Where is the World Going? (and Europe ...?)

Michel Herland
Economist. Professor at the University of French West Indies and Guiana and Aix-Marseille

Pascal Lamy, Nicole Gnesotto and Jean-Michel Baer
Où va le monde? [in French]
Paris, Odile Jacob, 2017, 235 pp., € 19,90

Where is the world going? Three French specialists, three convinced Europeans, have asked the question in a recent book. Pascal Lamy and Jean-Michel Baer worked in the cabinet of Jacques Delors at the European Commission before occupying positions of responsibility within the same Commission (P. Lamy later went to the WTO). Nicole Gnesotto holds the chair of EU affairs at the university Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers and presides over the destinies of the French Institute of High Studies on National Defence. Although they do not answer the question asked in the title – who could? – , they let nonetheless understand that Europe, due to its values and its traditions, would be – if it existed on the international scene – the best suited to help overcome the tensions that characterize the world today.

State of the field

This book, for the most part, analyzes the situation of the world and of Europe in the recent period. Thus, the authors distinguish three stages in the last globalization: a first happy phase (1985-2001) characterized by the unprecedented growth of the emerging countries, the progress of democracy and, on the ideological level, the belief in the perfection of the markets and the end of history (Fukuyama). There has been then a “painful” phase since 2001, inaugurated by the attacks of September 11, 2001, that will be followed by the war in Iraq and then by the Georgian crisis in 2008, the failure of the Arab revolutions in 2011 and, on the economic plane, the financial crisis of 2008, with the realization that globalization does not benefit all in the same way, that there are losers next to winners, that inequality is increasing in Northern countries. One might think the picture is already sufficiently depressing, but the authors add a third phase from 2013 (the year marked by the annexation of Crimea), the period of “crises and powerlessness”, with a slower growth  of the emerging countries and weakness elsewhere, the emergence of a terrorist State and the accelerated deconstruction of the Middle East, a Turkey which is going to “Putinize” itself, the election of Donald Trump in the United States, the concerns related to the technological revolution, etc.

Concerning Europe, the authors also distinguish three steps. The first (1950-1990) corresponds to its “golden age”, peace and prosperity, that of the Europe of the six, expanding without apparent difficulties to nine and then to twelve, with the prolegomena of a European democracy (1979: election of its Parliament by universal suffrage). The next phase (1990-2008) is that of the “Greater Europe” with the entry of the Central and Eastern European countries, the euro, Schengen, an embryo of common foreign and security policy, but also that of the difficulties tied to the heterogeneity of the new configuration. From 2008 on, comes finally the “Europe of crises”: Greek crisis, refugee crisis, Brexit, rise of nationalisms and the extreme right, general disenchantment with the EU.

If the authors agree on the statement, they diverge a little on the lessons that can be learned from it. P. Lamy has a “geo-economic” approach, he believes that the world remains on the path of  progress, that the exit of entire peoples from misery represents the major phenomenon of our time, and he notes that the armed conflicts remain limited to countries that did not board yet the train of globalization. The analysis of N. Gnesotto, on the other hand, is geo-political. In her opinion, the major phenomenon is the disappearance of the global balance that was assured, volens nolens, by the two nuclear superpowers, and its replacement with a new multipolar configuration, unstable by nature and fraught with danger.

The last part of the book is devoted specifically to Europe. Unlike the previous ones, it is signed collectively by the three authors. It therefore results from a compromise, which may explain why it often leaves the reader on his hunger. Of course, the picture of Europe’s weaknesses does not (unfortunately) lead to challenge it. It is only too true that the EU is to blame for not knowing how to decide the question of its identity (where are the borders of Europe?), its functioning (which institutions for a Europe gathering some thirty countries?), its project (a defensive wall or a springboard for globalization?). It is no less true – and this follows from that – that the EU has shown itself helpless in the face of the financial crisis imported from the United States, of Putin’s  aggressive policies (Georgia, Ukraine, incursions into Europe’s airspace, installation of missiles in Kaliningrad), of Islamic terrorism (for example, in France, the indefinite extension of the state of emergency under another form), of the influx of refugees and other migrants. If Europe nevertheless has a strong point, it is in the field of values. It is the leader in the fight against global warming, in official aids to development (more than 50% of the world total, if we add the Union level and the Member States), and in aid to countries affected by war (Afghanistan, Palestine, Bosnia, Kosovo...). Europe always embodies abroad freedom and human rights, despite the regression observed in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia ...

