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The House Magazine - 7 March 2007
A Europe which has lost its way. A Europe stuck in the mind-set of institution-building. A Europe unwilling or unable (or both) to recognise and respond to the new world of globalisation, climate change, development challenges.
This is the conventional wisdom about the European Union. Certainly this Europe exists. Key members have been resistant to economic reform though Germany is now experiencing strong growth and some structural change and France is now being asked to choose between post-Socialism and post-Gaullism in her Presidential election.
But there is another Europe: in the sphere of geo-politics Europe has been a glittering success. Enlargement to embrace virtually the whole of the Soviet Union’s satellite empire within half a political generation has achieved the biggest peaceful transition in Europe in a millennium. The aspiration to be part of the EU or, to put it more poetically the idea of Europe has impelled the establishment of democracy and a nascent civil society across the Continent.
This did not happen by itself. The process of enlargement followed a leap-in-the-dark decision to take in all candidate states from Cyprus to Latvia in one wave. It presented a huge challenge to those candidates which had to accept tough conditions. Bulgaria and Romania, the latest members, were the rawest of new democracies. Croatia and the Balkan states are in the wings and, of course, the immensely disputed prospect of Turkish entry looms distantly.
This widening has not been philanthropic. Eastward enlargement has added some 50m workers to the single market. Western European businesses have invested in countries like Hungary, Poland and Slovakia to maintain competitiveness in the global market and have been able to secure more flexible working from unions as the price for maintaining operations at home. Countries with high business taxes have had to address low-tax (and sometimes flat-tax) competition from new entrants.
In Britain, where some 20,000 EU migrants arrive each month, (Britain, Ireland and Sweden alone imposed no restriction on migration from the “Ten” though Britain has curbed freedom of movement for Bulgarian and Romanian workers) the Polish population is estimated by the Polish embassy at around 650,000. It is not just the legendary Polish plumber: the hospitality and catering industry, the construction industry, transport and, increasingly health would have serious labour problems without the presence of migrant workers.
Of course a Europe which is wider still and wider (to transpose from the English anthem) will feed the criticism that Europe lacks coherence and purpose: it is more diverse, more complex, carries more baggage. In many ways Europe’s demography gives it little choice but to expand: it needs to import people. Europe must accept its neighbours either as nations or as tribes. Enlargement is the logical choice. And the geo-politics of the relationship between the west and Islam may bear increasingly upon its future choices.
Perhaps Europe should adopt the words of Galileo as he decided that discretion was the better part of valour in his brush with Papal doctrine: Et pur si muove – but it moves all the same.
© The House Magazine
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