Continent by Default

The European Union and the Demise of Regional Order

Anne Marie Le Gloannec

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781501716676
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Continent by Default, Anne Marie Le Gloannec, a distinguished analyst of contemporary Europe, considers the European Union as a geopolitical project. This book offers a comprehensive narrative of how the European Union came to organize the continent, first by default through enlargement and in a more proactive, innovative, but not always successful way. The EU was not conceived as a foreign-policy actor, she says, and the Union was an innocent on questions of geopolitics. For readers who may wonder how the EU arrived at Brexit, the invasion of Ukraine, and the refugee crisis, Le Gloannec ties events to the EU's long-term failure to think in politically strategic terms.

Le Gloannec takes readers through the process by which, under the security umbrella of the United States, the European Commission engineered a new way for states and societies to interact. Continent by Default shows the Commission domesticated international relations and promoted peace by including new members—enlargement was the most significant tool the EU used from its inception to organize the continent, but the EU also tied itself to its regional neighbors through various programs that too often gave those neighbors the advantage. As Continent by Default makes clear, the EU cannot devise strategy because foreign policy remains the privilege of national governments. It is a geopolitical actor without geopolitical means.

1

In the Beginning Was Enlargement

Central Europe cannot … then be defined and determined by political frontiers (which are inauthentic, always imposed by invasions, conquests, and occupations), but by the great common situations that reassemble peoples, regroup them in ever new ways along the imaginary and ever-changing boundaries that mark a realm inhabited by the same memories, the same problems and conflicts, the same common tradition.

—Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe”

No sooner was the Rome Treaty signed and ratified than neighboring governments knocked on the door of the newborn community. While all along distrusting the endeavor and skeptical of its success, the British government nonetheless turned to the incipient European Economic Community (EEC) and in 1958 offered to conclude a free trade agreement. The United Kingdom (UK) applied to join in 1961, and, together with Ireland and Denmark, it became a member in 1973. This was the first of a series of enlargements. The history of the Community is the history of enlargement. Paradoxically though, the European Community (EC), later the European Union (EU), hardly ever took the initiative to enlarge. It was not a policy. This was not its policy. The EU did not have any proactive policy of enlargement till the turn of the millennium. Throughout most of its existence, applications have been mostly considered with concern and even disquietude, at least on the part of certain member states. Rather than a sect of proselytes, the EC/EU is more akin to a club, to which it has often been compared, where potential new members have to show their credentials in order to join.

What explained the drive of the neighbors? Why did they want to join the EC/EU? What benefits did they hope to reap? And what response did they receive? If enlargement was a possibility from the beginning, it changed in nature over the decades, from a promise to include like-minded democracies and market economies to an incremental and almost haphazard strategy designed to embed democracy, the rule of law, and the rights of minorities, to prop up market economies, and to stabilize neighboring countries in transition—in other words, to organize the continent. The neighbors’ reasons for wanting to join the long-attractive and powerful Community and Union, the change in the meanings, aims, and significance of enlargement, and the creation of instruments to further the aims of enlargement will be examined in this chapter. The limits inherent in an improvised policy will be considered in the next.

Pressures from the Neighborhood

While past empires often sought to expand their frontiers, and conquer neighboring countries, the pressure to enlarge the Community or Union never originated from its midst. Rather, pressure arose from its environs. The Community’s or the Union’s neighbors sought to join it, and new neighbors followed suit relentlessly.

In the beginning, neighbors sought or obtained only association, a procedure less constraining than membership, which implied shared laws and policies. The British government first toyed with the idea of a free trade agreement. In 1959, Greece and Turkey applied for associate membership, although the agreements signed with Greece in 1961 and with Turkey two years later gave these two countries the prospect of becoming full members.1 In 1961, the UK applied to join the EEC, prompting Ireland, Denmark, and Norway to follow suit—though de Gaulle’s veto delayed applications and negotiations—while Sweden, Finland, Austria, Switzerland, and Spain sought associate membership. This triggered the first of several waves of enlargements, with the UK, Ireland, and Denmark joining the original six members in 1973, followed by a second wave in 1981–1986 including Greece, and later Portugal and Spain, and a third wave in 1995, with Austria, Finland, and Sweden as new members. The latest, fourth round saw Union membership leaping from fifteen to twenty-seven, between 2004 and 2007, and to twenty-eight members in 2013.2 Very few among the neighbors resisted or opposed joining; Norway, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein are notable exceptions. Most neighboring countries wanted to join, and there were many reasons, material and intangible, economic, political, and cultural, none of which alone could explain the call for enlargement (Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005b).

