Facing the harsh realities of EU enlargement

By Robert Cottrell

Date: 04/05/05

YOU would have looked in vain for signs of large-scale celebration in Central Europe at the weekend, marking the anniversary of last year's enlargement. Membership has lost its novelty and its shine. But still, all has gone well. The European institutions have gone on working. The economies of Central Europe have gone on growing at two to four times the eurozone average. In Poland even the farmers are happy, something rarely seen in nature.

If only the old members felt half as good. Instead they worry about tax-competition and loss of influence. France has got itself into an epic sulk over enlargement, immigration, globalisation and domestic politics all at once. It is less at ease in a Europe too big for it to lead.

If Europe does not want to be quite so French any more, does France still want to be quite so European? That question will be answered this month when France has its referendum.

A 'No' may provoke a bit of short-term buffeting. But, after two or three months, the excitement will be over and we will be back where we are now.

A far worse outcome, in the eyes of the new members at least, will be a French 'Yes' coupled with a British 'No'. If Britain is pushed to the margins, the Union will become even more of a cartel for exporting French social policy and German business costs.

Whatever happens to the constitution, the single market and the euro are robust enough to survive. All the participants have too much invested in them.

But still, we are living through a watershed for Europe. Enlargement has made the Union too big and too diverse to be contained by its founding methods and founding principles. The constitution was a belated attempt to set those principles down in minute detail and it turned out that nobody wanted that very much, save for the drafters.

The Union is left with something of an identity crisis, while it decides where it does want to go next. Worryingly for those of us out on the Union's eastern frontiers, the mood seems to be turning against further enlargement. Even bringing last year's new members into the Schengen area is starting to look difficult.

Governments were able to plan last year's enlargement amid public indifference, and they rightly did so. But now the public has woken up to the idea of an ever-wider Union. It finds the prospect almost as disconcerting as the idea of an ever-closer Union used to be.

Old Europeans worry excessively, but understandably, about losing factories and jobs to central Europe, and getting cheap labour in exchange.

Old and new Europeans worry both about the supposed dangers of some day letting Turkey in, and the risks of shutting it out.

There is only good to be said for competition and diversity in Europe. But right now those values are losing ground to anxieties about cultural integrity and national security. These tensions mean that the Union will probably open negotiations with Turkey later this year while having no serious desire ever to complete them.

Enlargement is coming to be seen, not as a way of exporting stability, but of importing instability. That misconception needs to be overcome, because the job is far from over. Turkey waits, and Ukraine, and the Balkans too.

The International Commission on the Balkans argued last month that a European perspective has become all the more vital to peace and prosperity in that region, partly because other strategies have failed. Let Europe not lose the will to enlarge, just when it has mastered the process so well.

• Robert Cottrell is Central Europe correspondent for The Economist.

Commentary feature in which the author looks at current challenges for the European Union one year after the May 2004 enlargement.