Telo M. European Union and New Regionalism. Regional Actors and Global Governance in a Post-Hegemonic Era
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from Constantinople/Istanbul to Helsingfors/Helsinki before the waves of national
assimilation and ethnic cleansings.
The change has been enormous because of its concentration to certain cities,
mainly capital or otherwise central cities. In Amsterdam about half of school
children are of immigrant background, and in Paris in 1990 a third of all youths
below 17 lived in a family of immigration. In the early 1990s ‘non-whites’ made up
a fifth of the Greater London population. In Frankfurt and Brussels a good quarter
of the resident population are ‘foreigners’. (Therborn, 1995:49–50)
Even if one, as this writer, considers multiculturalism as an asset, sociology
and history teach us, that it is not unproblematic. What ‘Europe’ will mean to the
West Indians or Bangladeshis in Inner London, to the Mahgrebins in the suburbs
around Paris, to the Turks and the Kurds in Berlin and Frankfurt is far from self-
evident. And if there will be little or no proper space for them on the labour market
and for their cultures among the cultures of Europe, the ensuing society will not
be the normative area of the Council of Europe with its recognition of the rights
of diversity.
The prospects for a rich, peaceful, and stimulating multiculturalism versus
those of ghettoization, crime and ethnic strife and violence are difficult to assess.
Evidence available so far belies any straightforward extrapolation in either
direction. Unemployment hits proportionately more immigrants and immigrants’
children than natives. The immigrant population tends to have a higher crime rate
than the native. Xenophobic and ethnic violence has become part of social life all
over Europe. Nativist parties and politicians have gained widespread support in
several countries, notably in Austria, Belgium, France, and Switzerland. Protest
riots against racism and discrimination have occurred in Britain, France and
Germany.
On the other hand, there are also a large number of positive inter-ethnic contacts,
including marriages. Public policy and public opinion are strongly in favour of
multicultural integration. The immigrants, for their part, are not reducible to passive
objects of discrimination. As migrants they tend to represent the more vigorous and
active part of their original population. Therefore it is not surprising that many
of them, or their children, do very well at school. The raw school records do not
take class into account, which gives a distorted picture of school performance and
migration. In all countries there is a considerable new ethnic entrepreneurship, and
also, in the areas of concentration, a new ethnic politics.
To conclude, even if disaster scenarios are unlikely, Western European societies
of the future are likely to be less cohesive than in the past, harbouring more
mechanisms of exclusion than in the 1960s and 1970s. And certainly, there will
be less of any unity or social integration rooted in ancient European culture and
identity. Even the memory of the fatal national wars will disappear as a centripetal
force – already in a few years, when the generation of Helmut Kohl leaves the
political front stage. However, there are as yet no tendencies of socioeconomic and/
or cultural polarization or segmentation in sight likely to break up the institutional
inertia, either of ‘Europe’ or of the Western European nation states.
Europe: Trading Power, American Hunting Dog, or the World´s Scandinavia?
289
The East-West divide
The adoption of capitalist democracy in Eastern Europe has not turned out to be a
quick fix of Northwestern European prosperity. But, how high the costs of systemic
change have been, and for how long they will have to be paid, is controversial and
uncertain, respectively. To analyze them is completely outside the scope of this
chapter. However, in order at least to hint at the magnitude of making one Europe,
a couple of indicators are needed.
Unicef data on life expectancy show a clear difference between, on one hand,
the countries of the former Soviet Union and the Balkans and, on the other, Poland,
Czechia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and, with qualification, Hungary. The latter group
maintained their late-Communist mortality rates during the first years of the 1990s
and have already started to improve, although not yet at the rate of improvement
during the 1980s. The successor states of the USSR (including the Baltics) and the
Balkans on the other hand, have experienced a dramatic decline of life expectancy,
which was already considerably lower than in Western Europe even before 1989–
91.(Unicef, 1995:24ff, 143) As increased life expectancy is one of the very few
development indices in which even sub-Saharan Africa has been able to participate,
the 1990s decline in post-Communist Eastern Europe is a serious sign.
By the turn of 1997–98 only Poland was at least back at its GDP of 1989 (in the
Polish case somewhat above both the pre-crisis peak of 1978 and 1989). Eastern
Europe (except the ex-USSR) as a whole was about 8 per cent below its level of
1989. Before the crisis of 1998, the GDP of Russia was less than 60 per cent of
its 1989 level. Consumption expenditure figures give a somewhat brighter picture.
