From Stratfor's free e-mail Geopolitical Intelligence Report:
The idea of a united Europe is not a moral project -- it is a mutually beneficial contract that has no moral hold once those benefits are no longer safeguarded.
This gives the idea of Europe a fundamental fragility. A political system that has no basis on which to justify hardship cannot endure hardship, and hardship is the one certainty that comes to all regimes. In this immediate case, Europe -- or at least France, Germany and Italy, the center of gravity of Europe -- is in serious economic trouble. Growth has slowed to only 1.5 percent per year while unemployment has climbed into the double digits. For these three countries, the EU model is simply not delivering on prosperity.
(snip) Europe either must undergo a massive reinvention or sink into the abyss. In either case, a generation of European workers will pay the price. Like all humans, they will blame someone, and the most logical target -- whether valid or not -- is the immigrant population, whose presence they see as the catalyst for the problem.
There is a deeper level to this. France is France. France was very happy to go to Algeria and declare it "France." Its people have been much less happy to have Algerians come to France and declare it "Algeria." Whatever the irony of it, France is changing demographically, with the inevitable result that many French -- particularly those outside the corporate elite -- don't want their country to change. Even more to the point, some feel that they are losing control of their country to immigrants, and that they no longer have the sovereign right to determine the kind of society they will have.
The EU constitution institutionalizes that powerlessness. The doctrines embedded in the EU recognize the right of immigration from one country to another: Once you have citizenship somewhere, you have the right to go anywhere within the union. This might make sense from an economist's view of labor markets, but it means that France no longer controls its fate. When Turkey enters the EU, the perception is, an avalanche of Muslim immigrants will sweep France, and the European government's bureaucrats will celebrate the shift instead of stopping it. The guarantees of security are being kept in preventing nation-states from fighting, but not -- it is perceived -- in protecting the traditional way of life in France and other countries.
The issue only partly concerns migration. The deeper issue is sovereignty. The government of France is asking its people essentially to transfer major elements of sovereignty to a state that France cannot control. The French do not see a common identity with the rest of Europe, and the rest of Europe does not see a common identity with France. The EU is rooted in an alliance of convenience that is rapidly becoming inconvenient. (emphasis added)
I'm not a big fan of the EU. I liked the idea of a Common (Free) Market, but it has since then grown into a bloated, metastatizing socialist uber-state. I suppose this highlights, more than anything else, the difference between American (Anglo?) and Continental governance. Here, we find a huge outcry when the goverment tries to implement much-needed national ID cards. There, a fifty year experiment of ever-increasing economic mutual interdependence, legal reform and reconciliation, and surrender of national sovriegnty was foisted upon the citizenry by unaccountable political elites without anything so much as a "by-your-leave", resulting in economic stagnation and a 300 page (!) constitution that nobody wants. It's a situation that I would not like to find myself in. It also illustrates why accountability is one of the more important virtues for good, democratic governence.
The e-mail is posted in its entirety after the jump.
THE GEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT
The European Crisis
May 24, 2005 19:38 GMTFrance will vote on the new draft European constitution May 29. All 25 EU members must ratify the constitution if it is to take effect. The odds of that happening are pretty slim under any circumstances. However, at the moment it appears that the referendum in France might fail. Whether it actually does is less significant than the fact that France is the engine behind European unification -- and if ratification of the constitution in France is in doubt, it is difficult to imagine how it could possibly pass in many other European countries.
In other words, if unification is a question mark in France, then an EU constitution is not going to pass in its current form, if at all.
This is a dramatic shift in Europe. During the 1990s, the emergence of a transnational European state appeared to be a foregone conclusion. The introduction of the euro seemed to make this inevitable. The new currency made it possible to place control of Europe's money supply in the hands of a transnational central bank. It made little sense to have a European currency without a European state -- it was like wearing a tie without a shirt. Therefore, since at least part of Europe accept the euro with relative ease, it appeared to follow that the framing document -- a constitution -- would readily follow.
But there is a huge difference in the ways political systems function in relatively prosperous times and in more austere times. Things that are acceptable when the economy is healthy become less tolerable -- or intolerable -- when the economy is weak. This does not mean that the primary issue is economic. The chief obstacle to an EU constitution in France and elsewhere is political and social -- it is the unwillingness to abandon sovereignty. This sensibility is always there, but it is activated when the political ambitions of the new regime interact with hard times. This is doubly the case when people believe that their own problems and votes might have no bearing on the actions or policies of the new political system.
This dilemma is symbolized by the nature of the new constitution -- it is 300 pages long. A constitution must define the regime. It must define institutions and the limits on those institutions. It must define individual rights and, in a federal system, the rights of nonfederal governments. Above all, it must be terse. The more complex it is, the less the ordinary citizen can trust it.
A 300-page constitution, by dint of its very size, sums up the first problem facing Europe: The EU is governed by a bureaucracy whose ways cannot be understood by ordinary citizens, and which does not intend itself to be understood. It is therefore not trusted. A second problem is that the constitution is made up of a series of staggeringly complex compromises that defy clear understanding. If American constitutional law is complex, European constitutional law, as written, is beyond comprehension, let alone debate.
The voters simply don't know what they are voting for. Even if they did favor the principle of European unification, no one really knows, under this constitution, precisely what they would be committing to. This is not a solvable problem. The complexity is inevitable. It derives from an understanding of Europe that relies on specialists rather than citizen-politicians, and an uneasiness among nations that has resulted in a compromise of bewildering complexity. The Europeans either have an incomprehensible constitution, or they have no chance of agreeing on one at all.
Beneath the complexity of the task lies politics.
There were two reasons for creating the EU. The first was to build institutions that would prevent a fourth war between France and Germany. The catastrophic record of European statesmanship created the impulse to tie the hands of European politicians by creating overarching institutions. In other words, transnationalism was designed to overcome Europe's ruinous nationalism.
