A year on from the French and Dutch “No” votes, the EU remains at an impasse. It has had a year to reflect and understand, a difficult year when the grim reality of the difference between popular opinion and political decision-making has come to surface. On Friday, European leaders met in Brussels for their summer summit in an attempt to decide what happens next.
The “No” votes effectively put a boulder in the middle of the road to enlargement. The mass of this boulder is made up of fears about migration and security. Almost inevitably now, the mix of fears about migration and fears about security results in fears regarding Muslims. And the last year has only served to strengthen this trend. Not only did the July 7 London bombings remind Europeans that terrorism is a real and constant threat which could strike anywhere any time any place, but the fact that the bombers were British-born added a frightening new dimension to the terrorist threat. The bombers were “one of us”— lads born and bred in Britain, who were part of the fabric of the society in which they lived, who, let us not forget, “even played cricket.” In one swoop, the face of terrorism changed. Whereas before the London bombings, the face of terrorism came from a cave in Afghanistan, a face with the traits of Osama Bin Laden or Ayman Al-Zawahiri, men wearing robes from another time, men who look positively alien to Western eyes, now the terrorists had a familiar face, the kind that we come across every day in the streets of London, Amsterdam or Paris.
One consequence of this has been to bring what was the unacceptable face of the immigration debate into the mainstream. In effect it lifted the veil on the myth of integration. It made it politically acceptable to speak of Muslim culture as being incompatible with the European way of life. The idea of unbridgeable cultural difference was then compounded by the controversy over the Danish cartoons.
The majority of Europeans found the violence of the Muslim reaction to the Danish cartoons incomprehensible. Many also found it hard to understand why Muslims took offense at something satirical in nature. On the Muslim side the pervasive incomprehension of their point of view reinforced both the notion of difference and the belief that Muslims are discriminated against.
It’s hardly surprising then that a year on from the French and Dutch “No” votes, the EU effectively finds itself stuck between a rock and a hard place, particularly as the most critical issue its future concerns enlargement and its most controversial candidate member is Turkey.
Turkey formally started negotiations to join the EU last October. It would be wrong to say that their application to join the EU has been met wholeheartedly. The EU is pulled in two directions.
While there is a strong political and economic case to be made for Turkey’s eventual membership, socially the issue of cultural difference stands in the way. As Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, put it on Friday, it will “be very demanding for them but also demanding for us here to be ready to accommodate such an important big country that is seen by so many of us as culturally different from, let’s say, mainstream Europe”.
Within the EU, the camp is split between what is often referred to as “Old Europe” and presumably what is new or modern Europe. The difference between the two groups is both ideological and practical. The old bloc is led by France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Austria. In ideological terms, these are the countries that signed on to the dream of the European project, one that would see increasing political union among a group of equals, whereas the “New” Europeans see the EU in terms of a strategic trading bloc.
In practical terms, the countries that form the “old” Europe are countries where the EU’s galloping pace of enlargement over the last decade has raised serious issues about immigration and unemployment. These are also countries where public opinion is against Turkish membership with the consequence that their governments are desperate to set limits on the EU’s capacity for enlargement.
First, there was the idea of defining the EU’s physical boundaries. This idea was subsequently replaced by that of absorption capacity. Austria tabled a motion at Friday’s summit that membership of the EU should only be open to countries that meet a strict criterion of being within the EU’s absorption capacity. However, the “new” camp won the day at the summit, absorption capacity was not added as a criterion for membership; instead the European Commission has been asked to draw up a report on the subject of absorption capacity to be presented by the end of the year. Meanwhile the Turks are understandably irritated and increasingly playing hardball. The question is no longer whether Turkey should join the EU but whether Turkey is willing to pay the price for joining the EU and the message from Ankara is beginning to veer toward the negative. Cyprus then, may well end up being the scapegoat, a convenient issue for both the EU and Turkey to hide behind. The current crisis revolves around opening up Turkish ports to Cypriot-registered vessels. The EU wants Turkey to open all it ports and airports to all EU states, including Greek Cyprus.
The Turks will only do so if the “Republic of Northern Cyprus” is recognized. And here we find ourselves at yet another impasse. As Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg put it: “If Turkey were not to implement this condition this year, my view is that the negotiations will have to be postponed”.
Delay and postponement seem to be the cure-all when it comes to the European Union. Friday’s summit predictably failed to find a replacement for the EU’s moribund constitution. Instead the decision was taken to — you guessed it — postpone for another two years.
A new rulebook is to be devised, one that is unlikely to be called a constitution and one that can be implemented without recourse to the vagaries of referenda but by the much more predictable process of parliamentary ratification. France — who will take over the presidency of the EU in the second half of 2008 — will then have the honor of finding a solution to the problem it created, as Jose Manuel Barroso so fittingly put it.=
