Today the German political class, in which nationalist reflexes are no longer so dormant, is having second thoughts about monetary union, as the prospect of a single currency has come to look ambiguous on the other side of the Rhine too. Could it be that Germany received shadow rather than substance in the bargain at Maastricht? In chorus, Waigel for the ruling coalition and Tietmeyer for the central bank have been upping the ante for monetary union, with stentorian demands for ‘strict compliance’ with the convergence criteria appended to the Treaty (public debt no higher than 60 per cent and public deficit no more than 3 per cent of GDP, inflation within 1.5 and interest rates 2 per cent of the three best performers in the Union) and a ‘Stability Pact’ beyond them. This orchestrated clamour has no legal basis, since in the text signed at Maastricht the convergence criteria are not unconditional targets to be met, but ‘reference values’ to be moved towards; and whether or not sufficient movement has been achieved is for the Commission alone—not the Federal Republic or any other government—to decide. These provisions were the work of Philippe Maystadt, foreign minister of Belgium, a country with good reason to insist on flexibility, and certain memories. In its disregard for legal niceties, or small neighbours, the tone of current German diplomacy has become increasingly Wilhelmine.
Nevertheless, it is a striking fact that so far this ‘Teutonic tirading’, as Adorno once called it, has met no rebuff. Paris, far from reacting, has been eager to accommodate. For Connolly, this is only to be expected. Under Mitterrand, the attitude of the French elite has been a Vichy-like subservience to German economic power. In its pursuit of a franc fort requiring punitive interest rates to maintain alignment with the D-mark at the cost of massive unemployment, this establishment has committed treachery against the French people. Noting the widespread alienation from the political class evident in every recent poll, and recalling with relish the country’s long traditions of popular unrest, Connolly—who describes himself as a Tory radical—looks forward with grim satisfaction to the explosion of another revolution in France, when the population becomes aware of the price it is paying for monetary union, and rises up to destroy the oligarchy that sought to impose it.38
Premonitions of this kind are no longer regarded as entirely far-fetched in France itself. For the moment the prospect is less dramatic, but still fraught enough. The Maastricht referendum revealed the depth of the division in French opinion over the likely consequences of a single currency—would it lead, in the stock question, to a Europeanized Germany or to a German Europe? The victory of Jacques Chirac in the subsequent presidential elections guarantees that the tension between antithetical calculations will continue to haunt the Elysée. For no French politician has so constantly oscillated from one position to the other, or so opportunely reflected the divided mind of the electorate itself. Clambering to power on a platform challenging the bipartisan consensus of the Rocard-Balladur years, la pensée unique that gave higher priority to a strong franc than to job creation, after a few mis-starts Chirac in office has reverted frantically to financial orthodoxy again. The Juppé government is now administering even tougher doses of retrenchment to force the deficit down to Maastricht levels.
Yet even the tightest budgetary rectitude is no guarantee of a franc fort. The ‘convergence criteria’, as Connolly rightly insists, are completely unrealistic in their exclusion of growth and employment from the indices of a sound economy. Designed to reassure financial markets, they satisfy only central bankers. The markets themselves are not mocked, and will sooner or later mark down any currency where there is widespread unemployment and social tension, no matter how stable are prices or balanced are public accounts—as the French Treasury discovered in the summer of 1993. The current domestic course of the Chirac regime can only tighten already explosive pressures in the big cities at the cost of its electoral credibility, on which that of its exchange rate also depends. The massive street protests of late November could be a harbinger of worse trouble to come. The regime’s slump in the opinion polls is without precedent in the Fifth Republic. An image of zealous compliance with directives from the Bundesbank involves high political risks.
