44. As Gentz explained in 1818: ‘The political system established in Europe since 1814 and 1815 is a phenomenon without precedent in the history of the world. In place of the principle of equilibrium, or more accurately of counterweights formed by particular alliances, the principle that has governed and too often also troubled and bloodied Europe for three centuries, there has succeeded a principle of general union, uniting all states collectively with a federative bond, under the guidance of the five principal Powers’; making of Europe ‘a grand political family, united under the auspices of an areopagus of its own creation, whose members guarantee to themselves and to all parties the tranquil enjoyment of their respective rights’. See his ‘Considérations sur le système politique actuellement établi en Europe ’, in Dépêches inédites du Chevalier de Gentz aux hospodars de Valachie. Pour servir à l’histoire de la politique européene (1813 à 1828), Paris 1876, pp. 354–5.
45. A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812–1822, Cambridge Mass. 1957, pp. 11, 321. For the depth of the change in the international system brought about by the Restoration, see Paul Schroeder’s great—conservative—work, The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848, Oxford 1994, passim, and ‘Did the Vienna System Rest on a Balance of Power?’, in Systems, Stability and Statecraft: Essays on the International History of Modern Europe, New York 2004, pp. 37–57.
46. Cours d’Histoire Moderne. Histoire générale de la civilisation en Europe depuis la chute de l’empire romain jusqu’à la révolution française, Paris 1828, Lesson II, pp. 6–12.
47. Cours d’Histoire Moderne, Lesson XIV, pp. 40–41.
48. Cours d’Histoire Moderne, Lesson II, p. 7.
49. ‘European civilization has entered, we may say, into eternal truth, by the plan of Providence; it follows the paths of God. Therein lies the rational principle of its superiority’: Cours d’Histoire Moderne, Lesson II, pp. 11–12. For Guizot, the Crusades were ‘the first European event’, in which all Europe participated, ‘moved by the same sentiment and acting in the same cause’. Before them, ‘Europe did not exist’. They were also the gateway to greater existential diversity: ‘the peoples threw themselves into the Crusades as into a new existence, wider and more varied, at once recalling the ancient freedom of the barbarians and opening the horizons of a vast future’: Lesson VIII, pp. 11, 17.
50. Leopold von Ranke, Die grossen Mächte (1833), Leipzig 1916 (ed. Meinecke), pp. 58–63.
51. Weltgeschichte (1881), Leipzig 1896, p. 5.
52. Historische Fragmente (notes from 1867), Stuttgart 1942 (ed. Kaegi), pp. 141–148.
53. See below, pp. 518–519.
54. See Jean-Luc Chabot’s fine study of the idea of European unity in these years, Aux origines intellectuelles de l’union européenne, Grenoble 2005, pp. 14–16; also the good earlier account, angled more at the diplomacy involved, and covering a slightly different time-span, in Carl Pegg, Evolution of the European Idea 1914–1932, Chapel Hill 1983.
55. ‘La Crise de l’esprit’ (1919), Oeuvres, I, Paris 1992, p. 988: first published in English, in The Athenaeum—scarcely conceivable today.
56. ‘Notes sur la grandeur et décadence de l’Europe’ (1927), Oeuvres, II, p. 930: ‘Not knowing how to rid ourselves of our history, we will be relieved of it by happy peoples that have none, or almost none. These happy peoples will impose their happiness on us’. Valéry explained he had first started to think along these lines in the 1890s, impressed by the victories of the United States over Spain, and Japan over China.
57. Ortega, La Rebelión de las masas, Madrid 1930, pp. 302–8; Benda, Discours à la nation européenne, Paris 1931, passim; Croce, Storia d’Europa nel secolo decimonono, Bari 1932, p. 358. Note the clustering of dates around the Briand Plan. Ortega was exercised by the challenge from the USSR: ‘I see in the construction of Europe as a great national state the only enterprise that could thwart the victory of the “Five Year Plan” ’.
