June 21, 2005
Odyssey to Nowhere
The European Union at the end of its rope.
by Jennifer Heyne
Private Papers

The E.U. hierarchy met last week to rethink and regroup after its much heralded Constitution is now the bane of European voters. It is no surprise that French and Dutch voters rejected the Constitution. Most governments find political consensus through plebiscites on matters of foreign affairs a tough domestic hurdle — rife with criticism, scandal, protests, and unrest. Outside of Western democracies, far worse civic unrest in connection with reform and change is of course common. Bolivia’s President Mesa, for example, finally resigned after offering his citizens a generous package of elections and a new constitution. The Uzbek government is losing its grip on law and order under enormous protests and suicide bombings; in fact, lacking security, the Israeli embassy has left the country nearly to a man. China seems to have a consensus, but remains also on everyone’s human rights watch list.

But Europe isn’t one of these top-heavy governments facing democratic pressures, and it has spent a half-century on careful diplomacy leading up to its utopian Constitution. Why, then, have the citizens nipped it now at the penultimate stage of continental nationhood? 63% of the Dutch voters — with a record turnout itself of over 60 percent — voted against ratification of the charter that would regulate and police 25 nations, and further emasculate sovereignty at a time when the Netherlands is more and more worried about Islamicist challenges to the idea of Holland itself. This came only two days after the French voters markedly rejected the Constitution by 54% — also over questions of nationalism and worries over surrender of a sense of self, though as much from the left as the right. In general, why are European voters so wary of one European government and their distant leadership so shocked by its failure?

In truth, there was every reason to expect success. Europe is after all a region of nation builders, constitution writers, political philosophers, judges, police, civil codes and civil rights, all those purveyors of law and order, unity and the rule of reason that might help them craft an all-encompassing charter. Confidence in centralized control and the power of government are in Europeans’ collective blood. Surely they must be above the pandemonium of those incipient nations whose people have a short, if any, history of individual rights and majority votes — nor even the experience of a responsible aristocracy, but more often are experts in how to negotiate almost any and all alternatives to democratic rule. We expected a consensus too, since the old notion of a “European”— cultured, educated, and sophisticated aristocrats leading hardworking, patriotic, if parochial peasants and bridged by a middle class with aristocratic aspirations — might supersede other elements of particular national consciousnesses.

These days, other than a little healthy cultural competition — Shakespeare or Moliere, Goethe or Hugo, Jaguar or BMW, fresh canned or fresh baked, Gloucester or Gouda, Bordeaux or Chianti, Lake District or Florence — French, British, and the states of the European West still share in a long constitutional tradition, starting with Magna Carta, Estates Generales, Parliament, Reichstag, Hobbes, Locke, Montequieu, and Rousseau. This liberal tradition, Europeans believe, is what the E.U. perpetuates and ensures against repeats of their past endemic detours to authoritarianism and militarism. After all, they have witnessed the unification of German states and the volatile Italian peninsula, watched the disintegration and collapse of the Ottoman, German, British, and Soviet empires, almost annihilated the European race on the battlefield, only at last to see the entire continent at peace and under constitutional governments.

So they have had their wars, but found in the twentieth century that war meant mutual destruction, leaving no alternative but mutual assurance in diplomacy and signed agreements. Thus, French and British have forgotten a Hundred Year’s war, a Spanish succession, an Austrian succession, or a Seven Year’s war. The Italians might still wish for the return of Napoleonic loot, but are more content with French markets and tourists. The Spanish are still probably a little miffed at Guernica, but the Germans have spent fifty years apologizing to everyone, the Spanish included.  Gibraltar and the Elgin Marbles are not the stuff of wars any more. In post-World War II era, an age that ended western empires in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, these countries overcame national differences to form cooperative institutions like to OEEC, ECSC, Common Market, NATO, GATT, WTO and the U.N. — the logical culmination of which is the present E.U. Constitution.