Chirac’s resumption of nuclear tests can be seen as a clumsy attempt to compensate for economic weakness by military display—demonstratively flexing the one strategic asset the French still possess that the Germans do not. The result has been merely to focus international opprobrium on France. Partial or hypocritical though much of this reaction has been (how many pasquinades have been written against the Israeli bomb?), Chirac’s experiments remain pointless. Forcible-feeble in the style of the man, they can scarcely affect the political balance of Europe, where nuclear weapons are no longer of the same importance. At a moment when French diplomacy ought to have been engaged in winning allies to resist German attempts to harden the Treaty of Maastricht, for which France’s immediate neighbours Italy, Belgium and Spain were more than ready, it was gratuitously incurring a hostile isolation. On present performance, Chirac could prove the most erratic and futile French politician since Boulanger.
Nevertheless, contrary to received opinion, in the end it will be France rather than Germany that decides the fate of monetary union. The self-confidence of the political class in the Federal Republic, although swelling, is still quite brittle. A cooler and tougher French regime, capable of public historical reminders, could prick its bluster without difficulty. Germany cannot back out of Maastricht, only try to bend it. France can. There will be no EMU if Paris does not exert itself to cut its deficit. The commitment to monetary union comes from the political calculations of the elite, and the world of classical state-craft—a foreign policy determined to check German and uphold French national power. The socio-economic costs of the franc fort have been borne by the population at large. Here, absolutely clear-cut, there is a conflict between external objectives and domestic aspirations of the kind Alan Milward would banish from the record of earlier integration. How much does it matter to ordinary French voters whether or not Germany is diplomatically master of the continent again—are not the creation of jobs and growth of incomes issues closer to home? In France the next years are likely to offer an interesting test of the relative weights of consumption and strategy in the process of European integration.
Meanwhile the pressures from below, already welling up in strikes and demonstrations, can only increase the quandaries above. On the surface, the French elite is now less divided over Maastricht than at the time of the referendum. But it is no surer that the single currency will deliver what it was intended to. Germany bound—or unbound? In the space of the new Europe, the equivocation of monetary union as an economic project is matched by the ambiguity of its political logic for the latent national rivalries within it.
Finally, what of the prospects for extending the European Union to the east? On the principle itself, it is a striking fact that there has been no dissent among the member-states. It might be added that there has also been no forethought. For the first time in the history of European integration, a crucial direction has been set, not by politicians or technocrats, but by public opinion. Voters were not involved; but before the consequences were given much consideration, editorialists and column-writers across the political spectrum pronounced with rare unanimity any other course unthinkable. Enlargement to the east was approved in something of the same spirit as the independence of former republics of Yugoslavia. This was not the hard-headed reckoning of costs and benefits on which historians of the early decades of European integration dwell: ideological good-will—essentially, the need to recompense those who suffered under communism—was all. Governments have essentially been towed in the wake of a media consensus. The principle was set by the press; politicians have been left to figure out its applications.
Here the three leading states of Western Europe have divided. From the outset Germany has given priority to the rapid inclusion of Poland, Hungary, the former Czechoslovakia and more recently Slovenia. Within this group, Pol
and remains the most important in German eyes. Bonn’s conception is straightforward. These countries, already the privileged catchment for German investment, would form a security glacis of Catholic lands around Germany and Austria, with social and political regimes that could—with judicious backing for sympathetic parties—sit comfortably beside the CDU. France, more cautious about the tempo of widening and mindful of former ties to the countries of the Little Entente—Romania or Serbia—has been less inclined to pick regional favourites in this way. Its initial preference, articulated by Mitterrand in Prague, was for a generic association between Western and Eastern Europe as a whole, outside the framework of the Union.
Britain, on the other hand, has pressed not only for rapid integration of the Visegrád countries into the EU, but for the most extensive embrace beyond it. Alone of Western leaders, Major has envisaged the ultimate inclusion of Russia. The rationale for the British position is unconcealed: the wider the Union becomes, in this view, the shallower it must be—for the more national states it contains, the less viable becomes any real supranational authority over them. Once stretched to the Bug and beyond, the European Union will evolve in practice into the vast free-trade area which in the eyes of London it should always have been. Widening here means both institutional dilution and social deregulation: the prospect of including vast reserve armies of cheap labour in the East, exerting downward pressure on wage costs in the West, is a further bonus in this British scenario.
