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The European Crisis

May 24, 2005 19:38 GMT

France will vote on the new draft European constitution May 29. All 25 EU
members must ratify the constitution if it is to take effect. The odds of
that happening are pretty slim under any circumstances. However, at the
moment it appears that the referendum in France might fail. Whether it
actually does is less significant than the fact that France is the engine
behind European unification -- and if ratification of the constitution in
France is in doubt, it is difficult to imagine how it could possibly pass in
many other European countries.

In other words, if unification is a question mark in France, then an EU
constitution is not going to pass in its current form, if at all.

This is a dramatic shift in Europe. During the 1990s, the emergence of a
transnational European state appeared to be a foregone conclusion. The
introduction of the euro seemed to make this inevitable. The new currency
made it possible to place control of Europe's money supply in the hands of a
transnational central bank. It made little sense to have a European currency
without a European state -- it was like wearing a tie without a shirt.
Therefore, since at least part of Europe accept the euro with relative ease,
it appeared to follow that the framing document -- a constitution -- would
readily follow.

But there is a huge difference in the ways political systems function in
relatively prosperous times and in more austere times. Things that are
acceptable when the economy is healthy become less tolerable -- or
intolerable -- when the economy is weak. This does not mean that the primary
issue is economic. The chief obstacle to an EU constitution in France and
elsewhere is political and social -- it is the unwillingness to abandon
sovereignty. This sensibility is always there, but it is activated when the
political ambitions of the new regime interact with hard times. This is
doubly the case when people believe that their own problems and votes might
have no bearing on the actions or policies of the new political system.

This dilemma is symbolized by the nature of the new constitution -- it is
300 pages long. A constitution must define the regime. It must define
institutions and the limits on those institutions. It must define individual
rights and, in a federal system, the rights of nonfederal governments. Above
all, it must be terse. The more complex it is, the less the ordinary citizen
can trust it.

A 300-page constitution, by dint of its very size, sums up the first problem
facing Europe: The EU is governed by a bureaucracy whose ways cannot be
understood by ordinary citizens, and which does not intend itself to be
understood. It is therefore not trusted. A second problem is that the
constitution is made up of a series of staggeringly complex compromises that
defy clear understanding. If American constitutional law is complex,
European constitutional law, as written, is beyond comprehension, let alone
debate.

The voters simply don't know what they are voting for. Even if they did
favor the principle of European unification, no one really knows, under this
constitution, precisely what they would be committing to. This is not a
solvable problem. The complexity is inevitable. It derives from an
understanding of Europe that relies on specialists rather than citizen-
politicians, and an uneasiness among nations that has resulted in a
compromise of bewildering complexity. The Europeans either have an
incomprehensible constitution, or they have no chance of agreeing on one at
all.

Beneath the complexity of the task lies politics.

There were two reasons for creating the EU. The first was to build
institutions that would prevent a fourth war between France and Germany. The
catastrophic record of European statesmanship created the impulse to tie the
hands of European politicians by creating overarching institutions. In other
words, transnationalism was designed to overcome Europe's ruinous
nationalism.

Second, the European Union, and the European Community before it, were
designed to facilitate European prosperity. It was reasonably assumed that a
Europe without protectionist barriers would do better than a Europe
fragmented into multiple, exclusionary markets. On this level, the EU had a
purely utilitarian goal: It was designed for economic ends, and the only
justification for its existence was how readily it achieved those ends and
how universally it could distribute those benefits across national lines.
The European Union was designed to allow Europe to be competitive in the
global marketplace.

Preventing war and generating prosperity are not trivial goals, but they
lack the moral drive possessed by the great revolutionary regimes -- France,
the United States, the Soviet Union. What binds the EU together is a dream
of peace and prosperity. One might argue that this is a more reasonable goal
than "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite." But it is also judged by a different
standard: It is possible to sacrifice all to "Workers of the World Unite" or
"We hold these truths to be self-evident …" But a regime founded on the
principles of safety and prosperity cannot demand sacrifice that threatens
either. The idea of a united Europe is not a moral project -- it is a
mutually beneficial contract that has no moral hold once those benefits are
no longer safeguarded.

This gives the idea of Europe a fundamental fragility. A political system
that has no basis on which to justify hardship cannot endure hardship, and
hardship is the one certainty that comes to all regimes. In this immediate
case, Europe -- or at least France, Germany and Italy, the center of gravity
of Europe -- is in serious economic trouble. Growth has slowed to only 1.5
percent per year while unemployment has climbed into the double digits. For
these three countries, the EU model is simply not delivering on prosperity.