No wonder then, given history and ideology, European elites are baffled, and offered nervous responses to the failed ratification in France and the Netherlands. The new E.U. would have provided something that even Charlemagne, Napoleon, or Hitler could not achieve: a united 25 European states, with a combined population over 450 million, encompassing territory larger than the US. The hope of some and the nightmare of others left European elites confused and conflicted. German Chancellor Schroeder proclaimed “the ratification process must continue . . . if we desire a democratic, socialist, and strong Europe.” Out-of-touch Chirac shook up his cabinet in the aftermath of the French “non,” replacing Prime Minister Raffarin with the aloof, anti-war Villepin. The Financial Times, Britain’s premier economic voice, called it a “slap in the face” for Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende. And the British now have postponed their referendum on the Charter.  Something is amiss in Europe, as aristocratic dreams are dashed by democratic realities.

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There are many reasons to predict the failure of European integration. We forget how the European Union came into existence. As the bombs ceased falling on Europe in 1945, Western European landscape resembled Raft of the “Medusa” by the Romantic painter, Gericault, a people clinging to hope as they searched a distant horizon for redemption, yet standing atop destruction and despair. It came to them then, as a utopian vision often touches those in desperate straits, that supranational institutions might mitigate national disagreements in the future while economic integration might help Europe rebuild and heal. And it worked for a time. European economies expanded — the German economy beyond all expectation given the physical destruction of the German landscape in World War II — and the talk of a federation of European states began almost immediately.

Leadership in those post-war, bombed-out, under-fed, exhausted nations — Germany’s Adenauer, Britain’s Attlee, Italy’s Gasperi, and France’s Jean Monnet — led a resurgence of European economic might in the world.  The U.S. provided aid through the Marshall Plan, hoping as much to curb domestic communist movements in Europe as to subvert the Soviet presence, even offering aid to Eastern European nations. Six western countries signed the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) seeking access to Ruhr steel resources, the wealthiest region in Europe for industrial development. Also, German latent economic might made everyone nervous, even the short-sighted never lost the frightening view of German imperialism, hence the dogma of NATO — America in, Russia out, and Germany down.

The very success of the ECSC and its administration led to further integration with a 1957 treaty signed in Rome to establish the Common Market: an agreement to end tariffs in the Common Market, to coordinate external tariff policy, and eventually to develop policies for open borders to capital and labor. All these key elements reduced costs to industry and encouraged commerce for its materials and labor force, and opened markets.  However, these agreements were born out of financial opportunism, not a new European identity rising like a Phoenix out of the ashes of disgraced nationalism. Mutual profitability was not the same as collective nationalist aspirations, and most leaders apparently forgot that making money together is not quite the same as speaking the same language, sharing the same culture, and having the same friends and enemies.

Nonetheless, after the fall of communism (1989) in the east, the Common Market had fully evolved into something that we now know as the European Union (1991) that opened as never before nations to the free flow of tourists, labor and goods. Without Soviet divisions on their borders, European leadership had every reason to hope for even greater gains on their road to integration, making a Europe of over 450 million a competitor with the wealth and power of the United States that was no longer essential to keeping Europe safe, given the demise of the Red Army.

While leadership saw strength in the power of numbers, its citizens soon worried more about the power of the purse, paranoid that their own welfare programs might be bankrupted by transfers of capital to impoverished eastern nations equally seated in a European parliament. Growing national wealth, confidence in government, broadly supported socialist parties, U.S. contributions to military defense, all made the growth of cushy welfare programs possible, providing for healthcare and pensions from cradle to grave. By 2000 the average European worked less than 40 hours per week, and the number of paid vacation days far outnumbered those in the U.S.  Germany, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark created large university systems that offered free education to citizens. Nowhere on the continent did responsible statesmen warn the citizenry of Europe that much of their prosperity was the result of subsidized American defense and the hard work of past generations who knew real poverty after the war. Few reminded Europeans that in a globalized world there was no intrinsic reason why they should deserve to work less than the Chinese, Japanese, Indians, or Americans.

The Cold War, too, had given Western Europe a false sense of collective purpose; as long as there remained a large antithetical enemy on the borders, fear and the need for shared defense might well have resulted for a time in a single political entity. We sometimes forget that as representatives signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957, other diplomats settled an agreement for military collaboration, the European Atomic Community, so that they might share military secrets and security in addition to their NATO alliance — the nascent beginnings of a unified state responsible for common defense.

