Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century

Mark Leonard

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780007398393
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: International Business
• Index: Business

CHAPTER 1
Europe’s Invisible Hand

In the beginning there was no future, only the recent past. Blood-drenched, genocidal, and everywhere. The bodies had piled up with each new vision of European unity: 184,000 in the Franco-Prussian War, 8 million in the First World War, 40 million in the Second World War.¹ Grand plans and charisma had almost extinguished a continent. It needed a miracle to recover, but Europe could not bring itself to believe in romantic leadership again. With six words the French poet Paul Valéry captured the European condition in 1945: ‘We hope vaguely, we dread precisely.’²

That is why Europe’s epic escape from history was guided not by the larger-than-life heroes of the war – people like Churchill or De Gaulle, who inspired a generation to fight – but by a group of almost anonymous technocrats who were dedicated to taking the gun out of Europe’s future. The key figure was Jean Monnet, a small, unprepossessing, stocky French official, who reminded the journalist Anthony Sampson unavoidably of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot.

Monnet’s contribution was a vision of how not to have a vision. He took Valéry’s observation and turned it into a dictum for the organization of Europe. He let the fear of conflict drive European unity and left its goal vague, allowing everyone to feel that Europe was going their way. To this day, Europe is a journey with no final destination, a political system that shies away from the grand plans and concrete certainties that define American politics. Its lack of vision is the key to its strength.

Monnet’s first principle was to avoid blueprints. The ‘Schuman Declaration’, which the French and the Germans signed to launch the European project in 1950, makes the lack of plans a cardinal principle: ‘Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single general plan. It will be built through concrete achievements, which first create a de facto solidarity.’³ Monnet had worked in the disastrous League of Nations after the First World War and understood the need to start with concrete forms of co-operation rather than an illusory idea of the international community. He tried to bind France and Germany together by uniting the production of coal and steel: the industries that had built the weapons of war would now provide the foundations for peace. Monnet’s tactic was always to focus on technical details rather than the big political questions that attract headlines. He tried to tackle contentious issues by breaking them down into component parts – it is a lot easier to get agreement on coal and steel tariffs than war and peace. And once the governments of France and Germany were sucked into endless negotiations, they were less likely to go to war.

The best way to change the facts on the ground was through gradual change – what Monnet called engrenage. Each agreement to co-operate at a European level would lead inexorably to another agreement that deepened European integration. Once Europe’s leaders had agreed to remove tariffs, they focused on non-tariff barriers such as regulations, health and safety standards, and qualifications. When many of the non-tariff barriers had been addressed by the creation of a single market, Europe’s leaders focused on the single currency. Wider and wider groups of politicians and civil servants now had a stake in European integration. Thousands of meetings took place between officials from different governments, which meant, quite simply, that they got to know each other very well. They would therefore think spontaneously of other things they could do together.

Monnet’s bizarre working practices set a pattern that the European Union’s workings would follow. Stanley Cleveland, one of Monnet’s disciples, describes his method:

Whenever Monnet attacked a new problem he would gather a bunch of people around him…He would begin a sort of non-stop Kaffeeklatsch. It could go on sometimes for a period of one or two weeks – hours and hours a day…Monnet would remain silent, occasionally provoking reaction, but not saying much…Then gradually, as the conversation developed – and it often took several days or even a week before this happened – he began venturing a little statement of his own.⁴

Monnet would start with a very simple statement, almost a slogan, to see how his companions reacted. He would then expose a little more of his thinking, turning the slogan into a few sentences and then a couple of paragraphs. As his companions objected and told him what was wrong with what he said, he would reformulate his ideas until they were acceptable to everyone in the discussion. Monnet would produce up to thirty drafts of a memorandum, speech, or proposal. The purpose of this constant iteration is identical with the purpose of the EU’s current never-ending process of policy formulation, negotiation, and review: to remove any and all conflicts or obstacles around an issue. The product would be an outward simplicity for a complex idea.