Taboos

If none of this is negligible, “the Union is rarely regarded as something other than a donor”. It will be so as long as the EU will not be a military power, but the obstacles are so great in this respect that the authors evoke a real taboo. These obstacles include the fear of having to give up NATO’s “umbrella”, the fact that Europe was built after the second world war to make peace and not war ... which is not incompatible, in countries such as France, with a certain “obsession with national greatness”,  anyway supported by the will of survival of the diplomacies of such countries.

Beyond the example of defence, the authors are right to stress that the powerlessness of Europe is a sign of an “original flaw”, inscribed in Jean Monnet’s bet according to which the economic construction of Europe will ultimately lead to political integration. It is true that the enlargement of the Union has led to an agreement on questions concerning the sensitive “nerve” of national sovereignties, more and more difficult to reach. Who does not see that compromises that were still possible in  the relatively homogeneous configuration of the six founding members are no longer so at twenty-eight or twenty-seven? On this last point, however, P. Lamy and his co-authors do not show any regret. According to them, welcoming in the Union the old countries of the Warsaw Pact was a “historical necessity” (as if there were not a thousand formulas to associate them without giving them the blocking power reserved to the Member States!). We are here faced with another taboo – alas very widely shared and not just by supporters of the Europe of the nations, who are very happy at every  setback of the federal perspective.

This leads us to a third taboo – also shared by the three authors of the book –, the one that concerns the words “Federation”, “federalism”, as if the mere fact of writing them could discredit those who use them. But the last pages of the book sketch an authentically federalist agenda: European tax (carbon tax), suppression of fraud, evasion and fiscal competition, a grand program for innovation, minimum salary (differentiated at first, but bound to become the same across Europe), solidarity between the national regimes regarding unemployment insurance (which in practice would mean the merging of those regimes, allowing, finally, for the appearance of a powerful “automatic stabilizer”), a single security policy inside the EU, at its borders, and outside (“S” file and unified asylum law, the granting of Structural Funds being subject to the compliance with Union rules on the reception of foreigners, a European defence and diplomacy, aid to development conditional on the regulation of migratory flows).

Not everything has to be invented in today’s Europe – for example, in the area of ​​security, the creation of a register of air passengers is finally decided – but lacking an authority superior to the states in most areas, decisions, when adopted, are always late and incomplete and their application is never guaranteed. Anyway, if the European project of the authors came true, any linguistic shyness put aside, the EU would become an authentic federation. It can only be suitable for the supporters of a federal Europe. Therefore, we would expect from the great technocrats experienced in the operation of the EU that they tell us more about the method that would transform the current decision-making process, or, failing that, would make it possible that the States can agree to adopt the “new European contract” proposed in the book. How, in other words, to convince the states to make their own night of August 4^th? But while the authors pose two conditions for European recovery, none answer this question; they rather assume the problem is solved. Obviously, they do not expect anything from the pressure that could be exerted by a popular movement led by the federalists... Unfortunately, they do not propose anything in exchange.

Another gap in the book and, again, of the former European technocrats themselves favouring  a deeper integration, for which they should have at least part of the answer: how did we get there? Why, for example, the Heads of State embarked on a process of enlargement of Europe without deepening it sufficiently beforehand? Is it true that the French President Georges Pompidou wanted the entry of Britain precisely for the purpose to prevent any further evolution towards the federation? And why was he followed by his peers who were not all, a priori, hostile to such an evolution? Rather than proposing another relaunch project that is likely to remain a dead letter, it’s on topics like this that P. Lamy and his co-authors could have done a useful work. Because we do not fight our enemies well unless we know them.