Europe’s missing union - by David Marquand

he European Union was conceived in hope: hope that peaceful, law-based integration would exorcise the demons of the continent’s past and embed democratic norms and institutions in its political culture. That hope has come closer to realization than anyone could reasonably have expected when the process started 60 years ago.

The centuries-old struggle for mastery between France and Germany has come to an end. The fascist regimes that once ruled Portugal, Spain and Greece have disappeared, as have the Soviet puppet regimes that once ruled 10 nations in central and Eastern Europe.

But these achievements are now in danger. Thanks to the eurozone crisis — and the mixture of political sclerosis and financial turbulence that have accompanied it — we can no longer take for granted that the democratisation of Europe is a done deed. In Portugal, Greece, Spain, Italy and Ireland voters have discovered that the bond markets have more power over their destinies than they have themselves. In Europe’s troubled periphery Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address has been amended: government may be of the people, but it is for the credit ratings agencies.

Political union is not a panacea. Everything depends on how it is constructed and what purposes it serves. It seems pretty clear that Merkel sees political union as a way of locking the Continent into German-style fiscal rectitude — in other words, German-imposed austerity — which will lead only to more apathy and extremism.

But political union does not have to be a German-imposed austerity trap. No iron law decrees that a democratic federal union, based unequivocally on the principle of popular sovereignty and designed to foster civic engagement on all levels of government, is beyond the bounds of possibility. The obstacles are timidity, lack of imagination and small-minded nationalism, not inexorable fate.

The economist and diplomat Jean Monnet, one of the greatest Frenchmen of the last century, overcame precisely those obstacles 60 years ago, when he persuaded his government to take the first step to what became the EU. The great question now is whether France’s new president, Hollande, or Italy’s prime minister, Mario Monti, will have the weight and will to persuade Merkel to take the first step toward a truly democratic Europe.

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