A divided Union

Reuters

The European Union has achieved much, but it may now be pushing up against its limits, says Gideon Rachman

FOR many centuries Europe was the world's most powerful, prosperous and technologically advanced continent. That period of European cultural and political dominance came to a definitive end with the second world war. In 1945 Germany was defeated and in ruins; France was half-starved and humiliated; Britain was bankrupt and on the point of losing its empire; Spain was a backward, isolated dictatorship; and the countries of central and eastern Europe had been absorbed into a Soviet empire. Nobody would have guessed that Europe was at the beginning of a new golden age.

In 2004, a continent that had been wracked by war for centuries can look back on almost 60 years spent largely at peace. A continent that lay in economic ruins in 1945 is now prosperous as never before. A continent that in 1942 could list only four proper democracies is almost entirely democratic. A continent that was divided by the iron curtain until 1989 now enjoys free movement of people and common political institutions for 25 countries, stretching from the Atlantic coast of Portugal to the borders of Russia.

This new period of peace and prosperity has coincided with the rise of a new form of political and economic organisation. The founding fathers of what is now the European Union—Jean Monnet, a French civil servant, and Robert Schuman, a French foreign minister of the 1950s—were convinced that the origins of conflict in Europe lay in the continent's system of competing nation-states. As Schuman put it, “Because Europe was not united, we have had war.” Those founding fathers were determined to build a new union in Europe that would banish conflict for good. Their building-blocks were economic, but their goals were political.

Starting with agreements between six countries on the pooling of coal and steel resources in 1951 and moving on to the creation of a common market in 1957, the EU has gradually spread into a plethora of activities. Today it is hard to think of a field of public policy in which it is not active. It is involved in everything from foreign policy to immigration, and is reckoned to be responsible for around half of all new laws passed in its member states.

The people who run the European Commission in Brussels like to believe that this golden age of peace and prosperity is directly linked to the rise of the EU. Yet this view is often contested. Peace in Europe, it is argued, could equally be credited to the presence of American troops on European soil, and prosperity to the same causes of economic growth as in the United States or Asia, such as rising productivity and increasing trade. As for freedom, the revolutions in central Europe and Spain, Portugal and Greece were not led from Brussels.

Indeed, say critics of the EU, far from promoting peace, prosperity and freedom, it now threatens all of these achievements. In Britain, for example, Eurosceptics see a direct threat to British self-government and democracy in the many laws emanating from institutions in Brussels over which the British electorate has no control. In Britain and elsewhere, critics also argue that the EU is increasingly responsible for a tide of unnecessary regulation that is engulfing the European economy. And some believe that its overweening ambition may end up causing exactly the sort of conflicts that it has been seeking to eradicate. Martin Feldstein, an eminent American economist, has argued that the launch of a single European currency could cause political tensions culminating in war.

But for now the EU is riding high, with more and more countries seeking to join it. Having started with just six members in 1957—Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands—the EU now has 25. Its biggest ever expansion was completed in May this year with the addition of ten new members, mainly from the former Soviet block. The Poles, the Spanish and others undoubtedly won their freedom without any help from Brussels. But they all saw joining the EU as a way of consolidating democratic gains and spurring economic and political modernisation. For much the same reasons Turkey and the Balkan countries are now waiting in the wings.

Enlargement should be enough of a challenge to keep the Brussels machine humming for the foreseeable future. But oddly enough, many of the most ardent believers in the creation of a European federation see enlargement as an unwelcome distraction from the EU's most urgent business: to develop into a real political union. Enlargement and political union—“widening” and “deepening” the EU—have often been portrayed as opposing courses, but in fact in the past five years they have moved ahead simultaneously. On January 1st 2002, 12 EU countries ditched their national currencies and adopt a new single currency, the euro; and in June 2004, the 25 EU governments agreed on the Union's first ever written constitution.

Over the past decade Europe has displayed a daring political imagination

Over the past decade Europe, a continent often accused of sclerotic caution, has displayed a daring political imagination that has produced a run of successes. Javier Solana, the EU's foreign-policy chief, explains: “Our philosophy is jump in the pool, there is always water there.”

The trouble with that kind of philosophy is that it can eventually lead to a nasty accident, and indeed the European project looks increasingly troubled. Economically, the EU is falling further behind the United States, and can only envy the dynamism of China or India. Politically, its members have been at each other's throats over Iraq, the management of the euro and the constitution. Perhaps most dangerously of all, the EU is plagued by a lack of popular understanding and enthusiasm.

