History Strikes Back: How States, Nations, and Conflicts Are Shaping the 21st Century

3. A Europe That Knows What It Is and What It Wants

chapter three A Europe That Knows What It Is and What It Wants For decades now, Henry Kissinger’s famous quip about there being no single phone number for Europe has been a convenient reference point for gloating Americans and regretful Europeans alike. Europeans could often have responded by pointing out that the United States has itself often been divided among three or four competing centers of power, but that would have been facile. In any case we might as well just admit it: there will be no “United States of Europe.” There will be no Philadelphia-style constitutional convention, no equivalent of George Washington talking about how Europeans are “all alike” in a farewell address. As former European Commission president Jacques Delors has put it, Europe—or more specifically, the European Union (EU)—is and will remain not a “federation” but a “federation of nation-states.” To be even more precise, it is a “confederation of nation-states” in 59 60 A Europe That Knows What It Is and What It Wants the wider EU of twenty-seven or more members and a “federation of nation-states” in the euro zone. Years of experience have demonstrated that identities and states do not disappear. Does this mean the end of the European project? No. It just means that the project will become more creative and realistic. Europeans have perhaps been too thin-skinned about Kissinger’s comment. After all, it is less important to have unified representation than to have shared perspectives and policies. Who cares if Europe speaks with many voices if all of them say the same thing and Europeans all want to move in the same direction? In any case, you can’t unify people against their will. You have to go about it in a different way. But Europeans who know who they are and agree on what they want will have considerable influence in the world, both as partners with the United States and on their own. They can reach this goal by confronting the issues that still divide them. Except for a few marginal political parties, Europeans do not question what has been done in their name by American and European leaders for the past fifty years. What they fail to agree on is where to take the Europe-building process from here. Indeed, the European Union is nervously uncertain about three aspects of its future: its political nature, its borders, and its role in the world. These uncertainties will have to be resolved. The Political Future The first issue—how power is shared among EU member states and between those states and Brussels—has its roots in an uncertain period that began in the early 1990s, when member states felt they had to make a top priority of expansion to central and eastern Europe. Thus in 1996, the then fifteen members of the EU began a major negotiation to determine how many members of the European Parliament, how many members of the European Commission , and how many votes in the Council of the European Union the new member states would get. The meager results in the 1997 Amsterdam treaty led to a further negotiation at the Nice meeting of the European Council, which produced a new treaty signed in February 2001. The Nice treaty was agreed to unanimously, but it was immediately criticized. Federalists complained that it did not make the necessary leap forward toward European integration. And Germany was frustrated by the fact that the “double-majority vote” (the requirement that a measure would need a majority both of states and population to pass) was not adopted. As a result, the idea began to take hold that a more ambitious treaty would have to be written. EU leaders thus agreed to hold a “European convention ,” designed to be more representative than a simple “intergovernmental conference” of heads of state and government because it would be made up of members of the European Parliament and national parliaments. Its mission would be to go further in the direction of political integration and to draft nothing less than a “constitutional treaty,” which—for appearances’ sake—would be called a “constitution.” The result was the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, signed in Rome in October 2004. A Europe That Knows What It Is and What It Wants 61 Legally, the name “constitution” was a lie, but it was thought to be a useful...