Europe's Endangered Liberal Order

Timothy Garton Ash

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 1998

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Summary:  Europe's great drive toward unification can distract attention from the liberal order that already exists in most of the continent. But this extraordinary achievement is itself threatened precisely as a result of Europe's forced march to unity, especially Helmut Kohl's push for European monetary union. Europe's leaders set the wrong priority after 1989 by neglecting the east and federalizing the west. They fiddled in Maastricht while Sarajevo burned. Europeans should instead consolidate and spread across the continent the order that already exists. It provides for security and liberty; more would be less.

Timothy Garton Ash is a Fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford. His books include The Magic Lantern, In Europe's Name, and most recently The File: A Personal History. This essay is dedicated to the memory of Sir Isaiah Berlin.

THE DREAM IS HERE

Like no other continent, Europe is obsessed with its own meaning and direction. Idealistic and teleological visions of Europe at once inform, legitimate, and are themselves informed and legitimated by the political development of something now called the European Union. The name "European Union" is itself a product of this approach, for a union is what the EU is meant to be, not what it is.

European history since 1945 is told as a story of unification: difficult, delayed, suffering reverses, but nonetheless progressing. This is the grand narrative taught to millions of European schoolchildren and accepted by central and east European politicians when they speak of rejoining "a uniting Europe." That narrative's next chapter is even now being written by a leading German historian, Dr. Helmut Kohl. Its millennial culmination is to be achieved on January 1, 1999, with a monetary union that will, it is argued, irreversibly bind together some of the leading states of Europe. This group of states should in turn become the "magnetic core" of a larger unification.

European unification is presented not just as a product of visionary leaders from Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman to Francois Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl but also as a necessary, even an inevitable response to the contemporary forces of globalization. Nation-states are no longer able to protect and realize their economic and political interests on their own. They are no match for transnational actors like global currency speculators, multinational companies, or international criminal gangs. Both power and identity, it is argued, are migrating upward and downward from the nation-state: upward to the supranational level, downward to the regional one. In a globalized world of large trading blocs, Europe will only be able to hold its own as a larger political-economic unit. Thus Manfred Rommel, the popular former mayor of Stuttgart, declares, "We live under the dictatorship of the global economy. There is no alternative to a united Europe."

It would be absurd to suggest that there is no substance to these claims. Yet when combined into a single grand narrative, into the idealistic-teleological discourse of European unification, they result in a dangerously misleading picture of the real ground on which European leaders will have to build at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In fact, what we have already achieved in a large part of western and southern Europe is a new model of liberal order. But this extraordinary achievement is itself now under threat precisely as a result of the forced march to unity. What we should be doing now is rather to consolidate this liberal order and to spread it across the continent. Liberal order, not unity, is the right strategic goal for European policy in our time.

THE PAST AS WARNING

In the index to Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, we find "Europe, as battlefield," "Europe, as not an intelligible field of historical study," and, finally, "Europe, unification of, failure of attempts at." Toynbee is an unreliable source, but ...

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