At least, let’s hope they are, for there is much to do. If Europe is to assume the geopolitical role for which it is abundantly equipped, it is going to have to discover some real political leadership. Yet the immediate prospects for doing so are poor.
To be sure, the European economy is humming along merrily, with growth in the Euroland 11 now forecast to be about 2 percent this year. Ireland continues to grow at speeds more appropriate to pre-1997 Asia, while Finland churns out high-tech ideas that get rave reviews even in such a booster of Silicon Valley as Wired magazine. Unemployment, though still too high, is everywhere in steady retreat. Measured only by statistics, or by the palpable sense of European prosperity–all those long vacations and mobile phones that the rest of the world would kill for–the old continent has rarely looked better.
As long, that is, as you define “Europe” in a particular way. For 10 years after the fall of the Berlin wall, the continent remains divided. To truly integrate Europe is an enterprise that calls for immediate, decisive, action. Certainly, there have been gains in the lands to the east of the old Iron Curtain; Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic have joined the ranks of the developed economies, even if the Czechs have recently been in a deep recession. But elsewhere, the economic picture in East and Central Europe is nothing to celebrate. The three Baltic states will see almost no growth this year. Romania’s trade was severely disrupted by the Kosovo war. Belarus is a basket case; somewhere in Minsk, someone is still making parts for those Soviet-era tractors that were meant to break the soil of the steppe but often just broke down. And Ukraine–with 50 million people–belongs in the category of “beyond basket case.” Its economy is still largely a stranger to those reforms that have lifted incomes elsewhere, and a tricky presidential election looms.
And that’s the good news. For really dismal tidings, consider Russia, whose economy is a corrupt shambles. Rumors swirl around a sick and ineffective Boris Yeltsin. Unpredictable elections beckon for both the Duma and the presidency. Or take a look at the Balkans–after eight years of war, no nearer political stability than when Yugoslavia started to fall apart. Optimists measure the time they think that peacekeeping forces will have to stay there by decades; pessimists wonder when the next Balkan war will begin.
This division of Europe is morally objectionable. For two generations, West Europeans were the lucky beneficiaries of the cold war, protected by American arms, able to integrate their economies without having to worry about Polish peasants or Serb steelworkers. For all that time, Western Europe’s leaders got misty-eyed over the distant prospect of a continent whole and free. With the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, they were asked to match deeds to words. So far, they have failed. Ten years on, not a single nation of the old communist bloc has yet joined the EU. (Who would have guessed that NATO, and not the Union, would first open its doors to members of the Warsaw Pact?) Of course, aligning the economies of East and Central Europe with the obligations of EU membership is not easy; and to be sure, negotiations for the accession of six nations to the Union are underway. But the pace has been miserably slow.
That has to change. The willingness of the EU to shoulder some responsibility for its “near abroad” is the only real measure by which we can judge if the EU is able to take its place in the first rank of world powers. Yet a decisive commitment to the steady integration of East and Central Europe will not happen without real political leadership. At present, it is lacking.
The political future of Europe now largely rests in the hands of four men–British Prime Minister Tony Blair, French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, Germany’s Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, and Romano Prodi, the Italian who last week was installed as president of the European Commission. Politically, all are on the center-left, and all “modernizers,” even if Jospin doesn’t like the Third Way/Neue Mitte rhetoric of Blair and Schroder. A network of advisers and personal friendships link them together. Each has great qualities. Yet in terms of aspiring to the leadership of Europe, each is flawed.
Start with the chancellor, who heads the government of Europe’s most populous nation (outside Russia) and by far its largest economy. Too bad that economy looks sick. Germany’s public finances, said Finance Minister Hans Eichel in the Reichstag last week, “are in a ruinous state.” Germany’s status as an economic model, he continued, was “finished.” Of course, Germany has one of the world’s most highly skilled work forces and a manufacturing sector studded with world-beating companies. But there are real doubts that the Mittelstand–the small- and medium-size companies, often family owned, which were the lifeblood of the postwar miracle–can compete successfully in a globalized economy. Those who built up those firms after 1945 were hungry; their children have grown up in a Germany that sometimes seems to value long vacations over hard work.
Schroder has reacted to Germany’s troubled economy with a plan to cut both taxes and red tape (box). Assume he means what he says; even so, the events of the past month have made abundantly plain that he cannot “modernize’ Germany with a wave of the hand. In recent Lnder elections, traditional supporters of the SPD have deserted the party in droves. The German government says all the right words about the need to expand membership of the EU. But even Michael Steiner, Schroder’s national-security adviser, concedes that “In the situation he has now, [Schroder] has to concentrate on his own house.”
