Analysis: Deciding the EU's borders  

Is there a French doctrine for the enlargement of the EU? There is more than one. In fact, there are so many that it is difficult to keep stock of them. Some recent examples reflect uncertainties or even old contradictions. Jacques Chirac, president of the French Republic, has long supported the EU’s enlargement to include Turkey. His main argument is that Turkey has been a secular state, often compared to France and France’ respect for secularity. The fact that a moderate Islamist party ascended to power in Ankara did nothing to change his mind. On the contrary, it strengthened his conviction that Turkey can serve as a model for other countries with a Muslim majority. He believes the EU should show the way to integrating Muslim communities into the fabric of democracy. 

However, the French President had to take into consideration that the majority of the French public is hostile to Turkey’s accession. Chirac tried, unsuccessfully, to dampen the debate about Turkey in the heat of the campaign leading up to the referendum on the Constitutional Treaty, which was failed. Chirac promised and included in the French Constitution a stipulation that a referendum should be staged to approve all future enlargement This doesn’t include the integration of Romania, Bulgaria or Croatia, which is already on the way. This position, seen as pro-Turkish, resulted in Chirac being alienated within his own party. 

The Union for Presidential Majority (UMP) would prefer a “privileged partnership” with Ankara. UMP chairman Nicolas Sarkozy, Minister for Home Affairs and presidential candidate of the right wing in the next elections, is opposed to Turkey’s EU accession. He is not alone, either in his own camp or in the left-wing opposition. 

His opponent in the presidential elections, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, also distanced himself from Chirac’s position on Turkey. In August 2005, in the midst of the debate on whether accession negotiations should be opened with Ankara, Villepin declared it “inconceivable” that the EU should consider admitting a country which does not recognize one of the member states (Cyprus). Shortly after this, France reaffirmed her official position in favor of the negotiations. Villepin then softened his stand, but he had already set the tone. 

Divisive enlargement 

Turkey’s prospective EU membership divides political groups on both right and left, Europhiles as well as Euroskeptics, but for entirely different reasons. Some Euro-enthusiasts are against it because they see it as a dilution of the union. Other pro-EU advocates subscribe to Chirac’s arguments. On the anti-EU side, some people support Turkey’s membership precisely because it could dilute the Union, ending dreams about a politically unified EU. Others are opposed to it because they do not want a “Muslim state” in the EU. 

If, in this complex configuration, Turkey is substituted by the overall issue of enlargement, the picture is largely the same. Advocates of the EU integration are among the supporters of enlargement (they want to propagate the European model) and among its opponents (they are afraid of a loss of identity). Likewise, opponents of the European integration are among the EU sceptics, opposing enlargement, (because they are afraid of a massive influx of foreigners,open borders) and among . the proponents of enlargement, (because they hope this will undermine the possibility for a politically unified EU). 

To complicate the situation, Chirac was not always a keen supporter of enlargement. 

In the early 80s, he was very reticent about the accession of Spain and Portugal to the European Communities. As Minister of Agriculture of the time, he was concerned about the competition Mediterranean produce would present to French farmers. 

The same concern cropped up in the context of the 2004 enlargement, and spread over to other areas of industry and services. That was illustrated by the heated debate on the directive on services, known as the Bolkestein directive. 

At a conference organized by the Austrian presidency in Salzburg in January 2006, Villepin summarised the French position in a single sentence: “The identity crisis we [Europeans] experience is closely related to the speed of enlargement.”The fears are not new. They were not triggered by the accession of ten countries in 2004, or by the prospect of future rounds of enlargement already decided. They go back to the inception of the Common Market. At that time, the main concern of France’s leaders, from De Gaulle through Mitterrand to Chirac, was to circumvent the process of enlargement. Should they fail to prevent it, they at least hoped to channel it and use it to deepen EU integration. The rhetoric, not specifically French, of the 80s and 90s about the “dialectics of enlargement and deepening” is rooted in this: one does not go without the other, one is a condition for the other. 

There is no enlargement without deepening, they said, if the efficiency of the EU institutions is to be maintained. There is no deepening without enlargement because the member states would have been unable to agree on wider integration without the push of the newcomers. 

