The New Old World (9 page)

Here the three leading states of Western Europe have divided. From the outset Germany has given priority to the rapid inclusion of Poland, Hungary, the former Czechoslovakia and more recently Slovenia. Within this group, Poland remains the most important in German eyes. Bonn's conception is straightforward. These countries, already the privileged catchment for German investment, would form a security
glacis
of Catholic lands around Germany and Austria, with social and political regimes that could—with judicious backing for sympathetic parties—sit comfortably beside the CDU. France, more cautious about the tempo of widening and mindful of former ties to the countries of the Little Entente—Romania or Serbia—has been less inclined to pick regional favourites in this way. Its initial preference, articulated by Mitterrand in Prague, was for a generic association between Western and Eastern Europe as a whole, outside the framework of the Union.

Britain, on the other hand, has pressed not only for rapid integration of the Visegrád countries into the EU, but for the most extensive embrace beyond it. Alone of Western leaders, Major has envisaged the ultimate inclusion of Russia. The rationale for the British position is unconcealed: the wider the Union becomes, in this view, the shallower it must be—for the more national states it contains, the less viable becomes any real supranational authority over them. Once stretched to the Bug and beyond, the European Union will evolve in practice into the vast free-trade area which in the eyes of London it should always have been. Widening here means both institutional dilution and social deregulation: the prospect of including vast reserve armies of cheap labour in the East, exerting downward pressure on wage costs in the West, is a further bonus in this British scenario.

Which outcome is most likely? At the moment the German design has the most wind in its sails. In so far as the EU has sketched a policy at all, it goes in the CDU's direction. One of the reasons, of course, is the current convergence between German calculations and Polish, Czech and Hungarian aspirations. There is some historical irony here. Since the late eighties publicists and politicians in Hungary, the Czech lands, Poland and more recently Slovenia and even Croatia have set out to persuade the world that these countries belong to a Central Europe with a natural affinity to Western Europe, and that is quite distinct from Eastern Europe.
The geographical stretching involved in these definitions can be extreme. Vilnius is described by Czesław Miłosz, for example, as a Central European city.
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But if Poland—let alone Lithuania—is really in the centre of Europe, what is the east? Logically, one would imagine, the answer must be Russia. But since many of the same writers—Milan Kundera is another example—deny that Russia has ever belonged to European civilization at all,
⁴⁰
we are left with the conundrum of a space proclaiming itself centre and border at the same time.

Perhaps sensing such difficulties, an American sympathizer, the
Spectator
's foreign editor Anne Applebaum, has tacitly upgraded Poland to full occidental status, entitling her—predictably disobliging—inspection of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine
Between East and West
.
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Another way out of them is offered by Miklós Haraszti, who argues that while current usage of the idea of Central Europe may make little geographical sense, it does convey the political unity of those—Poles, Czechs, Magyars—who fought against Communism, as distinct from their neighbours who did not. More Romanians, of course, died in 1989 than in the resistance of all three countries combined for many years. Today, however, the point of the construct is not so much retrospective as stipulative: originally fashioned to repudiate any connexion with Russian experience during the Cold War, it now serves to demarcate superior from inferior—i.e., Romanian, Bulgarian, Albanian, etc.—candidates for entry into the EU.