Fast forward half a century to a world of globalization, the end of Soviet communism, and the integration of Eastern Europe with the specter of Turkey to follow, and the original idealism seems naïve. Europeans once worried about Russians, themselves, and French-Germany rivalry — not workers in China, international Islamic terrorism, lifestyle parity accorded to those in Poland and perhaps Turkey.

*  *  *

European leadership would have preferred their utopian dream to continue, but the course of human events more often brings profound disruption to a temporary bliss, even when it is the product of highly educated and sensitive European aristocrats. The decade of the ‘90s was a false honeymoon for the Europe Union as the Computer Age ushered in new markets and economic prosperity in the aftermath of the Cold War, as Eastern European nations lined up to enter the union. Their economic backwardness, decayed infrastructures, and politically ignorant and beaten populations mattered little as long as modern-day Voltaires and Rousseaus led them into utopia. Meanwhile, a great deal of the world outside Europe remained in the eighth century — brought home when the lords of disorder raised their ugly heads in the Middle East, awakening that comfortable European mass, much to the chagrin of their politicians who were embarrassed to report back that not everyone abroad listened to a sophisticated continent without an army. Europe’s red-faced leaders resent American “unilateral” actions not just because it exposed Russian and French sweet-heart deals with Saddam, but more because it raised the specter of Muslim-Christian world conflict that could derail a disarmed Europe’s effort to create global rule by multilateral consensus.

Dutch and French voters must now consider the likelihood of a Turkey admitted to the union and the free flow of 70 million Muslims into Europe, all in the wake of the widely publicized murder of Theo van Gogh and death threats to Ayaan Hirsi Ali the Dutch parliamentarian. Turkey’s membership means not just a porous border, which is difficult enough to patrol, but opening the floodgates to millions of Muslims and the new idea that a peasant in eastern Anatolia as a European was entitled to a state-mandated promise of economic parity with a Western European.

Turkey, unlike even an Albania or Bosnia-Herzegovenia, is nearly all Muslim (99.8%).  The secularist and founding father, Kemal Ataturk, is becoming a distant memory, and with him the idea that Turkey is Western and European rather than Islamic and Middle Eastern. While most Turkish Muslims of the E.U. would be peaceable and industrious, jihadists would only have more opportunities for disguise, infiltration, and assault within a continent that had no passports or security checks between states. These fears may seem unenlightened by Europe’s sophisticated ruling class, but they are the worries of Europe’s less sophisticated who know civilians like themselves were the targets of the WTC, Spanish trains, and Russian airliners.

Even before Islamic terrorism became a daily worry, a European parliament had enough nativist and agrarian opponents. Farmers, who reaped the benefits of protectionist policies in their own countries, have not been supporters of the lowering of tariffs, especially as it means competing with eastern farmers who have much lower labor costs. European agriculture is struggling in a highly competitive industry where profit margins are low and the stability of a farm enterprise is subject to price fluctuation and periodic losses. In response, “lifestyle” and “traditions” justify saving the family farmer at enormous costs, even when it means higher food prices for largely non-agrarian nations.

The E.U. has attempted to co-opt conservative farming constituencies with subsidies. But even these payouts are highly contested and fuel ever more debate about relative sacrifice, as each country now calibrates to the very Euro the taxes going into Brussels and entitlements coming back.  Britain, under Thatcher, began to receive a rebate on its E.U. contributions — which amounted to double those of even France, since most contributions to the latter went to subsidize farming while Britain had a small farm sector.

Farm policy is one small concern for broad-based western voters, who see not only competitive imbalances, but also east European infrastructures that need to be rebuilt: something like the task of restoring Western Europe after World War II, but without wealthy Americans across the ocean to help pay part of the bill What then might happen to the vaunted welfare system?

