The European Union is faced with a difficult decision. If it doesn't allow Turkey to join the EU, it could be viewed as further proof of the "clash" between the Muslim world and the west. If it does allow Turkey to join, it faces a potential wave of immigrants that people aren't ready for or fully accepting. And, with open borders and Turkey's neighbors, obvious security concerns.
Europeans praise themselves for their ability to overcome the past, by creating things like a European Defense Agency 90 years after World War I and only 15 years after the fall of Communism. But to turn its attention away from overcoming centuries of exclusion and battles against the Muslim world and the Turks would be to ignore a much more pressing issue.
International Herald Tribune -Is EU ready for Turkey? Muslim world is waiting
Roger Cohen: Is EU ready for Turkey? Muslim world is waiting
Roger Cohen International Herald Tribune
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
Globalist
ISTANBUL
Where Europe ends, and with it presumably the European Union, has long been a vexed question. Just how vexed will be demonstrated over the next seven months as the EU grapples with a critical decision: whether to begin negotiations leading to Turkish membership.
The EU has just admitted 10 new members without being sure how it will run itself as a 25-member club. So the notion of opening the way for Turkey appears far-fetched. This is a country of close to 70 million people, the vast majority of them Muslims, bordering Iraq, Syria and Iran. Few Europeans associate such dangerous borders with their continent.
But Turkey amounts to a special case. Its links with the EU go back to 1963, when it entered into economic agreements. Ever since, the prospect of possible membership has been dangled with growing specificity before this diverse and determinedly secular state. Now the EU Commission is completing a report on Turkey that will form the basis for a decision by European leaders in December.
The looming verdict will provoke sharp divisions. Tony Blair, the British prime minister, recently expressed strong support for Turkish membership, saying it would bring a "new dimension" to the EU. The German government also appears favorable. But Alain Juppé of France, the leader of President Jacques Chirac's UMP party, said last month that his party opposed opening negotiations with Turkey. Chirac himself has been more evasive, saying Turkey has a "European vocation." Make of that Delphic phrase what you will.
Scrutiny of the EU's next move is intense in the United States, in the Islamic world and in Turkey itself. The American view is straightforward. Europe says it wants good relations with Muslims. That being the case, it cannot slam the door on Turkey.
"If the Muslim world is not an enemy, they have to go through with this," said one American official.
The American idea, of course, is that Turkey's natural role is as a bridge between the West and the Islamic world at a time when suspicion and anger are growing over Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To open talks leading to EU membership would sweep away suspicions of religious and cultural prejudice that have grown as Turkey has waited on the sidelines for four decades. It would show that a Muslim country that is also a secular democracy has its place at the same European table as France, Britain and Germany.
Support for EU membership is strong in Turkey. Saban Disli, the vice-chairman of the governing Justice and Development Party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said that negotiations should begin in the first half of next year with a view to bringing Turkey into the EU by 2008, or 2010 at the latest.
"If Turkey is left out, close to 1.5 billion Muslims around the world will feel as bad as I will feel," he said. "The clash between Islam and the West will be sharpened."
Erdogan, who leads a party with Islamic roots that some now refer to as "Muslim Democrats" (an echo of Europe's right-of-center Christian Democrats), has worked hard to persuade European leaders that Turkey, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is now ready. Just last week, special state security courts sometimes used to try Kurds were abolished, one of a series of amendments to the Constitution.
In general, the army has lost its once dominant behind-the-scenes role; the often trampled rights of Turkey's minority Kurdish population have been bolstered. Erdogan has also pushed hard to reunite the divided island of Cyprus through support for a United Nations peace plan that was rejected last month by Greek Cypriots.
In all this, he has shown himself responsive to European and American prodding. Colin Powell, the American secretary of state, wrote to the Turkish government in February, urging it to do more for judicial transparency. This month, he called Turkey a "very, very secular democracy" (after causing ire earlier by mistakenly labeling it an "Islamic republic").
But resistance to Turkey in Europe remains strong. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the former French president and overseer of efforts to draft a new EU constitution, declared in 2002 that Turkey's entry would mean "the end of Europe." Such views are widely shared, if seldom expressed so directly.
Turkey resides somewhere deep and ambivalent in the European psyche. It was against the westward pushing forces of the Ottoman empire and Islam that Europe long fought. The Ottoman army at the gates of Vienna, the centuries-long battle to put an end to Turkey-in-Europe - these events were marking.
The mingled minarets and church steeples of Bosnia are only the most obvious imprint of the Turkish presence.
Today, that presence is felt most immediately in the large number of Turkish immigrants in the EU, particularly in Germany. The specter of hordes of young Turks moving west troubles many people. Europe remains uncertain about how to integrate its growing Muslim population. The notion of the EU as some sort of Christian club has not been entirely lost. In such a club, of course, Turkey does not fit.
So, many Turks are skeptical. "Turkey is a big thing to swallow," said Lerzan Ozkale, a university professor. "I think the EU prefers us cooperating on the outside." Up to now, it is true, the EU has done well by tantalizing Turkey without admitting it.
