On 1 January 1999, more than 30,000 people joined a street party in front of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt to celebrate the launch of the Euro and the first economic union in Europe since the Roman Empire. A band struck up a stirring tune to mark the historic day. Curiously, it was not Beethoven's 'EU Anthem' but Land Of Hope And Glory. (The Guardian, 2 January 1999.)

Now June 2005, Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac met a few weeks ago, and the conversations were, in diplomatic terms, frank. Not surprising given the fact that not only German, Dutch and Belgian’s, but today also more than one million French, citizens are living abroad. The countries where Frenchmen have moved to in hordes (US, UK, Switzerland, Asia...) are indicative of what they are looking for. The new entrepreneurs are moving to the Anglo-Saxon world, to be able to create. The old entrepreneurs, who have been successful, are moving to Switzerland, to avoid the punitive French tax rates.

Young French (and all over Europe) entrepreneurs and those with ambition will increasingly vote with their feet. Young creative types are moving to places where there is more opportunity. Many others are going to Eastern Europe, where taxes and constricting rules are fewer and opportunities are greater.

Gerhard Schroeder in Germany has essentially thrown in the towel on trying to get reform through his own party. What meager reforms he has gotten has been with opposition support. The German economy is on the verge of recession (with 10% unemployment) and his own supporters are upset with him because he urges reform which means his base will have to cover their share of the cost. But his version is reform-lite.

He has called for elections this fall, essentially asking his own party to give him a vote of no confidence. The polls suggest it is quite possible that the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) could win an outright majority. They would have three years to put reforms in place and hopefully see them make a difference in the economy. The CDU would move Germany to a more free market model.

In the beginning, this would almost surely mean higher unemployment. But it might also force the European Central Bank to actually cut interest rates. Germany is the true linchpin of the European Union.

But just like we have done with other continents and countries, to understand Europe today, one has to understand its past.

 

A Short True History of Europe

After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, forty years before Columbus' discoveries, a succession of metropolitan leaders brought the European centre of gravity from Amalfi to Venice, then Genoa and the Iberian cities. Ottoman occupation would create a secluded East, while the West was taking off. The Spanish reconquista pushed Arabs to Africa and tore `Europe' from the Mediterranean however. The discovery of the `New World,' economic dynamism north of the Mediterranean, the reconquista in the West, and Ottoman occupation of the Levant shifted the core of Europe from Italian cities to Iberian and Northern ports and raised an imaginary about `superior' cultures.

Perhaps the essentialisation of Europe was never more conspicuous than in the period of colonialism. In the sixteenth century, during the age of exploration, expansion, and Protestant Reformation, `Europe' was redefined in a context of eurocentric power relations and unequal geopolitics and was mapped as the centre of the world in colonial domination. It was even personified as Queen Europe reigning over the `New World' in a posture of superiority. In the 1572 Atlas of A. Ortelius in Antwerp, Europe was represented as a queen with the rest of the continents at its feet. This eurocentric representation was combined with the clash between Christendom on the one hand and Islam, as well as pagan cultures, on the other, along with their myths and legends. Europe was a land of Christian faith, but also of colonial superiority and arrogance. Its southern boundary was defined against Islam, even if this meant geographical distortions, such as the one in the Iberian peninsula until 1492, when the Moors were finally defeated. In the sixteenth century, Europe excluded Egypt, the whole of Mediterranean Africa and the Middle East, basically on the divide of a Christian versus an Arab world.

Sixteenth-century maps of Christendom drew a border with the South of the Mediterranean, but were also ambiguous on the eastern side of Europe. The exclusion of Slavs, despite their Christian persuasion, first on cultural and later on economic grounds, rendered Europe's eastern boundary rather fuzzy. At the turn of the seventeenth century, some strongly argued to exclude Russia from the European order, on grounds of inferiority. Russians reciprocated by distancing themselves from Europe, which they considered as "a speech act; it is talked and written into existence. This meant the rupture of geographical continuity, especially after Turkish conquests and extensive reborderings creating basic problems in defining Europe for quite a long period.

The Enlightenment next offered a new perception of `Europe' as a system of sovereign states rather than a community of believers. In place of a semi-goddess or a queen, we now find Europe as a secularized region where technological development unfolded, capitalism was rising, and imperialism remained powerful. Its epicentre shifted further to the northwest and away from the Levant, and Mediterranean cities were surpassed by Northern ports, which now became dynamic metropolitan leaders. Bruges, Antwerp, Amsterdam, then London, and finally the towns of the industrial revolution. The Mediterranean fell from core to peripheral status in the global economy and the Euro-Mediterranean imaginary was dropped from mappings. The sea which used to bridge civilization, became a border. The core of Europe was consolidated toward the one we know today and new spatialities evolved with the emergence of nation-states. Historiography considers the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 as the beginning of this process. It established the principle of sovereignty for each prince's territory and gradually nation-states rose and became the regions bounded by hard borderlines.