58. In Britain alone, there was what could be regarded as a curious postscript. In the wake of Briand’s failure, the millionaire heir to a Welsh industrial fortune, Baron Davies, a former secretary to Lloyd George, founded the New Commonwealth Society, acquiring no less a figure than Ernst Jäckh as its international director, the two creating in turn an institute in 1934, publishing a quarterly that five years later, in the aftershock of Munich, became the platform for a rash of schemes for ‘federal union’ of one kind or another. These were set off by the bestseller Union Now—drafted in the winter of 1933–4, but unable to find a publisher until 1939—by the American journalist Clarence Streit, which called for the ‘fifteen democracies of the world’—the United States, Great Britain, the White Dominions, France, the Low Countries, the Nordic lands and Switzerland—which ‘own almost half the earth, rule all its oceans, govern nearly half of mankind’, to band together in an invincible federation against the Axis powers. When war broke out, the alternative of an Anglo-French union was floated in The New Commonwealth Quarterly, and adopted in desperation by Churchill—he had been president of the British section of the New Commonwealth Society—after the fall of Paris, in a vain attempt to get the Third Republic to fight on. Once Germany was defeated, such last-minute federalism was naturally forgotten in Britain. In America, however, the Cold War revived talk of an Atlantic union, this time against the menace of Communism, and Streit graced the cover of Time magazine as late as 1950. Jäckh, admirer and mourner of Talat, who had ‘saved many Armenians’, could congratulate himself both on his role in the German alliance with the Young Turks against Russia, anticipating America’s Truman Doctrine, and on his contribution to supranational ideals in Europe: Der goldene Pflug, pp. 20, 219–20.
59. ‘Problemès d’Europe’, Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, No. 35, September 1935, p. 473.
60. L’Europe. Genèse d’une civilisation, Paris 1999 (till then unpublished lectures notes), pp. 279, 284–9, 316, 292. Febvre drew extensively on themes both of Valéry—the ricochet from dissemination of European knowledge to the non-European world—and Bloch—Europe remaining a theatre of fear: of industrial competitors, colonial risings, communist experiments, further national conflicts: pp. 308–9.
61. ‘L’Idea di Europa’, based on a lecture course given in Milan in the winter of 1943–4, now in Luisa Azzolini (ed.), Idea d’Europa e politica dell’equilibrio, Bologna 1995, pp. 139–203. Of the extensive later literature, the two most distinguished works remain among the earliest: Heinz Gollwitzer, Europabild und Europagedanke, Munich 1951, covering German writing from the Enlightenment to Nietzsche, in a major work of crisp scholarship, and Carlo Curcio’s vast compendium, of less analytic erudition, Europa. Storia di un’idea, Florence 1958, dealing with all the major cultures of the continent, and running from ancient to post-war times. French historians have tended to concentrate on the more strictly political side of ideas about Europe, starting with Pierre Renouvin’s L’Idée de Fédération Européenne dans la Pensée Politique du XIXe Siècle, Oxford 1949, and continuing—with a far wider scope—through Jean Duroselle, L’Idée d’Europe dans l’histoire (preface by Monnet), Paris 1965, and most recently Patrice Rolland’s anthology L’unité politique de l’Europe. Histoire d’une idée, Brussels 2006. From Switzerland, De Rougemont’s chronicle Vingthuit siècles d’Europe appeared in 1961.
62. His pre-war essay ‘Il Principio dell’ equilibrio nella storia d’Europa’ had ended with a paean to the ‘amply European and human’ diplomacy and ‘new great mission which fascist Italy has assumed under the wise and firm leadership of the Duce’, Idea d’Europa e politica dell’equilibrio, pp. 30–1. Curcio, a Neapolitan, had been a much more committed adherent of the regime, and was for a time purged after the war.
63. Respectively ‘L’Idea di Europa’, and ‘Europa. Storia’ in Idea d’Europa e politica dell’equilibrio, pp. 203, 257.
64. Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, Berne 1948, pp. 14, 21.
65. Je
an-Baptiste Duroselle, L’Idée européenne dans l‘histoire, Paris 1965, p. 26; Alan Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State, p. 318 ff.
