The old rules are changing, though, and the EU itself is in transition, with its levers of power up for grabs. So it was that at a rancorous EU summit in Brussels last week Blair gained the upper hand against France and Germany, the philosophical progenitor and economic locomotive, respectively, of postwar European integration. He deprived them of their choice for a key EU job–head of the powerful European Commission–and edited their cherished draft Constitution to suit his purposes. How did this come to pass?
Welcome to the new EU. Blair’s lukewarm Europeanism, as much as it chafes his Labour Party’s Europhiles, strikes a chord with many in Europe these days. Witness the June 10-13 European Parliament elections, which saw a record low turnout all across Europe and the stunning rise of Euroskeptic parties from Warsaw to London. In Central and Eastern Europe, where eight former Soviet satellites joined the EU just six weeks ago amid fireworks and street parties, voter turnout was 10 percent below what it was across Europe as a whole–which was, in turn, the lowest it’s been since Europeans began voting in Europewide elections in the 1970s. Cool Europeanism sells better these days than the hot stuff peddled by France and Germany.
Is that bad news or good? It’s worth taking another look at the newest EU members. How could apathy have set in so quickly after the hoopla of May 1? An embarrassed Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski called it “a disease.” In Lithuania, Vytautas Dumbliauskas of Vilnius University’s Institute of International Relations and Political Science had a simpler explanation: “The European Parliament seems very far away for Lithuanians, and especially from their everyday problems. People don’t know what, who, or where the EP is all about.”
The rest of the EU’s 450 million people feel pretty much the same way. Germany, France, Britain and six other “old EU” states had turnouts below Lithuania’s. Apathy is nothing new in the EU. But these days there’s so much that the EU is looking like the proverbial “sick man of Europe.” Even as the EU has proliferated bureaucracies and extended political and economic integration, it has done too little to make Europeans feel they have a say in the Union’s affairs, according to John Palmer of the European Policy Centre in Brussels. As a result, says the Oxford historian Vernon Bogdanor, EU politicians and bureaucrats live in “a house without windows,” sealed off from popular pressures.
Last week’s summit seemed determined to prove the skeptics right. It quickly became known as the Acrimony Summit–not so much a windowless house as one with all the glass punched out. The decision on the EC presidency was tailor-made to show the EU’s least appealing face. Each of the “big three”–Germany, France and Britain–had an effective veto over the choice. France and Germany made their favorite known well before the summit: Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt. But he was too “federalist” for Britain’s less Europhilic tastes. Blair floated the name of EU External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten. But French President Jacques Chirac slapped Patten down: he’s British. This “red line” is less eccentric than it seems. Britain has not signed up to two pillars of Europeanism–Schengen and the single currency. To elevate a Brit to a lofty job where he would be in charge of 20,000 EU fonctionnaires was inimical not just to France but to a number of other countries as well. In the end, it was easier for the bruised parties to postpone the decision.
The wrangling over the Constitution was more consequential than filling Romano Prodi’s shoes. This argument has been, in some ways, doomed since Valery Giscard d’Estaing’s European Convention started work in 2002. Talk of “our Philadelphia” and language akin to that of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution raised expectations ludicrously high. The so-called Constitution is really a treaty among EU member states and as such was never going to avoid dry legalisms. Compare “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union…” with “The [European] Union shall coordinate the policies by which the Member States aim to achieve these objectives, and shall exercise in the Community way the competences they confer on it.”
Huh? Exactly.
The real trouble, which especially infuriated Chirac last week, is that this new Constitution could be dead on arrival, thanks to Blair. Savaged at home for going to war against Iraq with President George W. Bush, the British P.M. announced in April that Britons would be allowed to vote in a referendum on the constitutional treaty. It will be extremely difficult vote for Blair to win–10 to 1 odds, says the MORI pollster Bob Worcester. Since a single “no” sends the treaty back to the drawing board, Blair may well be toppling a pillar of Europe’s future.
As the Acrimony Summit showed, Europe is entering the next chapter of its life with a bang. With a Constitution, it has new powers over an immense swath of territory–yet little agreement on how to wield them. The old Berlin-Paris axis endures but can no longer carry Europe. Neither can Britain, for all its shared Euroskepticism to the east. Says Britain’s minister for Europe, Denis MacShane: “Too many people see the EU as a problem, not as the solution.” Amid all this, warns EC vice president Neil Kinnock, “the people’s insecurities are being exploited by parties of the ultraright.” Europe will muddle through this passage–as it will crises to come–much as it has since the idea of a Union was born in the rubble of the second world war. It just won’t be pretty.
