Postwar

Public opinion echoed these sentiments: in a poll taken four months before the new members were due to join the Union 70 percent of French voters declared the EU ‘unprepared’ for their arrival, while 55 percent opposed their inclusion altogether (compared to 35 percent of EU voters as a whole).[370]

But antipathy towards the EU also played a part in Eastern Europe. In the Czech Republic, the Civic Democratic Party—aligned with Vaclav Klaus and loudly skeptical of the EU and its ‘over-mighty’ powers—was the clear victor in 2004, winning 38 percent of the country’s European Parliamentary seats. In neighbouring Poland Euroskeptic parties of the far Right actually did better than the ruling center-left coalition—not surprisingly, perhaps, considering that in a Eurobarometer poll taken a few months previously only just over half the Polish electorate thought that the European Union was a ‘good thing’.

And yet, taken all in all, the EU is a good thing. The economic benefits of the single market have been real, as even the most ardent British Euroskeptics had come to concede, particularly with the passing of the passion for ‘harmonizing’ that marked the Commission Presidency of Jacques Delors. The newfound freedom to travel, work and study anywhere in the Union was a boon to young people especially. And there was something else. In relative terms, the so-called ‘social’ element in the EU budget was tiny—less than 1 percent of the European-area GNP. But from the late Eighties, the budgets of the European Community and the Union nevertheless had a distinctly redistributive quality, transferring resources from wealthy regions to poorer ones and contributing to a steady reduction in the aggregate gap between rich and poor: substituting, in effect, for the nationally based Social-Democratic programmes of an earlier generation. [371]

In recent years the citizens of Europe had even acquired their own court. The European Court of Justice (ECJ), set up in 1952 under the same Treaty of Paris that established the European Coal and Steel Community, had started out with the limited task of ensuring that EC legislation (‘Community law’) was interpreted and applied in the same way in each member-state. But by the end of the century its judges—originally one from each member-state—were authorized to settle legal disputes between member-states and EU institutions, as well as to hear cases brought against lower court decisions or even against national governments. The ECJ had, in effect, assumed many of the powers and attributes of a pan-European Court of Appeals. [372]

As the example of the Court suggests, the rather indirect and often unintentional manner in which the Union’s institutions emerged had its advantages. Very few lawyers or legislators in even the most pro-European states of the European ‘core’ would have been willing to relinquish local legal supremacy had they been asked to do so at the outset. Similarly, if a clearly articulated ‘European project’, describing the goals and institutions of the Union as they later evolved, had ever been put to the separate voters of the states of western Europe it would surely have been rejected.

The advantage of the European idea in the decades following World War Two had thus lain precisely in its imprecision. Like ‘growth’ or ‘peace’—with both of which it was closely associated in the minds of its proponents —‘Europe’ was too benign to attract effective opposition.[373] Back in the early Seventies, when the French President Georges Pompidou first took to speaking airily of a ‘European Union’, Foreign Minister Michel Jobert once asked his colleague Edouard Balladur (the future French Premier) what exactly it meant: ‘Nothing’ replied Balladur. ‘But then that is the beauty of it.’ Pompidou himself dismissed it as ‘a vague formula… in order to avoid paralyzing doctrinal disputes’.[374]

Of course it is this formulaic vagueness, combined with the all-too-precise detail of EU legislative directives, which has given rise to the democratic deficit: it is hard for Europeans to care about a Union whose identity was for so long unclear, but which at the same time appears to impinge upon every aspect of their existence. And yet, for all its faults as a system of indirect government, the Union has certain interesting and original attributes. Decisions and laws may be passed at a trans-governmental level, but they are implemented by and through national authorities. Everything has to be undertaken by agreement, since there are no instruments of coercion: no EU tax collectors, no EU policemen. The European Union thus represents an unusual compromise: international governance undertaken by national governments.

Finally, while the European Union has neither means nor mechanisms to prevent its member-states coming to blows, its very existence renders the idea somehow absurd. The lesson that war was too high a price to pay for political or territorial advantage had already been brought home to the victors after World War One, though it took a second war to convey the same lesson to the losing side. But just because a third intra-European war would have been catastrophic and perhaps terminal does not mean it could not have happened, at least in the early postwar years.

By the end of the century, however, the elites and institutions of the European Union were so intertwined and interdependent that armed conflict, while never impossible, had become somehow inconceivable. That is why ‘Europe’ was such an object of desire to aspirant members like Latvia or Poland, an escape route out of their past and an insurance policy for the future. But it is also, ironically, why the EU’s own leaders proved so fatuously helpless when confronted with the reality of war in the Balkans.

Its humiliation over Yugoslavia[375] is a reminder that the European Union cannot escape the defects of its virtues. By not being a state the Union has been able to bind some 450 million people into a single, loosely articulated community with remarkably little dissent. But because it is not a state—because its citizens’ primary loyalties remain to the country in which they find themselves, whose laws they obey, whose language they speak and whose taxes they pay—the EU has no mechanism for determining or enforcing its own security interests.

This does not mean that ‘Europe’ has no common foreign policy. On the contrary, the European Community and its successor the EU have for many decades been extremely effective in advancing and defending their interests in international forums and against foreign competitors. But those interests have from the outset been defined in overwhelmingly economic—or more precisely, protectionist—terms. European economics ministers and trade commissioners have engaged in open combat with Washington over tax breaks for American exporters or import restrictions on European products.

More controversially, the EU has also fought very effectively to maintain high external tariffs in defense of Europe’s subsidized farmers—restraining open trade in commodities like sugar, for example, to the detriment of farmers in Africa or Central America.[376] But whereas the separate member states of the EU—even the most powerful ones—have been pleased to pass on to Brussels responsibility for presenting their economic case in the World Trade Organization and elsewhere, they have reserved for themselves the vital attribute of any modern state. The European Union has no army.

In part this is an accident of history. In the early 1950s there were many who thought that in future the Western Europeans could and should organize their military affairs collectively—at an August 1950 meeting of the Council of Europe’s Consultative Assembly, Paul Reynaud of France even argued the case for a European Minister of War. But the defeat of the proposal for a European Defense Force (see Chapter 8), and the incorporation of West Germany into NATO, put an end to such ideas for a generation; instead Western Europe snuggled comfortably under the American nuclear umbrella.

Following the end of the Korean War and the retreat from empire, every Western European country cut its defense budget. With the fall of Communism, spending on the military reached new lows. In the late Eighties the average share of defense spending in NATO members’ budgets had already declined to 3.4 percent of GNP; by 2003 Denmark was spending just 1.6 percent of GNP on defense; Italy 1.5 percent; Spain a mere 1.4 percent. Only the French and British spent substantially more, though in neither case did spending now exceed 5 percent— negligible by historical standards.

Moreover, none of the armed forces of Europe was under ‘European’ control or likely to be in the foreseeable future, despite plans announced in 2000 for a European ‘Rapid Reaction Force’. Although there had for some years been a European Commissioner for External Relations, since the Treaty of Amsterdam his functions were duplicated (and his authority thereby diminished) by a High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, answerable only to the EU Council of Ministers. And neither the Commissioner nor the High Representative had any authority to initiate his own policy, despatch armed forces or speak for the foreign policies or ministers of the member-states unless previously instructed. Henry Kissinger’s sardonic question of an earlier