European Unity Hinges on Factors Great and Small

Jose Happart is a hard-nosed politician whose career has thrived on linguistic tensions.

In a nation that binds Dutch-speaking Flemings and French-speaking Walloons in an uneasy marriage, Happart is a Walloon agitator convinced that history betrayed his people, that Flemings are aggressors and that Belgium is doomed as a nation-state.

Those views helped catapult the 49-year-old farmer into the European Parliament two years ago with more votes than any other Belgian member.

“I’m a symbol of Wallonia,” he said with a shrug, explaining his popularity.

Eighty miles to the east in Bonn, in a large corner office, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl towers above such disputes and impatiently wills Europeans toward the dream of greater unity that has become his big mission.

“The question of European unity is a question of war and peace in the 21st century,” he said.

War or Peace

Two leaders. Two views. Two choices for Europe on the eve of the new millennium. Can Europeans make the leap of faith needed to transcend the past and enter a new age not filled with blood and war? Or will they succumb again to the call of tribal loyalty and be dragged by the weight of history back into confrontation and conflict?

Does Europe’s future lie in Brussels or in Bosnia?

For Americans, the answers are more than academic.

A stable, more unified Europe constitutes a vital ingredient for the United States’ prosperity and provides an important partner in world affairs.

The 15 countries of the European Union and the United States are bound together by the world’s largest economic tie--three-quarters of a trillion dollars in direct investment and annual trade that translates into millions of jobs on both sides of the Atlantic.

Europeans may rankle at American attempts to strangle Cuba, Libya and Iran with trade boycotts, but perhaps more than anyone they share the United States’ values and view of the world.

At the World Trade Organization meeting in December in Singapore, for example, it will be the EU that is expected to join with the United States to confront Asia to end child labor, stop slavery and offer such basics as the right to join a trade union.

Renewed conflict in Europe would inevitably involve the United States. The graves of 9,000 American war dead in a sprawling cemetery six miles east of here underscore the price of this alternative.

Many insist that Europe’s fate lies in such stark “either/or” terms. The drive toward European unity is on a bicycle, they say. If you stop, you fall off.

It’s not an easy ride.

Over the next decade, the EU states are committed to giving up sovereignty in such politically touchy areas as currency, foreign affairs, defense and law enforcement and opening their arms to new, less affluent members, mainly to the east.

At the same time, they must cut back popular welfare state benefits that have helped preserve social peace during the post-World War II era and also shoulder more of the burden for their own defense.

“Few countries in the world or international organizations face the number of daunting challenges the European Union and its 15 member states must confront in such a short period of time,” summed up Stuart Eizenstat, the U.S. undersecretary of commerce for international trade, who until earlier this year was the U.S. ambassador to the EU.

The quest for a common currency, seen as the glue needed to hold the EU together over the long haul, has become a kind of death-defying tightrope walk as member states wobble uncertainly toward their self-imposed deadline of January 1999.

Austerity budgets needed to prepare for the currency union have already brought rioters into the streets of Paris and more than 300,000 Germans to Bonn in the country’s largest street protest since World War II.

In Belgium, the Parliament has given Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene the power to rule by decree to reduce public debt and contain budget deficits.

With more cuts inevitable, political analysts predict a hot autumn on the streets of Western Europe. Last month, angry union officials representing French teachers announced plans for a campaign of protests and a possible strike over government plans to reduce jobs in education for the first time since the early 1980s.

Despite such pressure, the will to push ahead among key European leaders remains strong, and global currency markets continue to bet that monetary union will occur.

Eastward Expansion

Enlarging the EU eastward, the ultimate step in erasing the Continent’s old East-West divide, is also planned to start around the end of the century. It will probably be no easier and less popular than the run-up to monetary union.

Even the most economically advanced of the post-Soviet democracies, such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, will be drains on community coffers during their early years of membership. And because it is financially impossible to extend the EU’s huge farm subsidies to new eastern members, the EU’s single biggest handout--one equal to a whopping $15,400 annually for every full-time farm worker in the union--must either be slashed drastically or eliminated completely as part of the enlargement process.

But the cost of not enlarging eastward could be even greater, as Czech President Vaclav Havel reminded the European Parliament meeting in Strasbourg, France, as long ago as March 1994.

“If the future European order does not emerge from a broadening European Union . . . then it could well happen that . . . this future will fall into the hands of a cast of fools, fanatics, populists and demagogues, waiting for their chance to promote the worst European traditions,” he warned.

