In Europe (119 page)

After their introduction, French writer Régis Debray referred to the new euro banknotes as ‘play money’, printed for a virtual community known as ‘Euroland’. It is, indeed, anything but the coinage of a political union with a sense of what it is and where it wants to go. For too long, European unification was a technocratic project set up by idealistic pioneers and soon taken over by businessmen, bureaucrats and government leaders, with only the occasional starry-eyed statesman to shake things up again. The new European cooperative venture was, in that way, largely a top-down affair. From the very start, of course, the common market was a major goal. And in the long term, of course, many European entrepreneurs would be lost if Europe did not develop into a single, huge, common domestic market. But the creation of a free European market has increasingly edged out the original objective, which is to provide a structure for peace.

The European project was and is closely interwoven with the phenomenon of globalisation. As early as 1919, the economist John Maynard Keynes described how a person in London, drinking his morning cup of tea in bed, could order almost any product in the world, in the certainty that it would be delivered to his doorstep as quickly as possible. That international interweaving has since developed to what a person of that day would have considered unbelievable proportions. According to some,
the EU played – and continues to play – a major role in curbing and controlling these chaotic international networks and concentrations of power. In the eyes of others, however, the EU is very much an expression of the kind of globalisation against which increasing protest has arisen since the turn of this latest century; a globalisation driven by the nigh-religious belief that ‘the market’ is a panacea, that burgeoning international trade will ultimately work for the good of all, that poverty and tyranny will duly vanish of their own accord, that economic figures determine everything, that privatisation always has a beneficial effect, that competition is always best, that within these global systems the nation states will ultimately become obsolete. It is the philosophy of most political elites, but many citizens – even the majority in any number of European countries – don't believe in it at all.

It is precisely this credibility gap which, as opinion polls showed, played such an important role in the rejection of the European Constitution by the French and the Dutch. It is not European unification itself which they rejected, but the way in which the project has been given form and continually expanded, until it has become so vague that they can no longer identify with it. For them, Europe meant the lifting of the bell jars under which each European nation had lived for centuries. It meant the dissipation of sources of conflict, the opening of markets and cultures, the freedom to go where you wish. But it also meant the abandonment of the national context within which the culture, economy, legal system and democracy had developed for centuries. For these voters-in-protest, borders did, sometimes, have a positive function: as the delimitation of their familiar, predictable, influenceable, safe world.

Those same European pioneers, therefore, underestimated just how important such feelings of national cohesion can be, particularly in times of great change and turbulence. Or, better said, the way in which the rise of guarantor states after the war would provide a completely new basis for national sentiment. For in addition to the old national ties of language, culture, economic and military power, the 1950s saw burgeoning welfare arrangements that elicited a new brand of nationalism. Each land developed its own ‘legacies’, valuable claims that no one wanted to surrender – and preferably not share with foreigners: ample pension facilities, good health care, generous disability benefits.

In this way, a complicated situation arose. Max Kohnstamm, one of the last living pioneers, put it this way during one of our conversations: ‘The market is a merciless god. Its counterpoint, compassion, cannot be based entirely on charity; if it hopes to remain durable, it must be based on rules of law. The market these days is regulated on a European scale, but the compassion is organised largely at the national level. And it is apparently very difficult indeed to raise that compassion to a European level, because, traditionally, it differs so widely from one country to the next.'When it comes to communal social regulations, therefore, that single Europe still seems far away – and it may never arrive at all.

Much more complicated was the political manoeuvring surrounding the expansion of the Union. For the Germans, whose country has more neighbours than any other European nation, the expansion was vital. Only in that way, after all, could peace and stability in that corner of Europe be guaranteed for future generations. The British saw in the newcomers, above all, a group of new allies. The Central and Eastern Europeans were never in favour of a strong federal Union and, after long years under communism, were dead opposed to excessive market regulation. The French had no choice: they realised that their ‘baby’, the European Union, was very much taking on a life of its own, but at the same time they could not, morally, permit themselves to use their veto against expansion. In desperation, therefore, they voted for
‘le beau geste
’.

‘The community we have created is not a goal in itself,’ Jean Monnet wrote at the end of his memoirs in 1978. ‘The community is merely a step towards the organised world of tomorrow.’ That prediction has, in part, come true: the European experiment has indeed proven to be an inspiring example to other parts of the world. Yet in many ways, exactly the opposite has happened: the European Community often acts as a fortress, as a hermetic trading bloc with which to obstruct and frustrate the emergence of poorer countries.

In the course of this half century, the political mood within the EU has greatly changed. The democratic clarity of the first years has disappeared. The mediating power of the political parties has been weakened. With the rejection of the constitution, the ideal of the European federation could be stowed away. Potential new members are received without
much enthusiasm. The tone is no longer set by the community itself, but by divergent national interests, and by a million and one intergovern-mental issues. The chance that a ‘two-speed Europe’ will arise, a wealthy Euro-bloc with a series of poorer satellite states, is clear and present.

At the same time, the EU remains the most successful experiment in the field of international political institutions since the Second World War. The Union constitutes the largest market on earth. It is the largest exporter and the largest foreign investor. It is home to many of the world's largest and most successful concerns. The introduction of the euro went swimmingly, the expansion of the Union was a textbook example of successful ‘soft power’: never had so few means been required to so greatly promote democracy, prosperity and stability throughout such a large part of Europe.

The pioneers present at the outset of the European Community were brought together by a common fate. All six countries had, in one way or another, made it through the war, all those who participated in the negotiations had experienced enormous chaos and destruction. The solutions they came up with in the space of those fifty years were designed for that little group of six countries, small and surveyable. But with twenty-five countries now taking part, the EU can no longer be run in that fashion. The right to veto of five hundred thousand Greek Cypriots, for example, can forever frustrate the negotiations for the admission to the Union of sixty-five million Turks. If only for that reason, a new organisational foundation – be it in the form of a new kind of constitution or a new Treaty of Rome – is sorely needed.