What Monnet created was a machine of political alchemy. Each country would follow its national interest, but once the different national interests were put into the black box of European integration, a European project would emerge at the other end. For the Benelux countries, the Second World War had drastically exposed their vulnerability to the big powers in Europe, so they needed to find a way of reining in France and Germany; but also, as small European powers, their only real prospect of exercising influence was through some kind of unified inter-state system. For Germany, and also to an extent Italy, the major goal was political rehabilitation from their position as pariah states. Membership of a European community also represented a buttress against the threat from the East, and an opportunity to get rid of the allied market restrictions that prevented the necessary access to markets for Germany to rebuild. For France, German containment was the key goal, backed up by the prospects for economic growth which access to German markets and productive capacity offered – what Jacques Delors described as the marriage contract on which the EEC was founded.⁵

All of these were calculations of national interest, and yet the outcome of their filtering through Monnet’s European institutions was a solution to the problem of European conflict.⁶ In Europe today, war is not simply undesirable – it is inconceivable. The founder of liberal economics, Adam Smith, developed the evocative idea of the ‘invisible hand’ of the market to explain how a system of perfect liberty, operating under the drives and constraint of human nature and intelligently designed institutions, would give rise to an orderly society rather than a ‘war of all against all’.⁷ In many ways, Monnet’s genius was to develop a ‘European invisible hand’ that allows an orderly European society to emerge from each country’s national interest. ⁸ And that is possibly the most powerful element of Monnet’s vision: he did not try to abolish the nation-state or nationalism – simply to change its nature by pooling sovereignty.

Europe has been able to extend itself into the lives of Europeans largely unchallenged by seeping into the existing structure of national life, leaving national institutions outwardly intact but inwardly transformed. The ‘Europeanization’ of national political life has largely gone on behind the scenes, but its very invisibility has seen the triumph of a unique political experiment.

The Invisible Political System

The Palace of Westminster, London. It is 11.30 a.m. on a Thursday and the Secretary of State for Agriculture, Margaret Beckett, is preparing to take questions – just as her predecessors have done for three hundred years. The daily prayers have been said and MPs are settling down on their green benches – behind the sword-lines that were originally introduced to stop the opposing front benches from stabbing each other while they spoke. The MPs are tired and anxious to get off to their constituencies so the chorus of ‘Hear, Hear’ and the waving of order papers is even louder than usual.

Although the trappings of ‘Question Time’ have not changed in centuries, this façade of continuity hides the fact that over half of British agricultural legislation is made to implement decisions taken by our ministers in Brussels.⁹ Although the House of Commons can hold Margaret Beckett to account, the key decisions are not made by her alone. Instead they are made in negotiations with her counterparts in gatherings of European agriculture ministers and the various technical committees that meet between three and four hundred times a year.¹⁰ But for a visitor to the House of Commons, or even a British farmer, nothing has changed because the policies are not implemented or ratified at a European level. The farmer will continue to deal with the national Ministry of Agriculture, the national customs and excise authorities, the national vets and health and safety executives who have become the custodians of European policy.

This invisible Europeanization of power is happening across the spectrum of British politics. There is no longer a single national ministry that has not met with its counterparts in some EU forum or another, including defence ministers, transport ministers, and even home affairs ministers. The best estimates are that up to a third of British legislation and two-thirds of economic and social legislation are made by British ministers with their European colleagues in Brussels.¹¹

While Europe has seeped into the bloodstream of national politics, it is careful to take a back seat. It is the House of Commons, national civil servants, and national law courts that ratify and implement European decisions. Because national governments are the agents of European power, the European Commission can remain small and discreet. The European Commission has a total staff of 22,000 – less than many large city councils. This gives it barely half a civil servant per 10,000 citizens, as against 300 per 10,000 on average for the national civil services.¹² Some Eurosceptics have unfairly argued that Europe is a stealthy federalist project. In fact, every single step has been voluntary and has been debated and agreed by national parliaments. It is, however, deliberately low profile so that its builders focus on making policy work rather than political grandstanding.

The European Union is about enhancing rather than destroying national identities. Brussels, the antithesis of an imperial capital, is in many ways a microcosm of Europe, representing and encapsulating European history. Almost every invasion and political project – from the Roman Empire, through Napoleon to the Third Reich – has come through and absorbed it. And today its population, architecture, and ideology is a haphazard over-layering of their legacies. A third of its population is foreign¹³ (with the rootless, well-paid elite of Eurocrats living side by side with the socially excluded immigrants of European empires past, Moroccans, Congolese, Rwandans). It is the capital of a country with no real sense of national identity (and a constant jockeying for position between the Walloons and Flemings who inhabit it).