But geopolitical concepts rarely escape their origins altogether. The idea of
Mitteleuropa
was a German invention, famously theorized by Max Weber's friend Friedrich Naumann during the First World War. Naumann's conception remains arrestingly topical. The Central Europe he envisaged was to be organized around a Germanic nucleus, combining Prussian industrial efficiency and Austrian cultural glamour, capable of attracting satellite nations to it in a vast customs community—
Zollgemeinschaft
—and military
compact, extending ‘from the Vistula to the Vosges'.
⁴²
Such a unified
Mitteleuropa
would be what he called an
Oberstaat
, a ‘super-state' able to rival the Anglo-American and Russian empires. A Lutheran pastor himself, he noted regretfully that it would be predominantly Catholic—a necessary price to pay—but a tolerant order, making room for Jews and minority nationalities. The Union it created would not be federal—Naumann was an early prophet of today's doctrine of subsidiarity too. All forms of sovereignty other than economic and military would be retained by member-states preserving their separate political identities, and there would be no one all-purpose capital, but rather different cities—Hamburg, Prague, Vienna—would be the seat of particular executive functions, rather like Strasbourg, Brussels and Frankfurt today.
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Against the background of a blue-print like this, it is not difficult to see how the ideological demand for a vision of Central Europe in the Visegrád countries could find political supply in the Federal Republic.

But given that widening of some kind to the East is now enshrined as official—if still nebulous—policy in the Union, is it probable that the process
could
be limited to a select handful of former Communist states? Applications for admission are multiplying, and there is no obvious boundary at which they can be halted. Europe, as J.G.A. Pocock once forcibly observed, is not a continent, but an unenclosed sub-continent on a continuous land mass stretching to the Bering Strait. Its only natural frontier with Asia is a strip of water, at the Hellespont, once swum by Leander and Lord Byron. To the north, plain and steppe unroll without break into Turkestan. Cultural borders are no more clearly marked than geographical: Muslim Albania and Bosnia lie a thousand miles west of Christian Georgia and Armenia, where the ancients set the dividing-line between Europe and Asia. No wonder Herodotus himself, the first historian to discuss the question, remarked that ‘the boundaries of Europe are quite unknown, and no man can say where they end . . . but it is certain that Europa [he is referring to the beauty borne away by Zeus] was an Asiatic, and never even set foot on the land the Greeks now call Europe, only sailing [on her bull] from Phoenicia to Crete'. The irony of Herodotus perhaps still retains a lesson for us. If Slovakia is a candidate for entry into today's Union, why not Romania? If Romania, why not Moldova? If Moldova, why not the Ukraine? If the Ukraine, why not Turkey?
In a couple of years, Istanbul will overtake Paris to become the largest city in what—however you define it—no one will contest is Europe. As for Moscow, it is over two centuries since Catherine the Great declared in a famous
ukaz
that ‘Russia is a European nation', and the history of European culture and politics from the time of Pushkin and Suvorov onwards has enforced her claim ever since. De Gaulle's vision of a Europe ‘from the Atlantic to the Urals' will not lightly go away. All the stopping-places of current discussion about widening the EU are mere conveniences of the ring of states closest to it, or of the limits of bureaucratic imagination in Brussels. They will not resist the logic of expansion.

In 1991 J.G.A. Pocock remarked that

‘Europe' . . . is once again an empire in the sense of a civilised and stabilised zone which must decide whether to extend or refuse its political power over violent cultures along its borders but not yet within its system: Serbs and Croats if one chances to be Austrian, Kurds and Iraqis if Turkey is admitted to be part of ‘Europe'. These are not decisions to be taken by the market, but decisions of the state.
⁴⁴

But as Europe is not an empire in the more familiar sense of the term—a centralized imperial authority—but merely (as he put it) ‘a composite of states', with no common view of their borderlands, it is not surprising that its
limes
has yet to be drawn by the various chancelleries. Since he wrote, however, there has been no shortage of expert opinion to fill the gap.

For example Timothy Garton Ash, one of the first and keenest advocates of a PCH fast track, has recently adjusted his sights. ‘Having spent much of the past fifteen years trying to explain to Western readers that Prague, Budapest and Warsaw belong to Central and not to Eastern Europe, I am the last person to need reminding of the immense differences between Poland and Albania', he writes in the
Times Literary Supplement.
‘But to suggest that there is some absolutely clear historical dividing line between the Central European democracies in the so-called Visegrád group and, say, the Baltic states or Slovenia would be to service a new myth'.
⁴⁵
Instead, the dividing-line must be drawn between a Second Europe numbering some twenty states which he
describes as ‘set on a course' towards the EU; and a Third Europe that does not share this prospect, comprising Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and—a cartographical nicety—Serbia.

