By the 1980s, hard experience had shown that the West had been suffering from three persistent illusions. It had been the vogue among political scientists to talk of ‘convergence’—the idea that time would draw the political and economic systems of East and West closer together. This was pure make-believe. The gap was widening with every day that passed. It had also been judged appropriate to ‘differentiate’ between communist regimes according to their degree of subservience to Moscow. This policy had given the greatest favours to the most repressive of regimes, like that of Ceausescu.
Détente
had fostered a hypothesis that has been called ‘ornithological’. The conduct of the communists, it was argued, was dependent on the good conduct of the West. Beastly comments in Western capitals would only encourage the ‘hawks’; kindness would encourage the ‘doves’. In practice, no such pattern emerged. No one had been subjected to such harsh words as Jaruzelski, yet he turned to reform. No one was offered so many sweeteners as Honecker—and Honecker remained as hawkish as ever. The fact is, the communists did not respond to kindness. As one of the earliest critics of
détente
had argued in his
Theses on Hope and Hopelessness
, raising the tension of East-West relations was a dangerous ploy; but it was the only strategy which held out a promise of ultimate success.
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In the midst of these divided counsels there appeared a new star in the East. In March 1985 Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev (b. 1931) emerged as the fourth General Secretary of the CPSU in three years. He was chosen by the Party apparatus, and had no democratic credentials. Yet, as a person, he was completely different; and he was the first Soviet leader to be untainted by a Stalinist record. He was affable, quick-witted, and spoke without notes. Here at last was a man, as Mrs Thatcher was quick to announce, ‘with whom we can do business’.
Gorbachev’s early months in office were taken up by reshufflings of the Politburo, by the ritual denunciation of previous leaders, and by an ominous campaign against corruption. But the style had obviously changed. The world waited to see if the content would change with it. Foreign policy offered a Soviet leader the most room for manoeuvre. It was reasonable to assume, if Gorbachev moved, that he would first make a move on East-West relations.
The initial meetings between Gorbachev and Reagan were not specially productive. The newcomer was taking the old ‘Star Warrior’s’ measure. But the burden of military spending was no secret; long preparations for a treaty on the reduction of Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) preceded the summit scheduled at Reykjavík, Iceland, for December 1987. Suddenly, in the middle of the talks at Reykjavík, Gorbachev struck without warning. He proposed a sensational 50 per cent cut in all nuclear weapons. Reagan reeled, recoiled, and regretted. The INF was signed; but the ultra-cautious, ultra-suspicious encounters of the past were over. This General Secretary seemed intent on stopping the Cold War in its tracks.
Shortly afterwards, an extraordinary incident served to puncture the balloon of East-West tensions. Air defence had been the burning military issue of the decade: it was the issue behind Cruise, and behind Star Wars itself, and it was costing multi-billions. Each side was terrified that the missiles and bombers of the other would find their target without response. The Soviet Union had attracted enormous opprobrium for building an unauthorized anti-IBM radar station at Krasnoyarsk, and for shooting down a South Korean passenger flight, KAL 007, which had strayed into Soviet air space. Yet all the expert anxieties of the world’s military planners were cut down to size by the prank of a German schoolboy. On 28 May 1987,19-year-old Matthias Rust piloted a tiny private monoplane up the Baltic from Hamburg, crossed the Soviet frontier in Latvia, flew at treetop level under the most concentrated air defences in the world, and landed on the cobblestones near Moscow’s Red Square. Single-handed, he made the whole Cold War look ridiculous.
By the time of the Malta Summit in December 1989, Presidents Bush and Gorbachev felt free to announce that the Cold War had ended.
Integration and Disintegration, 1985–1991
For two or three years after Gorbachev’s appearance, the main contours of Europe’s political landscape remained untouched. In Western Europe the American presence was still a determining factor; and the horizons of the EEC were still confined to the economic sphere. In Eastern Europe people were still being shot for trying to cross the Iron Curtain. All the old immovables still held office—Honecker, Husák, Kádár, Ceausescu, Zhivkov, Hoxha. The ‘Other Europe’ was still ‘the last colonial empire in existence’.
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Even Gorbachev maintained a granite exterior. In November 1987 he presided over the 70th anniversary celebrations of the Bolshevik Revolution in traditional style. As late as May 1988 he was promoting the Orthodox millennium in Kiev in a spirit of Russian nationalism of which Stalin himself would have approved.