But that game now looks exhausted. Turkey is impatient; a world of tensions between Islam and the West is watching. The country has much to offer the EU: its understanding of the Islamic world, its vitality, its large army, its geographic bridge.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the Green politician, spoke this month of the EU as a land of "miracles." The first two were Franco-German reconciliation and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The third, he suggested, could be Europe's rapprochement with the Muslim world through Turkish membership. He had a point. To close the EU to Turkey would be to look backward at a time when a troubling future must be confronted.
What's the position of Europe toward the Iraqui prisoners' scndal? If Britain knew, and was partly responsible, how do the Europeans feel about the violation of the Geneva convention?
Here is a French article about Tony Blair's position towards the EU Constitution and the British Referendum. The article explains pretty clearly the strategic reasons why the Premier supported the idea of a referendum, and the general Europhobic feelings throughout the country...
British citizens apparently need to be reassured about the "scary" idea of being part of a new United States of Europe...
Le Monde, "Tony Blair soumettra la Constitution de l'UE à un référendum", 4/21/04
The Tories (and however many Britons don't want to be in the "centre of Europeand decision-making", as Tony Blair put it) can turn to Switzerland and Norway for reasons why it's not necessary to join the EU.
The Swiss are prosperous and content with its relationship with the EU, its major trade partner. NOrway, as this Telegraph article points out, has grown twice as much as the UK in the last 30 years.
They don't have to deal with their business being over-regulated, they don't have to deal with the burden of rebuilding Eastern European countries like Poland and the Czech Republic and they don't have to balance what some consider the teetering weight of 25 member-nations.
Telegraph - 'The EU? It's political suicide to mention it in Switzerland'
'The EU? It's political suicide to mention it in Switzerland'
(Filed: 08/05/2004)
Last week, the European Trade Commissioner had a grim warning for Britain: if we vote against the EU constitution in the forthcoming referendum, we could end up like... Switzerland. Graham Turner asked the Swiss exactly what this would mean
Lack a day! Lack a day! News that the British might actually be allowed a say on the EU constitution has brought predictable auguries of doom and woe from the Euro-federalist brigade. Should Britain vote No, it would become no more than an impotent shadow on the margins of Europe - relegated to the "rearguard" of its nations, according to Pascal Lamy, the Brussels Small Trade Commissioner.
Others of the same ilk hinted darkly that Britain might even be forced to leave the EU. At the very least, declared Mr Lamy last week, we would end up like Switzerland.
All of this, not surprisingly, provoked a certain amount of discreet mirth in both Switzerland and Norway, which happen to be the richest countries in Europe. Both have only an arm's-length relationship with the EU. Both have prospered exceedingly; Norway, for instance, has grown twice as fast as Britain over the past 30 years. Neither looks likely to join the EU for some considerable time.
In Switzerland, the EU is definitely on the backburner. "You should know," said Professor Franz Jaeger, who was a member of the Swiss National Council (their equivalent of our House of Commons) for 24 years, "that for the next 15 years at least, you will not be able to convince the Swiss to enter the EU. We just don't need it."
Nor is the professor's timescale by any means the longest on offer. "I was asked to speak at the 350th anniversary of the Treaty of Westphalia, which created Swiss neutrality," recalled Dr Hugo Butler, chief editor of the prestigious Neue Zuricher Zeitung, a paper that is broadly in favour of membership, "and I said that, if the EU develops well and is able to guarantee the sort of freedoms we have, then in 50 years' time, maybe the Swiss will join."
Others are thinking in the same sort of timeframe, though they wonder whether the EU will still be there to join. Michel Dérobert, general secretary of the Swiss Private Bankers Federation, felt that the Swiss probably would become members in 50 years' time - "just before the EU finally disappears."
Klaus Wellershoff, chief economist of the Union Bank of Switzerland - the largest wealth managers in the world, with £800 billion of client assets under their wings - also thinks Swiss membership extremely unlikely in the foreseeable future. "It's way out there," he declared, "if at all."
The issue is so dead that the prudent prefer not to speak its name. "It is now political suicide to mention the EU," said Jean-Jacques Roth, chief editor of Le Temps in Geneva. "No one would dare to take the issue out of the box."
Even the so-called Euroturbos, who two years ago launched a campaign for negotiations with Brussels to begin immediately, confess to having been struck dumb since 75 per cent of the Swiss turned them down in a referendum. "We were completely wiped out," admitted Professor Peter Tschopp, professor of economics at Geneva University and himself a leading Euroturbo. "We don't dare to say anything any more."
Many Swiss are convinced that the EU is more likely to change than they are. "Within 15 years," declared Beat Kappeler, a distinguished columnist, "the EU will have become a free trade area, and then there will be no problem for us to enter."
"I know the people in Brussels," said Robert Nef, president of the Liberal Institute in Zurich, "and they are already afraid of the high degree of complexity they have. They admit privately that even more complexity - now that the 10 East European countries have joined - could result in a disaster."
