The EU needs a unified polity

The European Union unquestionably deserves the Nobel Prize for its past accomplishments.  To cite just a few:  peace between France and Germany, post-World War II European economic development and prosperity (no it wasn’t all due to the Marshall Plan), absorbing a reunified Germany and what used to be called eastern Europe into the European architecture, most of the staffing of peacekeeping operations in the Balkans (and many other parts of the world) in the 1990s and 2000s (and most of the aid money)…

The question is whether the much-expanded EU of 27 countries can do for the next generation what it has done for the last two.  While I count myself a euro-enthusiast, I doubt it.  Without a decisive move towards greater political unity, the EU is hamstrung.  And the politics in many European countries–from Germany to Greece–militates against greater unity.

The EU’s current problems arise essentially from its inability to make quick and wise decisions.  There is a dramatic contrast between European slowness in responding to the euro’s problems and the American reaction to its 2008 financial crisis.  Consensus at 27 is difficult to achieve, even in the best of circumstances.  When the decisions involve redistributing big economic and financial burdens, politics in the member states will rarely align.

Europe has created a unified economic space, but it lacks a unified political space.  As we happen to be enjoying an American presidential campaign, it should be clear what this means.  Even with the archaic electoral college process, which bends the campaign into a focus on the relatively few “battle ground” states, it is clear that Romney and Obama are conducting campaigns that try to appeal throughout the country.  Europe is essentially stuck with a political system resembling the one we had under the Articles of Confederation, but its economic system is continent-wide. There are no European officials elected in constituencies that extend beyond the national borders of the member states.

This matters to Americans, because Europe is one of our biggest markets (as we are to Europe), a giant source of investment (also as we are to them), an educational and cultural partner of the first order, and still our most important military alliance, even if EU military capabilities have naturally atrophied with the continental peace its members now enjoy.  Slow American economic growth today is due in part to Europe’s current financial crisis and its economic consequences.  The NATO mission in Afghanistan relies in part on European contributions, as did the NATO-led effort against Muammar Qaddafi.

I am about to go off to moderate a talk by the Macedonian defense minister, Fatmir Besimi.  His troops guard NATO headquarters in Kabul, even though Greece has blocked his country’s membership in the Alliance.  That, too, is an example of Europe’s continuing political division and how it hampers a stronger, more effective European Union.

I can offer no solution.  The Europeans will have to find it for themselves, as they have often in the past.  It is not going to be easy.  America did it by writing a new constitution behind closed doors in Philadelphia.  That won’t work in the Twitter age.  I hope this Nobel Prize, ironically awarded by a committee in Norway (which has declined EU membership), will inspire Europeans to unify their political space.