Paris flies forward 

This dialectic has doubtless worked, but only within very narrow limits. Enlargement, or as certain French politicians prefer to put it, “the flight forward”, has been faster than the deepening process. 

It soon gave rise to the impression that an inexorable mechanism was set in motion, automatisms were triggered and one manifestation was the attraction of the European Communities, then the European Union.There is no need to go back to De Gaulle’s visceral rejection of the accession of the U.K. to the Common Market in the 60s to explore the traces of this attitude. De Gaulle regarded Britain as the Trojan horse of the Americans in the European Community. Jacques Chirac was thinking much the same when in 2003, at the time of the U.S. intervention in Iraq, he told Central European accession countries to be quiet if they wanted to be worthy of EU integration... The only reason De Gaulle’s successor at the helm of France let Britain joint the Community was to create a counterbalance to Germany, as he mistrusted the Ostpolitik of Chancellor Willy Brandt. 

Before the 1995 enlargement, bringing in Austria, Finland and Sweden, French President François Mitterrand clearly formulated the reserved French position. He said the Union should deepen integration and reform its institutions to be able to embrace new members. This principle did not last long. At a state visit in Vienna in 1993, Mitterrand changed his tune. He claimed the idea that the community institutions needed to be transformed in order to keep them operating once membership increased from 12 to 15 was “artificial”. So the door opened without any decision on reforms necessary for creating a “political Europe”, which were sketched in Maastricht and then left unfinished. The decision was postponed until the 1997 Council Meeting in Amsterdam. That accomplished only a fraction of its mission, and passed on the matter of reforms to the 2000 Nice Council Meeting. That event, in turn, failed on this point and left it to the European Convention to formulate a proposal on transforming the institutional system. We know where that ended. In any case, Mitterrand sacrificed the need for deepening for the sake of enlargement. He did that for tactical reasons. 

In fact Mitterand needed the support of Austria and other candidate countries for a plan he had cherished, about a Great Europe. On December 31, 1989, a few weeks after the Berlin Wall came down, Mitterrand raised the idea of a European Confederation. Seeing the “European” aspirations of the Central and East European countries that had just gotten rid of communism, his concern was to avoid the debate on opening the way to enlargement of the European Community, as the EU was called at the time. He proposed a new organization, with regular meetings of the heads of state, heads of government and ministers and a permanent secretariat. Its job would be to develop the framework of these new democracies’ naturally belonging to Europe, without jeopardizing the Community edifice. 

Mitterrand was concerned that, embroiled in the adventure of the common currency, Germany would throw EU integration to the wind for the prospect of assuming a new role in Central Europe. He was also afraid that the admission of such a large number of new members would be a fatal blow to integration efforts, even if German Chancellor Helmut Kohl were to stick to his European commitment. 

Dangerous pleasures 

The idea of a European Confederation reflects Mitterrand’s dual thinking. He condemned the Yalta regime, but set out for a European structure that was not irreversible. This idea, and its failure, was the hallmark of the French attitude to enlargement. Why did the project fail? For several reasons. 

Firstly, preparation had been inadequate at the level of the French diplomatic services, and in terms of relations with the capital cities concerned. Both its goals and its organization were vague. There was an institution, the Council of Europe, which could have served as a starting point for a confederation, especially since it was at the time headed by a French Socialist Party member, Catherine Lalumière. Yet French diplomacy pretended not to comprehend this, for personal reasons. 

Secondly, countries aspiring to full membership of the EC, then the EU, saw the confederation as a waiting room, or, worse still, as a dead end. 

Thirdly, Mitterrand torpedoed his own brainchild when he included the Soviet Union in the confederation but categorically excluded the U.S. This was more than the former satellite states of Moscow were prepared to accept. Having only just shed the Soviet yoke, they were grateful to the U.S. for its contribution to their liberation.