The foundations upon which the EU is built are now increasingly a part of the daily reality of each citizen. It is no longer the pioneers, the statesmen and the nations that shore up the Union, it is above all that immense warp and weft of businesses, cities and people, that slowly-developed, self-evident European existence, that will have to weather the storm. Everything has changed and the organisation has grown too slowly to accommodate it, that is the major problem at this point. And the feeling of solidarity that existed in those early days, that is gone as well.

During my travels I saw, by chance, a remarkable TV commercial for the British Conservative Party. As far as I remember, it went like this. Two prosperous thirty-somethings appeared on the screen. It was morning,
she was sitting on the edge of the bed, he in the bathroom, shaving. Talk between the two gradually turned to Europe. He saw no problem in it, to him Europe meant the Tuscan sun, a Mercedes, Dutch cheese. His wife protested: but what about the euro, and all that bureaucracy in Brussels? He began having doubts of his own, and finally she was able to convince him. At the end, the couple tumbled back into their cosy bed. The punch-line was: ‘In Europe, not run by Europe.’

Just as European leaders and bureaucrats have sometimes neglected the reasonable need for national cohesion, this commercial showed how many Europeans go to the other extreme: the almost fearful brush-off given to all the international and European ties that have slowly come to form the basis of our daily lives.

Telling in this regard is the marginal interest shown in the European parliament: the average turnout fell from sixty-three per cent during the first elections in 1979 to forty-four per cent at the most recent polls. The rejection of the constitution, on the other hand, was strikingly clear and powerful. During the last European parliamentary elections, only thirty-nine per cent of the Dutch voting public went to the polls, while the referendum drew sixty-three per cent. In France, the discrepancy was even more striking: forty-three as opposed to seventy per cent. Surveys in Germany, Denmark, Britain and other countries indicated a similar mood. This was no longer a crisis of confidence amongst national governments, but a fundamental rift between European citizens and their political leaders. The European project is faced, in other words, with a gigantic legitimacy crisis.

That hiatus is due in large part to the vagueness and limitlessness of the European project. Limitlessness in the most literal sense: where, after all, does Europe end? It is no coincidence that the physical limits of the current European Union – with the exception of Switzerland, Norway and Greece – largely coincide with the scope of Catholic Christianity in the Middle Ages. To a monk in the year 1006, the map of the European empire of 2006 would look rather familiar. But what if the expansion of the EU were to simply continue, what if expansion were to become an independent trait of the European project, like a bicycle that must keep rolling if it is not to fall over? Would it not eventually become something completely unrecognisable to the citizens of the original member states? And, besides that: would the Union not be running the risk of a
European variation on ‘imperial overstretch’? Might not an all-too-rapid modernisation and democratisation in certain regions – the Balkans, Turkey – unleash uncontrollable forces? And might not the Union itself in that way become too unstable?

In addition there is, for the average citizen, that other form of limitlessness: the ‘Brussels bureaucracy’. Despite what is often claimed, it is not the size of the apparatus that is the problem: the Union is run by fewer than 17,000 civil servants, half of whom are engaged only in translation work. In a city like Amsterdam, for example, the body of civil servants is one and a half times that size. The quality of the Union's apparatus is generally quite high. The problem is found in the enormous quantity of regulations spread by the EU – due often enough, by the way, to the fact that all manner of national ‘fixers’ are pleased to take cover under the wings of ‘Europe’. The total of some 80,000 pages of Union directives could fill a bookcase, their limitlessness extends from the prescribed thickness of bicycle tires and the length of window washers’ ladders to the composition of chocolate bars and the methods for making goats’ cheese.

Europe is no longer a network of separate nations but is gradually becoming one huge interwoven body of companies, cities and people, a new supercountry beside and above the traditional nation states. This situation definitely does not always work to our advantage, it sometimes creates huge problems, more than half of all Europeans are unhappy with it, but it is not something we can simply choose to ignore.

Soon every European country will be able to arrest the subjects of all other European countries, the new pan-European arrest warrant will abolish national forms of legal protection, and meanwhile the values have been turned upside down: it will, after all, not be the best national systems of law that establish the European norm, but the weakest among them.

The same thing is happening to democracy. For no matter how you look at it, in a country where hundreds of thousands of demonstrators take to the streets every time their leaders meet, there is something fundamentally wrong with the democratic system. The same applies to the EU. The new constitution drafted so laboriously in recent years may be an improvement for the EU itself; in comparison with the constitutions and
democratic systems of many of its member states, however, it often amounts to nothing more than a return to the way things were before 1848, when the national parliaments still had to fight for most of their powers.

Furthermore, there is no guarantee that this cautious, formal democracy will assume sufficient critical mass within Europe. The democratic tradition has been limited largely to the continent's north-western corner: Scandinavia, Belgium and the Netherlands, England and France. Right after the collapse of the great monarchies in 1917 and 1918, the rest of Europe also embraced the loveliest democratic constitutions with the most liberal basic rights, but that honeymoon did not last long. Political conflicts had a way of degenerating into civil wars, and the elite in many countries chose anti-communism first, and only afterwards democracy and the rule of law. In Hungary, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Greece and Rumania, power was quickly seized by generals and populist dictators, and this finally happened in powerful Germany as well. After the war, the communist parties imposed their authoritarian policies all over Central and Eastern Europe, while Southern Europe, with the exception of Italy, was run until the 1970s by ultra-right-wing dictatorships.