Postwar

by Tony Judt

  The UK and Denmark, meanwhile, signed the main body of the Treaty but opted out of the proposed common currency—partly in anticipation of its economically restrictive impact; partly because of its symbolic resonance in nations already more reluctant than most to abandon the trappings of sovereignty to transnational agencies; and in the case of the UK because—as so often in the past—the march to Union was regarded with acute misgivings as a further step towards a European super state.349

  To be sure, the Maastricht Treaty made much play with ‘subsidiarity’—a sort of Occam’s Razor for eurocrats, stating that ‘the Union does not take action (except in the areas which fall within its exclusive competence) unless it is more effective than action taken at national, regional or local level’. But even this had different meanings for different ears: in France it meant limiting the power of supernational bodies beyond Paris’s control; for the Germans, it implied special privileges and powers for regional governments; for the British it represented a device for blocking institutional integration.

  Maastricht had three significant side-effects. One of them was the unforeseen boost it gave to NATO. Under the restrictive terms of the Treaty it was clear (as the French at least had intended) that the newly liberated countries of eastern Europe could not possibly join the European Union in the immediate future—neither their fragile legal and financial institutions nor their convalescent economies were remotely capable of operating under the strict fiscal and other regulations the Union’s members had now imposed upon all present and future signatories.

  Instead, it was suggested in the corridors of Brussels that Poland, Hungary and their neighbours might be offered early membership of NATO as a sort of compensation: an interim prize. The symbolic value of extending NATO in this way was obviously considerable, which is why it was immediately welcomed in the new candidate member-states. The practical benefits were less obvious (unlike the damage to relations with Moscow which was real and immediate). But because Washington had reasons of its own for favouring the expansion of the North Atlantic Defense community, a first group of central European nations was duly admitted to NATO a few years later.350

  The second impact was on European public awareness. The Maastricht Treaty provoked an unprecedented level of interest in what had hitherto been the obscure workings of the European Union and its anonymous bureaucracy. Even though the Treaty was approved in every country where it was put to a national vote (albeit by just 50.1 percent in the French case) it aroused sufficient opposition to place the question of ‘Europe’ on domestic political agendas, often for the first time. For four decades, the institutions and rules of a new continental system had been quietly designed and decided in obscure Benelux towns with no reference to public wishes or democratic procedure. Those days, it appeared, were over.

  The third consequence of Maastricht was that it cleared the way for the coming together not, indeed, of Europe, but at least of its western half. The end of the Cold War, and the EU’s commitment to a single market, removed the impediments to membership for the remaining members of the old European Free Trade Area.351 Sweden, Finland and Austria all duly applied, no longer constrained by their commitment to neutrality (or, in the Finnish case, by the need to maintain good relations with Moscow) and increasingly nervous at being left out of the common European space.

  The accession negotiations with the new applicants were completed in just three months, facilitated by the fact that all three countries were not only stable and small—their combined population less than one quarter that of Germany—but also decidedly rich. The same would have been true of the last remaining hold-outs, Norway and Switzerland. But despite considerable enthusiasm on the part of local business leaders the populations of both countries voted against membership—fearful of losing their autonomy and initiative in a supranational federation and skeptical of the benefits of participation in the new currency.

  A comparable skepticism marked the closeness of the vote in Sweden in November 1994, when EU membership was put to a referendum. Just 52.3 percent voted in favour, and even then only on the understanding that their country would stay out of the common currency (ten years later, when the government in Stockholm recommended to the nation that they finally abandon the krone and join the euro, it was decisively and humiliatingly defeated in a referendum, just as the Danish government had been in September 2000 when it posed the same question). The reaction of Per Gahrton, Swedish Riksdag member for the Green Party and a bitter opponent of EU membership, echoed a widespread Scandinavian anxiety: ‘This is the day that the Riksdag decided to transform Sweden from an independent nation to a sort of province within an expanding superpower, in the process converting itself from a legislative body to little more than an advisory panel’.

  Gahrton’s feelings were shared by many northern Europeans, including some who nonetheless voted in favour of membership. Even those in the Swiss or Scandinavian political and business elites who wanted to join the EU, so as not to miss out on the benefits of the single market, recognized that there were economic and political costs to that option: in private they conceded that if the decision went against them it would not be an unmitigated disaster for their countries. In Sweden—or Norway, or even Denmark and the UK—the EU (not to speak of its newly integrated currency) was seen as a choice, not a necessity.

  In Central and Eastern Europe however, membership of ‘Europe’ was the only possible option. Whatever their reasoning—whether it was to modernize their economies, secure new markets, obtain foreign aid, stabilize their domestic politics, lock themselves into ‘the West’ or simply head off the temptation of a retreat into national Communism—the new rulers from Tallinn to Tirana looked to Brussels. The prospect of joining the EU, with its promise of affluence and security, was dangled temptingly before the liberated electorates of post-Communist Europe. Don’t be seduced by those who tell you it was better under the old system, they were warned. The pain of transition will have been worth it: Europe is your future.352

  Seen from Brussels, however, the picture was quite different. From the outset the European project was deeply schizophrenic. On the one hand it was culturally inclusive,open to all the peoples of Europe. Participation in the European Economic Community, the European Community and finally the European Union itself was the right of any European state ‘whose system of government is founded on the principles of democracy’ and which agreed to accept the terms of membership.

