European Politics

Reading some of the responses to “Chris’s”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/29/3370/ and “my”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/30/no-regrets/ posts on Turkey and the future evolution of the European Union, reminds me of Tyler Cowen’s “aside”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/05/liberalism_stan.html a couple of weeks ago, that:

bq. The modern liberal vice is to think that everyone can be taken care of, and/or to rule out foreigners from the relevant moral universe.

The latter bit is the relevant one here, of course, and it’s a tough question for European leftwingers. Is some dilution of the traditional European welfare state acceptable, if it substantially increases the wellbeing of current outsiders (i.e. for example, by bringing Turkey into the club). My answer is yes, if European leftwingers are to stick to their core principles on justice, fairness, egalitarianism etc. Of course, this is a somewhat broader variant of the more general theoretical questions surrounding the relationship between nationality and cosmopolitanism. So far, I haven’t seen any very convincing counter-arguments that suggest that lefties should privilege fellow-Europeans or fellow nationals over those from elsewhere. Below the fold, I set out some of the arguments that I’ve seen or can think of, but that don’t seem to me to be convincing. Others may disagree – or have other, better arguments that I haven’t thought of.

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A few thoughts in response to the (not exactly unexpected) outcome in France.

(1) The old way of pushing European integration – agreements among political elites, followed by the odd referendum here and there – is dead. My best-guess prediction – a lot more emphasis in the future on ‘informal’ integration processes such as the Lisbon agenda. I also predict that some of the key issues _will_ be revisited in a future quasi-constitutional text, which will attempt to lay down the law for once and for all. There are a number of dry-as-dust issues regarding the balance between different institutions, between member states on the Council etc which aren’t attracting much attention outside the specialist community now, but which are likely to provoke interesting political crises down the line. Hence, I think there will be another effort to push through Treaty change a few years from now – but unlike previous efforts, it will be proceeded by a widespread and vociferous public debate. The last Constitutional Convention tried very hard to create political buzz and debate, and failed miserably. Their successors won’t have much difficulty in getting attention, for better or for worse.

(2) The Turkish accession process is likely to be a lot more robust than people are giving it credit for being at the moment. The major political decision was taken last year, to open up negotiations with Turkey. The next major political decision comes at least a decade from now, when the member states and Parliament decide whether or not to accept Turkey as a member state. In the meantime, the political running will be made by the European Commission, which is the only body involved in direct negotiations. It’s going to be hard for grumpy member states to disrupt this, even if they want to. Frank Schimmelfennig had a great “article”:http://www.sowi.uni-mannheim.de/lehrstuehle/lepolzg/Schimmelfennig%20-%20EU%20Enlargement.pdf in _International Organization_ a few years ago, talking about how the states of Central and Eastern Europe became members of the EU – despite the unwavering opposition of key member states such as France. The processes that he identifies aren’t as powerful in the Turkish case as in the East European one – but they will make it harder to reverse negotiations than one might imagine. The only situation in which I can see Turkey’s accession being seriously endangered is if renewed opposition from the Christian Democratic right (and parts of the left) coincide with reluctance on Turkey’s part to make the necessary concessions in terms of human rights, the role of the military etc etc.

(3) The above said, I do suspect that we are going to see more overt opposition within the European Union to Turkey, e.g. the election of a significant number of candidates on an anti-Turkey platform in the next round of elections to the European Parliament. More generally, depending on how the Christian Democrats finesse this, the extreme right may be able to make hay with this. Contrary to the usual implications in the blogosphere, West European neo-Nazis rely less on anti-Semitism than on ‘Little Green Footballs’ style xenophobia to drum up popular appeal; Turkey is potentially a winning issue for them.

