In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

by Geert Mak

  It was, at the same time, an unparalleled movement with regard to democratisation and human rights. During the last half-century, the Council of Europe, set up in 1949, developed into a pan-European organisation in this regard. The greatest success is the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. There, citizens can file actions directly against their state – uniquely in the annals of international law – for violations of human rights. And often enough, their claims are honoured. The Court's authority is enormous: its verdicts are legally binding, resonate throughout the legal systems of all affiliated states, and no one would dream of ignoring them.

  In addition, the unification was also the most important European process of modernisation since the Napoleonic regime in the early nineteenth century. At this moment, the EU comprises the largest economy in the world. According to estimates from the European Commission, some two and a half million jobs were created as a direct result of the further relaxation of internal borders in 1993. With the introduction of the euro, member states have finally been forced to put their own economic households in order. Thanks in part to the European markets, Italy has grown in the course of fifty years from an impoverished land into a prosperous nation. Something similar is taking place in Ireland: employment there has doubled in the last fifteen years, unemployment has almost disappeared, and for the first time in human memory the Irish are not emigrating to the United States, but are returning from there to their mother country. Within a single generation, Spain, with the help of a great many European facilities, has been transformed from an infirm dictatorship into a reasonably modern country. In this regard, the latest expansion of the Union's membership has also been extremely successful: the economies of most of the new member states are growing faster than expected.

  The eyes of Asia have also been turned on the European experiment. In 1967, the first members of ASEAN (the Association of South-East Asian Nations) – Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand – committed themselves to form a ‘zone of peace, freedom and neutrality’. By 1999, all ten East Asian countries had joined that organisation. In 2001, the East Asian vision group, including Korea, Japan and China, published a series of recommendations which, if carried out, may lead to an Asian counterpart of the EU: the East Asian Community. There is even talk of the introduction of an Asian ‘euro’ somewhere around the year 2020.

  The success of the European model, despite the many problems, has also caught the attention of increasing numbers of Americans. Europe still cannot hold a candle to the dynamism, flexibility and energy of American society, but when it comes to quality of life the average citizen of the Old World – particularly its western regions – has quietly left his American cousin in the dust. Average life expectancy in Europe is longer, there is less poverty, daily life is safer, there is considerably more leisure and holiday time for all, one can – at least for the time being – retire much earlier, social security facilities are often more generous and, even in Slovenia, the infant mortality rate is lower. And with regard to modernisation of the infrastructure: today, in 2006, a high-speed train begins its trip between Paris and Lyon – lasting a little less than two hours – almost every thirty minutes, and nobody finds that remarkable. The one daily Amtrak service between San Francisco and Los Angeles, a comparable distance between comparable population concentrations, takes almost a full day, and plans for a high-speed line are no more than doodles on the drawing board.

  America is, in short, no longer Europe's shining example, not by any means. Almost unnoticed, we on this continent have taken a road completely our own.‘Europe,’ writes the American social-economic publicist Jeremy Rifkin, ‘had become a huge laboratory for rethinking humanity's future. In many respects, the European Dream is the mirror opposite of the American Dream. While the American Dream emphasises unrestrained economic growth, personal wealth and the pursuit of individual self-interest, the European Dream focuses more on sustainable development, quality of life and the nurturing of community.’

  No one foresaw the current EU. Who would have dared to predict in 1953 – the year in which Stalin died, in which George Marshall and Albert Schweitzer received the Nobel Prize for Peace, in which Princess Elizabeth became Queen Elizabeth II, the year in which the East Germans rebelled and the Dutch-Belgian border was the scene of a fierce manhunt for butter smugglers – who would have dared to predict that half a century later there would be an EU of fifteen – and soon, twenty-five – members, with its own currency and its own parliament, a free space with largely open internal borders, that would stretch from Ireland by way of a united Germany to the very borders of chaotic Russia? And, by the same token: who would have dared to predict in 1953 that divers feelings of national pride and unity would play such an important role in European politics at the start of the twenty-first century?

  After their introduction, French writer Régis Debray referred to the new euro banknotes as ‘play money’, printed for a virtual community known as ‘Euroland’. It is, indeed, anything but the coinage of a political union with a sense of what it is and where it wants to go. For too long, European unification was a technocratic project set up by idealistic pioneers and soon taken over by businessmen, bureaucrats and government leaders, with only the occasional starry-eyed statesman to shake things up again. The new European cooperative venture was, in that way, largely a top-down affair. From the very start, of course, the common market was a major goal. And in the long term, of course, many European entrepreneurs would be lost if Europe did not develop into a single, huge, common domestic market. But the creation of a free European market has increasingly edged out the original objective, which is to provide a structure for peace.