66. Gesammelte Schriften, p. 503.
67. Bluntschli, Gesammelte kleine Schriften, Bd 2, pp. 293–4, 298–9.
68. Coudenhove, Adel, p. 36.
PROGNOSES
1
Where then, as the first decade of the new century draws to a close, does the European Union now stand? Politically, at an interval in the theatre of constitutional reform, whose first act saw the triumphant production of a charter of rights and duties agreed by all member-states, undone in a spectacular second act by the French and Dutch electorates, imperturbably resuscitated in a third act at Lisbon, only to be spurned in a fourth by voters in Ireland. Few doubt that there will be a happy ending. But the spectacle has been instructive. The purpose of the Treaty of Lisbon was to circumvent any further possibility of popular dissent from the arrangements devised by Giscard and approved by the assembled governments in 2004, after their overwhelming rejection by voters in France and the Netherlands. This time, ratification would be reserved for parliaments, not peoples. In only one European country was a popular consultation legally unavoidable. But it could surely be discounted. Was not Ireland by tradition the greatest single beneficiary of the largesse of Brussels, and economic success-story of European integration? In Dublin, were not all three of the country’s principal parties, not to speak of its trade-unions and business associations, solidly behind the treaty, under a prime minister who had played a leading role in the diplomacy around the original constitution? True, Irish voters had once before been irresponsible enough to reject a treaty, the pact approved by the council at Nice in 2000. But they had quickly been obliged to repent, and reverse themselves. They could be expected to have learnt their lesson.
In June 2008, the referendum––held back, to impress on the Irish unanimous acceptance of the treaty by their fellow Europeans, until the parliaments of eighteen other member-states had ratified it—came due. After a campaign in which the entire Irish establishment, and assembled lights of liberal opinion, rallied behind a document which the prime minister and foreign minister alike confessed they had never read, the result was virtually the same as in France three years earlier. On a higher turnout than before, the new treaty was rejected by a margin of 53 to 46 per cent. If maverick opposition from a free-market entrepreneur, and theological reservations among the pious, contributed to the outcome, class polarization decided it—Sinn Fein’s spirited attack on a gombeen bourgeoisie and all its works mobilizing those who had benefitted least from the Irish bubble. In Dublin West, where richer precincts went 70 per cent for the Treaty, poorer neghbourhoods voted 80 per cent against. The sociological divide essentially matched Dutch and French patterns.
Consternation in Brussels was no less. This time, however, it was not two of the founding Six, one of them long the most powerful member of the Community, whose electors had produced the wrong result, but one of the smallest states, peripheral in history and position, in the Union. Official fury was thus more openly and brutally expressed. The Treaty of Lisbon, moreover, was the joint creation of Berlin and Paris, an alignment not accustomed to being trifled with in matters of high concern in the EU. Steinmeier in Germany, treating Community law with the disdain of a Bethmann-Hollweg, threatened Ireland with expulsion from the Union––‘exiting the integration process’—if it did not comply with the wishes of the Aussenamt and its partners. In France, Sarkozy announced without further ado that ‘the Irish must hold a second referendum’ to expunge the verdict of the first. Much of the media outcry was even more violent, leading organs of opinion in Germany, in particular, drawing the lesson that it was folly to submit any proposal for European unity to the popular will. But as matters stood there was little to be done. The Fianna Fáil regime in Dublin, after a decade in office by now deeply unpopular, was unlikely to take the risk of a second rebuff that might prove worse than the first.
Three months later, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in New York, triggering the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression. The impact on Europe of the crash in America was––mondialisation oblige––much quicker this time, putting paid to any notion of a decoupling of EU and US economies. By the end of 2008, Eurozone GDP had fallen more steeply even than American. Denmark, long hailed as the star performer in the labour market flexibility demanded by all right-thinking reformers, was the first to plunge into recession. Germany, the strongest economy in the Union, was soon suffering a sharper contraction of output than France or Italy, as export markets dived. Worst hit were the two countries that had posted the highest growth rates in the EU since monetary union, Spain and Ireland, in each case primed by real estate speculation. By early 2009, Spanish unemployment was over 20 per cent. The crisis struck hardest of all in Ireland, where output contracted by 8.5 per cent between the first quarters of 2008 and 2009, and the fiscal deficit soared to over 15 per cent of GDP. Though a probable death warrant for the regime in place at the next polls, in the short run the debacle of the Celtic Tiger was a diplomatic godsend to it. Amid popular panic, the government could now count on frightening voters into accepting Lisbon, however irrelevant it might be to the fate of the Irish economy.