Which outcome is most likely? At the moment the German design has the most wind in its sails. In so far as the EU has sketched a policy at all, it goes in the CDU’s direction. One of the reasons, of course, is the current convergence between German calculations and Polish, Czech and Hungarian aspirations. There is some historical irony here. Since the late eighties publicists and politicians in Hungary, the Czech lands, Poland and more recently Slovenia and even Croatia have set out to persuade the world that these countries belong to a Central Europe with a natural affinity to Western Europe, and that is quite distinct from Eastern Europe. The geographical stretching involved in these definitions can be extreme. Vilnius is described by Czesław Miłosz, for example, as a Central European city.39 But if Poland—let alone Lithuania—is really in the centre of Europe, what is the east? Logically, one would imagine, the answer must be Russia. But since many of the same writers—Milan Kundera is another example—deny that Russia has ever belonged to European civilization at all,40 we are left with the conundrum of a space proclaiming itself centre and border at the same time.
Perhaps sensing such difficulties, an American sympathizer, the Spectator’s foreign editor Anne Applebaum, has tacitly upgraded Poland to full occidental status, entitling her—predictably disobliging—inspection of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine Between East and West.41 Another way out of them is offered by Miklós Haraszti, who argues that while current usage of the idea of Central Europe may make little geographical sense, it does convey the political unity of those—Poles, Czechs, Magyars—who fought against Communism, as distinct from their neighbours who did not. More Romanians, of course, died in 1989 than in the resistance of all three countries combined for many years. Today, however, the point of the construct is not so much retrospective as stipulative: originally fashioned to repudiate any connexion with Russian experience during the Cold War, it now serves to demarcate superior from inferior—i.e., Romanian, Bulgarian, Albanian, etc.—candidates for entry into the EU.
But geopolitical concepts rarely escape their origins altogether. The idea of Mitteleuropa was a German invention, famously theorized by Max Weber’s friend Friedrich Naumann during the First World War. Naumann’s conception remains arrestingly topical. The Central Europe he envisaged was to be organized around a Germanic nucleus, combining Prussian industrial efficiency and Austrian cultural glamour, capable of attracting satellite nations to it in a vast customs community—Zollgemeinschaft—and military compact, extending ‘from the Vistula to the Vosges’.42 Such a unified Mitteleuropa would be what he called an Oberstaat, a ‘super-state’ able to rival the Anglo-American and Russian empires. A Lutheran pastor himself, he noted regretfully that it would be predominantly Catholic—a necessary price to pay—but a tolerant order, making room for Jews and minority nationalities. The Union it created would not be federal—Naumann was an early prophet of today’s doctrine of subsidiarity too. All forms of sovereignty other than economic and military would be retained by member-states preserving their separate political identities, and there would be no one all-purpose capital, but rather different cities—Hamburg, Prague, Vienna—would be the seat of particular executive functions, rather like Strasbourg, Brussels and Frankfurt today.43 Against the background of a blue-print like this, it is not difficult to see how the ideological demand for a vision of Central Europe in the Visegrád countries could find political supply in the Federal Republic.
