Abstract
The collapse of communism in Europe from 1989 onwards led to profound changes not just in those Central and East European states that cast of communism, but right across the continent. This article assesses the impact of these changes on the process of integration, analysing how the prospect of German unification affected attitudes among allies and contributed to moves that led to the Treaty on the European Union. It then looks at how the demands of the Central and Eastern European countries (CEE) led to pressures to enlarge, which necessitated controversial treaty reform.
The fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 was the most powerful symbol of the collapse of Communism in Europe and precursor of the end of the Cold War. Immediately, and idealistically, one imagined the prospect of German families reunited after more than four decades divided between two fundamentally different regimes: one espousing market economy and liberal democracy and integrated into Western institutions, notably the European Community (EC), 1 the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and Council of Europe; the other, one of the most hard-line Communist states, closely allied with the Soviet Union within the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) and the Warsaw Pact. In many ways this division of Germany had been but a microcosm of a divided Europe, where Eastern states had adopted Communism and the West largely comprised free-market liberal democracies, each side allied to its hegemon—respectively the US and the Soviet Union. As state after state overthrew its Communist government, the expectation of both the perpetrators of this largely peaceful revolution 2 and observers alike was that these countries would change dramatically as they rejected the doctrine that had dominated for 40 years or more. What few could have predicted was that the collapse of the Wall would fundamentally alter not only the political and economic lives of those people who had lived behind the Iron Curtain in the Communist East but also Europe as a whole. Most notably, the (West) European integration project would both widen and deepen the integration process, expanding both the number of its members and the scope of policies undertaken at the European level.
The European Community is used to mean the three Communities (Coal and Steel, Atomic Energy and, most significantly, Economic) that were established in the 1950s and which would later be incorporated into the first pillar of the European Union.
The overthrow of Communism was peaceful in the vast majority of Central and Eastern European states, with the bloodshed in former Yugoslavia very much the exception. Indeed, so peaceful was the breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1993. Nonetheless, even two decades on there are tensions between Russia and some former Soviet states, notably the Baltics, which secured their independence in 1991, and Georgia, which witnessed armed conflict with Russia in August 2008.
The ramifications would be felt not just in Germany but across Europe, as German unification and the transformation of former Communist states in Central and Eastern Europe paved the way for an unprecedented enlargement of the European Union (EU) as it had by then become. During the Cold War only Western European states could join the European Community; membership was precluded for Communist states both by their Soviet allies and by the de facto membership criteria laid down by the EC. 3 Thus there was a tendency to conflate ‘Europe’ with Western Europe and often just with the EC. No sooner had the Berlin Wall come down than those realities changed, as German Chancellor Helmut Kohl drew up a 10-point plan for German reunification which inter alia sparked a rapid movement to bring the five East German Länder into the Community. Other Central and Eastern European (CEE) states also quickly began to consider their future economic and political direction, concluding almost unanimously that membership in a wide range of European and international organisations was the best option. 4
Until 1993, there were no formal membership criteria for the EC, but the expectation was that the candidates would be democratic liberal market economies and, more specifically, would be willing to adopt the acquis communautaire, the corpus of the Community's primary and secondary legislation, which by definition would exclude Communist states.
Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova are the only post-Communist European states to have been ambivalent about relations with the EU. Most have sought membership, though some have not yet met the criteria.
Yet if Central and East European states viewed membership in the European Community along with NATO as prized goals—the former for the economic benefits it was expected to confer and the latter to ensure their security—many more anxious questions were raised in the West: Would a united Germany be resurgent? What role would Russia play in the new world order? Did the EU still have a role? Yet at the same time as the EC Member States were addressing such existential questions, the prospect of a large number of potential new members raised a further raft of concerns: Would the Union be viable with 25 or more Member States? Would the newcomers weaken the integration process, either by virtue of their attitudes towards integration or because the Union itself would be unable to function when institutional arrangements designed for six states could not cope with four times that number?
This article will outline the changes to the European integration process that arose in the two decades after the fall of the Wall, looking at the institutional dynamics of the Union and the preferences and interests articulated by its Member States. It will argue that German unification certainly altered the role the largest state now plays in the integration process but that this has not led to German dominance. Similarly, while expansion to Central and Eastern Europe has placed additional pressures on the European institutions, it has not brought them to a standstill. Moreover, the transformation of geopolitics in Central and Eastern Europe proved a catalyst for reforms within the EU that could arguably not have been achieved while the continent was divided, including economic and monetary union and cooperation on security issues, that is, in policy areas intimately connected with the very essence of the modern state. Thus, while enlargement may have made Europe more complex, the changes in Europe after 1989 enabled a deepening of the integration process.
