L'Europe vue d'Australie : FORGET the image of united Europe. From secular France to Christian Poland, national differences are on the rise.
As the debate about Europe intensifies, national identity is becoming more, not less, important writes editor-at-large Paul Kelly
Illustration: Peter Nicholson
Beneath the incessant EU talkfest lie contradictions over identity, the eurozone economy and the famous European social model. As the debate about Europe intensifies, national identity is becoming more, not less, important.
In Paris, government officials talk about the European malaise. The EU has been brilliant at entrenching democracy and the market economy from Spain to Greece and Poland, but Europe suffers an internal culture shock.
The French have drawn the line. "It is time for the EU to define its limits and talk about its final borders," a senior French official says. "The EU cannot become a process of permanent enlargement."
The mood in Paris is against Turkish entry. Indeed, the French want a different debate, about the EU's endgame.
President of Fondation Robert Schuman, Jean-Dominique Giuliani, says: "We must provide for Turkey, given its support in the Cold War. But we need to limit our borders and public opinion is worried about Turkey. We need a neighbourhood association with Turkey but without its entry into the EU. Turkey's society is far from Europe and European citizen want to see clear borders."
The French aspiration is for a common European political culture. Last year's rejection by French voters of the new EU constitution (a rejection of the French Government as much as the constitution) was a shock. Paris thinks enlargement has strained to breaking point the EU's internal machinery and public acceptance.
With each expansion Paris sees its conception of the European project being watered down, along with its influence.
Yet the EU's civilising mission and the huge economic gains from membership guarantees a long list of aspiring entrants from the Balkans, Ukraine, Turkey and the Caucasus. This will follow the imminent expansion to 28 involving Bulgaria, Romania and Croatia, a done deal. In a little more than a half-century the original six have become 25 nations with EU institutions complex, bureaucratic and weak. Any talk of the EU as a power to rival the US or China is absurd since the EU is not a nation but an experiment in shared sovereignty.
Britain has long championed Europe's enlargement mission. So does the most influential of the "new 10", Poland, run by a right-wing nationalist Christian government. Poland is the new version of Euro scepticism. It comes with its history: a nation that once lost its independence for more than a century and, in the 20th century, has been the ultimate victim of totalitarian oppression.
"Poles are happy to be in the EU but there are differences in our political cultures," says Elzbieta Jakubiak, Secretary of State at the President's Chancellery in Warsaw.
"About 90 per cent of Polish society declares itself to be practising religion. Poland supported the reference to Christian values in the draft EU constitution. For us, the lack of this reference is a false and unnatural conclusion for Europe."
Her colleague Marek Cichocki says: "People in Poland don't believe we live in a post-national era. Our political culture is linked to tradition and we are attached to the idea of freedom. Poles cannot think of Europe as an EU without nation-states."
At the Foreign Ministry, Under-Secretary of State Stanislaw Komorowski says: "After we regained our independence in 1989, Poland had two objectives: to join NATO and to join the EU.
"Now they are achieved we need to be as influential as possible in these institutions. Poland believes that Europe should not close its borders, that it should not put new obstacles in the way of fresh entrants. And that means keeping an open mind on entry for Ukraine, which is a European country.
"Poland belongs to the West, socially, religiously, culturally. Yet because of history we were left on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. Now we are back where we always belonged. But Poland doesn't want to see new borders created by the EU that will only exclude others."
A visit to the Finance Ministry documents the reality behind Warsaw's rhetoric. The EU is a vast instrument for redistribution. From 2007 to 2013, Poland's average benefit from structural funds and agricultural subsidies will be E13 billion ($22 billion), equating to 4.7 per cent of gross domestic product annually. It is a bonanza, a tribute to the EU's huge wealth and its redistributive ability.
Europe, however, is not just divided over enlargement and identity; it also is split, fundamentally, over economic policy within the eurozone.
Although growth prospects are brighter this year, Europe is locked in a low-growth mire. It is poor economic performance across the big nations of western Europe, notably Italy (facing a crisis), France and Germany that provokes public anger and disillusionment. The defect lies embedded within the EU model. It is the contradiction between a single monetary zone spread across 12 nations with a central European bank setting interest rates for that zone and the persistent refusal to create a genuine single European market where goods, services, capital and labour can move freely.
The conundrum is that Europe has a monetary union but it does not have a single economic market, the way the US or Australia has a single market to underwrite its currency zone.
Europe's political leaders embraced the euro but failed to identify its consequences. European nations surrendered their currencies but have yet to surrender the national attachment to rules, systems and protectionism. This is not the fault of Brussels. It is the fault of national governments.
It is most evident in the area of services, where Europe's performance in relation to the US is weakest. Until these national governments, notably the French, agree to create a genuine free single market, then the eurozone will underperform and the long slow fuse of Europe's incremental crisis will keeping burning.
This brings us to the European social model that lies at the heart of such resistance. The truth, however, is that Europe does not have a single social model but a range of such models. Once again, national differences dominate. The key to analysing the EU is through the power of its different national political cultures.
Andre Sapir from Bruegel, a Brussels think tank, argues that Europe constitutes four social models that deliver different results.
These models with their rating are
Nordic (high on efficiency and equity),
Anglo-Saxon (high on efficiency and low on equity),
Continental (low on efficiency and high on equity)
and Mediterranean (low on efficiency and equity).
Sapir's conclusion is bracing: "Poised at this new crossroads in Europe's economic history, policy-makers must choose the path of reform at both the EU and national levels."