European Union: Wider still and wider

The Guardian – United Kingdom; Jun 15, 2005

The vision of a European Union smoothly spreading its blessings and
extending its membership to a larger and larger circle of nations has
been one of the casualties of the French and Dutch referendums. The
prospect of an ultimate union of up to 40 nations, spreading perhaps
as far as the Caucasus, is now clouded, with European governments so
timorous about expansion that they appear to have agreed to excise
all but the vaguest mention of it from the joint statement they will
produce at the end of this week’s summit. Divided though they were
over expansion, they had neverthless agreed on it sufficiently to
alienate a public opinion in most of the older member states which
wanted either to proceed with it more slowly or not to embrace it at
all. Membership for Turkey, in particular, may have been an issue
which tipped the balance for voters in France and the Netherlands.
European leaders are now inevitably going to have to reassess their
plans and timetable for negotations with prospective new members.

There are difficulties in dealing with all of the three very
different categories of potential members, not least because in each
of them a quite different array of interests and prejudices operates.
The easiest in principle is south-eastern Europe, with Romania and
Bulgaria already due to join in 2007, Croatia waiting hopefully, and
the other Yugoslav successor states expected ultimately to follow.
This is more completion than expansion, filling in a gap within
the map of united Europe, in the case of Romania and Bulgaria,
and foreclosing any return to war, in the case of former Yugoslavia.
Romania and Bulgaria, as with earlier candidates, have to meet certain
conditions, and there could be a brief delay. The greater problems,
not helped by prevarication and procrastination by the EU, are in
former Yugoslavia, with Kosovo’s status uncertain, and the legacy of
the war far from overcome elsewhere. But, after the traumas of the
1990s, most Europeans will not need convincing of the sense of using
membership to bring stability to the Balkans.

More difficult, and more distant, is the question of membership for
the Ukraine (and Belarus, if political change comes in that country)
because there is a distinct divergence between most western members
of the union and most eastern ones, with the latter much more drawn
to the idea of taking Russia’s immediate neighbours quickly into the
European orbit. Anxiety about Russia, in other words, is the key to
the motives both of applicants and those most likely to welcome them.
That anxiety weakens as you move west, and public opinion varies
accordingly. Georgia and Armenia are even more far flung and, after
the referendums, truly remote possibilities.

Most difficult of all is Turkey, and not only because anti-Turkish
sentiment was so clearly a factor in the French and Dutch votes. The
deeper problems are the degree of ambivalence on both sides, and
the likelihood that in the long negotiations due to begin in October
there will, over the years, be just too many occasions for friction
and worse. Jacques Chirac has probably committed any future French
government to a referendum on Turkish entry. It is ironic that a
move intended to take the Turkish factor out of the decision on the
constitution failed in that purpose, but has instead laid a landmine
which could go off with disastrous effect in the future. Turkish
support for entry has already dropped somewhat since the referendums,
and nationalist resistance to some of the EU’s demands and standards
has stiffened. The lesson of Turkey is not that Turkish membership is
a bad idea – that is a different argument – but that in a Europe which
is fed up with being told rather than persuaded, you must convince
before you act, and not the other way round.