Ode to Utopia

On revolutionary ideas and their value outside the candle-lit student kitchen.

Anna Hatzius Sarramona

Children are dreamers. If they had their way, we would live in houses made of candy and bedtime would be banned. As we grow older, we learn that too much sugar leads to cardiovascular disease and eight hours of sleep is a privilege to be cherished. Suddenly it’s all about George Orwell. And what happens to our utopias? ‘Utopian’ becomes synonymous with naïve; it reads as an insult. The Everyone foundation, however, is turning things around by reclaiming utopianism to its advantage. The result is a proposal that has the power to revolutionize the European Union.

It is the end of June in Berlin and a group of high EU officials take the stage of the European House. Among them, Katarina Barley, vice President of the European Parliament, and Anna Lührmann, German representative to the Council. And, as the only non-politician, Ferdinand von Schirach, a former lawyer and one of today’s most successful authors in Germany. In 2021, he published the book Jeder Mensch (in English: Everyone), in which he proposes to add six new articles to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU. He argues that, due to the global nature of today’s challenges, they cannot be sufficiently addressed by domestic law, but rather require action on a European level.

Between the EU officials, von Schirach stands out. While Barley and Lührmann, both experienced politicians, come across as if they had practiced their sentences for months, von Schirach gets tangled up in his own words. He breaks up sentences halfway through and chooses a different angle. When he enthusiastically explains the six articles, he makes eye contact with Barley and Lührmann, almost as if engaging in a private conversation.

Five of the proposed articles are substantive in nature. They are intended to offer protection from climate change, misinformation, and inhumane working conditions in supply chains, and to control artificial intelligence and big data. The sixth article is the most ambitious one: it aims to make EU Fundamental Rights enforceable directly before the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU). Until now, EU citizens could only file fundamental rights complaints with their domestic courts and hope for referral to the CJEU. Von Schirach’s proposal would make the CJEU directly accessible to every EU citizen.

By June 2022, the project had collected more than 260,000 signatures. A foundation named after the book Everyone has been set up to gain more traction in Germany, as well as in other EU Member States, to which the project quickly expanded. Ferdinand von Schirach and other representatives of the foundation have been invited to present their ideas on TV and radio, at film festivals and university conferences. The project has noticeably struck a chord with EU citizens. But it also came under criticism, especially from the legal field.

Criticisms of Everyone focus less on individual articles – most EU citizens agree on the importance of these issues – instead, the project is criticized for being too unrealistic. In his column in the Spiegel, former judge Thomas Fischer compares it to a student essay on how the world would be a better place. The debate between von Schirach and the EU politicians seems like a clash with reality. For every enthusiastic impulse by von Schirach, there is a well-rehearsed “it’s not that easy”.

Admittedly, at the moment the project is still far from being realized. An extension of the Charter of Fundamental Rights falls under the Treaty Revision Procedure set out in article 48 TEU. According to the article, the Council can convene a so-called European Convention by simple majority, which would prepare a concrete proposal. Currently, support for a Convention among Members of the Council is low. And even if a majority was reached, the Convention’s proposal would have to be unanimously adopted by all 27 EU Member States, as well as ratified under national law. The more than 250,000 supporters of Everyone are in no way a guarantee of success. After all, the project depends on the requirement of unanimity.

“The question is therefore not whether the project is utopian – in fact, the members of the foundation, many of them experienced lawyers, are the first to underline the utopian nature of the proposal.”

In an interview with Entr’acte magazine, Dr. Bijan Moini, a renowned lawyer and board member of Everyone, differentiates the utopian character of the project into two aspects. On the one hand, the goal of reshaping the Charter of Fundamental Rights can, due to the unanimity requirement, be described as utopian. On the other hand, the legal enforcement of the articles, even after their entry into force, is utopian in the sense that having a right to something is not yet a guarantee that this right will ‘come true’. For example: although the first article of the German constitution declares the inviolability of human dignity, it is still violated every day. Laws exist because humans are prone to breaking them. A society without murders would not need any homicide laws. At the same time, homicide laws certainly do not prevent murder. In this sense, legislation is always utopian, for it merely provides a rulebook for an ideal society. (Ideal, of course, in the opinion of those who made the law.) What Bijan Moini describes as the first utopian aspect, namely the difficulty to revise EU primary law, is what gives Everyone its particularly utopian character. Does this mean that Everyone should steer away from its utopian goals and adopt a more realistic approach? Could a utopia not survive outside of the candle-lit student kitchen?

Oscar Wilde once wrote that progress is the realization of utopias. Interestingly, history shows that human progress was often the result of previous utopias. In a German philosophy podcast, von Schirach points out that major declarations, such as declarations of independence or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, never represented how society was, but rather how people wanted it to be. During the French Revolution, in a time when citizens were everything but free, Lafayette wrote the Declaration of Rights of Man and of the Citizen. So if it is necessary to be utopian in order to set progress in motion, why do so many people criticize the utopian character of Everyone and refuse to endorse it?

Utopias require imagination. In Utopia for Realists, Rutger Bregman points out that utopian ideals are lacking because we cannot imagine anything better than what exists. He is not suggesting that we are satisfied with everything in the world. What he is saying is that we do not recognize the systemic root of our dissatisfaction. Systemic problems like poverty are seen as individual problems. Just as we see the problem in the clothing brand producing under inhumane working conditions rather than acknowledging the errors of a legal system that allows it. Once we recognize a pattern and see the big picture, we can imagine a better EU.

A utopia is by definition distant from current reality. It goes without saying that a campaign without utopia would certainly give a sense of achievement in the short term. However, in the long run, no great change would occur. A campaign without utopia can only provoke change within the frame of the current status quo. It looks at the state of affairs and asks where it is possible to adjust it. A utopian campaign like Everyone, on the other hand, asks what the EU should look like and what must be changed to get there.

Everyone’s utopia is a strong, united Europe with a legal system that protects every citizen from modern challenges. What needs to be changed to achieve this goal is the Charter of Fundamental Rights, its application and the general awareness of these rights. If we understand Everyone less as a project aimed at extending the Charter by six new rights and more as an encouragement to rethink Europe, we will better understand its value. In other words: we must measure the success of Everyone not by the speed with which the six new articles are enacted, but rather by the impetus it gives to the transformation of the EU. For utopia is not a blueprint. It does not give definite answers or solutions, but can, as Bregman puts it, ask the right questions. Everyone encourages EU citizens to wake up their inner child and to think about their utopias. It might not be a house made of candy we dream of, but maybe a city powered by renewable energies.