Did Europe Die on August 2, 1993?

DID EUROPE DIE ON AUGUST 2, 1993? Patrick McCarthy J ean François-Poncet, the ex-foreign minister of France, stated on August 1, 1993, that without currency union there could be no Internal Market and indeed no Europe. The next evening, Prime Minister Edouard Balladur stood haplessly before the television cameras and repeated that the European Monetary System (ems) was still alive, when in fact the currencies were floating within a "band" of 30 percent He also insisted that die franc had not been devalued, although it was worth 3 percent less against the mark than twentyfour hours earlier. Meanwhile, President Mitterrand expressed his satisfaction that the Franco-German relationship had been saved, somehow forgetting that the Bundesbank's refusal to reduce its discount rate by 0.5 percent had destroyed the policy of maintaining a fixed parity between the franc and the mark, which was a cornerstone of Franco-German cooperation. Remembering François-Poncet's judgment, one might be forgiven for concluding that Europe was dead but that its leaders refused to bury it This was merely the most recent defeat the European Community (EC) had suffered. It followed the humiliation ofbeing unable to halt the slaughter in Bosnia; the inability to agree on an agricultural platform for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (gatt) negotiations; the Danish rejection and the French near-rejection of the Maastricht Treaty; the reluctant British tolerance of selected parts of the Treaty; the apparent lack of economic gain from the official introduction of the Internal Market; and the growing Patrick McCarthy is a professor ofEuropean studies at the Johns Hopkins University SAIS Bologna Center. He is the author of Céline and Camus, and is the editor of France-Germany 1 983-1 993: The Struggle to Cooperate; The French Socialists in Power 1981-1 986; and co-editor ofTKe End of Post-War Politics in Italy. The Landmark 1 992 Elections. He has also written many articles on French and Italian politics. 1 2 SAIS ReviewWINTER-SPRING 1994 disenchantment in the former communist countries with the EC's inability to help them. Evidence indicating that the EC was alive much less well was hard to uncover. Yet we would like to suggest, in diis introduction to a series of more detailed articles on specific EC issues, that what died on August 2 was the illusory concept of a Europe moving rapidly toward political, economic, and monetary union. Another more modest and more realistic Europe, in better hannony with EC history, is still possible. The grand illusion stemmed from die Maastricht Treaty or, ramer, from one interpretation of it. The Treaty itself is riddled wifh ambiguity. For example, in die labor relations section it is hard to know which issues are to be decided by qualified majority voting in die Council ofMinisters and which still require unanimity. Perhaps die wording ofdie document does not matter. EC agreements are best understood as fragments ofa political process. The Single Europe Act was an uninspiring text that disappointed many people, but die follow-up legislation on die Internal Market turned it into an historic milestone. However, while future developments may retrospectively turn Maastricht into a milestone, developments to date have exposed it as unworkable. The interpretation that EC leaders gave ofdie Treaty was diat it prefigured a Europe diat would be united in a decade. In reality die Treaty was audacious in only one area—monetary integration. In die rest it was timid, and if politicians had chosen to downplay it, dieir citizens might never have noticed die Treaty was diere. John Major made die section on worker information and consultation sound as if it would impose soviets on ici, whereas it merely formalized die Val Duchesse process, which had been proceeding harmlessly for years. Most European leaders exaggerated in die other direction: diey glorified die supposedly gigantic strides toward unity. So doing, diey alarmed their voters. Few people have "transferred to Europe dieir principal sense of identity"; diey remain Italian or Dutch.1 Turnout is low in elections for die European Parliament and people cast dieir votes on die basis of national issues. A unified Europe is at best a promise of...