The coup de grâce to the confederation was dealt by one of its supposed adresses, Václav Havel, then president of Czechoslovakia. In 1991, at the first preparatory meeting on the confederation, in Prague, Mitterrand tried to involve the Council of Europe. It was too late. His Prime Minister incumbent for the second term, Edouard Balladur, made his own contribution to the theory of non-enlargement by throwing in the concept of “concentric circles”. This did not go any further than Mitterrand’s ideas. It gave rise to the European Commission’s concept of “privileged partnership” and “new neighborhood policy”. Its success is rather questionable. For the time being, unless the EU proves to be a spectacular failure, the only goal for the states along its peripheries is to become full-fledged members. Once Turkey is admitted on account of its long-standing commitment, or the Balkan states in the interest of European stability, there is little ground for refusing the accession of Ukraine or Moldova, or eventually Belarus or the Caucasian states. That is, provided they otherwise meet the criteria. 

That means that French reservations concerning a quasi-unlimited EU enlargement are not entirely unfounded. French companies and the French in general have traditionally been afraid of opening the borders. The protectionist reflexes, going back to before World War II, have survived, despite the highly positive experience of the French economy in the Common Market. Any new opening triggers the same old fears, albeit in different guises. These may take the shape of a fear of globalization, an Anglo-Saxon term that had to be made more palatable by devising the French term “mondialisation”. Alternatively, the fears might focus on the relocation of French business activities abroad, or more recently the image of the “Polish plumber”, a symbol of cheap labor ruining the French trades. 

Then there is the actual evolution of the EU. At the outset, the Common Market was a kind of “French garden”. Its organizational structure emulated the French administrative system. Its offices were staffed by French bureaucrats. Successive rounds of enlargement put an end to this dominance. Anglo-Saxon work methods have gained ground. French lost its leading status as a working language. 

In general, power lines changed to the detriment of the six founding members. France was one of the Big Three, together with Germany and Italy, and was also the only one of the six with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, and the only one with nuclear arms. Today, it is just one of 25 member states, though it has retained some of the prerogatives others do not have. France has been relegated to a medium-rank power. EU enlargement did not so much cause this development as reveal it. The reasons lie in the end of the Cold War, and the east-west opposition that enabled France to assume a role above its real power. This explains French leaders’ ambivalence toward the Yalta system. As Mitterrand put it, it is an “unjust” system that must be fought in the name of morality – but maintained in the name of reality, because it provided France with an enviable weight. 

“There are dangerous pleasures,” Mitterrand said, when the Berlin Wall collapsed - and with it, the Yalta regime. 

Exporting stability 

The main reason for French reticence to EU enlargement is rooted in the issue of deepening. It seemed more difficult to construct a politically unified EU that included an increasing number of member states of increasingly differing living standards, traditions and aspirations. At the same time French diplomacy has been striving for a politically united European Community since the 60s, not to be back a decade earlier. As the EU enlarges, so this goal gets further away. It is not the newcomers’ fault. It is the result of some arithmetic law. Obviously, the French argument would be more convincing if Paris had not several times missed the opportunity to build a politically unified Europe while it still could. This would have required sacrificing a bit more of its sovereignty – a sacrifice France was not prepared to make. 

What to do now? The number one priority now should be to define the borders of Europe. But this is a necessary, but an impossible task. It would clearly point to the countries that would stay out. One of the greatest achievements of the EU over the years has been the ability to export stability through the only means in its possession: the promise of adherence to a democratic and relatively prosperous club. If the EU loses this attraction to its neighbors, it risks facing unstable and chaotic peripheries. 

“Everything but politics”, was how Romano Prodi defined the new neighborhood policy when he was president of the European Commission. But this orientation has two drawbacks. On the one hand, it excludes areas of cooperation which are sometimes easier to organize than economic convergence. On the other, it leaves partners in an inferior position because they have to abide by rules over which they have no control. There remains the idea of concentric circles, and reinforced cooperation, and even that of a hard core, not to mention a Directoire, which evokes everybody’s fears. That idea crops up from time to time. It should not be discarded without due consideration. Europeans must make up their mind to tackle diversity, institutionalize heterogeneity and promote integration. The French debate on enlargement, which started much too late, may give the impression of enlargement being mainly a luxury for the rich. But it is no less indispensable if we want to avoid that European integration becomes a feeble and casual process.

Daniel Vernet is a journalist and director for international relations at Le Monde.