The New Old World (12 page)

It is this millennial record, of repeated humiliation and oppression, that entry into the Union offers a chance, finally, to leave behind. Who, with any sense of the history of the continent, could fail to be moved by the prospect of a cancellation in the inequality of its nations' destinies? The original design for EU expansion to the East was a joint product of German strategy under Kohl and interested local elites, seconded by assorted Anglo-American publicists. It aimed to fast-track Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into the Union, as the most congenial states of the region, with the staunchest records of resistance to communism and most westernized political classes, leaving less favoured societies to kick their heels in the rear. Happily, this invidious redivision of the East was avoided. Credit for preventing it must go in the first instance to France, which from the beginning advocated a ‘regatta' approach, insisting on the inclusion of Romania, which made it difficult to exclude Bulgaria; to Sweden, which championed Estonia, with the same effect on Latvia and Lithuania; and to the Prodi Commission, which eventually rallied to comprehensive rather than selective enlargement. The result was a far more generous settlement than originally envisaged.

What of the upshot of expansion from the other end, for the Union itself? Thanks to the modesty of the share of Structural Funds allocated to the East, its financial cost has been significantly
less than once estimated, and the balance of trade has favoured the more powerful economies of the West. This, however, is the small change of enlargement. The real takings—or bill, depending on who is looking at it—lie elsewhere. Core European capital now has a major pool of cheap labour at its disposal, conveniently located on its doorstep, not only dramatically lowering its production costs in plants to the East, but capable of exercising pressure on wages and conditions in the West. The archetypal case is Slovakia, where wages in the auto industry are one-eighth of those in Germany, and more cars per capita are shortly going to be produced—Volkswagen and Peugeot in the lead—than in any other country in the world. It is the fear of such relocation, with closure of factories at home, that has cowed so many German workers into accepting longer hours and less pay. Race-to-the bottom pressures are not confined to wages. The ex-Communist states have pioneered flat taxes to woo investment, and now compete with one another for the lowest possible rate: Estonia started with 26 per cent, Slovakia offers 19 per cent, Romania advertises 16 per cent, and bids at 15 per cent are being mooted in Poland.

The role configured by the new East in the EU, in other words, promises to be something like that played by the new South in the American economy since the seventies: a zone of business-friendly fiscal regimes, weak or non-existent labour movements, low wages and—therefore—high investments, registering faster growth than in the older core regions of continent-wide capital. Like the US South, too, the region seems likely to fall somewhat short of the standards of political respectability expected in the rest of the Union. Already, now that they are safely inside the EU and there is no longer the same need to be on their best behaviour, the elites of the region show signs of kicking over the traces. In Poland, the reigning twins defy every norm of ideological correctness as understood in Strasbourg or Brussels. In Hungary, riot police stand on guard around a ruler who has vaunted his mendacity. In the Czech Republic, months pass without parliament being able to form a government. In Romania, the president insults the prime minister in a phone-in call to a television talk-show. But as in Kentucky or Alabama, such provincial quirks add a touch of folkloric colour to the drab metropolitan scene more than they disturb it.

All analogies have their limits. The distinctive role of the new South in the political economy of the US has depended in part on immigration attracted by the region's climate, which has given it rates
of demographic growth well above the national average. Eastern Europe, which offers no comparably broad Sunbelt, is much more likely to suffer out-migration, as the recent tide of Poles arriving in Britain, and similar numbers from the Baltics and elsewhere coming to Ireland and Sweden, suggest. But labour mobility in any direction is—and, for obvious linguistic and cultural reasons, will remain—far lower in the EU than in the US. Local welfare systems, inherited from the Communist past, and not yet much dismantled, are also potential constraints on a Southern path. Nor does the East, with less than a quarter of the population of the Union, have anything like the relative weight of the South in the United States, not to speak of the political leverage of the region at federal level. For the moment, the effect of enlargement has essentially been much what the Foreign Office and the employers lobbies in Brussels always hoped it would be: the distension of the EU into a vast free-trade zone, with a newly acquired periphery of cheap labour.

The integration of the East into the Union is the major achievement to which admirers of the new Europe can legitimately point. Of course, as with the standard encomia of the record of EU as a whole, there is a certain gap between ideology and reality in the claims made for it. The Community that became a Union was never responsible for the ‘fifty years of peace' conventionally ascribed to it, a piety attributing to Brussels what in any strict sense belonged to Washington. When actual wars threatened in Yugoslavia, far from preventing their outbreak, the Union if anything helped to trigger them. In not dissimilar fashion, publicists for the EU often imply that without enlargement, Eastern Europe would never have reached the safe harbour of democracy, foundering in new forms of totalitarianism or barbarism. There is more substance to this argument, since the EU has supervised stabilization of the political systems of the region, with a good deal of direct interference. But it too exaggerates dangers in the service of vanities. The EU played no role in the overthrow of the regimes installed by Stalin, and there is little sign that any of the countries in which they fell were at risk of lapsing into new dictatorships, had it not been for the saving hand of the Commission. Enlargement has been a sufficient historical annealment, and—so far—economic success, not to require claims that it has also been, counter-factually, a political deliverance. The standard hype demeans rather than elevates what has been accomplished.