The survey will argue that many of the EU's current difficulties stem from its past successes. In post-war Europe, achieving peace and re-establishing prosperity seemed like urgent and difficult tasks that required political sacrifices. Now, though, long years of peace and prosperity in western Europe, together with the collapse of the Soviet threat, make further European integration seem much less urgent. Indeed, the very depth of the political integration achieved so far has caused something of a backlash as the EU has gained new powers that threaten deeply rooted national traditions. Sometimes this has been in important fields such as frontier controls and fiscal policy, but sometimes, too, it has been in areas that irritate by their triviality.

The post-war gains in European prosperity may also have begun to create their own problems. Rich countries such as Germany and France were encouraged to develop elaborate welfare states which are becoming increasingly unaffordable as populations age. Before the creation of a single EU market and a single currency, such problems could be regarded as mainly national in character. But now they can cause tensions across the Union.

Enlargement is another example of a success that makes the EU a riskier place. By increasing the diversity of political interests and views within the Union, it has made them much harder to contain within a single framework.

European federalists—the heirs to Monnet and Schuman—are well aware of these problems. Some believe that a new impetus for European unity can be provided by trying to build up the EU into a new superpower—a global force that can equal the United States. But so far any moves in that direction have served only to deepen divisions within the EU, in particular over attitudes to America.

The EU's new constitution represents another effort to preserve and deepen European unity, but it too could backfire. For the constitution to come into force, it must be approved by all 25 EU countries. At least 11 of them are likely to hold referendums, and in a few of those, notably Britain, the verdict is likely to be negative. Such an outcome could well provoke a crisis within the Union.

This survey will conclude that the EU may indeed split. But a split need not be a disaster. It could lead to a multi-layered EU in which different countries adopt different levels of political integration and experiment with different economic models. If the EU were preserved as an over-arching framework, it could actually benefit from such diversity. But there is also a darker, if less likely possibility. A split in the EU could cause Europe once again to divide into rival power blocks. That could threaten what most agree is the Union's central achievement: peace in Europe.

Peace in our time

Europe has largely avoided war for nearly six decades, but the European Union no longer gets the credit

AFP

Mitterrand and Kohl made history

IN THE whole of Europe there is probably no more blood-soaked battlefield than Verdun. In 1916 some 800,000 French and German soldiers were killed or wounded, fighting inconclusively over a few square miles of territory near the Franco-German border. The young Charles de Gaulle was wounded three times and captured at Verdun. Louis Delors, a 21-year-old French private, suffered terrible injuries there and was almost killed by a German officer who was finishing off the French wounded with a pistol. In the 1990s his son, Jacques Delors, became the founding father of a monetary union of France, Germany and ten other European countries. Mr Delors's two great collaborators were Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor, whose father had also fought at Verdun, and François Mitterrand, the French president. In 1984 these two leaders, in a historic act of Franco-German reconciliation, walked hand in hand across the battlefield that had been a killing ground for so many young men from both countries.

Many of the European Union's most ardent supporters still see the EU as a crucial bulwark against the return of war to Europe. In pressing the case for monetary union, Mr Kohl argued that adopting the euro was ultimately a question of war and peace in Europe. When efforts to write a European constitution looked like stalling, Elmar Brok, a prominent German member of the EU's constitutional convention (and confidant of Mr Kohl), gave warning that if Europe failed to agree on a constitution, it risked sliding back into the kind of national rivalries that had led to the outbreak of the first world war.

Such arguments resonate particularly strongly among an older generation of French and German politicians, but also have wider currency. Timothy Garton Ash of St Antony's College, Oxford, one of Britain's most astute observers of European affairs, says in a recent book that the Union is needed “to prevent us falling back into the bad old ways of war and European barbarism which stalked the Balkans into the very last year of the last century.” Mr Garton Ash concedes that “we can never prove that a continent-wide collection of independent, fully sovereign European democracies would not behave in the same broadly pacific way without the existence of any European Union. Maybe they would, but would you care to risk it?”

Believers in the pacifying effects of the drive for European unity acknowledge the contributions to peace in post-war Europe made by American troops and by the spread of prosperity and democracy. But they argue that the EU has played the central role, by forcing European leaders to co-operate intensively and continuously, by proving that membership of the Union brings prosperity and by demanding that all EU countries adhere to basic principles of democracy, human rights and the peaceful resolution of disputes.

Seen in this light, EU enlargement is part of the same “peace project” that was initially centred on reconciliation between France and Germany. Countries that apply to join the EU first have to meet a set of basic democratic criteria, and have to put aside old territorial disputes. Eight former members of the Soviet block were admitted to the EU this year, and Romania and Bulgaria are lined up for entry in 2007. But the idea that enlargement of the European Union will inevitably resolve conflicts and spread freedom and democracy will face even bigger tests in future.

