[on her bull] from Phoenicia to Crete’. The irony of Herodotus perhaps still retains a lesson for us. If Slovakia is a candidate for entry into today’s Union, why not Romania? If Romania, why not Moldova? If Moldova, why not the Ukraine? If the Ukraine, why not Turkey? In a couple of years, Istanbul will overtake Paris to become the largest city in what—however you define it—no one will contest is Europe. As for Moscow, it is over two centuries since Catherine the Great declared in a famous ukaz that ‘Russia is a European nation’, and the history of European culture and politics from the time of Pushkin and Suvorov onwards has enforced her claim ever since. De Gaulle’s vision of a Europe ‘from the Atlantic to the Urals’ will not lightly go away. All the stopping-places of current discussion about widening the EU are mere conveniences of the ring of states closest to it, or of the limits of bureaucratic imagination in Brussels. They will not resist the logic of expansion.
In 1991 J.G.A. Pocock remarked that
‘Europe’ . . . is once again an empire in the sense of a civilised and stabilised zone which must decide whether to extend or refuse its political power over violent cultures along its borders but not yet within its system: Serbs and Croats if one chances to be Austrian, Kurds and Iraqis if Turkey is admitted to be part of ‘Europe’. These are not decisions to be taken by the market, but decisions of the state.44
But as Europe is not an empire in the more familiar sense of the term—a centralized imperial authority—but merely (as he put it) ‘a composite of states’, with no common view of their borderlands, it is not surprising that its limes has yet to be drawn by the various chancelleries. Since he wrote, however, there has been no shortage of expert opinion to fill the gap.
For example Timothy Garton Ash, one of the first and keenest advocates of a PCH fast track, has recently adjusted his sights. ‘Having spent much of the past fifteen years trying to explain to Western readers that Prague, Budapest and Warsaw belong to Central and not to Eastern Europe, I am the last person to need reminding of the immense differences between Poland and Albania’, he writes in the Times Literary Supplement. ‘But to suggest that there is some absolutely clear historical dividing line between the Central European democracies in the so-called Visegrád group and, say, the Baltic states or Slovenia would be to service a new myth’.45 Instead, the dividing-line must be drawn between a Second Europe numbering some twenty states which he describes as ‘set on a course’ towards the EU; and a Third Europe that does not share this prospect, comprising Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and—a cartographical nicety—Serbia.
A dichotomy so visibly instrumental is unlikely to be more durable than the mythical distinction it has replaced. At the end of his Orchestrating Europe, a capacious and strangely zestful guide through the institutional maze and informal complications of the Union, Keith Middlemas looks out on a somewhat broader scene. Europe, he suggests, is surrounded by an arc of potential threat curving from Murmansk to Casablanca. To hold it at a distance, the Union needs a belt of insulation, comprising a ‘second circle’ of lands capable of integration into the Community, shielding it from the dangers of the ‘third circle’ beyond—that is, Russia, the Middle East and Black Africa. In this conception the respective buffer zones logically become Eastern Europe, Cyprus and Turkey in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Maghreb. Middlemas, however, explains that while the first two are ultimately acceptable into the Union, the third remains inconceivable. For ‘the countries of the Maghreb are irrelevant as a barrier to a sub-Saharan Africa, which presents no threat except via small numbers of illegal immigrants’. In fact, on the contrary, ‘the threat comes from North Africa itself’.46 If this is a more ecumenical approach than that of Garton Ash, who expressly excludes Turkey from Europe, it traces the same movement, common to all these tropes—a slide to aporia. Every attempt so far to delimit the future boundaries of the Union has deconstructed itself.
For the moment, it is enough to register that ‘Europe Agreements’, formally designated as antechambers to entry, have been signed by six countries: Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria; and that four more are impending (Slovenia and the Baltic states). It is only a matter of time before Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Albania and what is left of Bosnia join the queue. Does this prospect—we might call it an inverted domino effect, in which the pieces fall inwards rather than outwards—mean that the British scenario will come to pass? Harold Macmillan once spoke, with a homely national touch, of his hope that the Community, when exposed to the beneficent pressure of a vast free-trade area, would ‘melt like a lump of sugar in a cup of tea’.47 Such remains the preferred vision of his successors. Their calculation is that the more member-states there are, the less sovereignty can practically be pooled, and the greater is the chance that federal dreams will fold. How realistic is it?
There is no doubt that enlargement of the Union to some two dozen states would fundamentally alter its nature. If its existing arrangements were simply extended east, the cost of integrating the Visegrád quartet alone could mean an increase of 60 per cent in the Union budget. There is no chance of the existing member-states accepting such a burden, at a time when every domestic pressure is towards tax reduction. That leaves either reducing current support to farming communities and poorer regions in the west, composed of voters with the power to resist, or watering down the acquis communautaire to create a second-class membership for new entrants, without benefit of the transfers accorded to first-class members.
These are just the fiscal headaches attending rapid expansion. There are also the material consequences for the former Communist economies. If the effort of adhering to the convergence criteria for monetary union is already straining prosperous Western societies to breaking point, can impoverished Eastern ones be expected to sustain them? No previous candidates, however initially disadvantaged, had to scale such a macro-economic cliff. Contemplating the requirements of EMU, it is not suprising that enthusiasts for expansion are starting to call for the whole idea of a single currency to be dropped. For Garton Ash, the needs of Warsaw and Prague dovetail with what is anyway the wisdom of London. ‘Europe could perhaps use a little more British thinking at the moment’, he writes of monetary union, ‘with “British” here meant in the deeper sense of our particular intellectual tradition: sceptical, empirical and pragmatic’.48 The suspicion that EMU and Eastern enlargement might be incompatible is shared from the opposite standpoint by the unlikely figure of Jacques Attali, who regards the single currency as a valid but now lost cause, and enlargement as a German project that will lead away from a federal Europe, for which most of the national elites, mesmerized by American culture, anyway have no appetite. L’Europe ne s’aime pas, he glumly observed at the end of the Mitterrand experience.49
Maastricht is unlikely to evaporate so easily. But the hazards of enlargement do not just lie in the economic pitfalls it poses for new or old members. Even if derogations of various kinds—from the Common Agricultural Policy, from the Structural Funds, from the single currency—were to be made for what were once the ‘captive nations’, a more fundamental difficulty would remain, of a purely political nature. To double its membership could cripple the existing institutions of the Union. Already the original balance of the Six or the Nine has been thrown out of kilter in the Council of Ministers. Today the five largest states—Germany, France, Italy, Britain and Spain—contain 80 per cent of the population of the Union, but command only just more than half of the votes in the Council. If the ten current ex-Communist applicants were members, the share of these states would fall even further, while the proportion of poor countries in the Union—those now entitled to substantial transfers—would rise from four out of fifteen to a majority of fourteen out of twenty-five.
Adjustment of voting weights could bring the pays légal some way back towards the pays réel. But it would not resolve potentially the most intractable problem posed by enlargement to the east, which lies in the logic of numbers. Ex-satellite Europe contains almost exactly as many states as continuously capitalist Europe (at the latest count, sixteen in the ‘East’ to seventeen in the ‘West’, if we include Switzerland), with a third of the population. Proliferation of
