New Republic , D.C.
June 1 2005
WHY THE FRENCH VOTE WAS GOOD FOR EUROPE.
For Better
by Efraim Karsh
On Sunday, Europe’s “grand political project,” as Romano Prodi,
former president of the European Commission, has termed it, took
a major beating when French voters decisively rejected the new EU
constitution. The defeat followed a scare mongering campaign by pro-EU
politicians across Europe on the dangers of voting no. While Jacques
Chirac merely threatened his constituents that their neighbors
were bound to regard a no vote as a French rejection of Europe,
other politicians went further. Dutch Prime Minister Jan-Peter
Balkenende warned that rejection of the constitution could lead
to a new Holocaust. “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 followed suit in
a speech on the sixtieth anniversary of V-E Day at the Theresienstadt
concentration camp in Prague. “There are those today who want to
scrap the supranational idea,” she warned. “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.”
But in truth, France’s vote against the constitution is an important
victory for European unity, because the document posed a serious threat
to the great European experiment in peace and prosperity. What began 53
years ago as an idealistic attempt to use economic cooperation to heal
a war-torn continent has deteriorated with the passage of time into
a gigantic imperial machinery that has largely eroded the democratic
values and objectives for which it was originally established.
As the European Coal and Steel Community evolved (in 1957) to
the European Economic Community and then (in the mid-1980s) to the
European Union, and as its membership expanded from the original six
to a staggering 25, the organization’s vision of a confederation of
states collaborating on an equal footing was increasingly replaced
by the reality of an empire in the making–a consensual empire, yes,
but an empire all the same, one in which a metropolitan center run by
a new kind of bureaucratic political elite is responsible for more
and more European decision-making and increasingly determined to
remove control of lawmaking from member state governments. As Czech
president Vaclav Klaus has warned:
The dangers are that Europe is departing from the foundations of
democracy and liberty. I cannot imagine a democratic society without
a nation state. I do not mean an ethnically pure nation state, which
I reject. Democracy needs an identifiable state as its base–otherwise
we are in a post-democracy and the European Union is a post-democratic
institution.
The distinction between this outlook and that of Chirac and his
likeminded EU supporters is hardly a matter of academic sophistry. It
is the difference between individualism and universalism, between
independent paths of development and the expansionist impulse–in
short, the difference between nation and empire.
Taking their cue from a dominant post-World War II school of thought,
the so-called pro-Europeans hold nationalism to be the scourge of
international relations and the primary source of conflict and war;
and they regard a tightly unified pan-European super-state as a
panacea. In fact, there is nothing inherently ugly or violent about
the desire of a specific group of people, sharing attributes including
a common descent, language, culture, tradition, and history, to live
their lives as they see fit in a territory they consider to be their
historical or ancestral homeland.
Rather, the real problem is imperialism, which has constituted the
foremost generator of violence throughout world history. The desire
to dominate foreign creeds, nations, or communities and to occupy
territories well beyond the ancestral homeland contains the inevitable
seeds of violence. The worst atrocities in human history–from the
exile of entire nations by the ancient Mesopotamian empires, to the
decimation of the native populations of North and South America,
to the Armenian genocide of World War I, to the Holocaust–have been
carried out by imperial powers seeking regional or world mastery. Even
some of the worst outbursts of recent violence, from the Middle East
to Rwanda to Kosovo to Chechnya, are remnants of the bitter legacy
of longstanding imperial domination.
Notwithstanding its universal pretense, each and every great empire
throughout history has been dominated by a specific religious, ethnic,
or national group, which has viewed its preeminence as a vehicle
for the promotion of self-serving interests and the assimilation of
attributes and value systems in the subject populations. This is how
the great monotheistic religions of Christianity and Islam expanded
well beyond their original habitats to become world religions, and how
so many languages–Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, English, and French,
to mention but a few–transcended their origins to be assimilated by
numerous countries and communities.
The same rule applies to the EU. It is no mere coincidence that the
initiative for the coal and steel community came from two former
great European empires–France and Germany–both of which have
subsequently provided the main impetus behind its steady expansion.
Beginning with Charles De Gaulle, French leaders, left and right,
have viewed the European Union as a central tool for the restoration
of imperial grandeur and influence. “We have to recognize,” explained
former French Euro Commissioner Pascal Lamy, in 2003, “that [within the
EU] there are some countries which remember that they were once great
world powers and which believe that this was not an accident–that they
still have special qualities that deserve recognition.” Given these
sentiments, it is hardly surprising that the EU’s smaller nations have
remained wary of anything that smacks of imperialism–or that they have
generally expressed greater affinity for the United States than France.
Indeed, Lamy should have added that many of those who support further
European political integration–beginning with ratification of the EU
constitution–do so because they see it as the best way to counter
U.S. global predominance and establish the EU as a major challenger
to the United States in the international arena. One of Chirac’s
foremost arguments for a yes vote in the referendum was that Europe
needed a much deeper level of integration as it was “faced with this
great world power.” EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana was even
blunter when he argued in April 2005, in a speech at the Institute of
Political Science in Paris, that France must vote for the Constitution
because otherwise “you run the risk of negating the hope for a better
Europe and for a greater balance in the world. … Some American
neoconservatives are also hostile to the constitution precisely because
they are see it as a sign of a new rise in Europe’s power.” So not
only does the frenzied rush toward integration risk turning the EU
from an egalitarian community of states into an imperial ogre, but
it predicates the organization on a negative footing–challenging
U.S. global power–rather than giving it a positive rationale. Should
their resounding non lead to a more modest EU, French voters will have
done their continent a favor. For if history tells us anything it is
that imperial overextension is a recipe for disaster–a destroyer,
rather than a guarantor, of peace and unity. The version of the EU
constitution voted down on Sunday was an imperial document, not a
democratic one. Europe and the European Union are both better off
without it.
Efraim Karsh is the head of the Mediterranean Studies Programme at
King’s College, University of London.