In Europe

Treaty of Rome – is sorely needed.
    The foundations upon which the EU is built are now increasingly a part of the daily reality of each citizen. It is no longer the pioneers, the statesmen and the nations that shore up the Union, it is above all that immense warp and weft of businesses, cities and people, that slowly-developed, self-evident European existence, that will have to weather the storm. Everything has changed and the organisation has grown too slowly to accommodate it, that is the major problem at this point. And the feeling of solidarity that existed in those early days, that is gone as well.
    During my travels I saw, by chance, a remarkable TV commercial for the British Conservative Party. As far as I remember, it went like this. Two prosperous thirty-somethings appeared on the screen. It was morning,she was sitting on the edge of the bed, he in the bathroom, shaving. Talk between the two gradually turned to Europe. He saw no problem in it, to him Europe meant the Tuscan sun, a Mercedes, Dutch cheese. His wife protested: but what about the euro, and all that bureaucracy in Brussels? He began having doubts of his own, and finally she was able to convince him. At the end, the couple tumbled back into their cosy bed. The punch-line was: ‘In Europe, not run by Europe.’
    Just as European leaders and bureaucrats have sometimes neglected the reasonable need for national cohesion, this commercial showed how many Europeans go to the other extreme: the almost fearful brush-off given to all the international and European ties that have slowly come to form the basis of our daily lives.
    Telling in this regard is the marginal interest shown in the European parliament: the average turnout fell from sixty-three per cent during the first elections in 1979 to forty-four per cent at the most recent polls. The rejection of the constitution, on the other hand, was strikingly clear and powerful. During the last European parliamentary elections, only thirty-nine per cent of the Dutch voting public went to the polls, while the referendum drew sixty-three per cent. In France, the discrepancy was even more striking: forty-three as opposed to seventy per cent. Surveys in Germany, Denmark, Britain and other countries indicated a similar mood. This was no longer a crisis of confidence amongst national governments, but a fundamental rift between European citizens and their political leaders. The European project is faced, in other words, with a gigantic legitimacy crisis.
    That hiatus is due in large part to the vagueness and limitlessness of the European project. Limitlessness in the most literal sense: where, after all, does Europe end? It is no coincidence that the physical limits of the current European Union – with the exception of Switzerland, Norway and Greece – largely coincide with the scope of Catholic Christianity in the Middle Ages. To a monk in the year 1006, the map of the European empire of 2006 would look rather familiar. But what if the expansion of the EU were to simply continue, what if expansion were to become an independent trait of the European project, like a bicycle that must keep rolling if it is not to fall over? Would it not eventually become something completely unrecognisable to the citizens of the original member states? And, besides that: would the Union not be running the risk of aEuropean variation on ‘imperial overstretch’? Might not an all-too-rapid modernisation and democratisation in certain regions – the Balkans, Turkey – unleash uncontrollable forces? And might not the Union itself in that way become too unstable?
    In addition there is, for the average citizen, that other form of limitlessness: the ‘Brussels bureaucracy’. Despite what is often claimed, it is not the size of the apparatus that is the problem: the Union is run by fewer than 17,000 civil servants, half of whom are engaged only in translation work. In a city like Amsterdam, for example, the body of civil servants is one and a half times that size. The quality of the Union's apparatus is generally quite high. The problem is found in the enormous quantity of regulations spread by the EU – due often enough, by the way, to the fact that all manner of national ‘fixers’ are pleased to take cover under the wings of ‘Europe’. The total of some 80,000 pages of Union directives could fill a bookcase, their limitlessness extends from the prescribed thickness of bicycle tires and the length of window washers’