There remains the largest question. What has been the impact of expansion to the East on the institutional framework of the EU itself? Here the glass darkens. For if enlargement has been the principal achievement of the recent period, the constitution that was supposed to renovate the Union has been its most signal failure, and the potential interactions between the two remain a matter of obscurity. The ‘Convention on the Future of Europe' decided on at Laeken met in early 2002, and in mid-2003 delivered a draft European Constitution, agreed by the European Council in the summer of 2004. Delegates from candidate countries were nominally included in the Convention, but since the Convention itself amounted to little more than window-dressing for the labours of its president, Giscard d'Estaing, assisted by a British factotum, John Kerr—the two real authors of the draft—their presence was of no consequence. The future charter of Europe was written for the establishments of the West—the governments of the existing fifteen member-states who had to approve it, relegating the countries of the East to onlookers. In effect, the logic of a constituent will was inverted: instead of enlargement becoming the common basis of a new framework, the framework was erected before enlargement.

The ensuing debacle came as a brief thunderclap to the Western elites. The Constitution—more than five hundred pages long, comprising 446 articles and 36 supplementary protocols, a bureaucratic elephantiasis without precedent—increased the power of the four largest states in the Union: Germany, France, Britain and Italy; topped the inter-governmental complex in which they would have greater sway with a five-year presidency, unelected by the European Parliament, let alone the citizens of the Union; and inscribed the imperatives of a ‘highly competitive' market, ‘free of distortions' as a foundational principle of political law, beyond the reach of popular choice. The founders of the American republic would have rubbed their eyes in disbelief at such a ponderous and rickety construction. But so overwhelming was the consensus of the continent's media and political class behind it, that few doubted it would come into force. To the astonishment of their rulers, however, voters made short work of it. In France, where the government was unwise enough to dispatch copies of the document to every voter—Giscard complained of this folly with his handiwork—little was left of it at the end of a referendum campaign in which a spirited popular opposition, without the support of a single mainstream party, newspaper, magazine, let
alone radio or television programme, routed an establishment united in endorsing it. Rarely, even in recent French history, had a
pensée
quite so
unique
been up-ended so spectacularly.

In the last days of the campaign, as polls showed increasing rejection of the Constitution among the voters, panic gripped the French media. But no local hysterics, though there were many, rivalled those across the border in Germany. ‘Europe Demands Courage', admonished Günter Grass, Jürgen Habermas and a cohort of like-minded German intellectuals, in an open letter dispatched to
Le Monde
. Warning their neighbours that ‘France would isolate itself fatally if it were to vote “No” ', they went on: ‘The consequences of a rejection would be catastrophic', indeed ‘an invitation to suicide', for ‘without courage there is no survival'. In member-states new and old ‘the Constitution fulfils a dream of centuries', and to vote for it was a duty not just to the living, but to the dead: ‘we owe this to the millions upon millions of victims of our lunatic wars and criminal dictatorships'.
¹⁰
This from a country where no democratic consultation of the electorate was risked, and pro forma ratification of the Constitution was stage-managed in the Bundesrat to impress French voters a few days before the referendum, with Giscard as guest of honour at the podium. As for French isolation, three days later the Dutch—told, still more bluntly, that Auschwitz awaited Europe if they failed to vote yes—threw out the Constitution by an even wider margin.

Such two-fold popular repudiation of the charter for a new Europe was not in reality a bolt from the blue. The Constitution was rejected, not because it was too federalist, but because it seemed little more than an impenetrable scheme for the redistribution of oligarchic power, embodying everything most distrusted in the arrogant, opaque system the EU appeared to have become. Virtually every time—there have not been many—that voters have been allowed to express an opinion about the direction the Union was taking, they have rejected it. The Norwegians refused the EC
tout court
; the Danes declined Maastricht; the Irish, the Treaty of Nice; the Swedes, the euro. Each time, the political class promptly sent them back to the polls to correct their mistake, or waited for an occasion to reverse the verdict. The operative maxim of the EU has become Brecht's dictum: in case of setback, the government should dissolve the people and elect a new one.

Predictably, amidst the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of
the Treaty of Rome, Europe's heads of state were soon discussing how to cashier the popular will once again, and reimpose the Constitution with cosmetic alterations, without exposing it this time to the risks of a democratic decision. At the Brussels summit in June 2007, the requisite adjustment—now renamed a simple treaty—was agreed. To let Britain disavow a referendum, it was exempted from the Charter of Fundamental Rights to which all other member-states subscribed. To throw a sop to French opinion, references to unfettered competition were tucked away in a protocol, rather than appearing in the main document. To square the conscience of the Dutch, ‘promotion of European values' was made a test of membership. To save the face of Poland's rulers, the demotion of their country to second-rank in the Council was deferred for a decade, leaving their successors to come to terms with it.

The principal novelty of this gathering to resuscitate what French and Dutch voters had buried was Germany's determination to ensure its primacy in the electoral structure of the Council. Polish objections to a formula doubling Germany's weight, and drastically reducing Poland's, had—for reasons that voting theory in international organizations has long made clear, as experts in such matters pointed out—every technical consideration of fairness on their side. But issues of equity were no more relevant than issues of democracy to the outcome. After blustering that demographic losses in the Second World War entitled Poland to proportionate compensation in the design of the Union, the Kaczynski twins crumpled as quickly as the country's pre-war colonels before the German blitz. Brave talk forgotten, it was all over in a phone-call. For the region where Poland accounts for nearly half the population and GDP, the episode is a lesson in the tacit hierarchy of states it has entered. The East is welcome, but should not get above itself. For these purposes at least,
Deutschland
is once again
über alles
.