The EU at 50: Once-glorious family fraying at the seams

It is aware of need to change but is too obsessed with own internal divisions


LONDON - FIFTY years ago, on a rainy, drab afternoon, the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg signed a treaty which promised to create a free trade zone.

There was hardly any public discussion about their project. And, with the usual European mixture of grand vision and inefficiency, the treaty was not printed on time, so the leaders actually signed a blank document.

The British just laughed it off. Then-prime minister Harold Macmillan famously said he did not want to join a club of 'six nations, four of whom we had to rescue from the other two' in World War II.

How wrong he was.

For yesterday, the leaders of no fewer than 27 nations (including a humbled Britain) gathered in the German capital to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the European Union, the biggest multinational trading and political bloc in the world.

The EU is the most astonishing success story in modern history. But, paradoxically, it is also a project whose future remains as controversial today as it was half a century ago.

The fathers of this EU shared a common dream: After two world wars which devastated their continent, they wanted to merge their nation states in order to remove future conflicts.

However, they also knew that their people, still sore and resentful of one another, were not prepared to consider such a union.

So, they settled instead for liberalising trade; if national borders could not be abolished immediately, they could at least be made irrelevant.

It was an attempt to rewrite history by bureaucratic steps.

And it worked, brilliantly. As people and goods moved freely, old animosities were forgotten. And, as one country helped the other, the sense of a new community was created.

Europe succeeded in burying its past, better than anyone else on the planet.

And yet, the original EU project had three fundamental flaws, all of which are now coming back to haunt it.

Britain had not been defeated, occupied or humiliated in World War II; it therefore never understood the new European idea.

While for the founding members of the EU, free trade was just a route to political union, for the British, free trade remains the key objective.

Furthermore, while for some countries the EU represented salvation, for the British, Europe signified a retreat from a bigger colonial past.

One of the first consequences of Britain's entry into the EU in 1973 was the final withdrawal of British troops from Singapore.

The EU was also built on the assumption that the continent's division - between a Soviet-occupied East and the independent West - would last forever.

When that division fell apart with the collapse of the Soviet empire, the East Europeans joined. And they transformed the EU altogether.

Having just regained its sovereignty, Eastern Europe has no intention of losing it again.

The East Europeans also see the United States - rather than Europe - as the guarantor of their security.

Britain's suspicions about the EU are now shared by half of the union.

But the biggest flaw was the belief that such a process of unification could be imposed from above, by politicians alone.

In fact, as regulations, decrees and laws from the EU came showering down on nations (the full body of EU law is now over 100,000 pages long), people started rebelling.

The attempt to engage Europe's nations came too late, and turned into a fiasco: None other than France and the Netherlands, two of the founding members, rejected the latest European Constitution proposal.

The bloc's leaders gathered in Berlin over the weekend to try to gloss over such difficulties.

But they know that their project is stuck.

And, meanwhile, the world has moved on.

When the EU was created, it accounted for 27 per cent of the world's gross domestic product.

Today, its share is 18 per cent and falling. Half a century ago, the four top EU nations controlled a fifth of the world's wealth; now, this figure is just 13 per cent, and it has already been overtaken by China.

The EU project started with hopes for economic growth; it has now been reduced to a defence against other global competitors, especially from Asian nations, which have been good at copying the European model, while ignoring most of its political baggage.

Despite its problems, the EU is here to stay.

But it will probably just bumble along, proud of its past, apprehensive about its future, aware that it needs to change in order to meet global competition, but too obsessed with its own internal divisions.

Mr Martin Wolf, a noted British commentator, brilliantly summed up the predicament in a recent newspaper article.

'Europe', he wrote, 'is doomed to relative decline. Let it decline magnificently'.

Many of the EU leaders gathered in Berlin for yesterday's birthday bash probably shared his sentiment.