Climate fears revive unity

"The future treaty you are discussing has no chance of being agreed; if it was agreed, it would have no chance of being ratified; and if it was ratified, it would have no chance of being applied," said Russell Bretherton, a British diplomat, speaking at the 1955 Messina conference which laid the groundwork for the Treaty of Rome.

This spectacular misreading of the political will of the six founding nations to launch European integration bears some similarity to the EU’s latest project, 50 years later.

A year or two ago next to no one would have been prepared to bet that the EU constitution would ever be ratified and applied. Yet, in June EU leaders will launch a process which will probably lead to most of the constitution’s provisions being in place by 2009.

The European Union or the European Economic Community, as it was christened in 1957, has always gone through periods of torpor before finding new élan to move ahead dramatically. The longest downturn was arguably in 1966-84 after the then French president Charles de Gaulle insisted on the so-called Luxembourg compromise, allowing a member state to veto proposals by invoking defence of vital national interests. This deal condemned the community for decades to needing unanimity for decisions until the agreement on the Single European Act in 1986 and a major shift to qualified majority voting.

In 2005 the rejection of the EU constitution by French and Dutch voters came as a hammer blow to the confidence of Europe’s leaders in the European project. The votes were the result of various influences. The constitution’s idealistic drafters were guilty of hubris, mistakenly thinking that the public would share their enthusiasm for dressing up the Union’s exceptional institutional arrangements and calling it a constitution. The timing was also unfortunate, following the Union’s biggest ever enlargement (in terms of number of new member states). Voters in France and the Netherlands were partly voting ‘No’ from a sense that their way of life, either in terms of economic certainty or cultural identity, was under threat. The feeling of being disconnected from EU institutions increased their perception of a loss of control over the political process.

From any angle, the collapse of communism and the reunification of Europe have been the key determining events in the EU’s history and the aftershocks are still reverberating.

That this weekend’s summit to mark the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome is being hosted by the first German chancellor from formerly communist East Germany is a concrete example of the evolution of Europe.

The summit is designed to give EU leaders a chance to recommit themselves to the European project of working together to address common challenges, a recasting of the Messina declaration in 1955 which paved the way for the Treaty of Rome and which was dismissed in such an offhand way by Bretherton.

There are still divisions on the continent but they are not the ideological and physical divide of the Cold War with its geographical separation of population. The discussions on the Berlin Declaration and the impending negotiations on the constitution show divisions between those like the UK, Poland and the Czech Republic, which jealously guard against any transfer of powers, while the Germans, Spanish and others chafe against the lack of ambition for Europe.

But two years after the rejection of the EU constitution there is a new sense of optimism in the air. Despite the fact that 27 members need to agree, the recent summit on climate change and energy policy gives ground for optimism that the Union is on the verge of a new period of progress and common action to tackle shared problems.

This spirit of co-operation, if it materialises, will not be accompanied by a major leap forward in the degree of European integration as with the 1986 Single European Act and the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. The era of profound rounds of integration probably peaked in 1992 and that level of ambition is unlikely to return.

The process of economic integration started in the 1950s, relaunched in the 1980s with the single market and its summation with the creation of the euro has been the European Union’s main success story for the first 40 years. But since the late 1980s it is the enlargement process that has given the Union the power to create a cohesive political space that the founding fathers hoped for when they started the community in the 1950s. The lure of membership has spurred countries to align themselves with the Union’s political and economic systems and will continue to do so in Croatia, Albania and Turkey.

But the very success of this policy is at best misunderstood, if not resented, by many EU citizens who see expansion only as a threat to economic, political even cultural certainties. This is translating into doubts about future enlargement among some EU leaders, including Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy. The prospect of Turkey actually joining the EU seems further away than ever.

That aside, the EU seems to be on the verge of emerging from what European Commission President José Manuel Barroso calls "Europessimism", a self-fulfilling prophecy that Europe is unable to act and takes decisions which rob it of the energy to do so.

The challenges are huge. Europe’s model of high social protection, leisure time and state provision of education, health and welfare services is under pressure from globalisation. Populations are shrinking as the importance of material and psychological satisfaction through work is forcing down the numbers of children that people want. Populations are ageing while Europe is still reluctant to let in the numbers of young, highly motivated immigrants that would offset this trend.

But these issues can best be tackled together as the hope that the nation state is best placed to address such global challenges is fading.

Opinion polls show that only a small majority of citizens are convinced that the EU is a good thing and that their countries have benefited from membership and levels of scepticism in many countries run deep.

But the political challenges abroad and the benefits of closer economic integration and political co-operation make it almost impossible to imagine a world without the EU or an EU which looked very different from how it is today.

• Simon Taylor is senior political reporter of European Voice.

"The future treaty you are discussing has no chance of being agreed; if it was agreed, it would have no chance of being ratified; and if it was ratified, it would have no chance of being applied," said Russell Bretherton, a British diplomat, speaking at the 1955 Messina conference which laid the groundwork for the Treaty of Rome.