What kind of Europe is possible in the future?

In a recently published statement, Colin Crouch argues that the question of how much sovereignty governments of EU member sta-tes are willing to give up in favour of the grand design, namely to create a political union and strengthen supranational institutions, is at least as old as the integration process itself. The question was sidelined for decades. It was revitalised in the context of the Maastricht treaty and later in drafted but failed constitution project. Surprisingly the issue is on the agenda again, however under more dire conditions than 60 years ago.

After reconstruction of the war-torn economies was to some extent completed, the issue in the 1950s focused on creating conditions for a peaceful Europe to avoid the reemergence of aggressive nationalism and interstate wars. In this prospect European integration was fully successful.

The present debate on the future of the euro is linked to the fate of European integration and happens unfortunately at a time when fundamental changes in the power constellations of the internatio-nal system occur. However the issue of today is not any more preser-vation of the status quo, but what position and role Europe may, should and could play in the world of tomorrow. This question was neglected previously. There was no need to address such issue, because in the minds of political and ruling elites the hegemony of the United States over the western parts of Europe was widely accep-ted. Washington’s position rested on the following functions:

· to guarantee the peaceful transition of nationalism toward Europeanization without interfering directly;

· to safeguard the security concerns of Western European states during the period of the Cold War and bipolarity;

· to keep Germany until 1990 under Allied dominance and control, a role which was shared with the Soviet Union and her obligations in Eastern Germany;

· to allow the rise of European economies as competitors to the US as long as Washington’s global defence and security position remained unchallenged and his predominance in global trade and financial regimes or networks was uncontested.

Relatively closed and evenly economically structured world of the former OECD countries, including Japan, ended somewhere in the middle of the 1970’s. The first shock waves for some countries and industrial sectors, happened in the middle of the seventies demo-lishing industrial sector after industrial sector. But the dominance of the US in ruling the financial, security and military networks was never at stake and continued well into the new millennium.

Transatlanticism as the ruling ideology of the Western hemisphere was never questioned. And even today, twenty two years after the security equation fundamentally changed in the whole of Europe and globally, when concerns about the domestic and external course of US-politics are growing, transatlanticism still remains the dominant ideology for the ruling political strata in Europe.

However, neither against Washington nor embedded in a long-term strategic project, European integration embarked in Maastricht 1992 upon a path of development which differed from the US model. The creation of the European Union was accompanied with ambitious projects:

· the creation of an unified European market;

· the introduction of a common currency;

· the visa-free-travel within the Schengen agreement;

· the establishment of a common foreign and security policy.

Each project rested on interaction, on intensive forms of dialo-gues and laid the basis for networks and regimes fully controlled by European institutions. In setting up economic, financial and partly political institutions and networks, the hegemony of the US was challenged. Transatlanticism as the coherent ideology of member state elites was weakened. As a result, the EU stepped into the role of a global player but without adequate institutions and without a consensus among national member state elites. The situation is best illustrated in Xavier Solana’s concept of European foreign policy which was later upgraded to the first European security doctrine.

Summing up, all the new efforts produced some sort of an unfinished torso, because the path to political integration and state building was blocked.

We can indicate some reasons which drove us into such situation.

First, the EU’s enlargement to the East, a necessity to safeguard and stabilize the Central European states, came too fast and overruled all efforts to finish the process of deepening integration. But the decision to widen and not to deepen integration led to a loss of consensus. The EU was fragmentized from within.

Second, launching a common currency gave credit to the EU’s role as a global player. But evidently such decision mostly driven by political objectives, disregarding economic and social facts, shar-pened the fragmentation in the EU between competitive and rather weak economic actors. Instruments of the EU, like the social and economic programmes for harmonization and reconstruction, were expected to bridge the growing differences in terms of competitiveness among member states. But membership in the euro-zone was primarily used to gain access to favourable credit conditions on international financial markets. State and private debts grew astronomically in the less competitive states. And the financial markets played their role, hoping and speculating on bail-out procedures if states would be confronted with default. So far, their gambit proved to produce the desired outcome: gigantic financial rescue programmes were created, and in the end the transformation of the EU into a Transfer Union without a political roof could well happen.

Third, such a scenario is more than possible, and as well in the interests of the still dominant actor in global financial markets, the US. The US were challenged, indeed, but kept their predominance in the security and defence field, and above all in financial matters. US-rating agencies and banks, supported by US–governments, define until today conditions and rules on the international financial market. No players including the European Union or China is able to confront or change the global predominance of the US-banking-ra-ting-government complex, and pressure from within is out of sight.

To sum up and sketch possible future scenarios: Where do we go from here, and what kind of Europe is possible in the future?

Europe has been thrown into a deep crisis of identity. Already in 2011 Eurobarometer, a permanent public opinion poll on trends among EU member states, showed that only 42% of European citizens trusted Brussels, while less than 49% rated the membership of their country in the EU as positive. Such sobering assessment of pe-ople throughout the EU is remarkable, because since 2009 the degree of democratisation and transparency of the EU institutions grew and the envisioned «Strategy 2020» precisely focuses on growing participation of European citizens. Contrary to such ideas the legiti-macy of the EU and EU institutions did not enhance. In the wake of the present financial crisis, the gap between Europe’s citizens and the EU institutions widened.

Such crisis may and could lead to the revitalisation of nationalism, and following from that the stoppage of European integration. Trends of such nature are visible in most of the member states, impeding further progress to political unity and the emergence of Eu-ropean identity.

Such scenario, the reemergence of nationalism and the fragmentation of the EU in diverse parallel existing groupings of states, hold together by particular interests, would not mean the end of the EU as such, but definitely the end of the EU as an emerging global player.

None of the member states alone, or interlinked in groups with varying degrees of integration would be able to resist and counter the challenges from the outside. On top of this, Europe’s security needs would be solely transferred to NATO, dismantling any effort of the EU to create her own CFSP. The EU would again slip under the political and security dominance of Washington.

The conflict and struggle over the Euro are the battlegrounds where such questions and prospects will be decided.

The EU will remain as an integrated entity with or without the Euro. But the political coherence and projecting power of the EU to participate in shaping the future of the whole continent and its adjacent areas in the South and in the East will shrink. In this respect, the Euro crisis is essential for the political fate of the EU altogether.

This may involve decisions against the constellation of participant states within this zone, but the alternative is clear. Either the crisis is settled without destroying the social coherence or political consensus in member states, without regressing to national policies or the whole continent will be weakened. To avoid such development, political decisions to rectify policies of the past which proved to be inappropriate are necessary.

In light of such efforts political elites would be forced to reconsider the Maastricht treaty obligations. If not, or in the case the EU would give up or postpone any move in such direction the political dimension of unity or equivalent forms of statehood would be eliminated from the agenda. The EU would mutate to a role not too different from the EEC during the times of bipolarity – only that the other pole would not be located in Europe.