THE CHALLENGE OF ENLARGEMENT
Tibor Dessewffy*
Who would have been audacious enough to imagine in 1957 that at the age of 50 the EU would serve as an institution to unify most of Europe? Hardly anyone would have been bold enough to predict that by the year 2007 the European Union, in addition to extending to virtually all of Western Europe, would also include vast parts of the continent’s East, gradually incorporate the Balkans and even bits of the (now former) Soviet Union. To all those who experienced the World War II induced division of Europe as a source of bitterness – us Hungarians certainly included – the current (and future) map of the European Union is a soothing sight to behold. For some, the humongous Union of 27 is an unfathomable Babel, its innumerable languages a sign of its bloated structure that is no longer capable of operating smoothly and efficiently. Yet, for most of us, especially many who got stuck on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, it is the fulfilment of a political vision of a unified Europe whose time had come long before it could be realised in practice.
For us Hungarians, the last two rounds of Enlargement and the potential – hopefully soon realised – accession of Croatia offer a special opportunity. Finally, there is a development which holds out the promise that the injustice of the Trianon Treaty – the Hungarian version of Versailles, only harsher – will be remedied in the most civilised and peaceful manner possible. The ethnic Hungarian minorities who ended up across the Hungarian borders following World War I are gradually all becoming part of the same political community as the citizens of Hungary themselves. This creates the opportunity of intensifying economic and cultural ties without the political tensions that the cross-border relations have engendered thus far. For Hungarians, ultimately, this may prove a consolation for a historical grievance we have never quite managed to fully absorb. So we might say that at 50, we are pleased with what the EU has achieved and done for us – as newcomers in particular.
But somewhere the critics, though often oblivious to the political implications of a vastly grown EU, also have a point, and not a negligible one at that. The European Union at fifty has aged, and it has not done so altogether gracefully. And while it is debatable whether it is a result of its size rather than of lacking leadership, it is indeed increasingly obvious that currently the world’s largest economic bloc is incapable of formulating the common policy that is necessary for keeping up with this rapidly changing world. Europe, for centuries the world’s economic and political powerhouse, is in rapid relative decline, and there is nothing at all inevitable and natural about this.
As recent surveys have shown, popular attitudes towards the Union are ambivalent at best, and again the Hungarian perspective, novel to the EU, is an instructive one: three years after joining most Hungarians do not see what the accession has brought us. By this I do not refer to the customary whining about lacking money, but to any palpable change at all. Most citizens simply do not experience any change whatsoever in their lives. There is clearly a crisis of identity – not so novel to connoisseurs of the EU – of people not feeling European or not knowing why exactly they should. There is also another crisis, though (arguably at least partially capable of explaining the former): that of an EU hardly felt and hardly seen, an EU that does far too little in the way of addressing the policy issues that are at the core of the challenges facing the peoples and nations in the 21st century. More than anything else, the European Union ought to give European states an edge in terms of addressing those problems that common policies are ideally better equipped to handle. To give citizens and European economies the tools and knowledge to successfully tackle globalisation, the information society, competition, and a rising Asian continent, for example.
Instead we have an EU that is truly ageing, a mellow middle-aged gentlemen who does with exquisite expertness what it has done all along, but little besides. The forays into new policy areas, the necessary and important reforms, are undertaken ever so carefully, fearful of offending someone or everyone and wary of the changes that they may bring. And if these piecemeal reforms do on occasion yield successful and necessary changes, they tend come as too little and too late. What’s more, while citizens are uncertain what being European means and how it helps, and decision-makers offer little more than grand pronouncements when it comes to addressing the key problems of our day, it appears that we are not sufficiently troubled by these phenomena either. At fifty, Europe is slithering into what may be the gravest threat of them all: complacent indifference.
So there is no Europe that citizens can identify with, and there is no European policy that resolves the essential dilemmas of European politics: the restructuring of the welfare state, the adjustment to a global economy and creating a truly knowledge-based society. There are several Europes instead: a “core” Europe (e.g. France, Germany and the Benelux), a Mediterranean Europe (e.g. Italy, Spain, Portugal), an Anglo-Saxon/liberal Europe (UK and Ireland), a Central Eastern European/post-Communist Europe (most of the newly acceded states), and a Scandinavian Europe. These present distinct models for responding to the challenges above. They may not be wholly coherent models, differences between the countries within the various clusters of states certainly abound. But nevertheless, they are clearly identifiable in terms of the various policy approaches they embrace overall, in the manners in which they prepare for global competition and adapt their economies to the requirements of the information society.
While certainly disillusioning in terms of the widespread intellectual longing for a unified Europe, these different models have some benefits to offer: they all have their respective advantages and appealing solutions when it comes to addressing at least some of the problems alluded to above. And one of them in particular, the Scandinavian model, offers successful approaches towards modern economic and social policy in a wide range of areas. With some reservations, one might say that so far only the Scandinavians have managed to compete successfully in the global economy without making significant sacrifices in terms of providing for the disadvantaged. In this sense they did square the circle of achieving a robustly growing economy simultaneously with a healthy and sustainable welfare state that keeps poverty low and distributes opportunities fairly. In European comparisons, the Scandinavians consistently rank among the best performers in terms of growth, information society and knowledge indicators, poverty, and quality of life overall.
Ultimately, therefore, there is still a lot of hope left for the European model, unless we let our indifference get the best of us. The Scandinavian model may not be universally applicable in all its details, but in whichever area a common policy is possible and desirable, it should offer some key inspirations to decision-makers as to what outcome we seek and how we might go about it.
Europe at 40 was talking about many of the same problems it is facing today. But while these problems have only intensified in the past ten years, the solutions to address them have proven lacklustre. Let us hope that the EU at 60 will match its rhetoric with policies that will contribute to creating a Europe that will be felt and experienced by all – felt and experienced as a result of the successful policies it affected to bring improvements to our lives. The challenges are spectacular, but so are the opportunities: innovation, prosperity and higher quality of life.
*Tibor Dessewffy is a Hungarian public intellectual and professor of Sociology at Eotvos Lorànd University (ELTE) in Budapest where he previously obtained his M.A. degrees in Law, and Sociology. He was a visiting fellow of Boston University and The New School for Social Research. He is a member of the board of the ELTE-UNESCO Ethnic and Minority Studies and the leader of the Hungarian section of the World Internet Project, initiated by UCLA. He is co-author of “The Democratic Papers” collection (British Council, Vision et al. 2004).
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