For Europe, a Moment to Ponder

March 25, 2007
For Europe, a Moment to Ponder
ByROGER COHEN
SEVILLE, Spain
IT is not easy to think of Spain asPoland.Stroll around this southern city at dusk, beneath the palms, beside thehandsome bridges on the Guadalquivir River, past the chic boutiques andthe Häagen-Dazs outlet, the Gothic cathedral and the Moorish palace,and it is scarcely Warsaw that comes to mind.
But, insisted Adam Michnik, the Polish writer, “Poland is the newSpain, absolutely.” He continued: “Spain was a poor country when itjoined theEuropean Union 21 years ago. It no longer is. We will see the same results in Poland.”
If history is prologue, Mr. Michnik is likely to be right. TheEuropean Union, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of its foundingtreaty this weekend, is more often associated with Brussels bureaucratssetting the maximum curvature of cucumbers than with transformationalpower. But step by step, stipulation by stipulation, Europe has beenremade.
What began in limited fashion in 1957 as a drive to remove tariffbarriers and promote commercial exchange has ended by banishing warfrom Europe, enriching it beyond measure, and producing what Mr.Michnik called “the first revolution that has been absolutely positive.”
Asia, still beset by nationalisms and open World War II wounds, canonly envy Europe’s conjuring away agonizing history, a process thatinvolved a voluntary dilution of national sovereignty unthinkable inthe United States.
This achievement will be symbolized as leaders from the 27 memberstates gather in Berlin — the city that stood at the crux of violent20th-century European division. They will sign a “Berlin Declaration”celebrating the peace, freedom, wealth and democracy that the Treaty ofRome has now helped spread among almost half a billion Europeans.
But it is a celebration in uncertainty. A bigger union, expanded toinclude the ex-Communist states of Central Europe, has proved largelyungovernable. A constitution designed to streamline its governance wasrejected in 2005. Integration has been a European triumph, but notalways of those who are part of large-scale Muslimimmigration. “The E.U. is on autopilot, in stalemate, in deep crisis,” saidJoschka Fischer,the former German foreign minister who seven years ago called for aEuropean federation run by a true European government. The foundingtreaty, signed by the six founding members on March 25, 1957, rested oncreative ambiguity. It called for an “ever closer union among theEuropean peoples”; behind it lay dreams of a United States of Europe.The bold politics nestled inside basic economics — a common market —and was thus rendered unthreatening. A common currency, the euro,emerged in 2002.
Still, the ambiguity persisted; it has proved divisive. Economicpower has been built more effectively than political or strategicunity. Military power has lagged. Recent disputes — from Iraq tocurrent American plans to install missile defenses in Poland and theCzech Republic — have shown how hard it is for Europe to speak with onevoice or, as Fischer put it, “define what strategic interests it has incommon.”
Nonetheless, “autopilot” in the union still amounts to a lot.
It will ensure, for example, that over $100 billion is sent toPoland from now to 2013 to upgrade its infrastructure and agriculture,a sum that dwarfs American aid. Similarly, more than $190 billion hasbeen devoted to Spain since it joined the union in 1986, 11 years afterthe end of Franco’s dictatorship.
The result has been Spain’s extraordinary transition from a countrywhose per capita output was 71 percent of the European average in 1985,90 percent in 2004, and now 100.7 percent of the median of the 27members. Spain has moved into the club of the well off. Dictatorshipseems utterly remote.
Poland under the Kaczynski brothers is far from overcoming thepainful legacy of Communist tyranny, but by 2025 — its own 21-yearmembership anniversary — safe to say that healing will be advanced.
“The E.U. slashes political risk,” said Chris Huhne, a LiberalDemocrat member of the British Parliament. “It also exercises a softpower on its periphery that has far more transformational impact thanthe American neocon agenda in the Middle East. Countries in the Balkanswanting to come into the European democratic family have to adapt.”
That adaptation is economic as well as political. The creation ofsomething approximating an American single market has been powerful inending cartels and monopolies, introducing competition, pushingprivatization and generally promoting the market over heavily managedcapitalism.
Which is not to say, of course, that European capitalism isAmerican capitalism. It is less fluid; it creates fewer jobs. It isalso less harsh.
Indeed, defense of what is called the European social model, withuniversal health care and extensive unemployment benefits, has become atenet of European identity. How far that identity, as opposed tonational identities, exists today is a matter of dispute. Only 2percent of European Union inhabitants of working age live in memberstates other than their own.
