The New Old World (96 page)

The outlines of a sub-imperial role to come are still emergent. But its ideologies and strategists are already in harness, and current priorities are clear. Military back-up for the United States in Afghanistan; economic sanctions and diplomatic menaces against Iran; privileged relations with Israel, and subsidies for a further Oslo; rapid deployment forces in the Horn, the Gulf and––if need be––the Balkans; more virtuous targets for reduction of carbon emissions, and regulation of financial flows, than America; comparable pressure for liberalization of services in the WTO. None of these elicits any discord, as the NATO alliance extends its ‘defensive' reach to the ends of the earth.

Potentially more divisive are the geo-politics of the EU's own eastern front, with the categorical exclusion of Russia, and the prospective inclusion of Turkey, in the new Europe. Culturally and historically, this may make little sense, but politically it is perfectly consonant with the functions of a regional system within an overarching American imperium. Union dependence on Russian supplies of energy, and the need to nurture the country's recently acquired capitalism, however unpalatable the forms it
may have taken, preclude more than guarded hostility to Moscow. But formally correct relations still allow for Russia to feature as a potential adversary against which Europe must fortify itself, a task anyway high on the list of concerns of its new member-states in the east. No conflict with the United States is likely here.

Turkey poses a more ticklish problem. Ever since the Clinton administration, its entry into the EU has been a top priority for Washington, as a means of anchoring a key American ally into the comity of Western nations, bolstering the military throw-weight of a loyal Europe––the Turkish army is near twice the size of that of any country now in the EU––and building a barrier against anti-imperialist dangers in the Arab world. Within the Union, the Commission in Brussels and establishment opinion in the media rallied with much further ado to Turkey's candidature, and soon every effort was being made to accelerate Ankara's passage into the EU. By 2003––the Bush administration in full cry, the Blair government in close support, Schröder and Chirac benevolent––success seemed virtually assured. But rapid closure came to grief on the rock of Cyprus, taken for granted too easily by the interested parties.

Since then, a gap has opened up between official professions and actual calculations, present and future intentions, in the capitals concerned. New Labour, of course, remains a steadfast messenger for Washington. But in France and Germany, Sarkozy and Merkel––unlike Chirac or Schröder––had to face voters for whom Turkish entry was no longer an invisible issue, and in proposing doses of neo-liberalism neither could be certain the electorate would take to, each preferred not to incur the risk of another potentially unpopular commitment. Of the two, Sarkozy went further than Merkel in appearing to set his face against Ankara. Once in office, each ruler has naturally tacked. Across Europe, elite opinion––in France and Germany no less than in other countries––remains as generally favourable to Turkish entry as popular opinion is doubtful or opposed. But in any case, the American will is not lightly crossed. In early 2009, the new US president made its priorities clear with a visit to Ankara soon after his inauguration, extolling the close ties of the two countries, and avoiding any inconvenient description of a remote past. Obama's campaign pledges swiftly buried, recognition of the Armenian genocide now has less congressional traction than under Bush.

On an issue as strategically critical as the inclusion of Turkey in the EU, Paris and Berlin, caught between masters and voters, can
thus only temporize. Sarkozy, loudly repeating his opposition to Turkish entry with one side of his mouth, has made sure with the other that constitutional requirements for a referendum on it in France have been blocked, and negotiations on Turkey's accession continue as if he had never made any principled objection to it. Merkel, with a large Turkish community to consider, some of it entitled to vote, has been happy to take cover in a less exposed position behind him. These are tactics of circumstance, unlikely to affect the ultimate outcome, if only because neither ruler has an indefinite political life in front of them––Sarkozy will be gone within at most eight, and not inconceivably three years, while Merkel's hope of presiding over an unhampered Black–Yellow regime will be lucky to hold good for more than four. In the eyes of Brussels, and
a fortiori
of Washington, Turkey remains the ‘glittering prize' of European expansion to come, and will not be casually relinquished. Around it, the discourse of diversity has for a good while been working overtime. What fairer trophy of multi-cultural tolerance could there be than the entry of this moderate Muslim land into the European Community? What newcomer could be better equipped, historically and actually, to share the responsibilities of a subaltern empire?