The European Commission in Brussels has already made it clear that all the Balkan countries are potentially eligible for membership, in the hope of encouraging them to make peace and introduce democratic reforms. Croatia, which earlier this year became the first major combatant in the Balkan wars to be formally accepted as a candidate for EU membership, had to step up its co-operation with the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague before negotiations became possible.

The EU was rightly castigated for its inability to prevent war in the Balkans in the 1990s, and many Europeans felt humiliated by the need for American military intervention to end the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo. But the EU is taking over the peacekeeping mission in Bosnia from NATO later this year in what will be the Union's biggest ever military operation. In the longer term, it is hoped, the prospect of EU membership may help to cement the fragile democracies and the peace settlements now in place across the Balkans.

A similarly ambitious logic is being applied to Turkey's aspirations to join the Union. Although many EU politicians and citizens are worried about admitting a large Muslim nation into the Union, the proponents of Turkish membership have the upper hand. Turkey is likely to be invited to start negotiations to join the EU later this year. Once again, the key arguments are about peace and the spread of freedom and democracy.

At a time when relations between the West and the Islamic world are so delicate, most EU leaders seem to feel that refusing to admit a large Islamic country into the Union would be seen as a disastrous confirmation of the “clash of civilisations”. European diplomats, for their part, hope that admitting Turkey to the EU will bring confirmation that Islam is not incompatible with western values. They point out with some pride that the prospect of EU membership has already driven forward reforms in Turkey such as increased political and civil rights for the Kurdish minority and the abolition of the death penalty.

Many citizens fear that rather than exporting stability, the EU will import instability

For geo-strategic thinkers sitting in foreign ministries in London, Paris and Berlin, the arguments for using the EU to spread peace and democratic stability seem compelling. But ordinary European citizens find them much less convincing. Many fear that rather than exporting stability, the EU will import instability. In western Europe, public debate about EU enlargement has tended to concentrate on fears about competition from low-cost labour and waves of immigration. So far such fears have proved containable, and the admission of the new members from central Europe has not caused too much of a fuss. But the new central European members, though poorer than the European average, are smallish (except for Poland), and all are predominantly Christian.

Turkey, which on current trends will have a larger population than any current EU member by 2020, is a different proposition. Because all EU citizens are free to live and work anywhere in the EU, there could be serious resistance to Turkish membership in France, Germany and the Netherlands, where the rapid growth of Muslim populations in the past 30 years is already a highly sensitive issue.

Even without such worries, the traditional arguments for European integration as a “peace project” have anyway been losing force with the passing years. The current generation of EU leaders still has some memories of the depredations of war in Europe. Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, never knew his father, who was killed in the second world war; Jacques Chirac, the French president, lived through the war as a child. But for most younger Europeans, the threat of war in western Europe now seems almost unimaginably remote.

The expansion of the EU beyond the original six also added new countries with different historical experiences. Although some Britons, such as Mr Garton Ash, take the threat of a recurrence of war in Europe seriously, the British have generally approached the Union in a very different spirit from the French and Germans. Whereas statesmen such as Monnet and Schuman considered the 1939-45 war as the final proof that traditional European political structures needed to be radically changed, the British tended to see it as a vindication of their own long-established democracy and as confirmation of their anti-continental prejudices. As Margaret Thatcher, a famously Eurosceptic British prime minister, remarked: “In my lifetime all our problems have come from mainland Europe and all the solutions from the English-speaking nations across the world.” The British are wary of dreams for political union in Europe. Unlike their French and German counterparts, British politicians have always wanted the EU to be above all about free trade.

As the EU has expanded, so Britain has become less isolated in its resistance to the idea that European unity is essential for the maintenance of peace. When in 2003 Sweden held a referendum on whether to join the euro, Goran Persson, the Swedish prime minister, used the peace argument, but watched it fall flat in a neutral country that has been at peace for nearly 200 years. The Swedes voted “no”. The new EU members in central Europe also bring a different perspective to the European Union. Whereas the traditional “builders of Europe” were suspicious of nationalism and keen to build up supranational institutions at the expense of the nation-state, many of the central Europeans are still joyfully re-asserting their own national identities after decades of Soviet domination.