Even Europhiles believe that if the extension into Eastern Europe is not handled well, the EU could collapse altogether. "If I am honest with myself," said Peter Tschopp, "I think there is a 50-50 chance of the whole thing imploding. I may be considered a Euroturbo, but I was not in favour of this extension. The Marshall Plan will be nothing compared with the job of rebuilding these countries. The Czech Republic, for example, may look nice but, inside, it is just painted ruins. Somebody will have to pay for all that."
"The whole thing is getting too big," agreed Theo Phyl, a mountain farmer in central Switzerland. "It was like that in Russia. They became too big and then collapsed. I think it'll be the same with the EU."
So, the Swiss have settled for the kind of semi-detached relationship that many people in Britain would prefer: a series of bilateral deals with the EU - easily their largest trading partner - which ensures the free movement of goods, capital and labour as well as common security arrangements. So far, they have made no financial contribution whatsoever to the EU. They have retained their own political system, currency, tax regime and labour market laws.
The only downside, so far as the majority are concerned, is having to accept many EU regulations which they have had no part in shaping. It is, they think, a small price to pay. "When you are organising a free market," said Franz Steinegger, a leading Christian Democrat MP, "you have to accept the regulations of the bigger one."
The fact that Cristoph Blocher's Swiss People's Party made the greatest gains in last year's elections on a platform of total opposition to EU membership has only confirmed the prevailing mood.
So how, and why, have the Swiss arrived at such definite conclusions? They are, after all, notoriously slow in coming to judgment - and joined the United Nations, for example, only after decades of hesitation. (The Swiss themselves tell the story of the man from Zurich who took a walk with a friend from Berne. The man from Berne trod on a snail. "Why on earth did you do that?," asked the Zuricher. "I couldn't help it," his friend replied; "he was overtaking me on the inside").
To begin with, the Swiss want to keep the EU at arm's length because, in many ways, their political system is the exact opposite of the Union's. While the EU has a massive democratic deficit, Switzerland has an equally massive democratic surplus. Whereas we in Britain have what Lord Hailsham called "elective dictatorship," the Swiss have direct democracy. They vote about anything and everything, at national and local level. And their ardour for the polling booth leaves foreigners utterly bewildered. "They are voting all the time," murmured a German pastor who works in Winterthur. "I just can't keep up with it all."
There have been no fewer than 46 national referendums in the past four years. The Swiss voted on whether to cut working hours, and turned the idea down. They voted on whether to have minimum national holidays of four weeks - and turned that down, too, because they could not see why such things needed to be set in stone. In a fortnight's time, they will even vote on their finance minister's tax proposals. It is as if Gordon Brown's Budget had to be ratified by the people.
All it takes to call a national referendum is 50,000 signatures gathered within 100 days of a new law being proposed.
Much the same applies in each of Switzerland's 26 cantons. "When a new law is proposed here," explained Josias Clavadetscher, editor of the biggest local paper in the canton of Schwyz, "people are given two months in which to collect 2,000 signatures - we only have a population of 130,000. And if people vote in the referendum against the law, it is thrown into the rubbish bin. The number of signatures required depends on the population of the canton.
"In 2002, for example, the cantonal administration said they wanted to build a new, very modern prison at a cost of 35 million Swiss francs (£15.5 million). The previous estimate had been 25 million francs. So people launched a referendum and decided that they didn't want such a luxurious prison for criminals in our canton. Now, the government has to come up with new proposals."
At communal level, similar rules apply. "In my community," said David Syz, Switzerland's secretary of state for economic affairs, "we have 4,000 people, and they decide what the local tax rate for the next year will be. There is usually a meeting of about 200 citizens in the town hall. They look at the budget which the administration has put up and then they say: 'We don't want either the new school or the 10 new roundabouts you're proposing, so forget them."
What would happen in Switzerland, I wondered, if they had been members of the EU and had been told - as Tony Blair told Britain until his recent U-turn - that they would not be allowed to vote on the new EU constitution? "It could not possibly happen in this country," said Theo Phyl, the mountain farmer. "If it did, the Swiss would demonstrate en masse and the prime minister would be fired. Poodle [Tony Blair's nickname in much of Switzerland] would simply have had to go."
For most Swiss, the idea of giving up this profoundly democratic system in exchange for a stream of mandatory directives from Brussels is simply unthinkable. "I see no chance that Swiss people will accept less power," said Michel Dérobert, "because they do not want to lose the right to have the final say. There is not going to be less democracy in this country; in fact, we are going to have more because the Swiss like it."
"We want to preserve our very democratic system," agreed Jean Bouregois, director of the Swiss Farmers Union. "Much more decisive than anything which might happen to farming if we joined the EU is a general belief that we have a political system which is sacred to us - and that it would not be possible to keep that system in the EU as it stands today."
"Just take VAT," said Lutzi Stamm, a Swiss People's Party MP. "The second we joined the EU, we would have to increase it from our present 7.6 per cent to at least 15 per cent. You could collect a million votes, never mind 50,000, and you still would not be able to bring it down even to 14.9. That is the opposite of direct democracy."
