Can Europe happen?

In September 194-6, when Winston Churchill, speaking at the University of Zurich, was calling for the creation of a United States of Europe, parts of that continent still lay in ruins; the wounds of war had not yet scarred over. There were zones of occupation, but Germany had not yet split into two separate states. Churchill attributed both world wars to the German lust for domination and believed that a united Europe, with a Franco-German alliance at its center, would in time erase the memory of past horrors and make it impossible for Germany ever again to rekindle the fires of war.

Similar arguments in favor of European unification are often heard today, especially among the French: a united Europe, it is said, will be able to check Germany's imperialist tendencies. Of course we are all aware that Europe's history is also one of wars, some of them appallingly bloody and destructive, and that in this history there are no innocent parties: all European nations have massacres, invasions, and aggressive raids on their conscience. And although in 1946 it was natural to attribute the cause of the war to Hitler, the Soviet Union played a considerable part in the proceedings, beginning with the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact and the plan of a joint partition of Poland by two imperialist powers with an insatiable lust for conquest, powers temporarily allied but both knowing full well what their alliance was worth. In his Zurich speech Churchill hardly mentioned the Soviet Union; it is unclear whether he believed that it, too, could be civilized, transformed from a barbarian empire into a country that could join the European family and participate in it on equal terms, rather than as a conquering power brandishing its whip--now in the form of atomic weapons.

Today, more than half a century later, after the fall of the communist regimes and after so much effort by so many, we like to believe that a United Europe, if it can be brought about, will permanently remove the specter of war from our horizon. But we do not know whether it can succeed; we do not yet know what kind of Europe it will be nor how--in what sense--it will be united. We have seen, over the years, how fraught with difficulty was the process of unification, how greatly hampered by particular national interests: British beef, French apples, Spanish wine--the list goes on. And indeed it could hardly have been otherwise: all these particular interests are real, not imaginary, and one cannot demand too many sacrifices of member states in a situation where each wants to preserve its own interests and wrest as many concessions as possible from the others. The interests of farmers and industrialists, the issues of unemployment and inflation--these are real issues, and we have far to go before all the conflicting interests we see today will flourish in blissful harmony. Human interests inevitably conflict, and we cannot aim to eliminate such conflicts. We can only try to work out efficient mechanisms to resolve them through compromise, rather than war.

In England the debate about Europe has long been dominated by the issue of the Euro--a currency whose name is pronounced differently in every member state. The arguments put forward by many economists against a common currency seem convincing: it would entail the imposition of a uniform tax system and interest rate in all the member states, and the central bank, whose decisions would be independent of governments, would play the decisive role. Thus the two basic mechanisms of regulating the economy--the tax system and the interest rate--would, critics say, be taken out of the hands of particular states. States would also forfeit the possibility of manipulating their own inflation and debt. At the same time, given that the economic cycles of the various countries are not synchronized, the imposition of rigid rules by international institutions could harm parts of the Union. Britain's forced exit from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism was perhaps an unpleasant shock, but in the end, these critics say, it was beneficial, bringing a lower inflation rate and lower unemployment; it did nothing to strengthen the argument for a common currency. And the argument that a common currency will put a stop to currency speculation seems weak, since there will always be a sufficient number of other currencies to speculate with.

I am reluctant to discuss these issues further, because--like the great majority of Europe's citizens--I am not competent to do so. Even those who are competent often differ in their analyses; sometimes (rarely) they even admit that their past diagnosis may have been wrong. We have no reliable authority to which we could turn. But the situation has become worrying: a crisis of the common currency would now be a crisis for Europe as a whole, and in all respects. So if the common currency does not succeed, everyone will have to pretend otherwise. If there is a referendum in Britain about joining the Euro, its outcome, given the inevitable and incurable incompetence of the voters, will be an act of uninformed will, not of reason, and a positive outcome will not mean that joining the Euro will be beneficial, either for Britain or for Europe as a whole. The majority need not be right; witchhunts and the death penalty were abolished by parliaments against the will of the majority.

Moreover, there is a peculiar asymmetry to a referendum on the issue: if the majority vote is against a ...