1995, p. 64.
38. The Rotten Heart of Europe, pp. 391–2.
39. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Central European Attitudes’, in George Schöpflin and Nancy Wood (eds), In Search of Central Europe, London 1989, p. 116.
40. Milan Kundera, ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’, New York Review of Books, 26 April 1984; see also George Schöpflin, ‘Central Europe: Definitions and Old and New’, In Search of Central Europe, pp. 7–29.
41. London 1994. Like most writers in this genre, Applebaum is not always consistent—in the mediaeval period, Poland is accounted an ‘average central European country’: p. 48.
42. Friedrich Naumann, Mittleleuropa, Berlin 1915, pp. 3, 129–31, 222ff, 254ff.
43. Naumann, Mitteleuropa, pp. 30, 67–71, 232–8, 242.
44. J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Deconstructing Europe’, London Review of Books, 19 December 1991; now in The Discovery of Islands, Cambridge 2005, p. 287.
45. Timothy Garton Ash, ‘Catching the Wrong Bus?’, Times Literary Supplement, 5 May 1995.
46. Keith Middlemas, Orchestrating Europe, London 1995, pp. 664–5.
47. Duchêne, Jean Monnet, p. 320.
48. Garton Ash, ‘Catching the Wrong Bus?’
49. Jacques Attali, Europe(s), Paris 1994, pp. 15, 147–50, 181–99.
OUTCOMES
2007
An epiphany is beguiling Europe. Far from dwindling in historical significance, the Old World is about to assume an importance for humanity it never, in all its days of dubious past glory, possessed. At the end of Postwar, his eight-hundred-page account of the continent since 1945, the historian Tony Judt exclaims at ‘Europe’s emergence in the dawn of the twenty-first century as a paragon of the international virtues: a community of values held up by Europeans and non-Europeans alike as an exemplar for all to emulate’. The reputation, he eagerly assures us, is ‘well-earned’.1 The same vision grips the seers of New Labour. Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century declaims the title of a manifesto by Mark Leonard, the party’s foreign policy Wunderkind. ‘Imagine a world of peace, prosperity and democracy’, he enjoins the reader. ‘What I am asking you to imagine is the “New European Century” ’. How will this entrancing prospect come about? ‘Europe represents a synthesis of the energy and freedom that come from liberalism with the stability and welfare that come from social democracy. As the world becomes richer and moves beyond satisfying basic needs such as hunger and health, the European way of life will become irresistible’.2 Really? Absolutely. ‘As India, Brazil, South Africa, and even China develop economically and express themselves politically, the European model will represent an irresistibly attractive way of enhancing their prosperity whilst protecting their security. They will join with the EU in building “a New European Century” ’.3
Not to be outdone, the futurologist Jeremy Rifkin—American by birth, but by any standards an honorary European: indeed a personal adviser to Romano Prodi when he was president of the European Commission—has offered his guide to The European Dream. Seeking ‘harmony, not hegemony’, he tells us, the EU ‘has all the right markings to claim the moral high ground on the journey toward a third stage of human consciousness. Europeans have laid out a visionary roadmap to a new promised land, one dedicated to re-affirming the life-instinct and the Earth’s indivisibility’.4 After a lyrical survey of this route—typical staging-posts: ‘Governing without a Centre’, ‘Romancing the Civil Society’, ‘A Second Enlightenment’—Rifkin, warning us against cynicism, concludes: ‘These are tumultuous times. Much of the world is going dark, leaving many human beings without clear direction. The European Dream is a beacon of light in a troubled world. It beckons us to a new age of inclusivity, diversity, quality of life, deep play, sustainability, universal human rights, the rights of nature, and peace on Earth’.5
These transports may seem peculiarly Anglo-Saxon, but there is no shortage of more prosaic equivalents on the continent. For Germany’s leading philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, Europe has found ‘exemplary solutions’ for two great issues of the age, ‘governance beyond the nation-state’ and systems of welfare that ‘serve as a model’ to the world. So why not triumph in a third? ‘If Europe has solved two problems of this magnitude, why shouldn’t it issue a further challenge: to defend and promote a cosmopolitan order on the basis of international law?’6—or, as his compatriot the sociologist Ulrich Beck puts it, ‘Europeanisation means creating a new politics. It means entering as a player into the meta-power game, into the struggle to form the rules of a new global order. The catchphrase for the future might be: Move over America—Europe is back’.7 Over in France, Marcel Gauchet, theorist of democracy and an editor of the country’s central journal of ideas, Le Débat, explains that ‘we may be allowed to think that the formula the Europeans have pioneered is destined eventually to serve as a model for the nations of the world. That lies in its genetic programme’.8
1
Self-satisfaction is, of course, scarcely unfamiliar in Europe. But the contemporary mood is something different: an apparently illimitable narcissism, in which the reflection in the water transfigures the future of the planet into the image of the beholder. What explains this degree of political vanity? Obviously, the landscape of the continent has altered in recent years, and its role in the world has grown. Real changes can give rise to surreal dreams, but they need to be calibrated properly, to see what the connexions or lack of them might be. A decade ago, three great imponderables lay ahead: the advent of monetary union, as designed at Maastricht; the return of Germany to regional preponderance, with reunification; and the expansion of the EU into Eastern Europe. The outcome of each remained ex ante indeterminate. How far have they been clarified since?
Of its nature, the introduction of a single currency, adopted simultaneously by eleven out of fifteen member-states of the EU on the first day of 1999, marked the most punctual and systematic transformation of the three. It was always reasonable to suppose its effects would be the soonest visible, and most clear-cut. Yet this has proved so only in the most limited technical sense, that the substitution of a dozen monies by one (Greece joined in 2002) was handled extremely smoothly, without glitch or mishap: an administrative tour de force. Otherwise, contrary to general expectations, the net upshot of the monetary union that came into force in the Eurozone eight years ago remains inconclusive. The stated purpose of the single currency was to lower transaction costs and increase predictability of returns for business, so unleashing higher investment and faster growth of productivity and output.
But to date the causes have failed to generate the results. The dynamic effects of SEA, the ‘single market act’ of 1986, held by most orthodox economists to be an initiative of greater significance than EMU, had already been wildly oversold—the official Cecchini Report estimated it would add between 4.3 and 6.4 percent to the GDP of the Community whereas in reality it yielded gains of little over 1 per cent. So far, the pay-off for EMU has been even more disappointing. Far from picking up, growth in the Eurozone initially slowed down, from an average of 2.4 per cent in the five years before monetary union, to
