The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

  For the moment, it is enough to register that ‘Europe Agreements’, formally designated as antechambers to entry, have been signed by six countries: Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria; and that four more are impending (Slovenia and the Baltic states). It is only a matter of time before Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Albania and what is left of Bosnia join the queue. Does this prospect—we might call it an inverted domino effect, in which the pieces fall inwards rather than outwards—mean that the British scenario will come to pass? Harold Macmillan once spoke, with a homely national touch, of his hope that the Community, when exposed to the beneficent pressure of a vast free-trade area, would ‘melt like a lump of sugar in a cup of tea’.47 Such remains the preferred vision of his successors. Their calculation is that the more member-states there are, the less sovereignty can practically be pooled, and the greater is the chance that federal dreams will fold. How realistic is it?

  There is no doubt that enlargement of the Union to some two dozen states would fundamentally alter its nature. If its existing arrangements were simply extended east, the cost of integrating the Visegrád quartet alone could mean an increase of 60 per cent in the Union budget. There is no chance of the existing member-states accepting such a burden, at a time when every domestic pressure is towards tax reduction. That leaves either reducing current support to farming communities and poorer regions in the west, composed of voters with the power to resist, or watering down the acquis communautaire to create a second-class membership for new entrants, without benefit of the transfers accorded to first-class members.

  These are just the fiscal headaches attending rapid expansion. There are also the material consequences for the former Communist economies. If the effort of adhering to the convergence criteria for monetary union is already straining prosperous Western societies to breaking point, can impoverished Eastern ones be expected to sustain them? No previous candidates, however initially disadvantaged, had to scale such a macro-economic cliff. Contemplating the requirements of EMU, it is not suprising that enthusiasts for expansion are starting to call for the whole idea of a single currency to be dropped. For Garton Ash, the needs of Warsaw and Prague dovetail with what is anyway the wisdom of London. ‘Europe could perhaps use a little more British thinking at the moment’, he writes of monetary union, ‘with “British” here meant in the deeper sense of our particular intellectual tradition: sceptical, empirical and pragmatic’.48 The suspicion that EMU and Eastern enlargement might be incompatible is shared from the opposite standpoint by the unlikely figure of Jacques Attali, who regards the single currency as a valid but now lost cause, and enlargement as a German project that will lead away from a federal Europe, for which most of the national elites, mesmerized by American culture, anyway have no appetite. L’Europe ne s’aime pas, he glumly observed at the end of the Mitterrand experience.49

  Maastricht is unlikely to evaporate so easily. But the hazards of enlargement do not just lie in the economic pitfalls it poses for new or old members. Even if derogations of various kinds—from the Common Agricultural Policy, from the Structural Funds, from the single currency—were to be made for what were once the ‘captive nations’, a more fundamental difficulty would remain, of a purely political nature. To double its membership could cripple the existing institutions of the Union. Already the original balance of the Six or the Nine has been thrown out of kilter in the Council of Ministers. Today the five largest states—Germany, France, Italy, Britain and Spain—contain 80 per cent of the population of the Union, but command only just more than half of the votes in the Council. If the ten current ex-Communist applicants were members, the share of these states would fall even further, while the proportion of poor countries in the Union—those now entitled to substantial transfers—would rise from four out of fifteen to a majority of fourteen out of twenty-five.

  Adjustment of voting weights could bring the pays légal some way back towards the pays réel. But it would not resolve potentially the most intractable problem posed by enlargement to the east, which lies in the logic of numbers. Ex-satellite Europe contains almost exactly as many states as continuously capitalist Europe (at the latest count, sixteen in the ‘East’ to seventeen in the ‘West’, if we include Switzerland), with a third of the population. Proliferation of partners on this scale, no matter how the inequalities between them were finessed, threatens institutional gridlock. Rebus sic stantibus, the size of the European Parliament would swell towards eight hundred deputies; the number of commissioners rise to forty; a ten-minute introductory speech by each minister attending a Council yield a meeting of five hours, before business even started. The legendary complexity of the already existing system, with its meticulous rotations of commissarial office, laborious inter-governmental bargains and assorted ministerial and parliamentary vetoes, would be overloaded to the point of paralysis.

