Chapter 7: Actual Democracy and a United Europe of States: A Case Study of Austerity and Protest in the Republic of Ireland

They call it the Kissinger Question. “If I want to call Europe, who do I call?” Henry Kissinger reportedly remarked in the 1970s, when he was U.S. Secretary of State. At the time, there was no European Union, and there was far less economic, fiscal, and political integration than today. If Kissinger was confused and ambivalent about the lack of centralized power in the European Economic Community, the precursor to the European Union (EU), one can only imagine his confusion with today’s expanded and crisis-ridden union.

The Kissinger Question is a good one. The political and fiscal union in Europe, motivated by a desire not to repeat the mistakes leading to the two world wars, rests on centuries of interrelated but distinct national beliefs, values, traditions, and morals—factors that lie at the foundation of economic practices and attitudes toward democracy. The cultural psychological differences across the EU reveal some foundational issues at the heart of the current financial Eurozone crisis, with examples from how we can understand, for example, the variable response to Syrian refugees and the controversial decision of Britain to vote to leave the EU. This is because cultural psychological processes, including moral reasoning, lie at the foundation of people’s understandings of, and reactions toward, these emerging social phenomena. Understanding cultural psychological processes of denizens within the EU can help us comprehend current and future crises as well as larger issues concerning democratic processes within the region.