Other minority groups have joined farmers. Nationalists and racists in member countries have long resisted both economic and political integration because of unwanted competition or immigration, and there is no evidence that 100,000 bureaucrats in Brussels can defuse their hysteria better than local and state governments. The morality of a neo-Nazis or LePenist may distance the common voter in ordinary times, but not necessarily now. Agreeing to a supranational constitution, which can only mean that federal power will have more control over their lives, has driven even more exasperated citizens to find alliance with those once unsavory groups, whose political agendas at least concern their unaddressed concerns with unruly, uneducated immigrants flooding their borders.

Ironically, European leadership continues to dream of the power of numbers, as if the E.U. can mean a new pan-European empire under the control of a benign Directorate. And perhaps they have a belief that they might achieve the same ends as the United States, through peaceful means — in spite of an expansion to Eastern European countries that have a short-lived tradition of democracy and a pressing need for instant parity with the West accomplished by massive cash transfers. But this Panglossian optimism in Brussles is not shared by their citizens, who see weaker economies being a drag on their already taxed welfare systems and so a reduction of benefits that had been the promise of their hard-working parents. Furthermore, if the Cold War has ended, a new, more complex war takes its place waged by murderous thugs in the Middle East. Indeed the war against terrorism poses a variety of conflicts for citizens of Europe that go to the very heart of the idea of the European Union.

Europe’s leadership is failing, but not for the reasons given by Giscard D’Estaing, who claims the setback in France was Chirac’s fault: his logic was that Chirac should never have given the 448 articles to every French citizen. D’Estaing, himself the architect of the E.U. constitution, commented to the New York Times that he “thought the French people would be rational people.” That is classic double-speak of European aristocratic condescension — the peasant is too ignorant to understand his brilliant document of his own authorship, but the rustic is nevertheless at least “rational.” Surely he must understand that brilliant rich people like D’Estaing can be trusted to know what is good for the less gifted.

D’Estaing and European leadership are suffering from other delusions apart from thinking they shared the intellect of Madison, Adams, and Jefferson. First, their own elites seem less concerned about jihadists on a killing rampage to thwart democratic efforts in Iraq, and yet they are keen on posturing about the problems with U.S. “unilateral” action in the Middle East to build democracy. In one of the most short-sighted policies in recent memory, Europeans are either opposed to or neutral about the only policy that has a chance of deflating the gas of anti-Western sentiment among Europe’s Muslims: creating democracies abroad that foster prosperity, discourage emigration, and curtail Islamic extremism at its source.

Second, given the possible future of an unassimilated Muslim voting majority with allegiance more to a mythical pan-Islamicism than the postmodern European Union, the Europeans are understandably concerned with the lack of any moderate voice in the Muslim community. But for too long their elites, in aristocratic fashion, seem to think it is merely yet another backward peasantry to be cajoled and pacified, and lacks the sophistication to undermine the liberal machinery of 21^st-century Europe. Thus instead of confrontation and accountability, the Europeans pass of their disdain and contempt for the Muslims in their midst by benign neglected masquerading under multicultural tolerance.

Lastly, Europe’s leadership clings to a failing institution like the United Nations as the only alternative to the hyper-puissance of the United States, in spite of its criminality and general inertia. As the list of U.N. faults grows longer — the mass graves at Srebrenica, Rwandan massacres, rape and pedophile rings in the Congo, slow aide to Tsunami survivors, oil-for-food scandal, Darfur — the confidence and support of the very idea of global transnational government erodes for the more rational European electorate: is the E.U. to evolve into a U.N.-like entity, with no checks and balances, no accountability, and illiberal constituencies, with utopian pretensions shaming legitimate protestations? The realist common folk simply don’t have the same allegiance to an institution with so much practiced deceit and incompetence, and thus rightly fear their elites will tolerate the same excesses and wastes in a European Union.

I’m afraid the French “non,” and the landslide defeat in the Netherlands, come as no surprise. The utopian dream of a supranational European charter is as admirable as it is unattainable. A new European empire is unlikely, except through “blood and iron” a la Bismarck — or worse.  Instead, aristocratic Europe seeks to evoke culture, heritage, and idealistic pretension in lieu of confidence that at last grassroots Europeans can govern themselves without destroying each other. And thus we are watching the end of Europe’s long odyssey to nowhere.