OPINION
Can
Europe Survive the Rise of the Rest?
By TIMOTHY GARTON ASH
The New York
Times, September 1, 2012
Oxford, England
WHO won the most medals at
the Olympics? Europe. Who has the largest economy in the world? Europe again. And
where do most people want to go on holiday? Europe, of course. On many measures
of power, the European Union belongs with the United States and China in a
global Big Three. Yet say that to officials in Beijing, Washington or any other
world capital today and they would probably laugh out loud. As European leaders
stagger into yet another round of crisis summitry, this potential superpower is
widely viewed as the sick man of the developed world.
Why? The flawed design
of the euro zone has made Europe’s recession more acute than America’s, and a
collapse of the euro zone would drag the rest of the world economy down with
it. But why haven’t Europeans shown the political will to save the euro zone by
moving toward closer fiscal and political union? What happened to the forces
that drove the project of European unification forward over the last 60 years?
And, if those have faded, where might Europeans find new inspiration?
As I recently argued in Foreign
Affairs, the five great drivers of European unification since the
1950s have now either disappeared or lost much of their energy.
First and foremost was
the personal memory of war, and the mantra of “never again,” which motivated
three generations of Europeans after 1945. But the last generation to have
experienced World War II is passing on, and the collective memory is weak.
Second, the Soviet
threat provided a powerful incentive for Western Europeans to unite during the
cold war. And throughout the cold war, the United States was an active
supporter of European integration, from the Marshall Plan to the diplomacy around
German reunification. No longer. Try as he might, Vladimir Putin is no Joseph
Stalin. And these days, the United States has other priorities.
Third, until the
1990s, the engine of European integration was the Federal Republic of Germany,
with France at the steering wheel. Germans felt a powerful idealistic desire to
rehabilitate themselves in the European family of nations — and had a hard
national interest in doing so. For only by gaining the trust of their neighbors
and international partners could they achieve German reunification. Now that
national purpose has been accomplished, and European idealism has faded with
the passing of the wartime generations. These days, Germany will no longer
reach for its checkbook whenever Europe calls.
Fourth, the once
captive nations of Eastern Europe are no longer uniformly passionate about the
European Union even though their citizens have more recent memories of
dictatorship, hardship and war. While Poland is one of the union’s most
vigorous advocates, Hungary and the Czech Republic are now among its most
skeptical and contentious members.
Finally, the
widespread assumption that “Europe” would mean a rising standard of living and
social security for all Europeans has been badly dented by accumulated debt,
aging populations, global competition and the crisis of the euro zone. Young
Greeks and Spaniards hardly see those benefits today.
Nonetheless, even in
the most skeptical countries there is a basic understanding that it is better
to belong to a single market of 500 million consumers, rather than depend on a
domestic one of 50 million, or fewer than 10 million — the size of half the
European Union’s current members.
And that is the
beginning of the new case for European unification. While we Europeans should
redouble our efforts to ensure that our continent does not forget its troubled
past, the need for scale is the key to our shared future. The 21st-century
world will be one of giants: weary old ones, like the United States and Russia,
and hungry new ones, like China, India, Brazil and South Africa. You do not
need to accept the most apocalyptic forecasts of European decline to
acknowledge that Europe is unlikely to remain the world’s largest economy for
long. In such a world, even Germany will be a small- to medium-size power.
IF Europeans are to
preserve the remarkable combination of prosperity, peace, relative social
security and quality of life that they have achieved over the last 60 years,
they need the scale that only the European Union can provide.
In a world of giants,
you had better be a giant yourself: A trade negotiation between China and the
European Union is a conversation between equals; one between China and France is
an unequal affair.
A decade ago, Chinese
policy makers took the European Union seriously as an emerging political force,
a potential new pole in a multipolar world. Today, they treat it with something
close to contempt. They look to Brussels only in a few specific areas, like
trade and competition policy, where the European Union really does act as one.
Otherwise, they prefer to deal with individual nations, as this week’s
reception in Beijing for Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, made clear.
The remedy lies in
Europe’s own hands. Were it to move beyond the resolution of the euro zone
crisis into a closer fiscal and political union, then onto a genuinely common
foreign policy, China would take it more seriously, as would America and
Russia.
And Europeans should
not entirely abandon the hope — faint though it looks today — that their
pioneering version of peaceful integration between previously warring states
could point the way for better “global governance” in response to shared
threats like climate change and to the tensions that inevitably arise between
rising and declining powers. For without enhanced cooperation on a global
scale, the 21st-century world may come to look like the late-19th-century
Europe of rivalrous great powers, writ large. At best, Europe could become not
just another giant; it could offer the example of a new kind of cooperative
multinational giant.
When Ms. Merkel’s
19th-century predecessor Otto von Bismarck was shown a map of Africa by an
eager German colonialist, the Iron Chancellor, dismissing the strategic value
of faraway colonies, replied that the only map that mattered to him lay in
Europe: “France is to the left, Russia to the right, we’re in the middle —
that’s my map of Africa.” Today’s Europeans need to adapt Bismarck’s wisdom,
declaring “China, India and Russia are to the right, America and Brazil to the
left — that’s our map of Europe.”
Timothy
Garton Ash is a professor of European studies at Oxford
University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
A version of this op-ed
appeared in print on September 2, 2012, on page SR5 of the New
York edition with the headline: Can Europe Survive The Rise of the Rest?