Nonetheless, all these countries were eager to join the EU. They saw membership as an assertion of their European identity, as well as a ticket to prosperity and some protection against any threat from a resurgent Russia. But they are also much less enthusiastic than western European federalists about an “ever closer union” for Europe as spelled out in the Treaty of Rome. Vaclav Havel, the hero of the Velvet Revolution and former president of the Czech Republic, explains that for countries that have recently thrown off Soviet domination, “the concept of national sovereignty is something inviolable”.

For a variety of reasons, then, the most powerful traditional argument for European unity, peace, has been losing force. European federalists are beginning to look for new rationales for European unity.

E pluribus unum?

The pros and cons of becoming a superpower

Reuters

Birth of a nation?

IF EUROPEANS no longer feel that “ever closer union” is needed to avert war, what new project might unite them? For many European leaders the answer is obvious: the EU must strive to become a global power. In his opening address as president of Europe's constitutional convention in 2002, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, a long-serving former president of France, laid out his hopes: “If we succeed in 25 or 50 years...Europe's role in the world will have changed. It will be respected and listened to, not only as the economic power it already is, but as a political power which will talk on equal terms to the greatest powers on our planet.”

The constitution drawn up by Mr Giscard d'Estaing and his collaborators tries to advance this ambition. If and when it is ratified, the EU will have a “foreign minister” in charge of his own diplomatic corps. The constitution also commits the EU to the “progressive framing of a common defence policy”. The British and other nation-staters protest that all this sounds more impressive than it really is. The foreign minister will simply be a co-ordinator with a fancy title who will have no power to over-rule national foreign policies. Decisions about troop deployment will remain in the hands of national governments.

But the symbolism of choosing titles such as foreign minister and president for the EU's senior officials is both deliberate and significant. In foreign policy, as in so many other areas, the EU's powers tend to build up through a series of small steps, not in one massive leap. Ben Bot, the Dutch foreign minister, reflects that only 20 years ago EU ministers felt it would have been too controversial to have a formal discussion of foreign and security policy.

Yet even as Mr Giscard d'Estaing and his conventioneers laid out their plans for “ever closer union” in foreign affairs, events outside the conference chamber mocked their aspirations. The constitutional convention took place against the backdrop of bitter European divisions about the war in Iraq. With an anti-war camp led by France and Germany and a pro-war camp led by Britain and backed by Spain, Italy and Poland, the EU's hopes of a “common” foreign policy looked forlorn.

The Iraq dispute was disturbing not just because of its bitterness, but also because it revealed that the EU was split between two competing visions. One of them, most closely identified with France, is known as “multipolarity” or “Euro-nationalism”. In essence, it calls for the EU to become an independent actor on the world stage to counterbalance the United States. The other vision, most closely identified with Britain, is known as Atlanticism. This holds that the “western alliance”, forged in the cold war, remains vital today. Tony Blair, Britain's prime minister, argued that trying to build up Europe as a counterweight to the United States was a profoundly misguided and dangerous idea.

The very fact that the EU was divided over Iraq might have been expected to dishearten the Euro-nationalists, and initially it did. But many Euro-nationalists ultimately took heart from the Iraq crisis, for beneath the divisions between European governments they saw a fundamental unity in the anti-war sentiment of the European public. For example, although Spain's then prime minister, José María Aznar, supported the war, only 4% of the Spanish public agreed with him, and his party lost power at the subsequent election, albeit after a terrorist attack on Madrid just before polling day. Even in Britain a large majority of the public seemed opposed to the war.

After a slew of anti-war demonstrations across Europe on February 15th 2003, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former French finance minister and passionate pro-European, proclaimed: “On Saturday February 15th, a new nation was born on the street. This new nation is the European nation.” Mr Giscard d'Estaing also felt that the anti-war movement marked the birth of a “European public consciousness”.

The emotions stirred up by an impending war, although powerful, can also be ephemeral. But those who believe that there is enough common ground in time to underpin a united European approach to world affairs have other evidence to draw upon. A poll carried out in Europe for the German Marshall Fund of the United States earlier this year found widespread support for the idea that: “The European Union should become a superpower like the United States.” Not unexpectedly, 83% of French respondents and 73% of Germans agreed, but so did over 50% in countries whose governments had supported the Iraq war, such as the Netherlands, Poland and even Britain (see chart 1).

Support for the idea of Europe as a superpower does not necessarily translate into support for automatic opposition to the United States. Asked if they supported European superpower status to “compete more effectively with the US”, only 36% of French and 37% of British respondents agreed. Support in Germany and the Netherlands was even weaker. But large majorities in most of the countries supported European superpower status in order “to co-operate more effectively with the US” in dealing with international problems.

