The New Old World (14 page)

With the abrupt deterioration in the global economic climate in the seventies, and the general neo-liberal turn that followed in the eighties, Hayekian doctrine was rediscovered throughout the West. The leading edge of the change came in the UK and US, with the arrival of Thatcher and Reagan. Continental Europe never produced comparably radical regimes, but the ideological atmosphere shifted steadily in the same direction. The collapse of the Soviet bloc sealed the transformation of working assumptions. By the nineties, the Commission was openly committed to privatization as a principle, pressed without embarrassment on candidate countries along with other democratic niceties. Its most powerful arm had become the Competition Directorate, striking out at public sector monopolies in Western and Eastern Europe alike. In Frankfurt the Central Bank conformed perfectly with Hayek's pre-war prescriptions. What was originally the least prominent strand in the weave of European integration had become the dominant pattern. Federalism stymied, inter-governmentalism corroded, what had emerged was neither the rudiments of a European democracy controlled by its citizens, nor
the formation of a European directory guided by its powers, but a vast zone of increasingly unbound market exchange, much closer to a European ‘catallaxy' as Hayek had conceived it.

The mutation is by no means complete. The European Parliament is still there, as a memento of federal hopes forgone. Agricultural and regional subsidies, legacies of a cameralist past, continue to absorb most of the EU budget. But of a ‘social Europe', in the sense intended by both Monnet and Delors, there is as little left as a democratic Europe. At national level, welfare regimes that distinguish the Old World from the New persist, of course. With the exception of Ireland, the share of state expenditure in GDP remains higher in Western Europe than in the United States, and the larger part of an academic industry—the ‘varieties of capitalism literature'—is dedicated to showing how much more caring ours, above all the Nordic versions, are than theirs. The claim is valid enough; the self-satisfaction less so. For as the numbers of long-term jobless and pensioners have risen, the drift of the age has been away from earlier norms of provision, not beyond them. The very term ‘reform' now means, virtually always, the opposite of what it denoted fifty years ago: not the creation, but a contraction, of welfare arrangements once prized by their recipients. Historically, the two chief structural advances beyond the post-war gains of social democracy—the Meidner plan for pension funds in Sweden, and the thirty-five-hour week in France—have both been rolled back. The tide is moving in the other direction.

Today's EU, with its pinched spending (just over 1 per cent of Union GDP), minuscule bureaucracy (around 16,000 officials, excluding translators), absence of independent taxation, and lack of any means of administrative enforcement, could in many ways be regarded as a
ne plus ultra
of the minimal state, beyond the most drastic imaginings of classical liberalism: less even than the dream of a nightwatchman. Its structure not only rules out a transfer, of the sort once envisaged by Delors, of social functions from national to supranational level, to counter-balance the strain these have come under from high rates of unemployment and growing numbers of pensioners. Its effect is to accentuate, rather than compensate, pressure on national systems of social provision, as so many impediments to the free movement of factors of production. As a leading authority explains: ‘The neo-liberal bias of the EU, if it exists, is justified by the social-welfare bias of current national policies', which ‘no responsible analyst
believes can be maintained'—‘European social policy exists only in the dreams of disgruntled socialists'. The salutary truth is that ‘the EU is overwhelmingly about the promotion of free markets. Its primary interest group support comes from multinational firms, not least US ones'. In short: regnant in this Union is not democracy, and not welfare, but capital. ‘The EU is basically about business'.
¹¹

That may be so, enthusiasts might reply, but why should it detract from the larger good that the EU represents in the world, a political community that stands alone in its respect for human rights, international law, aid to the poor of the earth, and protection of the environment? Could the Union not be described as the realization of the Enlightenment vision of the virtues of
le doux commerce
, that ‘cure for the most destructive prejudices' as Montesquieu described it, pacifying relations between states in a spirit of mutual benefit and the rule of law?