The existence of a European Central Bank has complicated the situation
rather than simplified it. All the countries that have adopted the euro as
their currency now are subject to the monetary policies of the European
Central Bank. Europe is an extraordinarily diverse place, becoming more
diverse every time a new country enters the union or an old one accepts the
euro. The ECB has followed policies designed to support the three major
members of the euro bloc -- but not all of the euro bloc states are in the
same economic position. The problem is that a single policy must hurt some
and help others. Since the promise of prosperity is the foundation of the
system, how do you keep those who lose out from central bank policies in the
system? More to the immediate point, how do you expand the system to give
the European state more power when the benefits of the current system become
increasingly unclear?

What is interesting, of course, is that the ECB is being extremely
solicitous of French needs, and France has been able to simply ignore the
stabilization pact that required it to bring its budget into balance. France
has been the beneficiary of the system, yet the new constitution is being
strongly challenged in France.

The reason has to do with the first goal of the European system -- security.
The old threat to security was a continuation of Europe's wars. But now a
new threat -- immigration -- is perceived. Immigration appears threatening
on two levels: Economically, it increases competition for jobs; socially, it
increases diversity. From an economist's point of view, job competition
increases efficiency, while social diversity is a non-quantifiable
irrelevancy. They miss the point, to say the least.

In the long run, austerity imposed by job competition and restructuring
might be beneficial to an economy. But a 10- or 20-year dose of austerity
measures will devastate an entire generation. A person who cannot get
satisfactory employment from the age of 25 to 40 has had his life gutted.
The time scale of a human life and the time scale of economic theory do not
mesh. In effect, economic theory creates competition between this generation
and the next -- and the members of this generation, being alive, tend to
win.

Europe either must undergo a massive reinvention or sink into the abyss. In
either case, a generation of European workers will pay the price. Like all
humans, they will blame someone, and the most logical target -- whether
valid or not -- is the immigrant population, whose presence they see as the
catalyst for the problem.

There is a deeper level to this. France is France. France was very happy to
go to Algeria and declare it "France." Its people have been much less happy
to have Algerians come to France and declare it "Algeria." Whatever the
irony of it, France is changing demographically, with the inevitable result
that many French -- particularly those outside the corporate elite -- don't
want their country to change. Even more to the point, some feel that they
are losing control of their country to immigrants, and that they no longer
have the sovereign right to determine the kind of society they will have.

The EU constitution institutionalizes that powerlessness. The doctrines
embedded in the EU recognize the right of immigration from one country to
another: Once you have citizenship somewhere, you have the right to go
anywhere within the union. This might make sense from an economist's view of
labor markets, but it means that France no longer controls its fate. When
Turkey enters the EU, the perception is, an avalanche of Muslim immigrants
will sweep France, and the European government's bureaucrats will celebrate
the shift instead of stopping it. The guarantees of security are being kept
in preventing nation-states from fighting, but not -- it is perceived -- in
protecting the traditional way of life in France and other countries.

The issue only partly concerns migration. The deeper issue is sovereignty.
The government of France is asking its people essentially to transfer major
elements of sovereignty to a state that France cannot control. The French do
not see a common identity with the rest of Europe, and the rest of Europe
does not see a common identity with France. The EU is rooted in an alliance
of convenience that is rapidly becoming inconvenient.

We do not know what will happen with the French referendum on May 29, but
the important thing already has happened. If France cannot be absolutely
counted on to vote for the constitution, then the constitution is dead. The
founders of the EU would have trouble understanding the issue -- they took
their bearings from economic theory and built the system to overcome
nationalism, which they saw as the problem.

Nationalism is, however, a foundation of the human experience. We all have
our roots in a community, and economics is far from the only value we
pursue. Adam Smith knew this, which is why he called his masterpiece "The
Wealth of Nations." Nationalism is not an unfortunate and archaic impediment
to a more perfect society; it is simply an omnipresent feature of human
life. Like greed, it can be condemned, if you get pleasure from doing so,
but it never goes away and can never be controlled.

The EU was designed to overcome nationalism. The best it could do has been
to mitigate it. In placing some nations at an economic disadvantage through
its central bank and leaving others socially vulnerable by its immigration
policies, the EU has not submerged nationalism, but energized it. The EU
increases the threat to its own long-term existence every time it tries to
extend its authority, institutionally or geographically.

If French support for the EU can no longer be taken for granted, then
nothing can be taken for granted.

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