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
Outgoing Mail Scanned by NAV
2002
