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Introduction

The future of the European Union

and the transatlantic relationship

International Affairs 79, () ‒

JULIE SMITH

If 1989 was a momentous year in terms of geopolitical change, 2004 looks set tobe equally dramatic, at least as far as two of the West’s major organizations areconcerned. With both NATO and the European Union due to enlarge in May2004, there is considerable speculation about how the new member states willfit into the established institutions. Are their interests similar to those of theexisting member states? Is there a ‘new Europe’ joining the ‘old Europe’ asDonald Rumsfeld would have us believe? Will they become America’s ‘newbest friends’? And will enlargement help or hinder the organizations concerned?While it is tempting to try to stereotype the prospective new members and toview them as a monolithic entity, nothing could be more wrong. Each of thenew members comes with its own historical, political and economic legacies andeach will affect NATO and the EU in different ways. Thus we must view thenew members as individuals, each with its own peculiarities, sometimes allyingwith France and Germany, at other times with the UK, Italy and Spain, or thenagain working at times primarily with other newcomers.

In this issue focusing on the future of Europe and the transatlantic relation-ship, authors from both sides of the Atlantic address various aspects of US andEuropean foreign and economic policy and their interplay from the perspectivesof contemporary politics and historical analysis. Stanley Hoffman and StrobeTalbott analyse transatlantic relations past and present, while Melvyn P. Lefflerlooks at US foreign policy after September 11, put in the perspective of America’straditional approach to international engagement. Marcin Zaborowski and KerryLonghurst look at Poland’s role as a regional leader and America’s protégé incentral Europe, a role they perceive to have arisen in part because of Poland’shistorical and political legacies. Turning to economics, Arthur Cyr puts theemergence of the euro into historical relief, while Jacek Rostowski argues forthe early entry of the new EU members into the euro. Looking to the future,both Peter Hain, in conversation with Martha Kearney, and Anand Menon lookat the Convention on the Future of Europe, which ran from February 2002until July 2003 and which paves the way for an intergovernmental conferencethat is expected to provide a new constitutional treaty for the European Union.

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Alongside their respective expansions, both NATO and the EU are under-going significant internal transformations. In the case of NATO, the transform-ation began in the 1990s as commentators and practitioners pondered whetherthe end of the Cold War would render the Alliance obsolete. As Stanley Hoffmannmakes clear in his article, ‘US–European relations: past and future’, NATO didserve a useful purpose in the early 1990s and persisted, ‘because it became a toolfor the management of relations between its members, on the one hand, and thenewly liberated central and east European countries and Russia on the other’(p. 1030). Yet, in an entirely new international environment, NATO trans-formed itself from a Cold War military alliance into an organization focusing ona broader range of security issues. Enlargement to include Hungary, Poland andthe Czech Republic did not fundamentally alter the Alliance but subsequentevents, notably the US’s rejection of NATO assistance in the aftermath of theterror attacks on September 11 2001 again called NATO’s existence into ques-tion and, along with the war in Iraq, threatened to tear apart the transatlanticrelationship that had been established over fifty years. Enlargement of the Euro-pean Union may also have an impact on the transatlantic relationship as severalarticles in this issue make clear.

The European Union will change fundamentally when it enlarges to thesouth and to the east on 1 May 2004. Not only will the Union’s boundariesexpand to touch the borders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus and the number ofmember states almost double from 15 to 25 but the attitudes and interests of thenew members may also differ from those of the current member states on manyissues from farming to foreign policy. Previous enlargements have had aprofound impact on the nature of the Union—after all, inviting the neighboursin can have unexpected consequences. This enlargement is qualitatively differ-ent from earlier rounds, however. Apart from the different historical, politicaland economic experiences of the new members, all bar Malta and Cyprusformerly communist states, their size will also have an impact on the Union, sinceall except Poland are small in terms of population. This need not necessarily bea problem, since it is in many ways easier to absorb the demands of small statesthan large ones, partly by judicious apportionment of financial resources.However, there is a concern that the prevalence of small states might lead tointractable differences between large and small members, as was seen in the2000 Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) that led to the Treaty of Nice. Onpast experience, there is unlikely to be much impact on day-to-day decision-making but there is an immanent problem, since the Union is currentlyengaged in institutional reform, which requires unanimity among its members,including the ten who will join in 2004.

As a corollary to its enlargement, the European Union is attempting to bringabout a fundamental reform of its institutional arrangements, with the intentionof ensuring that a Union of 25 or more member states will be able to functioneffectively, transparently and democratically. The current 15 members decidedto convene a special Convention on the Future of Europe, back in 2001. The

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aim of the Convention was to pave the way for the Intergovernmental Con-ference, which the Treaty of Nice required to be held in 2004, and to bringEurope ‘closer to the people’ by giving national parliamentarians a very largevoice in the proceedings and offering a Forum in which citizens and represen-tatives of civil society could have their say. The Convention succeeded inproducing a draft Constitution for the Union, which achieved near consensusamong the 105 members. Europe’s leaders meeting at the Thessaloniki Summitin June felt that the draft would be a useful starting point for the deliberations ofthe IGC, which was brought forward to open on 4 October 2003. Many, notleast the Convention’s president, former President of France, Valéry Giscardd’Estaing, hope that the draft will be adopted unchanged by the Intergovern-mental Conference, arguing that if any part of the draft is unpicked the rest ofthe carefully constructed compromise might unravel.