Yet Europe, both East and West, was fast approaching the brink of unforeseen transformations. As the clouds of the Cold War lifted, new, exciting vistas could be glimpsed on many fronts. Within two years of Gorbachev’s disarmament offensive at Reykjavík, the Soviet Union had relinquished its grip on its satellites.
Within three years, political union was moving up the agenda in Western Europe. Within four years, the Soviet Union itself evaporated. As Western Europe integrated, Eastern Europe disintegrated.
No single individual, or individuals, can claim the credit for upheavals on such a scale. But two men found themselves promoted to positions at the centre of the swirling tides. One was Gorbachev; the other was the new President of the European Commission, Jacques Delors. Their enemies would say that both lacked a sense of realism—the reformer in pursuit of the unreformable, the integrator in charge of the unintegratable.
Jacques Delors (b. 1925), formerly French Finance Minister, presented the outward appearance of an archetypal technocrat. Born in Paris, he was at once a practising Catholic and a socialist, but had never visited the USA. But he was also a man with a mission, a true disciple of Monnet and Schuman, whose wider vision had lain dormant for 30 years. His opponents called him a Euro-fundamentalist. ‘Europe will not be built at a stroke or according to a single plan,’ Schuman had once remarked; ‘it will be built through concrete achievements.’ This summed up the Delors approach exactly. The principal instrument for his ambitions was the Single European Act (SEA). Two terms of office, 1985–9 and 1989–92, would be sufficient to see it through from conception to realization.
In the formal sense, the Single European Act could be regarded as nothing more than the contents of its text—an elaborate programme for the total abolition of barriers to trade and mobility within the EEC. As presented in 1985 and adopted by member states in 1986, its 282 chapters set out a long list of humdrum measures which would lead to a single unified market of 320 million customers by the end of 1992. It envisaged the removal of internal frontiers, free business competition, the standardization of consumer protection, the equalization of living standards, the mutual recognition of professional qualifications, the harmonization of VAT and other indirect taxes, and unified guidelines for television, broadcasting, and telecommunications. Article 148 introduced the principle of qualified majority voting in the executive Council of Ministers. Members’ votes were to be weighted in the ratio of West Germany, France, Italy, and Britain (10 each), Spain (8), Belgium, Netherlands, Greece, Portugal (5 each), Denmark and Ireland (3 each), and Luxemburg (2). An effective majority was to require 54 of the 72 votes, or 75 per cent.
However, it was not hard to foresee that the SEA could be used as the Trojan Horse for more comprehensive plans. Once launched, there was every opportunity to argue that the single market could not be made viable without the abolition of still more barriers. This is indeed what happened: a chain reaction of demands set in for further financial, political, legal, and social integration. After two decades of very modest advance, the tempo of the EEC was quickening: the catch-word in Brussels was ‘ça bouge’ (it’s moving). In 1987, as a sign of the times, the Community officially adopted the flag of the Council of Europe. Twelve golden stars on a deep blue ground no longer symbolized the starry ideals of Strasbourg. They now stood for the twelve member states in an expandable circle of perfect union.
The European Commission issued a growing flood of directives. Taken separately,
these directives often looked petty. One concerning the obligatory dimensions of the European condom (whose size the Italian Government apparently sought to reduce) was not the sole butt of ribaldry. Taken together, they formed an avalanche moving in a consistent direction. After the Council’s acceptance of the free movement of capital, in June 1988 the Commission issued a directive for reviving the process of Economic and Monetary Union.
When the Commission’s intentions became apparent, its critics pressed the alarm button. Margaret Thatcher had accepted ‘Project 1992’ with reluctance. In a speech to the College of Europe in Bruges on 20 September 1988, she now attacked the prospect of a ‘European superstate’, and of ‘an identikit European personality’ with passion. On another occasion her strident protests of ‘No! No! No!’ recalled de Gaulle’s performances 20 years before. She won the sympathy both of the ‘Little Englanders’ and of conservative Americans who feared the growth of an anti-American ‘Fortress Europe’. But she misjudged the mood of her own Party, which removed her in a ‘Cabinet Coup’ in November 1990.