Fractured from within, with rivalries and wars, Europe emerged in the mid- I940s with hopes for peace, reconciliation, and unification. A new narrative has been under construction since the first postwar years, with the basic drive of discursively transforming the `dark continent' into a unified Europe. The emergent narrative has been contested by multiple voices since Churchill and Schuman and has involved several different spatialities since the European Coal and Steel Community as we have seen in part 1 otf this tree part article, united the West versus its eastern `others' during the cold war. Ambiguities of the past, especially the ones concerning the fragmentation of the Mediterranean and the boundaries of Europe on the East, have followed us into the mid-twentieth century, when De Gaulle referred to a Europe "from the Atlantic to the Urals," hinting at the partition of Russia into two parts. Another ambiguity was expressed by Churchill in Zurich on 19 September 1946, in his proposal for a United States of Europe -without the UK.

The hardest boundary that Europe has ever known was the `Iron Curtain,' which was also named by Churchill. `Iron' sends us to a notion of impenetrable enclosure and a checkpoint of extreme restriction of movement in the heart of Europe. The visibility of the cold war has dominated the landscapes of many regions and cities, especially Berlin, with its wall built in August 1961 as a material symbol of the Iron Curtain. Similarly, a fence split Gorizia/Nova Gorica (a single town in Italy/Slovenia) and several barbed wire borders encircled `free Europe.' However, boundaries remained undefined and in fact confusing in cases such as Prague, which despite its location to the northwest of Vienna was considered as a city of the `east' .Eastern Europe, especially the Balkans and the USSR, were the Second' World and became the other' for the `First World' of Western Europe and the United States.

For many centuries, the River Don was the boundary between European and Asian sections of Russia. This was rejected in the eighteenth century and the Ural Mountains came to mark the eastern frontier of Europe with the erection of boundary posts, where prisoners to Siberia used to pause. In European discurse, all this was the East, a notion ambivalent cognitive geography of Europe. It has been crystallized especially since 1992, when the Maastricht Treaty was signed after the end of the cold war. The narrative includes anniversaries, days of celebration of Europe, and landmarks in its development (e.g., 9 May 1950), as well as `heroes' and visionaries of European integration, such as Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, giving their names to metro stations, streets, and University Chairs in Brussels, Paris, London, Florence, and throughout Europe.

By implicitly equating "Europe" with the European Union after successive territorial formalizations, the new narrative influences the construction of new spatialities in cultural and social life. It attempts to place `Europe' as a constructed spatiality in parallel with the nation-state, by passing legislation, regulations, and treaties in the EU. It creates a European postnational political culture by regulating hierarchies of borders and negotiating Europe's spatial limits and multilayered bordering. This ranges from a diverse set of national boundaries whose significance has been changing to external borders under negotiation, especially since the Schengen treaty. The tiers and hierarchies of borders of Europe shift during the new world order and the fluidity of its territory causes significant shifts in the domains of culture and identity, besides the important global restructuring in the economy, politics, and social organisation.

The debordering of cold-war Europe, the porosity of East-West boundaries, and the permeability of the Mediterranean were effectively renegotiated in the 1990s, with Berlin as a place of effective symbolism. In Europe, the collapse of the `Iron Curtain' did not mean the melting of borders. In fact as soon as the curtain was lifted between West and East, the borderline was hardened elsewhere: Europe was rebordered. At the turn of the new millennium, as Gorizia was considering the demolition of its fence between Italy and Slovenia when the latter was becoming a candidate EU member state in the 1990s, a barbed wire enclosure was built around Melilla, the Spanish town in Morocco. In fact the current globalization narrative overemphasises external forces shaking the principle of national sovereignty and challenging the system of nation states or even superseding it. It also underestimates hardened borders around the United States after 9/11 or in fact around Europe, for that matter.

Thus despite such key developments as globalization and the emergence of the EU, states and their borders retain their relevance on at least three levels: security, political, and administrative jurisdiction and individual status. The spatial recalibration of Europe has not undermined the importance of the nation-state as an imagined community. The principle of 'subsidiarity' was partly devised as the pole opposite to 'Europeanization' within one and the same institutional discourse, in order to calm rising euroscepticism in the face of centralistic decision-making processes. This contradiction is mirrored in the tendency of a postnational political culture to essentialise the nation-state in the context of the EU dominant bureaucratic narrative.

The social construction of boundaries, often in line with the dominant narrative. The Schengen Agreement has created several types of borders and often bizarre hierarchies. The Treaty, signed in Luxembourg in December 1998, was initially expected to loosen up, "relax," or "demolish" internal EU borders, while tightening external ones. It originally included Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Portugal, Greece, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Seven countries decided to move ahead and implement it. Since then, the five Nordic countries have acceded to the Agreement. The unusual element here is that Norway and Iceland are not EU member states! Though Schengen was for EU members only, it was initially rejected by some member states while it was accepted by non-members (including Switzerland, recently) raising absurd issues of migration, transactions, and border hierarchies more generally. Soon afterward, a new border was erected in 2002 with the EMU, the Euro currency zone, which facilitates the free flow of capital and payments among twelve of the then fifteen EU member states.