Indeed, the Swiss have no intention of sacrificing any part of their unique political system, whose aim is to disperse power rather than concentrating it in any one individual or party. They have no prime minister. Their president holds office only for a year. Very few can even tell you who he is. As for their "cabinet", the Federal Council is made up of seven representatives from the four main parties. And their job is to come up with an all-party compromise on every issue.
The Swiss have what Robert Nef calls "a strong anti-leadership instinct". They do not like big figures. Big figures, they feel, can make big mistakes - so a Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair would be inconceivable in Switzerland. I asked Hansrudolf Kamer, the deputy chief editor of the Neue Zuricher Zeitung, whether the Swiss wanted leadership. "No," he replied flatly.
"Even the president is not the leader of the government," said David Syz. "The members of the Federal Council are widely respected, but they ought not to appear on the media too often because people would not like it. We have a culture that does not want prima donnas.''
"The seven have to argue as a collective" agreed Robert Nef. "If an individual politician, such as Tony Blair, were to say, 'Trust me!', people here would feel there was something very wrong. That would be altogether too personal."
In Switzerland, the citizen really is king. "We elect our parliamentarians," Nef went on, "not to have a policy, not to have a programme, but to frame laws which we, the people, can then challenge and, if necessary, repeal through a referendum. The citizen rules the state and not vice-versa." In Switzerland, remarked Hugo Butler, it was the people who were Her Majesty's Opposition.
This belief in the primacy of the people is one reason why the EU's sometimes high-handed behaviour has gone down so badly. "The first thing we didn't like," said Edouard Brunner, a former secretary of state for foreign affairs and ambassador in both Washington and Paris, "was the way Chirac treated the Haider question in Austria, trying to put him in quarantine and making a pariah of the whole country. We are not particularly fond of Haider, but he had been elected by the people.
"The second was Chirac's remark to the Poles after they had signed a letter, along with others, supporting the US and Britain in the Iraq war. Chirac told them that if they wanted to join the EU, that was not a particularly clever thing to do. Well, we don't want to be dictated to in that way."
The Swiss put an almost equally high value on their economic freedoms. Their taxes are lower than the EU's, and money is much cheaper. "Our interest rates," said Beat Kappeler, "are about half theirs and our mortgage rate is only three per cent compared with six per cent or more in the EU. In many cantons, there are no inheritance taxes."
When the Swiss held a referendum on bank secrecy, no less than 80 per cent of the public voted in favour. It is not only foreign investors who like their privacy.
The country is also blessedly free of Brussels's red tape. There is little support for a 35-hour week here. "The Swiss," Kappeler went on, "work an average of 41.5 hours a week, and there are more of them still working at the age of 64 than in any other country. They actually like work.
"If you're an entrepreneur, what's more, you don't ask if you want to make a change - you just do it. You pay the wages you want, according to people's performance. You can hire and fire at very short notice for economic reasons, without judges intervening as they would in France or Germany. There's also very little in the way of worker participation. So we have all the advantages of being in a common market, without any of the disadvantages."
Taxes, both local and corporate, are held down by fierce competition between cantons. "If you take the average tax level as 100," said Hugo Butler, "it is around 50 in the canton of Zug and 144 in Graubunden. So businesses and individuals can always threaten to move. Without that competition, taxes would undoubtedly rise - and there's no doubt that, if we were in the EU, Brussels would be pressing for them to be the same everywhere." The result is that, while France and Germany wallow in recession, Switzerland has survived remarkably well.
For the past 15 years," said Klaus Wellershoff, "our growth rate has been rather dismal; and unemployment is rising somewhat, though, at four per cent, it is still fabulously low compared with places like Germany. We've also kept a remarkable stability in prices - they've only gone up between zero and one per cent a year for the last decade.
"As for income per head, it is still among the highest in the world. Just look at the cars in this city: BMWs, Mercs, Jaguars. Their average age is very low and a lot of them are brand new. We are still doing excellently and the bank is rather optimistic about the future."
"Everywhere in Switzerland is flourishing," agreed Hugo Butler. "You will find wealthy people wherever you go. There are no suburbs with only the poor living in them. We have difficulties - prices are far higher than in France or Germany - but they are the problems of a country with a very high standard of living." This is what Jean-Jacques Roth of Le Matin, describes as "une crise de luxe." Had Switzerland been in the EU, said Butler's deputy, Hansrudolf Kamer, who is in favour of membership, "we would definitely be worse off - far more regulations, higher taxes, higher interest rates."
For the moment, then, the Swiss are very happy to keep the EU at a distance. If the Union asks them to stump up to help meet its expenses in Eastern Europe, they will say that they are willing to contribute - but only directly to the country concerned. They will not put a single franc into the EU's common pot. "We never know what happens to that common pot," said Edouard Brunner.
"We do not," declared Ueli Maurer, "want to be a colony of a government somewhere in Brussels which decides what happens here in Switzerland." Perhaps the Swiss, slow though they are, are the ones who have got it right.
