At stake was the future of a new European constitution. Would the burgeoning European Union operate under rules that favor consensus or veto, action or inaction? The showdown has often been cast as a rivalry between the Big Four–Germany, France, Britain, Italy–and all the rest of Europe. But in practical terms, it’s a contest between those who want to build the European Union and grow, and those who want to preserve a cumbersome, slow but still-functioning status quo. As tensions rose, old-member Spain and candidate-member Poland presented themselves as spoilers, insisting they hold on to voting rights–veto rights, in effect–out of all proportion to their wealth or population. And thus they threw the summit into crisis.
It’s not the first time in recent months that these two countries on the geographical periphery of the Union have wound up on the political fringe as well. Indeed, they seem to like it there. When Germany and France opposed the Bush administration’s rush to war in Iraq last spring, the governments of Spain and Poland hurried to support the United States. They were pleased, then, when U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called them part of a “new Europe.” More recently, NEWSWEEK has learned, some American officials have bruited the idea of new defense relationships–what one British official disparagingly calls “the doughnut strategy”–allying the United States more closely to peripheral European states at the expense of the old core powers of France and Germany.
Is Washington trying to rule by keeping the EU divided? It says no, but “there’s always been a bit of schizophrenia on the U.S. side,” says Kirsty Hughes, senior fellow at the Brussels-based Centre for European Policy Studies. “They want to see Europe peaceful, but they don’t want it to be a rival.”
If the United States thinks Spain and Poland hold the keys to a new American- European future, however, it better think again. Europe may not be a perfect union, but it’s already a more effective one than Washington seems to realize. Increasingly, its politics are those of a single entity with competing centers of influence and power, rather than a collection of separate countries making broad compromises to be put into effect by faceless Brussels bureaucrats. Member governments ally on one issue, clash on another, cutting deals for money, votes and influence in horse-trading sessions not so different from what you’d find on Capitol Hill or in the Houses of Parliament. As a U.S. congressman once said, “All politics is local,” and that increasingly goes for European Union politics, too.
The current game of Poland and Spain is a case in point. They are among Europe’s poor relations. Spain’s pumped-up economy since 1986 has been primed with billions of euros from Brussels. This year alone it got some $8.3 billion. Poland, for its part, is hoping EU subsidies will help lower its 20 percent unemployment rate and underwrite much-needed improvements to its infrastructure. And who provides the largest share of these funds to Brussels? Germany. Those facts are more germane to their future than any of Washington’s grand plans for Europe. “This Spanish-Polish alliance is one of circumstance,” says Guillaume Durand, a French policy analyst at the European Policy Center in Brussels. “These two countries will be directly opposed to each other in the upcoming financial discussions. Spain will try to keep its subsidies as long as possible, and Poland will be trying to get them [for itself].”
Yet for the moment they share a common concern. At a summit in Nice three years ago, Europe’s leaders were supposed to come up with a plan to facilitate decision making in the EU as it grew from 15 members to 25 in 2004. After five grueling days they agreed to give each present and future member a certain number of votes in the European Council of Ministers. Germany settled for 29, the same as France and the U.K., while Spain and Poland walked way with 27 each, the same as Italy.
For Poland, that sense of clout has been a major source of national pride. As President Aleksander Kwasniewski rather smugly told a French newspaper last week, “It’s been remarked that Poland and Spain together, with 80 million inhabitants, have 54 votes in the Council, while Germany, with 82 million inhabitants, only has 29.” If French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder were dumb enough to settle for this arrangement, Kwasniewski suggests, “it’s up to them to explain why they supported then what they find so bad today.”
Good question. Whatever the answer, they’re clearly intent on winning a simpler, more equitable alternative. Under the European constitution drafted over the past 16 months, a simple majority (13 of 25 countries) representing at least 60 percent of the population would be all that’s needed to approve a major initiative. The Wall Street Journal calculated last week that, compared with the Nice rules, the new voting scheme would make it 10 times easier to get an issue through the EU’s Council of Ministers. And given that the Union will encompass 450 million people and account for a quarter of the globe’s gross domestic product, such flexibility in decision making would seem useful. If a compromise can’t be found, the whole European project could be slowed, or even shattered.
Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar seems to have made his clashes with France and Germany, on this and other issues, almost a matter of honor. Having declared that he is not a candidate for re-election, he’s ignored popular sentiment in Spain–which is apathetic about the voting issue, at best, and which has been overwhelmingly hostile to his position on the Iraq war. “The motivation behind this is the same that led Aznar to back Bush on Iraq,” says Juan Pedro Velazquez-Gaztelu, a political writer for El Pais. “He wants to increase Spain’s strategic position in the world. He wants Spain to be a major player within the EU. And he is happy to fight Paris and Berlin for both causes.”
Polish leaders, for their part, argue that voting power in the Council was one of the ways they sold the idea of joining the EU. “We can’t tell people now that this is being changed and that we will have a less important place in the Union,” says Edward Krzemien, political-affairs editor for the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. “Poland cannot agree to sit there and watch while four major states dominate the Union. We believe in having solidarity, and in having richer countries pay for poorer countries.”
For now, the dispute is largely theoretical. But Poles, not all of whom share old Europe’s cozy conception of itself and the world, can easily imagine occasions when it will soon need the clout won at Nice. One example: protecting Poland’s 6 million farmers–more than France and Germany’s combined–who worry that EU competitors will drive half their number out of business. How to protect them, Warsaw wonders, with a diminished say in Brussels? Another: Poland sees itself as bringing “wisdom” to the EU’s relations with nations east of the Union, chiefly Ukraine and Belarus. In the past month alone it has granted more than 100,000 visas to its eastern neighbors, the better to ensure its borders will not close once Poland joins the EU. Further enlargement of the EU may not much interest the –Union’s old guard at this point. But it’s very much on Poland’s agenda.
Small wonder, as one Eurocrat puts it, that Poland and Spain these days are jokingly referred to as the “awkward squad.” (Kwasniewski, especially, epitomizes the plain-speaking new Europe, unrepentantly pushing its own interests and unwilling to defer to the older members of the club.) Their stand with America on Iraq was a harbinger of today’s face-off on voting rights. But it’s not at all clear how long they will want to keep this up, or if other nations will follow.
The speed with which the summit collapsed on Saturday underscored the intransigence on all sides. Even before it started, Berlin had dropped thinly veiled hints that subsidies could be cut. (Some analysts suggest the real aim of Spain and Poland is, in fact, merely to get subsidies raised as payment for surrendering their sweetheart deals on voting rights.) France, meanwhile, has floated the idea that Europe’s reluctant fringes could be left behind as the core countries of the Union move forward with, for lack of a better term, a coalition of the willing.
In effect, the new constitution is now on hold. Even if the summit had approved it, the document faced a tough fight to be ratified by every one of the 25 member countries. But no pause is likely in the hardball politics of the new Europe. Alliances of convenience (and occasionally of conviction) will be knit and reknit as the need arises. Sooner or later, the divisive issue of voting rights will be resolved, and Europe’s constitution will almost certainly be approved. The process will be messy. But the union, imperfect as it is, will go on.
