Please note that this is BBC copyright and may not be reproduced or copied for any other purpose. RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS THE EUROPEAN JUGGERNAUT TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Bruce Clark Producer: Ingrid Hassler Editor: Nicola Meyrick BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 7279 Broadcast Date: 05.12.02 Repeat Date: 08.12.02 Tape Number: TLN248/02VT1049 Duration: 27.37 Taking part in order of appearance: Gisela Stuart, Labour MP for Birmingham Edgbaston, Presidium member and Parliamentary Representative, The Convention on the Future of Europe George Papandreou, Foreign Minister of Greece The Rt Hon. David Heathcoat- Amory, Conservative MP for Wells, and full member of the Convention on the Future of Europe Dr Francois Heisbourg Director of the Foundation for Strategic Research , Paris Dr Christopher Coker Reader in International Relations at the London School of Economics Dr Josef Janning, Deputy Director of the Centre for Applied Policy Research, Munich , adviser to the German government and the European Commission Dr Heather Grabbe Research Director, Centre for European Reform , London Bartholomew I, Patriarch of Constantinople, Istanbul CLARK In a few days’ time, the leaders of the European Union will be inviting 10 more members to join the club. Soon the Union will stretch from Galway to the Black Sea, and comprise nearly 500 million people. For some people, the enlargement of the European Union is the fulfillment of a deeply- held personal dream. Like Gisela Stuart, Labour MP for Edgbaston. STUART My mother comes from Eastern Europe, I spent the first 20 years of my life in Germany. I’m now a British MP - I have Neville Chamberlain’s old constituency. I would be deeply offended if anybody would even dream to suggest that I’m not a good European. CLARK The emotional stakes are also quite high for some politicians in Greece, which as the next holder of the Union’s revolving presidency, will soon be staging a spectacular show under the Acropolis to mark the enlargement treaty. George Papandreou, the Greek foreign minister, spent his youth fighting to establish democracy in the land of its birth - and he too has family roots in the ex-communist bloc. PAPANDREOU Truly, when I did travel to Poland and Lithuania where my great - grandfather was born, it was quite a revelation and also an important moment, I think, for those who hosted me having a feeling that we have so much in common. Having travelled quite a bit and lived through some very difficult moments, for example, the dictatorship in Greece and, therefore, being exiled and knowing what that means. So, enlargement and travelling around these countries has been at times emotional in seeing how countries and people who have had similar experiences such as exile and, or seen friends of theirs or family in jail because of their political views, how this now has changed. STUART To me it is almost a question of setting right a historic wrong. They have been excluded from their rightful place in Europe for 50 years. I find it deeply depressing when I go to some of these countries and meet a generation of 40, 50, 60 year olds and I think you have been sold down the river for a whole generation by communism. So, there’s a real emotional link that they have a right to be returned to their place within Europe. CLARK Gisela Stuart. So at long last, the wounds of the cold war are being healed. But some people remain unmoved by what they see as touchy-feely arguments - British conservatives, for example. David Heathcoat- Amory, MP is a colleague and sparring partner of Gisela Stuart’s on the Convention on the Future of Europe. HEATHCOAT- AMORY I’m very worried about enlargement - I think it’s one of those unexamined good ideas that people are afraid to oppose but haven’t really thought through the consequences of and I think that if we think the European Union is undemocratic at the minute it’s going to get much worse when we try and absorb a lot of other countries with different cultures for which our judicial and legal systems are quite unprepared, it’s going to be extremely expensive. CLARK Expensive indeed. How will the European club’s 15 well-dressed members cope with 10 rather bedraggled newcomers, whose combined economic output is less than that of the Netherlands? And those cultural problems look likely to deepen, with three more countries - including Turkey - officially accepted as candidates. The real question is whether the European Union can survive the strains of an open-ended enlargement process. It’s an important question - but one that’s surprisingly little discussed by the peoples of Europe. Dr Francois Heisbourg is director of the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris. HEISBOURG There’s been comparatively little public debate. There are high levels of skepticism vis a vis enlargement in French opinion polls, and enlargement in political discourse has been treated in a largely defensive way that is with pro-enlargement politicians speaking about the measures that they’re taking in order to avoid the negative effects of enlargement rather than putting forward the arguments in favour of enlargement, the positive aspect s of enlargement. CLARK If the French are indifferent, people in Britain appear to be largely ignorant. A recent poll here found that three-quarters of people could not name a single one of the 10 countries which are next in line to join the Union. The right answers are: Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, the three Baltic states, Cyprus and Malta. In western Europe as a whole, pollsters find that attitudes to enlargement demonstrate at best a grudging acceptance. None