CHRONOLOGY
1998
JANUARY-FEBRUARY. Parts of the Drenica area in Kosovo are claimed as “liberated” by the Kosovo Liberation Army.
28 FEBRUARY MARCH. Violent repressive action by Serb forces against the extended families of Kosovo Liberation Army activists sparks large-scale armed insurrection in Kosovo.
12 MARCH. Leaders of the eleven states recognized as candidates to join the EU meet with EU leaders in London to launch enlargement. Turkey not being so recognized, refuses to attend.
25 MARCH The European Commission declares that eleven member states have met the Maastricht criteria for monetary union and wish to go ahead. Greece does not qualify; Britain, Denmark, and Sweden do not wish to join at this stage.
THE CASE FOR LIBERAL ORDER
THERE IS EUROPE AND THERE IS “EUROPE.” THERE IS THE PLACE, THE continent, the political and economic reality, and there is Europe as an idea and an ideal, as a dream, as project, process, progress toward some visionary goal. No other continent is so obsessed with its own meaning and direction. These idealistic and teleological visions of Europe at once inform and legitimate, and are themselves informed and legitimated by, the political development of something now called the European Union. The very name “European Union” is itself a product of this approach. For a union is what it’s meant to be, not what it is.
European history since 1945 is told as a story of unification—difficult, delayed, suffering reverses, but nonetheless progressing. Here is the grand narrative taught to millions of European schoolchildren and accepted by Central and Eastern European politicians when they speak of rejoining “a uniting Europe.” Meanwhile, Western European leaders have repeatedly reaffirmed the goal of “ever closer union” since it was first solemnly embraced in the Treaty of Rome.
A classic example of this European self-interpretation is the French historian Jean-Baptiste Duroselle’s Europe: A History of Its Peoples, published simultaneously in several European languages in 1990. Discussing different ways of viewing the post-1945 history of Europe, he writes, “One may, finally, see this phase of history in a European light”—by implication, the other lights must be un-European—“and observe how many objective factors have combined with creative acts of will to make possible the first step towards a united Europe.”
The next chapter in this grand narrative is even now being written by a leading German historian, Dr. Helmut Kohl. Its millennial culmination is to be achieved on 1 January 1999, with a monetary union that will, it is argued, irreversibly bind together some of the leading states of Europe. This group of states should in turn become the “magnetic core” of a larger unification.
European unification is presented not just as the work of visionary leaders from Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman to François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, but also as a necessary, even an inevitable, response to the contemporary forces of globalization. Nation-states are no longer able to protect and realize their economic and political interests on their own. They are no match for transnational actors such as global currency speculators, multinational companies, or international criminal gangs. Both power and identity, it is argued, are migrating upward and downward from the nation-state: upward to the supranational level; downward to the regional one. In a globalized world of large trading blocs, Europe will be able to hold its own only as a larger political-economic unit. Thus Manfred Rommel, the popular former mayor of Stuttgart, declares, “We live under the dictatorship of the global economy. There is no alternative to a united Europe.”
It would be absurd to suggest that there is no substance to these claims. Yet when combined into the single grand narrative, into the idealistic-teleological discourse of European unification, they result in a dangerously misleading picture of the real ground on which European leaders will have to build at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Here I shall make what many Europeans will regard as the heretical argument that unification is the wrong paradigm for European policy in our time. And I shall suggest a better one: that of liberal order.
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In the index to Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History, we read, “Europe, as battlefield,” “Europe, as not an intelligible field of historical study,” and, finally, “Europe, unification of, failure of attempts at.” Toynbee is an unreliable source, but he raises important questions about the long sweep of European history. The most fundamental point is, of course, his second one. Is the thing to be united actually a cultural-historical unit? If so, where does it begin and end? It is, Toynbee claims, a “cultural misapplication of a nautical term” to suggest that the Mediterranean ancient history of Greece and Rome and modern Western history are successive acts in a single European drama. He prefers the Polish historian Oskar Halecki’s account, in which a Mediterranean Age is followed by a European Age, running roughly from A.D. 950 to 1950, which in turn is succeeded by what Halecki called an Atlantic Age. Today we might refer to our period simply as a global age.
Yet, even in the European Age, the continent’s eastern edge remained deeply ill-defined. Was it the Elbe? Or the dividing line between Western and Eastern Christianity? Or the Urals? Europe’s political history was characterized by the astounding diversity of peoples, nations, states, and empires and by the ceaseless and often violent competition between them.
In short, no continent was externally more ill-defined, internally more diverse, or historically more disorderly. Yet no continent produced more schemes for its own orderly unification. So our idealistic-teleological or Whig interpreters can cite an impressive list of intellectual and political forebears, from the Bohemian king George of Podebrady through the duc de Sully and William Penn (writing already in America) to Aristide Briand and Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, the prophet of Pan-Europa.
