L'élargissement et les vagues de l'histoire

Dans ce commentaire, Michael
Emerson, chercheur au Centre for
European Policy Studies, retrace les évolutions ayant
mené l’Union européenne à jouer un rôle de véritable centre
d’attraction à l’égard de ses voisins d’Europe centrale et
orientale, et évoque deux scénarios possibles pour le prochain
demi-siècle. 

When asked what he had been most concerned with in his long
political career, the British Prime Minister of half a century ago,
Harold Macmillan, replied: “Events, dear boy, events.” Macmillan
was certainly well-read enough to have known Tolstoy’s argument in
War and Peace about the flood-tides in the ocean of history.
“Though the surface seemed motionless, the movement of humanity
continued as uninterrupted as the flow of time,” Tolstoy wrote.
“Coalitions of men came together and separated again; the causes
that would bring about the formation and the dissolution of empires
and the displacement of peoples were in course of
preparation.” 

Our dear leaders of Europe are still
having trouble keeping up with events, especially regarding the
political structure and geography of Europe. But what are events
telling us these days about the flood-tides in the ocean of
contemporary European history? 

Principally the story is this. The EU has
created a system of institutions and values that have become the
dominant gravitational force in the whole of the European
continent. Yet EU leaders find themselves confronted with a
strategic dilemma. On the one hand they would like to keep the EU
reasonably compact in number of member states; on the other, the
high principle of their system is to be open to all European
democracies. As a result they have created, although to their own
surprise and not by strategic design, the world’s most powerful
magnet whose strict conditions for membership transform the
periphery in line with the model of the center. 

This great conditionality machine is
simple in essence, while hugely complex in implementation. If you
sincerely want to join the club, here are the rules you have to
respect, namely the infamous 30,000 pages of EU legislation. But
the leaders of the former communist states of central and eastern
Europe have discovered that this is the fastest and surest way of
achieving the transition into the modern world of liberal democracy
and the open society. 

The EU has been trying for 20 years to
persuade its neighbors to be satisfied with close association
arrangements, rather than full membership. First there were the
Nordic countries, who were offered full integration within the EU’s
single market without political membership. Sweden and Finland only
took a few years before deciding that this was politically
unacceptable—to be policy takers without a voice in policy
making.   

Then when the Berlin Wall fell it was
thought that just the four Visegrad states of Central Europe would
be serious candidates, and the former Soviet Baltic states were
expected not to follow suit. But that did not work either. Then it
was supposed that Romania was incapable of making the grade, but
that seems to have been wrong again. And so here we are now with EU
25, about to become EU 28 (with Bulgaria, Romania and soon after
Croatia). As for the rest of the Balkans our leaders again found
themselves unable to stop the flood-tide of history, and have
accepted that all of the region should one day accede to what then
would be EU of 33. By this time Norway and Iceland would decide
that it was time to join in, making EU 35. 

Now the Turkey question is serious. Turkey
is led by a formerly Islamist party, which a few years ago was
viewed with relief as proof of Turkey’s unsuitability for accession
to the EU. Surprise event! The party says it has converted itself
into a Muslim equivalent of Germany’s Christian Democratic Party,
and demonstrates that Islam is compatible with secular democracy
following exactly EU norms—at a time when Europe’s existential
priority is to avoid the clash of civilizations. So Turkey cannot
be ignored any longer. 

To read the article in full, visit the Centre for European Policy Studies website.