Peter Hain, who served as the British Government’s representative on theConvention, argues in an interview with Martha Kearney in this issue that thereis little appetite for a re-opening of the major issues discussed in the Conven-tion. Certainly from a British perspective, he feels that there is little need torevise the document, a view shared by Anand Menon in his article, ‘Britain andthe Convention on the Future of Europe’. After all, the hysteria of the Britishtabloid press aside, the draft was seen by many on both sides of the Channel as avictory for the UK—a British document indeed. Thus, Menon cites FrenchSenator Robert Badinter, as saying, ‘It would be appropriate to call the Euro-pean constitutional project “the British”…’ (p. 978). And, as Hain points out, itwas the federalists rather than states-righters who were most concerned aboutthe draft that finally emerged from the Convention.

If the British Government is broadly satisfied with the draft Constitution, thesame cannot be said about all the governments of the current and future mem-ber states. The fixed-term Council Presidency to which the French and Britishwere deeply committed found its way into the draft but is not universally sup-ported by the 25. More importantly, perhaps, is the proposal to cap the numberof full Commissioners with voting rights, which is perceived by most of thesmall countries as something that will damage their national interests. At leastten smaller states, including Poland, have discussed the need to reopen the draft,with all the potential for unravelling it that Giscard and others fear. In addition,Poland and Spain are also opposed to the re-weighting of votes in the Council,which would disadvantage them in comparison with the already sub-optimal pro-visions of the Treaty of Nice. Thus, they are likely to seek revisions in that area.

In addition, even if the British Government is broadly satisfied with the draftit has also expressed concern over some aspects of it, not least the idea of aEuropean foreign minister (in the language of the draft Treaty, Union Ministerfor Foreign Affairs). To a certain extent this is simply a semantic difficulty, asHain makes clear: without a European government the concept of a minister ismeaningless, thus he feels ‘representative’ would be a more felicitous title.Semantic difference or not, this does mean that the British Government has

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begun to propose amendments to the draft that may not be welcomed by all.The more such amendments are proposed, the more likely it is that the IGCwill not be concluded until some time in 2004. Thus, the ambitious desire ofthe Italian Government that the IGC should be brought to a close under itspresidency of the European Union, i.e. by 31 December 2003, is unlikely to bemet, putting into doubt the chances of the Treaty being signed before the nextround of elections to the European Parliament due in mid-June 2004.

In contrast to previous enlargements of the Union when institutional and/orpolicy reforms occurred before or alongside the accession of new memberswithout any reference to them, the candidate states participated in the Conven-tion on the Future of Europe, so they have already had a chance to articulatetheir views about the direction the Union should take. However, in the initialphases of the Convention the representatives of the candidate states were fairlysilent. Only once the European Council confirmed its decision to admit themin 2004 did they begin to make their own positions clear. Even then theirapproaches to the institutional dynamics of the Union were inevitably less well-formed than those of the EU-15, since for the previous decade their focus hadbeen on joining the Union rather than on the nature of the entity that theysought to enter. The majority of the candidate states do, in fact, share similarviews to each other on questions of institutional reform: there are few outrightfederalists among the ranks of the candidate states but neither are there manywho support the preference of the large member states for a fixed-term electedPresident (or chair) of the European Council; most are opposed to the idea thatthe College of Commissioners should be capped at 15, since they perceive thatthis would damage their representation at the European level (and that despitethe fact that the Commissioners are obliged not to adhere to any nationalmandate!).

New member states are required to sign up to the full acquis communautaire,the Union’s body of treaties and legislation that has been agreed over half acentury. Outside of the institutional issues being discussed in the Conventionand IGC, therefore, the ten new members have relatively little choice about thesort of Europe they join. Thus, as Jacek Rostowski notes in his article, ‘Whenshould the central Europeans join EMU?’, on the thorny issue of the euro, thecandidate states have only one choice on joining, when not whether. As ArthurCyr points out in his article, ‘The Euro: faith, hope and parity’, ‘the euro servesas a symbol of the political commitment by member states and citizens to theEuropean Union’ (p. 980). It is a commitment which voters in Sweden andDenmark have declined to make in referendums and over which the Britishelectorate has yet to be consulted; candidate states are required to make thatcommitment as a condition of joining the Union whether or not their citizenslike that particular aspect of European integration. Some of the candidate states,including Poland and Hungary have expressed their desire to join the euro assoon as possible, others, notably the Czech Republic, are willing to wait a littlelonger. Rostowski sees many advantages for the candidates in joining the euro at

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an early stage and argues plausibly that because they already trade extensivelywith the EU-15, the candidates are not in a significantly more sub-optimalcurrency area than the current 12 eurozone states. Yet if the candidates arerequired to be ready to take on the acquis that does not mean the currentmembers will make it easy for them to join all the policy areas. The Bundesbankand the European Commission have expressed concern about letting the tennew members join the euro at an early date, just as there is a reluctance to allowthem to become members of the Schengen acquis on frontier controls, despitethe requirement that they be ‘Schengen-ready’ when they accede to the Union.Double standards perhaps but ones that those would-be member states arerequired to accept as the price of joining the Union.