There are thus several types of borders in and around the EU today (Map 4): those specified by Schengen around member states and those around non-members; those with candidate members and long-term candidate members for whom discussions for inclusion will start in the future; there are EMU borders; and borders with memories of bipolarity and of the `Iron Curtain.' There also is the question of Europe beyond the mainland and here, besides Melilla and the Canaries there are French lands further afield, in the Caribbean and in the Indian Ocean (Lewis and Wigen 2001: 4). Such examples of the several tiers of borders, internal and external, augment the tensions between nationalism, regionalism, and federalism. The multiple hierarchy of borders also undermines the ideal of a borderless Europe as promoted by the Schengen Agreement, surrounded by hard EU boundaries. Deconstructing the bureaucratic narratives we find differing political philosophies in space and time that create its diversity and contradictions.

But the most important tiering and the greatest shift in borders has followed developments in Eastern Europe. These culminated in 1989 and then again in 2004 when eight among the ten new member states accepted into the EU are East European countries: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia. Most Eastern European countries are still excluded, of course, especially the Balkans. Two of the states of former Yugoslavia, still derelict from civil wars and the Kosovo bombings of 1999, have not even applied for EU membership. Bulgaria and Romania were not accepted during the present round of EU expansion, on economic grounds. With the accession of Turkey before the Balkans or at least before Albania, Serbia, and FYROM, we may soon see a deformed EU map with a big hole down its southeast, incomparably larger than the Swiss `hole'. Though the Balkans are predominantly Christian, their population, along with Ukranians and Georgians, are not treated as Europeans but as `others' when they migrate to the EU, just like Afghans, Iraquis, Africans, and other peoples further afield. The Balkan people are' one boundary shift away from European citizenship, but this shift is surrounded by ambiguity, though their geography is much more `European' than that of Algerians and Moroccans, whom France failed to integrate into Europe. But that is yet another story.

From an economic point of view, today, the European Central Bank is focused on the needs of the three major economies - Germany, France and Italy. The rest of Europe is not only ignored, but is directly harmed by the inability of Germany and France in particular to impose economic discipline on themselves.

It is now clear that economic discipline will not be coming anytime soon. Therefore, France and Germany will continue to drag down the rest of the eurozone. And so, for the first time, respectable voices - i.e., those deemed respectable by the European elite - are raising serious questions about the future of the euro. The issue is not really so much the future of the currency as the fact that, in May, the euro's future became a reasonable topic of conversation.

As of May 2005, there is no Europe. There is France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland and so on. As sovereign countries, they have entered into a series of important economic agreements. But none of these countries have abandoned their sovereignty. Decisions on war and peace or lesser foreign policy issues remain in their hands, not in those of Brussels. It is unlikely that any broad consensus on any of these issues will be reached by all of Europe, and anyone basing their policies on what "Europe" will do will be as misguided as those basing policies on what "Asia" will do. These are geographic and to some extent cultural expressions.

When the European Economic Union was formed the French negotiated significant agricultural subsidies for France called the EU Common Agricultural Policy or CAP. Margaret Thatcher dug her heels in and demanded a rebate of English taxes to equalize the CAP subsidies going to France. Chirac recently stated that it is time for England to give up her rebates. That rebate is currently around €4.6 billion (or $5.7 billion). Blair is quite adamant that this is not something for the British to give up (quote): "...if people want a reconsideration of the rebate there has to be a reconsideration of the reasons for the rebate. This is not some special thing that has been given as a special privilege to Britain. This is a mechanism of correction for something that would otherwise be grossly unfair.

Two weeks ago, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said, 'We are prepared ... to recognize that the rebate is an anomaly that has to go, but it has to be in the context of the other anomaly being changed as well.”

What "anomaly" is he talking about? The extra French CAP subsidies. That is why the latest talks between Blair and Chirac were "frank." Chirac cannot be seen as giving in to the Anglo-Saxons on anything, especially something as important to France as agricultural subsidies.

In fact France receives about one quarter of the CAP subsidies, with nowhere near that percentage of farmers. Most of "New Europe" gets almost nothing. The CAP does not mean all that much to Germany. Indeed, the German opposition leader, Wolfgang Erhardt, has spoken favorably of reform. And it is quite possible that under a conservative government Erhardt could be the foreign minister.

We are not talking about small sums here. The CAP is €55 billion (or around $65 billion). There are calls from other European quarters to see that money directed to programs that would enhance Europe's markets and technological capabilities.

The European intelligentsia has 50 years invested in the idea of a United Europe. They will not easily give up on that dream, which has seen more than a few setbacks, although admittedly none as severe as the recent ones. Could a Blair and a more conservative Germany in concert with many other "New" European nations develop a Union with a more "Anglo-Saxon" economic model at its base? When confronted with a fait accompli, could a Sarkozy led France get a few concessions so he can sell it at home?

Would the intelligentsia, who are almost viscerally opposed to such an idea, go along with it in order to get their #1 objective, a unified Europe? My bet is they will, rather than lose their dream. If they do in fact get it, they will immediately work to make changes, but that is another battle for another day.

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