(4) Finally, I suspect that there are tough decisions ahead for the European left. While the “Glyn Morgan piece”:http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=642292 that Chris “links to”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/29/3370/ is correct in arguing that some leftists are reaching for the security blanket of nationalism, they clearly will find it far more awkward to make that grab than do their competitors on the right. “Herbert Kitschelt”:http://www.scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=%22herbert+kitschelt%22&btnG=Search (link to Google Scholar page) made an argument a decade ago that still holds. European social democrats are in a sticky position, in that they need to appeal to two, very different electorates in order to win elections. On the one hand, their traditional base is in the working class (which is economically left-wing but often socially conservative). On the other, they’ve often succeeded in appealing to a new set of ‘postmaterialist’ voters, who are usually more centrist on economic issues, but a lot more left wing on cultural ones). If they want to win, they need both – but the two adhere to very different ideas of what the left is (one is on the economic left, the other is on the cultural left). It seems to me that European social democrats can move in one of two directions. Either they can rework the economic cleavage so as to attract middle class voters as well as the working class, by stressing how the middle class too is subject to economic instability and insecurity. Or they can try to remake the cultural cleavage, by seeking to persuade voters that stronger border controls, opposition to Turkish membership etc aren’t xenophobic, and that Islam is ‘different,’ fundamentally anti-liberal etc etc. My hope is that they go for the former rather than the latter, but I’d hesitate to lay any bets on whether this hope is likely to be confirmed by reality.

The exit polls say “that the French electorate have rejected the European Constitution”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4592243.stm , with 55% voting “no”.

As the French prepare to vote “non”, my friend Glyn Morgan has “a piece in the Independent about the constitution”:http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=642292 , the conservative nationalism of its opponents on both left and right, and the importance of enlargement. Unfortunately, he argues, faced with problems of demographic transition, immigration, international competition from India and China, and the unilateralism of the only global superpower, much of the left would prefer not to face facts:

bq. Befuddled by these challenges, many Europeans, particularly in France, have slipped their moorings from reality. Both the Eurosceptic left and the Eurosceptic right have reached for the security blanket – moth-holed and threadbare, though it is – of nationalism. The Eurosceptic left’s embrace of nationalism is particularly insidious, because it hides behind the language of social justice. Time was when the European left was outward-looking, internationalist, and concerned with the least well-off, no matter where they lived. In Europe today, the least well-off are to be found primarily in central and eastern Europe. European enlargement, one of the greatest achievements of post-war Europe, offers these victims of history a life-line into the modern democratic world. That’s the reason for admitting Turkey.

Interesting times for the European Union’s constitutional project. The French are looking “decidedly wobbly”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/002081.html on the new European constitution, which they vote on next Sunday. The Dutch, who will be voting soon after, appear to be strongly opposed. This all sounds dreadful for pro-Europeans. However, I’m going to make two predictions. First, the unexceptionable one – I don’t think that the constitution has much chance at all of being ratified. If it somehow gets over the French hurdle, it’s going to come a cropper at the British one. Then the risky one – I reckon that the European Union may be on the verge of acquiring real political legitimacy for the first time, exactly and precisely because of the vociferous debates which are starting to get going.
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The _Economist_ does its little bit to try to shut down the “Capitalism debate” that’s starting to happen in Germany. Franz Müntefering, who’s chairman of the German Social Democratic Party, has compared certain financial firms to ““swarms of locusts that fall on companies, stripping them bare before moving on,” and the _Economist_ plays the Nazi card.

THE metaphor of the swarm of locusts devouring all in its path is as old as the Bible. But when politicians, particularly German ones, use it today to attack groups whose behaviour they don’t like, it is hard not to be reminded of Nazi propaganda against “social parasites” and “blowflies”. Such comparisons, even though they are by no means signs of anti-Semitic thinking, are especially regrettable when uttered so close to the anniversary of the end of the second world war.

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Kimberly Morgan, who guestblogged with us a couple of weeks ago, spoke a little while ago on the BBC World Service about the politics of childcare in Western Europe and the United States. It’s a great interview.

