W. Europe to Set Out on Path to Unity

Western Europe’s political leaders will meet today and Tuesday to try to forge their diverse nations into a unified Continent that could ultimately rival the United States in diplomatic as well as economic might.

A “United States of Europe,” if one is to develop at all, remains years or probably decades away. The immediate goals are more modest: to cement Western Europe’s economic union, which began in earnest in the mid-1980s, and to support it with “political union”--a mechanism for developing common policies in such areas as foreign relations and even defense.

“In unity there is strength”--that old American motto is guiding those who would be the founding fathers of tomorrow’s Europe. “European countries feel they cannot make it economically or politically on their own,” says Dominique Moisi, associate director of the French Institute of International Affairs.

To the Continent’s chagrin, Europe contributed little to resolving the Persian Gulf crisis of late 1990 and early this year, and its effort to halt Yugoslavia’s civil war has fallen conspicuously on its face.

“It’s time we played a diplomatic role commensurate with our economic power,” says Stanley Crossick, chairman of the Belmont European Policy Center, a Brussels think tank.

When the heads of the 12 European Community nations gather in the Dutch town of Maastricht, they will consider proposals to form a union that would arguably be more intimate than any ever before forged voluntarily by sovereign nations.

On the economic side, the leaders may set the terms for replacing the British pound, the German mark, the French franc and nine other national monies with a common “European currency unit” by the end of the decade.

That will be the easy part. More contentious yet is the drive to subordinate national policies in a host of other areas--from foreign policy to workplace rules--to a common EC authority.

Breathtaking in scope, the European agenda has serious implications for the United States. A unified Western Europe, with a population bigger than America’s and an economy almost as big, looms not only as an economic rival but also as an equal player on the world diplomatic stage.

“Americans are going to have to realize that they’re going to have to deal with a major, mature partner,” says Crossick, a British lawyer.

The Bush Administration says it is ready.

“We welcome the emergence of the new Europe. . . ,” President Bush said in the Netherlands last month. “America recognizes the accelerating unity of Europe as a natural evolution toward our common aim: a commonwealth of free nations working in concert.”

But to Zbigniew Brzezinski, former President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, the Administration’s policies do not match its rhetoric.

“We want European unity but feel uneasy about the European Community’s growing economic power,” Brzezinski wrote last month. “We want Europe to stand on its feet politically and militarily, but we object to efforts to create a European defense structure.”

Many Europeans wonder if the United States will play ball if a united Europe begins to threaten its post-Cold War status as the world’s only military and economic superpower. In his speeches, Jacques Delors, who as president of the EC Commission is the EC’s top bureaucrat, gently urges that “the across-the-Atlantic partner does not dip its nose too deep into European affairs.”

Propelling Europe’s march toward unity, beyond a conviction that a unified Europe would be stronger than the sum of its parts, is the fear of a reunified Germany as an economic and, potentially, a military colossus.

Nowhere is that fear greater than in Germany itself. Germans are asking the rest of Europe to save them from themselves--to anchor them so firmly in the Continent that they cannot, as in 1914 and 1939, again spin out of control.

“If Western Europe turns its back on Germany,” says Hermann Bunz, who heads the Brussels office of the German Social Democratic Party’s foundation, “Germany will be tempted to turn instead to the East.”

It was because West Germany was tied so securely to Europe that Europe so easily tolerated its reunification with East Germany last year. Andre Szasz, deputy president of the Dutch Central Bank, says Europe must continue to draw Germany in or else “the Western European country we are so familiar with will be replaced by a central European power, with interests of its own which may differ significantly from ours.”

With the sudden demise of communism, Western Europe’s leaders also see a unique opportunity to spread their economic and political gospel throughout the Continent.

“We cannot afford to lose the momentum created by German unification and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe,” says Michael Sturmer, director of Germany’s Ebenhausen Institute for Economics and Politics.

Europe’s most tireless unifiers, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and French President Francois Mitterrand, predict darkly that an inability to make progress at Maastricht would send Europe hurtling back into the abyss of national rivalries that bred two world wars this century.

Kohl warned last month that failure would set back European integration “for more than a generation” and constitute nothing less than a “catastrophe for European development.”

Such dire prophecies are probably designed mostly to whip the more reluctant Europeans into line. Before the European leaders can map out the road to unity, they will have to convince one of their major partners that the goal is worth reaching.

