Terrorism in London and the French and Dutch rejections of the EU's Constitutional Treaty have brought Euro-pessimism back into fashion. The failure of the June EU summit and the bitter clashes between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac have even inspired some to proclaim the beginning of the end for Europe.
They are wrong. Europe is neither dead nor dying. But recent events do spell the end of one version of European integration -- the vision of an "ever closer union" producing a federal country that would become a new superpower.
That vision, however, was not in the cards even before the recent setbacks. Once the original six core countries began to expand to include northern, southern, and, most recently, eastern European countries, the old federal vision was doomed. The constitution was designed to make a Europe of 25 members more efficient, not produce a strong federal state.
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
Chirac's rhetoric often includes references to a "multi-polar world" in which the United States is no longer the only superpower. A recent Pew poll found that many Europeans have lost their attraction to the US and would like Europe to play a larger role in world politics. But even if America has lost some of its attractive "soft power," Europe's post-industrial publics are not willing to pay the price -- a doubling or tripling of defense spending as a share of GDP -- to invest in the military power that would be required to balance its hard power.
Complex power relationships
Even so, the picture for Europe is not as bleak as pessimists assume. Power in world politics today is distributed like a three-dimensional chess game that is played vertically as well as horizontally. On the top board of military relations among states, the US is the world's only superpower with global reach. Europe or China are unlikely to overtake the Americans in the next two decades. Here the world is uni-polar.
On the middle board of economic relations, the world is already multi-polar. This is the board where Europe acts as a union, and other countries like Japan and China play significant roles. The US cannot reach a trade agreement or settle anti-trust cases without the approval of the EU Commission. Just recently, after the WTO ruled in favor of a European complaint, the US Congress had to rewrite billions of dollars of tax legislation. This hardly fits the description of a uni-polar world.
The bottom board includes transnational relations that cross borders outside the control of governments -- everything from drugs to infectious diseases to climate change to transnational terrorism. On this board, power is distributed chaotically among non-state actors. No government can control outcomes without the cooperation of others. Here the US needs the help of Europeans, and it makes no sense to call this world uni-polar, either.
On this bottom board, the degree of close civilian cooperation is also important, which is affected by a country's attractiveness or soft power. Here European countries are well endowed, having overcome centuries of animosity and developing a large successful market.
One danger of the recent setbacks is a halt to EU enlargement. At the Cold War's end, East European countries did not try to form local alliances, as they did in the 1920s, but looked toward Brussels as the magnet for their futures. Similarly, countries like Turkey and Ukraine have adjusted their policies because they are attracted to Europe. The loss of soft power implied by rejection of further enlargement would be a setback for Europe, the Balkans, and international stability.
What will the EU do next? Some counsel retreating to the original six countries as an inner core that creates a federation within the larger union. This approach appeals to those who think that the French and Dutch referendums were a rejection of the British liberal economic model.
Show the EU still works
But that diagnosis is suspect, because polls show that many who voted "non" were objecting to Chirac and/or to high rates of unemployment. Turning backward and inward to the original six EU members is unlikely to meet such concerns, and augurs poorly for the liberalization of labor markets that Europe's economies need to get moving.
A better path for the EU is to show that Europe still works. This means a compromise on a new budget that curtails some of the expenditure on the common agricultural policy and devotes funds to integrating the new members who joined last year. It also means carrying on with the important role that Europe plays in foreign policy such as attracting Serbia to reach agreement on the future status of Kosovo, or continuing efforts to persuade Iran to give up its plans for the enrichment of uranium.
Equally important will be to press ahead with the Doha round of WTO trade talks, and to follow through with past commitments regarding aid to Africa. Eventually, after the dust has settled, it may be possible to reach inter-governmental agreements to tidy up some of the institutional arrangements that would have been settled if the new constitution had been approved.
Such a practical, effective EU may not reach the lofty rhetorical aspirations beloved by politicians, but it will not be moribund. On the contrary, such a Europe has a lot to gain for itself as well as to contribute to the rest of the world.
Joseph Nye, a former US assistant secretary of defense, is professor at Harvard University and author, most recently, of The Power Game: A Washington Novel.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) sits down with US President Donald Trump in Beijing on Thursday next week, Xi is unlikely to demand a dramatic public betrayal of Taiwan. He does not need to. Beijing’s preferred victory is smaller, quieter and in some ways far more dangerous: a subtle shift in American wording that appears technical, but carries major strategic meaning. The ask is simple: replace the longstanding US formulation that Washington “does not support Taiwan independence” with a harder one — that Washington “opposes” Taiwan independence. One word changes; a deterrence structure built over decades begins to shift.
Taipei is facing a severe rat infestation, and the city government is reportedly considering large-scale use of rodenticides as its primary control measure. However, this move could trigger an ecological disaster, including mass deaths of birds of prey. In the past, black kites, relatives of eagles, took more than three decades to return to the skies above the Taipei Basin. Taiwan’s black kite population was nearly wiped out by the combined effects of habitat destruction, pesticides and rodenticides. By 1992, fewer than 200 black kites remained on the island. Fortunately, thanks to more than 30 years of collective effort to preserve their remaining
After Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) met Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing, most headlines referred to her as the leader of the opposition in Taiwan. Is she really, though? Being the chairwoman of the KMT does not automatically translate into being the leader of the opposition in the sense that most foreign readers would understand it. “Leader of the opposition” is a very British term. It applies to the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, and to some extent, to other democracies. If you look at the UK right now, Conservative Party head Kemi Badenoch is
A Pale View of Hills, a movie released last year, follows the story of a Japanese woman from Nagasaki who moved to Britain in the 1950s with her British husband and daughter from a previous marriage. The daughter was born at a time when memories of the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki during World War II and anxiety over the effects of nuclear radiation still haunted the community. It is a reflection on the legacy of the local and national trauma of the bombing that ended the period of Japanese militarism. A central theme of the movie is the need, at
RSS