Today’s FT has an interesting short article about the growing foreign policy clout of the European Union (something I wrote about back in June of last year). Robert Zoellick recognized this when he took time out of his short European tour to talk to MEPs in the Parliament’s foreign affairs committee. Even more interesting is that the Parliament has been taking more of a hands-on role in the enlargement process; a highly critical Parliament report on corruption in Romania (which is an EU candidate state) triggered a government reshuffle there. This is the kind of under-the-radar change that is likely to have substantial long-term repercussions for the transatlantic relationship. On the one hand, as I noted last year, this is likely to mean a more stormy relationship between the EU and US over the medium term. Just as the US Congress passes laws and makes demands that constrain the ability of the executive to make international deals, so too the European Parliament is likely to make it more difficult for the EU as a whole to reach accommodations with the US. This is especially likely in the touchy issue area where human rights and security concerns intersect. When I talk to people in the Parliament about transatlantic cooperation in security and intelligence sharing, the Maher Arar case and the practice of extraordinary renditions come up again and again. On the other, the Parliament may provide the US with a new ally in areas such as the China arms embargo, where Parliament’s concerns about human rights and US foreign policy interests point in the same direction.

Since you can’t find this anywhere online and I think it’s worth a mention, I thought I’d do the honors. April 4, 1945 was the end of World War II in Hungary. When I was growing up, it was referred to as the day the country had been liberated and big celebrations ensued with one of my favorite Soviet-era songs (“Április négyrõl szóljon az ének..”). Not surprisingly that approach didn’t survive the political changes of the 1990s. Nonetheless, the fact that the significance of this day in the country’s history has been completely obliterated saddens me and leaves me frustrated. Talk about the social construction of holidays and historical dates. I would be much less bitter about all of this if the country had decided to commemorate the end of World War II on some other day, for example, the end of the war in Europe or across the world. But no such luck. Ignoring this issue is completely consistent with Hungary’s inability to face up to its horrific role in that war. Celebrating the war’s end would mean acknowledging that the country had anything to do with it and that’s clearly asking too much.

BBC2 broadcast “a fascinating fly-on-the-wall documentary”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/this_world/4352171.stm this evening about France’s Islamic headscarf law. It followed a group of young Muslim women about and had them explain their thoughts and feelings about the law and did the same with the teachers in their school. The teachers clearly sincerely believed that the women were the puppets of fundamentalist groups, though this wasn’t the impression given by the film. Rather, their families urged compromise so that they might finish their education. Obviously, much of the impression the viewer gets will have been shaped by the editing decisions of the film-makers. Nevertheless, the message I took was of the profound unwisdom of the measure. The headmaster tried to be pragmatic (by his own lights) and insisted that the law could be complied with if girls wore a bandana in a colour other than black that left the forehead and ears clearly visible. This upset some of the extreme secularist teachers (who saw this as backsliding from pure Republican principle) but didn’t leave the pupils happy either (though they largely complied). But the image that one was left with was of the hapless headteacher stopping the Muslims one by one at the school gate, singling them out, insisting on minor adjustments to their dress (“A bit more ear please!”). Utterly, utterly humiliating for all concerned. And the women themselves, now convinced that they would never be accepted in France. One had ambitions to be a nurse, but the government has now extended the law to medical service. Petty inspection, endless argument about the tiniest details of the garb worn by “those people”: humiliating and counterproductive.

You are spending a few days in Budapest and decide to get some souvenirs. You walk down the most famous tourist street (Váci utca) and browse the shop windows. You wonder: should it be an embroidered tablecloth or maybe a plate with a sketch of the Parliament? Neither quite makes sense for your home so you keep on looking. And voila, look no further: a little plastic Hitler figurine. Just what you needed. And so he is not lonely, you can get another guy with an armband sporting the swastika.

