LONDON–“Some frontiers are only in the imagination” wrote Jan Morris in her “Fifty Years of Europe”. Prince Metternich used to say the frontier of Asia was at the Landstrasse, the street which ran towards Hungary away from Vienna’s city walls. It is also said that Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of West Germany after World War 2, held similar feelings about Prussia. He was a Rhinelander, and whenever his train crossed the Elbe, on its way eastward to Berlin, he too would groan, “Hier beginnt Asia”, and pull the blinds down. After last week-end’s momentous event, the launching of the single currency, the Europeans now have to consider where they go next. Do they in fact need frontiers within Europe any more? If they can come this far, shouldn’t they let their imaginations work further and complete the journey to a United States of Europe?
By any measure of history the European monetary union is a milestone. Those who try to put it into perspective by comparing it with the long forgotten monetary union of Charlemagne, The Holy Roman Emperor or, in more recent years, the failed shilling that linked Kenya, Tanganyika and Uganda miss the point. This single currency of western Europe is not only a more sophisticated concept, resting on the most rigorous monetary discipline that has taken years to perfect, it is part and parcel of a union, that like no other in history, has voluntarily wedded a majority of the world’s most developed economies which, if they had chosen, would have continued reasonably well as independent economic entities.
The reason they chose not to is essentially idealistic and visionary. Of course, economic union, starting with a custom union for iron and steel in the 1950s and maturing today into a single currency zone does have economic benefits- we know that from the stunning twentieth century success of the greatest continental economy of them all, the USA. But on its own, long-term, economic self-interest was never enough to drive Europe’s horses through and over the forest of hedgerows and fences that lay in their path. It was to end war, to remove the causes of belligerency and to create institutions that would further the development of democracy, to push forward the supremacy of human rights law out of the reach of the meddling of the politicians and bureaucrats. So what next? The question will not disappear simply because the process of the change-over of currencies is fairly complex and will take a few years to resolve. Nor because the issue of British, Swedish, Danish and Greek entry still has to be sorted out. Nor because western Europe has promised to bring in eastern Europe, starting in 2003, which should have been the priority all along rather than expanding NATO. Nor, even, because the new Europe has to realize that it has to bite the bullet on Turkish entry, a necessary Muslim counterweight to the monolithic Christian culture of Europe.
If America could be united why not Europe? European public opinion, still very nationalistic and anti a federal Europe, is generally ignorant of how American federalism came about. Very few are aware that starting from the Declaration of Independence it took nearly 90 years to establish a fully mature common currency. Even then the federal reserve system didn’t come into being until 1913. (The European Union has travelled the same course in just over 40 years. ) As with Europe today the fledgling republic used currency to help unify the country. In the middle of the Civil War the National Currency Act of 1863, providing for the replacement of state bank notes with the universal greenback, helped pull the divided country together.
No one more personifies the quest for a united Europe than Chancellor Helmut Kohl. In the push for the single currency he has not had the majority of the German people behind him. Nor did he have the Bundesbank. But two weeks ago the German parliament gave the go-ahead with an overwhelming majority. Scarred by a brother dying in combat in World War 2 and by his own teen-age years as a conscript he has nurtured and brought to fruition a dream that most of Europe’s sophisticated commentators at one time or another, have misinterpreted, maligned or, too casually, derided.
Indeed, Kohl has had to temper his vision to accommodate this hostility. In recent years he has played down political union. A “United States of Europe” no longer appears in his speeches. Nevertheless, it’s fair to assume this quiet approach has been merely a tactic for Kohl. A call for a federal Europe is bound to resurface, especially if he wins the German general election in September. If he loses, as is currently predicted, the flame will have to be passed to newer hands which may be no bad thing, as the idea needs to be translated from the older generation’s quite necessary obsession with avoiding another pan-European war to one where the growing might of European economic institutions is subject to democratic audit.
As the single currency becomes ingrained in everyday habits a united Europe will seem a more natural evolution to public opinion than it appears today. It may take another quarter of a century to realize but it is probably inevitable that the frontiers of Europe which are set to become more and more “only in the imagination” will begin to disintegrate.