In the current repertoire of tributes to Europe, it is this claim—the unique role and prestige of the EU on the world's stage—that now has pride of place. What it rests on, ubiquitously, is a contrast with the United States. America figures as the increasingly ominous, violent, swaggering Other of a humane continent of peace and progress—a society that is a law to itself, where Europe strives for a legal order binding on all. The values of the two, Habermas and many a fellow-thinker explain, have diverged: widespread gun culture, extreme economic inequality, fundamentalist religion and capital punishment, not to speak of national bravado, divide the US from the EU and foster a more regressive conception of international relations. Reversing Goethe's dictum, we have it better here.

The crystallization of these images came with the invasion of Iraq. The mass demonstrations against the war of 15 February 2003, Habermas thought, might go down in history as ‘a signal for the birth of a European public'.
¹²
Even such an unlikely
figure as Dominique Strauss-Kahn, recently installed head of the IMF, announced that they marked the birth of a European nation. But if this was a Declaration of Independence, was the term ‘nation' appropriate for what was being born? While divergence with America over the Middle East could serve as a negative definition of the emergent Europe, there was a positive side that pointed in another conceptual direction. Enlargement was the great new accomplishment of the Union. How should it be theorized? In late 1991, a few months after the collapse of the Soviet Union and a few days after the summit at Maastricht, J.G.A. Pocock published a prophetic essay. A trenchant critic of the EU, which he has always seen as involving a surrender of sovereignty and identity—and with them conditions also of democracy—to the market, though one never yet completed, Pocock observed that Europe now faced the problem of determining its frontiers, as ‘once again an empire in the sense of a civilized and stabilized zone which must decide whether to extend or refuse its political power over violent and unstable cultures along its borders'.
¹³

At the time, this was not a formulation welcome in official discourses on Europe. A decade later, the term it loosed with irony has become a common coin of complacency. As the countdown to Iraq proceeded, the British diplomat Robert Cooper, special adviser on security to Blair, and later to Prodi as head of the Commission, explained the merits of empire to readers of
Prospect
. ‘A system in which the strong protect the weak, in which the efficient and well-governed export stability and liberty, in which the world is open for investment and growth—all of these seem eminently desirable'. Of course, ‘in a world of human rights and bourgeois values, a new imperialism will . . . have to be very different from the old'. It would be a ‘voluntary imperialism', of the sort admirably displayed by the EU in the Balkans. Enlargement ahead, he concluded, the Union was en route to the ‘noble dream' of a ‘cooperative empire'.
¹⁴

Enlargement in the bag, the Polish theorist Jan Zielonka, now at Oxford, exults in his book
Europe as Empire
that its ‘design was truly imperialist'—‘power politics at its best, even though the term “power” was never mentioned in the
official enlargement discourse', for this was a ‘benign empire in action'.
¹⁵

In more tough-minded style, the German strategist Herfried Münkler, holder of the chair of political theory at the Humboldt University in Berlin, has expounded the world-historical logic of empires—which stabilize adjacent power vacuums or turbulent border zones, holding barbarians or terrorists at bay—in an ambitious comparative work,
Imperien
, whose ideas were first presented as an aide-mémoire to a conference of the ambassadors called by the
Aussenamt
. While naturally loyal to the West, Münkler disavows normative considerations. Human rights messianism is a moral luxury even the American empire can ill afford. Europe, for its part, should take the measure of its emergent role as a sub-imperial system, and match its required tasks to its capabilities without excessive professions of uplifting intent.

The prefix, of course, poses the question that is the crux of the new identity Europe has awarded itself. How independent of the United States is it? The answer is cruel, as even a cursory glance at the record shows. In many ways, perhaps at no time since 1950 has it been less so. The history of enlargement, the Union's major achievement—extending the frontiers of freedom, or ascending to the rank of empire, or both at once, as the claim may be—is an index. Expansion to the East was piloted by Washington: in every case, the former Soviet satellites were incorporated into NATO, under US command, before they were admitted to the EU. Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic had joined NATO already in 1999, five years before entry into the Union; Bulgaria and Romania in 2004, three years before entry; even Slovakia, Slovenia and the Baltics, a gratuitous month—just to rub in the symbolic point?—before entry (planning for the Baltics started in 1998). Croatia, Macedonia and Albania are next in line for the same sequence.

