When retired US diplomat Wayne Merry was in Europe recently, newspapers were brimming with debate over issues arising from the EU's imminent enlargement.
On his return to Washington, where he studies European integration at a think tank, the EU's expansion to 10 new member countries from eastern and southern Europe was "scarcely mentioned" in the US media.
Americans are largely unaware of the EU's formal admission yesterday of Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.
Merry, though, makes his living thinking about the EU as a senior associate at the American Foreign Policy Council, one of the US capital's many private policy institutes.
Speaking on Thursday at a forum in Washington on EU enlargement, he declared himself "more pro-European than many Europeans are themselves." Merry immediately conceded that his support for EU expansion was based on "benefits for my own country."
In his assessment, the current Bush administration -- in its wrangling with France, Germany and others in Europe over trade issues and especially the war in Iraq -- and the earlier Clinton administration both have tended to lose sight of the benefits of a free and peaceful Europe, which are reinforced by the EU.
Washington does not support proposals for an EU military command structure separate from the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). While wary of Europe forming any kind of military counterweight to the US superpower, the Bush administration has been supportive of EU enlargement and is openly cheerleading for a future Turkish bid to join the EU.
Parallel to EU expansion, NATO admitted seven new members on March 29: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Five are in the same 2004 class of EU entrants, while Bulgaria and Romania are scheduled to join the EU in 2007. Three more new EU members are already in NATO -- the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland.
Merry, though, is a Euro-fan but a NATO sceptic, calling it a "one-way alliance." A broader and deeper EU could help wean Europe from the formal Atlantic alliance as Cold War memories fade.
Marian Tupy is assistant director of the Project on Global Economic Liberty at the Cato Institute, a Washington think tank with a "libertarian" or free-market liberal philosophy. Born in what is now Slovakia, he called the EU expansion an "academic" issue in the US.
"I think most Americans don't understand and are not interested in European Union enlargement," Tupy said.
The new members will have a chance to influence the course of economic growth across Europe, and the continent's economic future is important to the US, he said.
"When Europe is sick, the United States gets a cold, and vice versa," Tupy said. "If the European Union becomes more economically vibrant, more economically liberal, that will be good for the United States."
Despite their lower standards of living and eight of the new EU members' long histories of socialism under Soviet domination, some of them have more liberalized economies than their wealthier, Western partners.
Estonia, the darling for free-marketeers, has a zero tax rate on reinvested or retained corporate profits, compared to corporate tax rates of 39.4 percent in Germany and 34.3 percent in France.
Joining the EU gives the new entrants unfettered access to the world's largest tariff-free market, while they will have to accept 97,000 pages of dictates from Brussels. The new regulations will raise environmental and workplace-safety standards, but also reach into the far corners of the economy and will make labor and other costs of doing business much more expensive.
"Many of those rules were inappropriate and outright harmful," Tupy said.
With the competitive advantage of cheaper labor likely to erode quickly, the 10 new members will be left to lure investment with their lower tax rates. Germany, which foots much of the bill in the EU, is already pressing for more unified tax policies, and the outcome of that looming battle with the new members could be decisive.
However, the unanswered question, Tupy said, is whether "Eastern Europeans change Europe, or Europe changes the eastern Europeans."
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