Crisis in Europe deepens as people ask: What’s the matter with Germany?
Even the most passionate supporters of European integration are now starting to voice their concerns about the future of the EU publicly. In a panicky looking article distributed by Project Syndicate and picked up by the Guardian, Germany’s Joschka Fischer — foreign minister from 1998-2005 — openly frets about Germany’s increasing scepticism towards the European Union. Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall and almost as long since Germany reunified he sees nationalism replacing Europeanism as the dominant current among the German people and its main political parties.
“…while Europe no doubt remains important for asserting both common and national interests, it is no longer a project of the future. The German perspective is thus shifting in the direction of that of France and the UK: the EU is increasingly seen as a framework and precondition for asserting national interests, rather than as an aim in itself.”
For Fischer, this is a deeply worrying state of affairs. But he seems quite unable to understand why it has come to pass.
He tells us that:
“It is a strategic illusion of the large member states that they can defend their own status without this stolid entity called Europe. After all, can Germany really afford to let the EU’s enlargement into eastern Europe fail? Can it afford a life-threatening crisis of the euro, a common market endangered by growing protectionism, or Russia pushing into the EU’s eastern neighbourhood? Can it really conduct an independent national policy in the Middle East and Africa, or play an effective role in resolving global issues, from addressing climate change to building a new financial order?”
Of course, his answer to all these questions is emphatically “no”. Indeed, “only a strong, substantially more integrated EU can manage all this”.
But in a manner which is typical of the EU elite, he simply leaves it at that: the point is merely asserted rather than argued for. It does not occur to Fischer that maybe the reason for the German people’s scepticism towards the EU on everything from the Euro to the Lisbon Treaty is that convincing arguments have simply not been made to them.
Opinion poll after opinion poll has shown that they would prefer the Deutschmark to the Euro. Are they really wrong to believe that? There is certainly a case to be made that Germany has suffered over the last decade from not being able to set its own interest rates. At the very least, it is a matter for reasonable debate. Was there such a debate in Germany? No. The Lisbon Treaty? Polls also show that Germans would have liked a referendum. Did they get one? No. Even if one accepts, as I most certainly do, that nations can achieve their aims far more successfully in many cases when they cooperate, why would a more deeply integrated and bureacratic EU be a better mechanism than a more loosely integrated intergovernmental EU? Have Germans and other Europeans been offered a vote or even a proper debate on what kind of EU they want? No. And has anyone provided a knock-down argument as to why, in Fischer’s words, Europe should be “an aim in itself”? Again, no.
But with that point, Fischer gives the game away. His concerns and the concerns of many millions of Europeans do not converge. There are many people, myself included, who support intra-European cooperation but most emphatically not as an end or aim in itself. It deserves support only in so far as it is a means to an end, in so far as it perpetuates higher values and more widely held goals such as liberal-democratic government, accountability and transparancy. And anyone who thinks on such lines must have deep concerns about the way things have been going with the EU in recent years as the scandalous behaviour of EU integrationists over several recent referendums has amply demonstrated.
Integrationists have been oblivious to reasonable questions about the EU for many years now. It should be no surprise if Germans and other Europeans are increasingly cynical about the enterprise as a whole.
For a more extended discussion of these issues see my Wall Street Journal piece on the subject reproduced in my blog entry below entitled: Dead Man Walking? Democracy in Europe
For the whole of Fischer’s article click here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/30/germany-europe-eu