According to them, the 1989 was reached by 1995–96 in Croatia, the Czech
Republic, Poland, Romania and Slovenia. In the other countries, real consumption
expenditure had not reached its level under Communism (UN, 1998:146–47).
Thereafter, there has been a substantial recovery. By 2005, only Bulgaria out of
the latest EU members was still below its overall economic level of 1989. Latvia
and Lithuania were about level, and the others significantly above the economically
not very glorious year of 1989. Russia (index 88), Ukraine (59), and Serbia (58)
were still well below, but not Belarus (123, on a par with the Czech Republic and
Estonia) (UNECE, 2006:15). Nevertheless, there is a persistent gap between East
and West. In 2004 the OECD (2004:194) calculated that with the growth rates
of 1995–2003 it would take Poland thirty-seven years to close half of that gap,
Hungary twenty-nine years.
The East-West divide and the internal polarization in the East will interact with
the economic and the ethnic segmentations and tensions in the West, and with
the political efforts at wider continental integration. This will probably involve
an upper middleclass continental rapprochement – already palpable – a tendency
to aggravate the frustrations of the working and of the unemployed classes both
from the East and West, without bringing them closer to each other, and, thirdly, to
complex webs of continental networks of crime and of illicit business.
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4 Conclusion: A second West Germany or Scandinavia enlarged?
The future of Europe in the world is a function of its weight, its specificity and its
unity. Western Europe is still a global heavyweight, but it has lost some force and
speed. The institutional specificity of European societies as an aggregate remains,
but is being subject to erosion both from the inside and from the environment.
Globalization is not trumping European-type regionalization. But the most dynamic
specificity of Europe, the effort at building a supra-state ‘Europe’, alongside the
continental system of nation states, is facing difficult tasks of unification, within
the increasingly segmented Western European societies as well as bridging the
recently much widened gap in life chances for the bulk of the population in Eastern
and Western Europe.
We may summarize the important possible future positions in the world by
Table 14.5.
A plus sign on either political or economic relative performance, in comparison
with the average of the world according to prevailing criteria – which may be
political efficiency and stability or armed might, and economic growth or level of
wealth – is a prerequisite for influence or power. Negative signs on both means
underdevelopment or marginalization. In order to distinguish sharply between
power and influence I have here called the holder of the latter a ‘model’. A model
is taken as influential only to the extent that other people choose to regard it as
such. Lack of plus signs on both influence (model capacity) and power means
insignificance, irrelevance, whatever the objective level of performance. You
may also have plus signs in all cells, having both economic and political model
influence, as well as power.
Europe is not going to under develop or to be marginalized in the foreseeable
future, neither politically nor economically. Europe in the next century will not
become the, say, East Africa or Luxemburg of the twentieth century. But will
it remain a significant, major player in the world? And if so, will this be as an
institutional or policy model or as a power bloc?
‘Europe’ as a global role model might take on two appearances, not necessarily
incompatible with each other. It might appear as an economic model, of market
unification and supra-state economic organization, possibly but much less likely
of economic institutions in general. ‘Europe’ might also be taken as a normative
model, of human rights, citizenship, gender and generation relations, of supra-
national norms and institutions.
As a power bloc ‘Europe’ is most unlikely to manifest itself in any other form
than an economic one, as a continental ‘trading-state’ of the sort that the West
Germans and the Japanese created so successfully after their military defeat. Even
Table 14.5 Kinds of standing in the world
Relative Performance Model Power
Political +/- +/- +/-
Economic +/- +/- +/-
Europe: Trading Power, American Hunting Dog, or the World´s Scandinavia?
291
a successful EU agreement on a common foreign and security policy is unlikely
to yield any globally impressive military power. And without the backing of force
and willingness to use it, ‘Europe’ is unlikely to become a normative power, telling
other parts of the world what political, economic and social institutions they should
have.
What may happen in the short run, and there are currently clear signs of it, is that
old colonial reflexes and secularized vestiges of Christian mission can enlist Europe
as an auxiliary force, a global Hilfspolizei, of the United States. After some Balkan
testing in the 1990s, German troops are at the time of writing proudly patrolling
northern Afghanistan for the Americans. Not only the British government and the
Polish warriors, but also the rightwing government of the previously very peaceful
Denmark are currently relishing in fighting Islamists in Afghanistan and Iraq. It
is difficult to see this hunting dog role as sustainable for Europe. The widespread
intense British hatred of or contempt for Tony Blair because of his part in the war
on Iraq seems to indicate that.
