Economía y Politica Internacionales

La expansión pone en riesgo la visión fundadora de la Unión Europea

Autor: William Pfaff

Fecha: 20/2/2004

Traductor: Celeste Murillo, especial para P.I.

Fuente: International Herald Tribune

Expansion jeopardizes EU's founding vision

The expansion of Europe means the transformation of Europe. This has been intuitively understood in the founding states of the European Union, as well as those that have since become full members.

The consequences of the Union's further expansion in May, however, will put it in a more difficult internal as well as geopolitical situation than it has ever experienced. At the same time, expansion is diminishing the Union's capacity for strategic agreement and common action. This is a more serious threat to "Europe" than usually is appreciated.

The latest expansion is dictated by the original moral vision of a Europe saved from its modern history of suicidal violence.

When Jean Monnet was sent by Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister, to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of Germany in 1951 with a proposal to put the war-making industrial capacities of the two countries under a common authority, Adenauer replied, "I have waited 25 years for a move like this. ... For me, like you, this project is of the highest importance: It is a matter of morality."

The details came after. The initial commitment was moral. The geopolitical significance was to resolve the great uncertainty over German's future by integrating that country into the coal and steel arrangement. In 1951 there was still anxiety about the country that had recently conquered Europe.

EU expansion to Britain, Denmark and Ireland in 1973 was a matter of practical interests. Expansion to Greece in 1981 and Spain and Portugal in 1986 was again driven by moral conviction, that "Europe" had to include the nation at the source of European civilization, Greece, and two countries that had just awakened from rightist dictatorships. In 1995, after the fall of Communism, expansion incorporated the "neutrals," Austria, Finland and Sweden.

The moral argument for incorporating the former Soviet states of Central and Eastern Europe has been: How can we exclude them after all they have been through? But it must be asked at the same time what this does to the character of the EU, and what risks and responsibilities it entails.

Much of this region is troubled, having emerged from feudal political conditions in the 19th and 20th centuries. Since the Soviet Union's collapse, the region has been afflicted by political and criminal mafias. This time the EU is on a rescue mission.

The EU, for admirable and altruistic reasons, runs the risk of weakening itself as a union and annexing serious social and political trouble. At the same time expansion automatically reduces - and in some cases may completely block - the EU's ability to make decisions and take common action.

Expansion poses a risk to the Union's ambitions to formulate and defend a specific set of European strategic interests, and to play an important international political role (in parallel with the international economic role it has already claimed with confidence).

It is possible that an EU vanguard may assume such a political role, employing "reinforced cooperation" and "coalitions of the willing"; but that notion has already created much fracas among the second-ranking and smaller EU governments, and could prove impossible even within the framework of the EU as it currently exists, much less in an enlarged union.

Otherwise it is imaginable that the EU will simply lapse into a material and economic association. That would not extinguish "Europe" as a political presence in the world, but would mean that Europe would only exist by way of individual governments, and by its individual members acting together in terms of ad hoc alliances of national or group interest.

That would be very distant from the moral vision of those who created a European community that they hoped could put the past behind and give a new political expression to European civilization.