ex-Communist countries for entry. Can any predictions be made about the outcomes that might emerge from a metabolism of this magnitude?
At this historical crossroads it is worth thinking back to the work of Monnet and his circle. Historically, state-construction has proceeded along three main lines. One is a gradual, unplanned, organic growth of governmental authority and territory, such as occurred in—let us say—late mediaeval France or early modern Austria, whose architects had little or no idea of long-term objectives at all. A second path is the conscious imitation of preexisting models, of a kind that first really emerges in Europe in the eighteenth century, with the emulation of French Absolutism by its Prussian or Piedmontese counterparts. A third and historically still later path was deliberate revolutionary innovation—the creation of completely new state forms in a very compressed period of time, under the pressure either of popular upheavals like the American or Russian revolutions, or elite drives like the Meiji Restoration in Japan.
The process of statecraft set in train by the projectors—the term of Burkean alarm can be taken as homage—of a federal Europe departed from all these paths. It was without historical precedent. For its origins were very deliberately designed, but they were neither imitative of anything else, nor total in scope; while the goals at which it aimed were not proximate but very distant. This was an entirely novel combination: a style of political construction that was at once highly voluntarist, but pragmatically piecemeal—and yet vaultingly long-range. Relying on what he called a ‘dynamic disequilibrium’, Monnet’s strategy was an incremental totalization, en route to a hitherto unexampled objective—a democratic supranational federation. The implications of his undertaking did not escape him. He wrote: ‘We are starting a process of continuous reform which can shape tomorrow’s world more lastingly than the principles of revolution so widespread outside the West’.23 It is one of the great merits of Duchêne’s biography that it seeks so intelligently to take the measure of this innovation, which he calls—by contrast with conquest, adjustment or upheaval—‘that rarest of all phenomena in history, a studied change of regime’.24 This is a striking formula. Yet there is in it at once a certain over-statement, and under-statement. The changes were more improvised than studied; but at stake was more than a regime.
Looking back, who can deny the genius of this conception of political advance—as if the ambitions of Napoleon could be married to the methods of Taaffe? On the other hand, it exacted a characteristic price. If all historical undertakings are subject to the fatality of unintended consequences, the more deliberate they are the more pronounced the gap may become. The ‘construction of Europe’ set in train by Monnet and his circle was an enterprise of unrivalled scope and complexity, which yet nearly always relied on drab institutional steps and narrow social supports. Historically, it was bound to lead to what it did—that is, a persistent pattern of consequences that disconcerted and foiled the intentions of its architects.
The series of these bafflements has been continuous down to the present. In the fifties Monnet wanted Euratom and was landed with the Common Market; working for a supranational union, what he eventually got was an inter-governmental consortium dominated by the statesman most opposed to everything he stood for, De Gaulle. The General in turn thought his procedural fixture in the sixties would stymie the bureaucratic pretensions of the Commission—which in fact rebounded more strongly than ever out of them in the seventies. In the eighties, Mrs Thatcher believed the Single European Act would repeat and extend the deregulated internal market she championed in the UK—only to discover it leading towards the single currency she most detested. The hopes of Jacques Delors are still with us. Is it likely their fate will differ in the nineties?
2
On New Year’s Day 1994, Europe—the metonym—changed names. The dozen nations of the Community took on the title of Union, though as in a Spanish wedding, the new appellation did not replace but encompassed the old. Was anything of substance altered? So far, very little. The member-states have risen to fifteen, with the entry of three former neutrals. Otherwise things are much as they were before. What is new, however, is that everyone knows this is not going to last. For the first time since the war, Europe is living in anticipation of large but still imponderable changes to the part that has stood for the whole. Three dominate the horizon.
The first is, of course, the Treaty of Maastricht. We can set aside its various rhetorical provisions, for vague consultation of foreign policy and defence, or ineffectual protection of social rights, and even ignore its mild emendations of the institutional relations within the Community. The core of the Treaty is the commitment by the member-states, save England and Denmark, to introduce a single currency, under the authority of a single central bank, by 1999. This step means an irreversible move of the EU towards real federation. With it, national governments will lose the right either to issue money or to alter exchange rates, and will only be able to vary rates of interest and public borrowing within very narrow limits, on pain of heavy fines from the Commission if they break central bank directives. They may still tax at their discretion, but capital mobility in the single market can be expected to ensure increasingly common fiscal denominators. European monetary union spells the end of the most important attributes of national economic sovereignty.
Secondly, Germany is now reunited. The original Common Market was built on a balance between the two largest countries of the Six, France and Germany—the latter with greater economic weight and slightly larger population, the former with superior military and diplomatic weight. Later, Italy and Britain provided flanking states of roughly equivalent demographic and economic size. This balance started to break down in the eighties, when the EMS proved to be a zone pivoting on the deutschmark, the only currency never to be devalued within it. A decade later, Germany’s position has been qualitatively transformed. With a population of over eighty million, it is now much the largest state in the Union, enjoying not only monetary but increasingly institutional and diplomatic ascendancy. For the first time in its history, the process of European integration is now potentially confronted with the emergence of a hegemonic power, with a widely asymmetrical capacity to affect all other member-states.
The third great change has followed from the end of Communism in the countries of the former Warsaw Pact. The restoration of capitalism east of the Elbe has further transformed the position of Germany, both by reinstating it as the continental Land der Mitte which its conservative theorists always—with reason—insisted it would once again become, and—a less noticed development—by reducing the significance of the nuclear weapons that France and Britain possessed and it lacked. Yet more significant, however, is the currently expressed desire of virtually all the East European countries, and some of the former Soviet lands, to join the EU. As things stand, the total population of these candidates is about 130 million. Their inclusion would make a Community of half a billion people, nearly twice the size of the United States. More pointedly still, it would approximately double the membership of the European Union, from fifteen to some thirty states. A completely new configuration would be at stake.
Historically, these three great changes have been interconnected. In reverse order, it was the collapse of Communism that allowed the reunification of Germany that precipitated the Treaty of Maastricht. The shock-wave moved from the east to the centre to the west of Europe. But causes and consequences remain distinct. The outcomes of these processes obey no single logic. More than this: to a greater extent than in any previous phase of European integration, the impact of each is quite uncertain. We confront a set of ex ante indeterminacies that, adopting a Kantian turn of phrase, might be called the three amphibologies of post-Maastricht politics. They pose much more dramatic dilemmas than is generally imagined.
The Treaty itself offers the first. Its origins lie in the dynamism of Delors’s leadership of the Commission. After securing passage of the Single European Act in 1986, Delors persuaded the European Council two years later to set up a committee largely composed of central bankers, but chaired by himself, to report on a single currency. Its recommendations were formally accepted by the Council in the spring of 1989. But it was the sudden tottering of East Germany that spurred Mitterrand to conclude an agreement with Kohl at the Strasbourg summit in the autumn, putting the decisive weight of the Franco-German axis behind the project. Thatcher, of course, was implacably opposed.
But