Very brief and clear introduction by the BBC to the ideas in the draft of EU Constitution. I found it useful, as I didn't really know all these issues before. Take a look...
It's an interactive page on the BBC
An American columnist goes back to Europe after many years, and is surprised by Europeans feelings about the US, and Bush in particular. Sensitive to a traditional understanding of power (he cites Kagan) he writes that: "Europe is too weak to lead and too proud to follow." Nevertheless, he understands that Europeans attitude towards netotiations comes from their capacity to "control historical hatreds through the EU."
There a re a lot of interesting considerations in this column, starting with the basic one which is that "we are drifiting."
The Washington Post - Drifting Apart
Drifting Apart
By Robert J. Samuelson
Wednesday, May 5, 2004; Page A29
BRUSSELS -- This ought to be a moment of great triumph for Europe and America together. Instead there is mutual disenchantment. On May 1 the European Union accepted 10 countries -- most of them remnants of the Soviet empire -- into membership. The EU is now a massive free-trade area and loose political union with 25 countries, 455 million people and an $11.6 trillion economy. After World War II, farsighted Europeans and Americans promoted European unification to end a history of ruinous continental wars. The vision has succeeded spectacularly, and yet there's no common celebration.
You can see this in coverage of the "enlargement" (the new members are Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Cyprus and Malta). The U.S. media paid scant attention; it was no big deal. In Europe it was a gargantuan deal. But the self-congratulation virtually ignored the huge American role in European unification: in encouraging it after World War II; in providing a defense shield against Soviet invasion and intimidation, permitting the EU to grow; and in maintaining the military and economic pressure that led to the Soviet Union's ultimate collapse.
This was my first European visit in several years. I knew, of course, that widespread opposition to the war in Iraq had darkened opinion toward America. In a March poll, the Pew Research Center found that only 38 percent of Germans and 37 percent of the French had "favorable" views of the United States. In mid-2002, the comparable figures were 61 percent and 63 percent. Still, I was not prepared for the depth of feeling. "Even my parents, who are part of the World War II generation and always supported the United States, think Bush is a war criminal," a 48-year-old German, a mid-level EU official, told me. War criminal?
It's not just that many Europeans oppose Bush's Iraq policies. They mistake the motives -- and that's scarier. The implication is not simply that the United States made an error. It's that something about Bush or America (it's not clear which) represents a permanent menace. One view is that Bush went into Iraq for oil. About 60 percent of the French and Germans believe that, says Pew. Another view is that U.S. foreign policy has fallen hostage to Bush's religious fervor. Militarism becomes a heavenly mission.
"We've been much more used to a distinction between the state and God," says John Palmer of the European Policy Centre, a Brussels think tank. It's "deeply worrying . . . for the major superpower to be deriving its strategy from fundamentalism." By labeling these views distorted, I don't mean that Bush is bound to prove his critics -- at home and abroad -- wrong. The outcome in Iraq is unknown; the administration may fail. What I do mean is that prevailing European readings of Bush represent dangerous misunderstandings.
His motives were upfront: finding weapons of mass destruction, fighting terrorism, ending tyranny -- and not oil. Although Bush advertises his religious faith, his good-guys-and-bad-guys rhetoric remains firmly in the moralistic tradition of U.S. foreign policy. Enemies (the Nazis, the Japanese, the commies, al Qaeda) represent evil. Wars become moral crusades -- to save the world for democracy, to establish universal peace. Missionary zeal is routine. Indeed, it buttressed the post-World War II U.S. enthusiasm for European unity.
Bush, it's said, created this rift -- and can end it by embracing cooperation or (involuntarily) retiring. There's something to this. Love him or hate him, Bush has a knack for offending critics. But the roots of disagreement, I suspect, go much deeper.
In his book "Of Paradise and Power," Robert Kagan argued that Americans and Europeans have divergent views of military power. Americans believe that only raw power can defeat evil, he wrote. Having controlled historical hatreds through the EU, Europeans prefer negotiation and compromise.
Not surprisingly, Europeans and Americans see Sept. 11, 2001, differently. "Americans felt this was the beginning of a war," says Roland Koch, a leading German politician. "This is not the feeling of Europeans." The terrorist threat is seen as "more or less far away." In the Pew poll, 57 percent of the French and 49 percent of Germans said Americans overreacted to terrorism. Even the Madrid bombing didn't much change opinion, Koch says.
Opposition to the United States also distracts from Europe's own problems. There's a growing collision between generous welfare benefits and poor economic growth. From 1996 to 2003, economic growth averaged 1.3 percent annually in Germany, 1.5 percent in Italy and 2.2 percent in France (the U.S. rate: 3.3 percent). Many EU countries have taxes between 40 percent and 50 percent of national income. Aging populations intensify upward pressures on benefits. From 2000 to 2020, the over-65 population in the 15 countries of the "old" EU is projected to rise 38 percent, while the number of people between 25 and 49 falls 14 percent. These economic tensions even affected the "enlargement" process. The 10 countries received membership on grudging terms: Economic aid and farm subsidies were limited; immigration rights were curtailed.