  The European project was and is closely interwoven with the phenomenon of globalisation. As early as 1919, the economist John Maynard Keynes described how a person in London, drinking his morning cup of tea in bed, could order almost any product in the world, in the certainty that it would be delivered to his doorstep as quickly as possible. That international interweaving has since developed to what a person of that day would have considered unbelievable proportions. According to some, the EU played – and continues to play – a major role in curbing and controlling these chaotic international networks and concentrations of power. In the eyes of others, however, the EU is very much an expression of the kind of globalisation against which increasing protest has arisen since the turn of this latest century; a globalisation driven by the nigh-religious belief that ‘the market’ is a panacea, that burgeoning international trade will ultimately work for the good of all, that poverty and tyranny will duly vanish of their own accord, that economic figures determine everything, that privatisation always has a beneficial effect, that competition is always best, that within these global systems the nation states will ultimately become obsolete. It is the philosophy of most political elites, but many citizens – even the majority in any number of European countries – don't believe in it at all.

  It is precisely this credibility gap which, as opinion polls showed, played such an important role in the rejection of the European Constitution by the French and the Dutch. It is not European unification itself which they rejected, but the way in which the project has been given form and continually expanded, until it has become so vague that they can no longer identify with it. For them, Europe meant the lifting of the bell jars under which each European nation had lived for centuries. It meant the dissipation of sources of conflict, the opening of markets and cultures, the freedom to go where you wish. But it also meant the abandonment of the national context within which the culture, economy, legal system and democracy had developed for centuries. For these voters-in-protest, borders did, sometimes, have a positive function: as the delimitation of their familiar, predictable, influenceable, safe world.

  Those same European pioneers, therefore, underestimated just how important such feelings of national cohesion can be, particularly in times of great change and turbulence. Or, better said, the way in w
hich the rise of guarantor states after the war would provide a completely new basis for national sentiment. For in addition to the old national ties of language, culture, economic and military power, the 1950s saw burgeoning welfare arrangements that elicited a new brand of nationalism. Each land developed its own ‘legacies’, valuable claims that no one wanted to surrender – and preferably not share with foreigners: ample pension facilities, good health care, generous disability benefits.

  In this way, a complicated situation arose. Max Kohnstamm, one of the last living pioneers, put it this way during one of our conversations: ‘The market is a merciless god. Its counterpoint, compassion, cannot be based entirely on charity; if it hopes to remain durable, it must be based on rules of law. The market these days is regulated on a European scale, but the compassion is organised largely at the national level. And it is apparently very difficult indeed to raise that compassion to a European level, because, traditionally, it differs so widely from one country to the next.'When it comes to communal social regulations, therefore, that single Europe still seems far away – and it may never arrive at all.

  Much more complicated was the political manoeuvring surrounding the expansion of the Union. For the Germans, whose country has more neighbours than any other European nation, the expansion was vital. Only in that way, after all, could peace and stability in that corner of Europe be guaranteed for future generations. The British saw in the newcomers, above all, a group of new allies. The Central and Eastern Europeans were never in favour of a strong federal Union and, after long years under communism, were dead opposed to excessive market regulation. The French had no choice: they realised that their ‘baby’, the European Union, was very much taking on a life of its own, but at the same time they could not, morally, permit themselves to use their veto against expansion. In desperation, therefore, they voted for ‘le beau geste’.

  ‘The community we have created is not a goal in itself,’ Jean Monnet wrote at the end of his memoirs in 1978. ‘The community is merely a step towards the organised world of tomorrow.’ That prediction has, in part, come true: the European experiment has indeed proven to be an inspiring example to other parts of the world. Yet in many ways, exactly the opposite has happened: the European Community often acts as a fortress, as a hermetic trading bloc with which to obstruct and frustrate the emergence of poorer countries.

  In the course of this half century, the political mood within the EU has greatly changed. The democratic clarity of the first years has disappeared. The mediating power of the political parties has been weakened. With the rejection of the constitution, the ideal of the European federation could be stowed away. Potential new members are received without much enthusiasm. The tone is no longer set by the community itself, but by divergent national interests, and by a million and one intergovern-mental issues. The chance that a ‘two-speed Europe’ will arise, a wealthy Euro-bloc with a series of poorer satellite states, is clear and present.

  At the same time, the EU remains the most successful experiment in the field of international political institutions since the Second World War. The Union constitutes the largest market on earth. It is the largest exporter and the largest foreign investor. It is home to many of the world's largest and most successful concerns. The introduction of the euro went swimmingly, the expansion of the Union was a textbook example of successful ‘soft power’: never had so few means been required to so greatly promote democracy, prosperity and stability throughout such a large part of Europe.

  The pioneers present at the outset of the European Community were brought together by a common fate. All six countries had, in one way or another, made it through the war, all those who participated in the negotiations had experienced enormous chaos and destruction. The solutions they came up with in the space of those fifty years were designed for that little group of six countries, small and surveyable. But with twenty-five countries now taking part, the EU can no longer be run in that fashion. The right to veto of five hundred thousand Greek Cypriots, for example, can forever frustrate the negotiations for the admission to the Union of sixty-five million Turks. If only for that reason, a new organisational foundation – be it in the form of a new kind of constitution or a new Treaty of Rome – is sorely needed.

