Colossus

by Niall Ferguson

  At the same time, Europeans remain far less “European” than French, British, German, Italian and so on. Nine out of ten Europeans feel “fairly attached” or “very attached” to their countries. But fewer than five out of ten—45 percent—feel as “attached” to the EU. In some countries—Sweden, Holland, Britain and Finland—between two-thirds and three-quarters of citizens describe themselves as “not very attached” or “not at all attached” to the EU. Only a tiny proportion of Europeans identify themselves exclusively as “European”; nearly half see themselves primarily as members of a traditional nationality and only secondarily as European. Moreover, the popularity of EU membership within the fifteen current members is in decline. In 1990 more than 70 percent of Europeans thought membership a good thing; the most recent surveys show a drop to just 55 percent. Just under half of Europeans regard EU membership as having “as many advantages as disadvantages.” In the light of these figures, European identity seems less than securely established.

  Moreover, the impact of immigration to Europe, which will almost certainly need to continue and indeed increase to counter the rising dependency ratios discussed above, is tending to reduce rather than increase European cultural cohesion. Millions of people have moved into the European Union in the past decade, whether as economic migrants, asylum seekers or ethnic Germans. These migrants are following previous influxes, notably of former subject peoples from the defunct colonial empires in the 1960s and 1970s. According to recent estimates, between 3 and 4 percent of the populations of Holland, Germany and Britain are now Muslims; in France the proportion is nearly double that, 7.5 percent.72 Recent trends in applications by asylum seekers and their success rates suggest that some countries are likely to end up with larger immigrant populations than others. In the years 1990 to 2000, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and Sweden admitted the largest numbers relative to their respective populations. For the foreseeable future there is certain to be a profound tension between the economic need to attract more legal immigrants to Western Europe and the political antagonism toward newcomers that tends to be felt most acutely in (or close to) the relatively poor neighborhoods where they settle.

  It would be an exaggeration to depict recent successes by politicians with explicitly anti-immigrant platforms as manifestations of a revival of extreme nationalist or racist politics in Europe. The politicians concerned, ranging from Jean-Marie Le Pen to Jörg Haider to the late Pim Fortuyn, have too little in common and have achieved such ephemeral successes that it would be more accurate to speak of a rash of protest votes with xeno- phobic overtones. Still, hostility to immigrants is widespread. A survey conducted in 2000 found that more than half of Europeans think that ethnic minorities abuse national welfare systems and that immigrants increase unemployment. Nearly two-fifths think that even legal immigrants should be sent back to their countries of origin.73 It is hardly surprising that unscrupulous populists are tempted to pander to such sentiments. The implications for those who dream of a federal Europe are dispiriting. Asked by Eurobarometer pollsters what the EU meant to them, more than a fifth of European voters checked the box marked “Not enough border controls.” Whatever restrictions are initially left in place, enlargement seems certain to heighten the perception that the EU encourages migration by creating new opportunities for young men in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to move westward. A few demagogues are already linking hostility to immigration and hostility to European integration. More in this vein seems almost inevitable.

  And then there is the Turkish question. The Turks first applied to join the European Union as early as 1987. Hitherto their advances have been rebuffed, mainly on the ground of Turkey’s somewhat checkered political, civil and human rights record; implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) because Turkey is overwhelmingly a Muslim country. The economic case for membership has, however, been growing stronger. According to some estimates, per capita income in Turkey is in fact higher than in Hungary, Latvia or Lithuania, all of which are now members of the EU, and more than double that of most of the Balkan states. The religious argument, by contrast, has become a politically incorrect embarrassment, as Giscard himself discovered when he injudiciously advanced it last year. The notion that Europe is by definition Christian will no longer hold water; as we have seen, there are just too few observant Christians and too many non-Christian immigrants. Nor can it any longer be claimed that Turkey is not a functioning democracy. A moderately Islamist party came to power there in free and fair elections; the army has not intervened, as it might have done in the past. Meanwhile the strategic arguments for binding Turkey to the West by new institutional ties are compelling. The Turkish Parliament’s refusal to facilitate a U.S. invasion of northern Iraq demonstrated that its members, if no one else, have read and understood the North Atlantic Treaty, which does not have a clause justifying preemptive war. By overthrowing Saddam Hussein, the United States has clearly demonstrated the perils of being a “rogue regime” in the Middle East. But what better way could there be to signal the rewards of being a democratic and religiously moderate regime than to admit Turkey to the EU?

  Here is the only way in which Charles Kupchan’s notion of Europe as a new Byzantium might be seen as (unintentionally) prescient. Should Turkey join the EU, and should the Muslim communities in Western Europe continue growing, there may one day be good reason to draw parallels between Brussels and Byzantium—or rather, Ottoman Constantinople.

  “THE HOUR OF EUROPE”

  Though immigration to France has not been especially high compared with other EU countries, the presence of large Muslim communities in France—now into their third generation—may help explain the success of the National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen in the first round of the French presidential elections of 2002. To be certain of victory in the second round, Jacques Chirac had to distance himself from Le Pen’s stance on immigration, and that in turn may help explain why he was so reluctant to be associated with military action against Iraq in 2003.