A Myth and Its Facets

The EC/EU, or rather “Europe,” provided a myth that exerted a powerful spell over most of its neighbors. At first glance, the EU may not resonate as a myth, mired as it currently is in financial turmoil, economic sluggishness, demographic and geopolitical woes, and dwarfed by the rising power of Asia and the emergence of other models of development. The United States, though weakened compared to its status as the sole superpower at the turn of the millennium, still captured the imagination and minds of young people, by offering a powerful narrative of freedom and the pursuit of happiness. Reduced to a bureaucratic acronym, the EU seemed to offer laws and regulations rather than the promise of shaping one’s destiny. Yet it has long been synonymous with peace and stability, the reason the Community was created in the first place, and for decades it also provided prosperity, although this has not been turned into a powerful narrative by successive generations in power—if it is still even possible to produce a narrative in a fragmented and globalized world. It may be too late to work on a narrative, as decision makers are engrossed in the travails of stabilizing the Eurozone, fighting terrorism inside and outside Europe, and facing Russia’s hybrid war in the East, and Euroskepticism and populism are gripping citizens, who are turning their back on an EU that can no longer deliver prosperity and security.

One should not forget, however, that for a while the EC/EU offered Southern, Central, and Eastern European elites and citizens a resonating myth. The EC/EU was Europe, and Europe meant the West, a symbol of modernity and modernization, of freedom and democracy. It exerted attraction. There is nothing new about attraction. Empires and world cities alike have always exerted a powerful attraction on their peripheries. The populations of subjugated provinces have been attracted by the metropolis and its glory, by its lifestyle and the promises it held, material and intangible. Rome and Constantinople, Tenochtitlan and Cuzco, Madrid, Vienna, London, or Paris, and, of course, the New World and maybe the new Asian world, all offered—and offer—the promise of a better life at the price of acculturation and sometimes submission. In this respect, the EU has been attractive for a long time, offering a solid infrastructure, good education and health, and being on the whole democratic, relatively transparent, probably less corrupt, and certainly less arbitrary than other regions in the world, in spite of its limited access to immigrants, and in spite of robust anti-immigration and xenophobic parties in European societies.

Since the early days of the Community, people in neighboring countries who do not enjoy the same liberties and standards as people inside the EC/EU have been attracted. Various transnational channels conveyed this appeal. Immigration, for instance, played a role, spreading habits and ideas in a Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Polish, or Yugoslav diaspora in France, Germany, or Austria, ranging from members of the lower middle class, who had come to seek a better living, to dissenters, who had fled repression. Tourism opened up countries and societies, such as Franco’s Spain and Tito’s Yugoslavia in the 1960s and later. However, while there is nothing new about attracting individuals, attracting countries is another story, though individuals played a role in funneling ideas and aspirations back to their countries of origin. Certainly, in the past, provinces joined empires or states, and federations emerged. Yet the way in which the EC/EU has come to absorb not immigrants but new states is remarkable.

