21 June, 2002The Guardian
The strike of air traffic controllers provides a tempting metaphor for the political scene in our continent, namely that we understand what goes on below 28,000 feet, where nations still rule, but not what is happening above that level, where Europe is supposed to take over. The truth is that, as national politics shift, so do those of Europe. The political air space is one, but what effect the changes recently registered by national campaigns and elections are going to have is an important question at a time when Europeans are trying to remake their institutions to suit a true union of both east and west.
Crime, migration, jobs and terrorism are the intertwined issues that dominated the Danish, French and Dutch campaigns and that, in a slightly different configuration, are colouring that in Germany. Security and employment issues reinforce each other, often to the point where the citizen, as well as the unscrupulous politician, blurs very different threats and problems together. They are the issues of the day in European countries, often muddled together in this dangerous chemistry and often connected with feelings of disillusion, disappointment or hostility as far as the EU is concerned. This mood can incorporate a degree of anti-Americanism, too, in which judicious argument about America's role is displaced by the scared feeling that Washington's policies always tend to endanger Europeans.
Obviously the extreme right counts on these issues and this mood but they and it cannot, if for that reason alone, be avoided by others. The parties have to play to them at both national and European levels, as the importance of immigration and asylum at the coming summit in Seville shows. They have to play to a degree of nostalgia as well, as when Helmut Kohl, forgiven for his transgressions, tells Christian Democrats that the days of unification were some "of the happiest days in the history of our country".
Kohl was the European master at the maintenance of loyalty within a traditional constituency. Now, with mainstream parties weakened by a decline in such loyalty, there is a new volatility to electorates. Random events can push them at speed in one direction or another. The French elections showed how a random result can be set right, as it were, by a collective act of will. Yet the result is hardly satisfactory. In order to repudiate Le Pen, the French had to embrace Chirac and, in order to make that embrace complete, they had to hand him a majority in the assembly.
As a result, Chirac and his party have a victory but not a true mandate, a recipe for trouble in coming years, particularly as the French can no longer inflict coexistence on their rulers at mid-term. Since it is weak in this way, the French government may be more assertive at the European level in order to look good at home. It has already indicated that it will seek reinterpretation of the stability pact so that it can cut taxes. The pact, under which countries were supposed to be fined if they exceeded certain limits on their deficits, has already been fudged for Germany and Portugal. Some say the pact was never workable, or intended to work, in this way and that it needs amendment, but the European idea suffers when countries make rules, even if they are foolish rules, and then repudiate them unilaterally when they become politically inconvenient.
I n general, however, new European governments are as European as their predecessors. European leaders remain committed to enlargement in both west and east, with the recent victories of pro-European centre-left parties in Hungary and the Czech Republic testimony of that in the latter case. If Edmund Stoiber wins in Germany he may be slightly less "European" than Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who has in any case been trimming his own pro-European position. But Germany's obvious interest in an eastern enlargement suggests that Stoiber will not be too different from Schröder on European matters if he gains office.
European leaders also remain committed to reform, though reform means different things to the governments of the larger states, who tend toward changes that will consolidate their power by strengthening the European council, than it does to those of the smaller states, who see in the commission a bulwark of their rights that must be preserved and reinforced.
The problem, in large and small countries alike, is that their public opinion is less than wholly with them. What does it mean when 46% of French people say they are against enlargement or when, in six out of the 10 candidate countries, there is no majority for membership of the union? The deficit here is not the familiar democratic deficit in which Europe is unpopular because it is not democratically accountable. It is a deficit of European feeling at the popular level, a perception among significant proportions of the population that the union is one of the threats Europeans face and not a means of salvation.
In such circumstances some politicians will earn points in two ways - by resisting European rules or objectives or by claiming credit for changing those rules and objectives to reflect "what the people really want". Some will quite happily do both. It is true that most will continue to do what decent politicians do, balancing courage and compromise in the continuing effort to keep the world on an even keel. It is also true that Europe has always been a struggle, as Mitterrand learned when he very nearly lost the Maastricht referendum in September 1992.
Distrust of Europe and the issue of reform came together in the Irish referendum of June 2001, when Irish voters rejected the Nice treaty, the legal basis for changing the institutions of the union. They are due to vote again on the matter this autumn and, if they vote No again, which the polls indicate that they might, enlargement would be blocked.
The Irish government is hoping to swing the vote by getting a declaration at Seville that the Nice treaty and Irish neutrality, the possible loss of which was one of the reasons the referendum went the way it did, can be reconciled. Neutrality, of course, acquires extra importance, now that everyone is measuring a terrorist threat which small, uncommitted countries might be spared. The other big issue for the Irish was that as a small state it would be sidelined in an enlarged EU.
Between last summer and this autumn lies September 11. There is a tangible resentment of an outside world which threatens European lives and prosperity, an anxiety about being associated with a US whose actions may invite a counter attack on European soil, and a tendency to be preoccupied with threats and to merge them together. Whether this will find its outlet mainly in a retreat into the national shell or mainly in a change in European objectives is not clear. It is a question of the sense people have of where protection best lies and, equally of whether politicians will emerge who can lift or at least moderate the darkening mood.
