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French lessons for the European Union
By DAVID HOWELL
LONDON -- So the French have voted down the proposed EU Constitution decisively.
What now? Will the European Union fall apart? Certainly not. Does it mean that
the attempt to impose a single "top-down" constitution on all 25 member states
is dead? Probably -- especially if the Netherlands also votes "No" this week.
Does it mean that the EU will simply be kept as it is today, as many influential
people, including a former British foreign secretary, advise and predict? No,
that is the worst mind-set of all, guaranteeing further division and trouble. It
is precisely the failure to appreciate how fast the world is changing, and how
fundamentally the rise of the network age has altered the whole pattern of
international relations -- and the character of the EU in particular -- that has
led to the present impasse.
A whole army of European leaders, experts, officials and apologists have wasted
years, as well as forests of paper, chasing after a flawed belief that Europe
can somehow be welded into a solid bloc that will carry weight on the world
stage, counter-balance American hegemony and confront Asian challenges.
These people seem not to have grasped that networks have now replaced
hierarchies and blocs. They seem not to have understood that the advent of the
information age, the new era of globalization and the huge dispersal of
information and power make old-style central authority and governance redundant.
People power has now been e-enabled, humbling high authority while making the
whole business of government much more difficult and subtle.
This applies as much to the EU as to the nation states within it. Trying to
recreate the EU in the image of the 200-year-old United States was a foolish
mistake. It was worse, because it has distracted the Europeans from the real new
tasks to which they should be applying their combined strength -- namely
combating the rise of global terror, crime and the warped power of fanaticism,
which also derives its dangerous growth from the information revolution. This is
the dark side of globalization.
I tried to warn about this over six years ago in my book "The Edge of Now." But
few people took the slightest notice. The EU experts pressed on with their plans
for more and more integration and centralization, regardless of the changed
balance of power, and national governments continue to this day to assert absurd
degrees of authority and control -- which they no longer possess -- over issues
such as economic management and social engineering. These efforts then fail and
increase general distrust and frustration.
This fallacious thinking is now even being extended to overseas development,
where the conviction has grown that ever larger dollops of government aid can
somehow lead to Third World development and abolish poverty. Of course they will
do no such thing. They merely increase Third World frustration and fury that the
real development issues -- good and light governance, the rule of law, the
unshackling of individual enterprise, the establishment of well-run markets and
open trade, and the entrenchment of property and investment rights -- continue
to be ignored.
As all these initiatives fail yet again, people confusedly turn to dreams of
world government and new master plans and strategies in a search for the magic
button that will solve all these problems and disputes with one click.
But the central task is -- and has been ever since the rise of networks, the
Internet and the information explosion more than 20 years ago -- not to
surrender the state to some unaccountable supranationalism, not to look for
central "solutions," in Europe or elsewhere, but to let the healthy grass roots
grow everywhere, to let innovation and enterprise flourish and the good side of
globalization bring its colossal potential to bear, both at local and global
level. The task is not to give up on the nation state but to recast it so that
it can play an effective part in resolving all these issues.
The same goes for the EU. Some people hope that a new generation of European
leaders, such as Nicholas Sarkozy in France, or Angela Merkel, the new Christian
Democratic Union Party leader in Germany, will recognize these truths and
abandon the search for a tightknit European bloc, in favor of something much
more modest and flexible.
But the omens are not good. Both these leaders, and others in the EU leadership
in Brussels and elsewhere, continue to talk as though a bunched-together Europe,
ruled by one high authority and one legal system, is "the answer," and that with
or without referendums, and with or without popular consent, this is the goal
for which to press.
Eventually they will learn, but not before more damage has been done to sensible
and practical cooperation in the European region, and more chances of missed of
linking up with the global network, and the Asian parts of that network in
particular.
For 600 years or so, ever since China's retreat into itself before 1400, it has
been the Western Europeans who have set the pace and style in government and
social organization. But perhaps it is now time for a reversal. Perhaps it is
time for the Europeans to look outwards and learn from Asia how to govern and
work together effectively. It is sadly obvious that by looking inward, and by
trying to apply old principles to a new world order, they are making a dreadful
mess of things.
David Howell is a former British Cabinet minister and former chairman of the
Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. He is now a member
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