In this last year the European Union has greatly extended its membership and made substantial progress towards an agreed constitution. These are achievements, but not such as to ensure that the union has a great future, writes Desmond Fennell
I mean "great" in respect of creativity and impact on the world, like Europe prior to the second World War or the Soviet Union in its heyday, or like the US, Japan or China in the present.
On present showing, any hopes that such a future lies in store for the union are vain hopes. Its defects as a political entity will continue to hinder its strength, creativity and self-projection in the world.
The union entirely lacks any distinctive and animating ideology, rhetoric and symbolic system comparable to the ardent nationalisms of America, China and Japan, to Soviet patriotism in its heyday, or even to present-day English, French or Finnish nationalism.
The union's piecemeal development from free-trade area to quasi-state has not been guided by any profound realisation of what was being attempted, and of the need therefore to create for the new unified Europe an inspirational apparatus equal to that which helped to make historical Europe great.
That Europe, in its latter five centuries when it rose to leadership of the world, was rendered strong, creative and influential mainly by two factors. In the first place, it was a community of competing political communities, like ancient Greece in its heyday.
In addition, it was energised by two levels of inspirational indoctrination. At nation-state level, there was a collection of nationalist rhetorics and symbolisms. These convincingly conveyed to each component people that it was specially endowed with great ancestry, moral excellence, and outstanding abilities in certain fields. At the same time, shared by all the peoples was the imparted conviction that they belonged to that superior part of humanity that was Christian, European, white and civilised.
During the construction of the European Union, it has been assumed, without logical grounds, that success equivalent or superior to that of historical Europe could be achieved while ending that Europe's inter-state competition, and providing no equivalent for its double-layered inspirational apparatus.
This latter omission has combined with the union's opaque institutional structure to produce among its citizens no feeling whatsoever that they are its citizens (in the ordinary meaning of that word). On the one hand, in the everyday language of the union's peripheral peoples, "Europe" still means, in territorial terms, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Benelux countries, the rough equivalent of Charlemagne's Frankish empire.
On the other hand, throughout the entire union, "Europe" means, in political terms, the complicated dictatorship that issues its decrees regularly in Brussels. Of loyalty to that dictatorship, or a sense that it is a legitimate government deserving their obedience, there is among the ordinary, nominal citizens of the union no trace.
These are fundamentally debilitating features of what purports to be a quasi-state. Add to them that this quasi-state has no army, navy or air force, and is unlikely ever to have an armed force of significant size.
And add to that, because the union's rules say its members must agree unanimously on its foreign policy, it can have no foreign policy worthy of the name. Of that effective, independent action in the Balkans, say, which any single leading nation of the old Europe was capable of and practised, there can be no collective equivalent in the new.
Finally, given that this European quasi-state is extremely multi-ethnic, it lacks something which history has shown is essential for a multi-ethnic state to succeed, namely, a predominant ethnic group which leads and which the elites of the other ethnic groups come to terms with.
This role has been played in the US by the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, in the Soviet Union by the Russians, in the old German federation by Prussia, in Yugoslavia during its two successful periods by the Serbs, and in China by the Han. Signs were until recently that, in the European Union, France and Germany together (the old Frankish core) were keen on playing this role. But jealous forces within the union, combined with interested American subversion, have deprived the union of this serviceable, historically-rooted leadership.
In view of all this, there are grounds for believing that a better way for Europe to remake itself would have been to restrict its union to an administered free-trade area, leaving its nations to pursue their courses in varying combinations. But too late; the die is cast for a listless European quasi-state and the bumbling, marginal future which this holds in store.
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