The expansion of NATO to former Soviet borders, casting aside undertakings given to Gorbachev at the end of the Cold War, was the work of the Clinton administration. Twelve days after the first levy of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic had joined the Alliance, the Balkan War was launched—the first full-scale military offensive in NATO's history. The successful blitz was an American operation, with token auxiliaries from Europe, and virtually no dissent in public opinion. These were
harmonious days in Euro-American relations. There was no race between the EU and NATO in the East: Brussels deferred to the priority of Washington, which encouraged and prompted the advance of Brussels. So natural has this asymmetrical symbiosis now become that the United States can openly specify what further states should join the Union. When Bush told European leaders in Ankara, at a gathering of NATO, that Turkey must be admitted into the EU, Chirac was heard to grumble that the US would not like being instructed by Europeans to welcome Mexico into the federation; but when the European Council met to decide whether to open accession negotiations with Turkey, Condoleezza Rice could telephone the assembled leaders from Washington to ensure the right outcome, without hearing any inappropriate complaints from them about sovereignty. At this level, friction between Europe and America remains minimal.

Why then has there been that sense of a general crisis in transatlantic relations, which has given rise to such an extensive literature? In the EU, media and public opinion are at one in holding the conduct of the Republican administration outside NATO to be essentially responsible. Scanting the Kyoto Protocol and the International Criminal Court, sidelining the UN, trampling on the Geneva Convention, and stampeding into the Middle East, the Bush regime has on this view exposed a darker side of the United States, one which has understandably been met with near-universal abhorrence in Europe, even if etiquette has restrained expressions of it at diplomatic level. Above all, revulsion at the war in Iraq has, more than any other single episode since 1945, led to the rift recorded in the painful title of Habermas's latest work,
The Divided West
.

In this vision, there is a sharp contrast between the Clinton and Bush presidencies, and it is the break in the continuity of American foreign policy—the jettisoning of consensual leadership for an arrogant unilateralism—that has alienated Europeans. There is no question of the intensity of this perception. But in the orchestrations of America's
Weltpolitik,
style is easily mistaken for substance. The brusque manners of the Bush administration, its impatience with the euphemisms of the ‘international community', and blunt rejection of Kyoto and the ICC, offended European sensibilities from the start. Clinton's emollient gestures were more tactful, if in practice their upshot—neither Kyoto nor the ICC ever risked passage into law while he was in office—was often much the same. More fundamentally, as political operations, a straight line led
from the war in the Balkans to the war in Mesopotamia. In both, a casus belli—imminent genocide, imminent nuclear weapons—was trumped up; the Security Council ignored; international law set aside; and an assault unleashed.

United over Yugoslavia, Europe split over Iraq, where the strategic risks were higher. But the extent of European opposition to the march on Baghdad was always something of an illusion. On the streets, in Italy, Spain, Germany, Britain, huge numbers of people demonstrated against the invasion. Opinion polls showed majorities against it everywhere. But once it had occurred, there was little protest against the occupation, let alone support for the resistance to it. Most European governments—Britain, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Portugal in the West; all in the East—backed the invasion, and sent troops to bulk up the US forces holding the country down. Out of the fifteen member-states of the EU in 2003, just three—France, Germany and Belgium—came out against the prospect of war before the event. None condemned the attack when it was launched. But the declared opposition of Paris and Berlin to the plans of Washington and London gave popular sentiment across Europe a point of concentration, confirming and amplifying its sense of distance from power and opinion in America. The notion of an incipient Declaration of Independence by the Old World was born here.