with an increasingly interdependent single market. In their current configuration, the single market and single currency undermine the principles of solidarity (providing mutual assistance to the most needy among Europe’s peoples and nations) and subsidiarity (self-government at the most appropriate level in accordance with the dignity of the person and human flourishing). Connected with this priority of the economic over the social is a tendency to subordinate interpersonal relationships to the central state and the global market that converge at the expense of intermediary institutions such as professional associations, trade unions, universities, free hospitals, friendly societies, artisanal producers, manufacturing and trading guilds, and religious communities. Thus the European integration and enlargement processes are part of a wider logic of disembedding the economy from society and re-embedding social relations in economic transactions, as Karl Polanyi showed. This chapter argues that the European project blends bureaucratic collectivisation with commercial commodification that Catholic Social Teaching and cognate traditions in Anglicanism and Eastern Orthodoxy reject as false alternatives. The European ‘market-state’ undermines Europe’s shared cultural identity and hollows out the universal values derived from the Christian synthesis of ancient with biblical virtues on which vibrant democracies and market economies depend. The chapter also argues the, to some, surprising thesis that Europe’s Christian heritage is a source of both social solidarity and religious pluralism that offers key resources to shape the future of the European polity across the wider Europe and the whole world. Section 1 traces