Written by Toby Helm
Written by Toby Helm

European Union in 2003

Article Free Pass
Written by Toby Helm

The year 2003 would be remembered as the last in which the European Union was a uniquely Western club. It was a year of preparation for historic change that would see 10 new member states—8 of them from former communist Eastern Europe—join the community in May 2004. (See Map.) On a continent split for so long by the Iron Curtain, hopes were high that expansion would mark the final healing of its post-World War II divisions. Though preparations for enlargement brought EU nations together in a common purpose, profound differences were also exposed about the kind of union that the future membership of 25 countries wanted to create for the 21st century.

Tensions were bought into focus most sharply by the war in Iraq. As British Prime Minister Tony Blair, backed by Spain’s Prime Minister José María Aznar López, supported U.S. Pres. George W. Bush’s war with Saddam Hussein in the early months of the year, France and Germany—the most powerful axis in EU politics—led opposition to armed conflict to the last.

The war begged a series of key questions about the EU and its future direction. Was it sensible for the community to push forward in the creation of a common foreign policy—as it was trying to do—when big international issues such as Iraq merely highlighted profound differences between its member states? Was it a good idea for the bloc to create its own defense force with a measure of independence from NATO, as the French, Germans, Belgians, and Luxembourgers suggested, if this risked further upsetting the Americans and dividing the two continents? Indeed, what should the EU’s relationship be with the superpower U.S. in the era of global markets, global diplomacy, and global terrorism? Should it be a rival, preaching its alternative economic philosophy and foreign-policy priorities, or a superpower partner?

The year opened amid much economic and diplomatic uncertainty. The euro was finally moving upward against the U.S. dollar and British sterling after four years on the slide since the currency’s birth. Its climb was less a sign of the euro zone’s economic health than of uncertainties in the U.S. Germany, the EU’s economic powerhouse, was in the doldrums with barely any economic growth as it struggled with inflexible labour markets and resulting high unemployment. The stronger euro merely added to the pain and made exports from Europe’s manufacturing areas more expensive.

Britain, which remained outside the euro zone, was the notable exception, and it fared far better than most other EU member states. The U.K.’s relative success begged another question. Was the EU’s five-year-old monetary union—from which Britain, Denmark, and Sweden had been the only three nations to stand apart—doing mainland Europe more harm than good? Many believed that the one-size-fits-all interest rate for 12 nations was not delivering success. In June the British government, as expected, put off a decision to join the euro yet again, in effect for several years, in a further sign of its flagging confidence in the European economic system.

Worse was to come for the integrationists, however, when the Swedes rejected the euro by a substantial margin in a referendum in September, despite a strong campaign by government and business for a vote in favour. The campaign was marred by the murder of Anna Lindh, the popular pro-euro foreign minister, just days before the vote. While she was shopping, she was stabbed in what appeared at first to be an attack by an anti-EU fanatic. Investigators later ruled this out as a motive after they arrested a man with Serbian links and strong political views about the Balkan wars.

On the diplomatic front, it was Paris that was to set the tone for a year of rancorous exchanges between Europe and Washington—and bitter squabbling between the EU member states over the wisdom of the war in Iraq. In February the row between the Europeans became so serious that it threatened to throw enlargement off course. In that month French Pres. Jacques Chirac suggested that nations that were due to join the EU were putting their chances of admission at risk by supporting the Iraq war in defiance of Berlin and Paris. “These countries are very rude and rather reckless of the danger of aligning themselves too quickly with the Americans,” said Chirac. “Their situation is very delicate. If they wanted to diminish their chances of joining the EU, they couldn’t have chosen a better way.” The accession nations were furious, as was London, which had always seen itself as the number one supporter of enlargement to the east.

As the Iraqi conflict neared, Blair made no attempt to hide the rift with Paris and Berlin. His hopes of acting as a diplomatic bridge linking Europe and the U.S. lay in ruins. The French, Germans, Belgians, and Luxembourgers seemed determined to add to Blair’s discomfort as they hatched plans for a European defense force that went well beyond ideas envisaged by Blair. The four powers were plotting the creation of what would in effect be a new European army with its own command headquarters, rather than a mere peacekeeping force that could draw its recruits from national armies as before. In London and Washington there were worries that such a scheme would challenge the supremacy of NATO.

Though the Iraqi crisis was dominating world affairs, EU leaders still had to agree on how a community that was about to expand from 15 to 25 members would work. Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia—all from the former communist bloc—were due to join the following May, along with Malta and the Greek section of Cyprus.

For the first time, EU leaders decided to formulate a constitution that would lay down the rules about how an enlarged community would function and what its objectives and values would be. They had to decide how powers would be distributed between big and small member states and how to adapt Europe’s institutions that had originally been built for just six founding members in the 1950s.

Among the accession nations, the whole process was causing a mixture of excitement and alarm. In staunchly Roman Catholic Poland, the biggest in area and population of the accession nations, there were fears that its traditions would be swept away on a tide of EU conformity. There was to be no mention of God in the constitution, an omission that offended Poland’s Roman Catholic traditionalists. Fears grew that the Poles might reject entry in a referendum that was supposed merely to confirm the people’s will to join. In June, however, the Poles voted overwhelmingly in favour of entry, sending a positive, upbeat signal that encouraged many of their Eastern neighbours to do the same in national votes. Pope John Paul II did the “yes” cause enormous good when he publicly exhorted his Polish countrymen to support membership.

In June former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who had been placed in charge of drawing up the initial draft of the EU constitution, handed over a copy of the draft to EU heads of government. The document laid out plans to create a new full-time European president, a new European foreign minister, and a European public prosecutor. The powers of the European Parliament would be doubled and those of the European Commission (EC) greatly increased. Also important, the constitution would give the EU “legal personality” for the first time, granting it in effect the sole right to negotiate most treaties.

By the middle of the year, however, fraud had been uncovered inside the institutions. Romano Prodi, the EC president, had promised to root out financial mismanagement and corruption after a series of scandals under his predecessor, Jacques Santer, but it appeared that little progress had been made when a number of secret bank accounts were found at Eurostat, the community’s statistical wing. The suspension of three senior officials followed allegations that millions of dollars had been siphoned into secret bank accounts over several years. Officials were also accused of having wrongly awarded contracts to the same outside companies over which they themselves presided. Slush funds, it was alleged, were used to pay for dinners, travel under false pretenses, and perks for high-ranking officials. In October insider-trading claims surfaced in the EU’s agriculture fiefdom.

The last quarter of the year saw the French and Germans trying to rebuild diplomatic bridges with the U.S., but the niggling arguments about European defense continued to anger the Americans, so much so that in October they called a special meeting of NATO to discuss the threat to the alliance. Blair reassured the Americans that he would agree to nothing that would harm NATO, but Washington’s suspicions remained.

In November the EC published a report on the accession nations that claimed that in many ways they were not yet ready to be members. Corruption, the report said, was rife in public life, and legal systems were inadequate. Though arguments ensued over the constitution and the widespread belief that accession nations were not yet ready to be full members, it was made clear that they would join nonetheless the following May. In December the community failed to reach agreement on a new German-backed draft constitution after Spain and Poland raised objections to planned changes in voting weights allocated between large and small EU members.

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