As the European Constitutional Convention assembles to debate the fine points of the European Union's future institutions, now is the moment to think the unthinkable about where Europe is heading. Or at least, to consider perhaps a quite different question: where would it be reasonable for the EU to move?
Communism's fall saw the appearance of several small states in Europe. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania reemerged from Soviet occupation. Czechoslovakia split into two separate states. Yugoslavia gave way to Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia; it may perhaps shortly disgorge Kosovo and Montenegro as well. Although the Baltic republics merely reestablished their pre-World War II independence, and Yugoslavia's breakup was a bloody affair like so many other wars of independence, there is something tantalizing new in all this as well.
In the interwar years, the Baltic states were often viewed as impractical, artificial creations of the Great Powers. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia came into existence because their constituent parts were not seen as viable independent states. Why was this? Because 80 years ago, when Wilson, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George redrew the map of Europe, small states were dysfunctional in times of both war and peace. To be viable, a state needed to be large enough to defend itself and to constitute a relatively self-contained economic market. None of this holds true today. With the prospect of entry into the EU, national markets matter less. Both EU and NATO membership make war among European member states unthinkable, and an attack on even the smallest NATO member would bring a response from all NATO members. Lacking such external threats, the ties between, say, Czechs and Slovaks (to say nothing of Serbs and Croats!) are too weak to warrant a common national level of government.
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
Does this tell us something about the future of Europe as a whole? The difference between Czechoslovakia and Italy or Germany is mostly one of 50 years. After all, wasn't Italy, until the 1860s, a collection of kingdoms and principalities? Wasn't Germany's unification a matter of "blood and iron?"
France and Spain are older, but is the marriage of Basques, Catalans, and Corsicans with their national states that much happier than the former Czech/Slovak marriage? Is there really that much reason why the Scots and Welsh should be part of the same national state as the English?
Abstract for a second from the idea of French or German or Italian identity, patriotism, the collective memories of war and carnage that cemented the consciousness of today's linguistic communities and think of this: why do Europeans need an intermediate level of government, between the common European framework and their local institutions?
Why do Piemontese, Bavarians, or Scots need intermediate national bureaucracies to run their tax policies, welfare programs, securities laws, and the largely useless, duplicative armies? Wouldn't life be easier if a common market, currency, foreign policy, army, and a few other things were run on a Europe-wide basis, with the rest left to more meaningful local units?
It is fashionable to mock the bureaucratic minutia of European regulation. But European regulation is as nothing compared to the mountains of national laws and decrees, billions wasted in political patronage, and the colossal state machines that eat up 30 to 40 percent of the economic product of Europe's nation states. Could any common European state do worse?
Indeed, the creation of a European federal government and the elimination of national intermediaries would probably lead to the greatest liberalization of the economy (and society as a whole) in Europe's entire history. Look at America in 1787: creation of the federal government swept away the balkanized system of pre-revolutionary colonies, ushering in an era of entrepreneurial expansion across the entire American Continent.
The simple fact is that Europe as a whole is too diverse to be captured by the economic and political interest groups that now dominate national states. It is only as an additional level of government that the EU appears onerous and bureaucratic. If it were to displace national governments, its burden would be weightless in comparison to what exists today.
Nations also put Europe's constitutional balance out of kilter. Germany and Italy are simply too big, as compared to Portugal or Belgium (itself a rather questionable amalgam of the Flemish and the Walloons), and this creates the types of imbalances reminiscent of the heavy foot of Prussia in the old Bismarckian empire.
Could a federal Europe replace today's national identities? Could the French and the British feel as spiritually at home in "Europe" as they feel in their national states? No, but must they? When Europeans think of future institutions, the tension is always seen as that between national differences and the common European identity. But what if common European institutions are not viewed through the prism of national institutions? What if the evolution of European consciousness proceeds not by an upward transfer of attachment to supranational institutions, but by a devolution of loyalties, and a revival of smaller, more meaningful, communities?
Of course, the demise of national states is not imminent, but not because they are so deeply rooted in the consciousness of their citizens. Indeed, national identities are mostly impoverishing abstractions, cliches, like race, class, and other ideological creations. Think of how much more genuine diversity would there be in a united Europe if national states did not squat in the middle.
But Europe's nation states are not going to disappear for a while because they are centers of power. After all, forty cents out of every euro of GDP is a lot to fight about. If, however, Europeans gain a sense of where they should be going, perhaps in time the national identities forged in the last couple of hundred years (for they are not much older than that) will become like the appendix -- a part of the human body responsible for little else but an occasional inflammation.
Andrzej Rapaczynski, a native of Poland, teaches American Constitutional law at Columbia University in New York.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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