German unification and the treaty on European Union
The fall of the Berlin Wall was initially greeted with euphoria across the free world. Yet the positive reaction was swiftly replaced by a sense of hysteria as Western leaders began to voice their concerns that, after 40 years of peaceful cooperation in Europe, a united Germany might again become a dominant European power. Excitement rapidly turned into concern as German Chancellor Helmut Kohl called for the uniting of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Until the late 1960s, German and European leaders had assumed that the division of Germany was only temporary—the very Constitution of the Federal Republic being named a Basic Law, which would be changed following eventual reunification. But by the early 1970s, when the chances of any reunification seemed to have vanished entirely, few of Germany's allies were unduly upset: a divided Germany was after all a weakened Germany. While this had long been an aspiration tacitly shared by Germany's West European allies, their reactions in November 1989 proved that there was nevertheless a good deal of truth in the old saying of François Mauriac: ‘I love Germany so much that I am glad there are two of them’ (cited by [3]).
That Kohl should so swiftly have taken up the idea of unifying Germany thus came as a shock to some of his allies. The mistrust was then compounded by the fact that he announced his ‘Ten Point Plan’ for German unification to the Bundestag without first warning his colleagues in the European Council. Their reactions, fostered by a realist assumption that a unified Germany would inevitably be a resurgent Germany, bordered on the histrionic. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, her Dutch counterpart Ruud Lubbers and President François Mitterrand of France all expressed their fears more or less forcefully. Mitterrand, whom Kohl had considered a friend as well as an ally, in particular voiced his concerns in both Kiev (then still part of the Soviet Union) and East Berlin, where he reassured the East German leader, Hans Modrow, that he should expect to continue in his post as Prime Minister of the GDR. Margaret Thatcher's response to the prospect of German unification was not to offer support Helmut Kohl but rather to seek the views of the Soviet Premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of one of the four powers that would have to agree to any change in the constitutional order of the two Germanies. 5 This was an odd response indeed for an ‘Iron Lady’ whose government, along with that of US President Ronald Reagan, had been the most hostile to the Soviet Union. Yet it was also indicative of the realist thinking that prevailed in the minds of European leaders despite decades of cooperation within the security community that was the European Community, 6 an entity that was intended to foster mutual trust among its members.
For a full discussion of the British reaction to the prospects of German unification, see [1]. The negotiations would ultimately be in a ‘Two plus Four’ format involving the two Germanies and the four allied powers that had controlled the four sectors of Germany in 1945, namely France, the Soviet Union, the US and UK.
Karl Deutsch's definition of a security community is a group of states among which war would be inconceivable, which was very much the goal enshrined in the original Schuman Declaration of 1950. See [2].
One of those who recognised the political reality and the political opportunity, Commission President Jacques Delors knew that it would be impossible to divert Kohl from his ambition 7 and thus suggested that the way forward would be to bind Germany even more tightly into the European Community. Specifically, Delors took the opportunity to push for German membership in Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), an objective that was already on the Community agenda and the subject of ongoing preparations in the framework of an Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) but which enjoyed little support in Germany, without whose membership the project would have been meaningless. Contrary to the fears of his European Council colleagues, Helmut Kohl did not have expansionist ambitions. In Thomas Mann's words, he did not want a ‘German Europe’ but rather a ‘European Germany’, and acquiesced to demands of the French Government. One of the last of a generation of politicians to have lived through the Second World War, Kohl, like his predecessor Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, was ideologically committed to integration and was thus willing to bind Germany more closely into the European project as a way of demonstrating that commitment. Indeed, as David Spence has argued:
In practice, Kohl's desire to bring the two Germanies together was not based solely on idealism or a desire to see Germany resurgent but also, in part, on the more pragmatic concern about the strains West Germany was facing as tens of thousands of East Germans began to move west, creating socio-economic pressures for which neither country was prepared.
German agreement to the date of December 1990 for the start of the IGC on EMU was the price Chancellor Kohl paid to the French President in order to quell his publicly expressed doubts about the rapid unification of Germany and Kohl's ten-point plan for it. Once persuaded, Kohl and Genscher [the then Foreign Minister] made a virtue of necessity. They frequently used the open fears about German unification to stress their view of the vital link between German unity and further integration [6].
However, Kohl and his CDU party were not willing to be bound into EMU only; they also called for ‘political union’, eventually with support from Mitterrand, who had gradually accepted the new political realities of post-Cold War Europe. Thus a second Intergovernmental Conference, on Political Union, was duly called and moves were afoot to unify Europe, with Germany at its heart.