  In such conditions, would not widening inevitably mean loosening? This is the wager in London, expressed more or less openly according to venue, from the FCO to the TLS. In the long term, the official line of thinking goes, expansion must mean defederalization. Yet is this the only logical deduction? Here we encounter the final amphibology. For might not precisely the prospect of institutional deadlock impose as an absolute functional necessity a much more centralized supranational authority than exists today? Coordination of twelve to fifteen member states can just about operate, however cumbersomely, on a basis of consensus. Multiplication to thirty practically rules this out. The more states enter the Union, the greater the discrepancy between population and representation in the Council of Ministers will tend to be, as large countries are increasingly outnumbered by smaller ones, and the weaker overall decisional capacity would become. The result could paradoxically be the opposite of the British expectation—not a dilution, but a concentration of federal power in a new constitutional settlement, in which national voting weights are redistributed and majority decisions become normal. The problem of scale, in other words, might force just the cutting of the institutional knot the proponents of a loose free trade area seek to avoid. Widening could check or reverse deepening. It might also precipitate it.

  Each of the three critical issues now facing the European Union—the single currency, the role of Germany, and the multiplication of member-states—thus presents a radical indeterminacy. In every case, the distinctive form of the amphibology is the same. One set of meanings is so drastic it appears subject to capsizal into its contrary, giving rise to a peculiar uncertainty. These are the political quicksands on which the Europe to come will be built.

  1. Alan Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe 1945–51, London 1984, p. 492.

  2. Alan Milward and Vibeke Sorensen, ‘Interdependence or Integration: A National Choice’, in Alan Milward, Frances Lynch, Ruggiero Ranieri, Federico Romero, Vibeke Sorensen, The Frontiers of National Sovereignty: History and Theory 1945–1992, London 1993, p. 20.

  3. The European Rescue of the Nation-State, London 1992, p. xi.

  4. The European Rescue of the Nation-State, p. 447.

  5. ‘Conclusions: The Value of History’, in The Frontiers of National Sovereignty, pp. 194, 201.

  6. For the extent of the hostility to integration in the administrative elite, see Gérard Bossuat, ‘Les hauts fonctionnaires français et le processus d’unité en Europe occidentale d’Alger à Rome (1943–1958)’, Journal of European Integration History, No. 1, Vol. 1, 1995, pp. 87–109.

  7. Christian Pineau, Le grand pari: L’aventure du traité de Rome, Paris 1991, pp. 221–23.

  8. The European Rescue of the Nation-State, p. 334.

  9. François Duchêne, Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence, New York 1994, pp. 226–8, 198.

  10. Duchêne, Jean Monnet, p. 228.

  11. Jean Monnet, p. 364.

  12. Jean Monnet, p. 270.

  13. Jean Monnet, Mémoires, Paris 1976, p. 577.

  14. Jean Monnet, p. 357.

  15. The European R
escue of the Nation-State, p. 375.

  16. The European Rescue of the Nation-State, p. 433.

  17. The European Rescue of the Nation-State, pp. 395, 432.

  18. The European Rescue of the Nation-State, p. 433.

  19. The Frontiers of National Sovereignty, p. 195.

  20. ‘Allegiance: The Past and the Future’, Journal of European Integration, 1995, No. 1, Vol. 1, p. 14.

  21. The European Rescue of the Nation-State, p. 186.

  22. The European Rescue of the Nation-State, pp. 446–7.

  23. Duchêne, Jean Monnet, p. 390.

  24. Jean Monnet, p. 20.

  25. Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, London 1993, pp. 727, 729–730.

