The New Old World (6 page)

There were at least four principal forces behind the process of integration. Although these overlapped, their core concerns were quite distinct. The central aim of the federalist circle round
Monnet was to create a European order that would be immune to the catastrophic nationalist wars that had twice devastated the continent, in 1914–18 and 1939–45. The basic objective of the United States was to create a strong West European bulwark against the Soviet Union, as a means to victory in the Cold War. The key French goal was to tie Germany down in a strategic compact leaving Paris
primus inter pares
west of the Elbe. The major German concern was to return to the rank of an established power and keep open the prospect of reunification. What held these different programmes together was—here Milward is, of course, entirely right—the common interest of all parties in securing the economic stability and prosperity of Western Europe, as a condition of achieving each of these goals.

This constellation held good till the end of the sixties. In the course of the next decade, two significant shifts occurred. The first was an exchange of Anglo-Saxon roles. The belated entry of the UK brought another state into the Community of nominally comparable weight to France and West Germany; while on the other hand, the US withdrew to a more watchful stance as Nixon and Kissinger started to perceive the potential for a rival great power in Western Europe. The second change was more fundamental. The economic and social policies that had united the original Six during the post-war boom disintegrated with the onset of global recession. The result was a sea-change in official attitudes to public finance and levels of employment, social security and rules for competition, that set the barometer for the eighties.

Thus the last effective step of integration to date, the Single European Act of 1986, exhibits a somewhat different pattern from its predecessors, although not a discontinuous one. The initiative behind the completion of the internal market came from Delors, a convinced federalist recently appointed as French head of the Commission. At governmental level the critical change was, as Milward rightly stresses, the conversion of the Mitterrand regime at Delors's prompting to orthodox liberal discipline—soon after the turn to the right that brought Kohl to office in Germany. This time, however, a third power played a role of some significance—Thatcher collaborating in the interest of deregulating financial markets, in which British banks and insurance companies saw prospects of large gains; while Cockfield in Brussels gave the project its administrative thrust.

The higher profile of the Commission in this episode was testimony of a certain change in the balance of institutional forces
within the Community, which the Act itself modified by the introduction (more properly reinstatement) of qualified majority voting inside the Council of Ministers. On the other hand, the French stamp on the proto-federal machinery in Brussels was never more pronounced than during the Delors presidency, while Paris and Bonn retained their traditional dominance within the web of inter-governmental relations. The result of thirty years of such integration is the strange institutional congeries of today's Union, composed of four disjointed parts.

Most visible to the public eye, the European Commission in Brussels acts as—so to speak—the ‘executive' of the Community. A body composed of functionaries designated by member-governments, it is headed by a president enjoying a salary considerably higher than that of the occupant of the White House, but commanding a bureaucracy smaller than that of many a municipality, and a budget of little more than 1 per cent of area GDP. These revenues, moreover, are collected not by the Commission, which has no direct powers of taxation itself, but by the member-governments. In a provision of which conservatives can still only dream in the US, the Treaty of Rome forbids the Commission to run any deficit. Its expenditures remain heavily concentrated on the Common Agricultural Policy, about which there is much cant both inside and outside Europe—US and Canadian farm support being not much lower than European, and Japanese much higher. A certain amount is also spent on ‘Structural Funds' to aid poor or rust-belt regions. The Commission administers this budget; issues regulatory directives; and—possessing the sole right of initiating European legislation—proposes new enactments. Its proceedings are confidential.

Secondly, there is the Council of Ministers—the utterly misleading name for what is in fact a parallel series of inter-governmental meetings between departmental ministers of each member-state, covering different policy areas (about thirty in all). The Council's decisions are tantamount to the legislative function of the Community: a hydra-headed entity in virtually constant session at Brussels, whose deliberations are secret, most of whose decisions are sewn up at a bureaucratic level below the assembled ministers themselves, and whose outcomes are binding on national parliaments. Capping this structure, since 1974, has been the so-called European Council composed of the heads of government of each member-state, which meets at least two times a year and sets broad policy for the Council of Ministers.

Thirdly, there is the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, composed of judges appointed by the member-states, who pronounce on the legality or otherwise of the directives of the Commission, and on conflict between Union and national law, and have over time come to treat the Treaty of Rome as if it were something like a European Constitution. Unlike the Supreme Court in the US, no votes are recorded in the European Court, and no dissent is ever set out in a judgement. The views of individual judges remain unfathomable.

Finally there is the European Parliament, formally the ‘popular element' in this institutional complex, as its only elective body. However, in defiance of the Treaty of Rome, it possesses no common electoral system: no permanent home—wandering like a vagabond between Strasbourg, Luxembourg and Brussels; no power of taxation; no control over the purse—being confined to simple yes/no votes on the Community budget as a whole; no say over executive appointments, other than a threat in extremis to reject the whole Commission; no right to initiate legislation, merely the ability to amend or veto it. In all these respects, it functions less like a legislative than a ceremonial apparatus of government, providing a symbolic facade not altogether unlike, say, the monarchy in Britain.

The institutional upshot of European integration is thus a customs union with a quasi-executive of supranational cast, without any machinery to enforce its decisions; a quasi-legislature of inter-governmental ministerial sessions, shielded from any national oversight, operating as a kind of upper chamber; a quasi-supreme court that acts as it were the guardian of a constitution which does not exist; and a pseudo-legislative lower chamber, in the form of a largely impotent parliament that is nevertheless the only elective body, theoretically accountable to the peoples of Europe. All of this superimposed on a set of nation-states, determining their own fiscal, social, military and foreign policies. Up to the end of the eighties the sum of these arrangements, born under the sign of the interim and the makeshift, had nevertheless acquired a respectable aura of inertia.