Second, the European Union, and the European Community before it, were designed to facilitate European prosperity. It was reasonably assumed that a Europe without protectionist barriers would do better than a Europe fragmented into multiple, exclusionary markets. On this level, the EU had a purely utilitarian goal: It was designed for economic ends, and the only justification for its existence was how readily it achieved those ends and how universally it could distribute those benefits across national lines. The European Union was designed to allow Europe to be competitive in the global marketplace.
Preventing war and generating prosperity are not trivial goals, but they lack the moral drive possessed by the great revolutionary regimes -- France, the United States, the Soviet Union. What binds the EU together is a dream of peace and prosperity. One might argue that this is a more reasonable goal than "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite." But it is also judged by a different standard: It is possible to sacrifice all to "Workers of the World Unite" or "We hold these truths to be self-evident ." But a regime founded on the principles of safety and prosperity cannot demand sacrifice that threatens either. The idea of a united Europe is not a moral project -- it is a mutually beneficial contract that has no moral hold once those benefits are no longer safeguarded.
This gives the idea of Europe a fundamental fragility. A political system that has no basis on which to justify hardship cannot endure hardship, and hardship is the one certainty that comes to all regimes. In this immediate case, Europe -- or at least France, Germany and Italy, the center of gravity of Europe -- is in serious economic trouble. Growth has slowed to only 1.5 percent per year while unemployment has climbed into the double digits. For these three countries, the EU model is simply not delivering on prosperity.
The existence of a European Central Bank has complicated the situation rather than simplified it. All the countries that have adopted the euro as their currency now are subject to the monetary policies of the European Central Bank. Europe is an extraordinarily diverse place, becoming more diverse every time a new country enters the union or an old one accepts the euro. The ECB has followed policies designed to support the three major members of the euro bloc -- but not all of the euro bloc states are in the same economic position. The problem is that a single policy must hurt some and help others. Since the promise of prosperity is the foundation of the system, how do you keep those who lose out from central bank policies in the system? More to the immediate point, how do you expand the system to give the European state more power when the benefits of the current system become increasingly unclear?
What is interesting, of course, is that the ECB is being extremely solicitous of French needs, and France has been able to simply ignore the stabilization pact that required it to bring its budget into balance. France has been the beneficiary of the system, yet the new constitution is being strongly challenged in France.
The reason has to do with the first goal of the European system -- security. The old threat to security was a continuation of Europe's wars. But now a new threat -- immigration -- is perceived. Immigration appears threatening on two levels: Economically, it increases competition for jobs; socially, it increases diversity. From an economist's point of view, job competition increases efficiency, while social diversity is a non-quantifiable irrelevancy. They miss the point, to say the least.
In the long run, austerity imposed by job competition and restructuring might be beneficial to an economy. But a 10- or 20-year dose of austerity measures will devastate an entire generation. A person who cannot get satisfactory employment from the age of 25 to 40 has had his life gutted. The time scale of a human life and the time scale of economic theory do not mesh. In effect, economic theory creates competition between this generation and the next -- and the members of this generation, being alive, tend to win.
Europe either must undergo a massive reinvention or sink into the abyss. In either case, a generation of European workers will pay the price. Like all humans, they will blame someone, and the most logical target -- whether valid or not -- is the immigrant population, whose presence they see as the catalyst for the problem.
There is a deeper level to this. France is France. France was very happy to go to Algeria and declare it "France." Its people have been much less happy to have Algerians come to France and declare it "Algeria." Whatever the irony of it, France is changing demographically, with the inevitable result that many French -- particularly those outside the corporate elite -- don't want their country to change. Even more to the point, some feel that they are losing control of their country to immigrants, and that they no longer have the sovereign right to determine the kind of society they will have.
The EU constitution institutionalizes that powerlessness. The doctrines embedded in the EU recognize the right of immigration from one country to another: Once you have citizenship somewhere, you have the right to go anywhere within the union. This might make sense from an economist's view of labor markets, but it means that France no longer controls its fate. When Turkey enters the EU, the perception is, an avalanche of Muslim immigrants will sweep France, and the European government's bureaucrats will celebrate the shift instead of stopping it. The guarantees of security are being kept in preventing nation-states from fighting, but not -- it is perceived -- in protecting the traditional way of life in France and other countries.
The issue only partly concerns migration. The deeper issue is sovereignty. The government of France is asking its people essentially to transfer major elements of sovereignty to a state that France cannot control. The French do not see a common identity with the rest of Europe, and the rest of Europe does not see a common identity with France. The EU is rooted in an alliance of convenience that is rapidly becoming inconvenient.
We do not know what will happen with the French referendum on May 29, but the important thing already has happened. If France cannot be absolutely counted on to vote for the constitution, then the constitution is dead. The founders of the EU would have trouble understanding the issue -- they took their bearings from economic theory and built the system to overcome nationalism, which they saw as the problem.
Nationalism is, however, a foundation of the human experience. We all have our roots in a community, and economics is far from the only value we pursue. Adam Smith knew this, which is why he called his masterpiece "The Wealth of Nations." Nationalism is not an unfortunate and archaic impediment to a more perfect society; it is simply an omnipresent feature of human life. Like greed, it can be condemned, if you get pleasure from doing so, but it never goes away and can never be controlled.
The EU was designed to overcome nationalism. The best it could do has been to mitigate it. In placing some nations at an economic disadvantage through its central bank and leaving others socially vulnerable by its immigration policies, the EU has not submerged nationalism, but energized it. The EU increases the threat to its own long-term existence every time it tries to extend its authority, institutionally or geographically.
If French support for the EU can no longer be taken for granted, then nothing can be taken for granted.
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