The Treaty of the European Union (TEU), which resulted from the two IGCs, was the first fundamental revision of the Treaty of Rome. In some ways it can be seen as the high point of integration, reflecting the concerns and preferences of states resulting from their Cold War experiences, rather than as a direct response to the end of the Cold War or as the prospect of enlargement. However, without those fundamental changes it is not at all clear that EMU would have come into being. Until German unification on 3 October 1990, Helmut Kohl had been in a weak position domestically, and EMU was not popular with German business or the Bundesbank. Following unification he was able to drive forward European policy at home and press for a political, and arguably federal, agenda within the Community (or Union, as it was shortly to become). The TEU, which came into effect in November 1993, established a European Union comprising three pillars. The first pillar brought together the three existing Communities (Coal and Steel, Economic, and Atomic Energy) along with EMU, while the second and third pillars marked a considerable advance in two policy areas that were more politically sensitive: Common Foreign and Security Policy and cooperation in Justice and Home Affairs. The Treaty proposed creating a common currency, instituting a European Central Bank and coordinating interest rates. Additionally, for the first time since the failure of the European Defence Community in 1954, the TEU also put defence policy firmly onto the European agenda, albeit on an intergovernmental basis. The European integration process was now moving into policy areas that reach to the heart of national sovereignty, of which a common money and a common defence would be powerful symbols.
Similarly, the decision to expand the use of qualified majority voting (QMV) and the associated expansion of the role of the European Parliament via the codecision procedure marked a seemingly inexorable move towards something approximating a bicameral system, with the Council and Parliament, respectively representing the states and peoples of Europe, but one in which Member States were willing to cede ever more sovereignty in return for the political and economic benefits they believed would follow. And yet while the TEU marked a considerable advance in a process of integration that might not have occurred without the fall of the Berlin Wall, it also highlighted in some ways the limits of the process. For the first time the principle that integration had to proceed at the speed of the slowest or most reluctant European Member States was breached as the UK and Denmark were granted a series of ‘opt-outs’ in a range of policies including EMU, asylum and immigration and, in the case of Denmark, defence. Such opt-outs enabled integration to extend into previously uncharted territory, but at the expense of a unitary process. Acceptance of a multi-speed Europe would have considerable implications not just for the EU-12 which had negotiated the TEU but also for would-be new members, who would find that abandoning the principle that all move at the same speed could result in them being left behind—as has been the case with EMU where the CEEs have been slow to join and had little encouragement from the Commission to do so.
Enlarging Europe
Beyond the mini ‘enlargement without accession’ of the East German Länder in 1990, the collapse of Communism paved the way for a much more extensive expansion of the European Community/Union to the north, south and east. First a group of long-standing liberal market economies belonging to the European Free Trade Area (EFTA) and then more than a dozen newly emerging democracies began to file their membership applications. During the Cold War, Austria, Finland and Sweden had been reluctant to identify themselves too closely with the EC lest their links raise suspicion in the Soviet Union, potentially with adverse consequences for their security. However, from mid-1989, one by one they cast aside their previous reluctance to identify themselves fully with the West and finally sought EC membership. 8 As members of the European Economic Area, an agreement intended to give associated countries the benefits of the EU's internal market without the loss of sovereignty entailed by membership, these states had already adopted over 80% of the acquis communautaire. Thus their accession negotiations were relatively swift, and they joined the Union (as it had become) in 1995.
Norway also applied and, as in 1972, was offered membership, which was rejected by its citizens in a referendum.
By contrast, the raft of Central and East European states that sought membership of the EU from the early 1990s onwards found the accession process rather protracted as they struggled to make the reforms necessary to enable them to meet the EU's standards. 9 For decades, beyond a formal acceptance of the acquis communautaire, the membership standards had been essentially implicit; now, with the prospect of large numbers of new democracies seeking membership, the EU-12 finally decided to establish a clear set of membership rules. Adopted in June 1993, the so-called Copenhagen criteria were intended to ensure that new members would not weaken the Union, either through their inability to function within the norms of the Union or because they did not support closer cooperation or a deepening of the integration process. Three of the four criteria related to the applicants' credentials: that they be functioning democracies which respected human rights; that they have functioning market economies able to withstand competition within the Union; and that they have the administrative and judicial capacity to adopt, transpose and implement the Union's acquis. For states newly emerging from decades of non-democratic command economies, these requirements set the bar for membership very high, which the candidates took as a sign that the EU was not enthusiastic about having them join and which, they suggested, created double standards between what the existing members demanded of newcomers and what they did themselves. At the same time they tended to use the EU criteria as an excuse for introducing painful reforms that would have been necessary in any case. The net result was that Euroscepticism was fostered in some CEEs even before they joined the Union.