But if the Treaty––which in June 2009 received the blessing of the German Constitutional Court, in an opinion dismissing in the same breath the claims of the European Parliament to any democratic legitimacy1—could now henceforward be railroaded through, under cover of the economic crisis, it bore no solutions for the crisis in the Eurozone itself. There, each national government took its own steps to deal with the emergency, with ad hoc measures to bail out banks, feed auto industries or prop up the labour market––Germany, protesting in theory, leading the way in practice. Nine months into the crisis, no coordinated strategy for dealing with it had materialized; spreads in the bond market were widening, forcing up yields in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece; the Baltic economies were in free fall; the IMF was staving off bank-runs in Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. How deep the rot has gone in the EU, and how long it might persist, has yet to be seen. What is clear is that monetary union, though it created a stable currency, has been no cure for long-standing weaknesses of the continental economies. The low interest rate regime of the European Central Bank had fuelled bubbles in Spain, Ireland and the Baltics. More generally, not merely did per capita income in the Eurozone rise more slowly between 1999 and 2008 than in the previous decade. Productivity growth actually halved. By the spring of 2009, EU unemployment was still lower than in the US, but the exposure of European banks looked significantly worse. In April, the IMF estimated that out of a total of $2.3 trillion in toxic assets poisoning the world’s banking system, over half—$1.4 trillion––were held by European banks, as against $1 trillion by US banks. Write-downs in Europe were still a fraction––just a fifth––of those in America, while requirements for recapitalizing the banking system to the levels of the mid-nineties were reckoned to be nearly double.
Compared with the collapse of Wall Street in 1929, the financial crash of 2008—born of a much more explosive creation of credit—has had swifter and wider effects on the real economy across the world. Whether a comparable slump ensues is another matter, if only because all leading states of the advanced industrial world have flooded their markets with injections of public capital of one kind or another that came only haltingly and controversially in the 1930s. Just as the deregulations of the previous period were, if in differing degrees, more or less unanimous across time zones, so the bailouts of the present period have, at any rate so far, been common wisdom––whatever the doubts expressed, here and there, about their consequences in the longer term. In the blink of an eye, a pensée unique has become a pénitence unique, no less herd-like. Where in the inter-war period heterodox doctrines and iconoclastic recipes, of various sorts, were waiting in the wings, and as the Depression unfolded took central stage, today the intellectua
l cupboard is bare, and scarcely any alternatives have been canvassed in public debate. How long that will last is anyone’s guess. What seems clear is that the crisis, if it persists, is likely to put increasing social pressure on the existing state of the EU, in which there is neither effective policy coordination nor operative national autonomy. Growing unemployment and economic distress could drive the Union in either a centrifugal or a centripetal direction: towards divergent solutions dictated by national imperatives to protect local populations, or towards deepening integration, whose most probable forms would be extension of the single market to services, harmonization of tax regimes, and creation of a common European bond market.
2
At the turn of the century, looking back at his account of the origins of the post-war Common Market, the greatest historian of European integration asked himself what might now lie in store for it, with the arrival of monetary union.2 Milward had argued that the EEC, far from bringing any diminution of the nation-states that founded it, helped restore them to life after the catastrophes of the Second World War by delivering to their populations a material security, at once internal and external, that they had never before enjoyed. Governments answerable to voters had chosen to pool some of their prerogatives, in order to reconstruct their legitimacy by enhancing their ability to satisfy voters. Forty years later, did the same logic hold? Structurally, Milward thought, it did. Whether integration proceeded, stalled or regressed would depend, as it had always done, on its compatibility with the domestic policy choices of national governments. But in the interim, a sea-change had taken place in the way their economies were managed. Since the eighties, growth had slowed, and not only had competitive capacity declined, but social solidarity with it. Full employment and the provision of welfare—keystones of the original rehabilitation of the European nation-state—had ceased to be common priorities. The new imperatives were control of inflation, and deregulation of markets to enforce it. It was the demands of these, allied to traditional concern for the containment of Germany, that had led to a single currency and the European Central Bank at Maastricht.
The New Old World Page 66
