Columbia International Affairs Online
CIAO DATE: 6/5/2007
Die Europäische Union: Stolpersteine auf dem Weg zur Integration (The European Union: Stumbling Blocks on the Road to Integration)
May 2006
Project on Defense Alternatives
Abstract
If one believes the officials in Brussels, the European Union, along with its institutional predecessors, has been a story of thoroughly successful economic integration. It is claimed that this development has to a considerable extent resulted from the impact of market forces, but also from the Union’s (formerly: the Community’s) well-conceived policies to promote competitiveness in certain regions and branches of industry as well as economic cohesion in general. The reality is somewhat sobering, however.
Even core-Europe was quite heterogeneous. And, despite some success cases of countries making it up to the average or above, Europe’s successive waves of enlargement – especially the ones to the South and the East – have made it even more heterogeneous. Quite a few countries are limping behind – with, as of now, only dim chances of ever catching up. This applies, for instance, to relatively ‘old’ members such as Portugal and Greece, but even more so to most of the newcomers from the East. The chances of the latter are worse than those of the former. Their initial economic data are not as good as the ones of the southern-tier countries’ were, in relative terms, decades ago.
Given serious infrastructural deficits in the East, it is not likely that the above-average growth rates in some of the countries there can be stabilized. And money from Brussels for competitiveness and cohesion may not help very much. It is true: at the expense of Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) there will be, in a mid-term perspective, more resources for cohesion and competitiveness. But these resources are still likely to be insufficient – particularly also because the share of the countries with weak economic performance remains too low. Against this background a conflict-prone development is to be expected: grossly different paths of adjustment and modernization along with constant fighting for a redistribution of notoriously scarce central resources. These conflicts may – from time to time or as a general tendency – escalate, because the process of enlargement has washed into the Union evermore different national perspectives, increased the diversity of interests and cultures. And as some ‘old’ and ‘new’ members have already done to enhance their respective national profiles and bargaining power: it is not unlikely that politically maneuvering between the EU and the US becomes a more general pattern.
If Europe does not want to fall back onto the level of a mere free-trade arrangement, if it intends to become a unified actor in the international arena that transcends the role of just an economic bloc and is also capable of generating and executing global policies with respect to the environment, security and other issues, there is no alternative to an ‘openclub régime’. This does not imply the rule of the ‘old core’, but the representation of the EU by all those member states that accept a certain set of procedures and can agree on a number of key policies. To make it more likely that the newcomers are willing to join, central funding is to be more radically re-oriented towards the really needy.