That partner is Britain, separated from the rest of Europe not only by the English Channel but also by a deep suspicion of the Continental way of doing things.

“What we are talking about is the rights of the British people to govern themselves under their own laws made by their own Parliament,” former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher told her Parliament last month.

Thatcher, whose anti-Europeanism was too strident even for much of the British public, lost her job last year to the more moderate John Major. But British officials still cringe every time the bureaucrats in Brussels, the EC headquarters, meddle in what they regard as Britain’s business.

Even the British, however, seem generally to favor the drive toward unity. A recent EC poll found that 68% of the British public declared themselves to be basically in favor of efforts to unify Western Europe, not much below the 79% approval rating given by the 12 EC countries together.

The EC is already well into its drive to create a single economic market by the end of 1992, with free movement of goods, services, money and people across borders.

The chief economic issue on the table in Maastricht will be the next step toward economic union--a common currency for the 12 EC nations.

Under a formula approved by the EC finance ministers last week, a single currency would replace national currencies in 1997 by a unanimous vote of the EC countries and in 1999 by a majority vote. Britain, unwilling to commit to abandoning the pound, is demanding the right to stay out of the currency union.

In isolation, the single currency would probably sail through the Maastricht summit. But German Chancellor Kohl, fearful of higher inflation if Germany’s monetary policy were linked with that of such nations as Italy and Greece, says he will not sign the death warrant for the German mark unless he wins strong commitments to “political union.”

That stirs a hornet’s nest of sensitive issues--nine, by Delors’ count--that could sting the Maastricht summit.

Foremost is a proposal to set an EC-wide foreign policy by majority vote of the 12 member nations (with votes weighted according to population). Britain, reluctant to allow itself to be outvoted, insists on maintaining a veto.

Delors responds that unanimity is unwieldy and unworkable, as demonstrated by Europe’s indecisiveness in the Persian Gulf and Yugoslav crises. Managing the EC’s external economic relations by way of the EC but effectively leaving foreign policy to the member states, he says, would breed “organized schizophrenia.”

Just as sensitive is the issue of moving toward a common defense and security policy. Britain complains of anything that smacks of undercutting U.S.-dominated NATO; the French and Germans have proposed expanding an existing Franco-German brigade into a 50,000-member joint army corps that would be the nucleus of a future European army.

At a less lofty level, Britain and its EC partners may also bump heads over workers’ rights. The leaders in Maastricht will consider proposals, widely supported on the Continent, to limit the work week to 48 hours, mandate at least one full day off a week (“in principle,” Sunday) and require management to consult workers about such issues as plant closures and layoffs.

“Clearly we are against this proposal, chiefly because working time has never been legislated in Great Britain,” says a British diplomat in Brussels. “It’s always been a subject of collective bargaining.”

Britain is not the only guest that could spoil the Maastricht party. The poor cousins of the EC--Spain, Portugal, Greece and Ireland--are insisting on a greater flow of resources from the rich EC members to them.

Also up for grabs is the power of the European Parliament, which now has little. Germany believes that EC decision-making procedures must become more democratic as the EC acquires more responsibility, and to Germany, that means giving more authority to the elected representatives in the Parliament.

Here again the British are skeptical. So is Delors himself, who says the national model of executive, legislative and judicial branches may not translate to the supranational level of the EC.

With such a vast agenda, the leaders at Maastricht seem sure to engage in a lot of horse-trading. They have left open the possibility of meeting again shortly before Christmas if necessary.

Nearly everyone expects some kinds of agreement to emerge. Nobody is predicting exactly what.

“What is at stake,” says Moisi, “is what Europe will be like not tomorrow but the day after tomorrow--the possibility of moving toward an integrated Europe.”

Where EC Countries Stand

Here is where the 12 European Community nations now stand on several key issues concerning the unification of Europe:

Favors Majority EC Has Say Defense Pledges by Federal Sets Foreign on Social by NATO Rich to COUNTRY System Policy Affairs or EC? Help Poor BELGIUM yes yes yes EC no BRITAIN no no no NATO no DENMARK yes no yes NATO no FRANCE yes yes yes EC no GERMANY yes yes yes both no GREECE yes yes yes EC yes IRELAND yes no maybe neutral yes ITALY yes yes yes NATO no LUXEM. yes yes yes EC no NETH. yes yes yes NATO no PORTUGAL yes no yes NATO yes SPAIN yes yes yes EC yes