So it was in Helsinki last week. Some matters were handled just about adequately–like agreeing to the latest list of candidate members of the Union, which at last includes Turkey. Some were put off–like the proposal to implement a Union-wide withholding tax on investment income. And there were, as usual, earthshaking declarations that signify not much: this time on the naughtiness of Russia’s war in Chechnya and the virtues of a European defense force. Then it was off from the frozen north to wherever the participants intend to spend Europe’s long–really long–Christmas and New Year’s break. For a month or so, thank God, we won’t have to worry about them all.
Still, it’s worth noting something quite important: the EU has had a really bad year. We’re not talking about the euro here, though its value against the dollar will likely end 1999 more than 10 percent below its level last January. The euro’s relative weakness against other major currencies can be explained by the strength of the American economy and a policy-induced appreciation of the yen. Euroland is a relatively closed economy, so there is little danger that a depreciation of the currency will translate into higher inflation. There are far more important things to worry about; principally, a continuing weakness of political leadership in Europe and a pervasive sense that the whole European project has run out of steam.
The year started with the “discovery” of what many had known very well for years; that the Brussels commission was a place of tawdry, petty corruption, in which jobs were handed out to political friends, accountability was unknown and entrenched bureaucracies vigorously defended their privileges. Those revelations led to the resignation of the commission led by Jacques Santer; its successor, under new President Romano Prodi, says it is determined to clean house. Perhaps it will; but the necessary reforms will take years to put in place. In the spring the Kosovo war revealed just how unprepared were Europe’s armed forces, which had to rely on American pilots, American precision-guided weapons and American command-and-control systems to shift the Yugoslav Army out of the province.
At the end of the year, Britain blocked progress toward a unified tax regime, and France, in defiance of European law, refused to admit British beef to its markets. The German political establishment, meanwhile, seems happy to signal that though its own companies should be entitled to buy firms overseas, the converse upsets the laws of nature–at least if predators can be damned with that useful pejorative, “Anglo-Saxon.” At the end of a bad week it is hard to disagree with the judgment of Simon Jenkins, in The Times of London: “When push comes to shove, European collective action is revealed once again as a vehicle for national self-interest.”
To those who have hoped for more from the EU, this is pretty depressing stuff. Nobody with an ounce of sense ever believed all the high-flown rhetoric that the Union’s officials say about their miserable institutions. Still, if you think–as I do–that the rest of the world cannot and should not rely on the United States to solve all its economic and political problems, a strong, self-confident Western Europe is essential.
True, outside its governments, Europe is humming. Many of its high-technology firms will turn out to be significant competitors to those in America. (When, next year, the genome starts to displace the Internet as the most common topic of gee-whiz conversation, watch where most advances in genetic engineering occur.) European cities function remarkably well, with the most sophisticated public services in the world. Measure life by art galleries, concert halls, great places to eat and have fun, and it’s hard to see what’s wrong with the Old Continent.
Politics, however, is another story. Ten years after the fall of the Berlin wall, not one of the old communist states has so far been welcomed to the top table. A Europe whole and free exists only as a matter of rhetoric. Yes, the EU makes all the right noises about the need to beef up its military establishment and so avoid the humiliation of another Kosovo. But few politicians in Europe seem willing to spell out the consequences of this ambition–which is sharply increased defense spending.
Conceivably, 1999 will be seen as the year when 40-year-old European habits of mind started to seem tired and irrelevant. Since the Treaty of Rome, West European nations have been prepared to cede an ever-growing list of responsibilities to supranational bodies. That system worked tolerably well when the EU was limited to a few nations that fell on the right side of the Iron Curtain. But there are many matters, from security to agriculture, on which a Union stretching from Galway Bay to Anatolia will be unable to find common ground. The EU of the next century is almost certain to be a much less cohesive organization than hitherto; it will not dominate the European institutional structure as once it did. And so those who want “Europe” to step up and play a greater role in international affairs will have to look for new mechanisms by which it does so.
It would be nice to report that all this was the stuff of impassioned debate in the think tanks of Europe and Washington. Alas; it is not. The big lesson of the EU’s bad year: it should be.