  The foundations upon which the EU is built are now increasingly a part of the daily reality of each citizen. It is no longer the pioneers, the statesmen and the nations that shore up the Union, it is above all that immense warp and weft of businesses, cities and people, that slowly-developed, self-evident European existence, that will have to weather the storm. Everything has changed and the organisation has grown too slowly to accommodate it, that is the major problem at this point. And the feeling of solidarity that existed in those early days, that is gone as well.

  During my travels I saw, by chance, a remarkable TV commercial for the British Conservative Party. As far as I remember, it went like this. Two prosperous thirty-somethings appeared on the screen. It was morning, she was sitting on the edge of the bed, he in the bathroom, shaving. Talk between the two gradually turned to Europe. He saw no problem in it, to him Europe meant the Tuscan sun, a Mercedes, Dutch cheese. His wife protested: but what about the euro, and all that bureaucracy in Brussels? He began having doubts of his own, and finally she was able to convince him. At the end, the couple tumbled back into their cosy bed. The punch-line was: ‘In Europe, not run by Europe.’

  Just as European leaders and bureaucrats have sometimes neglected the reasonable need for national cohesion, this commercial showed how many Europeans go to the other extreme: the almost fearful brush-off given to all the international and European ties that have slowly come to form the basis of our daily lives.

  Telling in this regard is the marginal interest shown in the European parliament: the average turnout fell from sixty-three per cent during the first elections in 1979 to forty-four per cent at the most recent polls. The rejection of the constitution, on the other hand, was strikingly clear and powerful. During the last European parliamentary elections, only thirty-nine per cent of the Dutch voting public went to the polls, while the referendum drew sixty-three per cent. In France, the discrepancy was even more striking: forty-three as opposed to seventy per cent. Surveys in Germany, Denmark, Britain and other countries indicated a similar mood. This was no longer a crisis of confidence amongst national governments, but a fundamental rift between European citizens and their political leaders. The European project is faced, in other words, with a gigantic legitimacy crisis.

  That hiatus is due in large part to the vagueness and limitlessness of the European project. Limitlessness in the most literal sense: where, after all, does Europe end? It is no coincidence that the physical limits of the current European Union – with the exception of Switzerland, Norway and Greece – largely coincide with the scope of Catholic Christianity in the Middle Ages. To a monk in the year 1006, the map of the European empire of 2006 would look rather familiar. But what if the expansion of the EU were to simply continue, what if expansion were to become an independent trait of the European project, like a bicycle that must keep rolling if it is not to fall over? Would it not eventually become something completely unrecognisable to the citizens of the original member states? And, besides that: would the Union not be running the risk of a European variation on ‘imperial overstretch’? Might not an all-too-rapid modernisation and democratisation in certain regions – the Balkans, Turkey – unleash uncontrollable forces? And might not the Union itself in that way become too unstable?

  In addition there is, for the average citizen, that other form of limitlessness: the ‘Brussels bureaucracy’. Despite what is often claimed, it is not the size of the apparatus that is the problem: the Union is run by fewer than 17,000 civil servants, half of whom are engaged only in translation work. In a city like Amsterdam, for example, the body of civil servants is one and a half times that size. The quality of the Union's apparatus is generally quite high. The problem is found in the enormous quantity of reg
ulations spread by the EU – due often enough, by the way, to the fact that all manner of national ‘fixers’ are pleased to take cover under the wings of ‘Europe’. The total of some 80,000 pages of Union directives could fill a bookcase, their limitlessness extends from the prescribed thickness of bicycle tires and the length of window washers’ ladders to the composition of chocolate bars and the methods for making goats’ cheese.

  Europe is no longer a network of separate nations but is gradually becoming one huge interwoven body of companies, cities and people, a new supercountry beside and above the traditional nation states. This situation definitely does not always work to our advantage, it sometimes creates huge problems, more than half of all Europeans are unhappy with it, but it is not something we can simply choose to ignore.

  Soon every European country will be able to arrest the subjects of all other European countries, the new pan-European arrest warrant will abolish national forms of legal protection, and meanwhile the values have been turned upside down: it will, after all, not be the best national systems of law that establish the European norm, but the weakest among them.

  The same thing is happening to democracy. For no matter how you look at it, in a country where hundreds of thousands of demonstrators take to the streets every time their leaders meet, there is something fundamentally wrong with the democratic system. The same applies to the EU. The new constitution drafted so laboriously in recent years may be an improvement for the EU itself; in comparison with the constitutions and democratic systems of many of its member states, however, it often amounts to nothing more than a return to the way things were before 1848, when the national parliaments still had to fight for most of their powers.