London
It has been said in many an Old World barroom that the European Union has a regulation for everything. Not true. Last week it became clear that the E.U. has no equivalent of the Hatch Act, the U.S. law that forbids government employees from engaging in partisan political campaigns.
The E.U. hopes that its draft “constitutional treaty”–a four-inch-thick document that codifies existing laws, enumerates the E.U.’s “competences,” and makes elaborate lists of human rights–will have been ratified by all 25 E.U. member states sometime next year. Last month, it was approved by the parliaments of Greece, Belgium, and (after a flurry of government-funded publicity) Spain. It breezed through the German Bundestag last week.
But a dozen European countries have promised to submit the document to their voters in a referendum. In the first two big tests, among two of the least Euroskeptic populations on the continent, the document stands a good chance of going down. A poll in Le Monde shows the French, who will vote on May 29, narrowly supporting the treaty, although the “No” position has been winning all spring. In Holland, which will vote three days later, sentiment is running 53-47 against, and hardening, according to pollster Maurice de Hond. This bodes ill for the referenda in those countries–such as Denmark and the Czech Republic–that have always been lukewarm about the idea of Europe-wide government in the first place.
Faced with this threat, advocates of European integration have made common cause to scare their publics to death. In France, president Jacques Chirac threatened his constituents with excommunication on national television. “You can’t say, ‘I’m a European and I’m voting No,'” he warned. It has become commonplace among the E.U.’s advocates to assign it credit for everything from feminism to victory in the Cold War, but in Holland, things went even further than that. Justice minister Piet-Hein Donner invoked the specter of Yugoslavia to describe what would happen if Europe flagged in the task of dissolving its nation states. And prime minister Jan-Peter Balkenende dropped a very broad hint at the close of an interview with the NRC Handelsblad newspaper: “I’ve been in Auschwitz and Yad Vashem,” he said. “The images haunt me every day. It is supremely important for us to avoid such things in Europe. We really ought to think about that more.”
Sweden’s European commissioner, Margot Wallstrom, gave a speech against nationalism on V-E Day weekend at the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Prague. London’s Daily Telegraph described the speech under the headline: “Vote for E.U. constitution or risk new Holocaust, says Brussels.” Wallstrom claims she was misquoted, but the printed text her staff handed out to reporters read: “There are those today who want to scrap the supranational idea. They want the European Union to go back to the old purely inter-governmental way of doing things. I say those people should come to Terezin [Theresienstadt] and see where that old road leads.” Her country does not plan a referendum.
The effect of this publicity blitz, though, has been marginal. After Balkenende and his cabinet had spent a solid week of all-out campaigning for the constitution, Dutch pollster de Hond found that 70 percent of Netherlands respondents thought the prime minister “unconvincing,” while 18 percent were swayed; 38 percent said they were more anti-Europe than before Balkenende started talking, while 17 percent said they were more pro.
Part of the problem is the document itself. What is described as a “constitution” actually bundles together much of the regulation the E.U. has passed at various summits over the decades. It gets the worst of both worlds: It’s authoritative and uninspiring. But it does a good deal to move the E.U. towards being a superstate. It proclaims the superiority of the E.U.’s laws to those of its constituent nation states, and strips the power to make European laws from the European Council (made up of national ministers). It makes adjustments so that the 10 new members who joined in 2004 do not render the whole mechanism unworkable. Under the system in place since 2000, E.U. member states must come to unanimous agreement on major policy changes. Under the draft constitution, decisions taken in the European Council could pass by a “qualified majority” of 55 percent of council members, provided the states they represent compose 65 percent of the total E.U. population.
Who could have known, when work began on the constitution back in the 1990s, that it would touch on what are the two sore spots for the European-on-the-street in the spring of 2005? The first is that last year’s accession of the old East Bloc countries has brought an unexpected cataclysm. According to economist Hans-Werner Sinn of the Munich-based Institute for Economic Research (IFO), when Spain and Portugal joined the E.U. two decades ago, their average hourly labor costs were about half of West Germany’s. But today’s Eastern Europeans–in such skills-rich places as Slovakia and Hungary–will work at one-seventh the cost of the aging, gripe-prone German work force. The result is that France and Germany’s already troubled industrial sectors are disappearing to the east at lightning speed. Asking Western Europeans to vote “Yes” on a constitution meant to accommodate the newly arrived Slovaks and Magyars is a tough sell.
The other problem is Turkey, which has sought accession to the E.U. since the early 1960s. E.U. leaders agreed to open negotiations for accession last fall. Turkey has the same low-wage/reasonable-productivity problem in spades. And it is Muslim. On top of that, its population is growing at developing-world rates, so that it will be tens of millions of people larger than any other European country when it joins. France’s National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen (whose absence from the “No” campaign had up till now greatly broadened its appeal) weighed in last Wednesday with a thundering op-ed in Le Figaro in which he warned that a growing Turkey would be “the centerpiece of any blocking majority” against France. This is alarmist, but not wrong.
The collision of Turkey and the constitution has sent more moderate French policy-makers into a panic. Jacques Chirac has solemnly promised that French voters will get a final referendum on Turkish membership. Since there is not a single national public in Europe that favors Turkey, such a vote would doom its candidacy. Nicolas Sarkozy, Chirac’s rival and heir-apparent, has been giving speeches for the last several weeks in favor of the constitution and against Turkey. A loosely organized Europe will have room for Turkey, he reasons. But the more closely Europe is integrated, the harder Turkey will find it to live up to its picayune rules. In short: The only way to keep Turkey out is to empower the people who invited it in. An entire group of mostly conservative legislators has rallied around this argument. Frenchly, they call themselves “Yes for No.”
Never has Europe been closer to getting shown up as yesterday’s wave of the future. The Dutch philosopher Ad Verbrugge recently gave a fascinating interview about discontent with Europe to the NRC Handelsblad. Europe is a system that presents itself as the only logical response to modern conditions, but it is actually being propped up by taboos, said Verbrugge. He likened it to Dutch multiculturalism before the emergence of antiimmigrant populist Pim Fortuyn, who became the most beloved politician in the country in a few short weeks, before his assassination on the eve of elections in May 2002. “Europe,” Verbrugge warned, “is at a pre-Fortuyn stage.”
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
