The European Community

A Superpower in the Making

Johan Galtung

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000371123
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

This book, first published in 1973, analyses the European Community in a global perspective. It asks and answers two main questions: what does the European Community mean to the masses of the world, and what does it mean to the world community in general? Most critical studies of the EC were made from an internal point of view, and this book is rare in having an external perspective. The author discussed the EC with diverse audiences in 16 countries, and his analyses are invaluable in putting the European project in an international context.

Chapter 1
The background

These years and months, every week and every day, a new superpower is gradually taking shape in Western Europe: the European Community (EC). This is a long and problematic process. Many would not agree that extension and deepening the Community inevitably will lead to a superstate, and that such a superstate is bound sooner or later to end up as a superpower — in the present world, with its present structure and the present leadership. But people have become so overexposed to the US and Soviet giants that it took them a long time before they started taking a serious look at China, and some also at Japan. Moreover, the focus has often been on the weaknesses of the European Community, e.g. its 1965-66 deadlock when it was boycotted by France after the June 30 crisis, rather than on its strengths. What has been well publicized are failures to come to some agreements, rather than the smooth day-to-day workings of the machinery: journalism focusses on drama rather than on permanence. More recently, the focus has been on the problems of candidate countries rather than on the countries that are already in — with lengthy lists of arguments pro and con from the view of the present, never debating seriously what the future role of the Community may be.

The significance of this can hardly be overstated. Candidate countries are discussing problems which member countries have already been through, since they have to join on the basis of the Paris and Rome Treaties, particularly on the treaty establishing the European Common Market. In addition they have to accept the implementations of these treaties in the practice of the European Community — where for instance mainly in the field of agriculture, and in the year 1970 alone, the Commission put into force 2,448 regulations.¹ That this leads to questions of adjustments to an existing reality is obvious: and these questions are the major subjects of at last that part of the negotiations which reaches the public. But the EC itself has a considerably more forward-looking focus, as evidenced in the communique from the Hague summit meeting of 1-2 December 1969, the meetings of foreign ministers, and those higher up, and above all the Davignon and Werner Plans.²

This means that the candidate countries and their publics may now be going through a learning process where over-emphasis on adjustment details is combined with under-emphasis on underlying principles and pro-spectives. Factions will emerge in the candidate countries, not necessarily along traditional party lines; and they will still be interested in proving themselves right relative to the debate that has gone on. Adherents will point out that adjustment was more easy, antagonists that it was less easy — which will give some time dimension to the imprint these countries have so far received. But almost nowhere are there raised such basic problems as the future role of the EC in the total world community, its adjustment to the world as a whole and the world to it — problems that may be of considerably more consequence for present and future member states than the adjustment of joining nations to the EC and the EC to them.

This essay is concerned with the future world role of the EC. We shall base ourselves on what has happened up to now, on world trends at present and in the near future, and on (hopefully educated) guesses about the future.

The thesis is that a new superpower is emerging. In a stronger version, the thesis is that the European Community is an effort to recreate:

• 1) a Eurocentric world, a world with its center in Europe,
• 2) a unicentric Europe, a Europe with its center in the West.

Now, this is in fact more or less how the world looked for a long period, perhaps from the Great Discoveries, or at least from the beginning of Western colonization till around the end of World War II. Thus, our thesis could also be formulated as saying that the Community is an effort to turn history backwards, only adding a dimension of modern technology.

We say ‘effort’, because we think it will only succeed in the short run. It is a logical effort, easy to explain and foresee with elementary knowledge of Western European history and some social theroy. The Community is nevertheless a counter-historical approach, an effort to run against more basic world processes between and with nations. Since Western Europe is strong, it will take years, even decades of expansion before counterforces become sufficiently strong and the new giant suffers the fate of all giants before it.

What happened around 1945 that the European Community can be considered an effort to undo? Evidently, Hitler’s Third Reich was defeated by the mightiest military alliance the world had ever seen. But that was not basic. The world has seen very, very many wars among European powers — three of them with Germany in three generations. By definition, wars among European powers have been the most ‘important’ wars, if the most important wars are those fought by the most important powers. In that sense, the war fought against Hitler was a 19th century war a century delayed, fought in the spirit of that utterly 19th century figure, Winston Churchill. It was an intra-European tribal warfare between nation-states;³ it was not a 20th century war of national liberation from colonialism or a people’s war of liberation from exploitation, foreign and domestic. Although the war against Hitler turned out differently in its consequences, it was essentially a horizontal war between sovereign nations. It was a classical war, not a class war, but also a war mobilizing the total nation on either side.

What made this war different was its technology and its scale. Never before had the world seen so much technology mobilized in a war that increasingly took the shape of genocide on both sides: genocide inside the conquered territories justified by the ideology of Nazism, and genocide across the fronts, justified by the ideology of war. The genocide committed by the losing party, for instance with gas, is still generally held to be much more a crime against humanity than the genocide committed by the winning party, for instance by saturation bombing. Modern technology made depth and extension of warfare possible on a scale hitherto undreamt of. But the structure of the war was the old one.

