Old Europe fights to keep its club cosy

The Telegraph ^ | 02/06/2005 | David Rennie

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It may take months, even years, for Europe to work out what this double No from Holland and France means for the European Union.

But one message has already been made clear to all those countries hoping to join: Old Europe is turning in on itself.

Frightened for their jobs and anxious about losing generous social welfare benefits, voters on the Continent have little enthusiasm for further expansion of their once cosy club.

If one thing united the very different No votes in France and Holland it was a sense that the EU had expanded too far, too fast. In two decades, it has gone from 10 nations to 25, with Romania and Bulgaria both on course to join as early as 2007.

Croatia and Turkey have begun the formal accession process, while Serbia, Macedonia, Ukraine and Georgia all wish to join.

Interviewing French citizens last week, it often felt as if the vote was a referendum on enlargement, not the constitution.

The debate became dominated by the mythical figures of the "Polish plumber", coming to France to undercut French workmen and steal their jobs, and the "Romanian lorry-driver", about to roar down French roads for miserly pay, cross-eyed with fatigue thanks to his unlimited working hours.

French politicians from the No campaign complained, more subtly, about the speed with which communist nations such as Poland and the Czech Republic had entered the union. They had a moral argument we could not ignore, said leading campaigners, because they had suffered Soviet domination, and then the Berlin Wall came down. The fall of the Berlin Wall sounded like a trap that France had been unable to avoid.

The French No camp, on the Left and the Right, was particularly incensed that the new member states were proving valued allies of Britain, Ireland and other low-tax, free-market EU nations.

One French Green MEP complained that the Franco-German alliance had been replaced by an "Anglo-Polish axis".

Marek Belka, the Polish prime minister, said this week that enlargement was in trouble. "That is so obvious you do not need diplomatic language to say so."

One Eastern European official said his government was deeply concerned that a freeze on enlargement would be matched by France, Germany or other founding nations forging their own smaller "hard cores" within a weakened EU.

"This outcome in France and the Netherlands brings a different quality to the EU. Maybe old EU states will try to build a hard core; we're really frightened of that kind of integration," he said.

Britain remains a staunch advocate of further enlargement, including the admission of Turkey - in the face of clear opposition from voters in France, Holland and soon in Germany, where the Turkish question will dominate early elections this autumn.

Edmund Stoiber, the governor of Bavaria and the conservative challenger to Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in the 2002 elections, said yesterday that Germany's conservative opposition did not want Turkey in the EU, but rather to enjoy a "privileged partnership".

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[nathanbedford]

The French No camp, on the Left and the Right, was particularly incensed that the new member states were proving valued allies of Britain, Ireland and other low-tax, free-market EU nations.

One French Green MEP complained that the Franco-German alliance had been replaced by an "Anglo-Polish axis".

And so the EU must be riven as member states either face reality and reform congruently with the "Anglo-Poles" or deny the threat to socialist economies which is inexorably marching out of Asia, and slip deeper into socialism, stagnation, and protectionism. Even now, Italian politicians are calling for an exit from the Euro. The blame game has begun. The Euro in naught but a symptom but but it will become a symbol.

Every nation must chose whether it will accept short term pain or wait for the real agony under socialism.

One can hope that intelligent Europeans recognize how they have been played and seduced by the French and chose the American model; because choose they must, for the Chinese will vouchsafe them no amnesty from reality. Better to place the blame where it belongs- on the philosophy embodied by the French- than on an inanimate object like the Euro.