[332.1] BEYOND NATIONALISM AND CENTRALISM

[O]ur thinking about the nature of the European Union can be enriched by the kind of mutually nourishing pluralism [arising from] the theological language of our [Lutheran and Anglican]traditions. The society of states needs just the same balance between supposed autonomy and competing self-interests on the one hand and bureaucratic, rootless centralism on the other as we need in the life of the Church. And if we are to avoid centralising strategies for economic and social justice, we have to foster, as Christians, a vision of society within each state that will realise mutual responsibility and a vision of the community of states that will produce structures of co-operation and consultation, in economic life especially, capable of addressing the crises that no isolated state can cope with – the needs and rights of migrants, the control of the trade in arms, large and small, ecological pressures, the management of disease prevention as a cross-national concern and so on. If we believe in a common hope for humanity and in the possibility and imperative of mutuality in working towards this hope, we as people of faith are bound to be concerned with transnational structures in some degree, not out of utopian convictions about transnational government, but in order to discover how we specifically and concretely take responsibility for all the things that are beyond any definition of national interest alone. (Rowan Williams, from his recent Frieburg Lecture)

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