to monetary union comes from the political calculations of the elite, and the world of classical state-craft—a foreign policy determined to check German and uphold French national power. The socio-economic costs of the franc fort have been borne by the population at large. Here, absolutely clear-cut, there is a conflict between external objectives and domestic aspirations of the kind Alan Milward would banish from the record of earlier integration. How much does it matter to ordinary French voters whether or not Germany is diplomatically master of the continent again—are not the creation of jobs and growth of incomes issues closer to home? In France the next years are likely to offer an interesting test of the relative weights of consumption and strategy in the process of European integration.
Meanwhile the pressures from below, already welling up in strikes and demonstrations, can only increase the quandaries above. On the surface, the French elite is now less divided over Maastricht than at the time of the referendum. But it is no surer that the single currency will deliver what it was intended to. Germany bound—or unbound? In the space of the new Europe, the equivocation of monetary union as an economic project is matched by the ambiguity of its political logic for the latent national rivalries within it.
Finally, what of the prospects for extending the European Union to the east? On the principle itself, it is a striking fact that there has been no dissent among the member-states. It might be added that there has also been no forethought. For the first time in the history of European integration, a crucial direction has been set, not by politicians or technocrats, but by public opinion. Voters were not involved; but before the consequences were given much consideration, editorialists and column-writers across the political spectrum pronounced with rare unanimity any other course unthinkable. Enlargement to the east was approved in something of the same spirit as the independence of former republics of Yugoslavia. This was not the hard-headed reckoning of costs and benefits on which historians of the early decades of European integration dwell: ideological good-will—essentially, the need to recompense those who suffered under communism—was all. Governments have essentially been towed in the wake of a media consensus. The principle was set by the press; politicians have been left to figure out its applications.
Here the three leading states of Western Europe have divided. From the outset Germany has given priority to the rapid inclusion of Poland, Hungary, the former Czechoslovakia and more recently Slovenia. Within this group, Poland remains the most important in German eyes. Bonn’s conception is straightforward. These countries, already the privileged catchment for German investment, would form a security glacis of Catholic lands around Germany and Austria, with social and political regimes that could—with judicious backing for sympathetic parties—sit comfortably beside the CDU. France, more cautious about the tempo of widening and mindful of former ties to the countries of the Little Entente—Romania or Serbia—has been less inclined to pick regional favourites in this way. Its initial preference, articulated by Mitterrand in Prague, was for a generic association between Western and Eastern Europe as a whole, outside the framework of the Union.
Britain, on the other hand, has pressed not only for rapid integration of the Visegrád countries into the EU, but for the most extensive embrace beyond it. Alone of Western leaders, Major has envisaged the ultimate inclusion of Russia. The rationale for the British position is unconcealed: the wider the Union becomes, in this view, the shallower it must be—for the more national states it contains, the less viable becomes any real supranational authority over them. Once stretched to the Bug and beyond, the European Union will evolve in practice into the vast free-trade area which in the eyes of London it should always have been. Widening here means both institutional dilution and social deregulation: the prospect of including vast reserve armies of cheap labour in the East, exerting downward pressure on wage costs in the West, is a further bonus in this British scenario.
Which outcome is most likely? At the moment the German design has the most wind in its sails. In so far as the EU has sketched a policy at all, it goes in the CDU’s direction. One of the reasons, of course, is the current convergence between German calculations and Polish, Czech and Hungarian aspirations. There is some historical irony here. Since the late eighties publicists and politicians in Hungary, the Czech lands, Poland and more recently Slovenia and even Croatia have set out to persuade the world that these countries belong to a Central Europe with a natural affinity to Western Europe, and that is quite distinct from Eastern Europe. The geographical stretching involved in these definitions can be extreme. Vilnius is described by Czesław Miłosz, for example, as a Central European city.39 But if Poland—let alone Lithuania—is really in the centre of Europe, what is the east? Logically, one would imagine, the answer must be Russia. But since many of the same writers—Milan Kundera is another example—deny that Russia has ever belonged to European civilization at all,40 we are left with the conundrum of a space proclaiming itself centre and border at the same time.
Perhaps sensing such difficulties, an American sympathizer, the Spectator’s foreign editor Anne Applebaum, has tacitly upgraded Poland to full occidental status, entitling her—predictably disobliging—inspection of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine Between East and West.41 Another way out of them is offered by Miklós Haraszti, who argues that while current usage of the idea of Central Europe may make little geographical sense, it does convey the political unity of those—Poles, Czechs, Magyars—who fought against Communism, as distinct from their neighbours who did not. More Romanians, of course, died in 1989 than in the resistance of all three countries combined for many years. Today, however, the point of the construct is not so much retrospective as stipulative: originally fashioned to repudiate any connexion with Russian experience during the Cold War, it now serves to demarcate superior from inferior—i.e., Romanian, Bulgarian, Albanian, etc.—candidates for entry into the EU.
But geopolitical concepts rarely escape their origins altogether. The idea of Mitteleuropa was a German invention, famously theorized by Max Weber’s friend Friedrich Naumann during the First World War. Naumann’s conception remains arrestingly topical. The Central Europe he envisaged was to be organized around a Germanic nucleus, combining Prussian industrial efficiency and Austrian cultural glamour, capable of attracting satellite nations to it in a vast customs community—Zollgemeinschaft—and military compact, extending ‘from the Vistula to the Vosges’.42 Such a unified Mitteleuropa would be what he called an Oberstaat, a ‘super-state’ able to rival the Anglo-American and Russian empires. A Lutheran pastor himself, he noted regretfully that it would be predominantly Catholic—a necessary price to pay—but a tolerant order, making room for Jews and minority nationalities. The Union it created would not be federal—Naumann was an early prophet of today’s doctrine of subsidiarity too. All forms of sovereignty other than economic and military would be retained by member-states preserving their separate political identities, and there would be no one all-purpose capital, but rather different cities—Hamburg, Prague, Vienna—would be the seat of particular executive functions, rather like Strasbourg, Brussels and Frankfurt today.43 Against the background of a blue-print like this, it is not difficult to see how the ideological demand for a vision of Central Europe in the Visegrád countries could find political supply in the Federal Republic.
But given that widening of some kind to the East is now enshrined as official—if still nebulous—policy in the Union, is it probable that the process could be limited to a select handful of former Communist states? Applications for admission are multiplying, and there is no obvious boundary at which they can be halted. Europe, as J.G.A. Pocock once forcibly observed, is not a continent, but an unenclosed sub-continent on a continuous land mass stretching to the Bering Strait. Its only natural frontier with Asia is a strip of water, at the Hellespont, once swum by Leander and Lord Byron. To the north, plain and steppe unroll without break into Turkestan. Cultural borders are no more clearly marked than geographical: Muslim Albania and Bosnia lie a thousand miles west of Christian Georgia and Armenia, where the ancients set the dividing-line between Europe and Asia. No wonder Herodotus himself, the first historian to discuss the question, remarked that ‘the boundaries of Europe are quite unknown, and no man can say where they end . . . but it is certain that Europa [he is referring
