Free The New Old World by Perry Anderson Page A

Europe, the equivocation of monetary union as an economic project is matched by the ambiguity of its political logic for the latent national rivalries within it.
    Finally, what of the prospects for extending the European Union to the east? On the principle itself, it is a striking fact that there has been no dissent among the member-states. It might be added that there has also been no forethought. For the first time in the history of European integration, a crucial direction has been set, not by politicians or technocrats, but by public opinion. Voters were not involved; but before the consequences were given much consideration, editorialists and column-writers across the political spectrum pronounced with rare unanimity any other course unthinkable. Enlargement to the east was approved in something of the same spirit as the independence of former republics of Yugoslavia. This was not the hard-headed reckoning of costs and benefits on which historians of the early decades of European integration dwell: ideological good-will—essentially, the need to recompense those who suffered under communism—was all. Governments have essentially been towed in the wake ofa media consensus. The principle was set by the press; politicians have been left to figure out its applications.
    Here the three leading states of Western Europe have divided. From the outset Germany has given priority to the rapid inclusion of Poland, Hungary, the former Czechoslovakia and more recently Slovenia. Within this group, Poland remains the most important in German eyes. Bonn’s conception is straightforward. These countries, already the privileged catchment for German investment, would form a security
glacis
of Catholic lands around Germany and Austria, with social and political regimes that could—with judicious backing for sympathetic parties—sit comfortably beside the CDU. France, more cautious about the tempo of widening and mindful of former ties to the countries of the Little Entente—Romania or Serbia—has been less inclined to pick regional favourites in this way. Its initial preference, articulated by Mitterrand in Prague, was for a generic association between Western and Eastern Europe as a whole, outside the framework of the Union.
    Britain, on the other hand, has pressed not only for rapid integration of the Visegrád countries into the EU, but for the most extensive embrace beyond it. Alone of Western leaders, Major has envisaged the ultimate inclusion of Russia. The rationale for the British position is unconcealed: the wider the Union becomes, in this view, the shallower it must be—for the more national states it contains, the less viable becomes any real supranational authority over them. Once stretched to the Bug and beyond, the European Union will evolve in practice into the vast free-trade area which in the eyes of London it should always have been. Widening here means both institutional dilution and social deregulation: the prospect of including vast reserve armies of cheap labour in the East, exerting downward pressure on wage costs in the West, is a further bonus in this British scenario.
    Which outcome is most likely? At the moment the German design has the most wind in its sails. In so far as the EU has sketched a policy at all, it goes in the CDU’s direction. One of the reasons, of course, is the current convergence between German calculations and Polish, Czech and Hungarian aspirations. There is some historical irony here. Since the late eighties publicists and politicians in Hungary, the Czech lands, Poland and more recently Slovenia and even Croatia have set out to persuade the world that these countries belong to a Central Europe with a natural affinity to Western Europe, and that is quite distinct from Eastern Europe.The geographical stretching involved in these definitions can be extreme. Vilnius is described by Czesław Miłosz, for example, as a Central European city. 39 But if