The End Of Europe; Every beginning is the end of something else. The new era of European enlargement will be no exception.(Cover Story)

Byline: Michael Meyer

"Europe has never existed. it must be created ." So said Jean Monnet, father of the original Common Market, at the outset of the grand experiment that over the past five decades grew to become the modern European Union. Were he alive today, would Monnet survey his creation with pride--or reservation?

On May 1, Europe braces for another of its periodic Big Bangs. Not war but its antithesis--a regime of stability and (one hopes) growing prosperity spanning a region of 370 million citizens from the Aran Islands to Carpathia. Ten new nations will join the existing 15 members of the European club: eight formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe and the Baltics, plus the divided island of Cyprus and tiny Malta. It is by far the most ambitious enlargement ever undertaken by the European community. Yet curiously, this epochal step inspires more angst than euphoria.

Ask a German diplomat about the EU of tomorrow, and he pauses. "The new Europe," he says thoughtfully, "is looking more and more like the old Europe." For half a century, he explains, Europe has dedicated itself to overcoming division and creating an "ever-closer" political and economic union. The Europe of the future, he predicts, will retreat from this ideal. Instead of coming together, Europe's trajectory will be more toward the past--more toward discord and division than toward unity. Years from now, as The Economist magazine recently put it, Europeans may well look back at today's era as a lost "golden age" of harmony and good feeling. With only slight exaggeration, May 1 can be viewed as marking the beginning of the end of "Europe."

Too pessimistic? Consider recent headlines, challenging traditional assumptions that Europeans inhabit a common house. British Prime Minister Tony Blair last week changed direction and called for a national referendum on Europe's new draft Constitution, painstakingly cobbled together over the past two years and needing unanimous ratification by the Union's member governments. Blair could have simply approved the document; by turning it over to voters, likely to reject it, he in effect cast a veto over the rest of Europe. Meanwhile, as the Union dismantles geographical barriers to the free movement of people and goods, others are going up. Fearing floods of immigrants from the East, taking jobs from locals and overwhelming social services, governments across the Continent have hastily erected restrictions against the incoming members of their European family. Germany and France, among others, have barred such workers from seeking jobs for periods ranging from three to seven years. Similar controversies have erupted over everything from the EU's budget to economic development. After years of touting their commitment to helping their neighbors rebuild from years of communism--much as they helped Greece, Spain and Portugal resurrect themselves from decades of autocracy--the rich members of the Union are balking at the cost.

Spats over budgets and internal migration may pass with time, but some of the endings occasioned by May 1 will be more enduring. Consider three:

THE END OF EUROPE AS THE WEST: "If you want to read the future of Europe, look east," says Jean-Marie Colombani, director of Le Monde in Paris. Until now, the European Union has been a purely West European institution, whose interests lay traditionally within the geography of the NATO alliance. With enlargement, he argues, "the center of gravity of the old Continent will move east." Europe's new backyard is a morass of failing ...