Why Would Anyone Want to Join the EU?

Following Croatia’s vote (albeit on only 44 percent voter turnout) in January to join the European Union, Serbia has now also been accepted as a candidate for membership. This is its reward for agreeing to a compromise with Kosovo, mediated by the EU, whereby Kosovo will be written with an asterisk at international and regional meetings to highlight the disputed status of the breakaway province.

This leaves Kosovo’s future still something of a mess, especially because all the young country was offered by the EU for its agreement with Serbia was a "feasibility study" on integration. But the larger question is why the EU should want to absorb Balkan countries at all, given its troubles over Greece. More to the point, why should any country want to join the European project, which is itself in shambles?

The answer seems to be sheer desperation. The EU wants to prove that it is still attractive to someone, while Balkan countries, viewing EU members as richer and more stable than themselves, hope some of that residual wealth and stability will rub off.

Another curious case of EU membership that may soon arise is Scotland. First Minister Alex Salmond has promised a referendum on Scottish independence within the EU. This, of course, is a contradiction in terms because Scotland would become a separate but minor province of the EU under this plan rather than a truly independent state. Salmond assumes that an independent Scotland would not have to apply for membership because it is already in the EU as a part of the United Kingdom.

True, Salmond now says he wants to retain the pound sterling as the currency for Scotland and not (as until recently) the euro. Whichever he chooses, however, his independent Scotland would still have its interest rates set by a foreign bank (the Bank of England in London or the European Central Bank in Frankfurt) and would depend on Brussels for almost all policy decisions (the EU generates 84 percent of domestic legislation in Germany, according to the country’s Federal Ministry of Justice). In the weighted system of EU majority voting, moreover, Scotland’s mere handful of votes would count for nothing. Yet Scots will soon be offered this tartan pig in a poke.

Superficially, the EU seems to have made great progress since the 1957 Treaty of Rome. Almost every aspect of policy is now determined by bureaucrats in Brussels in combination with the European Council and the European Parliament. The EU even has its own foreign service and is struggling to create its own intelligence and federal police services. No wonder it impresses Arabs and Africans, whose own struggles for unity have, relatively speaking, gone nowhere.

The trouble, however, is that the EU as a whole is in absolute demographic decline and relative economic and technological decline, and its major policies — whether the common fisheries and agriculture policies or the euro and monetary union — have failed. In terms of foreign and security policies, it is an international joke. It spends next to nothing on defense, and even its main contributors in this area, Britain and France, have seen their armed forces so severely cut recently that in the Libyan war, where Europe "took the lead," they were entirely dependent on U.S. logistics and supplies. If the EU boasts of its reliance on "soft power," that is because it has no choice. Its head of foreign affairs, the British baroness Catherine Ashton, has been called "the world’s highest-paid female politician," yet she remains anonymous and has no influence on world events whatsoever. Her position sums up everything that is wrong with the EU — expensive but ineffective.

The fundamental problem with the EU, however, is that the people of Europe have no faith in it and do not identify with it. A 2010 Eurobarometer poll found that only 49 percent of EU citizens think their country’s EU membership is a "good thing," while only 42 percent trust EU institutions. Meanwhile, those institutions, like the EU’s whole ethos, are positively anti-democratic. Its key decision-making bodies — the European Council, Court of Justice, and European Commission — are, for all practical purposes, unelected, unaccountable, and removed from the people (commissioners are usually washed-up has-beens whose political careers in their home states have ended in failure). Their decisions are irreversible in national parliaments, and the European Parliament, while vested with powers of co-decision-making with the European Council, is also remote. The Parliament is a glorified debating society — not a government with an official opposition — and its parties cannot promise any fundamental policy changes in their election manifestos; indeed, its election outcomes rarely have an impact on the course of EU politics. Its members are unknown and despised as opportunists who merely seek inflated salaries, perks, expenses, and pensions. Voter turnout in the EU’s parliamentary elections is low and falling, reflecting the widely held belief among EU citizens that the EU doesn’t protect or represent their interests.

