Following the events of 11 September 2001 and in the context of the beginning of work of the European Convention, the Spinelli Group "For a New Federalism" is providing its contribution to the debate on the future of Europe, with a paper entitled "Europe in today's World". This text, that we publish here (in French and English), was drawn up by former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard, with the help of an editing committee comprising: Pervenche Beres, Max van den Berg, Maria Berger, Paulo Cosaca, Proinsias De Rossa, Klaus Haensch, Jo Leinen, David Martin, Pasqualina Napoletano, Raimon Obiols, Pacques Poos, Bruno Trentin and Anne Van Lancker.
EUROPE IN TODAY'S WORLD
The idea of gradually integrating the various European countries was first advanced in 1947, 55 years ago. The first treaty, on coal and steel, has been in force since 1951.
During this half century, the process has extended from 6 to 15 countries and negotiations have begun with 12 others. This process has also become far more complex and now affects the entire range of the Member States' economic, commercial, financial and social affairs. Such a fundamental change has inevitably had an impact on their legal systems and their foreign and security policy.
Yet it is quite clear that basically the process of European integration (and the way it has developed reflects this, as does the text of the treaties) is a response to European constraints, including the need, for reasons of efficiency, to establish a common foreign trade policy.
A minority, particularly among the six founding countries, hoped that with unification Europe would regain enough power and influence to allow it to continue playing a major role in world affairs. This was, however, never the majority view and was never translated into a binding undertaking, in the form of a treaty.
Aside from some vague statements made in the preambles, without any implementing provisions, the seven main treaties that unite us formally define and lay down binding provisions in relation to just two common objectives: to make any war between the Member States impossible and to offer their undertakings a market that can match up to the modern world.
Our 15 governments were therefore resolved to keep Europe's relations with the rest of the world entirely within their jurisdiction, like their security policies. It is quite clear, and became particularly clear at the Nice summit in December 2000, that the majority of Member States did not share the desire of the few for Europe gradually to become able to influence major world affairs by making concerted use of its economic, financial, diplomatic and military power. In the long-standing debate about whether Europe represents a power or an area, the decision went against the former on three occasions: Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice. In today's treaties, Europe is an area of cooperation that combines an integrated market and a single currency with an institutional system that gives a strong impetus to harmonising all the rules and structures that contribute to competition. That is already a substantial result and it will certainly leave its mark on the 21st century.
ANALYSIS
Nevertheless, and however reluctantly, since the mid-1980s the Council of Ministers, and especially the European Council, have had to face up to the fact, which to some extent they have accepted, that the scale and influence of the process of European integration made it illogical and incomprehensible to the outside world that there was no sign whatsoever of European diplomacy or a common military force.
The end of the cold war and the collapse of communism, moreover, put an end to the polarisation of the world and led to greater autonomy in the countries concerned.
Because of their geographical and cultural proximity, the Member States obviously have ever-growing common interests in relations between Europe and the various other parts of the world.
The largest provider of official development aid is bound to try to unify its Member States' foreign policy vis-à-vis the countries with which it is cooperating.
Politically, over time and often rather belatedly, this has been translated by the gradual homogenisation of Member States' foreign policies in the Middle East, where we have a permanent Council representative, and towards the various countries of former Yugoslavia.
Institutionally, this was translated first by the procedure of common foreign policy measures, then by the appointment of the Secretary-General of the Council of Ministers as the Council's High Representative for Foreign Policy. Finally, the decision to create a 60 000-strong deployable military force capable of remaining in place for a year to carry out what are known as Petersberg tasks, i.e. rescuing our nationals, supporting and protecting humanitarian actions, peacekeeping under the UN mandate and peacemaking, reflects the Union's resolve jointly to carry out the tasks that are required in the present state of the world but that do not come under the treaty that still guarantees the security of our states, the Atlantic Alliance.
All this will still have to be fine-tuned, examined in more depth and made more coherent at the forthcoming Convention in 2002 and the Intergovernmental Conference in 2003.
The world suddenly changed on 11 September 2001. Western society discovered that a few thousand men hated the West so much that they were prepared to commit suicide in order to carry out their terrible attacks. It also discovered its own tragic vulnerability.
We must look carefully at the rare messages that reach us from these nihilist killers. The war they say they have declared is not limited only to the United States, it is a war on the 'Jewish and Christian crusader campaign'. So it clearly concerns Europe too.
