World view

Europe: East and West

by Prof. Dr. Türkkaya ATAÖV

Turkish membership of the European Union (EU) has been on the agenda for a long time. When the French said non and the Dutch came out with a nee at the end of May and the beginning of June, the European Constitution was rejected by the citizens of these two important European countries. The referendums were the most predictable shocks in the history of European integration. The future of Europe is now being discussed even more intensively. The Constitution seems dead, but the European project will continue. After all, the EU has rapidly evolved from a free trade area of twelve nations to a multinational body of twenty-five countries within which millions were to share an official flag, an official currency, an official anthem (Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”), passports of a common colour and a court of human rights. Although the referendums rendered the Eurocrats speechless, perhaps the results of the May and June voting should be considered a “win” for EU democracy.

While Turkish membership is debated with equal zeal, it may be appropriate to reflect on how the EU reshaped Eastern Europe after the breakdown of the Stalinist model there. The fundamental question is this: has the EU exported welfare capitalism and a security order based on multi-nationalism and human rights, or has its expansion entailed the re-emergence of economic centre-periphery relations within the framework of the continent? 

Protection from enlargement

I shall offer a different picture than that suggested by European politicians and most of the academics, many of whom consider Europe a distinctive civilization. All the Eastern European countries adopted an economic liberal ideology. This was a most radical step for the former so-called “socialist” societies: a bourgeois ideology where a bourgeoisie did not traditionally exist. Hence, Western states, multinational firms and international financial organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank were to be the initiators, the guardians, and the promoters of the reform programmes. In a nutshell, the Europeans, into whose social structures American capital has penetrated, pursued a policy of protecting their own political economies against the disruptive influences of enlargement.

The EU made agreements to secure the “opening of markets” and the deregulation of the economies of the new areas. In contrast to the continental ideal of tamed markets, the EU helped privatize industrial and financial sectors and the social security system. It did not grant the new members equal social and economic rights. Although the free movement of labour is a citizenship right of the EU, transition periods were introduced before Eastern European workers could pass to the Western half of the continent. Western capital was attracted to the strategic sectors; it stood to benefit from low labour costs. The per capita transfer payments to the Easterners were much lower than those of the older members.  This figure is €29 for the Czech Republic, for instance, €41 for Slovenia and €40 for Hungary, whereas Greece currently receives €437, Ireland €416 and Spain €216.

All of this made a direct contribution to the social gap between the Western and the Eastern parts of Europe. Such developments are far removed from “exporting” institutional European way of life to the East. The EU experience for Easterners is, then, no different from that of Mexico in NAFTA. The costs of enlargement are on the shoulders of the poorer Eastern Europeans. Let us pose the following question: Does Europe indeed represent a distinctive, and better, civilization than the United States?

Former Yugoslavia

The responsibility for the bloody dissolution of the former Yugoslav federation is also on the shoulders of Western Europe. This crisis demonstrated that the European states cannot establish a security order even on the continent. The initial recognition of the secession and the independence of some former Yugoslav republics by one of the leading Western European states left the Bosnian Muslims so vulnerable that their ethnic cleansing became inevitable. I was a member of the Turkish group that went there to observe the tragedy at first hand. Even to recall some of the awful facts is an agony; I would rather try to dismiss them from my mind.

The only well-mannered thing that we were able to observe closely was the exemplary behaviour of the Turkish military detachment in Bosnia. Its doctors attended the sick and the wounded, regardless of which ethnic or religious group they came from, and its soldiers repaired buildings, including churches as well as mosques. Their deeds deserve a separate article.

This apart, what occurred first in Bosnia and then in other parts of Yugoslavia does not speak well for the capacity and willingness of Europe. The United Nations was also disastrously impotent. Moreover, NATO expansion accompanied the American drive to lead military operations outside UN control. The bombing of the Serb targets proved that the European role in bringing stability to Yugoslavia had reached a point of non-existence. NATO’s sole reliance on the air campaign, while the stated aim was to “protect the Kosovar Albanians”, in fact left other armed forces on the ground free to do whatever they liked. The war demonstrated the military insignificance of Western Europe.

Former Yugoslavia

So how are we to evaluate the “European alternative?” The European role in world affairs should be understood in terms of its ties with US expansionism. European capital operates within the same framework, not distinct from it. Hence, the patronizing posture over Eastern Europe is conceivable. The former “socialist” countries embraced the American version of market radicalism, not the European welfare state model. Not only European conservatives, but also the Social Democratic parties, the trade unions and the left-wing intellectuals in the EU countries, all of whom had been silenced for the last four decades or so, now ignore their accountability for withholding from the Easterners equal access to rights of continental citizenship and resources.

This trend is entirely compatible with the French colonial behaviour in the Maghreb and the Belgian coercion in the Congo when European integration was in its early years. If we remember Europe’s colonial history and the formation of Nazi Germany, we can realistically conclude that notions of inequality, discrimination, bias and browbeating are not entirely alien to Europeans. This tradition of arbitrariness is discernible even today.

Where are we to find the “light” then? The key to the struggle for democracy and equity lies not in a “Europe versus USA” formula, but within both the American and the EU nation-states. There exists no alternative other than to appeal to the much-subverted traditions of freedom, justice, and egalitarianism on both sides of the Atlantic.

(DIPLOMAT  -  September 2005  -  Ankara)