The New Old World. Perry Anderson
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are ultimately acceptable into the Union, the third remains inconceivable. For ‘the countries of the Maghreb are irrelevant as a barrier to a sub-Saharan Africa, which presents no threat except via small numbers of illegal immigrants’. In fact, on the contrary, ‘the threat comes from North Africa itself’.46 If this is a more ecumenical approach than that of Garton Ash, who expressly excludes Turkey from Europe, it traces the same movement, common to all these tropes—a slide to aporia. Every attempt so far to delimit the future boundaries of the Union has deconstructed itself.
For the moment, it is enough to register that ‘Europe Agreements’, formally designated as antechambers to entry, have been signed by six countries: Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria; and that four more are impending (Slovenia and the Baltic states). It is only a matter of time before Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Albania and what is left of Bosnia join the queue. Does this prospect—we might call it an inverted domino effect, in which the pieces fall inwards rather than outwards—mean that the British scenario will come to pass? Harold Macmillan once spoke, with a homely national touch, of his hope that the Community, when exposed to the beneficent pressure of a vast free-trade area, would ‘melt like a lump of sugar in a cup of tea’.47 Such remains the preferred vision of his successors. Their calculation is that the more member-states there are, the less sovereignty can practically be pooled, and the greater is the chance that federal dreams will fold. How realistic is it?
There is no doubt that enlargement of the Union to some two dozen states would fundamentally alter its nature. If its existing arrangements were simply extended east, the cost of integrating the Visegrád quartet alone could mean an increase of 60 per cent in the Union budget. There is no chance of the existing member-states accepting such a burden, at a time when every domestic pressure is towards tax reduction. That leaves either reducing current support to farming communities and poorer regions in the west, composed of voters with the power to resist, or watering down the acquis communautaire to create a second-class membership for new entrants, without benefit of the transfers accorded to first-class members.
These are just the fiscal headaches attending rapid expansion. There are also the material consequences for the former Communist economies. If the effort of adhering to the convergence criteria for monetary union is already straining prosperous Western societies to breaking point, can impoverished Eastern ones be expected to sustain them? No previous candidates, however initially disadvantaged, had to scale such a macro-economic cliff. Contemplating the requirements of EMU, it is not suprising that enthusiasts for expansion are starting to call for the whole idea of a single currency to be dropped. For Garton Ash, the needs of Warsaw and Prague dovetail with what is anyway the wisdom of London. ‘Europe could perhaps use a little more British thinking at the moment’, he writes of monetary union, ‘with “British” here meant in the deeper sense of our particular intellectual tradition: sceptical, empirical and pragmatic’.48 The suspicion that EMU and Eastern enlargement might be incompatible is shared from the opposite standpoint by the unlikely figure of Jacques Attali, who regards the single currency as a valid but now lost cause, and enlargement as a German project that will lead away from a federal Europe, for which most of the national elites, mesmerized by American culture, anyway have no appetite. L’Europe ne s’aime pas, he glumly observed at the end of the Mitterrand experience.49
Maastricht is unlikely to evaporate so easily. But the hazards of enlargement do not just lie in the economic pitfalls it poses for new or old members. Even if derogations of various kinds—from the Common Agricultural Policy, from the Structural Funds, from the single currency—were to be made for what were once the ‘captive nations’, a more fundamental difficulty would remain, of a purely political nature. To double its membership could cripple the existing institutions of the Union. Already the original balance of the Six or the Nine has been thrown out of kilter in the Council of Ministers. Today the five largest states—Germany, France, Italy, Britain and Spain—contain 80 per cent of the population of the Union, but command only just more than half of the votes in the Council. If the ten current ex-Communist applicants were members, the share of these states would fall even further, while the proportion of poor countries in the Union—those now entitled to substantial transfers—would rise from four out of fifteen to a majority of fourteen out of twenty-five.
Adjustment of voting weights could bring the pays légal some way back towards the pays réel. But it would not resolve potentially the most intractable problem posed by enlargement to the east, which lies in the logic of numbers. Ex-satellite Europe contains almost exactly as many states as continuously capitalist Europe (at the latest count, sixteen in the ‘East’ to seventeen in the ‘West’, if we include Switzerland), with a third of the population. Proliferation of partners on this scale, no matter how the inequalities between them were finessed, threatens institutional gridlock. Rebus sic stantibus, the size of the European Parliament would swell towards eight hundred deputies; the number of commissioners rise to forty; a ten-minute introductory speech by each minister attending a Council yield a meeting of five hours, before business even started. The legendary complexity of the already existing system, with its meticulous rotations of commissarial office, laborious inter-governmental bargains and assorted ministerial and parliamentary vetoes, would be overloaded to the point of paralysis.
In such conditions, would not widening inevitably mean loosening? This is the wager in London, expressed more or less openly according to venue, from the FCO to the TLS. In the long term, the official line of thinking goes, expansion must mean defederalization. Yet is this the only logical deduction? Here we encounter the final amphibology. For might not precisely the prospect of institutional deadlock impose as an absolute functional necessity a much more centralized supranational authority than exists today? Coordination of twelve to fifteen member states can just about operate, however cumbersomely, on a basis of consensus. Multiplication to thirty practically rules this out. The more states enter the Union, the greater the discrepancy between population and representation in the Council of Ministers will tend to be, as large countries are increasingly outnumbered by smaller ones, and the weaker overall decisional capacity would become. The result could paradoxically be the opposite of the British expectation—not a dilution, but a concentration of federal power in a new constitutional settlement, in which national voting weights are redistributed and majority decisions become normal. The problem of scale, in other words, might force just the cutting of the institutional knot the proponents of a loose free trade area seek to avoid. Widening could check or reverse deepening. It might also precipitate it.
Each of the three critical issues now facing the European Union—the single currency, the role of Germany, and the multiplication of member-states—thus presents a radical indeterminacy. In every case, the distinctive form of the amphibology is the same. One set of meanings is so drastic it appears subject to capsizal into its contrary, giving rise to a peculiar uncertainty. These are the political quicksands on which the Europe to come will be built.
1. Alan Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe 1945–51, London 1984, p. 492.
2. Alan Milward and Vibeke Sorensen, ‘Interdependence or Integration: A National Choice’, in Alan Milward, Frances Lynch, Ruggiero Ranieri, Federico Romero, Vibeke Sorensen, The Frontiers of National Sovereignty: History and Theory 1945–1992, London 1993, p. 20.
3. The European Rescue of the Nation-State, London 1992, p. xi.
4. The European Rescue of the Nation-State, p. 447.
5. ‘Conclusions: The Value of History’, in The Frontiers of National Sovereignty, pp. 194, 201.
6. For the extent of the hostility to integration in the administrative elite, see Gérard Bossuat, ‘Les hauts fonctionnaires français et le processus d’unité en Europe occidentale d’Alger à Rome (1943–1958)’, Journal of European Integration History, No. 1, Vol. 1, 1995, pp. 87–109.
7. Christian Pineau, Le grand pari: L’aventure du traité de Rome, Paris 1991, pp. 221–23.
8. The European Rescue of the Nation-State, p. 334.
9. François Duchêne, Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of