YOUNG Berliners partied the night away, with free beer and sausages and a Danish hip-hop group made up of Catholics and Muslims. But this was the 50th birthday bash of the European Union, so politicians were not content to left the festivities take care of themselves. A couple of dozen men in suits, and a lady in a yellow jacket, felt compelled to issue a document (where would the EU be without memoranda?). Here was the EU’s real celebration: the Berlin declaration.
Afterwards, the suits and jacket dominated the front pages of German newspapers. It had all been, apparently, a triumph for Angel Merkel, chancellor and host. She had managed to create something—“a good feeling, a good atmosphere”, burbled an EU diplomat—out of nothing. Or perhaps, if you actually read the document, you might conclude she had created hardly anything out of not very much. It was the triumph of virtual politics.
“For centuries Europe has been an idea, holding out peace and understanding,” the declaration begins. Such rhetorical flourishes obviously require a wide latitude of tolerance but, even so, this was bit thick. For most centuries of its history, the idea of Europe was much more likely to be associated with wars of conquest than with peace and understanding. If peace was to be found anywhere (which it wasn’t very often), it was more likely to be encountered inside nation states. But in polite European society, nation states are not usually considered sources of good things.
“That hope [of peace and understanding] has been fulfilled,” the document continues. This is remarkably self-confident. Custom normally dictates a certain tentativeness at this point in official declarations. People prefer to make references to aims, not achievements. America’s Declaration of Independence talks only of “the pursuit of happiness”, not the catching of it; its constitution was established “in order to form a more perfect union”, not having created one.
Throughout most of the text, the Berlin declaration is a strange mixture. Parts are inoffensively correct: “the individual is paramount”. Parts are surprisingly correct: “we have a unique way of living and working together in the European Union”. Boastful but accurate: no other institution has entwined national and supra-national authority together in quite the EU’s way. And some is outright misleading: “The European Union wants to promote freedom and development in the world.” Well, it may want those, but in practice the common agricultural policy has done as much as anything to beggar African countries.
“Thanks to the yearning for freedom of the peoples of central and eastern Europe, the unnatural division of Europe is now consigned to the past.” Really? That was a very odd thing to say the day before Martti Ahtisaari presented his plan for the independence of Kosovo to the United Nations Security Council. In the western Balkans, Ukraine and Belarus the unnatural divisions of Europe have certainly not been consigned to the past—to say nothing of Turkey’s desire to erase a boundary further east by joining the EU.
The German government originally wanted the Berlin declaration to rise above day-to-day squabbles and to stand the test of time. Of course, it couldn’t really. Two parts provide a practical guide to what the EU thinks it is doing now, and what the German government (at least) hopes it will do next. The document includes a laundry list: “We will fight terrorism, organised crime and illegal immigration...we intend jointly to lead the way in energy policy and climate protection.” This is the lowest common denominator between countries such as Belgium and Germany who like the EU for its own sake and want it to do as much as possible, and countries such as Britain and Poland which want the EU to restrict itself to a series of specific areas.
The declaration ends with the German government’s own little wish list, which only has one item on it: “we are united in our aim of placing the European Union on a renewed common basis before the European parliamentary elections in 2009.” This is code for: we want to bring back the European constitution by that date, though the constitution is anathema to several countries, so the word itself cannot be mentioned in the text (nor will it be mentioned in the revised constitution itself).
Mrs Merkel hopes that leaders will agree on a timetable in June, and hold a big conference on a new constitution in the autumn. Whoever is president of France and prime minister of Britain at that point will therefore have an enormous headache dumped on them as soon as they take office. But, of course, they were not around to sign the Berlin declaration.
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