I’ve just finished Günter Grass’s “Crabwalk”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0156029707/junius-20 , which which I read partly because it dovetails with some other stuff I’ve been reading (such as Sebald’s “Natural History of Destruction”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375504842/junius-20 ) and partly because I have to give a presentation to my German class about a recent book I’ve read. I figured that if I chose a German book there’s be plenty of on-line material to help me work out the relevant vocabulary.

There’s been “much blogospheric concern”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2005/02/14/thousands_of_neonazis_march_in_dresden.php recently about the resurgence of the German far-right, and that’s very much Grass’s concern. One of the favourite themes of the neo-Nazis is Germans-as-victims and Grass’s underlying thought is that the embarassed silence of the German mainstream about the fate of the refugees from Germany’s lost eastern provinces has gifted the extremists a monopoly of that issue. The novel is centred around the sinking of the “Wilhelm Gustloff”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KdF_Ship_Wilhelm_Gustloff on 30 January 1945. The ship, a former pleasure cruiser, was carrying as many as 10,000 people when it was sunk by a Soviet submarine. Nearly everyone on board perished and it therefore ranks as one of the worst maritime disasters even. The narrator protagonist Paul Pokriefke is a cynical journalist whose mother, a survivor, gave birth to him on one of the lifeboats. His estranged son, Konrad, is a neo-Nazi obsessive who runs a website devoted both to the ship and to the assasinated Nazi functionary after whom it was named. Paul tells us of the sinking itself, of his difficult relationship with mother (a DDR loyalist who cried when Stalin died) and son, and of the assassination of “Gustloff”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Gustloff himself in Zurich in 1936 by a Jew, “David Frankfurter”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Frankfurter .

One thing that Grass gets absolutely right is the atmosphere of internet chatrooms. The son, Konrad, is forever engaged in hostile-but-matey banter with a “Jewish” interlocutor “David”. Not only are their identities not quite what they seem but he gets the adolescent faux-enemy-I-hang-out-with thing. I won’t say more about this, because I don’t want to spoil the denoument for anyone.

I’m not sure that Grass ends up telling us all that much about the neo-Nazi phenomenon. What he does get across though is a sense that the commitment of all of his protagonists to anything like a liberal democracy is fragile and contingent. Certainly a book worth reading for both its literary and historical interest, though the translation is occasionally clunky.

Two interesting articles in the _Financial Times_ about how changes in internal EU politics are likely to affect the transatlantic relationship. First, “Wolfgang Munchau”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/633ac7ae-836a-11d9-bee3-00000e2511c8.html (sub required) talks about how US policy towards Europe can’t just consist of “picking your favourite partner for your favourite mission, and playing one country off against another” as it used to. As Munchau says, there’s a real sense in the capitals of Europe that the EU is becoming a more coherent foreign policy actor – and that the US needs to wake up to this. Stefan Wagstyl’s “article”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/f8f9cfea-83ad-11d9-bee3-00000e2511c8.html on how the countries of central and eastern Europe are adapting to EU membership should be of even greater concern to the divide and conquer school of US policy towards Europe. As Wagstyl says, not only do mass publics in former Warsaw Pact countries seem much keener on EU membership than anyone would have anticipated a year ago – membership is substantially affecting these countries’ foreign policy outlook. Countries like Poland, which many expected to act as an advocate for US interests within the EU, are going native.

bq. The best defence is closer integration with the EU, including on foreign policy and security issues, central Europeans are concluding. Officials say Nato, as a military alliance with an increasingly global responsibility, may be less useful than the EU in confronting non-military threats in Europe. That could imply less reliance on the US as a security partner and more on EU states – even in Poland, often seen as Washington’s strongest central European ally.

bq. Polish officials consider the country received little in return for its support of America in the Iraq war. Warsaw is to bring its peacekeeping unit home from Iraq this year. Marcin Zaborowski, a Polish foreign policy expert, recently published a paper for the EU’s Institute for Security Studies, arguing that “Poland’s Atlanticism is likely to be toned down in future”.