The success or failure of Europe’s great experiment rests on myriad unknowns, such as the commitment of a new generation of leaders now assuming power that has never experienced Europe at war.

For much of the last decade, Kohl, who dug bodies from the rubble of his bombed-out church in Ludwigshafen as a 15-year-old, the late French President Francois Mitterrand, once a prisoner of war of the Germans, and others from their generation pushed forward the dream of a unified Europe.

The new standard-bearers of European unity and the collective political will of their generation to make the tough choices needed to keep going forward remain a giant question mark.

Lure of Demagogues

Equally uncertain is the lure of demagogues and local populists in a Europe where state benefits are cut, unemployment rises to new post-World War II highs and prosperity gradually begins to erode. The Continent’s record in resisting the call to tribal loyalty is not good, and the tragedy of the former Yugoslav federation shows how quickly the grudges of history can explode when politicians start searching for scapegoats instead of solutions.

For Austrian Freedomist leader Joerg Haider or the president of France’s National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the target is foreigners; for Italy’s Umberto Bossi, the Northern League secessionist, the enemy is the lagging Italian south and corrupt government in Rome. In Belgium, Happart talks of Flemish cultural aggression and claims that the country’s very creation in 1830 was an Anglo-Prussian plot to contain French power.

For him, life’s defining experience was not the convulsion of war but the forced closure of his town’s French-speaking school by the Flemish government 20 years ago.

Even Europe’s most respected leaders occasionally try to score cheap points by playing to volatile public emotions, as did German Finance Minister Theo Waigel earlier this year when he addressed a gathering of former Sudeten Germans and demanded a Czech “word of regret” for the expulsion of Germans 50 years ago.

Waigel’s comments won calculated applause from his audience but drew a caustic response from Czech Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus, who suggested that Germans should discuss World War II in low whispers.

The role of Germany and the behavior of its leaders are a pivotal factor in Europe’s future. More than half a century after the Nazi collapse, Germany still brings the jitters to its neighbors.

A controversial study of the Holocaust by Harvard sociologist Daniel Goldhagen concludes that such horror could only have happened in Germany because only there would a people have cooperated so willingly.

But for half a century, the realities have mainly pointed elsewhere.

The former West Germany blossomed into a model and admired democracy, while those in the East engineered a spectacular and peaceful revolution against totalitarian rule. Today, it is a reunited Germany--whose currency and prosperity are the envy of its neighbors--that drives European unity forward and that has consistently taken the extra step to achieve compromise.

While pacifist instincts remain strong among Germans, they also have gradually begun to accept more responsibility for military security beyond their own frontiers.

After sitting out the 1991 Persian Gulf War, German forces joined the peace Implementation Force in the Balkans. Some complain that the Germans refuse to go beyond the fringes of the conflict (they operate only in Croatia), but the fact they are present at all is seen as a major psychological step.

Germany’s ability to accept a carefully measured military role in keeping the peace and to continue walking a fine line in political and economic affairs--leading while pretending not to lead--will also determine much of the Continent’s direction.

So too will the image of the European Union itself. In less than four decades, the modest six-nation plan to form a common market has grown into a union of 15 countries embarked on the greatest pooling of sovereignty between free and independent states since the American Revolution. Yet the EU inspires little public loyalty.

Few hearts in Europe beat faster at the sight of the EU’s blue and gold-starred banner.

Its accomplishments are taken for granted; its shortcomings and mistakes are the stuff of headlines.

‘Guardians of Peace’

If the EU fails to inspire, if it falls short of embracing much of the Continent in an economic and political union, then Europe could well go the way of Havel’s warning and fall prey to the fools, fanatics, populists and demagogues.

At one dramatic moment during his final speech to the European Parliament in January 1995, a frail and dying Mitterrand pushed aside his prepared remarks and spoke to the hushed house of more than 500 lawmakers, much as a father conveys wisdom to his children.

He reminisced about his time as a POW in Germany, the Germans he met there, the values and hopes he found they shared beneath the poison of nationalism.

“Nationalism is war,” he said. “And war is not just the past, it is perhaps the future too. It is you who are the guardians of peace and security.”

Marshall spent 20 years reporting from Europe, most recently as chief of The Times’ Brussels Bureau. Beginning Oct. 1, he will write from Washington.