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Birth Of An Empire, Part 2
"People only accept change when they are faced with necessity, and only recognise necessity when a crisis is upon them." - Jean Monnet (1888-1979), a "founding father" of the European Union.
The European Union's "federal phase" is complete; the EU elite now has its focus on Europe's geopolitical role. What challenges does Europe face as it strives for superpower status?
The next phase of the European project is twofold. To place “Europe” on the world stage as a superpower in its own right, and the creation of a European identity.
The two aren’t as different as they appear.
This much was evident to Henry Kissinger, who recently told a German interviewer,
“Nation-states have not just given up part of their sovereignty to the European Union but also part of their vision for their own future. Their future is now tied to the European Union, and the EU has not yet achieved a vision and loyalty comparable to the nation-state. So, there is a vacuum between Europe's past and Europe's future.”
Europe moves forward thanks to a vanguard effect. Brussels, with the connivance of some governments, comes up with policy; it is later legislated upon if necessary by parliaments national and European. The people, generally resistant to closer integration, catch up later. Former French President (and President of the committee which drafted the first European Constitution) Valéry Giscard d’Estaing captured the process nicely:
"Public opinion will be led to adopt, without knowing it, the proposals we dare not present to them directly."
It’s worth noting that Giscard is praising the process in the above quote. It's a strategy doubtless admired by many in Europe's elite. In the Guardian on 27 June, former Labour MP and Oxford University academic David Marquand writes that the leadership of the EU is gripped by a "bastard populism that makes courageous political leadership virtually impossible." Europe should be bold, he says, and make the leap to "quasi-superpower" status.
"The founding fathers - Konrad Adenauer, Robert Schuman, Paul-Henri Spaak, Alcide de Gasperi and Jean Monnet - did not follow existing public opinion. They dared to create a new one."
"The moral of the past 60 years of European history is that bold steps by a few eventually win over the timorous many," he concludes, urging Europe's current leaders to emulate post-war visionaries, now sanctified as the "founding fathers."
Marquand's support for European Unity borders on the cultish; his claim that Europeans face a choice between either hostile domination or superpower status dishonest. He's also guilty, however, of failing to notice that this particular horse has bolted: Europe's journey to superpower status is beyond doubt.
"There is no future for the people of Europe other than in union," wrote Jean Monnet. Union assumes some form of European identity. There have been various attempts to enshrine this identity, from a European "national anthem" through to a claim human rights were some distinctly European creation, and that "Europeanism" should be expressed as such.
How can Europe build this identity? According to the editorial in this week’s New Europe magazine, “citizens do not have basic knowledge of Europe, or willingness to learn... there is a fundamental lack of Europeanism; an element which should be inbred to the youths of today.”
French and German education departments have collaborated on the creation of “shared” history books; the European Union has spent endless millions of Euros on celebrations of Europe. There has been little notable success.
However, as a European State develops, citizens will have little choice but to become Europeans. Even those hostile to closer European integration would find themselves on the side of the superstate should their interests lie that way. If European “Defence Force” soldiers - our sons and daughters, potentially - line up on the border between the EU state of Turkey against Iran, would Eurosceptics be cheering Tehran on?
An extreme example, perhaps, but let us look at more peaceful alternatives. We might not wish the European Union well in its plans to become a superpower, but as the new state squares up against China or Russia, would we really wish it ill? If Europe is going head to head with the US on a trade round on which European - our - jobs depended, where would our loyalties lie?
It is possible to manufacture identity. We may resist the movement towards a European state, but we would welcome the outcome if it benefits us.
We become citizens of Europe through time and trauma, whether via trade or conflict.
Again, Kissinger was aware of this. "The major events in European history were conducted by nation-states which developed over several hundred years”, he said in the same interview, “There was never a question in the mind of European populations that the state was authorized to ask for sacrifices and that the citizens had a duty to carry it out. Now the structure of the nation-state has been given up to some considerable extent in Europe. And the capacity of governments to ask for sacrifices has diminished correspondingly"
As Europe’s role becomes more geopolitical, we become more European. Europe’s visionaries know the manufacture of European identity is a long game. Cooler heads in Brussels would probably counsel patience to those concerned about the lack of distinctly European character. The British didn’t think of themselves as such until relatively recently. The idea of being French didn’t exist before the 18th century, and even then took decades to catch on in the nation’s further-flung regions, despite campaigns by Paris to muster up support for France. Germany, too, still bears its history as a republic of independent lander.
The New Europe will be a state like no other in history. Britain’s young foreign minister David Miliband said this month that the UK’s borders no longer ended at the White Cliffs of Dover insofar as the War on Terror is concerned: What goes on in Afghanistan is, he said, as important as security in London and Leeds. Miliband, who is tipped to be a future Prime Minister, spoke this spring of how he envisaged Britain as a “global hub” of ideas, "linking world networks."
It’s a curious model for a 21st century state, at once everywhere and nowhere. Barroso called the EU the first “non-imperial empire.”
People Power
Of course, to build an empire - even a non-imperial one - you need people, and this is where the New Europe faces a stumbling block. There are 495.5 million citizens of the EU at present, but that figure is set to decline.
The total fertility rate is an internationally low 1.47 children born per female, where fertility rates above 2 per female are generally needed to maintain the current population. It has been reported that the EU could lose 60 million people from its workforce in the next ten years. The US, which the BBC claims has 160 million fewer people than the EU, could by 2050 equal it.
One US commentator has argued "Short of a postmodern baby boom, which looks unlikely, Europeans will have to brace themselves for being post-powerful.”
Additional workers are needed not just to give Europe its place on the world’s stage, but to pay for the often unsustainable welfare states of European nations.
Turkey (pop 70 million) could replace some of Europe’s lost workers, but advocates of Turkey’s membership of the EU have assured concerned citizens that a) only a tiny minority of Turks will want to migrate to the west and b) those Turks who do remain at home would, having tasted the pleasures of the western lifestyle, become model Europeans and thus shape their families to the European norm of 1.47 children too.
A return to Catholicism is possible, but even in Europe’s most deeply Catholic nations, the Vatican’s guidelines on family and contraception are rarely observed. French and Swedish policies of encouraging couples to have more children with social and financial support are paying off, but not spreading across the continent. Furthermore, critics claim that France’s enviable “baby boom” of 1.9 children per women is fed more by large families among the immigrant population than by the native French themselves. In any case, 1.98 (Europe’s highest fertility rate) is still below the “replacement figure” of 2.1.
Clearly the answer, as far as European thinkers left and right see it, is more immigration.
Thanks to Europe's new borders and current patterns based on colonial links, much migration into Europe will come from Islamic countries. Many Europeans are fearful of how millions of Muslims, many from rural and deeply conservative societies will adapt to the urban, liberal values of European nations. However, the values that make up the treasured identity of European nations will themselves be in flux as they adapt over time to European values.
Europe's geopolitical distance, though presumably not conflict, with the United States will reassure those Muslims opposed to US policy that the EU is not their enemy; new nations have historically been better able to welcome newcomers to the "melting pot" than established ones. Mosques on the skyline, whether in the hills of Bavaria, the housing estates of south London or the villages of the Czech Republic will be as much a part of European identity as cathedrals.
In Part 3: Resources and Resistance. What will life be like in the EU Empire - and what is the future for dissent?