One of the most egregious examples of the lack of democracy in the EU is the practice of making small states that vote "no" in EU referenda vote again. Denmark had to vote twice on the Maastricht Treaty, while Ireland was forced to go two rounds on the Nice Treaty and the Lisbon Treaty. Big states are not immune from this kind of bullying treatment, either. When voters in France and the Netherlands rejected an EU constitution in 2005, European leaders tweaked about 4 percent of the original wording, renamed the document the Lisbon Treaty, and then rammed it through the French and Dutch parliaments despite the popular votes. When then Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou suggested a referendum on the Greek bailout last year, he was maneuvered out of office within days.

The EU does not believe in the tolerant British saying, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do." Instead, its policy is, "When in Rome, do as the Germans do." Altogether, the outlook in Brussels and Berlin is like that of Napoleon in George Orwell’s Animal Farm: "He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"

The official German attitude is summed up by the regular fury from German politicians and the German media whenever an EU country calls for a referendum on initiatives from Brussels. When Ireland announced in February that it would hold a referendum on the EU’s new fiscal treaty, Der Spiegel marveled, "The Irish Again!" while Süddeutsche Zeitung declared that if the Irish fail to realize that the fiscal pact "is in their national interest," Germany "will not be able to help them." Perhaps nothing captures Germany’s elitist attitude better than an essay last summer in Der Spiegel by German political scientist Herfried Münkler titled, "Democratization Can’t Save Europe: The Need for a Centralization of Power." Münkler argues that elections and referenda cannot be trusted in Europe because "the European population has never been and still is not a European people." EU elites, he adds, "need to improve — and power has to be taken away from the periphery." Can you imagine a leading U.S. magazine printing such stuff about American elites and voters in certain states?

But this is exactly what is happening in Europe today. Power is being taken away from the periphery by centralizing elites. But these elites are failing. The EU’s key policy — monetary union — has been a disaster. The simple fact is that you cannot have a successful monetary union without a political and fiscal union, with monetary transfers between rich and poor areas legitimized by democratic institutions. (In a currency union of disparate economies where changes of interest and exchange rates are forbidden to members, weaker economies have no means of competing with stronger ones if there is no legal arrangement for democratic agreement among members that stronger economies will bail out weaker ones when they get into debt.)

In the EU, however, there is no appetite for political or fiscal union or for larger monetary transfers — particularly not in Germany. So the only solution to the productivity gap between the north and south in the eurozone, if it is to not break up after a series of defaults, is for the southern states to deflate themselves through austerity to the level of Chinese peasants in order to become competitive with Germany (according to the World Economic Forum, Germany is the world’s sixth-most competitive country, while Greece ranks 90th). Greece, for example, will see a 25 percent drop in GDP by the end of next year. Already, more than 1 million Greeks out of a workforce of 5 million are unemployed, suicides are going up along with homicides, barter is becoming the means of exchange in rural areas, and public support for extreme left- and right-wing political parties is growing.

Unsurprisingly, some now accuse the Germans of once again being bent on domination, because they have called the Greeks dishonest, doubted their ability to run their own economy, suggested a takeover of the country by a European commissioner, proposed the postponement of parliamentary elections, and called for the creation of a separate national account for the payment of debts to Frankfurt before any money can be spent on Greece itself. The quarrel, in any case, will probably be settled by Greece’s exit from the euro, which Germans would certainly now prefer.

In the meantime, similar problems are looming in Ireland, Portugal, and Spain. These have been assuaged temporarily by the policies of the new Italian head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, whose long-term refinancing operation has given more than 1 trillion euros to European banks to encourage them to buy bonds from states that could yet go bankrupt. Berlin and Brussels are headed in another direction and are staking everything on the ratification of the new European fiscal compact, which has been signed by 25 out of the European Union’s 27 member states and forces EU members to have their budgets approved by Brussels.

The problem, of course, is that the compact needs to be ratified. And, once again, democracy is rearing its ugly head. The probable winner of France’s forthcoming presidential election, François Hollande, promises to tear up the treaty. The hard-luck Irish may well vote "no" in a referendum. No one knows who will be ruling Greece or Italy within a year. The Spanish have just unilaterally rejected the latest deficit-reduction target set for them by the EU. Even in Germany, it now turns out that Chancellor Angela Merkel will need a two-thirds majority of both houses of parliament — in other words, support from opposition parties who will demand concessions — to pass the fiscal pact. The whole initiative will likely be overtaken by events.

This is the European Union that Serbia is a candidate to enter. We wish the country well.