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Books

Essays

THE NATURE OF THE BEAST
By John Thornhill

Financial Times (London)
June 28, 2008

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e978e48e-43e9-11dd-842e-0000779fd2ac.html

[Review of (1) Anand Menon, Europe: The State of the Union (Atlantic Books, April 2008), £16.99, 144 pages; (2) Sylvie Goulard, Il faut cultiver notre jardin européen ('We Must Cultivate Our European Garden' — an allusion to the conclusion of Voltaire's Candide) (Seuil, June 2008), €13, 107 pages; (3) Philippe Riès, L’Europe: malade de la démocratie ('Europe: Suffering from Democracy') (Grasset, March 2008), €9, 134 pages; (4) Stephen Wall, A Stranger in Europe: Britain and the E.U. from Thatcher to Blair (Oxford University Press, April 2008), £20, 230 pages.

[ILLUSTRATION by James Ferguson]

What is the point of the European Union? When even the Irish -- the most fortunate beneficiaries of their fellow Europeans’ generosity for the past 35 years -- vote “No” to the E.U.’s Lisbon reform treaty, then isn’t it time to bring down the curtain on the show? If, after several attempts, the E.U. cannot sensibly agree upon a new set of rules to run its own institutions, how it can it run anything else?

Even the most ardent europhiles may question their continuing will to succeed if they have to endure many more rounds of 27-sided wrangling over institutional minutiae such as variable geometry and qualified majority voting. According to Stephen Wall, the former British diplomat who confesses to having spent many of the happiest moments of his professional life in the E.U.’s Justus Lipsius building, there is only one known route to hysteria quicker than reading E.U. treaties: negotiating them in the first place.

One day the E.U.’s epitaph may run: a lovely idea in its day, but too unwieldy, slow-moving, and impractical for the 21st century.

Yet there is hope for the future. In different ways and wildly different styles, four new books make compelling arguments as to why Europe -- and the world -- would be a poorer place without the E.U. The authors reject the view that the E.U. is an accidental anachronism that grew out of the wreckage of postwar Europe. Instead, they argue that the organization can still provide a model for how governments can collectively confront many of this century’s great challenges: globalization, economic competitiveness, climate change, migration, and energy security.

One of the books’ common themes is how the E.U.’s uniqueness makes it hard to understand. The European Union is the duck-billed platypus of the political world: a curious-looking animal that defies simple categorization. Some people think it resembles a bird, others a reptile or a mammal. Similarly, everyone interprets the E.U. according to their own preconceptions rather than seeing it for the singular institution that it is.

As Anand Menon notes in Europe: The State of the Union, the E.U.’s most enthusiastic fans and fiercest critics share the same trait: they all describe what they wish, or fear, to see rather than what really exists. “Whether describing a threatening superstate or a welcome replacement for the nation state, europhiles and europhobes alike portray a fictional future disguised as fact,” he writes. “The exaggerated ambitions of the federalists are every bit as damaging as the unfounded attacks of the sceptics.”

A professor at the University of Birmingham, who has been teaching E.U. history for the past 15 years, Menon sets out to provide an accurate anatomy of this unlovable organization. He succeeds admirably, detonating myths on both sides of the debate as he goes.

Contrary to the overblown claims of some of its supporters, the E.U. is, in truth, largely a boring, technical institution (as Menon’s “comatose” students will attest). It’s concerned with regulating markets, negotiating trade agreements, and setting interest rates. The EU’s foreign policy is “soft,” its institutions are remote, and its greatest crisis involved the boycotting of committee meetings. Moreover, the Commission is an inherently weak institution heavily, and increasingly, reliant on its constituent member states.

Menon ridicules the idea, beloved of many eurosceptics, that the E.U. Commission is some kind of bureaucratic monster sucking the lifeblood out of Europe’s nation states. The Commission is a complement to the nation state, not a challenge to it, he argues. In total, the E.U. employs 30,000 officials compared with more than 1m civil servants in the U.K. alone. Boris Johnson, the eurosceptic mayor of London, probably controls a bigger administrative budget than José Manuel Barroso, president of the E.U. Commission.

The E.U.’s central achievement, Menon argues, has been the creation of the single market, now considerably bigger than the economy of the U.S. Though incomplete, it has brought real, practical benefits to thousands of companies and millions of consumers, and sharpened European competitiveness. The creation of a single, E.U. standard for mobile phones, for example, has led to its adoption in 50 non-European countries. This has given European operators a significant advantage in the global marketplace.

Yet fusing several national economies into a transnational market is an intensely political undertaking. And it can only work if independent referees, such as the E.U.’s competition authorities and European Court of Justice, have the authority to enforce the agreed laws. Eurosceptics fail to see that the European single market can only thrive in a strong legal and political framework. “It is curious how, so often, those most in favor of the market are those who understand it the least,” Menon writes.

