Introduction

When all the comic “Bushisms” and subterfuges over Iraq are long forgotten, the one phrase coined by the current US administration to be remembered in history may well turn out to be Donald Rumsfeld's jibe at “old Europe”. For the division between the “old” and the “new” Europes will surely be with us for some time to come, and the shifting frontiers between the two seem destined to determine the pattern of European politics on a variety of key issues. The return of a PSOE government in the recent elections seems to have pushed Spain from the “new” camp into the “old”, at least in terms of foreign policy, but moves in the opposite direction seem equally feasible given the increasing volatility of European electorates. As this issue of Debatte goes to the printers, the accession of ten, mainly East European states from the former communist bloc to full European Union membership is only days away – and it is of course in those ten countries, especially in Poland, where the political situation is the most volatile. Whatever the changes in the two teams, however, the contest between the two Europes itself is unlikely to end any time soon. So what are the issues separating the two, and why are they unlikely to be simply negotiated away in the Europe of twenty‐five by the time‐honoured methods which always seemed to come up with last‐minute compromise in the original Europe of the six?

The main reason for this, of course, lies across the Atlantic. Rumsfeld made his now famous remark during the run‐up to the US attack on Iraq and meant to draw a line between the countries opposing the war and those who signed up for the “coalition of the willing”. This indeed remains the most visible fissure running through Europe: the different attitudes to US leadership in the new world order, with “old Europe” – principally France and Germany – demanding multilateral structures of decision‐making in which their voices are heard and their interests taken into consideration while “new Europe” – the UK, Italy, the new East European members of NATO and / or the European Union – sees its interests best served by proving themselves loyal supporters of Washington. These differences, of course, affect the project of European integration because neither side wants to hand over political control of such critical aspects of EU policy as security and trade to the other which would use it to further its interest either in opposition to, or support of, the US. This is one part of the background to the recent ructions about the EU constitution, barely papered over by the latest “compromise” draft. Behind many such disputes over the future of the EU lurks the long arm of Washington, keen to prevent the emergence of an independent centre of political and economic – let alone military – power in Brussels. As the conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan put it in The New Republic :

The United States can and should strengthen its military ties to the new Europe, especially Poland and Hungary, and keep an independent relationship with all the Eastern European states. In trade negotiations, the United States could also try harder and harder to unravel European agricultural subsidies (…) Keeping Britain both in the USE and outside of it militarily, diplomatically, and monetarily should become a prime U.S. objective in foreign policy. Without it, the United States could lose its most valuable military and diplomatic ally. If you think that's unimportant, imagine the Iraq war – diplomatically and militarily – without the fig leaf of British support.

(…) That's the current challenge to U.S. foreign policy: how to prevent the new European constitution from becoming a reality, how to woo and keep the loyalty of pro‐American European governments and states, how to save new Europe from the stultifying and malign embrace of the old.1

Not all of it, however, can be blamed on the White House, Pentagon and State Department: things in Europe are not as simple as being a straightforward matter of pro‐US versus anti‐US.

Take the geographically opposite poles of Rumsfeld's “new Europe”, for example: Britain and Poland. Neither's attitude to the major issues in the EU is entirely determined by their relationships with the US. Blair's decision to call a referendum on the proposed EU constitution can only be interpreted as a concession to the massive Eurosceptic pressures in Britain which, while undoubtedly stoked by pro‐US media such as Rupert Murdoch's, have much deeper roots than that. The entire Blair project of making Britain the indispensable “bridge” between Washington and Brussels would be endangered by a likely negative outcome in the referendum, leading quite conceivably to a fall of his government and the UK leaving the EU altogether. Even more seriously for Brussels, Blair's U‐turn is likely to increase the pressure for referenda in other countries, thus threatening a possible chain reaction against the entire project.