There is one policy area where the new member states could make a majorimpact on the European Union and which continues to divide the currentmember states: foreign policy. The Europeans have been attempting to speakwith a common voice on foreign affairs ever since the early 1970s. Time andagain conflicting national interests, differing attitudes towards power projectionand contrasting approaches to the transatlantic relationship and to NATO haveensured that progress has been limited. The 1992 Treaty on European Unionput foreign policy on a formal footing but the divisions have remained on this ason the possibility of a European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP). More-over, in contrast to the Cold War era when the transatlantic relationship and theAtlantic alliance were givens, since 1989 rifts have become increasingly apparent,most significantly over the war on Iraq in Spring 2003. As Stanley Hoffmannargues in his article, ‘US-European relations: past and future’, during the ColdWar the ‘“Atlantic community” rested on two myths. One was the absence ofany necessary conflict between European integration and the Atlantic com-munity…The second myth was that Europe remained, for the United States,the most crucial diplomatic and strategic theatre, one with which the US waslinked not only by vital economic and security interests, but also by the link of acommon culture and common values’ (p. 1030). Moreover, as Arthur Cyr re-minds us, in the early years of integration, ‘US leaders often drew directanalogies between American and European economic and political integration’(p. 983). And they were not alone; the European founding fathers, notably JeanMonnet, saw the US as a model for European integration.

Tensions between European and American policy have become increasinglymarked over the last decade, not just in relation to NATO but over a widerange of issues from the environment and the Kyoto Protocol to internationallaw, the United Nations and the International Criminal Court. Over the years,however, transatlantic differences have emerged most visibly over security anddefence policy, as the United States has adopted a policy of preemption. Thispolicy, as it has been pursued by President George W. Bush has contributed inno small measure to the emerging transatlantic rift, even though, as Melvyn P.Leffler points out in his article, ‘9/11 and the past and future of AmericanForeign Policy’, the current US approach to foreign policy is not new.

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Nor, it should be remembered, are European states unanimous in theirapproach to foreign and defence policy. On the defence side, some in the USand Europe see ESDP as a threat to NATO; many French politicians and someGerman, Belgian and Luxembourgers do indeed wish it to be an alternative toNATO, but this view is not shared by the majority of European states, includ-ing the candidate states. While the United Kingdom has been most vocal in itssupport for the war in Iraq, several of the Central and East European candidatestates also expressed their support for action. This led President Chirac tosuggest that they had ‘missed a good opportunity to keep quiet’ and to implythat their support for the US could lead to delays in accession to the Union.However, Chirac’s response missed several key features of the candidates:

• first, three central European states—Hungary, Poland and the Czech Repub-lic—joined Nato in 1999 and therefore already have commitments to theAlliance. The others are seeking to join NATO in 2004. For many of thesecountries the Alliance is seen as at least as important as EU membership, sinceit offers security guarantees that the Union does not, thus is it inevitable thatthey should support allies or prospective allies within the Alliance;

• secondly, the candidate states typically see the United States, at least in part,as their liberator from Communism. Coupled with the presence of largediaspora communities in the US, this puts the Central and East Europeanspsychologically closer than most west Europeans to the US;

• thirdly, unlike the majority of the current EU members, the candidate statesare not Kantian in outlook. Recent history puts them next to the US asHobbesians in international politics, willing to engage in military action.

Of course it would be wrong to pigeonhole all the candidates into one pro-American block. Hungary and the Czech Republic were markedly cool aboutNATO action over Kosovo in 1999. By contrast, Poland and the Baltic Stateshave cast themselves as ‘good Atlanticists’. In their article, ‘The Emergence ofPoland as a regional leader’, Marcin Zaborowski and Kerry Longhurst arguethat Warsaw has always opted for Atlantic as opposed to European solutions andinstitutions to meet its security needs. Poland, they argue, is a regional leader inthe sense that America has cultivated in its war on terror, a state ‘with whichWashington seeks to work or may occasionally delegate some security-relatedtasks’ (p. 1009). Although this status could vanish if Poland does not modernizeits security thinking and could be jeopardized by Poland’s own eastern policy, itis indicative of a pro-American stance among several of the prospective newNATO and EU members. This could continue to put them at odds withFrance, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg but is in line with the views ofother states including the UK, Italy and Spain. The dynamics of Europe’sforeign policy and of NATO are both likely to change fundamentally withenlargement and in ways that are unlikely to please France and Germany. TheConvention on the Future of Europe addressed the idea of a common foreign

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and security policy; Article 15, para. 2 of the draft Constitutional Treaty states:‘Member States shall actively and unreservedly support the Union’s commonforeign and security policy in a spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity and shallcomply with the acts adopted by the Union in this area.’ This implies acommonality of policy that is belied by the reality. Differences are likely toabound in the enlarged Union and enlarged NATO—whether or not the twoorganizations will be more effective and better able to ensure the security oftheir members remains to be seen.

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