At this point the tide seemed to be turning fast in the Commission’s favour. The disintegration of the Soviet bloc was transforming the political and economic landscape. German reunification led to unease (not least in Germany itself) about Germany’s disproportionate influence. With no common policy, there was a danger that Europe as a whole would begin to drift.
In this climate, yet another wave of initiatives swept the Community. A Belgian memorandum of March 1990 set out the fourfold objectives of Subsidiarity, Democracy, Efficiency, and Coherence. A month later, a Franco-German letter raised the issues of common foreign, security, justice, and police policies. At that year’s Madrid summit, Delors spoke of ‘an embryo European Government’ within five years. The further enlargement of the Community, and the strengthening both of the European Parliament and of European security, all reached the agenda. Enlargement plans were directed at several categories of entrant. By 1991 the Community was proposing to admit the remaining EFTA countries to the Common Market (though not yet to full membership), to grant associate status to three post-communist states, and to finalize the admission of Austria, Sweden, Finland, and Norway within three years. Applications for full or associate status were pending from a number of extra-European states such as Turkey and Israel. The Twelve stood fair to become the Twenty or even the Thirty.
One reason why the member states welcomed the Commission’s initiative lay in their understanding of the principle of subsidiarity. This principle, borrowed from the practices of Catholic Canon Law, stated that the central organs of the Community should only be concerned with the most essential areas of policy, leaving everything else to ‘subsidiary levels of government’. National governments were eager to insist that everything else was going to be left to them. But subsidiarity, if extended, could also be used to link Brussels directly with regional or local authorities, and to bypass the national level of government. Definitions were urgently required.
The more rigorous advocates of political union made no secret of their dislike
of the nation-state. In addition to all its historic sins, the nation-state was now seen to be ‘too small to cope with the big issues, and too big to cope with the small ones’. There was some reason to fear that the Community might be turned, like the UN, into a club of governments. It was certainly consistent to argue that European democracy could not progress until the Community’s own Parliament was upgraded against the separate assemblies of member states.
It was in this context that debates about the ‘regions’ of Europe came to the fore. Any strengthening of the central organs of the Community automatically encouraged centrifugal tendencies within the member states. The rise of Brussels was bound to be followed by the rise of Edinburgh, of Milan, of Barcelona, and of Antwerp. Regional interests could be identified both within and between member states. Within the decentralized Federal Republic of Germany, for instance, the governments of the
Lander
enjoyed far-reaching autonomy. France, too, once the bastion of centralism, had recently strengthened the competence of its 22 regions. (In Britain, by contrast, where regional ‘devolution’ had been rebuffed and local government diminished, the opposite trend prevailed.) The concept of ‘Euroregions’ came into being to bridge the gap between the Community and its Eastern neighbours. Italy mooted the creation of a ‘Pentagonale’ of five countries in the Adriatic hinterland; Germany, Poland, and the Scandinavian countries discussed the possibility of future regions of co-operation on either side of the Baltic.
Political uncertainties strengthened centrifugal pressures within member states. In Spain, the long-standing discontents of Catalans and Basques were controlled but not fully satisfied. In Italy, a Lombard League was reborn with the aim of ‘liberating’ the north from the burdens of the
Mezzogiorno
. In Britain, the Scottish Nationalists were drawing their second wind: an independent Scotland looked a better risk inside the European Community than outside it.
In practice, though, everything remained to be played for. The Community was still debating whether it should be geographically enlarged before it was constitutionally ‘deepened’. Delors preferred ‘Deepen first, enlarge later’. His critics thought this a ruse for keeping the community small, Western, and controlled by the Commission. Even so, by the time that the leaders of the Twelve were due to meet at Maastricht in Limburg in December 1991, the momentum was still accelerating. To this end, the Commission was preparing to present a massive Treaty on European Union designed to amend and expand the Treaty of Rome. The 61,351 words of its text were to mark ‘a new stage in the process of European integration’. It mapped out pathways towards ‘economic and monetary union’, ‘a single and stable currency’, a ‘common citizenship’, and ‘a common foreign and security policy’.
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But it said nothing about enlargement, nothing about the transformation of Europe as a whole. Conceived by a Commission still preoccupied with purely Western concerns, Maastricht in no way prepared Europe for the avalanche that was about to break in the other half of the Continent.