The trouble is that those designs for European unification that were peaceful were not implemented, while those that were implemented were not peaceful. The reality of unification was either a temporary solidarity in response to an external invader or an attempt by one European state to establish continental hegemony by force of arms, from Napoleon to Hitler. Yet the latter, too, failed, as Toynbee’s index dryly notes.
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The attempt at European unification since 1945 thus stands out from all earlier attempts by being both peaceful and implemented. An idealistic interpretation of this historical abnormality is that we Europeans have at last learned from history. The “European civil war” of 1914 to 1945—that second and still bloodier Thirty Years War—finally brought us to our senses.
Yet this requires a little closer examination. For only after the end of the cold war are we discovering just how much European integration owed to it. First, there was the Soviet Union as negative external integrator. Western Europeans pulled together in face of the common enemy, as they had before the Mongols or the Turks. Second, there was the United States as positive external integrator. Particularly in the earlier years of the cold war, the United States pushed very strongly for Western European integration, making it almost a condition for further Marshall Aid. In later decades, the United States was at times more ambivalent about building up a rival trading bloc, but in broad, geopolitical terms it certainly supported Western European integration throughout the cold war.
Third, the cold war helped, quite brutally, by cutting off most of Central and Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain. This meant that European integration could begin between a relatively small number of nation-states—bourgeois democracies at a roughly comparable economic level and with important older elements of common history. As has often been observed, the frontiers of the original European Economic Community of six were roughly coterminous with those of Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire. The EEC was also centered around what historical geographers have nicely called the “golden banana” of advanced European economic development, stretching from Manchester to Milan, via the Low Countries, eastern France, and western Germany. Moreover, within this corner of the continent there were important converg
ences or trade-offs between the political and economic interests of the nations involved. The crucial trade-offs were between France and Germany.
None of this is to deny a genuine element of European idealism among the elites of that time. But, the more we discover about this earlier period, the more hard-nosed and nationally self-interested the main actors appear. Contrary to the received view, the idealists are more to be found in the next generation: that of Helmut Kohl rather than Konrad Adenauer. There is no mistaking the genuine en thusiasm with which Helmut Kohl describes, as he will at the slightest prompting, the unforgettable experience of lifting the first frontier barriers between France and Germany, just a few years after the end of the war.
To be sure, the national interests were still powerfully present in the 1970s and 1980s. Britain, most obviously, joined the then still European Economic Community in the hope of reviving its own flagging economy and buttressing its declining influence in the world. In a book of 1988 entitled La France par l’Europe, none other than Jacques Delors wrote that “creating Europe is a way of regaining that room for manoeuvre necessary for ‘a certain idea of France.’” The phrase “a certain idea of France” was, of course, de Gaulle’s. In my book In Europe’s Name I have shown how German enthusiasm for European integration continued to be nourished by the need to secure wider European and American support for the vital German national interest of improving relations with the communist East and, eventually, for the reunification of Germany. Besides this mixture of genuinely idealistic and national-instrumental motives, there was also a growing perception of real common interests.
As a result of the confluence of these three kinds of motive and those three favorable external conditions, the 1970s and 1980s saw an impressive set of steps toward closer political cooperation and economic and legal integration. Starting with the Hague summit of December 1969, they included direct elections to the European Parliament, the founding of the European Monetary System, the Single European Act, and the great project of completing the internal market in the magic year of “1992.”
This dynamic process, against a background of renewed economic growth and the spread of democracy to southern Europe, contributed directly to the end of the cold war. One of the reasons behind Mikhail Gorbachev’s “new thinking” in foreign policy was Soviet alarm at the prospect of being left still farther behind by a “Europe” that was seen as technologically advanced, economically dynamic, and integrating behind high protective walls.
How much more was this true of the peoples of east central Europe, who anyway felt themselves to belong culturally and historically to Europe—felt this with the passion of the excluded—and for whom the prosperous Western Europe they saw on their travels now clearly represented the better alternative to a discredited and stagnant “real socialism.” Accordingly, one of the great slogans of the “velvet revolutions” of 1989 was “the return to Europe.” In this sense one could argue, in apparent defiance of historical logic, that “1992” in Western Europe was one of the causes of 1989 in Eastern Europe.
The idealistic-teleological or Whig interpretation of recent European history, so widely taught and accepted in the 1980s, might not face the music of historical facts. But the very prevalence and wide appeal of this interpretation was itself a major historical fact. Nineteen eighty-nine seemed to be the ultimate confirmation of its rightness. Yet the end of the cold war also ended a historical constellation that was especially favorable to this particular model of Western European integration.
