The summit of Europe's ambitions?
The EU's leaders are letting us all down with their nationalism and lack of vision, says Will Hutton
Special report: European integration
Sunday June 17, 2001 The Observer
This was the summit that, even more than Nice, Europe's leaders will want to forget - and which exposed the EU's growing frailties. It wasn't just anti-globalisation protesters on the rampage. It was the way Europe's leaders seemed condemned to carry on with enlargement and clumsy top-down decision making whatever the misgivings of the people that seemed to give proof to the protesters' case. This is a process that is losing legitimacy by the month. The stakes could not be higher. Europe's leaders are engaged in an extraordinarily hazardous project. They are trying simultaneously to unite their currencies in the euro while opening EU membership to up to 11 countries in Eastern Europe - all of whom want to enjoy the same privileges as the existing membership in their quest to become full-fledged democracies. If the task proves beyond the current EU, it could bust wide open. It must succeed.
Yet Italy's Berlusconi is openly sceptical about the costs of enlargement; the Irish voted against it in their referendum for the same reason. The Irish Prime Minister, Bertie Ahern, admitted at the summit that the sense of disconnection between Europe's peoples and the European project is growing and needs to be closed. But how?
When the people are consulted - as in Denmark over the euro or in Switzerland over membership - they refuse more integration; even the vote for Maastricht in France was won by a whisker. And outside the summit the anti-capitalist protesters were making mayhem, explicitly ranking the EU as part of the same elitist, capitalist globalisation project as the World Trade Organisation, the IMF and the World Bank.
This is eminently unfair, but without strong leadership at EU and national level vigorously making the European case as an argument for Europe, mud is sticking. Any globalisation protester who believes the financial markets, the US government and Western multinationals would be less powerful and more accountable if the EU were to break up should be taken to the funny farm. The EU, properly conceived, is a democratic club of like-minded states who share values about citizenship, equality and the importance of a vital public realm and which is constructing political and economic architecture to protect those values, rather than hurt them. If the protesters could think, they would start to make their protest more forensic - and not include the EU.
But Europe's leaders don't help them think because they say nothing visionary nor break out of their national laager. Gerhard Schröder wants to build Europe around tried and tested German federal principles; Lionel Jospin wants to build Europe as an extension of la France; Tony Blair envisages Europe growing rather like the British Commonwealth. They are small men when Europe needs big men. Instead of building Europe, the project is in danger of collapsing into a twenty-first century version of the Congress of Vienna - a system of nation-state power-broking informed by no common vision.
The financial markets see through the political vacuum in their stubborn refusal to support the euro. Unlike the dollar, the euro is backed by no tried and tested system of economic policymaking nor a Central Bank anchored in a political community. Its decision-making is opaque.
Yet if the euro were to collapse, Europe would return to the anarchy of floating exchange rates. Its single market would buckle. The chance of its companies taking on US rivals would be diminished. Unemployment would rise. The political choice for Europe would be between becoming satellites of the US or Germany. The dream would be dead, and the protesters would have real reason for concern. The US would have no check or balance; we would all be playthings in Uncle Sam's backyard. Forget political sovereignty.
As Berlusconi plans to seal Genoa airport for the next G8 summit and Europe's leaders retreat to holding their council meetings in Fortress Brussels, the quest for intellectual and political leadership could not be more pressing. The case for Europe as Europe needs to be made loudly and clearly; it is useless for national leaders to keep talking the language of national rather than European interests. Europe needs an explicit democratic constitution. It needs its institutions to be overtly accountable. It must take on its vested interests. It needs common economic governance. That together will lay the foundation for a stronger euro, the platform for enlargement and a means to reconnect a disaffected public. The open question is whether any of that is likely - and what will happen in its absence.