Nor was participation by itself, of the powerful periphery of Europe —the United States and the Soviet Union — anything new; both had participated in World War I. But this time the impact of periphery participation was different; it was decisive. Europe was overrun, Britain alone could at most defend herself but not defeat the Axis powers. The entry of the Soviet Union and the United States in 1941, challenged into the war by Germany and Japan respectively, spelt defeat not only for Germany, but also for Europe. Europe, from Brest (in Bretagne) to Brest (Litovsk) was no longer able to handle her own affairs. In 1945 victors and vanquished alike were exhausted, run-down, bankrupt — the populations cold and hungry, walking along the roads, picking in the ruins. There were three war machines left: US, UK, and USSR; all the others were defeated or reduced to small units trained and stationed abroad, partisan, maquis, and other resistance forces, and so on. The true victors were the US and the USSR; even the UK was worn out.⁴

Europe as such was defeated by the war, not only Germany. But there were important variations. In Western Europe, the regimes were still by and large legitimate in the eyes of the population: Nazi Germany had ruled through quisling governments, the occupied nations had resisted (with France as a borderline case with much collaboration), and the powers of the state had taken refuge in London. But in Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia), many regimes were made Hitler’s allies, obviating any need for puppet governments; and large parts of the nations had cooperated. Whereas Western Europe was politically and socially intact but economically devastated when the power defined as legitimate returned, Eastern Europe was in chaos both politically and economically.

In a sense, this corresponded well to the capabilities of the supreme victors. The victor in the West, the United States, had fought with capital and technology more than with overriding, explicit political faith, and the war had served as a stimulus to either. The US was well fit to help the sagging economies of Western Europe, particularly since there was no socio-political issue with the regimes. In fact, the harmony and understanding were of such a nature and at such a level that it became natural for the US also to back up those regimes against the threat from forces that wanted basic social change, particularly the Communist parties. Economic reconstruction after the war therefore took the form of support to the regimes and the socio-economic structure they represented, not only the form of improving the standard of living of the population and a reconstruction of the productive forces after the war. The ‘fight against Communism’ was equally important.

On the other hand, there was the victor in the East, the Soviet Union. She had fought with her own and others’ resources but also with a faith and with an ideological dimension reinforcing the hatred most Soviet citizens felt towards the Nazi intruder. Right after the war the Soviet Union was not in a position to offer economic assistance: on the contrary, she capitalized on the Nazi collaboration of Eastern Europe to exact war reparations of considerable magnitude. At the same time, the USSR had strong and clear ideas about political reconstruction, as clear as those the US had about economic reconstruction. Not only the Eastern European regimes, but the entire structure was considered responsible for the collaboration: the only answer was a revolution. Just as economic reconstruction in the West took the form of US investment and penetration at the top of the economic structure, socio-political reconstruction in the East took the form of a Soviet political investment with a very heavy military-political penetration at the top of these societies. Both the US and the USSR did so with a double motivation of protecting themselves and protecting vs building the type of regimes they considered best for other peoples, i.e. regimes similar to their own. Unfortunately, in the eyes of the West social construction is seen as ‘ideological’ and economic reconstruction as ‘technological’ — where both are, of course, profoundly political.

Thus, the Eurocentric pre-war world received its first blow, not only because all of Europe was defeated, but because the US and the USSR each reconstructed ‘their’ (as defined by the Tehran and Yalta agreements) parts in their own image — an image strengthened tremendously by the victory over the enemy. Europe became not only bicentric, but bicentric with one center in Washington and one in Moscow: in other words, with centers located outside itself. This is tantamount to colonization. But it was a colonization in two empires, and almost immediately the two parts became hostile to each other: Europe was not only bicentric, it became bipolar, crystallizing militarily into the NATO and the Warsaw Treaty Organization.⁵

Why? In retrospect probably for one simple reason: the changing hegemony over Eastern Europe. Western Europe had been used to exercising this privilege (although mainly through Germany) — it was now taken over by Moscow. This was interpreted in the West as an expression of the greed for power in the USSR in general and Stalin in particular —with no reference to the political bankruptcy that most of Eastern Europe had gone through, with illegitimate regimes almost everywhere. Actually, the only population that as such had really resisted German occupation was found in Yugoslavia, and even there in a fragmented and problematic way. The legitimacy of the postwar Tito regime was therefore genuine, not dependent on the outside, as clearly evidenced in June 1948. Poland might have become a second exception if her resistance had not been crushed in August 1944.

With the exception of Czechoslovakia, Eastern Europe had socioeconomic systems lagging far behind with their feudal and pre-capitalistic structures. There was a construction job to be done, and it was in Moscow’s self-interest that the job be done under Soviet supervision, often also by them. There was also an economic reconstruction job to be done in Western Europe, and it was in the interest of the US that it be done by the US. Thus, World War II provided the occasion for both of them to expand and invest and imprint their economic message and structure on either part of Europe through the Marshall Aid and the OEEC, and through the Communist parties.