But given that widening of some kind to the East is now enshrined as official—if still nebulous—policy in the Union, is it probable that the process could be limited to a select handful of former Communist states? Applications for admission are multiplying, and there is no obvious boundary at which they can be halted. Europe, as J.G.A. Pocock once forcibly observed, is not a continent, but an unenclosed sub-continent on a continuous land mass stretching to the Bering Strait. Its only natural frontier with Asia is a strip of water, at the Hellespont, once swum by Leander and Lord Byron. To the north, plain and steppe unroll without break into Turkestan. Cultural borders are no more clearly marked than geographical: Muslim Albania and Bosnia lie a thousand miles west of Christian Georgia and Armenia, where the ancients set the dividing-line between Europe and Asia. No wonder Herodotus himself, the first historian to discuss the question, remarked that ‘the boundaries of Europe are quite unknown, and no man can say where they end . . . but it is certain that Europa [he is referring to the beauty borne away by Zeus] was an Asiatic, and never even set foot on the land the Greeks now call Europe, only sailing [on her bull] from Phoenicia to Crete’. The irony of Herodotus perhaps still retains a lesson for us. If Slovakia is a candidate for entry into today’s Union, why not Romania? If Romania, why not Moldova? If Moldova, why not the Ukraine? If the Ukraine, why not Turkey? In a couple of years, Istanbul will overtake Paris to become the largest city in what—however you define it—no one will contest is Europe. As for Moscow, it is over two centuries since Catherine the Great declared in a famous ukaz that ‘Russia is a European nation’, and the history of European culture and politics from the time of Pushkin and Suvorov onwards has enforced her claim ever since. De Gaulle’s vision of a Europe ‘from the Atlantic to the Urals’ will not lightly go away. All the stopping-places of current discussion about widening the EU are mere conveniences of the ring of states closest to it, or of the limits of bureaucratic imagination in Brussels. They will not resist the logic of expansion.
In 1991 J.G.A. Pocock remarked that
‘Europe’ . . . is once again an empire in the sense of a civilised and stabilised zone which must decide whether to extend or refuse its political power over violent cultures along its borders but not yet within its system: Serbs and Croats if one chances to be Austrian, Kurds and Iraqis if Turkey is admitted to be part of ‘Europe’. These are not decisions to be taken by the market, but decisions of the state.44
But as Europe is not an empire in the more familiar sense of the term—a centralized imperial authority—but merely (as he put it) ‘a composite of states’, with no common view of their borderlands, it is not surprising that its limes has yet to be drawn by the various chancelleries. Since he wrote, however, there has been no shortage of expert opinion to fill the gap.
For example Timothy Garton Ash, one of the first and keenest advocates of a PCH fast track, has recently adjusted his sights. ‘Having spent much of the past fifteen years trying to explain to Western readers that Prague, Budapest and Warsaw belong to Central and not to Eastern Europe, I am the last person to need reminding of the immense diffe
rences between Poland and Albania’, he writes in the Times Literary Supplement. ‘But to suggest that there is some absolutely clear historical dividing line between the Central European democracies in the so-called Visegrád group and, say, the Baltic states or Slovenia would be to service a new myth’.45 Instead, the dividing-line must be drawn between a Second Europe numbering some twenty states which he describes as ‘set on a course’ towards the EU; and a Third Europe that does not share this prospect, comprising Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and—a cartographical nicety—Serbia.
A dichotomy so visibly instrumental is unlikely to be more durable than the mythical distinction it has replaced. At the end of his Orchestrating Europe, a capacious and strangely zestful guide through the institutional maze and informal complications of the Union, Keith Middlemas looks out on a somewhat broader scene. Europe, he suggests, is surrounded by an arc of potential threat curving from Murmansk to Casablanca. To hold it at a distance, the Union needs a belt of insulation, comprising a ‘second circle’ of lands capable of integration into the Community, shielding it from the dangers of the ‘third circle’ beyond—that is, Russia, the Middle East and Black Africa. In this conception the respective buffer zones logically become Eastern Europe, Cyprus and Turkey in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Maghreb. Middlemas, however, explains that while the first two are ultimately acceptable into the Union, the third remains inconceivable. For ‘the countries of the Maghreb are irrelevant as a barrier to a sub-Saharan Africa, which presents no threat except via small numbers of illegal immigrants’. In fact, on the contrary, ‘the threat comes from North Africa itself’.46 If this is a more ecumenical approach than that of Garton Ash, who expressly excludes Turkey from Europe, it traces the same movement, common to all these tropes—a slide to aporia. Every attempt so far to delimit the future boundaries of the Union has deconstructed itself.
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