Jospin’s case is different. True, his government also runs the risk of alienating some of its traditional supporters, as the French economy continues to meet the challenge of globalization with mergers and the downsizing of some old-line companies (box). But the quiet competence of Jospin’s administration is popular, and the French are in many ways better suited to the challenge of globalization than any other Europeans. Precisely because their own sense of identity and pride in their institutions is so strong, they can face the challenges of the new world with a degree of security. France will always be France.
In the past, this has allowed French leaders to stamp their particular mark on the European agenda. But two factors militate against such leadership today. First, expansion of the EU to the east–the pressing issue of the next decade–has never been a priority in Paris. Second, even if the grand gestures of leadership were Jospin’s style (which they are not), he cannot make them. So long as authority is divided between Jospin and Jacques Chirac, the president, France cannot assume the role of leader of Europe to which it believes, with some reason, it is entitled.
Blair really is a leader–he proved that during the Kosovo war–even if the parochial British press seems to delight in ignoring the extent to which he is admired outside his own country. He presides over an economy whose prospects are better than they have been for two generations. Moreover, Blair, in his bones, is more sympathetic to the European project than any recent British leader.
But you cannot lead Europe from a nation that is not sure whether it really wants to be European. Britain is not a member of the European monetary union, and if the government proposed membership in a referendum this year, it would certainly lose. Euro-skepticism remains a powerful political force. Blair can and will usefully badger other European governments to modernize their defense and security policies; but he cannot play the visionary on the European stage so long as many of his own citizens distrust everything that Europe stands for.
Prodi has started his term at the Commission making all the right noises. He wants candidates for EU accession to be told precisely when they might join, and has spoken of placing a “European roof” over the Balkans. His new team of commissioners–with potential stars like Britain’s Chris Patten and France’s Pascal Lamy–looks much stronger than the hapless lot forced to resign in the spring. And it is possible to show real leadership from the Commission; the presidency of Jacques Delors proved that, as Lamy, who was Delors’s chief of staff, has doubtless reminded Prodi.
Yet the case is now altered. Delors relied on support from Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterrand, who led the German and French governments at the time, endorsed Delors’s agenda and were much closer to each other than Schroder is to Jospin (or Chirac, for that matter). Moreover, Prodi leads an institution wholly discredited by the allegations of corruption that doomed the Commission led by his predecessor Jacques Santer. The Italian’s first priority must be to establish his authority in Brussels–grand visions for the whole continent may have to wait.
For all these reasons, those seeking genuine leadership in Europe cannot rely on the Big Four. Still, Schroder, Jospin, Blair and Prodi do not have a monopoly of political wisdom. In the next few months, it will be interesting to assess the performance of two other men of the center-left–Javier Solana, who will shortly move from NATO headquarters to become the EU’s foreign and security policy czar, and George Robertson, the Scot who will move from Britain’s Defense Ministry to replace the Spaniard as NATO’s secretary general.
Solana was a success at NATO. He impressed the Americans (who knew little about him when he was appointed in 1995), negotiated skillfully with the Russians and kept NATO’s potentially fissiparous membership in line during the Kosovo war. He starts his new job with one great advantage: he is not French, which means that neither the United States nor Washington’s friends in Europe (and they exist outside London) need fear that he wants to develop a foreign policy that rivals Uncle Sam’s. Robertson’s appointment is something of a miracle; a rare case, in international affairs, of a round peg being found for a round hole. Passionately committed to the Atlantic alliance while at the same time a true European, he is uniquely suited to building a real European pillar within NATO without annoying the Americans.
Partly, that is because the Americans don’t want to be annoyed. The United States has no desire to be the world’s policeman, dragged into disputes wherever they occur simply because there is nobody else to do the job. Washington, these days, looks favorably on any rich democracy that steps up and helps shoulder the burden of making the world a safer place. That is why Australia’s role in the East Timor crisis has been so appreciated; more pertinently, it is why grumbles about the EU’s inward-looking stance are now quite common in Washington. Americans wonder why Europeans don’t understand that the world on their borders is a dangerous one, but one that with a little generosity could be made much safer.
Such generosity, however, needs a particular Europe; a Europe whose leaders look outside their own nations’ narrow interests, outside the EU’s charmed circle, and who ask their rich citizens to make modest sacrifices for a greater good. Right now, the conditions for such leadership do not exist. Europe–and the world–may one day rue that unlucky break.