This can also be traced back to the EU’s successful role in supporting democracy in the Ukraine – and the realization by countries like Poland that their membership of the EU is a valuable foreign policy resource.

bq. the Ukrainian crisis was a lesson in the EU’s political clout, as national leaders from the newly expanded club persuaded Mr Kuchma’s side to accept defeat. Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski and Valdas Adamkus, his Lithuanian counterpart, worked with Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, to secure that outcome. But Polish and Lithuanian officials are the first to acknowledge that their presidents’ influence was based primarily on their roles not as local national leaders but as representatives of the whole EU.

None of this is exactly surprising to scholars of the EU, who are acutely aware that it’s more than a traditional international organization, if less than a state. But the ways in which member states become socialized into the “EU club” are poorly understood in the US, where foreign policy experts usually see the EU as just another multilateral institution like NATO. This may have interesting long term consequences. Part of the reason that the US has advocated Turkish membership of the EU is its hope that Turkey will help pull the EU in a more Atlanticist direction. If Poland’s example is anything to go by, the pull may well go the other way – as Turkey becomes more enmeshed in the EU, it’s likely to start identifying more with the European project than with its trans-Atlantic ties.

I meant to blog a couple of weeks ago about the EU’s decision to end sanctions against Cuba and accede to a Cuban government veto on invitations of opposition figures to Embassy parties. Now I see via “Jim Lindgren”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_02_00.shtml#1107363948 that Vaclav Havel has condemned the EU’s action. Quite right too – but unfortunately the EU seems to have gone rather cool on democracy promotion across at least three fronts at once. In addition to Cuba, there’s the EU’s relationship with Iran. Here, the EU has effectively sidelined demands for greater democracy in favour of concentrating on the nuclear security issue. In its relations with China, the EU is abandoning the post-Tianamen arms embargo for no better apparent reason than to boost trade, and make nice with a rising power. Of course, it’s still interested in democracy promotion in its own back yard (various bits of Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean region), where it has a clear selfish interest in stabilizing wobbly governments, slowing down immigration flows etc.

It seems to me that there are three plausible explanations of what’s going on.

(1) Pure coincidence. It could be that this is just a random conjunction of three unrelated events. In favour of this theory – the changes in policy are being pushed by different coalitions of states within the EU. Spain has been pushing the change in Cuba policy, France the change in China policy, and a troika of France, Germany and the UK (with the tacit support of most other EU states) have been reshaping Iran policy. But still, it seems a little odd that these different policies would all change in the same direction within a relatively short period of time.

(2) A sea-change in the EU’s _raison d’etre_. A large part of the EU’s self-image is bound up in the idea that it represents an alternative order to the wars that ravaged mainland Europe in the first half of the last century, which is based on mutual coexistence and the spread of democratic norms. Critics like Robert Kagan have been telling the EU for a long while that it needs to wake up, and realize that it’s been leading a sheltered existence – its model depended on a unique set of historical circumstances. Maybe the EU is beginning to smell the coffee.

(3) A variant of old fashioned balancing. The EU (and its constituent states) are pushing back against US dominance, by (a) seeking new friends which give it new options vis-a-vis the US, and (b) demonstrating in the process that it isn’t to be taken for granted by the hegemonic power. As a side-effect, this means that the EU is less inclined to push for democracy, except where it’s demonstrably in its own self-interest to do so (i.e. around its own borders, or where it’s not liable to annoy potential friends).

My personal inclination is to plump for (3) as the most likely explanation of what’s going on. Which is personally disappointing for those, like me, who’d like to see the EU to continue to work seriously to promote democracy (it actually did pretty good work in Cuba back in the day). But the other two possible explanations have some merit too (as I’m sure do others that I haven’t thought of).

Update: “Quentin Peel”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/b30a6d44-754f-11d9-9608-00000e2511c8.html has an interesting article on EU policy toward China today (sub. required) – he seems to plump for a mixture of 1 and 3, with 1 dominating.