The State of the Union: at Summit, a Europe Divided

PARIS — Somebody attending this week’s conclave of European leaders in Amsterdam might well have come away asking: Is “European union” on the way to becoming a contradiction in terms like “military intelligence” or “civil war”?

At their two-day European Union summit, the 15 member countries managed to agree sufficiently so that their trading bloc can proceed as scheduled with talks to admit new members, including some from Eastern Europe. But the conference often came close to being a fiasco.

Instead of the vigorous progress that some had hoped for toward a European political union with common defense, foreign and law enforcement policies, old national rivalries surfaced. One of the toughest questions, on power-sharing, was simply pushed into the future.

“There were too many conflicting interests,” German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the dean of Western Europe’s leaders, said after flying home to Bonn.

French President Jacques Chirac admitted feeling frustrated but said the accords reached in the Dutch capital were “a reasonable step.”

Still, they were a far cry from the document originally submitted to the leaders, which was the fruit of 15 months of intense negotiations and was supposed to lay the groundwork for the next leap toward European integration.

“The heads of government go into a room, take a treaty we’ve worked on for more than a year and tear it to bits,” protested Noel Dunn, an Irish official who was his country’s chief negotiator in the writing of the Amsterdam Treaty.

Some countries, Britain foremost among them, said the summit’s meager results show that Europe must drastically alter its focus to win back the support of people worried about such day-to-day problems as unemployment instead of engaging in arcane talk about such issues as institutional reform, the voting majorities needed for a decision at EU headquarters in Brussels and the fiscal strictures imposed for the use of a common currency.

“We have to show real and tangible benefits to the people of Europe,” said an official traveling with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was attending his first full-dress European summit. “There are oodles of paper that have been flying around for years, but it doesn’t mean the lives of the people of Europe are better.”

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On the plus side, the leaders committed themselves to creating a “common space of liberty, security and justice” for their citizens, expanding the so-called Schengen Agreement that since 1995 has allowed people to circulate freely between seven European nations without visas or border checks. The 15 countries also agreed in principle to gradually give the European Union more responsibility for policing and justice.

Most problematic in the long run may be a rift only temporarily bridged between France and Germany, which have been the backbone of European integration since the process began more than 50 years ago with the pooling of the former enemies’ steel and coal resources after World War II.

Both countries are facing high unemployment and fiscal problems as they struggle to meet the spending and inflation targets laid down for the single currency, called the euro. A compromise of sorts was reached in Amsterdam, with France obtaining a declaration about the need for Europe-wide policies to promote jobs and growth. In exchange, a German-backed “stability pact” that forces euro users to hew to strict fiscal polices remained intact.

But the differences in the French and German approaches were so great that they seem certain to return.

French Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, making his first speech to Parliament on Thursday, said he will do his part to help create a monetary and economic union and its single currency by the scheduled date of Jan. 1, 1999. But he added: “You don’t share a currency without creating economic solidarity.”

Jospin’s remarks indicated that the French will keep pressing for a “political” counterweight to the new European Central Bank that is supposed to administer the euro. This would set France again on a collision course with Germany, which wants the Frankfurt-based bank to be independent so the new currency is not subject to the political caprices of individual EU countries.

The Amsterdam summit closed not only with a whimper, but also with a bang showing some Europeans’ misgivings about the plans being made in their name.

Near the end of the conference, the weary host, Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok, and European Commission President Jacques Santer took seats on a theater stage to brief reporters. A dozen young protesters rose in the audience.

As Kok began speaking, they unfurled banners and tossed handbills denouncing the “Corporate Union of Europe” and shouted, “We want a different Europe!”