Editorial I July 2010INTEGRATION FATIGUE?
As we increasingly strain to find signs of community ‘verve’, whether in public opinion around Europe or among the political leaders, an apt slogan has been coined: “integration fatigue”. The aim of the great single market – in theory, to censure and increase European prosperity while inducing a shared sense of citizenship – is barely being fulfilled at all. The broader the market, the greater the interest (and sometimes greed) in collaring an ever-wider free exchange area (Turkey is the classic case: by all accounts an exceptional market though reservations exist on all other fronts). But less and less do we sense that increase in integration which ought to have given the Union greater strength and international weight. The fact is that integration is barely ticking over. The international crisis is partly to blame, and there is more of that to come. Integration is uphill work whenever widely divergent and distant realities need mixing, and it just doesn’t work when one tries to standardize situations that fall under the umbrella of various national sovereignties. Take the most egregious case, what might generally be classified as “corruption”. There is a lot of it going on, from those cheating on agricultural subsidies to those who divert the proper use of community funds, but when we do decide to clamp down on malpractice, precious little ever comes of it. It becomes difficult to persuade the strongest countries to act as the “locomotives” they once did. Today Angela Merkel’s Germany is being accused of back-tracking – by former chancellor Helmut Schmidt, for one, in the pages of Die Zeit: she has forgotten her vocation to spearhead European development in tandem with France. And the German press is showing the first signs of persecution mania, complaining that the “hated Hun” syndrome is back in European public opinion. In actual fact, chancellor Merkel is reluctant to force the hand of a nation with a fast expanding economy but little inclination to subject it to a Europe of reckless partners who kick against any suggestion of checks on their own behaviour. This sours the real system of Union governance: the old debate between supporters of the “community method” and those favouring the “intergovernmental method” is beginning to sound like hollow dogma leading us nowhere. At the moment our new form of governance has not delivered much. President Van Rompuy seems to have little difficulty in rubbing along with what remains of the six-month rotating presidency of member countries: outgoing Spain put up a fairly nondescript performance, and incoming Belgium is a country without a government of its own (we shall presumably have to wait until October for that). Despite the scope that leaves Van Rompuy, no fireworks have been seen (in politics the occasional salvo helps), and for that matter not even the humblest walk-on appearance upon the public stage. Baroness Ashton, High Commissioner for Foreign Policy, has erected a formidable diplomatic corps of 6000. What exactly for, it is hard to say. Smarting at the snubs she has received, the baroness gave a very ‘British’ interview to the Financial Times, the drift of which was, yes, she may be a new-girl, but no-one could be doing much more. Action-wise that is possibly true, but in terms of communications there is enormous room for improvement. In such a set-up things tend to trickle on by inertia: so it is with Croatia’s membership negotiations, ditto for the approaching rounds with Iceland and Macedonia, and so again with Turkey’s bargaining marathon (the reader may be curious to know they are discussing chapter 13 of 35, on the subject of food security). Unfortunately, while bureaucrats busy themselves with these finer points, those in the know are currently alarmed at Turkey’s new international profile which has neatly been dubbed “neo-Ottoman”. Admittedly, Komorowski’s victory in Poland came as a relief. A pro-European president: but is it enough to keep back the fundamentalists? They have solid roots and are far from vanquished.
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