EU future uncertain at 50


Sunday, March 18, 2007

BY FRANCIS X. ROCCA

My family and I recently traveled 1,500 miles for a brief vacation in a foreign country. But except for the difference in language, it was practically as easy as staying home.

Flying to Spain from our home in Italy, we did not need to show our passports, submit to a customs check or change money. My Italian cell phone continued to work with the same number, without my having to touch a single button. And my round trip plane ticket cost only $150, which in the current golden age of low-cost European airlines, is actually a high price.


When the leaders of six western European nations met in Rome, 50 years ago next Sunday, to establish the forerunner of today's 27-nation European Union, it's safe to assume that facilitating leisure travel was not one of their top goals. Yet for many Europeans today, that's the chief way they experience the huge changes set in motion a half century ago.

Unfortunately, at a time of economic uncertainty and rapid social change, benefits like cheap flights might not be enough to convince the next generation of Europeans to build upon, rather than undo, their predecessors' historic achievement.

In promising to abolish obstacles the "free movement of goods, persons, services and capital" among their countries, the founders of the European Economic Community (as it was then called) sought to boost their national economies, still recovering from the ravages of a world war that had ended only a dozen years earlier. Even more important, these former enemies intended to forge links that would make any repetition of that conflict unthinkable.

The United States strongly backed this effort, in order promote stability among the participating nations (France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg) and to foster solidarity in resistance to the Soviet Union. Washington viewed European integration as an economic and political complement to NATO.

Half a century later, on these counts and more, the EU has proved an undoubted --though still incomplete -- success.

The EU's senior member states today enjoy some of the highest per capita incomes in the world. A single European market, now as large as the U.S. market, has created millions of jobs and made life more affordable for European consumers.

Thirteen of the 27 EU members now share one currency, the euro, and maintain open borders with each other. Within a few years, most of the remaining members also are expected to adopt the euro and open their borders.

From the eastern Mediterranean to the Arctic Circle, and from the British Isles to the borders of Russia, 490 million people now live under a common body of EU law. Europe has not been this unified for 1,800 years, since the height of the Roman empire.

Even more remarkably, while Rome was built through military conquest, this new European empire has been formed through the voluntary actions of democratically elected governments.

The former right-wing dictatorships of Greece, Portugal and Spain accelerated their transformations into modern democratic states in order to qualify for membership; and since the fall of the Berlin wall, 10 post-communist states in central and eastern Europe have done likewise.



Recently Turkey drastically revised its laws and policies on such sensitive issues as free speech, the death penalty, the treatment of ethnic minorities and the role of the military in politics even before the EU had agreed to discuss the possibility of membership.

The EU is an unsurpassed example of what the Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye calls "soft power." With such a track record, you might think that Europeans today would have plenty to celebrate.

Yet the commemorations next week in Berlin (current seat of the rotating EU presidency) are bound to exude an air of disappointment. On that occasion, European leaders are supposed to sign yet another of their countless declarations of values and principles. But only two years ago, the EU seemed on track to ratify a Constitutional Treaty that would have given the organization its own president, foreign minister, diplomatic service and expanded powers in many areas including law enforcement.

These grand plans came to naught in the spring of 2005, when the citizens of two founding EU member states, France and the Netherlands, both traditionally bastions of pro-integration sentiment, voted against ratification of the constitution. Economic anxieties played a big part in the constitution's failure. The EU has forced the dismantling of national monopolies and protectionist trade policies whose appeal has grown with the slow-down in Europe's economic growth. Particularly in France, left-wing opponents of the treaty managed to cast it as an instrument of "savage capitalism."

Worries about unrestricted immigration from the poorer post-Communist member states, but especially from candidate state Turkey, continue to trouble many western Europeans.

At the same time, European leaders have found themselves unable to make a convincing case for the EU.

One problem is that Europeans now take the EU's greatest successes for granted. The Cold War lies further in the past than World War II did in 1957. No one worries any longer about German militarism. Russia's Vladimir Putin has shown his potential for aggression, but most EU citizens seemed more worried about fending off Russia's former vassal nations, such as Ukraine, which would like to join but are still too poor to do so, than they are about forming a common front to deal with Moscow.

Attempts to promote the constitution by invoking the specters of genocide and nuclear war only provoked cynical laugher.

Until now, the EU has been built by diplomats and bureaucrats working mostly below the political radar, through agreements that few voters cared about or even understood. But if European leaders want the EU to last another half century, they will have to convince their citizens' that it is worth their while. That could prove the biggest challenge of all.



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