This points to a less aggressive version of Euro-nationalism which holds that Europe alone is too small to be able to influence a world soon to be dominated not only by the United States but also by India and China, superpowers with populations of over a billion each. As Danuta Hubner, the new European commissioner from Poland, puts it: “We should not forget that collectively we make up only about 11% of the world's population.” Seen in that light, Europeans need to group together to defend common interests.

Euro-nationalists believe that there is a distinctive European approach to the world that needs to be defended. Europeans, they argue, are more individualist than Asians but more collectivist than Americans. Opinion polls show that Europeans are generally less religious than Americans, less inclined to believe that war is sometimes necessary to achieve justice, and more inclined to think that success or failure in the world is determined by luck or social forces rather than personal effort. Such attitudes have political consequences. They mean that domestically Europeans are more likely to support a “European social model” with generous welfare provision; and that internationally Europeans are more inclined to express support for multilateral institutions such as the United Nations or the International Criminal Court. Euro-nationalists hope that in time an EU foreign policy can develop on the model of European trade policy, where the EU already acts as a block and is taken just as seriously as America.

Yet there are strong reasons for doubting that an attempt to turn the EU into a political superpower will provide it with a fresh impetus. Indeed, it is just as likely to end up splitting the Union.

True, the opinion polls do suggest a degree of consensus across the EU about the desirability of aspiring to superpower status. But that raises the awkward question of how to deal with the existing superpower. Undoubtedly discussion of the United States in France on the one hand and Britain and Poland on the other has a different quality to it. British left-wingers may rail against “that cowboy Bush”, but they do not believe that America represents some sort of existential threat to their country, whereas in France that feeling permeates the debate.

Although some leading European politicians seized on the anti-war demonstrations to claim the birth of a European nation, others were much more sceptical. Jacques Delors, for example, dismisses the polling evidence as much less significant than the history and the deep structures which he believes bind Britain to America. Similarly, Hans-Gert Pöttering, the leader of the dominant centre-right group in the European Parliament, has said that: “Defining Europe in anti-American terms could destroy Europe.”

There is also the uncomfortable reality that rivalries between EU countries are often at least as serious as any rift across the Atlantic. Indeed, the European split over Iraq was arguably as much about a struggle for control of the EU as it was about Iraq itself. The Spanish government's decision to align itself with Britain and the United States reflected Mr Aznar's belief that his country had too often allowed itself to be dominated by a Franco-German axis within Europe. And when Jacques Chirac, the French president, lashed out at central European countries that supported the war, saying they had “missed a good opportunity to shut up”, he was reflecting French dismay at the realisation that in the newly enlarged EU the French cockerel might no longer rule the roost.

But it is not just rivalries within the EU that will continue to bedevil efforts to turn the Union into a coherent global power. It is also Europeans' continued ambivalence about the whole idea of exercising power on the world stage. Probe a little deeper into the apparent support in the opinion polls for the EU becoming a superpower, and it quickly becomes more ambiguous.

For example, Europeans are distinctly reluctant to spend more money on defence, and markedly unenthusiastic about using military force. The 2003 poll for the German Marshall Fund asked respondents whether they thought that in some conditions war was necessary to obtain justice. In America 55% agreed strongly that it was, but in France and Germany only 12% felt that way. These public attitudes are reflected in EU countries' low levels of deployable military force compared with America.

Some Europeans argue that the EU's opportunity lies in becoming a new sort of superpower, using economic weight and skilful diplomacy as a form of “soft power”. They point out that the Union has managed to bring about deep changes in the behaviour of its neighbours through EU enlargement. The carrot of EU membership is an extraordinarily effective foreign-policy tool; one Brussels official jokes that: “Once a country applies to join the EU, it becomes our slave.”

But it cannot be applied to countries without any European connections, and there is nothing much else in the toolbox. Eurocrats like to note, for example, that the EU spends far more on foreign aid than does the United States; but all the money that the Union has thrown at the Middle East, and the Palestinian Authority in particular, has done little to give the Europeans any leverage there.

Observers from outside Europe can sometimes shine a cruel light on the EU's pretensions. Max Boot, an American neo-conservative at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, does not mince his words: “By the traditional measures of power, Europe is in decline: economic growth is anaemic, military budgets are in free fall, the fertility rate is declining.” He is putting his finger on a real problem. It is not just that Europeans are divided and reluctant to spend on military force; it is also that Europe's share of the world economy is shrinking as the United States constantly outstrips European growth and the Asian economies surge ahead.

Slow economic growth in the EU not only makes it harder to project European power. It also threatens the second pillar of the European project: the promise that European unity will deliver prosperity.