of this has prevented Europe’s political elites from ploughing on. Dr Christopher Coker, Reader in International Relations at the London School of Economics, thinks they are doing it for the wrong reasons. COKER Well, they’re pressing ahead furiously because I think they’re trying to evade confronting reality. That’s essentially what it comes down to. They don’t want a big debate about the consequences of enlargement because enlargement they see as a historical mandate that they have been forced to accept because the consequences would be too dire. But, on the other hand, they’re not really willing to revalue the vision of Monnet, Schumann and others back in the 1950s - in other words, history for the West has moved on as well as history in the East and this is not something that many of today’s politicians can really accept with equanimity. CLARK Whatever motives may be lurking in their subconscious minds, Europe’s masters are so busy with enlargement that Guenter Verheugen, the EU Commissioner in charge of it couldn’t find time to appear on this programme. But has this feverish activity been triggered by some higher moral purpose, or are there some rather more pragmatic factors at work? For Germany, the answer seems to be yes. Dr Josef Janning of the Centre for Applied Policy Research in Munich is an adviser to the German government as well as to the European Commission. JANNING German companies and German financial institutions are by far the leading investors in most of these countries. Germany is the biggest market for East Central European products and German companies are most visible there and if you travel throughout East Central Europe, you can hear many voices in the streets - people saying, haven’t the Germans bought enough, isn’t the German influence already too strong? So, in order to control for those sentiments critical of Germany because of Germany’s past or outright anti-German sentiments, we have no better framework than the European Union to explain also to our East Central European neighbours that this is not a form of neo- imperialism by the Germans but it’s rather part of daily reality of the European internal market and that everything is in order the way it is. CLARK If that’s Germany’s biggest motive for enlargement, it’s a cynical one, though it does have a ring of truth. Moreover, German voters have been promised that in this latest European project, they will not be the main pay-masters. They are fed up with bank-rolling French farmers, Irish motorways and Spanish fishing fleets. So if all goes to plan, the Germans will be more popular and they won’t have to pay for it. But what about the Greeks, at the opposite end of the chain? Having received billions of Euros in aid, what advantage can they see from letting in much needier countries? The Greek Foreign Minister, George Papandreou. PAPANDREOU Certainly enlargement will be very important for Greece. We have always suffered from the division of Europe. Therefore, enlargement is very much for us part of a wider peace project. Something which you may well understand is very important for south eastern Europe having been, having had gone through terrible crises in the last 10 years with ethnic conflict and this becomes a vision of cooperation and stability and peace. This will be a major theme in our presidency also. We should, with enlargement, we are creating a sustainable Europe, a sustainable freedom, if you like, which we cherish so much, our democratic values, our sense of protection and security - this is what we want to see. CLARK In fact, Greece’s neighbours Bulgaria and Romania have been told they won’t be joining before 2007, and the conflict-scarred states of the former Yugoslavia may have to hold on for a good bit longer. But the Greek argument about stabilising wild places also appeals to Gisela Stuart. STUART If we have instability and we see what’s happening, for example, in the Soviet Union, the breakdown of law and order, rise of corruption, illegal trade, it is actually in all our interests to create a European space of market economies through movement of labour. If central and eastern Europe falls apart then we will be damaged and we see it at the moment with the waves of immigration, the waves of asylum seekers. If you have those thousands of people there, how do you resolve that? Not by creating a fortress Europe which is prosperous inside , by creating the prosperity so they don’t feel the need to leave. No-one leaves their home country voluntarily. CLARK So both Gisela Stuart and George Papandreou, who speak so idealistically about Europe’s rendezvous with history, also have some rather hard-headed reasons for supporting the enlargement process. But they cut no ice with British Eurosceptics, who are deeply suspicious of the efforts of Euro- enthusiasts to draw up a constitution for an enlarged Union. The Tory MP David Heathcoat - Amory shuttles to Brussels on Eurostar once a week to try to restrain the zeal of the constitution-writers. HEATHCOAT- AMORY I think a constitution will actually be a big step further toward giving the European Union all the attributes of statehood because it is states that have constitutions and the European Union wants one and it will entrench a number of undesirable features. It will give the European Union, for the first time, a full single legal personality enabling it to operate on the world stage, to sign treaties, sue and be sued and so on. It won’t be a state in exactly the same way that a nation state is but it will have all the attributes. It’s already got an anthem, it’s got … getting an army, it’s got a flag, it’s got a legislature, it’s got a budget, it’s getting a foreign policy and defence policy. So, if