  But on the other hand the Union was functionally exclusive. Each new agreement and treaty had further complicated the requirements placed upon member-states in return for binding them into the ‘European’ family; and these regulations and rules had the cumulative result of building ever-higher fences to keep out countries and peoples who could not meet the tests. Thus the Schengen Treaty (1985) was a boon for the citizens of participating states, who now moved unhindered across open borders between sovereign states. But residents of countries outside the Schengen club were obliged to queue—quite literally—for admission.

  Maastricht, with its rigid requirements for a common currency and its insistence that all aspiring member-states integrate into their systems of governance the acquis communautaire, the rapidly burgeoning code of European practices, was the ultimate bureaucratic exclusion zone. It posed no impediment to Nordic applicants or Austria, but presented an awesome hurdle for would-be candidates from the East. Committed by the terms of its own charter to welcoming the new Europeans into its fold, the EU in practice sought to keep them out as long as possible.

  There were good reasons for this. Even the wealthiest of the new hopefuls—Slovenia, say, or the Czech Republic—were distinctly poorer than any existing EU member, and most of them were very poor indeed. By any measure the gulf separating East and West Europe was huge: infant mortality in the Baltic states was twice the average of the fifteen EU member states in 1996. The life expectancy of males in Hungary was eight years short of the EU average; in Latvia, eleven years.

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bsp; If Hungary, or Slovakia or Lithuania—much less Poland, with its 38 million inhabitants—were admitted to the Union on the same terms as its present members the cost in subsidies, regional assistance, infrastructure grants and other transfers would surely break the EU budget. In December 1994 the Bertelsmann Foundation in Germany published a study suggesting that if the six countries of Central Europe then seeking entry (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Romania and Bulgaria) were admitted on the same terms as existing members, the cost in structural funds alone would exceed thirty billion Deutschmarks a year.

  This, it was widely feared, could provoke a backlash in the electorates of the countries paying most of the Union’s bills and who would surely have to be asked to contribute even more: the Netherlands and Britain but especially, and more ominously, Germany. In any case, the recipient countries in the East were in no position to put up even the minimum matching funds required under existing EU regulations. What post-Communist Europe really needed was a Marshall Plan, but no-one was offering it.

  In addition to being expensive, the new recruits would be troublesome. Their legal systems were corrupt or dysfunctional, their political leaders untested, their currencies unstable, their borders porous. Their needy and indigent citizens, it was feared, would either head West in search of welfare and work or else stay home and accept derisory wages—tempting foreign investors and employers away from the old countries of the EU. Either way they would constitute a threat. There was talk of western Europe being ‘overrun’—a distant but unmistakable echo of Herder’s fears of the rumbling of the ‘wild peoples’ of eastern Europe. No one doubted that the EU could do wonders for eastern Europe. But what might eastern Europe do to the EU?

  With these concerns in mind, the western Europeans duly procrastinated. In the immediate aftermath of 1989 the German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher initially proposed that the European Union absorb all the countries of Eastern Europe as soon as possible, as a prophylactic measure against a nationalist backlash. But he was soon brought to heel; and although Margaret Thatcher continued to press enthusiastically for early enlargement (calculating that an enlarged Union would inevitably be diluted into the pan-European free trade area of British dreams) it was the French approach that came to dominate EU strategy.

  François Mitterrand’s first response had been to propose a loose-knit ‘European Confederation’—a sort of outer tier of associate membership, open to all-comers with no conditions and few material benefits. In later years French diplomats would bemoan the lack of support for this suggestion, regretting the lost opportunity for ‘calm collaboration’ towards an enlarged Union. But at the time it was rightly seen as a transparent ploy, to corral the newly liberated Eastern European states into an ersatz ‘European community’ that would justify keeping them out of the real thing indefinitely. Václav Havel understood this from the start, which is why he rejected it out of hand (and became for a while persona non grata at the Elysée Palace).

  Instead, relations between eastern and western Europe remained for the next few years stuck at the level of bilateral exchanges and trade accords, with certain countries—Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia—accorded a strictly limited ‘associational’ status vis-à-vis the EU but nothing more. However, the Moscow coup of 1991 and the Balkan wars that broke out shortly afterwards focused Western attention on the risks of letting the post-Communist countries fester in uncertainty; and it was duly agreed at an EU summit meeting in Copenhagen in June 1993 that in principle—and at a date yet to be determined—‘the associated countries in Central and eastern Europe that so desire shall become members of the European Union’.

  This did little to alleviate the frustration of the would-be members whose dealings with Brussels and the Western capitals had left them, in the understated words of the Polish Prime Minister Hanna Suchocka, ‘disappointed’. And indeed the political leaders of Eastern Europe spent much of the rest of the decade patiently and frustratingly seeking firm commitments from their reluctant Western partners, promising their domestic constituents that EU membership really was on the agenda while taking every opportunity to impress upon their foreign interlocutors the urgency of making it so.