However, in human societies anything can happen. A negative scenario of
European recruitment to an endless anti-Islamist crusade, supported by mounting
xenophobia at home has become at least conceivable. Large sectors of the Danish
and the Dutch populations have already shown how rapidly a liberal bonhomie
may be dropped for the frenzy of a frightened petite-bourgeoisie. Also in Sweden,
the liberal press was cheering on the American bomber squadrons and missiles
against Afghanistan and Iraq.
Were that tendency to gain the upper hand, the influence as well as the power of
Europe in the world would soon be gone. At best meaningless and irrational to the
new economic heavyweights of East and South Asia, frustratingly incomprehensible
to Latin Americans, and hated and despised by the whole Muslim world, a Europe
bogged down in Afghanistan, Iraq, or some other American hunting ground has
no positive relevance to the ASEAN, the Mercosur, or the African Union. And in
the eyes of a ruling America Europe would still remain sissy, because most of the
killing would be made by the Americans.
After all, Europe is more likely to keep a significant position in the world of
the next century. But not all places in the sun look available. A position as a major
politico-military power of global reach is to be ruled out for Europe, as far into
the future as any eye can see – except among some nostalgic politicians in the
ex-big-power countries, who are looking into their rear-view mirror Acceptance
as a significant economic institutional model appears very unlikely, for the time
being. Lacking the American back-up of military muscle, mass culture and elite
economics education, European economic role-modeling would have to rely – at
least to begin with – almost exclusively on clearly superior economic performance,
once the inspiration to other regional market arrangements has been spent. There
have hardly been any signs of that in the past twenty years, and it is unlikely
that aging Europe will provide the world with any new economic achievements
impressive enough to compare with either side of the Pacific.
This leaves us with two possible (positive) options, which do not necessarily
exclude each other, but could very well mix in various combinations. One would
be the position of a major purely economic power, the other that of a socio-political
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institutional model of some significance of influence, even if generally accepted as
such. In the former case Europe would become a sort of post-war West Germany
or Japan of the next century, that is, an economically prominent ‘trading state’. The
other, a Scandinavia writ large.
Both variants are variants of Europe, and have therefore a common background
and certain common preconditions of relative success. Both represented a break
with a, in the end disastrous, military power past – although the major Scandinavian
defeats occurred in the century of 1709–1809. Instead, both followed a concentration
on internal socio-economic construction, in neither case economically inward-
looking and protectionist, though, but open to and reaching out for the markets
of the world. Both the Federal Republic and the Scandinavian countries became
eminently prosperous in that way.
They differ in two basic respects: most obviously, of course, in their size and
significance in the world., but also in their interest in social experimentation and in
universalistic social norms. ‘No experiments’, was once a winning electoral slogan
in post-war West Germany, whereas ‘social reform’ has been a persistent aim of
successful Scandinavian politics. Scandinavians have also been outstandingly
active in pushing universalistic and supra-state norms, in the Council of Europe,
in the United Nations and the UN Conferences and Conventions, in the Palme
and Brundtland Commissions and in the most recent Commission on Global
Governance. German foreign policy has had a strong supra-state component in the
commitment to European unification, but has not shown any strong universalistic
interests.
Both variants are built on strong, if differently organized, forms of social
integration, and both require a well-managed prosperous economy. But there is
one major difference in the economic prerequisites. The German-type economic
power play requires the constant reproduction of a sharp competitive edge of a
long economic blade. A Scandinavian-type role model only needs some sharply
competitive niche capacity and maintenance of a certain amount of relative
prosperity.
For the future, both a Germany- and a Scandinavian-type Europe will require
some positive solutions to the two major problems of European unity – the
economic-cultural divisions within Western Europe and the gaps between Eastern
and Western Europe. A European ‘Scandinavia ‘will demand a maintenance of
characteristically European institutions as well as new endeavours with regard to
human and citizenship rights in the world. A European ‘Germany’ will have to
produce new generations of large-scale competitiveness.
In the beginning of the twenty-first century, Europe has three major options. It
can solidify its position as the world’s leading trader, and as such a big economic
Table 14.6 Europe’s positive futures
Model Power
Political ‘Scandinavia’? -
Economic - ‘Trading state’?