you actually look at the draft constitution already produced it is a highly undesirable institution from a British point of view. Britain has done without a written constitution for its entire history. We’re now getting a written constitution through the European Union. So, for the first time ever, although we haven’t wanted it and we don’t want it and we see no need for it, Britain is going to have a written constitution. CLARK It’s this prospect of a constitution being foisted on Britain that has put the Conservatives off the idea of enlargement. Margaret Thatcher used to see enlargement as a crafty way of diluting the European soup. But that won’t work any more; for better or worse, the European treaties have become so complex that they amount to a sort of constitution anyway. Gisela Stuart believes a single document might help the citizens of an enlarged Union to untangle the web of treaties and see where we are. STUART To me the constitution is an object of definition. It defines what the Union is and what it wants to achieve and, therefore, I think people will have more of a sense of certainty about this because many people think so far it’s been like a Maoist continuous revolution. I’m quite clear in my mind that this is the most important thing I’ve ever been asked to do because we’re setting a framework for Europe, not just for the next few years but for decades to come. I mean, just look, this is how far Europe has come - the British House of Commons have sent a German to represent them at the Convention. CLARK To British ears, Gisela Stuart may sound like a raving Euro-phile. But she - like the British government - sees the written constitution as a way of saying “thus far and no further...” STUART This is neither a United States of Europe - this is not my aim and I’m absolutely clear about this, nor is it a Federal Republic as the German s would subscribe to where you make the member states nothing but a chamber of the regions - a glorified one. To me it’s quite clear a new form of institution which has elements which are inter- governmental, they remain with the nation state and defence to me is one of those which I think are and, in my view, will remain in the realm of the nation states - it will be, in my mind, always a hybrid. CLARK So is it British government policy to keep it that way? STUART So far the government’s still agreeing with me, I think. CLARK In that funny language known as Euro-speak, the word “inter-governmental” is supposed to reassure people. What it means is that in some areas of European policy, the Union’s member governments can freely choose to co-operate, or not to co-operate. And whatever the practical arguments in favour of pooling sovereignty, some sceptics see historical and cultural reasons why Europe’s prickly nations need to be themselves for a bit longer before merging with others. Christopher Coker of the LSE. COKER The best way of creating internationalism was through the nation state. We now realize that there is no concept of internationalism without going through the phase of the nation state - we move on from nationalism to something larger. The east European states, the majority of them, have only experienced the nation state very briefly in their history - not just in the last 12 years - but also briefly in the inter-war period and that was not a very happy experience. So, in terms of things such as democratic accountability, in terms of the relationship between a political class and its people, in terms of parliamentary sovereignty - all of these are new, relatively new, and yet there are likely to be bypassed or transcended by larger international or transnational structures which essentially what membership of the European Union means. And I think it’s asking a lot of any society including one that is not particularly developed culturally or politically to make that transition. It’s asking it a lot of the present west European members particularly countries such as Britain. It’s asking even more of the east European ones. CLARK How will the existing members, both individually and collectively, be affected by close embrace with countries of a hugely different political and legal culture and a hugely different attitude to defence? COKER I think that the central issue here is probably less to do with the mechanism of decision making which is, of course, the issue most discussed by politicians and academics than the attempt to create a European identity. The real failing of the European Union as it entered the 21st Century is that there is no European identity, there are no European parties represented in the European parliament, there’s not a single European newspaper, there is not a single European media service, it’s even doubtful whether there is something called European public opinion even though there are Euro-barometers that are supposed to measure it. If that is the failing, then to add a further tranch of Europeans who come from a geographically very different background, whose historical experiences have been different again, who may even draw different lessons from those experiences than the ones we did from 1945, that is asking a lot of any organisation and particularly one which is still as amorphous as the European Union. CLARK Christopher Coker is probably right to say that a sense of being European is developing very slowly. And won’t it be harder still in a Union stretching from Lisbon to Latvia? But whether we like it or not, the big, unwieldy vehicle known as enlargement is already on the road - and this will have consequences which will have to be managed somehow. Otherwise we’re running the risk of losing all control. Dr Heather Grabbe is research director at the Centre