The 10 Questions Europe Has to Answer in 2006

by Denis MacShane*
1) The budget row is over. France will now pay the same amount of money to the EU budget as the UK and France has agreed to a full review of the EU budget including the CAP – the first time since the 1960s that the agro-protectionist block in the EU has formally accepted that the CAP-dominated budget needs reform. Britain has given up some its rebate. Spain will lose, by some estimates, 85 per cent of the net transfers from Brussels it has hitherto enjoyed. Germany is paying more to help Poland. But the most important statistic in Europe remains not the budget but the 20 million Europeans without work. Can Europe return to its No 1 challenge – re-launching the European economy? Europe must stop talking about itself and start doing itself. If Europe can rediscover the energy in economic and job-creation terms that European nations had between 1950 and 1980, then the EU has a bright future.
2) That future will be based on a Europe of Nations. The EU adds value to what its member states do. It does not replace them. The annual EU budget represents a little over 1 per cent of European income – about a quarter of what the Pentagon spends. It is to the nations of Europe and their governments, political, economic and social actors that will fall the responsibility of making Europe succeed, stagnate, or decline.
3) The Europe of axes is over. Looking for a Franco-German axis, or a Warsaw-Berlin-Paris triangle, or a British-Nordic free trade group or a Europe run by its six biggest nations, as suggested by Nicholas Sarkozy, is looking for shapes made out of fog. There will be shifting alliances, common policies, joint initiatives, letters from two or more leaders but these will be contingent and mobile.
4) But do not ignore the growing European identity  created by the Euro, no borders between countries, common defence activity including EU military missions in the Balkans and Africa, or EU rules on competition, fish quotas, or anti-terrorist regulations. Never have so many people flown at such low prices to so many destinations in Europe as a result of Brussels enforcing common rules. This growing European identity may be taken for granted or not associated in any positive way with the EU but it is real.
5) Europe’s biggest challenge is to be Europe. The endless defining of Europe against the United States – whether by ardent admirers of the American economy or by those who those who want the EU to oppose the United States in a multi-polar contest across international policy options – leads to a sense of self-abnegation and denial. America in the 1960s and 1970s also went through wrenching economic and social changes but Americans mostly did not indulge in denying their future prospects. The slavish admiration or denigration of America are past their use-by dates. Let Europe be Europe.
6) European culture grows from the confidence of its national, city, regional, ethnic and religious cultures. The biggest exhibitions in London and Paris recently have been devoted to Turkish, Iranian and Chinese art. The most important new museum was the Guggenheim – an American investment – in Bilbao. The most exciting popular music now comes from African and Caribbean Europeans. The growing confidence of Muslim and Arab culture in Europe makes Europe a cross-roads of global cultures. The new culture of gay society also confirms a distinct European development that should underline Europe as a centre of tolerance and the spirit of Voltaire.
7) Europe needs networks. Merkel and Marcinkiewicz , Blair and Berlusconi, Schüssel and Sanader are not enough. The diplomats working for the  Quai d’Orsay or the Foreign Office provide the bridge-builders to help Europe through some of its crises. What is missing are men and women who can find the ways for Europe to move forwards, a new generation of Monnets or Schumanns who can talk to each other in confidence and build trust and understanding. Where are they?
8) Europe does need new institutions. If there is one lesson from the 2005 it is that six-month presidencies are now utterly out-of-date as mechanisms to allow the elected governments of Europe to manage their European obligations. The constitution was killed by the French and Dutch voters. To attempt to revive it  would produce a revolt amongst European citizens whatever the view of the European political elite. To be sure, there are ideas in the constitution including a standing chair of the European Council and more power for national parliaments that are worth introducing on the basis of  inter-governmental agreement. The European Parliament, important as it is, does not and cannot represent the European demos. The EU needs a senate composed on national parliamentarians as a second chamber of the European Parliament to re-connect European parliamentary work with the nations and citizens of Europe.
9) Europe also needs new policies. One achievement of the UK presidency was to secure agreement on telecommunication data storage so that the terrorist threat can be countered. Tony Blair also called for a European energy policy which is overdue as Europe grapples with the triple challenge of finding responses to global warming, the need for new energy sources, including nuclear power, and the obligation in the name of European solidarity to prevent energy supply being used to divide Europe against itself by using energy supply as a crude political pressure. Europe needs to increase its common foreign policy response. An immediate problem is Belarus, to Europe what Zimbabwe is to southern Africa. But in all these policy areas, the question must be asked: Is what the EU is proposing to do something that it can do uniquely? Thus there is no need for the EU to imitate or seek to replace the work of the Council of Europe, the OSCE or involve itself in cultural or education matters which are better handled by national or sub-national governments.
10) The agreement on the budget and linked breakthrough at the WTO ministerial meeting in Hong Kong brings to an end a year, 2005, in which Europe seemed only capable of saying  No. The Nonistes or No-Sayers had their best ever year in recent European saying No to the Constitution, No to economic reform, No to Services Directive, almost No to Europe honouring its word to Turkey to open membership negotiations. Until mid-December many thought that the No-Sayers would also say No to the budget. But pragmatic, tough negotiations and a willingness of all EU member states to compromise – some conceding more, some accepting less – allowed the potentially annus horriblis of 2005 for the EU to end on a positive note. Now Europe has to find projects to which European citizens, as well as their leaders, can say Yes to. That is the challenge for the rest of this decade. Europe need to think more, speak about itself less, and above all bury out-of-date thinking on the left and the right which denies 20 million Europeans the right to work.

Denis MacShane is Labour MP for Rotherham and was Minister for Europe 2002-2005