The New, New Europe
For much of the past year, Europe has been divided over America and its war in Iraq. Now it is divided against itself. The chief culprits: France and Germany.
msnbc.com
By Stryker McGuire
NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL
Dec. 8 issue — The worm has turned. France and Germany assailed the United States for riding roughshod over other countries in the war on Iraq. Now they stand accused of being the America of Europe—a two-headed superpower that has the rest of the European Union lunging at its throat. Their supposed crimes: flouting EU economic rules, scripting to their design a constitution that was meant to be a Magna Carta for all of Europe and generally hijacking the great European project.
THE ROW BURST into the open last week when France and Germany bullied their EU partners into accepting a temporary suspension of the EU’s stability-and-growth pact. Europe’s two largest economies have both violated its strictures, running too-high budget deficits. But the dispute has been building steadily since last year, when President Jacques Chirac joined forces with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to strike a deal on reforming the Common Agricultural Policy that favors French interests. Not a few European countries—including Britain, Poland, Spain and Italy—remain indignant over France and Germany’s holier-than-thou stand on Iraq, which to a surprising degree has carried over to the postwar period. Many also feel excluded from the writing of a European constitution that some states, especially smaller ones, fear will marginalize their interests in the New Europe. What Le Monde said last week of the stability pact debacle is true of the deeper debate as well: “The small countries have been given a field day to decry the arrogance of the big ones.”
The individual contretemps wouldn’t matter so much if this weren’t such an important testing time for Europe. Next year’s enlargement will take the EU from 15 to 25 members, with a population of 450 million and an economy slightly larger than America’s. The new Constitution, if all goes according to plan, will be approved at a Dec. 12-13 EU summit in Brussels and will apportion real power among those nations. At the same time, current and future EU member states have already begun to coalesce around different economic models: some around the more statist examples of Germany and France, with their generous welfare systems, others, like Britain and Poland, around the more market-oriented U.S. system.
All of these grand designs were the subject of a noisy Pan-European conversation when along came Iraq, cleaving Europe down the middle at a time when it already had plenty to fight over. More so than ever before, the United States piled on to the heap of things for Europeans to debate. So just when it most needs forward momentum, Europe seems rudderless. “I haven’t seen such a leaderless Europe in my lifetime,” says an ardent pro-European member of the British Parliament.
It’s not surprising that the rest of Europe should turn on France and Germany. Until fairly recently, they were seen favorably as the powerful machinery crucial to building the EU and advancing the interests of all of Europe. Their inherent differences—Germany’s industry, France’s agriculture; Germany’s Protestantism, France’s Roman Catholicism—enriched the European project. So did their distinct visions of Europe. Germany favored a stronger European Commission; France advocated a more intergovernmental approach. Germany pushed for enlargement; France remained wary. In working out their differences, these two powerful neighbors often did in fact speak for, and act on behalf of, a greater Europe.
That’s not the case anymore, according to an increasing number of critics. When Chirac cut the deal with Schröder on agricultural subsidies, he argued that the Franco-German alliance was “at the service” of Europe as a whole. Many Europeans scoffed. After last week’s breaching of the stability pact—”not a good day for Europe,” said Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar—France and Germany have even fewer believers. “The deals they’ve stitched together have been in the interest of France and Germany,” says Heather Grabbe of the Center for European Reform in London. “They’ve become self-interested.” In the process, says the former politician and journalist Massimo Gaggi, Europe has suffered. “The events of this week leave Brussels full of uncertainty. It is incomprehensible the amount of confusion that reigns in the European Union right now.”
Will the power of the Franco-German axis ebb? Only a year ago, the pair were at odds, largely for reasons of poor personal chemistry between Schröder and Chirac. Moreover, some European politicians expect their influence to wane as Europe expands and alliances begin to reknit in new configurations, often around specific issues—Iraq, say, or matters of trade and commerce. With an eye on enlargement, a political ally of Prime Minister Tony Blair says, for example, “France and Germany at the moment seem like a colossus, but there are a lot of other countries coming down the track.”
But that may be wishful thinking on the part of rivals. If anything, many Europeans believe, the changes in Europe will drive France and Germany closer together—precisely because their traditional nexus of power is threatened. Already, some French and Germans speak of form—ing a so-called hard core within the broader Europe, united on key issues and determined to have their way despite the anticipated opposition of more numerous but smaller nations. Ulrike Guerot at the German Council of Foreign Affairs in Berlin already sees signs of this shift: “Germany has sided with France in a way it never has before.”
Consider how French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin speaks of the French-German union as “the single historical bet we cannot lose.” Note, also, how Chirac stood in for Schröder at the mid-October EU summit in Brussels, however briefly and ceremoniously. Few Germans dream of actual union, but something short of that isn’t implausible, says John Palmer of the European Policy Center in Brussels. “The EU has brought France and Germany closer together over the last 20 years. I think they are serious about a progressive [Franco-German] integration. That won’t happen overnight, but it will happen. They are even talking about sharing a U.N. seat.”
The escalating war over an EU constitution shows just how flukey Europe has become these days. The evolving treaty is in large part a Franco-German project. French and German fingerprints have been all over the document since the inaugural meeting of the Constitutional Convention in February 2002: Convention Chairman Valery Giscard d’Estaing worked off a de facto Franco-German blueprint. This has drawn France and Germany, sometimes together, sometimes separately, into confrontations with other states. Spain and Poland, for instance, threw fits over proposed reforms of the EU decisionmaking structure, particularly the German-led “qualified majority voting” scheme that would give the biggest EU states weighted votes at the expense of other member states. Poland, which joins the EU next year and therefore has a say in these deliberations, hopes a “final consensus” can be reached on this issue, but a Foreign Ministry spokesman said, “We don’t find any satisfactory progress yet.” If anything, France and Germany’s defiance of the union’s budget rules will make Europe’s smaller nations even more reluctant to cede additional power to the big countries.
There are other fault lines. Poland and Italy, for instance, have sought to enshrine Christianity in the new constitution. With its sizable Muslim population, Britain, along with France, is struggling to keep out such language. Where some find in this signs of disarray, or even the future disintegration of Europe, others see a vast and badly needed readjustment to a Europe of the 21st century. The Constitutional Convention has been a mess by any standard, so much so that instead of signing off on the document as planned in mid-December, the EU members may kick the whole process into the new year. But it’s a good mess, according to Palmer. “This is the natural process of the final stages of a complicated issue,” he says. “Europe is moving forward.”
Denis MacShane, Britain’s minister for Europe, shares Palmer’s enthusiasm for creative chaos. In a recent speech he quoted Hegel. “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing straight was ever constructed,” he said, adding: “Can we not learn that Europe is not architecture but something living and changing all the time?” Yet MacShane recognized something else. He pointed out that the United States invests 2.3 percent of its GDP in universities; the comparable figure for Britain, France and Germany is 1.1 percent. He pointed out, too, that over the last 10 years, the EU managed an economic growth rate of 2.4 percent a year, compared with 3.3 percent in the United States. A Europe divided against itself—as it is now over the Franco-German alliance—is a Europe in the slow lane, falling further behind the United States. Time is not necessarily on Europe’s side, and it could prove the undoing of a Europe in protracted chaos. |