A dichotomy so visibly instrumental is unlikely to be more durable than the mythical distinction it has replaced. At the end of his
Orchestrating Europe
, a capacious and strangely zestful guide through the institutional maze and informal complications of the Union, Keith Middlemas looks out on a somewhat broader scene. Europe, he suggests, is surrounded by an arc of potential threat curving from Murmansk to Casablanca. To hold it at a distance, the Union needs a belt of insulation, comprising a ‘second circle' of lands capable of integration into the Community, shielding it from the dangers of the ‘third circle' beyond—that is, Russia, the Middle East and Black Africa. In this conception the respective buffer zones logically become Eastern Europe, Cyprus and Turkey in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Maghreb. Middlemas, however, explains that while the first two are ultimately acceptable into the Union, the third remains inconceivable. For ‘the countries of the Maghreb are irrelevant as a barrier to a sub-Saharan Africa, which presents no threat except via small numbers of illegal immigrants'. In fact, on the contrary, ‘the
threat
comes from North Africa itself'.
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If this is a more ecumenical approach than that of Garton Ash, who expressly excludes Turkey from Europe, it traces the same movement, common to all these tropes—a slide to aporia. Every attempt so far to delimit the future boundaries of the Union has deconstructed itself.

For the moment, it is enough to register that ‘Europe Agreements', formally designated as antechambers to entry, have been signed by six countries: Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria; and that four more are impending (Slovenia and the Baltic states). It is only a matter of time before Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Albania and what is left of Bosnia join the queue. Does this prospect—we might call it an inverted domino effect, in which the pieces fall inwards rather than outwards—mean that the British scenario will come to pass? Harold Macmillan once spoke, with a homely national touch, of his hope that the Community, when exposed to the beneficent pressure of a vast free-trade area, would ‘melt like a lump of sugar in a cup of tea'.
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Such remains the preferred vision of his
successors. Their calculation is that the more member-states there are, the less sovereignty can practically be pooled, and the greater is the chance that federal dreams will fold. How realistic is it?

There is no doubt that enlargement of the Union to some two dozen states would fundamentally alter its nature. If its existing arrangements were simply extended east, the cost of integrating the Visegrád quartet alone could mean an increase of 60 per cent in the Union budget. There is no chance of the existing member-states accepting such a burden, at a time when every domestic pressure is towards tax reduction. That leaves either reducing current support to farming communities and poorer regions in the west, composed of voters with the power to resist, or watering down the
acquis communautaire
to create a second-class membership for new entrants, without benefit of the transfers accorded to first-class members.

These are just the fiscal headaches attending rapid expansion. There are also the material consequences for the former Communist economies. If the effort of adhering to the convergence criteria for monetary union is already straining prosperous Western societies to breaking point, can impoverished Eastern ones be expected to sustain them? No previous candidates, however initially disadvantaged, had to scale such a macro-economic cliff. Contemplating the requirements of EMU, it is not suprising that enthusiasts for expansion are starting to call for the whole idea of a single currency to be dropped. For Garton Ash, the needs of Warsaw and Prague dovetail with what is anyway the wisdom of London. ‘Europe could perhaps use a little more British thinking at the moment', he writes of monetary union, ‘with “British” here meant in the deeper sense of our particular intellectual tradition: sceptical, empirical and pragmatic'.
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The suspicion that EMU and Eastern enlargement might be incompatible is shared from the opposite standpoint by the unlikely figure of Jacques Attali, who regards the single currency as a valid but now lost cause, and enlargement as a German project that will lead away from a federal Europe, for which most of the national elites, mesmerized by American culture, anyway have no appetite.
L'Europe ne s'aime pas
, he glumly observed at the end of the Mitterrand experience.
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