The truth is that Europe is too weak to lead and too proud to follow. It doesn't want to undertake costly new commitments. It's already got more than it can handle. In some ways, George Bush is a political godsend. His style and language offend so many Europeans -- he seems simplistic, trigger-happy, uneducated -- that opposition to him camouflages more basic conflicts. I've been repeatedly reminded here that Europe and America share too much (common cultures, political systems and economic interests) to drift apart. Maybe. But we're still drifting.
This article by Roger Cohen, on The New York Times' Week in Review of Sunday, May 2nd, explains the changing attitudes of the US towards "Europe at 25".
'WHOLE AND FREE' AT LAST
By ROGER COHEN
WASHINGTON — The expansion of the European Union this weekend from 15 members to 25, marking the formal end of Europe's postwar division, presents America with a choice. Should it embrace this new union that stretches to the Russian border or try to foster Europe's many fissures in order to divide and rule?
For the moment, there is scant official comment, but perhaps Europe should not take this personally. The United States has shifted paradigms: Europe is old news. Still, the less-than-benign neglect surrounding the European Union's addition of 10 members, 8 of them once part of the Soviet bloc, reflects a moment of great difficulty.
"The situation has never been so bad in 50 years," Gunter Burghardt, the union's ambassador in Washington, said in an interview. "It is a fact of life that America is a hegemonic power, but the question is how that power is used. We need to know that America is open to a confident relationship, not just with certain member states but with the E.U. as such."
This assessment reflects the enduring wounds of the Iraq war and the feeling among many European officials that an American administration has determined that its interests may lie more in division within Europe than in unity, more in forging improvised coalitions of the willing than in honoring a partnership of the wedded.
"This is an administration that simply does not care about Europe," said Philip H. Gordon, an expert on European affairs at the Brookings Institution. "I don't think they do anything solely to divide Europe, but if that's a consequence of an action, fine, because they don't want a counterweight to American power emerging."
In many respects, the new European Union is a potential major power. Its highly educated population of 455 million people is far larger than America's and it accounts for 28 percent of world trade.
But it is also divided between formerly Communist states in Central Europe that are enthusiastic about Atlanticism, and other countries, led by France, where dislike of President Bush's America is intense. This is the basic ideological split that America could choose to quicken or quiet.
America might, for example, try to use the sympathies of Poland, Slovakia or Hungary to undermine European unity and pursue its own goals, which may include the establishment of military bases in at least one of these countries, quiet attempts to assure that Europe's military identity remains muted or the obstruction of moves toward a more federal United States of Europe.
But Iraq has been a sobering experience, and American officials seem, for now, to have dropped talk of "old" and "new" Europe in favor of a rediscovered pragmatism.
"Whatever the differences over the past year, we know that a Europe that is open, at peace, broadly united and reaching out toward Turkey is in the American interest," one State Department official said.
The mention of Turkey is significant. Faced by the union's expansion, many Americans respond by asking why Turkey is not included.
The question, of course, reflects America's shift from a focus on uniting Europe to the overriding quest to change the Middle East. Admitting Turkey, a Muslim country, to a core institution of the West like the European Union would, in the American view, provide an important example of bridge building to the Islamic world. It is therefore vital, American officials argue, that the union decide at the end of this year to begin negotiations on membership.
But the impatience over bringing Turkey into Europe also betrays enduring American misunderstanding over the nature of the European Union. The immense complexity and cost of offering membership to a country as big and poor as Turkey are not widely appreciated here.
The extent of integration within the union, and the surrender of sovereignty involved, are blurry ideas in America, perhaps because the notion of such transnational merging is anathema to a country at or close to the apogee of its power. If America, Mexico and Canada were as integrated as Europe's states, it would be possible to have a Mexican in Ottawa setting United States interest rates. But that, of course, is unthinkable.
This European indivisibility, despite all the continent's difficulties, makes it inevitable that new members like Poland will tend to seek shared European positions, whatever their strong American sympathies.
At the same time, these institutional differences complicate trans-Atlantic understanding because a sovereign America run by an administration for which power is the coin of the realm faces European states that have put their faith in international institutions like the European Union or the United Nations or an international criminal court.
But a lot is at stake in trying to overcome the current crisis of confidence. Between them, the European Union and the United States account for 40 percent of world trade. They are each other's largest trading partners. Business transactions between them run at close to $3 billion a day.
This web of economic interests is so rich that it tends to compel a quest to resolve differences and harmonize regulations. The problem is that, in the strategic area, the common purpose that long drove America's broad support of European unity - delivering stability to a continent with a debilitating penchant for war - has been lost.
It is not delight but some dismay that is accompanying the arrival of the Europe "whole and free" sought by the elder George Bush and reiterated as an objective by President Bush, who said in Warsaw in June 2001 that "our goal is to erase the false lines that have divided Europe for too long."
