INTERNATIONAL
Shaping Europe's global role II: The EU’s potential roots are its spring board for the future
Autumn 2010
There is much that is wrong with Europe, and much that is right. Vaira Vike-Freiberga, Latvia’s former President, argues that a return to the visions of the founding fathers holds the key to a greater global role for the EU
European Union governments share a common goal of creating a highly competitive and sustainable social market economy and maintaining the EU as a major player on the world stage. Much less clear are the chances of their reaching this goal within the next decade or so.
Sixty years after the Schuman Declaration, it is worth recalling its lofty long-term vision of Europe’s future, and also its extremely concrete recommendations for immediate action. It combined high aims and ideals with a modest step-by-step approach that always strove to transform apparently conflicting interests into mutually beneficial ones. There could be no better recipe for success for today’s European leaders.
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Common policies in Europe have to be forged in a multi-dimensional matrix of hard facts and indisputable needs that inevitably are then filtered through an equally complex matrix of perceptions, prejudices and irrational emotions. Decision makers across the EU are thus caught in a double-bind of needing rational solutions to very real problems while at the same time garnering sufficient public sympathy to win political backing for their actions. Public opinion is quick to express discontent, yet is notoriously slow to accept any change that affects ingrained habits or privileges. In the EU, this inherent policymaking tension has to be multiplied by the number of theoretically equal partners. It is, of course, the greatest barrier to common policies in all the areas where they are most urgently needed, ranging from internal and external security to foreign relations, to energy security and climate change and all the prerequisites for sustainable development and economic competitiveness.
It has become commonplace when analysing EU policy decisions or the lack of them to deplore the lack of great leaders on the political scene today, and to look back nostalgically to a mythologised past when political giants supposedly strode with lofty confidence across all the uncertainties of their own time and place. How grand they all look through the rose-tinted lenses of hindsight, and how enlightened their actions seem when compared to the puny efforts of our own supposed political midgets.
But frustrated hero-worship should not blind Europeans to the facts of what the EU has accomplished in the past ten years. While some people still moan about an ill-defined “enlargement fatigue”, or long for the cosy times when the EU was a small club of political cronies, it is only since the wiping out of the last sequels of World War II and picking up the last bits of debris from the Iron Curtain that the EU can look forward to its potential role as a major world power. A Europe truly whole and free, united under a flag of democracy and no longer cleft down the middle, can become a true beacon to the rest of the world. A Europe committed to what it has striven to become, not one looking back upon lost imperial or colonial splendours, will be a force to be reckoned with instead of being one that is spurned by China and ignored by the United States, as it has lately tended to be.
The founding fathers of the EU – Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet – set out a grand vision as well as a clear set of immediate practical steps to be taken. They could offer very little to start with, but a great deal to be gained in the long run. The EU of today has an incomparably larger tool-box of mechanisms for concrete action, even though it took years to complete ratification of the Lisbon treaty. With this new legal framework in place, it is now a matter of making the most of it. The world will not stand still while Europeans navel-gaze, for it is moving ahead and changing quickly. The EU needs to speed-up its reaction time to events elsewhere and start oiling the still creaky mechanisms of its collective decision making.
When commentators bemoan the lack of grand ideas in Europe, they should be sent a reading list of the vast amounts of serious documentation that are churned out by think-tanks, reflection groups and committees of experts. When they lament the lack of strong leadership, they should sit down for a few history lessons. Who more than Europeans should be wary of the siren song of great leadership? Millions of Europeans cheered in the 20th century to the populist rant of psychopathic tyrants, and untold millions in the world today still live under the iron fist of dictatorships. Europeans, more than most, should realise that infantile yearnings for a strong political father figure must be resisted. Only by participating in the kind of democracy that has been bought with the blood and suffering of their recent forebears can they hope to preserve the historically recent and still fragile form of governance that is democracy.
This said, we mustn’t go to the opposite extreme and denounce the whole notion of leadership, or smother the talents of those who have obvious gifts for it. Americans, probably for historical reasons, are much more laid-back than Europeans in accepting strong and capable leadership in both business and politics. Adolescent revolt against all authority and infantile dependency are equally far from mature adult democratic responsibility.
Leaders can only be as good as their followers, and as the institutional and legal framework within which they operate. Governments depend on civil servants to carry out their political decisions, and legislators depend on their voter’s support for their initiatives. The European Union has to contend with not being a superstate, even though the demands and expectations of its citizens often put pressure on it to function as such. It is bound by a legal framework of ratified treaties, yet has to react to unexpected events that usually were never anticipated in any of its repertoire of decision making mechanisms.
A major challenge for Europe is reaching informal consensus on common policies even where they are not formally demanded by existing treaties. The EU has been doing this for some time, and has no choice but to continue doing so. In other words, the Union should concentrate on achieving maximum cohesion and consensus in as broad a range of policy areas as possible, unless specifically excluded by an EU treaty. In doing so, it should undertake a serious review of the rules and regulations that govern its executive branch – the European Commission – so as to prune away the dead weight of structures and regulations that have become obsolete, and also to fill the gaps in its capacity to respond. There are a number of serious flaws in the EU’s governance mechanisms, and refusing to face them and correct them is not going to make them go away. Many areas of accepted community action that have been built up over time need to change with the times as well. And where there is a disconnect between inter-state collaboration by member governments and the need for EU-level action, European leaders will need political courage to take the necessary decisions, even at the risk of losing some popularity and political support.
In policy areas like agriculture where time and precedent have built up layers of counter-productive and obsolete directives with grotesquely detailed and pusillanimous prescriptions and proscriptions, EU decision makers must face the fact that these are a constant irritant to EU citizens and a source of ridicule to outsiders. There are other areas, like the co-ordination of economic policy, which although not specifically demanded by any of the EU treaties, have become so obviously necessary that the absence of even minor levels of coordination has become a serious handicap, responsible for the EU’s failings in better protecting the solvency of its banks, or even of some of its member countries.
Be it in shedding unnecessary ballast or in forging better mechanisms for common action, the EU will reach its full potential only if citizens and their elected leaders alike recognise their common destiny and work together to achieve it.
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