Term Problems Facing the UK and Other Advanced Industrial Societies
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The Demos circulation licence is adapted from the ‘attribution/no derivatives/non-commercial’ version of the Creative Commons licence. To find out more about Creative Commons licences go to www.creativecommons.org Demos Collection Issue 13/1998 Demos Collection is published by the independent think tank Demos 9 Bridewell Place London EC4V 6AP Tel: 0171 353 4479 Fax: 0171 353 4481 [email protected] www.demos.co.uk ISBN 1 898309 59 0 © Demos 1998 except Scharpf article © Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies All rights reserved. Editor: Ian Christie Commissioning Editors: Ian Christie Perri 6 Editorial Assistants: Tilo Fuchs Kay Chung Production Manager: Lindsay Nash Designer: Victoria Jones Printed in Britain by EG Bond Ltd Contents Euro Visions: new dimensions of European integration vii FEATURES Sustaining Europe 1 Ian Christie Flexible integration 19 Fritz W Scharpf Choosing Europe 37 Simon Hix Eastern approaches 49 Heather Grabbe and Kirsty Hughes Euro-capitalisms 57 John Plender European multiple currencies 63 Dave Birch Virtual Europe 71 John Browning Europe of the cities? 81 Dr Mark Hepworth Demos Collection 13/1998 Consumer movements in Europe 93 Colin Brown Easing the transition? 105 Éva Kuti Islam and Euro-identity 113 Yasmin Alibhai-Brown Global flows 121 David Goldblatt In search of Euro-citizens 127 Tilo Fuchs Europe’s legitimacy gap 139 Mark Leonard The myth of a Euro-identity 147 Cris Shore How European are we? 157 Alex McKie Branding Europe? 165 Carol Samms REGULARS Book marks 173 Facts 179 Demos news 183 vi Demos Euro Visions: new dimensions of European integration John Plender explores the variety of European capitalism Heather Grabbe and Kirsty Hughes highlight the social and cultural dimensions of EU enlargement Dave Birch asks whether the Euro has already been superseded by electronic currencies Yasmin Alibhai-Brown examines the place of Islam in the make-up of the new Europe Fritz W Scharpf calls for more flexible approaches to welfare reform in the EU Demos vii Sustaining Europe Ian Christie A continent in search of a mission Introduction: Europe’s improbable success In 1947, George Orwell published an essay entitled ‘Towards European unity’.1 In it he surveyed the bleak state of the post-war world and con- cluded that the three most likely scenarios for the future were pre- emptive nuclear war by the USA against the Soviet Union, Cold War between the superpowers followed by a nuclear Third World War, or the division of the globe between three gigantic slave states. Orwell argued that the only hope for a better future was the creation of a grouping of democratic socialist countries in Europe that would pro- vide a model of humane society to the rest of the world. True to his relentlessly honest pessimism, however, he ended the essay with a list of the overwhelming obstacles to the realisation of this vision of a democratic and socialist ‘Western European union’. Half a century later, we are only eight years away from the fiftieth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. By any criteria this surely ranks as one of the most successful treaties ever signed. It has played a crucial part in the steadily rising prosperity of Western Europe and has given Deputy Director, Demos. Demos 1 Demos Collection 13/1998 a civic underpinning for peace in a continent used to war and on the verge of total collapse in 1945. It may not have created Orwell’s ‘Socialist United States of Europe’,but it has helped to provide the framework within which democratic welfare states could flourish. The Semi-United Social Democracies of Europe have survived the grim beginnings of the project of European integration in the late 1940s and the Cold War of the 1950s. In short, what Orwell saw as a scarcely credible optimistic scenario in 1947 has, in large part, come to pass despite the huge obstacles that he outlined. It is a triumph for the project of integration that demands celebration and gratitude. But the achievement was shaped and limited by the conditions of the birth of the European Community. The Community was born in the Cold War and its vision of ‘Europe’ was necessarily limited, focusing on the democratic West and unable to imagine the liberation of the East.When the revolutions of 1989–90 put an end to the Cold War order in Europe, the European Union (EU) was found wanting in vision, inspiration and generosity. Its response was alarm at the reunification of Germany, a hyper-cautious approach to the question of accession to the Union by the emerging democracies of the East, an aid programme to the ex-Communist world that did not match the scale of the need or the historic nature of the opportunity for change and an introspective struggle over the Maastricht Treaty. Symptoms of stress in the European project It was the process of negotiation over Maastricht that underlined the extent to which the European project had been shaped by the Cold War. The arguments over the deepening of the Union seemed to block out the transformed political geography of the continent: there was a deep reluctance to face up to the implications for the West of the col- lapse of the Iron Curtain and at no point in the 1990s has a sense of urgency or historic responsibility to the cause of freedom and democ- racy appeared to animate the EU’s attitude to the applicant states of Central and Eastern Europe. Rather, the prevailing mood has been one of crabbed caution over the impact of the East’s farmers on 2 Demos Sustaining Europe the Common Agricultural Policy and the need for reform of the struc- tural funds in the face of eastward enlargement. ‘EMU will begin against a backdrop of considerable public misgivings and much expert disagreement. It is the culminating expression of the idea of designing a “Europe from above” as the right approach to saving the old continent from its own worst features.’ The Maastricht process also represented the high water mark for the technocratic, élite-driven approach to post-war integration in Europe. The Treaty of Rome and its successors, NATO and the big steps in eco- nomic integration were all negotiated in the conference halls and Chancelleries at some distance from the public gaze. Their drafters were undoubtedly foresighted and enlightened. But this was not in essence a democratic project. The builders of the Community assumed that their job was to define the future and that public opinion would follow. The task of creating a Europe that would never again relapse into the barbarism of the past was too important to be allowed a large measure of transparency and popular accountability. Maastricht was the point at which public opinion began to rebel against this approach to deeper integration.