With its democratically elected president and powerful finance minister, the European Union of the future will be more adept not only at fighting crises but at preventing them in the first place. Its bicameral legislature, with an empowered Parliament and an upper house like the United States Senate, will ensure greater legitimacy among the Continent’s polyglot people.
That, at any rate, is how Germany’s powerful finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, has laid out his vision for the future of Europe — or at least for the countries that use the euro — on the eve of a critical European Union summit meeting in Brussels.
In a crisis battled primarily through incremental steps, vision has been sorely lacking on the Continent. But here in Germany, scholars, politicians and journalists have intensely debated what form a future Europe would take. Chancellor Angela Merkel is fond of calling for “more Europe,” but few can say what that means, and pessimism about leaders finding a way is growing stronger, as pundits race to declare the euro a failed endeavour. Heading into Thursday’s meeting, there was little confidence that a significant breakthrough would be reached.
The meeting will be the first full-scale meeting for the leaders of the 27 European Union countries since François Hollande became the president of France on a pro-growth platform that seems to have shifted the political momentum in Europe from the austerity championed by Berlin.
At a moment when the world is waiting for agreement on a path forward in Europe’s debt crisis, Merkel told German legislators on Wednesday that she was under “no illusions” and expected a “controversial discussion” with other leaders at the conference. Just hours before flying on Wednesday evening to Paris to meet with Hollande, she predicted confrontation rather than harmony.
In recent days it has felt as though the more that leaders pressured Merkel to agree to stronger measures, whether in Los Cabos, Mexico, at the Group of 20 meeting or at a summit conference last week in Rome, the more she dug in against them. She has expressed particular antipathy for any proposals that would lead to greater sharing of the region’s debt burdens.
“I am afraid that at the summit, far too much time will be spent talking about all kinds of ideas for a common sharing of debt, and far too little about improved controls and structures,” she said, adding that “euro bonds, euro bills, debt redemption funds and much more are not only unconstitutional in Germany; they are also economically wrong and counterproductive.”
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Prime Minister Mario Monti of Italy, who has proposed using the Euro zone bailout funds and the European Central Bank to help bring down borrowing costs in troubled countries, told Italian lawmakers on Tuesday that he would not “rubber-stamp” general, pre-issued declarations at the summit meeting but would instead press for concrete measures. It is a critical juncture for Monti. If he returns from the meeting empty-handed, particularly after pushing through unpopular changes to labor laws on Wednesday, his government could be mortally weakened.
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of Spain told his Parliament on Wednesday that the meeting needed to urgently address Spain’s soaring borrowing costs, a sign of market nervousness about the state of the country’s finances. “We cannot finance at current prices for too long,” Rajoy said.
Political analysts say that Merkel has been forced to play hardball and hold out for the best possible deal because once she signs off on jointly issued debt, she cannot take it back. Yet utterances like “I don’t see total debt liability as long as I live,” which she said Tuesday at a closed-door meeting of lawmakers, do not appear to leave her much room to maneuver.
“Politicians have to lead,” Eckart D Stratenschulte, the director of European Academy Berlin, said at a recent forum on the future of Europe. “You have to identify the aim, you have to explain it, and you have to choose the way, and then you have to go there.”
Merkel prefers to work behind the scenes. A parade of European leaders has circled through Berlin in recent months, sometimes for one-on-one chats in the chancellery’s private dining room overlooking the Tiergarten. Crucially, Ms. Merkel has courted the support of smaller countries, like the Baltics or Slovenia, as well as her main partners in Rome, Paris and London.
Earlier in the year she hosted small rounds of national leaders at her retreat an hour’s drive north of the city, the Baroque 18th-century Schloss Meseberg, where they could speak in greater depth about the needs and wants of their individual countries than in the large groups of 27 that gather in Brussels. At the same time, Merkel has been hosting a “dialogue for the future,” through a series of town-hall-style meetings around Germany.
Merkel has been criticised time and again for her deliberative approach, for the cost of waiting and allowing market instability to chip away at economic activity. Her emphasis on austerity has contributed to political instability in Greece, and her reluctance to take more immediate measures to shore up the euro has helped bring down governments in Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece, and may yet bring down more. With populist parties on the rise, future conversations about “more Europe” may be held with very different interlocutors.
But analysts have long cautioned that it is a mistake to underestimate Merkel’s political instincts or her ability to use even negative momentum to execute a judo flip.
As Merkel has played the stern taskmaster, Schäuble has had the chance to portray the farsighted thinker. “So far, member states have almost always had the final say in Europe. This cannot continue,” Schäuble said in an interview with the newsmagazine Der Spiegel.
It is a common criticism that voters are more excited about the annual Eurovision song contest or the European soccer championship than voting for the European Parliament. A presidential election, Schäuble predicted, would change all that. “It would electrify citizens from Portugal to Finland,” he told Der Spiegel.
Germany, in part because of its cold war history, is typically seen as more prepared to give up sovereignty. But even here, there is opposition toward sending more power to Brussels.
“Political union is code for a state,” said Peter Gauweiler, a member of Parliament from the Christian Social Union. “We can’t allow the central committee to migrate from Moscow to Brussels.” Werner Weidenfeld, director of the Center for Applied Policy Research at the University of Munich, said change “only happens under pressure, never in fair weather.”
Melissa Eddy contributed reporting from Berlin, Rachel Donadio from Rome, and Stephen Castle from London.
© 2012 The New York Times News Service