Europe has worked hard on eliminating those divisions. But Mr. Burghardt believes recognition of this is scant in an America whose attention has moved elsewhere."The E.U. delivered on Nov. 9, that is the fall of the Berlin Wall," he said. "But we got hit by the geopolitical earthquake of Sept. 11." In other words, 9/11 trumped 11/9.
In his Warsaw speech three months before Sept. 11, President Bush also said something else: "When Europe and America are divided, history tends to tragedy."
The fate of a little grocery in Budapest is a symbol of anxious times as the EU grows.
By András Szántó on the Los Angeles Times, Sunday, May 2nd.
NEW YORK — The little grocery shop in the building where I grew up in Budapest closed Friday. A trivial event, perhaps, but one connected to momentous transformations in Hungary.
On Saturday, Hungary became one of the 10 new members of the European Union. The shop's owners couldn't afford the upgrades needed for "Euro-conformity," including separate freezers for meat and dairy and a new bathroom with a shower for the staff, whose size would have to double. So, they decided to shut it down.
Such are the trade-offs of EU membership, and they point to why so many Hungarians are uneasy about joining "Europe."
As every tourist knows, you can tell a lot about a country by visiting its food shops. The little grocery at No. 27 Veres Pálné utca has been a barometer of Hungary's evolution through the decade and a half since the fall of communism.
It opened before the big changes, during an early wave of private enterprise creation. The undercapitalized business pioneers of the late 1980s were shopkeepers and taxi drivers — people long on ambition and short on cash — who could get by on little more than sweat equity.
As trade opened up with the world after 1989, the shop saw many changes. Exotic fruits, unfamiliar cheeses and fine wines filled its shelves. One by one, familiar Hungarian brands were replaced by Western ones, or they reappeared in prettier packaging — and at higher prices.
In recent years, as its surrounding buildings were renovated from bullet-pocked half-ruins into elegant, pale-yellow apartment houses, the grocery shop became an anachronism. The storekeeper still knew you by name, and she would even make change for the new, high-tech parking meters lining the street. But the place seemed shabby and a little dirty, a remnant of a bygone world that Hungary, or at least the downtown street where the grocery was located, had nearly left behind.
Now it's over — or rather, it's finally beginning. The pale blue flag of the European Union has been ceremonially planted in the Budapest parliament adjacent to a Hungarian flag that has seldom stood alone in the last century — its serial cohabitation with the Austrian, German and Soviet flags marking the usually tragic compromises Hungary has made to prosper, or to survive.
Which is why you don't hear the sounds of rejoicing in the streets, even though the country is finally getting what it has yearned for: "a place at the table," "club membership in the civilized world," the chance "to take our place where we rightly belong" — to quote the clichés that for decades have echoed in the coffeehouses and the newspaper pages of Budapest.
There is something ironic about a nation that has struggled with mighty powers for so long, only to willingly throw itself into a multinational mega-state whose affairs are organized in capitals of other countries. When I asked a friend, who is a member of the Hungarian parliament, whether his colleagues were prepared for what it meant to follow directives from Brussels, he simply answered, "We have no idea."
The long-term consequences of the big bet on Europe will take years to play out. All signs indicate that although Eastern Europeans came late to the party, they are likely to profit from it. Meantime in Hungary, where you can still find street signs from the communist years crossed out with red paint, the changeover is the latest in a series of Tarzan-like leaps toward what, one can only hope, is a more promising future.
Until then, the transition to EU membership will boil down to little daily adjustments. They say the price of milk will plummet as Slovak dairy farmers flood the market, but the price of sugar may skyrocket as Hungarian producers go bust. You may look in vain for the chocolate bar that you've loved since you were a kid, but you'll be able to fly to London on a discount airline for the cost of a restaurant meal. And for those lamenting the loss of the little grocery in Veres Pálné utca, a shiny, clean, Euro-conforming supermarket is opening down the street.
(András Szántó is deputy director of the national arts journalism program at Columbia University)
This is an article on how the French perceive the American view of the enlargement... Mixed feelings. The basic idea is that Washington hopes the new members will make the EU more pro-american. Some neocons, though, believe that a bigger Europe will slowly drift away, and be more independent.
According to a European observer in Washington, the Americans "don't understand the European Union." It looks too much like NATO. Anyway, they are too busy dealing with Iraq and the coming presidential election.
Le MOnde - L'Amérique espère que l'Union à 25 penchera du côté de la "nouvelle Europe"
L'Amérique espère que l'Union à 25 penchera du côté de la "nouvelle Europe"
LE MONDE | 28.04.04 | 14h28
A Washington, on compte sur les dix Etats adhérents pour "atlanticiser" l'UE. A l'inverse, certains "néoconservateurs" craignent que celle-ci ne s'éloigne, avec le temps, des Etats-Unis.