  Such domestic political considerations—or, to be precise, the diversity of domestic political constellations—are the principal reason why it has proved so difficult to coordinate the diplomacy of the EU member states. In theory, a Common European Foreign and Security Policy is an appealing idea; in practice, it has proved exceedingly difficult. Over Bosnia, as we have seen, the “hour of Europe” manifestly failed to strike; the disagreements between the EU states led to a kind of political paralysis. Over Iraq even deeper fissures opened up within the EU. Would the creation of a European foreign minister change that? It seems highly unlikely.

  Europe’s, in short, is a curious kind of union, a confederation that fantasizes about being a federation without ever quite becoming one. It has an executive, a legislature, an upper house, a supreme court, a central bank, a common currency, a flag and an anthem. But it has only a tiny common budget and the barest bones of a common army. Many more decisions than its architects intended are still taken by the national governments at meetings of the Council of Europe or at intergovernmental conferences. The EU lacks a common language, a common postal system, a common soccer team, even a standardized electric socket. To some critics—perhaps most famously the late Conservative cabinet minister Nicholas Ridley—it threatens to become a “Fourth Reich,” not only dominated by Germany, but German in its institutional structure. To others—notably the Oxford professor of politics Larry Siedentop—it is the French who really run the union in the style of their own less than accountable bureaucracy, preventing its evolution into an American-style United States.74 Siedentop’s EU is more like a third Bonapartist empire than a Fourth German Reich.

  A better analogy than either of these might be with Switzerland, a country where economics tends to count for more than politics and where the cantons are more powerful than the central government. Yet even the idea of a super-Switzerland understates the importance of the two glaring democratic deficits that characterize the EU. The first is well known—namely
the weakness of the European Parliament relative to the European Commission, an institution that glories in its lack of transparency and seems barely accountable to anyone. The EU may not be Byzantium, but its inner workings are certainly Byzantine. The second democratic deficit is the less obvious but perhaps more important deficit that condemns the individual German voter to a far smaller say in European affairs than his fellow European in Luxembourg or Ireland. It may well be that both these deficits are necessary to the existence of the EU, since an authentically democratic system might unleash the xenophobia felt by many ordinary Europeans or revive the long-dormant German question in the minds of both the Germans and their neighbors. But under these circumstances the EU seems unlikely to achieve that increase in its legitimacy without which a common foreign and security policy is inconceivable.

  Already significant moves have been made in the direction of what is known, euphemistically, as variable geometry. Only twelve EU members have thus far adopted the euro; shortly before this book was completed, a second Swedish referendum went decisively against EMU membership, further reducing the odds of an imminent British vote on the subject. Britain and Ireland have not signed the Schengen Agreement to relax border controls within the EU. Between 1989 and 1997 the British also opted out of the Social Charter, one of the three “pillars” of the EU proclaimed at Maastricht. In a similar fashion, the new members of the EU will not immediately implement all the terms and conditions of membership. The concept of constructive abstention introduced in the Amsterdam Treaty and the concept of enhanced cooperation in Giscard’s constitutional treaty (Article I-43) point the way to more such à la carte arrangements. No one can seriously expect this to strengthen the EU. The more opt-outs there are, the less coherent the union is bound to become. A multispeed Europe can hardly achieve the Treaty of Rome’s goal of “ever closer union.” On the contrary, union will tend to become more remote. Instead there will be a multiplicity of petty unions, from the Treaty of Rome, in short, to a political spaghetti junction of partially overlapping “coalitions of the willing”—with the mission in each case defining the coalition. It was symptomatic of this tendency that, following the postponement of a decision on the constitutional treaty at the Brussels summit in December 2003, the leaders of France and Germany spoke openly of their countries as the “vanguard” of what is by implication a two-tier Europe.*

  MYTHS, STORIES AND PARADES

  The conclusion of this chapter is straightforward. The United States has nothing much to fear from either the widening or the deepening of the European Union—not least because the two processes stand in contradiction to each other. Talk of a federal Europe’s emerging as a counterweight to the United States is based on a complete misreading of developments. The EU is populous but senescent. Its economy is large but sluggish. Its productivity is not bad but vitiated by excessive leisure. It is a successful but still insufficiently liberal customs union. It contains a monetary union that has depressed rather than enhanced its members’ economic growth. It is certainly a legal union, but too much of its law emanates from an unelected and unaccountable commission for it to enjoy legitimacy. And as a political entity it seems likely to remain confederal for the foreseeable future. What de Gaulle said in 1962 remains fundamentally true today: “At the present time there cannot be any other Europe than a Europe of States, apart, of course, from myths, stories and parades.” And even these myths do not command much respect. Although there are traces of a common European culture that is distinct from the amorphous, American notion of “the West,” national identities still predominate, and immigration is doing little to diminish them. For all these reasons, a common foreign and security policy seems a remote and perhaps unattainable ambition.

