offers no comparably broad Sunbelt, is much more likely to suffer out-migration, as the recent tide of Poles arriving in Britain, and similar numbers from the Baltics and elsewhere coming to Ireland and Sweden, suggest. But labour mobility in any direction is—and, for obvious linguistic and cultural reasons, will remain—far lower in the EU than in the US. Local welfare systems, inherited from the Communist past, and not yet much dismantled, are also potential constraints on a Southern path. Nor does the East, with less than a quarter of the population of the Union, have anything like the relative weight of the South in the United States, not to speak of the political leverage of the region at federal level. For the moment, the effect of enlargement has essentially been much what the Foreign Office and the employers lobbies in Brussels always hoped it would be: the distension of the EU into a vast free-trade zone, with a newly acquired periphery of cheap labour.
The integration of the East into the Union is the major achievement to which admirers of the new Europe can legitimately point. Of course, as with the standard encomia of the record of EU as a whole, there is a certain gap between ideology and reality in the claims made for it. The Community that became a Union was never responsible for the ‘fifty years of peace’ conventionally ascribed to it, a piety attributing to Brussels what in any strict sense belonged to Washington. When actual wars threatened in Yugoslavia, far from preventing their outbreak, the Union if anything helped to trigger them. In not dissimilar fashion, publicists for the EU often imply that without enlargement, Eastern Europe would never have reached the safe harbour of democracy, foundering in new forms of totalitarianism or barbarism. There is more substance to this argument, since the EU has supervised stabilization of the political systems of the region, with a good deal of direct interference. But it too exaggerates dangers in the service of vanities. The EU played no role in the overthrow of the regimes installed by Stalin, and there is little sign that any of the countries in which they fell were at risk of lapsing into new dictatorships, had it not been for the saving hand of the Commission. Enlargement has been a sufficient historical annealment, and—so far—economic success, not to require claims that it has also been, counter-factually, a political deliverance. The standard hype demeans rather than elevates what has been accomplished.
There remains the largest question. What has been the impact of expansion to the East on the institutional framework of the EU itself? Here the glass darkens. For if enlargement has been the principal achievement of the recent period, the constitution that was supposed to renovate the Union has been its most signal failure, and the potential interactions between the two remain a matter of obscurity. The ‘Convention on the Future of Europe’ decided on at Laeken met in early 2002, and in mid-2003 delivered a draft European Constitution, agreed by the European Council in the summer of 2004. Delegates from candidate countries were nominally included in the Convention, but since the Convention itself amounted to little more than window-dressing for the labours of its president, Giscard d’Estaing, assisted by a British factotum, John Kerr—the two real authors of the draft—their presence was of no consequence. The future charter of Europe was written for the establishments of the West—the governments of the existing fifteen member-states who had to approve it, relegating the countries of the East to onlookers. In effect, the logic of a constituent will was inverted: instead of enlargement becoming the common basis of a new framework, the framework was erected before enlargement.
The ensuing debacle came as a brief thunderclap to the Western elites. The Constitution—more than five hundred pages long, comprising 446 articles and 36 supplementary protocols, a bureaucratic elephantiasis without precedent—increased the power of the four largest states in the Union: Germany, France, Britain and Italy; topped the inter-governmental complex in which they would have greater sway with a five-year presidency, unelected by the European Parliament, let alone the citizens of the Union; and inscribed the imperatives of a ‘highly competitive’ market, ‘free of distortions’ as a foundational principle of political law, beyond the reach of popular choice. The founders of the American republic would have rubbed their eyes in disbelief at such a ponderous and rickety construction. But so overwhelming was the consensus of the continent’s media and political class behind it, that few doubted it would come into force. To the astonishment of their rulers, however, voters made short work of it. In France, where the government was unwise enough to dispatch copies of the document to every voter—Giscard complained of this folly with his handiwork—little was left of it at the end of a referendum campaign in which a spirited popular opposition, without the support of a single mainstream party, newspaper, magazine, let alone radio or television programme, routed an establishment united in endorsing it. Rarely, even in recent French history, had a pensée quite so unique been up-ended so spectacularly.
In the last days of the campaign, as polls showed increasing rejection of the Constitution among the voters, panic gripped the French media. But no local hysterics, though there were many, rivalled those across the border in Germany. ‘Europe Demands Courage’, admonished Günter Grass, Jürgen Habermas and a cohort of like-minded German intellectuals, in an open letter dispatched to Le Monde. Warning their neighbours that ‘France would isolate itself fatally if it were to vote “No” ’, they went on: ‘The consequences of a rejection would be catastrophic’, indeed ‘an invitation to suicide’, for ‘without courage there is no survival’. In member-states new and old ‘the Constitution fulfils a dream of centuries’, and to vote for it was a duty not just to the living, but to the dead: ‘we owe this to the millions upon millions of victims of our lunatic wars and criminal dictatorships’.10 This from a country where no democratic consultation of the electorate was risked, and pro forma ratification of the Constitution was stage-managed in the Bundesrat to impress French voters a few days before the referendum, with Giscard as guest of honour at the podium. As for French isolation, three days later the Dutch—told, still more bluntly, that Auschwitz awaited Europe if they failed to vote yes—threw out the Constitution by an even wider margin.
Such two-fold popular repudiation of the charter for a new Europe was not in reality a bolt from the blue. The Constitution was rejected, not because it was too federalist, but because it seemed little more than an impenetrable scheme for the redistribution of oligarchic power, embodying everything most distrusted in the arrogant, opaque system the EU appeared to have become. Virtually every time—there have not been many—that voters have been allowed to express an opinion about the direction the Union was taking, they have rejected it. The Norwegians refused the EC tout court; the Danes declined Maastricht; the Irish, the Treaty of Nice; the Swedes, the euro. Each time, the political class promptly sent them back to the polls to correct their mistake, or waited for an occasion to reverse the verdict. The operative maxim of the EU has become Brecht’s dictum: in case of setback, the government should dissolve the people and elect a new one.
Predictably, amidst the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, Europe’s heads of state were soon discussing how to cashier the popular will once again, and reimpose the Constitution with cosmetic alterations, without exposing it this time to the risks of a democratic decision. At the Brussels summit in June 2007, the requisite adjustment—now renamed a simple treaty—was agreed. To let Britain disavow a referendum, it was exempted from the Charter of Fundamental Rights to which all other member-states subscribed. To throw a sop to French opinion, references to unfettered competition were tucked away in a protocol, rather than appearing in the main document. To square the conscience of the Dutch, ‘promotion of European values’ was made a test of membership. To save the face of Poland’s rulers, the demotion of their country to second-rank in the Council was deferred for a decade, leaving their successors to come to terms with it.
The principal novelty of this gathering to resuscitate what French and Dutch voters had buried was Germany’s determination to ensure its primacy in the electoral structure of the Council. Polish objections to a formula doubling Germany’s weight, and drastically reducing Poland’s, had—for reasons that voting theory in international organizations has long made clear, as experts in such matters pointed out—every technical consideration of fairness on their side. But issues of equity were no more relevant than issues of democracy to the outcome. After blustering that demographic losses in the Second World War entitled Poland to proportionate compensation