And yet, maybe the EU will be providing an
example to the Americas sometime in the future?
What do you economists, sociologists,
planners and futurists think?
What do the Europeans say?
Karen Watters
Cole
Another Decade Of
Diversity
How a newly expanded Europe will overcome its own
divisions and become a model for regional
governance
By Andrew
Moravcsik
NEWSWEEK
INTERNATIONAL
Jan.
6 issue
— The
big bang is done. The champagne’s
been drunk. A new Europe
stretches from Lisbon to Latvia. And now what? The reality is that the EU’s troubles
are just beginning.
History suggests that successful
international cooperation rests ultimately not on abstract rules but on
convergence. As the great Hungarian
economist Karl
Polanyi observed more than a half
century ago, any stable economy must
balance the disruption of market forces with the protection of diverse
socioeconomic and political arrangements. If the underlying
diversity is too great, conflict results. So with a wider and deeper Union.
The bigger it gets, the greater the challenge of managing its disparate
parts.
This is why the EU has moved toward greater
flexibility—”variable geometry,” it’s
called in Brussels. Nearly all major
initiatives of the past decade have been accepted by only a
subset of the
EU’s membership. The single currency has yet to be accepted by three
countries, and the elimination of border controls by two. EU social policy has settled on loose
coordination. Foreign and defense
policies are based on voluntary “coalitions of the
willing.” Yet even with this flexibility, the EU
may well be nearing its maximum tolerance for diversity.
Consider the European Monetary Union, which
seeks to impose a single monetary policy on a market region with divergent
national macroeconomic conditions. For years, economists have cautioned
that Europe’s diversity might ultimately be unmanageable. Remember the doomsday scenarios
centering on Italy, where it was feared that government incompetence,
political corruption and fiscal irresponsibility would drive up interest rates
throughout the entire Eurozone—triggering a political and financial crisis.
Today’s culprit is
Germany. One London think tank,
Independent
Strategy, sketches out a dire
scenario: the continuing global slowdown, tight money and a rising euro will
sap German export earnings, depress employment and consumer spending, and
eventually drive Germany into a “Japanese” stagnation, taking the rest of
Europe with it. The next two years, the
group predicts, could be a “very dangerous
time,” with close to a 50 percent
chance of things going horribly wrong.
The variety of the 10 new members—poorer,
smaller and geographically distant from the “core” of the EU—is sure to
exacerbate such tensions. Poland
is a case in point. Private investment is sluggish. Uncompetitive nationalized industries,
including the steel and energy sectors, must be integrated into the EU. So too its farmers. Public administration and courts are
less than fully reliable, while reform of public finance has yet to begin.
Regulatory standards in food
safety, fisheries management and environmental policy do not yet match those
of the West. Will Poland follow
the lead of Spain and Ireland, prior entrants that swiftly implemented market
and administrative reforms and were rewarded with rapid growth? Or will it resemble Greece, whose
bloated budgets, inefficient firms and corrupt government made the country a
virtual pariah
for a decade after its entry
in 1979?
Were this not enough, Romania and Bulgaria
are poised for membership in 2007—not to mention Turkey. It’s often forgotten that EU laws are
rarely implemented by Brussels, but by national governments. Deep trust between political systems is
thus required. An Irish consumer buying Turkish food, for example, must trust
Turkish farmers, Turkish regulators, Turkish border officials and, ultimately,
Turkish judges to assure the origin and safety of that food. Can such trust be maintained with
Turkey’s spotty record of democracy, rule of law and human rights and its
untried capacity for regulatory oversight?
Small wonder that European leaders at
Copenhagen rebuffed Washington’s efforts to push Turkey’s candidacy. Americans
simply cannot imagine the depth of cooperation entailed. Turkish accession would be
the equivalent, in North American
terms, of U.S. integration with
Mexico: elimination of border controls, disbursement of 3 percent of U.S.
federal spending as aid and comanagement with Mexico of the Federal Reserve, a
single currency, foreign-trade negotiations, antitrust policy, environmental
policy, agricultural subsidies and a dozen other federal functions—all
overseen by a supranational supreme court and a jointly elected
parliament.
Put this way, the challenge of diversity
sounds insurmountable. Yet the EU
is likely to do what it has always done: muddle through. Compromises will cushion the shock of
enlargement and monetary convergence. And when the
EU emerges from its decade of diversity, its distinctive strategy of trade,
aid and multilateral engagement may well emerge as the pre-eminent model for
the future of world politics—one very different from
that currently advocated by Washington. Successful enlargement will
demonstrate that the European experience is relevant not only to a small
number of rich, culturally homogeneous democracies with a totalitarian past.
The EU will have established itself as a viable model for regional governance
across the globe.
Moravcsik is professor of government and
director of the European Union Program at Harvard
University.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/850665.asp?0cv=CB30
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2002