‘Germany’
Europe: Trading Power, American Hunting Dog, or the World´s Scandinavia?
293
power, which will not be very easy to achieve, given the surging economic
dynamism of East Asia and India. But its skills in financial and other business
services, and the pooled economic clout of the Union provide Europe with a fair
chance in the intermediate run.
A disaster scenario, not to be ruled out, is Europe as the hunting dog of the
United States, providing supporting bellowing, helping to drive the prey into the
guns of the Americans, and taking care of the prey killed. It is certainly the explicit
option of very few, but it might come about by politicians dreaming of re-gaining
lost world power, of ideological zealots and crusaders dreaming of a world safe for
‘Western values’, and the support of angry xenophobes and racists.
A third option is to develop Europe as a social model, of economic efficiency
combined with trans-national law, relative equality, social security, and humane
social relations, of ecological awareness and commitment, of multi-national/multi-
cultural coping. A social continent prepared to help others in need, but abstaining
from ambitions to the dictate the good to others, as well as from bombardments
and invasions.
Which ideal-typically stereotype option to choose is a matter of preference.
But my guess is that at least by the second half of the twenty-first century the best
Europeans can hope for is to constitute a nice, decent periphery of the world, with
little power, but with some good ideas.
Notes
1 An interesting symptomatic reading of this new ideological export is provided by Galal
and Shirley (1994), a publication oozing the zeal of true believers Justly, the editors
recognize Lady Thatcher’s United Kingdom as the ‘pacesetting privatizer’ (p.6).
2 The issue of human rights is, of course, much more serious and difficult in the Americas
than in Western Europe, but according to Chilean human rights activists interviewed in
Santiago in January 1996, the new American institutions are doing a good job.
3 A good example is the World Bank’s country report on Hungary: ‘International
comparison shows that Hungary spends a far larger share [about the same as that of
Austria or Italy] of its resources on welfare than other market economies at similar
stages of development. .... if Hungary is to join the ranks of high-income countries,
reforming its welfare system is a sine qua non.’ (World Bank, 1995:b:25. Italics in the
original.) The report then goes on to spell out, that if you don’t severely cut pensions
rights and abolish general family allowances you will never join the rich.
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PART IV
Reconsiderations
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Chapter 15
European Union, Regionalism, New
Multilateralism: Three Scenarios
Mario Telò
1 New regionalist studies and European integration studies: Two bridges
To what extent is the discussion, concerning the European Union and its international
role, a crucial part of the broader debate on new regionalism? The first bridge
between European integration studies and comparative regionalist studies is the
controversial international salience of the regional cooperation process occurring
in Europe since 1945. We focused Part II of this volume on this side of the question.
This books takes explicit distance from two extreme theses: the EU as ‘the model
for regional integration’ in the classical ‘Balassian’ understanding, which has been
even more recently revived and is rejected by all the authors of this volume, in clear
terms by R. Higgott. Secondly, this volume rejects the opposite idea: according to
several scholars, that all that we learned from comparative research is the European
exceptionalism, that is the impossibility of a unique experience to interact, in terms
of mutual learning, by deepening similarities and differences, with other paths to
regional cooperation. In our understanding the European continent (and not just
the EU, but also the Council of Europe, the OCSE, and so on) still provides the
most complex, rich and elaborated workshop of regional cooperation/integration in
the world, namely of institutionalized integration. That’s why we absolutely need
further comparative studies including the European case, out of teleological and
evolutionistic models.
The second bridge between the EU experience and regional cooperation abroad
is the main topic of the present concluding chapter: we will focus attention on the
consequences of the occurring transformation of the EC/EU from a mere regional
regime into an international actor in the making, establishing relations with other
continents and regions and addressing the theoretical question of the nature of
its ‘power’. Many questions still remain open regarding both its institutional
capabilities and its ability to cope with the uncertainties of the globalized world after
the Cold War .
1
However, this major change is a matter of facts: the open question
is whether the European international regime is moving towards a mere entity, or a
player, or an actor, or already a new kind of power. Not only the article by B. Hettne
but also several insights provided by Söderbaum, Vasconcelos, Seidelmann, Joffé
and Therborn show how relevant the international size of the EU influence is both
in the near and the far abroad, allowing to define it as the second global actor after
the USA, to which it can be assimilated in terms of GDP (about 12 000 billions