For a discussion about the changes in Central and Eastern Europe from a Christian Democrat position, please see [4], Chap. 10.
The fourth Copenhagen criterion recognised that the Union itself should have the capacity to enlarge. This necessitated that the Union reform its institutional arrangements, which had barely changed since the Europe of the Six was established in the 1950s. While the 1986 Single European Act and the TEU had both altered the Union's institutional dynamics, neither was intended to undertake the wholesale institutional reform that was deemed necessary for a Europe of 25 or more members. Thus, a new IGC was established to address institutional questions. The resulting Treaty of Amsterdam failed in its task as Member States showed they lacked the political will to back up their positive rhetoric about enlargement. The message given to candidate states was clear: enlargement was not a priority for the existing Member States. This caused a good deal of resentment in the would-be Member States, which felt they were being set unduly high standards while the EU was failing to put its own house in order. A variation on an old East European saying thus arose: ‘You pretend you want us and we pretend we're ready.’ 10
The original went: ‘We pretend to work and you pretend to pay us.’
Nevertheless, the EU-15 did recognise their responsibility to prepare for enlargement and yet another IGC was convened. The ensuing Nice Summit of 2000 made sufficient progress for the Union to move towards enlargement. Yet the negotiations in the Nice IGC created a good deal of animosity and, for the first time in the history of integration, small countries were set against large and new against old, as Jacques Chirac, who was holding the rotating European Council Presidency, sought institutional solutions that would under-represent small and new Member States. Whether or not this was intentional, it created a climate in which potential newcomers were treated as inferior—not a promising start for close cooperation in an enlarged Union but indicative of French ambivalence about enlargement per se and a concern that this particular enlargement would do little to foster European idealism.
Chirac, like successive British prime ministers, recognised the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe were predominantly Atlanticist and intergovernmental in outlook, sharing many values with the UK and the US. Thus, the UK was a keen advocate of enlargement both as a way of securing new allies and potentially of weakening the integration process; neither perspective found favour in Paris. Expectations about the CEEs were clearly vindicated in 2003, when many of the would-be Member States supported the US and UK line on war in Iraq. This infuriated Chirac, who asserted that the would-be members had missed a good opportunity to keep quiet. Nevertheless, by then the case for enlargement had been effectively made, notably by the UK and Germany, the latter observing a moral responsibility for Western European states to support the emerging democracies, and eight CEEs (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia) plus Malta and Cyprus finally joined the Union on 1 May 2004, followed by two more (Bulgaria and Romania) in 2007.
While the Nice Treaty had introduced sufficient institutional reforms for the Union to expand, it had left many questions unanswered. Thus, a further process was established to try to bring about more holistic reforms to the Union, to bring it closer to the people and make it more appropriate for a Union of more than 25 members. The Convention on the Future of Europe was accordingly set up in February 2002 and its members drafted an ambitious blueprint for reform, in the form of a draft Constitutional Treaty that would become the basis for the Constitutional Treaty agreed in 2004, though never ratified. Representatives of the candidate states were present during the Convention but reluctant to air their views lest comments deemed unhelpful should damage their chances of eventual membership. Once safely inside the Union, most of the CEEs seemed content readily to adhere to the proposed changes. However, parts of the Czech and Polish elites have proved notably more sceptical than both their publics and other new Member States. Once the Accession Treaty had been signed, Poland joined forces with Spain to demand changes to the Constitutional Treaty, which would reduce the two countries' leverage compared with the Nice Treaty, on the basis of which Poland had held its referendum on accession. Poland backed down following a change in government in Madrid in 2004, but it had made its views clear. Then, after the Constitutional Treaty collapsed thanks to two founder members (France and the Netherlands), the Polish President refused to ratify the successor Lisbon Treaty for many months, as did his Czech counterpart. However, at the time of writing, immediately following the successful second Irish referendum, Polish President Kazcynski finally ratified the Treaty. The Czech President held out for an opt-out on the Charter of Fundamental Rights, but at the time of writing it seemed likely that he would eventually ratify, paving the way for a new phase of European integration.
Conclusions
The collapse of Communism paved the way for a transformation of the nature of European integration. It led to a membership that was more than double that of previously, with the prospect of further expansion to the Balkans firmly on the cards, leaving Europe as the world's largest economy and one that enjoyed free movement of people, a single currency (for some states at least) and an embryonic defence policy. Enlargement in turn necessitated painful institutional reform that was unpopular in many states, new and old alike, yet ultimately this process has been achieved. And despite different approaches to integration in the new Member States, the integration has deepened, Germany has not become a hegemon and Russia remains firmly outside—not yet an ally but not an existential threat either.