Can Europe Survive the Rise of the Rest?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/02/opinion/sunday/can-europe-survive-the-rise-of-the-rest.html

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Oxford, England

WHO won the most medals at the Olympics? Europe. Who has the largest economy in the world? Europe again. And where do most people want to go on holiday? Europe, of course. On many measures of power, the European Union belongs with the United States and China in a global Big Three. Yet say that to officials in Beijing, Washington or any other world capital today and they would probably laugh out loud. As European leaders stagger into yet another round of crisis summitry, this potential superpower is widely viewed as the sick man of the developed world.

Why? The flawed design of the euro zone has made Europe’s recession more acute than America’s, and a collapse of the euro zone would drag the rest of the world economy down with it. But why haven’t Europeans shown the political will to save the euro zone by moving toward closer fiscal and political union? What happened to the forces that drove the project of European unification forward over the last 60 years? And, if those have faded, where might Europeans find new inspiration?

As I recently argued in Foreign Affairs, the five great drivers of European unification since the 1950s have now either disappeared or lost much of their energy.

First and foremost was the personal memory of war, and the mantra of “never again,” which motivated three generations of Europeans after 1945. But the last generation to have experienced World War II is passing on, and the collective memory is weak.

Second, the Soviet threat provided a powerful incentive for Western Europeans to unite during the cold war. And throughout the cold war, the United States was an active supporter of European integration, from the Marshall Plan to the diplomacy around German reunification. No longer. Try as he might, Vladimir Putin is no Joseph Stalin. And these days, the United States has other priorities.

Third, until the 1990s, the engine of European integration was the Federal Republic of Germany, with France at the steering wheel. Germans felt a powerful idealistic desire to rehabilitate themselves in the European family of nations — and had a hard national interest in doing so. For only by gaining the trust of their neighbors and international partners could they achieve German reunification. Now that national purpose has been accomplished, and European idealism has faded with the passing of the wartime generations. These days, Germany will no longer reach for its checkbook whenever Europe calls.

Fourth, the once captive nations of Eastern Europe are no longer uniformly passionate about the European Union even though their citizens have more recent memories of dictatorship, hardship and war. While Poland is one of the union’s most vigorous advocates, Hungary and the Czech Republic are now among its most skeptical and contentious members.

Finally, the widespread assumption that “Europe” would mean a rising standard of living and social security for all Europeans has been badly dented by accumulated debt, aging populations, global competition and the crisis of the euro zone. Young Greeks and Spaniards hardly see those benefits today.

Nonetheless, even in the most skeptical countries there is a basic understanding that it is better to belong to a single market of 500 million consumers, rather than depend on a domestic one of 50 million, or fewer than 10 million — the size of half the European Union’s current members.

And that is the beginning of the new case for European unification. While we Europeans should redouble our efforts to ensure that our continent does not forget its troubled past, the need for scale is the key to our shared future. The 21st-century world will be one of giants: weary old ones, like the United States and Russia, and hungry new ones, like China, India, Brazil and South Africa. You do not need to accept the most apocalyptic forecasts of European decline to acknowledge that Europe is unlikely to remain the world’s largest economy for long. In such a world, even Germany will be a small- to medium-size power.

IF Europeans are to preserve the remarkable combination of prosperity, peace, relative social security and quality of life that they have achieved over the last 60 years, they need the scale that only the European Union can provide.

In a world of giants, you had better be a giant yourself: A trade negotiation between China and the European Union is a conversation between equals; one between China and France is an unequal affair.

A decade ago, Chinese policy makers took the European Union seriously as an emerging political force, a potential new pole in a multipolar world. Today, they treat it with something close to contempt. They look to Brussels only in a few specific areas, like trade and competition policy, where the European Union really does act as one. Otherwise, they prefer to deal with individual nations, as this week’s reception in Beijing for Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, made clear.

The remedy lies in Europe’s own hands. Were it to move beyond the resolution of the euro zone crisis into a closer fiscal and political union, then onto a genuinely common foreign policy, China would take it more seriously, as would America and Russia.

And Europeans should not entirely abandon the hope — faint though it looks today — that their pioneering version of peaceful integration between previously warring states could point the way for better “global governance” in response to shared threats like climate change and to the tensions that inevitably arise between rising and declining powers. For without enhanced cooperation on a global scale, the 21st-century world may come to look like the late-19th-century Europe of rivalrous great powers, writ large. At best, Europe could become not just another giant; it could offer the example of a new kind of cooperative multinational giant.

When Ms. Merkel’s 19th-century predecessor Otto von Bismarck was shown a map of Africa by an eager German colonialist, the Iron Chancellor, dismissing the strategic value of faraway colonies, replied that the only map that mattered to him lay in Europe: “France is to the left, Russia to the right, we’re in the middle — that’s my map of Africa.” Today’s Europeans need to adapt Bismarck’s wisdom, declaring “China, India and Russia are to the right, America and Brazil to the left — that’s our map of Europe.”

<NYT_AUTHOR_ID> <p>Timothy Garton Ash is a professor of European studies at Oxford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.