Charlemagne. Crisis, what crisis

In praise of the prosaic

IN THE run-up to the French and Dutch referendums, supporters of the European Union constitution avoided the subtle approach. One commissioner went to a Holocaust memorial to hint at what might happen if the constitution were rejected; other “yes” campaigners showed footage of the killings at Srebrenica. It was a crisis, lamented Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg, who then held the EU's revolving presidency, when the constitution went down in flames. After a bad-tempered summit a few weeks later, he upgraded his diagnosis to “deep crisis”.

Three months on, as European officials and politicians saunter back from holiday, one might be forgiven for asking: what crisis? War has not broken out in the Balkans. Italy has not pulled out of the euro. The work of EU institutions grinds on as if nothing had happened. Bloated farm payments are being scattered far and wide. The trade commissioner has wangled his way out of another row with China. The European Commission has announced it will accept the position taken by the Council of Ministers on batteries (phew!). Just another day at the office.

This is not to say that nothing at all actually happened. Obviously, voters blew their representatives a magnificent raspberry. But it was not quite the disaster that some had foretold. The rejection by two founding members of the Union has almost certainly ended not only the constitution (which needed to be ratified by all to come into force), but also the entire drive towards ever deeper European integration. For decades, this has proceeded through a succession of treaties, most of which handed over more power from national to European institutions. Now, and for the foreseeable future, new treaties will have to be put to voters - who are now minded to vote almost everything down. The goal of “ever closer union” sounds about as inevitable, these days, as the dictatorship of the proletariat.

European bigwigs are starting to recognise this. Immediately after the referendum, they were in denial. One government after another insisted ratification would continue. Austria's chancellor even said that France and the Netherlands would have to vote again until they got it right. Some people still think like this (the leader of the largest party in the European Parliament has just opined that the time was ripe for the French and Dutch to have another go). But on a trip to Poland to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Solidarity, the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, admitted openly: “In the foreseeable future, we will not have a constitution. That's obvious. I haven't come across any magic formulae that would bring it back to life.” That recognition of reality is spreading.

What they have not yet accepted is that the defeat of the constitution may be no bad thing, and that living with its consequences may be the most sensible approach. This conclusion may take a while to sink in - not just because people are awaiting the German election before doing anything at all, but because there are several plausible-sounding (but in fact, unjustified) reasons for worrying about the fall-out from the referendums.

They boil down to this: the rejection of the constitution has damaged a lot of the best things about the EU. It may bring the next round of enlargement to a halt - and enlargement has been one of the EU's successes. It may set back the prospects of economic reform - again, one of the EU's more important (if hardly popular or successful) tasks. It will certainly stop in their tracks efforts to make running the EU less cumbersome.

But enlargement was a problem even before the referendums. Croatia missed its deadline for starting entry negotiations in March, before the referendum campaigns began. Turkey, the biggest country waiting outside the entrance, was always going to be a mouthful, regardless of the referendum - though the French government's promise to put the Turks' admission to a popular vote has further dimmed their prospects.

Antipathy to the dreaded “Anglo-Saxon” model of capitalism clearly played a part in the constitution's defeat. European voters want to keep the cruel world at bay. But Angela Merkel's probable victory in Germany, the rise of Nicolas Sarkozy in France, and the imperative of demographic decline are all likely to keep economic reform on the EU's agenda, however much voters want to avoid it. As for the bureaucratic reforms buried by the constitution's defeat, they are a loss (it is hard to run a club of 25 with machinery made for 12, or even for six). Still, this is the least of the reasons for fretting about the constitution, and it may yet be possible to make some minor institutional improvements in any case.

The right response

In short, there are few reasons for seeing the defeat of the constitution as a disaster in itself. Hence the EU's reluctance to collapse during the summer. The corollary is that the proper response would be to go back to what the EU was trying to do before: that is, improve the single market, enlarge the club where it can, undertake the economic reforms its members promised at Lisbon in 2000, but have mostly failed to achieve.

The trouble with this prescription is that it is prosaic - and prose quickens few European hearts. In “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme”, Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain was excited to discover that he had been speaking prose all his life - but he is, characteristically, a figure of derision. Instead, Europeans thrill to visionary talk of “solidarity”, of “a European social space” and to grand, imprecise goals. “We're not here just to make a single market, that doesn't interest me,” said a former European Commission president, Jacques Delors, “but to make a political union.”

The impulse (if not the final ambition) persists. But the rejection of the constitution has weakened it. The past few weeks have shown the EU can work perfectly well without the vision thing. Can its leaders accept that a certain unaccustomed modesty might be not just advisable, but desirable?

Commentary states that the EU has not collapsed after the referendums in the Netherlands and France rejecting the proposed European Constitution. What can that teach us?