But a survey in the French daily Le Figaro showed that 71 percentof French people now feel some pride in a European identity. TheErasmus program has helped about 1.5 million young Europeans spend ayear studying in European universities outside their own countries.
The movie “L’Auberge Espagnole,” or “The Spanish Inn,” captured theErasmus experience: jumbled cultures, linguistic and amorous discovery,and the births of new identities from this mingling. CountlessEurocouples have not been the least of the union’s achievements.
How this generation will deal with what is often called thequestion of Europe’s final destination remains unclear. The union isopen geographically: It could end at the Iranian and Iraqi borders ifTurkey joins. It is also open politically: How much of a federationshould Europe be?
The union has been upended by Communism’s unexpected demise. TheEuropean Economic Community, as formed in 1957, did not try to liberatethe continent; it tried to ensure that half of it cohered in freedom.“Europe was initially built on accepting — with more or less equanimity— to forget about half of it, including historic centers of Europeancivilization like Prague or Budapest,” said Jonathan Eyal, a Britishanalyst. “And the irony is that it is precisely the return of thesecenters that has thrown the E.U. into existential crisis today.”
That crisis is partly procedural: It is not clear how you getthings done in a Europe of 27. It is partly of identity: The rapidlycohering Europe with a Franco-German core is gone, and nobody quiteknows what to put in its place. And it is partly political: Theconception of Europe in post-Communist countries is simply different.
These differences are apparent in recent tensions betweenGermany and Poland, whose reconciliation has been one of the European Union’s conspicuous miracles.
Germany has been utterly remade by an integrating Europe to thepoint that more people worry today about German pacifism thanexpansionism. But Poland is just entering that transformationalprocess; under Lech Kaczynski’s conservative presidency its wariness ofthe pooling of sovereignty inherent in the union has been clear.
Poland today, said Karl Kaiser, a German political analyst, “looksout and tends to see the old Germany and the old expansionistRussia; it has not taken part mentally in the long process of integration.”
So Warsaw sees Moscow-Berlin plots of sinister memory when Russiaand Germany agree to build a gas pipeline directly between each other,under the Baltic Sea rather than over Poland.
It pushes hard, but unsuccessfully, for references to Europe’sChristian roots in the Berlin declaration. It contemplates, as does theCzech Republic, installing part of a new American missile defensesystem against Iran, and does so despite German unease, Russian furyand the absence of any European orNATO consensus.
Of course, what Poles and Czechs see beyond Germany or Russia isthe America that defeated the Soviet Union and freed them: Poles, asMr. Michnik noted, “tend to be more pro-American than Americans.”
Whatever tempering of this sentiment Iraq has brought, Poland andthe rest of Central and Eastern Europe remain more pro-American thanthe Europe of the Treaty of Rome. With Britain they now form a clubwithin the club that sees Europe more as loose alignment than strategicunion.
“For Britain, Europe is a convenience rather than a concept,” said Karsten Voigt, a German Foreign Ministry official.
This is an intractable division, and the Bush administration hasaccentuated the split with its ad hoc approach to European alliances.That stance was evident at the time of the Iraq invasion and againtoday over missile defenses. Coalitions of the willing tend to leavethe unwilling bristling.
At a deeper level, Homo europeus, formed over 50 years, now lies atsome distance from Homo americanus. Post-heroic Europeans tend to favorprocedure, talk, international institutions and incremental measures toresolve issues, where Americans tend to favor resolve backed by force.
Peace is much more of an absolute value today in Europe than in theUnited States, as are opposition to the death penalty and commitment toreversingglobal warming.So what? The ties that bind the Atlantic family remain strong. But,unglued by the cold war’s end, they are not as strong as they were.Europe sees the United States today more through the prism of Baghdadthan Berlin.
Generations pass; memories fade; perceptions change. That isinevitable. The great achievement of the European Union has been toabsorb those changes and zigzags within the broader push for unity.
That push, that journey, is incomplete. But Europeans have learned,as Mr. Eyal said, that “traveling can be just as good as arriving.”Perpetual difficulty has been the union’s perpetual stimulus. A UnitedStates of Europe remains a distant, probably unreachable dream. At thesame time, continent-wide war has become an unthinkable nightmare.
“The E.U. is an unfinished project, but so what?” Mr. Voigt said. “Why be nervous? We have time.”
Time enough even, the 50-year history of the union suggests, for Turkey to become the new Poland.
Roger Cohen writes the Globalist column for The International Herald Tribune.
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