In 1945 the Eurocentric world suffered another crack of even greater significance: the beginning of the end of colonialism. World War I had seen the disruption of two European empires, the German (in Africa and the Far East) and the Turkish Ottoman Empire (in the Arab world). (Spain had been the first to lose hers; most of the Latin American colonies in the 1810-1825 wars, and Cuba and the Philippines in the wars with the US around the turn of the century.) But Germany re-established some type of neo-colonial empire in Eastern Europe before World War II, and during that had proceeded towards complete colonization, exposing Eastern Europe to the type of treatment that the Red Indians had been exposed to in the Americas, or the victims of e.g. Belgian, Dutch, French, and British colonialism elsewhere — only not so well publicized. Extermination, terror, fragmentation, and extreme division of labor were basic formulas.

Six Western European powers lost their colonies in the period subsequent to the 1945 defeat: Germany (in Eastern Europe), France, Italy, Belgium (including Luxembourg), Netherlands — and Britain. Of these, the first five (or six, if we include that appendix to Belgium called Luxembourg) became the founding members of the European Community, and the last one, Britain, the leading candidate country. This leads to one basic formula for understanding the Community: ‘take five broken empires, add the sixth one later, and make one big neocolonial empire out of it all’. The accuracy of this little recipe will be explored in chapters 5-9. Here we shall only point out that Spain (whose decline as a colonial power had come a century and a half ago), Turkey (who had had her eclipse only one world war earlier), and Portugal (always behind in any development, also in losing colonies) were not included. They did not fit that formula, nor did their internal regimes fit the basic EC assumption of structural similarity either. The consequences of this will be discussed in chapter 2.

In conclusion: the world was no longer ruled from rivalling powers in Europe. The colonial powers had lost or were rapidly losing their empires at the same time as Europe itself was increasingly being ruled from the two new centers, Washington and Moscow. And all this in the short span of a decade or two! Anyone who does not believe that rapid world changes can take place should consider this. But one could also respond with two very forceful arguments: it took a major social catastrophe, a world war, to do it. And, even so, the social inertia in the world is so deep-rooted that regeneration efforts came into being very quickly — which is precisely our thesis about the European Community. Europe cannot be split into two parts dominated from the former periphery, and Western Europe cannot lose her traditional hold both on Eastern Europe and on the Third World without throwing aside age-old rivalries in an effort to regenerate old power.⁶

Nevertheless, the changes were real, and the humiliation of classical Europe thorough. This was concealed by the cold war, by bicentrism translated into a highly dangerous but also carefully balanced bipolarity. Both Europes were invited to play a new role, as second in command on either side — and with high probability of being the first to be sacrificed should the cold war become hot. This was certainly far from the role Western Europe was used to playing in the world. That some rethinking and reorganization took place to negate some of this atimia (loss of status)⁷ is almost unnecessary to explain — the burden of proof rests on whoever suggests that the countries in Europe should have acquiesced forever to the role as pawns in a US-Soviet system, playing their roles in pax americana or pax sovietica respectively, increasingly turning into a joint pax condominica.⁸

So our interpretation of the European Common Market, as one of the Communities was once called, is that it is considerably more than a ‘market’: it is a struggle for power, for world power for Western Europe. It is also considerably less than ‘European’: it is only for those powers in Western Europe that meet certain requirements, above all recent loss of empires and/or NATO membership (see chapters 2 and 8). It is an effort to make the world Eurocentric and to locate the center of Europe in the West, even with an explicit peace philosophy, with a pax bruxellana (chapter 9) in mind. But within these limitations it is ‘common’, common for those who meet the bill. And that bill is written in power units more than in economic units alone. Hence an analysis of power is indispensable to understanding the European Community, and such an analysis will be presented in chapter 3 below. First let us have a brief look at some of the characteristics of the EC, as it has developed, as it appears today, and with a view to some of its prospects for the future.

Chapter 2
The European Community: A brief survey

The West German Chancellor, Willy Brandt, expressed in a press conference 8 October 1971¹ in very simple form some of the basic strategy in the growth of the European Community:

Once the matter of entry has been dealt with, the way will be open for further progress towards a currency and economic union, and for closer cooperation in foreign policy.

The membership issue concerns what in EC language is called extension, and in social science parlance is called the domain of this unification ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Chapter 1. The background
• Chapter 2. The European Community: A brief survey
• Chapter 3. On power in general
• Chapter 4. The resource power of the European Community
• Chapter 5. The structural power of the European Community
• Chapter 6. The European Community and the Third World countries
• Chapter 7. The European Community and the socialist countries
• Chapter 8. The military aspect
• Chapter 9. Pax Bruxellana: The European superpower
• Chapter 10. Beyond the European Community
• Epilogue: After the Referenda in Norway and Denmark
• Notes