Rethinking Europe's Future

"I’ve chosen rather a lot of American authors, and I think the reason is that most books on Europe—and this is especially true of British ones—tend to have a very national prism. The Americans take the overall view much more than we do ourselves. Rethinking Europe’s Future is by the grand old man of American academic analysts of Europe, David Calleo. He’s been operating at something called SAIS—which is Johns Hopkins University ‘School of Advanced International Studies’—for as long as I can remember. In fact, I have to admit that he was a friend of my late mother’s, so he must be getting on a bit. But David—who I always go and talk to whenever I’m in Washington because he has such a good overview of the big shifts in European thinking and policy—wrote this book around the turn of the century. It really is the long view from the high ground. He takes an enormously positive view of EU integration. He knows everything I’ve been saying about how troubled it is and how difficult it is to reconcile the different views, the lack of consensus and so on. But his overall view is that EU integration, ever since World War II, has built structures that respect national sovereignties. Somehow it ‘ferrets out’ common interests. He also thinks that Europe is vitally important as a brake on American power. He takes the view that all power corrupts, and that if you can dilute American power with European power, in what we used to talk about as ‘the West,’ that is much more preferable to Washington being a hyperpower. I agree with him totally on that. Absolutely. It seems to me that he correctly identified not now, but more than a quarter of a century back, at the time of the Maastricht Treaty—which ushered in the Euro and enlargement and so on—that if we didn’t keep pushing hard enough there was a tendency for European politicians, however pro-Europe they might be, to fall back and rest on their laurels. That in fact the very ambitious scenario I was sketching out a moment ago, about a total rethink of a European-level democracy, should have been the follow-up to Maastricht. But we didn’t do it. We hesitated. There were a few problems at the time, as I remember. There was first a Danish referendum that said no and then the French and so on. The momentum was checked. But that was a great shame because while people were open to new ideas, that was the moment for an ambitious opening up from what had gone before—a divided Europe, the Iron Curtain. That was the time we should have said, ‘Now, let’s sit down and go forward.’ We did try, of course. There was the European Convention. I remember, because I was writing quite a lot about it at the time, that it was a bit of a muddle. We allowed the lawyers to get involved. I think one should always only bring them in at the last moment. We had the Germans saying we needed a new basic law. Well, a basic law is a constitution, and the moment you said ‘European Constitution’ heckles rose all over Europe. We backed into the next phase of European integration in a very clumsy, maladroit way, and somehow lost momentum. It’s a pity, really. I wrote Slippery Slope as a rather plaintive appeal that we Europeans must strive to regain that momentum. Europe’s difficulties multiply the longer we wait."