To those who fled their countries and to those who remained, the EC/EU offered an alternative to exhausted myths and vanishing empires; it offered a new home to those who sought refuge from the defunct Soviet empire. The European dissidents from Central Europe, more than Eastern Europeans, brought down communist regimes in the name of Europe. The “return to Europe,” the Europe to which they felt attached, as Milan Kundera forcefully reminded us in the early 1980s, was a driving force. Central European intellectuals claimed to have nourished European culture and to have been nourished by it. Europe’s identity rested upon its culture, “which became the expression of the supreme values by which European humanity understood itself, defined itself, identified itself as European” (Kundera 1983, 1984). In many ways, “going back to Europe” was, for Central Europeans and for Southern Europeans as well, part of a historical process, a break with the recent past and the completion of a longer-term evolution. The liberals who fought against Franco’s domination invoked their Europeismo. For many, south and east of Europe, being European was a matter of fact: Wir sind Europa—We Are Europe—became the motto of the Austrian government when campaigning to join the Union. In other words, Europe belonged to all Europeans, and all were legitimately entitled to partake in the European construction. Borders that were perceived to be artificial and unjust, running through territories formerly belonging to the same cultural areas and organic economic units, were to be erased. If not a myth to all those who brought down communism, the return to Europe was at least a return to a normalcy that had been forcefully and arbitrarily interrupted.

In other words, the EC/EU served as a means to escape spent models. Some of the economies in the countries abutting the EC/EU were losing steam, and this led their leaders to look for new impulses and ideas. Portugal and Spain started knocking on the door of the Community well before the fall of their respective authoritarian regimes, when it dawned on their elites that they had outlived their time. In the 1960s, Franco tried to open up the Spanish economy to foreign investors and industrialists but needed the EC’s support lest the gap between Spain and Europe deepen (Tsoukalis 1981: 76). Though more internationalized, the Portuguese economy was mainly engaged in trading with its by then unruly overseas empire, and it lacked an industrial base, technology, and know-how, though the last government of predemocratic Portugal included modernizers and Europeanists alike (Sampedro and Payno 1983: 132–133). In both cases, a modest degree of modernization and liberalization had the unexpected consequence of further delegitimizing both regimes, which implicitly recognized the superiority of the dominant European model.

Though certainly not looking for new models, the British economy experienced lower growth rates and monetary crises linked to a “stop-and-go policy” of stimulating the economy abruptly followed by a tightening of demand. Even countries that had enjoyed strong economic growth in the past hesitated for a while, before finally choosing to join in a time of crisis: for instance, Sweden in 1992. Of course, Sweden was not Portugal, and though battered, the Swedish model was not to be discarded. Iceland also began to negotiate with the EU after the monetary and economic meltdown of 2008, before withdrawing its candidacy in 2015 (Mattli 1999; Gussarsson 2004). Those who advocated membership in the EU were not always necessarily looking for a new paradigm, but sometimes for an anchor, a support, to rescue their own model, though poorer countries were indeed seeking orientation and guidance, new standards and new blueprints. The latter group included the countries of the southern rim as well as the Central and Eastern European states.

In many respects, there were differences between the Southern European states and the Central and Eastern ones. Not only were the Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) trying to gain access to a by then 350-million-consumer-strong market, but they were also looking for technology and credit—as the prior communist regimes had been doing in the 1970s and 1980s—and they were keen to obtain foreign investments and support. On the ruins of a wrecked system, they were also looking for templates, recipes, and advice in a more radical way than the Southern European countries had twenty years earlier. After all, Franco’s Spain had started opening up to industrialization in the 1960s, and Greece had preserved many of its institutions and practices during the seven years when the junta ruled (1967–1974). Fifty years of communism, on the other hand, had erased most of these practical ideas. Certainly, some of those who helped to overthrow communism yearned for a “third way,” a new model, neither communism nor capitalism. Yet the idea of a third way had an unpleasant historical aftertaste, reminiscent of postwar experiments, which the Soviet regime had rapidly manipulated and destroyed in order to impose communist rule. Most in Central and Eastern Europe did not want to innovate, but rather preferred shortcuts toward democracy, the rule of law, and the market economy. The EU and its member states offered the knowledge and competence they sought, the templates and blueprints they needed, in short, the help required to overcome decades of straying from and trailing behind Western Europe and the Western world.

The countries that shrugged off authoritarian and communist regimes were looking then for new standards, that is, not only standards of living but those very principles that are the hallmarks of democracy and the rule of law, which would serve as guidance toward a better life, just as the Greeks, the Portuguese, and the Spanish had been seeking to replace “habits rooted in the past which are impeding rationalization of the economy … [and] also lead to introversion and chaos” (Sampedro and Payno 1983: 207). Standards did not amount to material benefits alone, but also to the political, economic, and moral prerequisites that underpin them, which Europe, and the EU, were supposed to embody—in short, modernization, or more specifically democratic modernization.