As for Poland (and, by extension, much of the rest of “new” Eastern Europe), the enthusiasm for the US has no ideological but very narrow practical limits, set by effective German control over the economy and the explosive social discontent of much of the electorate – of which the meteoric rise of Andrzej Lepper's populist anti‐EU party is just one symptom. Poland, by far the largest of the new member states but also perhaps the economically most desperate with the highest rate of unemployment and the structural crisis of its huge agricultural sector, is extremely vulnerable to political pressure from “old Europe” and cannot, when push comes to shove, risk any escalation of its opposition to France and Germany to the point where it might ignite the quite considerable and growing anti‐EU sentiment in the country. To quote Sullivan again:

Yes, there is resentment of France and Germany among the smaller European countries, especially in the east. But they will need Franco‐German economic aid more than they will need U.S. military support in the coming years; and their capacity to resist Brussels will be highly limited.2

The divisions of “new Europe” therefore make “old Europe” appear to have the stronger hand to play in EU matters. But the Franco‐German alliance at the heart of it is itself hobbled by internal contradictions, above all mutual suspicions of each other's long‐term motives3: for much of the French political establishment, European integration is still about clamping down Germany's potential Mitteleuropa ambitions. Although often referred to as the “motor of European integration”, the fuel on which this engine has been running has been a rather low‐octane mix of pragmatic interests, and it has tended to stall whenever there were not enough of these, as for a prolonged spell during the 1990s following reunification.4 Despite high‐flying rhetoric on both sides of the Rhine, and a considerable grassroots enthusiasm engendered by decades of exchanges sponsored by the 1963 Franco‐German Friendship Treaty, the Paris‐Bonn and now the Paris‐Berlin axis has always lacked a true common vision for Europe.

Where should such a vision come from? Certainly not from intergovernmental conferences. The European Union, despite all the paraphernalia of the blue “circle of stars” flag, the Beethoven “Ode to Joy” anthem, and “EU passports”, is still in essence a treaty organization of sovereign states, and the outcome of such conferences therefore represents little more than the lowest common denominator of national interests. As the Spanish example has just shown again, the political complexions of national governments change regularly: after the eastward expansion of the Union this year, there will be national elections in five or six member states each year. Under the conditions of such built‐in, structural paralysis of political agency, the only transnationally effective force capable of shaping the future of the European Union is the neoliberalism of the “Washington consensus” as all governments of whatever party‐political stripes are equally subject to the uniform pressures in the direction of deregulation, marketization, and privatization from markets, media, and virtually “gleichgeschaltete” academic advisors. The Euro and the Stability Pact remain the most significant achievement of Maastricht, and although France and Germany may be able to flout the latter with impunity, they would find it much harder to agree on something radically different to replace it, let alone get every other EU government to agree.

Even if all elections in the EU member states were to be synchronized, however, and the left parties were to win every single one of them, there is little prospect of the European project suddenly being filled with new vision and purpose. For the social‐democratic, socialist, and communist – and even the green – parties of Europe are deeply divided and far from capable of providing a coherent transnational programme for the Union. Some, like Britain's New Labour, are effectively positioned to the right of most continental parties as Blair's close cooperation with Berlusconi and Aznar showed. The French Socialists, still under shock from their catastrophic defeats in the last presidential and parliamentary elections, appear to have no discernible policies on anything at all. Schröder's SPD, as Peter Thompson's article on Agenda 2010 in this issue explains, is overwhelmingly at odds with the SPD‐led government's neoliberal turn but will not do anything serious about it for as long as the current Chancellor is in office. Further east, Polish prime minister Leszek Miller has announced his resignation to coincide with accession to the EU and his “social democratic” ex‐communists of the Polish SLD, having just suffered another split, look unlikely to survive in government for very long – no Polish or indeed East European government ever does these days.