  26. The Downing Street Years, p. 536.

  27. The Downing Street Years, pp. 549–51.

  28. The Downing Street Years, pp. 765–6.

  29. The Downing Street Years, p. 742.

  30. The Downing Street Years, pp. 70, 742, 736.

  31. Friedrich Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order, Chicago 1948, pp. 264–5. Retrospectively, Hayek’s clairvoyance is all the more striking for the distance between the context in which he was writing and the arrival of European Monetary Union. His essay published in September 1939, was a contribution to the debates around differing conceptions and schemes of federal union in the leading forum devoted to these, The New Commonwealth Quarterly. Its immediate background was the sudden wave of enthusiasm in the wake of Munich for schemes of federal union as a barrier against Nazi expansion, set off by the American publicist Clarence Streit’s call for the world’s fifteen democracies to league together against the Axis powers (see below p. 497). Intellectually, Hayek was inspired by the case made by Lionel Robbins for the “deplanning’’ of the interventionism of the past half century’ (Economic Planning and International Order, London 1937, p. 248; The History of Freedom and Other Essays, London 1907, p. 98), and by Acton’s belief that ‘of all checks on democracy, federalism has been the most efficacious and the most congenial’. Politically, he seems to have viewed Streit’s proposal for a Democratic Union stretching from the United States through Britain to Australia with understandable scepticism, plumping instead, along with Robbins, for an Anglo-French union once the war had broken out. By the time of The Road to Serfdom (1944), he was commending Ivor Jenning’s now forgotten treatise A Federation for Western Europe (1940) for post-war consideration. But when European integration eventually got under way with the Schuman Plan, the Coal and Steel Community was too dirigiste to win his sympathy.

  32. Wynne Godley, ‘Maastricht and All That’, London Review of Books, 8 October 1992.

  33. Friedrich Hayek, Denationalisation of Money: The Argument Refined, London 1978, pp. 19–20.

  34. Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, L’Europa verso l’unione monetaria, Turin 1992, pp. xii, 189.

  35. ‘Macro-coordination of fiscal policies in an economic and monetary union’, Report on Economic and Monetary Union in the European Community, Luxembourg 1989, p. 101.

  36. Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘Pursuing a Chimera’, Times Literary Supplement, 13 March 1992.

  37. Bernard Connolly, The Rotten Heart of Europe, London 1995, p. 64.

  38. The Rotten Heart of Europe, pp. 391–2.

  39. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Central European Attitudes’, in George Schöpflin and Nancy Wood (eds), In Search of Central Europe, London 1989, p. 116.

  40. Milan Kundera, ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’, New York Review of Books, 26 April 1984; see also George Schöpflin, ‘Central Europe: Definitions and Old and New’, In Search of Central Europe, pp. 7–29.

  41. London 1994. Like most writers in this genre, Applebaum is not always consistent—in the mediaeval period, Poland is accounted an ‘average central European country’: p. 48.

  42. Friedrich Naumann, Mittleleuropa, Berlin 1915, pp. 3, 129–31, 222ff, 254ff.

  43. Naumann, Mitteleuropa, pp. 30, 67–71, 232–8, 242.

  44. J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Deconstructing Europe’, London Review of Books, 19 December 1991; now in The Discovery of Islands, Cambridge 2005, p. 287.

