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The Washington Quarterly 23.4 (2000) 15-29



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Europe 2007:
From Nation-States to Member States

Simon Serfaty


Think back. The time is June 1957. A few European heads of state and government are meeting in Rome to launch a small common market as a down payment for an "ever closer" community that many of them question and none truly understand. What has brought them together is the evidence of their predecessors' failures, none as tragic as the two world wars they have just waged and from which they have been partially rescued by their new senior partner across the Atlantic. The peace they now hope to achieve will be sought a piece at a time. Their goal is not to dissolve the nation-states they represent but to save them from themselves as well as from each other.

Think ahead. Fifty years have passed, and the time is June 2007. The small community of six has grown into a larger union of many. Along the way, its agenda became ever more complex: deepen in order to widen, but also widen in order to deepen, and reform in order to do both. More than once, the process seemed hopelessly stalled. Yet, the fiction imagined earlier as "Europe" has turned into a reality: with an identity distinguishable from that of the nation-states that constitute it, with regional institutions distinct from the national institutions that gave them birth, and with a collective discipline often enforced in opposition to its members' preferences. Now, in 2007, the nation-states of Europe have been recycled into member states. Their former condition is a memory and a conviction more than a fact--the lingering memory of the national sovereignty they used to enjoy within their own boundaries and the illusory conviction that it has not been overtaken within the new common space they have agreed to make their own. [End Page 15]

By the very nature of history, moments with a predictable impact on the future cannot be identified until the moment is gone. The future must become past before it can be told. By its very nature too, a defining moment remains open-ended even after it has been uncovered. Hindsight determines when it began and even how it closed. Yet, because so much has already happened since 1957, much of what will be celebrated in 2007 can already be anticipated. It is as if history, at last, could be denied its imagination as it brings Europe into an endgame whose outcome can be ascertained before its time has been lived:

  • reform of EU governance negotiated through three Intergovernmental Conferences (IGCs)--in July 1997 in Amsterdam, in December 2000 in Nice, and, most likely, in 2004;

  • a completed euro-zone, started in 11 countries in 1999, perfected at 12 or more in 2002, and completed at 15 by 2005, with all EU members and many other non-EU states wanting easy access to the fully operational single market that began in 1992;

  • confirmation of the EU commitment to enlargement to the East, beginning in 2005, but also possible accession talks with such recalcitrant states as Norway and even Switzerland;

  • fulfillment, in 2003-2007, of the post-Kosovo "headline goals" as a down payment for a European Security Policy that would set the stage, at last, for a Common Foreign Policy and, ultimately, a Common Defense Policy; and

  • by 2007, too, new forms of U.S.-EU and EU-NATO relations, including new accords between the United States and the EU, as well as a reformed Atlantic Council that coordinates the complementary roles played by the two institutions.

In 2000, no country in Europe, and few of its political leaders, would dare acknowledge the scope and even urgency of the decisions they contemplate and the transformation they face. Historians will marvel. This, they will write, was a time neither for grand designs conceived from the top down, as after World War II, nor for revolutions enacted from the bottom up, as after World War I. This, historians will explain, was a time when the leaders' will...

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