Disgraceful debate

Disgraceful debate

Over the last while I’ve saved attentive readers considerable disappointment over economic and financial-market developments. Therefore, I don’t think there’s anything wrong about tweaking a few noses today.

I find the way the debate on eastern enlargement of the EU is being conducted in Germany and the other member countries a disgrace. It shows a lack of human compassion, a lack of historical awareness and a lack of economic understanding. It looks to me like a club of the small-minded. Twelve countries are in the final throes of negotiations to join the EU. Eight Eastern Europeans, Malta and Cyprus should be members by 2004, or 2005 at the latest. Bulgaria and Romania will follow in their footsteps a few years later (2007/2008). By then, former Yugoslavia will have joined the queue. This means the EU is taking on new dimensions! Before the end of the decade it will have become a club of 30 members instead of 15 and be home to nearly 500 million instead of today’s 350 million. The basic idea of the Treaties of Rome also fits this new Europe. With enlargement towards Central and Eastern Europe, Europe will become reunited, and its political and economic composition will match its traditional culture. Artificial divisions imposed by empires or ideologies will then belong to the past. Architecture and cuisine, music and science will be back in a framework which reflects their historical development. Riga, Budapest, Dubrovnik and Warsaw are part of the cultural heritage that Berlin, Paris, London, Rome and Madrid thrive on. This historical reality does not admit of patronising behaviour by the “old” EU states when they decide which of the candidate countries may join.

What won’t work, of course, is the status quo in the EU. You cannot run a club of 30 members the same way as one with 6. The new Union will include countries with very different levels of development. Many simple or moderately important issues must be handled using the principle of majority decision-making. Requiring unanimous agreement would too often raise the spectre of veto and thus standstill. To ensure that the new Europe continues to make headway and people understand each other, we must all have a common (second) language. English must be taught everywhere, starting in elementary school at the latest. For economic and cultural reasons, another language beside the mother tongue should be in the curriculum. What the Swiss and the Dutch are obviously able to do ought to be possible for other Europeans, too.

The European Convention should submit convincing proposals for the future of Europe, its institutions and framework for subsidiarity, so that the participants at the EU’s Intergovernmental Conference in 2004 can drive in first stakes for a United States of Europe.

The old EU needs skilled, motivated citizens from the accession countries. An important aspect for the candidate countries is their entry into the EU market and the underpinning afforded them by the assumption of the acquis communautaire. Another advantage for them is the international network already established in the Western European societies and the latter’s capital and management know-how. What the candidates do not need first, and by no means foremost, are EU transfers and subsidies. This dominant worry in the West, above all in Germany, is unfounded.

Eastern enlargement should, however, be an occasion in the old EU to shed old customs and sins – customs which are economically damaging and expensive, such as the misguided subsidisation of output in the agricultural sector and a social policy which is much too quick to fulfil demands that go over the top. It is largely the old EU’s inability to drive through reforms that is an obstacle to enlargement. Let’s hope that the new brooms in Europe will sweep cleaner!

For more analysis see the

Deutsche Bank Research website.