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What have we witnessed since? It is possible to construe the 1990s as one more chapter, even a decisive one, in the pilgrim’s progress to European unification. The Community has been renamed a Union. The major states of Western Europe have devoted extraordinary efforts to readying themselves for the unprecedented step of uniting their currencies. At the same time, preparations have been made to enlarge the union. Serious negotiations have started with five new postcommunist democracies and Cyprus, slightly less serious ones with five other postcommunist states. Certainly, there have been difficulties along the way; but never in its history has Europe been so close to the peaceful achievement of unity.
Against this optimistic, even Panglossian, view, we have to enter a number of objections. For a start, in this same period war has returned to the European continent: war and, in former Yugoslavia, atrocities such as we had not seen in Europe since 1945. Even in core states of the old European Community, we have seen a popular reaction against the technocratic, elitist model of “building Europe from above” epitomized by the impenetrable detail of the Maastricht Treaty. The French referendum vote on the Maastricht Treaty, so narrowly won, was a telling symptom of this. And the Amsterdam Treaty of 1997 was no more accessible or popular. This popular resentment, and a sense that the institutions of the European Union are perilously short on democratic legitimacy, still persists.
While these years have seen further incremental diminution in the effective powers and sovereignty of established nation-states, they have also seen the explosive emergence of at least a dozen new nation-states. Indeed, there are now more states on the map of Europe than ever before in the twentieth century. In the former Yugoslavia, these new states emerged through ethnic cleansing and the violent redrawing of frontiers. In the former Czechoslovakia, the separation into two states was carried out peacefully, by negotiation. In the former Soviet Union, there were variations in between.
I do not suggest that these de-unifications reflected some deeper historical necessity. The specific etiology is different in each case, but very often rooted in the conduct of postcommunist politicians, making manipulative use of nationalist agendas to gain or maintain power for themselves. Yet the logic of de-unification is by no means always antidemocratic. It can be closely related to that of democracy. Democracy requires trust. It requires that the minority is prepared to accept the decision of the majority, because the minority still regards the state as fundamentally “theirs.” The argument is hardly original—you find it already in John Stuart Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government. “Among a people without fellow-feelings,” writes Mill, “especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion necessary to the working of representative government cannot exist.”
Nor is this phenomenon of de-unification confined to the post-communist half of Europe. The cliché of “integration in the west, disintegration in the east” does not bear closer examination. It is surprising, for example, to see the progressive disintegration of Belgium cited as evidence of the decline of the nation-state and the rise of regionalism. For the tensions that are pulling Belgium apart would be entirely familiar to a nineteenth-century liberal nationalist. Each ethnolinguistic group demands a growing measure of self-government. Britain has for decades been an unusual modern variation on the theme of the nation-state: a nation composed of four nations—or, to be precise, three and a part. But now the constituent nations, especially Scotland, are pulling away toward a larger measure of self-government.
And what of Europe’s central power? It would be hard to dispute the simple statement that since 1989 Germany has reemerged as a fully sovereign nation-state. In Berlin, we are witnessing the extraordinary architectural reconstruction of the grandiose capital of a historic nation-state. Yet at the same time, Germany’s political leaders, and above all Helmut Kohl, are pressing ahead with all their considerable might to surrender that vital component of national sovereignty—and, particularly in the contemporary German case, also identity—which is the national currency. There is a startling contradiction between, so to speak, the architecture in Berlin and the rhetoric in Bonn.
I do not think this contradiction can be resolved dialectically even in the homeland of the dialectic. In fact, Germany today is in a political-psychological condition that can be described only as Faustian: “Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach, in meiner Brust” (“Oh, two souls live in my breast”). After monetary union has gone ahead and the Germa
n government moves to Berlin, then the country will wake up in its new bed on 1 January 2000, scratch its head, and ask itself, “Now, why did we just give up the deutsche mark?”
What is the answer? Of course there are economic arguments for monetary union. But monetary union was conceived as an economic means to a political end. In general terms, it is the continuation of the functionalist approach adopted by the French and German founding fathers of the European Economic Community: through economic integration to political integration. But there was a more specific political reason for the decision to make this the central goal of European integration in the 1990s. As so often before, the key lies in a compromise between French and German national interests. In 1990, there was at the very least an implicit linkage made between François Mitterrand’s anxious and reluctant support for German unification and Kohl’s decisive push toward European monetary union. “The whole of Deutschland for Kohl, half the deutsche mark for Mitterrand,” as one wit put it at the time. Leading German politicians will acknowledge privately that monetary union is the price paid for German unification.
History of the Present Page 33