As the European Union prepares to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome later this month, the EU is widely perceived to be on its knees. European integration is felt to have somehow met its Waterloo in 2005, when referendums in France and the Netherlands unexpectedly torpedoed the draft EU constitution. Media stories have focused on the paralysis that is said to have gripped EU decision-making, but the reality is different. Far from suffering an irreversible decline in its fortunes, the EU has been conducting business as usual, quietly getting on with the job of constructing new policies and pursuing new projects. Take a look at some recent headlines. The EU is putting together an energy and environment strategy that aims to end the self-defeating competition within Europe for oil and gas, while also establishing Europe as global leader in the effort to halt climate change. The union’s common foreign and security policy may not yet mean that Europe speaks to the world with one voice, but this unity is taking shape and has already healed some of the wounds inflicted by disagreements over the war in Iraq. Of equal importance, Europe’s economic integration continues to move ahead, with the euro’s value buoyant and a single marketplace for financial services now coming into sight. The starting point for the EU’s unhappy bid to create a shared constitution had been fears that its decision-making mechanisms were being overloaded by the accession of so many new members – first in May 2004 and again at the beginning of this year. The constitutional treaty was originally designed to streamline the system, and it was only later that it was over-enthusiastically expanded into the lengthy and pompous document that is now a dead letter. Yet there are signs that the EU machine has so far been coping rather well without the constitution. The volume of EU rule-making last year was almost exactly the same as 10 years ago. During 2005 and 2006, the flow of EU directives, regulations, and associated reports, green papers, and communications continued at the same rate as the 2,800 a year chalked up in 1996, when Jacques Delors was at the helm of the European Commission and the EU project was being widely hailed as unstoppable. Brussels is nowadays a government town akin to Washington DC, even if it is also a place where complex negotiations among the union’s 27 members move forward only very slowly. On top of all this, the European economy is looking brighter. In Germany, the EU’s economic locomotive, unemployment is down and business confidence is up. And throughout the EU, the positive effects of the enlargement strategy that has brought in 10 ex-communist countries over the past three years looks to be generating a new self-confidence. None of this should be surprising. It would take a good deal more than a hiccup in the EU’s delicate political process to bring integration to a standstill, let alone put it into reverse. The global pressures pushing European nations closer together are as strong as ever, so the impasse over the EU’s constitutional treaty was never going to push Europe off course for very long. The path ahead is far from clear, of course. But a consensus does seem to be emerging on how the EU’s future will pan out. Diplomats and policy analysts are generally in agreement that key elements of the failed constitution will be rescued from the wreckage and turned into something along the lines of the “mini-treaty that Nicolas Sarkozy, the front-runner in the French presidential race, proposed last autumn at a Friends of Europe meeting in Brussels. The details are still anyone’s guess, but the consensus view is that the EU will have many of the constitution’s most important procedural mechanisms by sometime next year. The EU is far from being out of the woods. Creating coherent policies is unremittingly difficult when there are so many nations, each with a different political culture. But the idea that the constitutional crisis is holding everything back is mistaken. The much greater problem has been that EU governments have been concentrating so hard on the details of “building Europe that they have neglected broader strategic questions. There is little or no discussion of where Europe is heading and what sort of Europe its people want. It is strange but true that even American unilateralism under President George W. Bush has not provoked a genuine debate over Europe’s future role in the world. The EU’s problem is not its so-called “constitutional crisis, but rather its lack of a recognizable political identity. Giles Merrittis secretary-general of Friends of Europe and editor of the policy journal Europe’s World. THE DAILY STAR publishes this commentary in collaboration with Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org).
The European Union is ailing? If you think so, look again