The Specter of Isolation

Had these countries surrounding the EC/EU stayed away, they would have suffered from what economists call negative externalities. An emerging common market and even more so a trading block, such as the Single Market, with elaborate standards and rules, spells losses for outsiders who cannot access it. It also results in investment diversion as investors, attracted by the bigger, regulated market, shun the outsiders, especially the smaller ones (e.g., Mattli 1999; Gros and Steinherr 2004). The absence of membership, and the existence of trade barriers of all sorts, hamper trade relations between outsiders and insiders, while institutionalized relations through membership facilitate them by reducing transfer costs, aligning standards and procedures, and increasing trust. Economists speak of the “gravitational pull” of a trade bloc, which attracts neighboring trade partners, gravitation being a function of size and proximity (Gros and Steinherr 2004; Emerson and Noutcheva 2004).

Indeed, it was often “the fear of being excluded from an economically dynamic core” that prompted outsiders in Europe to seek membership in the EC/EU (Gehler 2004: 141). Most applicants dreaded being relegated to an economic backwater if they did not join. At the end of the fifties, the Foreign Office warned the British government against trade diversion, and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), which the UK had called into existence in 1960 to counter the EC, was not sufficient for London to avoid joining the latter (Ludlow 1997). Before enlargement, Spain, Portugal, and Greece depended on the Community for over 50 percent of their exports (Sampedro and Payno 1983). The Danes, Greeks, and Austrians depended primarily on the German market, while the Irish, Portuguese, and Swedish economies were too tightly intertwined with Britain’s economy not to follow the latter’s lead when London applied for membership.3 With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Soviet Union, the CEECs severed their ties to the latter and quickly reoriented their trade to Western Europe, which posted large trade surpluses with them (Gower 1999: 6–7). The completion of the Single Market, due by 1992, enticed a number of countries to join the EU: an unprecedented number of applications were put on the table before the fall of the Wall. While most EFTA members and smaller states south and east of Europe chose to join the EU, only the richer neighbors that had a specific added value to defend, whether an economic niche (fisheries, oil and gas, finance) or a political one (status as a neutral country, a role as an international mediator or facilitator), opted for tailor-made elaborate agreements, multilateral ones, such as the European Economic Area (EEA), or bilateral ones, to adopt the Community’s rules and standards and access the Single Market while retaining some independence.4

For most, staying outside would also have meant strategic isolation. Without the Community, it was feared that London would lose its significance in the eyes of American administrations, which wanted Britain to bear upon the Community (Kaiser 2004: 17; see chapter 2 below). A founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a member of the Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), now the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and a recipient of Marshall aid, Portugal was more internationalized than Spain. Yet it was geopolitically and economically less relevant, and it was losing its grip on its waning empire. Driven out of Africa, it had no place to turn to but Europe. Spain under Franco was isolated, and Greece’s military junta was shunned. One of the main concerns that prompted the new democratic government in Athens to apply for membership, in 1975, was what it considered a shifting balance of power in the eastern Mediterranean following the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus in 1974, and compounding the seven years of isolation that the West had imposed upon the military junta. Resentment vis-à-vis the United States and US-led NATO, both deemed to have favored Ankara instead of Athens, the perceived necessity to counterbalance the United States and Turkey, and the heavy-handed interference of the former and the m...

Table of contents

• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Geopolitics without Power Politics
• 1. In the Beginning Was Enlargement
• 2. The Limits of Enlargement: The End of Certainties
• 3. Peace, War, and Confetti: An Elusive Security Policy
• 4. Boundaries and Borderlands: From Inside Out?
• 5. A Crisis in the Making? The Refugee Crisis
• 6. Competitive Decadence? Russia and the EU
• Conclusion: Can the EU Survive in a Postliberal World?
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography

• Index