Following is an extract from the 2040 edition of the Oxford Concise History of Europe:
The big question for Europe in 2023 was Iraq. The question was: should Iraq join the EU?
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
Turkey, itself an EU member for more than a decade, was strongly pressing for Iraqi membership. After all, Iraq had been a democracy of sorts for nearly 20 years. Its oil was vital for European prosperity. The Kurds in Iraq and Turkey did not like being divided by what they bitterly called the "Brussels Wall "of the EU.
Muhammed Ademi, secretary-general of the powerful Association of Muslims in Europe (AME), described the inclusion of Iraq as "a historical necessity." Ademi argued that the example of another largely Islamic country coming into the European community of democracies could only help the ongoing modernization of the Middle East. And Iraq would be another bridge to the EU's still troubled associate members, Israel and Palestine.
Some old-fashioned European Christian Democrats objected that Iraq was not a European country. "The whole idea is ridiculous!" said Romano Prodi, the 84 year-old former president of the European Commission. But the EU had crossed the traditional geographical, historical and cultural boundaries of Europe -- understood, from the 14th to the 20th centuries, to be the successor to Christendom -- when it decided to admit Turkey.
In the early 21st century, Europe had become one of the greatest empires in the world. But, like all the 21st century empires, it was an empire of a new kind. Where the American empire was scattered around the world in an imposing collection of informal protectorates, linked by sea and air routes, military bases, and heavy political and economic influence, the European empire was a single joined-up space of territorially contiguous countries, formally bound together by a constitutional treaty. It stretched from the Atlantic to the Sea of Azov and from the North Cape to the mountains of Kurdistan. With the admission of Ukraine and Moldova, in 2021, it counted 37 member states, and more than 600 million people.
At US$20 trillion, its economy was the largest in the world, comfortably outstripping that of the US. Each new wave of member states -- starting with the "Slavonic tigers" of Central and Eastern Europe, who joined in 2004 -- had brought a new injection of economic dynamism, shaking the stagnant, encrusted old economies of Western Europe.
The Euro-crisis of 2007, when the Eurozone nearly collapsed just a few months after Britain entered it, led to greater flexibility in the currency system and a European Solidarity Fund for worst-hit regions. The EU benefitted greatly from being the pivot between the Eurasian Free Trade Area (EURAFTA), which of course included Russia, and the Transatlantic Free Trade Area (TRAFTA), with the Americas.
Yet this was an empire without an emperor. It had no central command and no single hegemon. It therefore lacked several of the traditional attributes of imperial power. It was much more like the first Reich, the medieval Holy Roman Empire, than it was like the second (Bismarck's), let alone the third (Hitler's). Some people called it a commonwealth, and perhaps that term was more accurate.
In trade, aid and environmental negotiations, it was a formidable player. Gordana Dragovic, a feisty, flame-haired Serb with an MBA from Harvard, was respected and even feared worldwide as the EU's trade commissioner. But it still did not have an effective single foreign and security policy. When it came to major crises outside the EU, especially those that might require military action, the key deals were still brokered between Washington, London, Paris, Berlin and other national capitals, as well as Brussels.
The EU still had three different Presidents -- those of the European Council, European Commission and European Parliament. Although English was the everyday working language of the EU, the democratic politics of the Union were conducted in more than 20 different languages.
Arguably, the breakthrough came in the years 2004 to 2009, under the celebrated presidency of Tony Blair (council), Jose Maria Aznar (commission) and Bronislaw Geremek (parliament). Following the adoption of a rather minimal constitutional treaty in 2004, these three statesmen recognized that the hallmark of an ever larger union of the peoples of Europe would continue to be diversity.
The object was no longer to make some sort of United States of Europe to rival the US as a second "world nation "(as a former French foreign minister, Hubert Vidrine, had implausibly suggested). Rather, it was to keep cohesion and a sense of common purpose in such a diverse community; to work out what European nations had to do together in order that they should do the rest better on their own.
In the event, diversity proved, as it always had been, Europe's greatest strength as well as its greatest weakness. Competing national models in education, welfare, health care, traffic policy and other areas produced what the management guru Torsten Wannamaker called "an upward benchmarking spiral."
The key problems remained political and cultural. National rivalries still bedevilled the working of the Union. Electorates became increasingly disaffected with politics, seen as the remote competition for power by people who represented no deeper ideological alternatives.
Political parties increasingly seemed like alternative management teams for a public company, and most of the shareholders couldn't be bothered to vote. Extra-parliamentary forces of all kinds gathered strength.
At the same time, Europe was still much worse than the US at integrating the immigrants who continued to flood across the Mediterranean, and whom Europe's aging native-born population needed to help pay their pensions. Some of the ugliest politics of the 2010s had to do with populist campaigns against Muslims living in Europe, especially after the admission of Turkey brought their number to nearly 100 million. "Choose Allah or Europe!" was the slogan of Norbert Ptzel, leader of the far-right German Culture Party (DKP).
Fortunately, these tendencies were ultimately contained, in a context of rising prosperity and with the arrival of new generations of young Europeans in whom racial prejudice had been much reduced by travel, childhood friendships, and total immersion in American popular culture.
Europe in 2023 was not a triumphant new model of federal union, as some of its Founding Fathers had hoped 70 years before. But it had rather successfully muddled through.
Timothy Garton Ash is director of the European Studies Center at St Antony's College, Oxford, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford. His most recent book is History of the Present. This article was written for the 20th anniversary edition of the Wall Street Journal.
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