Washington de notre correspondant
S'ils n'étaient pas accaparés par l'Irak, le Proche-Orient et l'élection présidentielle de novembre, les responsables américains s'intéresseraient sûrement à l'entrée de dix nouveaux pays dans l'Union européenne. Mais, dans le contexte des dernières semaines, l'événement a les plus grandes chances de passer inaperçu outre-Atlantique, même si la délégation de l'UE à Washington a été contactée par plusieurs magazines à la recherche d'informations sur la "nouvelle Europe".
Pourtant, vu de la capitale américaine, l'élargissement est favorable aux intérêts des Etats-Unis. "Traditionnellement, nous soutenons l'extension de l'UE", rappelle Philip Gordon, un ancien de l'administration Clinton qui dirige le Centre d'études sur les Etats-Unis et l'Europe à la Brookings Institution, un des grands think tanks (groupes de réflexion) de Washington. "Les nouveaux membres modernisent leurs économies sans que cela ne nous coûte rien, explique-t-il. Les mauvais côtés - fonds structurels, problèmes d'immigration - ne sont pas pour nous. Et nous pouvons espérer que l'élargissement aura pour effet d'"atlanticiser" l'UE." Jacqueline Grapin, qui préside l'Institut européen de Washington, confirme que les Etats-Unis "comptent beaucoup sur la "nouvelle Europe" pour garder l'UE dans le giron américain".
L'expression "nouvelle Europe" a été lancée par Donald Rumsfeld, secrétaire américain à la défense, en janvier 2003. Au plus fort de l'opposition de la France et de l'Allemagne aux visées de George Bush sur l'Irak, M. Rumsfeld avait qualifié ces deux nations de "vieille Europe" et fait l'éloge des pays d'Europe centrale et orientale, en instance d'intégration dans l'UE et qui, eux, soutenaient Washington. Jacques Chirac avait répondu que ces pays avaient "perdu une occasion de se taire" en prenant position pour les Etats-Unis.
Fin mai 2003, à Cracovie (Pologne), M. Bush s'était insurgé contre les propos du président français. Ces pays n'ont pas fait tout ce chemin, à travers occupations, dictatures et révoltes, pour s'entendre dire qu'ils devaient "choisir, maintenant, entre l'Europe et l'Amérique", avait déclaré le chef de la Maison Blanche.
Cinq des nouveaux membres - l'Estonie, la Lettonie, la Lituanie, la Slovaquie et la Slovénie - ont été accueillis en grande pompe, le 29 mars, à Washington, dans les rangs de l'OTAN, un mois avant leur intégration dans l'UE. La Hongrie, la Pologne et la République tchèque font partie de l'Alliance depuis 1999. Les Etats-Unis font déjà campagne pour que la Bulgarie et la Roumanie, les deux autres nouveaux partenaires de l'OTAN, soient admises, à leur tour, dans l'UE. "Pour les Américains, l'UE, c'est un peu comme l'OTAN. Ils ne comprennent pas ce que signifie l'Union européenne", estime Mme Grapin. Certains, pourtant, s'inquiètent. Marian Tupy, un économiste slovaque qui suit les questions européennes au Cato Institute, fondation ultralibérale, raille les néoconservateurs de l'American Enterprise Institute, pour qui, dit-il, "tout ce qui renforce l'Europe est mauvais pour l'Amérique". En fait, les avis sont partagés. Certains font le pari que, plus l'UE s'étend, moins elle s'approfondit, et que cela complique la formation d'un contrepoids politique à la puissance américaine. D'autres estiment, au contraire, que l'élargissement ne peut qu'accroître la puissance européenne, et que les nouveaux adhérents, pour atlantistes qu'ils soient aujourd'hui, s'éloigneront inévitablement, avec le temps, de Washington.
Aux yeux de Jacqueline Grapin, c'est là une "position intellectuelle". Pour le moment, la réalité est que les pays d'Europe centrale et orientale "sont proches des Etats-Unis" et comptent sur eux pour leur sécurité, face à une Russie dont ils ont peur. Ils n'entreront donc jamais dans une stratégie qui aurait pour effet d'affaiblir l'Amérique. Aussi un responsable du département d'Etat peut-il affirmer, dans un entretien officieux, que les Etats-Unis considèrent l'Union européenne élargie comme leur "partenaire primaire" et n'ont "pas le moindre désaccord avec son existence"...
"Plus d'Europe ne signifie pas moins d'Etats-Unis", a assuré Anthony Wayne, un des adjoints du secrétaire d'Etat, dans un discours prononcé à Graz (Autriche), le 2 avril, au sujet de l'élargissement. Ce jugement, pourtant, ne se vérifie pas à 100 %. Ainsi, Washington s'est efforcé d'obtenir des nouveaux membres qu'ils signent, au préalable, des accords afin d'exempter les Américains de poursuites éventuelles devant la Cour pénale internationale (CPI). L'échec a été complet. Plus facile : l'application par ces pays du tarif extérieur commun et de la politique agricole commune aura des conséquences pour les exportateurs américains, qui demandent des compensations à l'UE. Ils devraient les obtenir.
Patrick Jarreau
• ARTICLE PARU DANS L'EDITION DU 29.04.04