Sylvie Goulard is a prolific author who heads the French wing of the European Movement, a pro-integration campaigning group. She makes an impassioned plea in Il faut cultiver notre jardin européen, where she argues that the E.U. can work as it should only when its leaders demonstrate the same level of commitment to the European ideal as the organization’s founders and bolster its institutions. In particular, she takes to task Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, whose country assumes the E.U.’s rotating presidency this week on July 1.

Sarkozy stands accused of being unacceptably nationalistic -- and anti-German. “France should not be ashamed of its history. She has not committed genocide. She did not invent the final solution,” Sarkozy said last year in an interview with a philosophy magazine. Unsurprisingly, his astonishingly tactless remarks still rankle in Berlin.

Goulard criticizes Sarkozy for his constant carping at the E.U. Commission and European Central Bank and his original proposals to create a Mediterranean Union, linking the E.U. members on the northern shore of the sea with north African and Middle Eastern countries to the south. But Goulard is glad that Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, slapped down Sarkozy on this proposal, insisting that this initiative should be a common E.U. endeavor.

Where Goulard argues that the fault with the E.U. lies in its current leaders, Philippe Riès shares the blame with the voters. In a splendidly outrageous polemic, L’Europe: malade de la démocratie, the French essayist rants against the political correctness that has engulfed the E.U. One frequent complaint is that the E.U. suffers from a “democratic deficit,” that it is an élite conspiracy whose leaders are out of touch with the ordinary people. The tragedy, Riès argues, is that this is no longer true.

From its inception, the European Community was a fundamentally, and necessarily, undemocratic project which elevated long-term strategic interests above short-term populist pressures. Franco-German reconciliation could only be achieved by ignoring the mutual hatred of its people. The E.U. was built by visionary leaders, not followers, “who had their eyes fixed on History’s horizon rather than on the last volatile opinion poll.”

Nowadays, he argues, E.U. leaders spend too much time pandering to ignorant voters. The E.U. is sick from democracy and has suffered a “lost decade” of integration as a result. “The construction of a unified, peaceful, and prosperous Europe, the most formidable human adventure of the second half of the 20th century, is today gravely threatened by the triumph of this democracy of opinion, in which particular interests systematically impose themselves on the general interest.”

Riès is particularly tough on his own country. He condemns those politicians (read Sarkozy) who blame the introduction of the euro for increasing prices -- even though the statistics show it has helped reduce inflation. He also damns those French corporatist interests, particularly the notaries, who opposed the E.U. services directive, which would have most benefited France. His final sally -- braving on the suicidal in France -- is against the Common Agricultural Policy, which he describes as “financially ruinous, economically inefficient, socially unjust, and dangerous for the environment and even public health.”

In this politically perverse universe, he argues: “If the perception contradicts the reality, then it is the reality that is wrong.”

Like Goulard, he recommends that the E.U. goes back to basics by regenerating a sense of shared destiny and recreating a combative and audacious Commission.

Of all the authors, Stephen Wall has had the most direct involvement in the E.U. and is perhaps its most persuasive champion. A Stranger in Europe is a dry but absorbing account of the European battles fought by the three British prime ministers he served. From the outside, political decision-making might seem like a considered science. But from the inside, it is haphazard art, owing as much to luck and bloody-mindedness as reasoned argument and strategy. This is exponentially true when applied to the E.U.

The organization is a “permanent negotiation” that can work only if there is creative friction and differences are fully aired. “I am such a passionate believer in the community that I accept all accusations of being a troublemaker. No, I am not awkward, I just want the E.C. to work,” said a certain Margaret Thatcher, who contributed mightily to the creation of the single market.

Wall argues that thanks to Thatcher’s efforts -- as well as those of her successors -- today’s E.U. should be a very comfortable place for Britain. The U.K.’s worst fears about political and monetary union have not been realized. CAP reform is happening, albeit slowly. The E.U. is developing a more effective foreign and security policy, without jeopardizing NATO.

Almost all of Britain’s biggest challenges can best be addressed through intergovernmental co-operation with its European partners, he argues. “Britain, as never before, needs in her national interest the Europe of the founders: a Europe which has strong supra-national institutions and which honors and advances the unique institutional framework which accounts for its success,” he concludes.

Yet it is an acid irony that the political future of the most secular of continents now rests on faith as much as reason. It depends on Europeans firmly believing in the ideal, irrespective of the messy compromises that are essential to realize it. The European community has, as one observer put it, always involved a “headlong flight into an unknown future to escape a fearful present.”

Or, in the slightly more uplifting words of Count Sforza, the former Italian foreign minister, there are times at the opera when you should enjoy the music and not worry about the words.

--John Thornhill is the editor of the FT’s Europe edition.