Between Russia and Turkey there remains, it is true, awkward from every respectable standpoint within the Community, the sprawling no man's land of the Ukraine. Hardly a model of constitutional stability, yet manifestly more democratic, by any standard, than Turkey; higher literacy and per capita income; less torture, no counter-insurgency, no ethnic cleansing, no genocide. Why should it be refused entry when its poorer and more repressive neighbour is ushered in? The answer is clear, but not easy to explain publicly, let alone square with the lofty professions of the Commission. The Ukrainian military is a shadow of the Turkish army; the stock market in Kiev is not a patch on that of Istanbul; the universe of Orthodoxy requires no coreligionary sepoys to check it. Last but not least, the regional hegemon is not America, in favour of a traditional client-state, but Russia, opposed to the alienation of a limb of its past. Empires can choose their terrain at will, when they are fully such. When they are no more than semi-sovereign, there are times when they must defer. So Brussels embraces Ankara and shrinks from Kiev. But Ukrainian pressure to enter the EU, which unites all parties in the country, will not go away. Somewhere in the future, a gap opening up in the eastern salient of the Union, a political Ardennes, may be in store for it.

Whether any of this will impinge on the internal politics of the Union, or unfold largely insulated from it, remains to be seen. Current European visions of a deputy empire are a replica writ large of what Britain has always represented: a special relationship with the United States, in which the junior partner plays an honourable role as help-meet and counsel, taking the initiative in its own sphere, and following its senior in theatres beyond it. In any such arrangement, the EU will certainly command more power, if without coming close to parity, than the UK ever did. In Britain, there was never any popular enthusiasm for the relationship, a matter settled between elites, but nor was there any significant dissent from it. Would a magnification of the same to a European scale be met with comparable passivity or indifference? Or, for all the current consensus among the interested capitals, might such ambitions, still in many ways embryonic, founder in advance on the centrifugal resistance of smaller member-states, unwilling to be brigaded for imperial ends by any renovated Directorate?

Neither the internal nor external direction of the Community is yet quite settled. Without clarity of means or ends, the Union seems to many adrift. Yet its apparent lack of any further coherent finality, deplored on all sides, might on one kind of reckoning be counted a saving grace, permitting the unintended consequences that have tracked integration from the start to yield further, possibly better, surprises. In principle, dynamic disequilibrium allows for that. In due course, a prolonged economic recession might reignite the engines of political conflict and ideological division that gave the continent its impetus in the past. So far, in today's Europe, there is little sign of either. But it remains unlikely that time and contradiction have come to a halt.

1
. In an opinion written by the same judge, Udo Di Fabio, who in 2005 gratified the political establishment by tearing up the country's ban on governments fixing the time of elections at their own convenience. Of immigrant descent, Di Fabio is the Clarence Thomas of the Federal Republic, nominated to the court by the CDU, and author of the neo-conservative tract
Die Kultur der Freiheit
, lauding vigorous market competition, attacking excessive welfare dependency, and calling for a return to the values of family, religion and nation—what, updating a prewar formula, might be called
Kinder
,
Firma
,
Kirche
, with a topping of
Volk
. The Germans had been tempted away from these and other expressions of their better nature by Hitler, who was no true German, lacking ‘any drop of the decency of the Prussian servant of the state, the attachment to home and zest for life of Bavarian Catholicism, any inclination to diligence and hard work, any sense of German ways of living, of bourgeois habits and Christian traditions'. After recovering these values in the ‘Golden Age' of the 1950s, Germans were now in danger of letting them crumble to a myopic hedonism, deleterious residue of the sixties:
Die Kultur der Freiheit
, Munich 2005, pp. 207, 212, 217ff––a work itself national enough in genre, what might ungenerously be called philosophical airport literature.

2
. Alan Milward, ‘Envoi', to the second edition of
The European Rescue of the Nation-State
, London 2000, pp. 425–36.

