PARIS, May 15 (UPI) -- Like the loyal soldiers of Napoleon's Old Guard, the dedicated bureaucrats of the European Union never surrender. The project for further political union, widely pronounced dead after the Dutch and French rejected the EU's draft new constitution last year, has been revived in another form.
The European Commission in Brussels has drafted a new proposal, which it seeks to launch publicly next year, on the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, the original agreement among the six founding member states that established the European Economic Community.
The new proposal, now being circulated among governments, seeks to win the support of the current 25 member states of the EU and the European Parliament behind a new Political Declaration "which not only sets out the EU's values and ambitions but also contains a shared undertaking to deliver them as an 'obligation d'engagement'." (This last phrase is in the original French, and while a direct translation would be "an obligation of engagement" it carries in French a rather stronger and more formal pledge.)
"The aim is to lead over time to an institutional settlement which strengthens the overall political ambition of consolidating a 'projet de vie en commun'," the document goes on. (Again this last phrase is in the original French, and it carries a firmer promise than the raw English translation of "a project of life in common.")
The real commitment of the Commission's new project is embedded in the document's final phrase, a quotation from the revered founding father of the European project, Jean Monnet, which reads: "There is no future for the European people other than in union."
The details of the Commission plan are full of good sense. It proposes to publish next year an undertaking of how and at what pace the EU should complete its single market for goods and services.
This is much more challenging than it sounds. The last year has seen a series of efforts in France, Italy, Poland and Britain to retain national control over key industries like energy and banking, to the frustration of those who see a genuinely free and common market among the EU's 450 million citizens as the silver bullet that could finally lift the sluggish growth rates of its larger economies.
The Commission plan also proposes "to transmit directly all new proposals and consultation papers to national parliaments and invite them to react, so as to improve the process of policy formation."
This would help ease the growing resentment among the various national electorates of the way the European elite in Brussels and the heads of national governments meeting in the EU Council in Brussels tend to agree matters among themselves, and then present them to national parliaments as a done deal. The public suspicion that the governance of Europe is a remote, secretive, undemocratic and elitist business has been corrosive, and helps to explain those crucial 'No' votes that the Dutch and French, two of the founding members of the European project fifty years ago and usually considered among the most pro-European in sentiment, delivered last year.
There are four main problems with the new Commission proposal. The first is that the thrust of its argument is that the problems of Europe can best be solved by more Europe, more common strategies and policies, more commitment to the European dream. And Europe's voters have heard this too often before.
The second difficulty is that the citizens of the EU stubbornly refuse to see themselves that way; they continue, as do their national politicians, to see themselves primarily as French, British, Dutch and Polish and so on, with distinct national interests that do not necessarily coincide with those of the EU elite in Brussels. For example, the latest Russian-German agreement to build a new energy pipeline under the Baltic Sea, by-passing the usual land routes through Poland and Ukraine, has been condemned by Poland's Defense Minister Radek Sikorski as reminiscent of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the 1939 deal between Hitler's Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union to carve up Poland between them.
The third problem is that too many of the current national leaders in Europe do not have the political clout to deliver on any undertakings they make. Tony Blair in Britain is a weak lame duck, and so are French President Jacques Chirac and his hapless Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. Italy's new premier, Romano Prodi, is a passionate pro-European, but presides over a fractious coalition with a thin majority and a nebulous mandate.
The fourth difficulty is locked within the text of the new EU proposal. It defines itself as a Political Declaration, just like the Political Declaration that was agreed at Messina in Sicily 50 years ago, and which led to the Treaty of Rome. And as the new document says, that meeting at Messina came after another political setback, the defeat of the plan for a common European Defense Force, seen in its day as just as devastating a blow to the European idea as the French and Dutch "No" votes last year.
But today's Europe of 25 nations, soon to be 27 with Bulgaria and Romania, and with Ukraine and Turkey and the Balkan and Caucasus states all knocking at the door, is a very different creature with very different economic and social systems to the Western Europe of 1957.
The new Europeans have their own distinct political traditions, in which the agreement of Messina and the Treaty of Rome mean very little. This distant European history matters a great deal less than the current reality which has most of the rich EU member states refusing, despite the rhetoric of single market and European solidarity, to let the poorer citizens of new Europe come to work and prosper. (Britain and Ireland are notable exceptions to this.)
It is noteworthy that the EU-enthusiasts in Brussels have overcome their crisis of morale and are trying again. It is significant that a year after the Dutch and French votes they think they can make progress toward a new "obligation d'engagement" for a new "project de vie en commun." It is interesting that they are prepared to bring the national parliaments much more closely into the EU's policy process. But it is all too depressingly familiar that they continue to underestimate the politics and sentiments of Europe's 25 nation states and the reluctance of national electorates to put their trust in Brussels and its eternal plea for "more Europe."