  But Western attention was elsewhere. The transition to a new common currency and the translation into practice of the Maastricht plans for institutional integration were the dominant preoccupation in every Western European capital. In Germany there was growing anxiety at the costs and difficulties of integrating the territories of the former GDR. Meanwhile the Yugoslav catastrophe—which at first had served to remind Western statesmen of the risks of underestimating post-Communist problems in general—had now become a full-time obsession.

  The gaze of prominent intellectuals—a sure barometer of passing political fashions—had moved away. It was only a few years since ‘Central Europe’ had been rediscovered by Western commentators, with Havel, Kundera, Michnik and their colleagues the toast of editorial pages and higher-brow periodicals from Paris to New York. But history was passing swiftly on: Prague and Budapest, their miraculous transition out of tyranny already a fading memory, had been left to tourists and businessmen. Bernard-Henri Lévy and Susan Sontag were more likely to be found in Sarajevo. Central Europe’s fifteen minutes of fame had passed and with it any public pressure to expedite its absorption into Western institutions. In public, politicians and managers in Brussels insisted upon their continued desire to see the Union enlarged to its East when conditions were ‘ripe’. Off the record they were more candid. As one very senior European Commission official observed in the mid-Nineties, ‘no-one here is serious about enlargement’.

  Enlargement, nevertheless, was on the agenda. Under the EU’s own rules it could not deny countries the right to apply for membership. The European Commission was accordingly constrained to accept applications from Hungary and Poland in 1994, Romania, Slovakia, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Bulgaria in 1995, and Slovenia and the Czech Republic in 1996. The ten former Communist candidates thus joined Malta and Cyprus, both of whom had submitted applications in 1989, and Turkey (whose application had been languishing since 1987). All of these candidate countries were now parked in a rather crowded ante-room, awaiting the Union’s attention.

  In 1997 the Treaty of Amsterdam added a series of important technical amendments to the original Rome Treaty, filling out the goals of Maastricht and putting teeth into the Union’s stated intention to develop a program of European citizenship and Europe-wide institutions to address employment, health, the environment and the glaring absence of a common foreign policy. At this point, with the common currency scheduled to come into effect in 1999, the Union had completed a decade of internal integration that had absorbed all its bureaucratic energies. There was no longer any excuse for postponing the far thornier issue of expansion.

  The preference of some national leaders, and many of the senior officials at the European Commission, would have been to limit accession negotiations to the ‘easy’ cases: small countries like Slovenia or Hungary, contiguous to the Union’s existing borders and with relatively modernized economies, which posed only a limited challenge to the EU’s institutional framework and its budget. But it soon became clear that this might be politically imprudent—left out in the cold Romania, or Poland, could drift into dangerously undemocratic waters—and so, beginning in 1998, the European Union officially initiated the accession process of all ten eastern European applicants together with Cyprus. Malta was added to the list shortly afterwards. Turkey, however, was held back.

  From this point the enlargement took on a dynamic of its own, notwithstanding continuing misgivings on the part of a number of existing EU members and, to judge from opinion polls, widespread lack of enthusiasm among their populations. Bilateral accession negotiations were set in motion, first with a presumptive inner core of candidates: Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia; and then, a year later, with the rest: Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Latvi
a, Lithuania and Malta. Poland’s presence in the first group, in spite of the economic difficulties it posed, was explained by its size and prominence. Slovakia, conversely, was ‘relegated’ to the second tier in response to the stagnation and corruption wrought there by Mečiar’s authoritarian rule—and as a warning and example to others.

  There followed five years of intense and sometimes acrimonious negotiations. ‘Brussels’ descended upon the capitals of all the candidate countries, showering them with advisors, recommendations, examples, programmes and instructions in an effort to bring their institutions, laws, regulations, practices and civil services up to a minimum standard compatible with those of the Union. The applicants, in turn, pressed as hard as they dared for assurances that they would have free access to EU consumers, while defending their domestic market from being overwhelmed by more attractive and efficient goods and services from the West.

  The struggle was decidedly unequal. Whereas the EU was the longstanding and openly avowed object of Eastern desires, the putative new members could offer little in return except the promise of good behaviour. And thus it was agreed that while the new members would be accorded a few limited concessions—among them temporary restraints upon foreign purchases of land, a sensitive political issue—they would have to accept that the EU, despite its commitment to a single market, was going to impose considerable restrictions upon their own export of goods and, especially, people.

  In response to wildly exaggerated estimates of likely population flows (one European Commission report published in 2000 prophesied an annual exodus of 335,000 from the ten eastern accession states if the frontiers were opened without restriction), most of the Western member-states insisted on quotas being placed on the number of eastern Europeans who could move to the West—in blatant disregard of the spirit and indeed the letter of a decade of proclamations and treaties. Germany, Austria and Finland imposed strict limits for two years with an option to extend these for a further five. Belgium, Italy and Greece followed suit. Only the UK and Ireland declared their willingness to conform to the ‘open door’ principles of the Union—while announcing that welfare benefits for work-seekers from Eastern Europe would be kept to a minimum.