The expat’s burden of carrying his home in his head means that there is no risk of going native. Few of the Eurocrats who move to Brussels even try to fit in. Many of the British cling to their roots by recreating a little England. Despite living in one of the culinary capitals of Europe, they fill their cupboards and fridges with pre-packaged, ready-made parcels of home: Bird’s custard powder, Walkers crisps, Heinz baked beans, Wall’s sausages, and Savlon cream. And this is nothing compared with the patriotic fervour of the Greeks, who kit themselves out in fancy dress and dance through the streets on their national holiday. Or the Irish, whose legendary St Patrick’s Day celebrations spill out of the dozens of Irish pubs that are scattered around the city. Brussels is an unobtrusive vessel that allows powerful national identities to flourish – the living embodiment of the British Conservative Party sound-bite of being ‘in Europe, not run by it’. By keeping a low profile at home and working through national structures, Europe has managed to spread its wings without attracting much hostility. As it becomes a force to be reckoned with on the world stage, it can act in the same way. When European troops go overseas they rarely wear European uniforms. They often serve under the flags of NATO or the United Nations. Where Europe has established protectorates, such as in Bosnia and Kosovo, its special representatives do so in the name of the United Nations as well as the European Union.

European power even has a low profile in the economic sphere. The EU economy is the same size as that of the USA, with comparable levels of capital investment in the economies of other countries, and yet that economic muscle – in many respects greater than that of the USA – just isn’t noticed in the same way. Anti-globalization is almost exclusively an anti-American phenomenon, even within the USA itself, when its antithesis, globalization, is just as much a European phenomenon. The intrusion of McDonald’s provokes the bile of economic nationalists and opponents of globalization everywhere. All of that movement’s hate figures – Starbucks, Gap, Nike – are universally identified as American companies. In some respects, the attack on the World Trade Center demonstrates this paradox – an attack on the heart of the global economy naturally took place in New York because American economic might is so blatant. Europe’s comparable might simply lacks that profile.

This even extends to America’s occasional fears of a foreign economic takeover within the USA. The 1980s saw remarkable levels of nail-biting and hand-wringing within the USA over the rise of Japan and its putative takeover of the commanding heights of the US economy. European investment in the USA now easily surpasses that of Japan, yet it barely merits a mention in American analysts’ dissections of European weakness.

The most obvious reason for Europe’s invisibility abroad is the dark episode of European colonial history that means there is a real reluctance in Europe to adopt the trappings of empire. But there is a deeper reason for this respect for local cultures. The European vision has never aimed to establish a single model of human progress: it is about allowing diverse and competing cultures to live together in peace. This was captured most dramatically when the Northern Irish politician John Hume was given the Nobel Peace Prize. In his acceptance speech he talked of the European Union as the most successful peace process in history: ‘The European visionaries demonstrated that difference is not a threat, difference is natural…The answer to difference is to respect it…The peoples of Europe created institutions which respected their diversity – a Council of Ministers, the European Commission and the European Parliament – but allowed them to work together in their common and substantial economic interest.’¹⁴

This diversity also has the unexpected effect of making the European Union stick to its principles. An example illustrates this well. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, there was no agreement on which former Communist countries to let into the club. Because Europe’s leaders failed to agree on the final borders of the European Union they decided to make entry open to anyone who met the ‘Copenhagen Criteria of democracy, the rule of law, and economic liberalism. Lurking in the background of this decision was a desire to exclude some countries. Several member-states were particularly keen to use the agreement to lift the bar of membership so high that Turkey would never be able to join, creating tough standards on human rights and respect for minorities that they felt would remain beyond the Kemalist republic’s reach. However, these very criteria have driven Turkey to reform itself, and they will pave the way for a modern and democratic Turkey to join (despite the lack of enthusiasm for Turkish membership from many EU members). The same happened with the Maastricht convergence criteria for monetary union – designed at least in part to keep the profligate Italians at bay – which had the effect of ending Italy’s profligacy and allowing it to join.

In all of these cases, member-states have struggled to agree on their final destination and taken refuge behind processes which reflect European values. Ironically, they have chosen to project their values to the European level in order to defend their interests at a national one. This creates a strange situation where nations have interests and no values and the EU has values but no interests.

Jean Monnet’s prediction at the outset of the European project was that, ‘We are starting a process of continuous reform which can shape tomorrow’s world more lastingly than the priciples of revolution so widespread outside the West.’¹⁵ But because the European project is at best half-glimpsed, hidden behind national legislatures and national executives, it is easy to miss. To the naked eye, power has not moved from the governments that remain the seat of legitimacy, and politics continues in the age-old ways. Ironically this very invisibility has allowed the European project to spread so far and so fast, creating an inexorable momentum for its own development. By coming together and pooling their sovereignty to achieve common goals, the countries of the European Union have created new power out of nothing. The silent revolution they have unleashed will transform the world.

CHAPTER 2
‘Divided We Stand, United We Fall’

1968 was a year of revolutions. What started in...