EUROPE

Spring 2008

by Armand Clesse

The EU has fallen victim to an enlargement fallacy, says Armand Clesse of the Luxembourg Institute for European and International Studies, and wrongheadedly believes it can remodel its new members in its own image. The price may be Europe’s long-term economic decline

During its formative first three decades, the European project was protected by the Iron Curtain, which relieved Europeans of the need to ask elementary questions about its goals and limits. And when the European Community of six was enlarged to include the United Kingdom, Ireland and Denmark, and after that Greece, Portugal and Spain, that created an illusion of political progress even though the EU was in fact moving away from building a genuine political community.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Europe has seemed increasingly at a loss. Unable to cope with new challenges, it has contented itself with references to loose politico-moral obligations; the mantra has been that we cannot leave central and eastern Europe out in the cold and in a geo-strategic void. But the EU has proved incapable of coming forward with a meaningful political design. More and more, it is the victim of divisions, rivalries and mutually incompatible demands.

Thus the EU risks paying the price for decades of complacency. Brussels is the weak, cold heart of the Union, regulating and de-regulating, imposing norms and standards, pumping money but not political content through the veins of the organisation. The EU is a gutless, spiritless, headless organisation held together by little else than material incentives. It is the kind of Europe the British or Scandinavians have always cherished, and that the other nations no longer have the spirit to oppose.

There is now a serious risk of a slow erosion of the EU’s basic ideological consensus, its political fabric and its social tissue. If so, Europe will be unable to avoid long-term economic decline. These trends may be accompanied and reinforced by resurgent nationalism and right-wing extremism that will focus on foreigners and immigrants, and specifically on Muslims.

Europe’s predicament highlights the many omissions and blunders that have been committed since the end of World War II. For Europe has yet to come to grips with its new and somewhat depressing geo-political situation. The EU’s situation is further aggravated because it is so ill-prepared to tackle the deeply irrational forces that now confront it. Its enlargement policy has been deeply flawed since its inception. The Union has deluded not only the public but also itself by proclaiming that geographic widening – and above all the feat of raising less economically developed countries to its own standards – was a sign of vitality. It has frequently applied superficial material criteria to candidate countries instead of more rigorous and comprehensive ones. And it has done so without examining the impact of enlargement on the consistency of the whole, or its capacity to act both economically and politically within Europe and globally. The EU has therefore been growing in size but shrinking in substance.

Nor has Europe’s enlargement policy ever become part of a lucid long-term integration concept in which a certain level of economic, social and political integration would have to be reached by prospective new members. Perhaps at each new stage of European integration − long before any further enlargements could be considered − there should have been a critical review of what has been achieved and what remains to be done.

Now that a perhaps fatal level of confusion and disarray has been reached, "enlargement fatigue", if not “enlargement aversion”, certainly seems to have set in. But this aversion is not the sign of a clearcut rejection, but rather of resignation and capitulation.

The EU has fallen prey to an enlargement fallacy − namely the Union’s irresistible power of attraction, persuasion and transformation, and its capacity to remodel the whole of Europe in its own image. Instead of setting rigorous conditions, the Community has relied on the hope that once inside, the new members would learn quickly, adapt and move towards the EU’s standards.

A dramatic example of this wrong-headed approach has been the issue of minority rights. The Union failed to apply the criteria it had set in Copenhagen by choosing to ignore the disastrous situation of the Roma in many central and eastern European countries, above all in Romania where up to 2.5m people of that ethnic group live in abject poverty and are daily victims of contempt and discrimination. Their situation is not much better in Slovakia and in some other neighbouring countries. It is only now, with the Roma having come to Rome, that the Romans want to put the issue high on the EU agenda. Unfortunately, the incentives for Romania and the others to act, and the means of pressure available to other member states are limited.

The EU is an organisation that seems unable to cope with existential challenges. Blame the architects of the Treaty of Rome for this, if you like, but any lack of courage at that time should be seen in the context of the failure of the proposed European Defence Community (EDC) and of a European Political Community (EPC) in 1954. Then there was the political lethargy of the 1960s and 1970s. In any case, the EU has largely betrayed the European ethos of the late 1940s and early 1950s and never seriously tried to define a telos. Today, more and more people have the impression that instead of alleviating the predicaments of the nationstate, the EU reinforces them, and that it is less and less able to deal with the most pressing issues of our time.

One might say that the EU’s enlargement policy reflects the politics of embarrassment, as characterised by a high degree of irrationality, incoherence and arbitrariness. Why, for example, admit Romania or Bulgaria and not first Croatia or Serbia? Is it because the EU has become a hostage of the Hague tribunal? One cannot avoid the impression that the people in charge in Brussels and in the capitals were often using specious arguments to justify such decisions. National affinities and antipathies have also played a significant role. Is it not somewhat paradoxical that those who created so much political disaster in Europe in the 1930s and early 1940s, the Germans, should have exercised an increasingly decisive influence on the building of the new European political order?

Looking to the present, one may wonder whether the EU of 27 has now embarked on a journey towards political irrelevance. The EU’s political periphery seems to be growing, while the core is petering out. Is the organisation falling prey to geographic overstretch that is a concomitant of its growing heterogeneity, so that the centrifugal forces prevail over the centripetal ones? The EU’s so-called Reform Treaty will certainly not stop the trend towards the Union’s slow dissolution. Nor could the ill-fated constitution have achieved that modest goal. To survive, the Union must now confine itself to a minimalist agenda and refrain from touching upon any questions of real political substance.

To be fair, when talking about the pernicious effects of enlargement, one has first to admit that the new members have joined an EU that is already decaying politically. It may, in the short and medium-term, be able to preserve economic achievements like the single internal market or the single currency, but any strengthening of its political underpinnings is hard to imagine. Debate about the EU’s “finalité” will only trigger endless discussions that are fruitless and frustrating. This means the Union will have to devote much of its energy to preventing the discrepancies between the political and the economic dimensions of integration from becoming too pernicious. For the sake of its own self-esteem, it may well stick to its discourse and lofty aims, but it will know inwardly that these are to remain unattainable goals.