Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

48 John Hutchinson
two nation-states that fought for European hegemony during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, France and Germany, who have dominated EU decisionmaking
since its origins. At points of crisis, German and French opinion makers
and politicians have called for a renewal of this alliance and the formation with
the Benelux countries of an inner core to further advance integration (see Lamers
1997).
The problem is that a kinship system implies hierarchy rather than equality and
can build up centrifugal resentments as the case of the USSR, and lately, the UK
demonstrates. Although this is reduced by the dual axis, the questions remain:
Who is to be the elder brother, and who is perceived as belonging to the inner core
of the family, as opposed to being a distant cousin, or even an adopted orphan
(e.g. Turkey)? The EU’s project of ‘widening’ and ‘deepening’ as it expands to take
in Eastern European countries revives these questions as the existing status order
is shaken both by territorial expansion and by the struggle for dominance over the
strengthened institutions. The Franco-German accommodation (like the former
Austrian–Hungarian Habsburg alliance) has always been pragmatic rather than
fraternal: there are tensions at the elite level between the French centralist and the
German federalist visions of the EU and popular suspicions below the surface. These
anxieties have been exacerbated by the combination of German re-unification with
EU expansion to the East that has awakened French fears of a revived German
hegemony shifting the centre of gravity of the Union from the West. The very
multiplication of actors within the EU following the entry of smaller and poorer
Eastern states would seem to presage not only the loss of national vetoes through
proposed majority voting but also the threats to the power of the richer and larger
states.
Increasing centralisation raises the stakes in the battle over whose conception of
Europe is to prevail which, when combined with the increase of members, intensifies
the need to find a cement for this arrangement. Will the countries from what
has been regarded as the periphery or even the outside of Europe perceive the
‘integration process’ as a form of imperialism, in which they have to submit to
an onerous framework designed for advanced industrial states? Can Europe rely on
institutional brokering and conjured rhetoric of common interest, or will the very
expansion of the EU increasingly expose its empty heart?
The danger that the EU, as presently constituted, may collapse from its own
contradictions is all the more likely as an unaccountable elite-driven integration
process gathers momentum in spite of the absence of a substantiated European
democracy (with a demos) that might legitimise the surrender of nation-state powers.
Major gaps with popular opinion have been exposed already by referenda in France,
Ireland and Denmark. The incapacity of national representative institutions to
regulate such central areas as monetary policy and frontier controls makes it all
too possible that grievances over unemployment, immigration and race and
ethnicity will express themselves in large-scale populist direct action.
One possible answer to this widening gap between the peoples of Europe and the
expanding EU political sphere is a written constitution that would authoritatively
define the respective national and Union jurisdictions, and return substantial