  45. Timothy Garton Ash, ‘Catching the Wrong Bus?’, Times Literary Supplement, 5 May 1995.

  46. Keith Middlemas, Orchestrating Europe, London 1995, pp. 664–5.

  47. Duchêne, Jean Monnet, p. 320.

  48. Garton Ash, ‘Catching the Wrong Bus?’

  49. Jacques Attali, Europe(s), Paris 1994, pp. 15, 147–50, 181–99.

  OUTCOMES

  2007

  An epiphany is beguiling Europe. Far from dwindling in historical significance, the Old World is about to assume an importance for humanity it never, in all its days of dubious past glory, possessed. At the end of Postwar, his eight-hundred-page account of the continent since 1945, the historian Tony Judt exclaims at ‘Europe’s emergence in the dawn of the twenty-first century as a paragon of the international virtues: a community of values held up by Europeans and non-Europeans alike as an exemplar for all to emulate’. The reputation, he eagerly assures us, is ‘well-earned’.1 The same vision grips the seers of New Labour. Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century declaims the title of a manifesto by Mark Leonard, the party’s foreign policy Wunderkind. ‘Imagine a world of peace, prosperity and democracy’, he enjoins the reader. ‘What I am asking you to imagine is the “New European Century” ’. How will this entrancing prospect come about? ‘Europe represents a synthesis of the energy and freedom that come from liberalism with the stability and welfare that come from social democracy. As the world becomes richer and moves beyond satisfying basic needs such as hunger and health, the European way of life will become irresistible’.2 Really? Absolutely. ‘As India, Brazil, South Africa, and even China develop economically and express themselves politically, the European model will represent an irresistibly attractive way of enhancing their prosperity whilst protecting their security. They will join with the EU in building “a New European Century” ’.3

  Not to be outdone, the futurologist Jeremy Rifkin—American by birth, but by any standards an honorary European: indeed a personal adviser to Romano Prodi when he was president of the European Commission—has offered his guide to The European Dream. Seeking ‘harmony, not hegemony’, he tells us, the EU ‘has all the right markings to claim the moral high ground on the journey toward a third stage of human consciousness. Europeans have laid out a visionary roadmap to a new promised land, one dedicated to re-affirming the life-instinct and the Earth’s indivisibility’.4 After a lyrical survey of this route—typical staging-posts: ‘Governing without a Centre’, ‘Romancing the Civil Society’, ‘A Second Enlightenment’—Rifkin, warning us against cynicism, concludes: ‘These are tumultuous times. Much of the world is going dark, leaving many human beings without clear direction. The European Dream is a beacon of light in a troubled world. It beckons us to a new age of inclusivity, diversity, quality of life, deep play, sustainability, universal human rights, the rights of nature, and peace on Earth’.5

  These transports may seem peculiarly Anglo-Saxon, but there is no shortage of more prosaic equivalents on the continent. For Germany’s leading philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, Europe has found ‘exemplary solutions’ for two great issues of the age, ‘governance beyond the nation-state’ and systems of welfare that ‘serve as a model’ to the world. So why not triumph in a third? ‘If Europe has solved two problems of this magnitude, why shouldn’t it issue a further challenge: to defend and promote a cosmopolitan order on the basis of international law?’6—or, as his compatriot the sociologist Ulrich Beck puts it, ‘Europeanisation means creating a new politics. It means entering as a player into the meta-power game, into the struggle to form the rules of a new global order. The catchphrase for the future might be: Move over America—Europe is back’.7 Over in France, Marcel Gauchet, theorist of democracy and an editor of the country’s central journal of ideas, Le Débat, explains that ‘we may be allowed to think that the formula the Europeans have pioneered is destined eventually to serve
as a model for the nations of the world. That lies in its genetic programme’.8

  1

  Self-satisfaction is, of course, scarcely unfamiliar in Europe. But the contemporary mood is something different: an apparently illimitable narcissism, in which the reflection in the water transfigures the future of the planet into the image of the beholder. What explains this degree of political vanity? Obviously, the landscape of the continent has altered in recent years, and its role in the world has grown. Real changes can give rise to surreal dreams, but they need to be calibrated properly, to see what the connexions or lack of them might be. A decade ago, three great imponderables lay ahead: the advent of monetary union, as designed at Maastricht; the return of Germany to regional preponderance, with reunification; and the expansion of the EU into Eastern Europe. The outcome of each remained ex ante indeterminate. How far have they been clarified since?

  Of its nature, the introduction of a single currency, adopted simultaneously by eleven out of fifteen member-states of the EU on the first day of 1999, marked the most punctual and systematic transformation of the three. It was always reasonable to suppose its effects would be the soonest visible, and most clear-cut. Yet this has proved so only in the most limited technical sense, that the substitution of a dozen monies by one (Greece joined in 2002) was handled extremely smoothly, without glitch or mishap: an administrative tour de force. Otherwise, contrary to general expectations, the net upshot of the monetary union that came into force in the Eurozone eight years ago remains inconclusive. The stated purpose of the single currency was to lower transaction costs and increase predictability of returns for business, so unleashing higher investment and faster growth of productivity and output.