3
. ‘Envoi', p. 428.

4
. ‘Envoi', pp. 435–6.

5
. Renaud Dehousse,
La fin de l'Europe
, Paris 2005, p. 71.

6
. Jürgen Habermas,
Ach, Europa. Kleine politische Schriften XI
, Frankfurt 2008, p. 105.

7
.
Ach, Europa
, p. 85.

8
.
Ach, Europa
, pp. 121–2.

9
.
Ach, Europa
, p. 110. The relative weight of internal and external motives in Habermas's ‘Plaidoyer für eine Politik der absgestuften Integration' can be judged from the space accorded each: about twice as much for the latter as the former.

10
. Stefano Bartolini,
Restructuring Europe. Centre formation, system building and political structuring between the nation-state and the European Union
, Oxford 2005, pp. 157–8.

11
.
Restructuring Europe
, pp. 284, 233, 198.

12
.
Restructuring Europe
, p. 331. Even on the most significant votes taken by the Parliament, under the procedure of co-decision, a third of MEPs never show up.

13
.
Restructuring Europe
, pp. 410–12.

14
. For Pomian's programmatic statement as director of the Museum, see ‘Pour une musée de l'Europe. Visite commentée d'une exposition en projet',
Le Débat
, No. 129, March–April 2004, pp. 89–100.

15
. Krzysztof Pomian,
L'Europe et ses nations
, Paris 1990, pp. 53–61, 91–117, 219–33; Elie Barnavi and Krzysztof Pomian,
La révolution européenne 1945–2007
, Paris 2008, pp. 261–9.

16
. Andrea Boltho and Barry Eichengreen, ‘The Economic Impact of European Integration', Discussion Paper No. 6820, Centre for Economic Policy Research, May 2008, p. 44. Based on a series of careful counterfactual controls, they conclude that the Common Market may have increased GDP by 3–4 per cent from the late fifties to the mid-seventies; that the impact of the EMS was negligible; that the Single European Act may have added around another 1 per cent; and that it is unlikely that Monetary Union has had ‘more than a very small effect on the area's growth rate or even level of output': pp. 27, 29, 34, 38. These are findings of authors who, as they point out, have always been, and remain, favourable to integration.

17
. See Peter Baldwin's systematic exposition,
The Narcissism of Minor Differences
, New York 2009, passim.

18
. Populations: EU—470 million; US––330 million. Economies: EU––GDP $18 trillion; US––$14 trillion. See IMF,
World Economic Outlook Database
, April 2009.

19
. Zaki Laïdi,
Norms over Force: The Enigma of European Power
, New York 2008, pp. 5, 8, 42–50, 120, 33, 129. The English edition is an expanded version of the French original,
La Norme sans la force. L'énigme de la puissance européenne
, Paris 2005.

20
. Edgar Morin,
Penser l'Europe
, Paris 1987, pp. 27–28.

21
.
Penser l'Europe
, pp. 149, 191, 212, 199, 207, 216–17.

22
.
Penser l'Europe
, p. 212; Leopold von Ranke,
Die grossen Mächte
(1833) Leipzig 1916 (ed. Meinecke), p. 58.

23
. There is a subtle, yet significant, distinction between the connotations of ‘variety' and ‘diversity'. Typically, the latter attaches to what is different but co-present, whereas the former more often implies alterations of experience over time, as in the lively imagery of folk wisdom. It was these that Fourier theorized in the figure of the Butterfly, in his taxonomy of the passions:
Oeuvres
, Vol. II, Paris 1845, pp. 145–6.

24
. Not that its arrival was simply continuous with previous constructions of the ‘melting-pot', or failed to serve new functions. The most devastating attack on the new discourse as a cover for inequality has come from the United States, in Walter Benn Michaels's blistering critique
The Trouble with Diversity
, New York 2006. No counterpart exists in Canada, where Multiculturalism Day is now officially celebrated alongside Mother's Day, Father's Day and other such solemnities.

25
. Christopher Caldwell,
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe
, pp. 3–4, 9–10, 29–30, 127–31, 19.