Europe on the brink: democratic values and the single currency.

• Author: Portillo, Michael
• Position: Includes related article on global polity and democratic ideals

The process of European political integration is moving at speed, cheered on by the United States. Europe, the argument goes, has been the place where the wars start, wars into which America is ultimately dragged, and European political union will put an end to such conflicts. And as far as U.S. foreign policy is concerned, things will be a good deal easier once there is a common European foreign and security policy, providing, as it were, the State Department with a single number to call in Europe.

Those assumptions need to be questioned. The single currency, due to commence next year, is a leap in the dark. Never has a group of sovereign nations attempted such a pooling before. Never have democracies been willing to invest so much power over the lives of their citizens in a body - in this case the European Central Bank - which is not democratically accountable. The tussle is on between the German bankers, who want to ensure that the currency will hold its value as reliably as their beloved Mark has done, and the rest, who fear for the impact of such austerity on their rates of unemployment.

We do not yet know whether the euro will be soft and inflationary, or hard and recessionary. In either event, chaos and recrimination in Europe are not in the U.S. interest. As I shall argue in this essay, those who believe that political union is the key to avoiding conflict have got it wrong. Rather, future danger lies precisely in forcing nation-states into an artificial political union that will transfer policy-making from the individual states, which are democratic, to the European Union, which in itself is not. The traditional danger in Europe has come from extremist nationalism. Political union seems likely to rekindle it, as national interests are ignored by policymakers who are both remote and irremovable.

There is more to a common European foreign policy than an easier life for State Department switchboard operators. At the time of writing, the United Kingdom is once again giving its willing support to the United States in its policy toward Iraq. Time and again, the United States and Britain have made common cause in the defense of liberty. There are few if any other nations who support America so dependably, and Britain's diplomatic backing is, I believe, an important asset for Washington.

If political union extends to the creation of a common European foreign and security policy, arrived at by qualified majority voting amongst the member states, the United States will stand to lose that backing. As recent history demonstrates, it is inconceivable that a common European policy would normally back America, or be generally robust. Indeed, the motivation of some of those now striving to create political union in Europe is to establish a new bloc with a distinctive policy outlook that will be at best un-American, and quite possibly anti-American.

I suggest that it is time for Americans to take a more careful look at what

is happening in Europe and, before cheering political union to the finishing line, to re-assess very carefully where their country's real interests lie.

I intend to discuss the issue of the European single currency not as it is often talked of in Britain, as though it were merely an economic device which can be measured simply in terms of material costs and benefits. I wish to examine it rather in the terms regularly used by Britain's European partners. They see it frankly as a project reshaping the way our continent is governed, to create a political union that can free Europe from the fear of conflict between its nations.

On the face of it, this may strike many as an excellent idea. In the last two centuries the peoples of Europe have paid a terrible price in wars. The Napoleonic Wars ravaged Europe for the best part of two decades. In World War I, fifteen million were killed, mainly soldiers. In World War II, the toll was at least forty-one million, of whom most were civilians. There is no higher or more important objective for politicians in Europe than to work for policies that may better guarantee the security of our continent and avoid a repetition of the dreadful slaughter of our modern history.

We can distinguish two causes at the root of these past European conflicts. The first was Franco-German rivalry. Prussia and Austria invaded France in 1793 and 1813. France occupied Prussian and Austrian territory between 1805 and 1813. Prussia dealt the French army a swift defeat in 1870, and went on to besiege the French capital, causing many Parisians to die of starvation. Germany invaded France in the opening stages of both world wars. Understandably therefore, since the Second World War much effort has been devoted to creating political institutions, and other links, to bind the former adversaries together.

A second cause of past conflict was the so-called Eastern Question in its various forms. There was the clash, both ideological and territorial, between the empires of Christendom and the Islamic empire of the Ottomans. The assassination in Sarajevo of an Austrian archduke, and Austria's revenge for it on Serbia, provided the spark for the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. But Germany's suspicion and fear of Russia, another part of the wider Eastern Question, were a more fundamental cause of that war. The mutual aggression between totalitarian regimes in Germany and Russia supplied the bitterest and most costly conflict of the Second World War. In contrast to what has been done in the Franco-German case, comparatively little effort has been devoted to bringing Russia fully into the family of Western nations, or to building bridges between Christendom and Islam in Europe, a matter I shall return to later. First, let us look at how efforts to resolve the rivalry between France and Germany have been taken forward.

The Idea of a United Europe

The ideal of creating a united Europe, even a United States of Europe, arose as part of the humanist-pacifist tradition long before the wars of the twentieth century, but until the end of the Second World War it was largely confined to academics and dreamers. Thereafter, it was taken up by statesmen like Altiero Spinelli and Jean Monnet.

These two men embodied two distinct approaches to European unity, and the distinction is important even today. Spinelli was a federalist, believing that local, regional, national, and European authorities should complement each other. Monnet was a functionalist, believing that, one by one, critical functions, and therefore ultimately sovereignty itself, should be transferred from the national to the European level. In the official European Community literature of the 1990s it is argued that "today the two approaches have been merged." Perhaps so. The Maastricht Treaty owes much to a functionalist approach, with its proposals that Europe should acquire its own defense and foreign policies and its own currency. But federalists will be happy with that, it is said, since the result is nonetheless federation - that is, the creation of a new political entity with the critical characteristic of a federation in that its laws are binding on the member states.

Those who support the creation of a European federation sometimes argue that federalism is generally misunderstood in Britain. They tell us that in continental Europe it is about decentralization, and that federal constitutions in a number of European states emphasize the devolution of powers to states or regions. But the federalism that is being unfolded at the European level is not like that. The process of integration now being pursued from one intergovernmental conference to the next is highly centralizing and owes much to the Monnet-functionalist approach.

While Spinelli, Monnet, and others were advancing European unity by whatever means they could, which in their day meant mostly devising institutions governing economic and trading relations in Europe, Britain held aloof from that process, while committing itself directly to European security. Clearly it is a myth that Britain has never cared about Europe. The British Empire lost nearly a million combatants in the First World War. In the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of British people died at home, or fighting in and around Europe, because of a commitment to the freedom of the continent.

Following that war, at a time when the nature of the Soviet empire was becoming clear, the British foreign secretary at the time, Ernest Bevin, committed Britain to a Western Union, an...