The Penguin History of the World

The difficulties of enlarging the Union were by then much clearer. The longest-standing candidate for admission was Turkey, of whom some asked whether it was a ‘European’ country at all since most of its territory lay in Asia and most of its people were Muslim. Worse still, the modernizing Atatürk legacy was under challenge there after a sixty-year ascendancy. Islamists had always resented the regime’s traditional secularism. Yet if the test of Europeanness was modernity in institutions (representative government and women’s rights, for example) and a certain level of economic development, then Turkey clearly stood with the Europeans rather than with the rest of the Islamic Near East. Turkish treatment of political opposition and minorities (particularly the Kurds) none the less met with much disapproval abroad, and the record of the Turkish government as a guardian of human rights was questioned. Turkey thus posed yet again old and unanswerable questions about what Europe really was. Significantly, though, Turkey’s old enemy Greece has become one of the key supporters of membership for Ankara, arguing both along economic and political lines, in spite of unresolved issues over Cyprus (now a member of the EU in its own right).

At the end of 2000, in negotiations at Nice, while the principle of further expansion was agreed upon, it was also agreed to change voting qualifications – although France succeeded in hanging on to the same ‘weighted’ voting rights as Germany, now indisputably much the largest and wealthiest member state. Ratification of the Nice treaty had still to be obtained in national parliaments, of course, and the Irish government soon had to face the problem posed by losing a referendum on its proposal; this sent another shock through the system. Agreement at the end of 2001 that a special convention should consider the working of EU institutions, and of possible changes in them, only slightly offset this. And when in 2005 referenda in both France and the Netherlands rejected the product of that convention – the somewhat extravagantly termed ‘European Constitution’ – the project of further deepening the integration process seemed, again, to be in deep trouble. But while the popular rejection of the constitution treaty was yet another sign of the European Union still being an enterprise of and by the political élites, much of the content of the constitution would – perhaps for that reason – find its way into EU rules and regulations, thanks to an amended version of the proposed constitution being brought back for referenda in the countries that rejected it.

To an extent, then, the end of the Cold War seemed at last to have revealed that Europe was more than the geographical expression it had so long seemed to be. Equally, though, there seemed less point than ever in seeking some innate European essence or spirit, let alone a European civilization, the major source of a world civilization though it might be. It was as ever a collection of national cultures resonating vigorously to their own internal dynamics, for, as the twenty-first century began, there was little sign of a European patriotism able, like the old national allegiances, to stir the emotions of the masses, for all that had been achieved since the Treaty of Rome. Participation by voting in elections for the European parliament had fallen everywhere except in those countries where voting was compulsory. Linguistic chauvinism threatened a new unworkability in the institutions of the Union – whose huge, disordered complexity already baffled those who sought political logic in them and undoubtedly contributed to a larger public sense of boredom with the idea of Europe.

But much had been achieved. Above all, the Union was a community of constitutional democracies and the first successful essay in European integration not based on the hegemony of a single nation. As the twenty-first century commenced, too, the EU was, even in rising economic gales, in the long run evidently an economic success. Its member states had a population of almost 500 million and accounted for some 20 per cent of world trade (most of it between her own member countries). Its GDP in 2010 was larger than that of the United States and three times that of Japan. Europe was one of the three prime movers of the world economy that had emerged in the previous fifty years. If Europeans still seemed to worry a lot about where they were going, they were obviously a team many outsiders wished to join.