  Who needs a counterweight anyway? In the final analysis, both the United States and the European Union have far more to gain from cooperation than from competition. The bottom line is that they need, even depend on, each other. This is most obvious in the economic sphere. Very nearly a quarter of EU exports go to the United States, while a fifth of EU imports come from there. The United States accounted for 65 percent of foreign direct investment into the EU in 1999; the same proportion of European FDI went to the United States. No less than 45 percent of the stock of U.S. FDI is in the EU.75 A substantial share of the U.S. government debt as well as the debts of American corporations are held in the portfolios of European investors and institutions. There is, then, something to be said for Richard Rosecrance’s characterization of the relationship as a partnership between “Caesar and Croesus”.76 But Euro-American common interests are cultural too; those who grumble at the ubiquity of McDonald’s throughout Europe overlook the immense number of French and Italian restaurants in the United States. As Disney chief executive Michael Eisner has been heard to remark, “Sleeping Beauty is culture, and that’s French; Peter Pan is English, Pinocchio Italian, Snow White German.”77 Above all, there can be no question that Americans and Europeans have a common interest in combating terrorism. The efforts of a small number of zealots to cause murder and mayhem, whether in Manhattan or Mombasa, will be defeated only if the intelligence agencies and police forces of the United States and Europe work together.78 Nation-building projects in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq are also more likely to succeed if there is meaningful transatlantic cooperation.

  Those in the United States of America who fret about the “rise” of a United States of Europe should therefore relax. And those in Europe who fantasize about precisely the same thing should get real. Brussels is still—both literally and metaphorically—a very long way from Byzantium.

  Chapter 8

  The Closing Door

  … the interesting subject of the finances of the declining empire.

  EDWARD GIBBON1

  THE GREAT RECONVERGENCE?

  For most of the period between the decline of the Roman Empire and the rise of the European Union, the characteristic condition of Europe has been political fragmentation. Periods of imperial unity—from Charlemagne to Hitler, by way of Charles V and Napoleon—have been the exceptions, not the rule. On the other side of the world, in East Asia, the opposite has been true. Since the third century B.C., when Shih Huang-ti, the first Ch’in emperor, united China and built the Great Wall, imperial unity has been the norm. Indeed, despite occasional eras of civil war and dynastic weakness, China has been the longest-lived empire in world history—as well as one of the largest. In the 1820s the Manchu dynasty directly ruled a vast territory, roughly coterminous with today’s People’s Republic; in addition, Korea, Indochina, Siam, Burma and Nepal all were Chinese vassals. For most of modern history, China has been home to between a quarter and a third of the world’s population—perhaps as many as 37 percent in 1820. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, China was also the titan of the world economy. Between 1500 and 1820 its share of world output was never less than a fifth, and it may have risen as high as a third in 1820.2

  Yet the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw a disastrous collapse of living standards in China. Between 1820 and 1950 gross domestic product per capita fell by roughly a quarter. By 1973 Chinese income per head was around a fifth of the world average, worse than in many parts of Africa. China’s share of world output, which had been close to 33 percent in 1820, fell below 5 percent. Why this happened remains a hotly debated question. The Chinese themselves tend to attribute their decline to the negative effects of Western imperialism after the Anglo-Chinese wars of the mid-nineteenth century (the so-called Opium Wars of 1839–42 and 1856–60). A more recent Western hypothesis is that China’s long-term political unity had a stifling effect on the country’s technological and strategic development at a time when Europe was divided into rival nation-states. It was their competition at home and abroad that gave the Occident its decisive economic and military edge over the more populous Orient.3 The acquisition of colonies in the New World, according to Kenneth Pomeranz, was what propelled Europe ahead of China. By the end of the early modern period, b
oth Western Europe and the Yangtze Valley had faced ecological crises associated with deforestation, but the Europeans could draw on American silver and Caribbean sugar—not to mention their own conveniently located coal—to commercialize and industrialize their way out of the Malthusian trap.4

  China’s fate in the twentieth century was a miserable one. The Europeans brought economic transformation to the Chinese periphery, but only in a few cities—notably Hong Kong—did they introduce the full array of legal and administrative institutions they had brought to the post-Mughal empire in India. At British instigation, the rival Occidental powers (including, by the late nineteenth century, the United States) agreed on the policy of the “Open Door”: China would be a huge free trade zone, but one that would retain its own political institutions, the decrepit remnants of the Ch’ing, or Manchu, empire.5 The transition from empire to republic in 1911 was abortive, above all because of the disastrous consequences of Japanese imperialism in the 1930s and the ensuing civil war. Victory in this went to the Marxist Mao Zedong, who successfully mobilized the impoverished peasantry, only to plunge Chinese society into the worst man-made famine in history (the “Great Leap Forward”) and one of the worst government-inspired social disruptions (the Cultural Revolution). Communist China continued to function as a successful empire, pursuing its foreign policy goals with a realism that deeply impressed Henry Kissinger. But its economic weakness placed serious limitations on Chinese power.