Bridging Commonsense: Pragmatic Metaphors and the ‘Schengen Laboratory’

Abstract

The French foreign minister Robert Schuman famously presented the plan for the European Coal and Steel Community, the cornerstone of the European Union (EU) project, as a ‘leap into the dark’. This expression suggests that the decision involved an element of doubt and uncertainty. Hence even the EU was not, at least initially, the purely technocratic exercise that it is generally portrayed to be. More generally, Schuman’s reference to ‘a leap into the dark’ reflects a recurrent scenario that visionary decision-makers encounter at crucial historical junctures.¹ What they are pondering is not just a change in policy, but rather a more radical transformation, a shift away from the taken-for-granted assumptions and practices that hitherto have characterized a particular policy field. This development entails a jump from what is known, firm ground, into unchartered waters. The decision to create a supranational entity such as the European Community (EC) in postwar Europe certainly falls into this category of ‘epochal events’, as it challenged what was until then the accepted ‘nationalist’ conception of governance based on the absolute primacy of state sovereignty. In this sense, the emergence of the Community as a post-national political and economic entity was also one of the earliest and most visible expressions of the set of processes we generally refer to as ‘globalization’.