In the nineties, however, three momentous changes loom over the political landscape in which this complex is set. The disappearance of the Soviet bloc, the reunification of Germany and the Treaty of Maastricht have set processes in motion whose scale can only be compared to the end of the war. Together, they mean that the European Union is likely to be the theatre of an
extraordinary conjunction of divergent processes in the coming years: the passage to a European monetary union; the return of Germany to continental hegemony; and the competition among ex-Communist countries for entry. Can any predictions be made about the outcomes that might emerge from a metabolism of this magnitude?

At this historical crossroads it is worth thinking back to the work of Monnet and his circle. Historically, state-construction has proceeded along three main lines. One is a gradual, unplanned, organic growth of governmental authority and territory, such as occurred in—let us say—late mediaeval France or early modern Austria, whose architects had little or no idea of long-term objectives at all. A second path is the conscious imitation of preexisting models, of a kind that first really emerges in Europe in the eighteenth century, with the emulation of French Absolutism by its Prussian or Piedmontese counterparts. A third and historically still later path was deliberate revolutionary innovation—the creation of completely new state forms in a very compressed period of time, under the pressure either of popular upheavals like the American or Russian revolutions, or elite drives like the Meiji Restoration in Japan.

The process of statecraft set in train by the projectors—the term of Burkean alarm can be taken as homage—of a federal Europe departed from all these paths. It was without historical precedent. For its origins were very deliberately designed, but they were neither imitative of anything else, nor total in scope; while the goals at which it aimed were not proximate but very distant. This was an entirely novel combination: a style of political construction that was at once highly voluntarist, but pragmatically piecemeal—and yet vaultingly long-range. Relying on what he called a ‘dynamic disequilibrium', Monnet's strategy was an incremental totalization, en route to a hitherto unexampled objective—a democratic supranational federation. The implications of his undertaking did not escape him. He wrote: ‘We are starting a process of continuous reform which can shape tomorrow's world more lastingly than the principles of revolution so widespread outside the West'.
²³
It is one of the great merits of Duchêne's biography that it seeks so intelligently to take the measure of this innovation, which he calls—by contrast with conquest, adjustment or upheaval—‘that rarest of all phenomena in history, a studied
change of regime'.
²⁴
This is a striking formula. Yet there is in it at once a certain over-statement, and under-statement. The changes were more improvised than studied; but at stake was more than a regime.

Looking back, who can deny the genius of this conception of political advance—as if the ambitions of Napoleon could be married to the methods of Taaffe? On the other hand, it exacted a characteristic price. If all historical undertakings are subject to the fatality of unintended consequences, the more deliberate they are the more pronounced the gap may become. The ‘construction of Europe' set in train by Monnet and his circle was an enterprise of unrivalled scope and complexity, which yet nearly always relied on drab institutional steps and narrow social supports. Historically, it was bound to lead to what it did—that is, a persistent pattern of consequences that disconcerted and foiled the intentions of its architects.

The series of these bafflements has been continuous down to the present. In the fifties Monnet wanted Euratom and was landed with the Common Market; working for a supranational union, what he eventually got was an inter-governmental consortium dominated by the statesman most opposed to everything he stood for, De Gaulle. The General in turn thought his procedural fixture in the sixties would stymie the bureaucratic pretensions of the Commission—which in fact rebounded more strongly than ever out of them in the seventies. In the eighties, Mrs Thatcher believed the Single European Act would repeat and extend the deregulated internal market she championed in the UK—only to discover it leading towards the single currency she most detested. The hopes of Jacques Delors are still with us. Is it likely their fate will differ in the nineties?

On New Year's Day 1994, Europe—the metonym—changed names. The dozen nations of the Community took on the title of Union, though as in a Spanish wedding, the new appellation did not replace but encompassed the old. Was anything of substance altered? So far, very little. The member-states have risen to fifteen, with the entry of three former neutrals. Otherwise things are much as they were before. What is new, however, is that everyone
knows this is not going to last. For the first time since the war, Europe is living in anticipation of large but still imponderable changes to the part that has stood for the whole. Three dominate the horizon.

The first is, of course, the Treaty of Maastricht. We can set aside its various rhetorical provisions, for vague consultation of foreign policy and defence, or ineffectual protection of social rights, and even ignore its mild emendations of the institutional relations within the Community. The core of the Treaty is the commitment by the member-states, save England and Denmark, to introduce a single currency, under the authority of a single central bank, by 1999. This step means an irreversible move of the EU towards real federation. With it, national governments will lose the right either to issue money or to alter exchange rates, and will only be able to vary rates of interest and public borrowing within very narrow limits, on pain of heavy fines from the Commission if they break central bank directives. They may still tax at their discretion, but capital mobility in the single market can be expected to ensure increasingly common fiscal denominators. European monetary union spells the end of the most important attributes of national economic sovereignty.

Secondly, Germany is now reunited. The original Common Market was built on a balance between the two largest countries of the Six, France and Germany—the latter with greater economic weight and slightly larger population, the former with superior military and diplomatic weight. Later, Italy and Britain provided flanking states of roughly equivalent demographic and economic size. This balance started to break down in the eighties, when the EMS proved to be a zone pivoting on the deutschmark, the only currency never to be devalued within it. A decade later, Germany's position has been qualitatively transformed. With a population of over eighty million, it is now much the largest state in the Union, enjoying not only monetary but increasingly institutional and diplomatic ascendancy. For the first time in its history, the process of European integration is now potentially confronted with the emergence of a hegemonic power, with a widely asymmetrical capacity to affect all other member-states.