The European centre‐left these days cannot only be found on both sides of Rumsfeld's “old Europe, new Europe” divide but pretty much on both sides of all significant divides: for and against the Euro, for and against neoliberal deregulation, for and against bans on headscarves for Muslim women in public employment. For this reason alone, even if by some miracle all EU states were to fall to the left more or less simultaneously, the political situation would be no different from what it is now and Washington would find it just as easy to drive a wedge through any European resistance to its policies. Real European unity cannot be the result of intergovernmental compromise but must grow from a common political will based on a grassgroots movement for a different Europe. Such a movement is possible, as the growing signs of disaffection with the EU and all its works show, but that disaffection will become the plaything of nationalist right‐wing demagogues – the impending referendum campaigns over the proposed EU constitution, especially in Britain, might well turn into a veritable carnival of national chauvinism – unless the left breaks with the politics of Maastricht and begins to reformulate the project of European unity. As Peter Thompson argues in the first article of this issue, such a new vision will require more than just empirical adjustments to policy but a more fundamental reassessment of the relationships between politics and economics, market and state.

German cinema has been spreading its wings in recent years, making a bid to escape the art houses to which even the celebrated “new German cinema” of the Fassbinder era had largely remained confined. Lola Runs, Nowhere in Africa, and above all Good‐bye Lenin!, have had a real impact at the box office, with The Miracle of Bern seemingly set to continue the line. Very different in subject matter and genre, the reasons for the success of each deserve careful analysis. In this issue, Nick Hodgin focuses on Good‐bye Lenin! and compares it with other, lesser known (outside Germany at least) films on the topic of German reunification.

Language, as the postmodernists never cease to remind us, matters. John Rodden's piece on the political uses and abuses of language in the GDR and the post‐unification Federal Republic, inspired by George Orwell rather than Ferdinand Saussure, suggests that there is something special in the German sensitivity to such abuses which stems from Germany's long exposure in both the Third Reich and the GDR.

Nearly seventy years after the “Nuremberg Laws” barred Jews from German citizenship, it is not uncommon to find authors discussing the anti‐semitic policies of the Third Reich in terms of “Germans” and “Jews” – a terminology which unwittingly concedes a rather crucial point to the logic of Nazism: that the intended victims of these “laws” were in some sense not “Germans” but aliens in their own land. To reject this terminology does not mean, of course, to ignore the difficulties of being a Jewish German even before Hitler and the Holocaust: as John Milfull's essay shows, assimilation was far from straightforward even for those determined to achieve it at almost any price, including self‐denial. Although stressing that, after Auschwitz, “to deny or conceal one's Jewishness is to become an accomplice of genocide after the fact”, Milfull suggests that the best affirmation of the Jewish humanist and messianic traditions today is one that – following in the footsteps of the subversive utopianism of a Lion Feuchtwanger or Isaac Deutscher – pursues “a just and united world, in which integration will not demand the rejection of self and identity”.

Questions of nationhood and identity also dominate the concluding piece in this issue, an introduction to the ambitious agenda of a new, ESF‐financed transnational research project on national historiography by Stefan Berger. Berger shows how the mainstream of European historiography since the nineteenth century has been nationalist history‐writing, often with an explicit pedagogical and propagandistic mission, and how this fixation of historians upon the nation state has barely been affected even by the secular globalizing trends of recent decades. As we have already observed, the European Union remains essentially an intergovernmental treaty organization of nation states, and opposition to the policies of the EU tends to be articulated in nationalist terms – not only from the right but also from the left. If the divisions between “old Europe” and “new” are primarily reflections of different nation state interests – over Iraq, for example, there was virtual unanimity in popular opposition to the war across the European divide – and the forthcoming referenda about the EU constitution are going to be fought over issues of “national sovereignty” rather than the future of Europe, academic historians must carry a good deal of the blame along with those who translate their work into the more popular nationalism that permeates “public history”. Yet the reality of nation states remains, and national government is unlikely to be replaced as the focus of social, economic, and political conflict for as long as even oppositional forces eschew effective transnational organization and define their agendas in exclusively national terms. It will therefore be interesting to see how this project progresses, and look forward to returning to this issue in Debatte in the not too distant future.

Notes

Andrew Sullivan, “The Euro Menace”, The New Republic, 14 June 2003.

ibid.

Cf. Pierre Béhar, “A marriage of convenience”, Le Monde Diplomatique, April 2004 , p. 11.

Cf. Gilbert Ziebura, “The beginning of the end for the European Union?”, Debatte, Vol. 3/No. 1 (1995), pp. 33‐43.