for European Reform in London, a Europhile think-tank. She thinks we’ve underestimated the implications of enlargement for the European Union. GRABBE After enlargement it will become qualitatively different because with 25 members and growing - perhaps going up to 30 members over time - inevitably it can’t be just a few people around a table deciding things on behalf of the rest of Europe. That will make the politics much more complicated. It will be harder to get deals. On the other hand though, the EU will become more ambitious because the demand will be there for it to act more in foreign policy because its borders will touch countries like Ukraine, like Belarus also, of course, North Africa, it will have to deal with problems on its doorstep and it will have to have a serious neighbourhood policy for , what you might call, its near abroad. It will also become a much weightier player in terms of international politics. Once you’ve got nearly half a billion people represented in the European Union that’s a significant voice in the world - in world trade negotiations, in discussing things with Washington, in dealing with problems like Iraq and Middle East policy, the European Union will have to become a bigger foreign policy player. It will also have to deal with more problems - things that it’s tried to ignore in the past like policy on minorities - the EU doesn’t really have a democracy agenda. There aren’t clearly stated what these European values really are - I think we’ll have to develop those. So, there will be more activity, more policies. The question is whether it will be a more cohesive unit. That, I think, is still very much a question to be answered. CLARK Developing European values? For Christopher Coker, that’s a very tall order for a Union that’s steadily moving eastwards. COKER One of the examples I found in my own travels across the Balkans, in particular, was the extraordinary distance both psychologically and emotionally from the war in Kosovo. Now, Kosovo was, if nothing, a European war, prosecuted by the European Union on behalf of something called a European Civil Society for which the European Union now claims to speak. What one found in Eastern Europe was an immense distance between politicians who were prepared particularly in government to go along with the Kosovo war because they knew that would be expected of them and public opinion that was mostly totally opposed to the Kosovo war by as much as 80% in a country such as Romania. I’m not sure that East Europeans expect to be involved in war as the next part of the European project nor do I think, given their historical experiences of the military which has been a highly negative one, will they consider that this is a legitimate aspiration for the European Union to pursue in the future. CLARK That doesn’t augur well for Europe’s hopes of a common foreign and defence policy. And if Christopher Coker’s right it’s hard to see how one would begin to define the values that would underpin such a policy. As the European Union becomes more diverse that dilemma is likely to become more difficult to solve. Most of the 10 incoming members, like most of the existing ones, have a western Christian heritage, either Protestant or Roman Catholic. But with the advent of Cyprus in this wave, and then Romania and Bulgaria in the next, the number of Union members with an Orthodox Christian majority will rise from one to four. And just behind those countries in the queue there is Turkey, which is overwhelmingly Muslim and where a party with Islamist roots has just won power. Bartholomew I, the Patriarch of Constantinople, is the senior bishop of the Orthodox Church, and he also speaks for the Christian minority in Turkey. Does he believe Islamic nations can become good Europeans? PATRIARCH This Christian past of Europe must not exclude people belonging to other faiths and other cultures. I see the entrance of these non-Christian people into the European Union such as the Turkish nation which is in the greatest majority Muslim, is only an enrichment. CLARK So can we say without hesitation that there is a place in the European Union for Muslim societies like Turkey or possibly Albania, Bosnia - can we say without hesitation that a Muslim country can fully participate in the European Union? PATRIARCH Yes it can fully participate. I hope that Turkey will be the first non-Christian country to be received into the European family. The minorities who are all of them in favour of such membership of Turkey into the EU will be able to improve their own position because they will enjoy more freedom, more respect of their minority rights, more religious freedom, everything will be ameliorated, will become better. CLARK The Patriarch’s support for Turkish membership isn’t all that surprising. A European Turkey would have to accept religious diversity - and in other ways, respect the European notion of human rights. To impress the Union, it has already abolished the death penalty. But nothing Turkey does is likely to assuage Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the former French president who’s overseeing the project to write a European constitution. He recently said Turkey was not a European nation and could never join the Union. He was saying, in effect, that the EU’s leaders should withdraw the promise of membership which they gave Turkey in Helsinki three years ago. In Paris Francois Heisbourg views the Giscard bombshell with unexpected equanimity. HEISBOURG He was wrong in terms of his recommendations which was to, which were not to let in Turkey. That being said, it is refreshing to have a senior European politician actually opening the debate publicly on the entry of Turkey. The Turkish issue has been dealt with by stealth, heads of state and government have been taking positions on the entry of Turkey without necessarily meaning what they were saying. I mean, I certainly had the - not entirely unexpected but still rather unpleasant experience of meeting one of the participants in the European Council in Helsinki a few days afterwards and who, you know, told me as he told a number of other people quite blithely, ‘oh yes, that’s what we said but, you know, Turkey will never be part of the European Union, n’est pas?’ CLARK However shameful the Union’s hypocrisy may be, it’s certainly true that an entirely new strategic challenge will face the EU if it expands as far east as Turkey. HEISBOURG In that case we will have a security border with Syria, with Iraq, with Iran, with Azerbeijan, with Armenia and with Georgia. That, I think, will lead the European Union to a much higher degree of obligation in terms of having a collective defence capability above and beyond the current plans within the European security and defense policy. CLARK It’s rather terrifying, isn’t it? And as the full consequences of enlargement become clear, in all their mind-boggling complexity, won’t we see some political ferment in the heart of Europe? Josef Janning in Germany. JANNING It is to be expected that Euro- sceptic politicians will have a greater acceptance in the population in the time to come - that’s one of the risks the process faces. For many people in the street, enlargement bears the risk of losing one’s job. People, especially here in Germany, see every day from, at their own work place or they hear it from neighbours where even smaller companies have moved production to Hungary or to Poland or the Czech Republic. So, people find it somewhat difficult to understand that making use inside this internal market of the factor costs of production in the East of cheap labour, of cheap land, of lower construction costs or lower energy costs is, in the longer term, adding to the prosperity of the European Union. CLARK Could one reason for the scepticism in Germany be the following: people think it was expensive and burdensome enough to unite Germany, how much more expensive will it be to unite Europe? JANNING That is a point very well taken. Yeah, that’s what they think. Indeed in many debates you hear this comparison being made. For German policy makers it is not very easy to tell them that this is entirely wrong. Extending solidarity is always a risky thing so you want to think twice about that. But they are in this process now and they are realising that it’s so far on the way that they cannot stop it. CLARK So it’s academic to discuss whether the enlargement project is good or bad; it has developed a momentum of its own. All the same, mightn’t it be a good idea to slow it down? Heather Grabbe of the Centre for European Reform. GRABBE If there’s a long delay, the costs could be huge, however. There’s an awful lot invested in this whole process, both politically and economically. For Central and Eastern Europe, there would probably be a drop off in foreign direct investment just when they really need that investment to upgrade their economies and to encourage growth. They would also see a lot of disillusionment among the public - that the EU hadn’t lived up to its promises - they’d made all of these painful reforms for nothing. So, we could see quite a lot of political backlash. For the EU, the real issue is credibility. The EU’s own credibility would be shot to pieces if it couldn’t live up to its promises to let in countries which are as well prepared as Hungary and Estonia then what hope is there for Croatia, for Ukraine, for Turkey, for countries which aspire, at least, to have a closer relationship with the European Union and for the candidates to come in at some later date. The EU will not be a credible actor on the world stage in terms of its external policy if it can’t actually make enlargement happen after 15 years of preparation and a huge amount of work on the applicants’ side. CLARK Heather Grabbe is right to say that well-prepared countries should get their just deserts. What’s more, the danger she cites - of deep disappointment in eastern Europe if the West fails to share its prosperity - is a very real one. But fear and confusion about where the European Union is going already abound among its current members. And Christopher Coker believes the Union will come to resemble a Theatre of the Absurd. COKER I suspect it will look very much like Pirandello’s play ‘ Six Characters in Search of an Author’. Where they’re all part of the script but they have different lines, different dreams and their own particular subtexts. We will all be dreaming of different visions of the European Union and that will make it very difficult for the European Union to press ahead as one into the 21st Century. We’re sleeping in the same bed but we’re definitely dreaming different dreams and some of us are going to wake up with nightmares. CLARK But the future doesn’t have to be so apocalyptic. Some of the absurdities of the Union in its current form will have to be swept away. But even if the EU didn’t exist, Europe would need some system for managing our differences and coping with common challenges that transcend frontiers, from pollution to money-laundering. An enlarged and reformed Union may yet provide that system - but we won’t get there through conspiracies of silence, or by utopian rhetoric. We must find the courage to construct an expanded Union in which many languages and beliefs, but common standards of legal certainty and mutual respect, can co-exist. Be it ever so large, Europe is too small a place for each of us to sleep in a separate bed.