This situation highlights certain extremely serious problems, the most fundamental of which was perceptible long before 11 September 2001.
We will confine ourselves to the two major problems: how to handle the threat now and in the short term, and what it is about the general state of the world that leads to this kind of violence.
Looking at the immediate situation, the key problem is how to clearly define and demarcate the threat so as to ensure that populations that would not be able to withstand it do not have to suffer en masse from the way the threat is handled: that would provoke international anger and the kind of solidarity that would heighten the threat instead of weakening it. A few tens of thousands of men, hardly more, hate our civilisation so much that they are prepared to commit suicide in order to attack it in the most terrible way. Sophisticated weapons are no use against a threat of this kind. It has to be handled primarily through policing rather than military methods. We can succeed only if our modern democracies make more headway in two areas in which they are advancing hesitantly if not reluctantly. The European Union should now take up these challenges.
The first is secrecy. Total transparency is clearly incompatible with any hope of success in tracing and identifying these killers, tracking them down and rendering them harmless. The talk of war and of military action that we have heard has the advantage of reflecting the degree of violence involved in the conflict in which we are engaged; but it has the serious disadvantage of implicitly suggesting concepts of territories and peoples that are not relevant here. We neither can nor should legally declare war on anyone. That means that the police remains the body responsible for handling the problem in all our democracies. The role of the police is to impose the law and in doing so it has to comply with strict and controlled rules governing its own actions and uses.
As is already the case in regard to war and the police, the fight against terrorism will require a corpus of law to ensure that it is effective, but without calling into question the principles and rights recognised in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the European Union's Charter of Fundamental Rights.
The idea of laws on terrorism will give rise to much hesitation and political debate. We will have to build up our secret services significantly and ensure that they work together, which is not evidently the case either. There is an urgent need to shift their focus towards the early detection of terrorist activity.
Furthermore, secrecy is an absolute prerequisite for tracing, not only for following known tracks but certainly also following up incomplete information. Clearly, we do not know how to do that. It has already become apparent that the strikes on Afghanistan are to some extent a response to media demands directed at the American people. The general feeling was that the Taliban military defences certainly had to be neutralised before it would be possible physically to track down Bin Laden. If the air strikes had continued, however, even in Afghanistan alone, this would have provoked a dangerously contagious Muslim anger. We will have to teach western public opinion and the media to put a real curb on their appetite for the spectacular.
The other problem facing democracies, as indeed all countries that are openly involved in fighting terrorism, is international cooperation. This term all too often conceals very polite social procedures while genuine cooperation makes slow and creeping progress. The measures taken allow for joint action only if none of them in any way calls into question established territories or powers, the prestige and even the traditions of each sovereign state concerned. Now, however, the situation is quite different. In future the world will need as rapidly as possible to adopt harmonised measures and procedures so that it can quickly and efficiently track down money laundering, gain access to the secrets of the tax havens, pool information from throughout the world for questioning all suspects, for extradition, and so forth. Clearly it is up to international organisations such as the UN, the OECD and the EU to take on this task so as to lend it real international legitimacy.
The European Union is therefore faced with a double problem. How can it harmonise legislation within the EU and acquire effective decision-making systems? How can it unify international diplomatic action so that it can speak with one voice and put all its potential power behind a single strategy of world governance?
All this, however, relates only to the current threat. It is a limited one, but there is little reason to think it can be eliminated quickly. We are bound to experience its pressure for some years, which is why the questions we have just asked are so serious.
The key problem still remains how to avoid any extension of this destructive hatred of the West.
We recently heard that many mosques are being built in Cambodia, although it is not a Muslim country. That means that terrorist money is being used for a strategy that offers a corrupt form of Islam as a pretext or justification for all those whose hatred of the West may lead them to embrace a suicidal and destructive nihilism.
Two and a half if not three billion people live on less than two dollars a day, one billion on less than one dollar; another billion, some of them the same people, have no access to drinking water. In about 1900, the average difference in per capita income between poor and rich countries was 1 to 5 or 6; in about 1970 it was 1 to 30. Today it is 1 to 60.
Our development aid instruments suffice to prevent some countries from sinking into famine. They in no way suffice to get their economies off the ground. They are not even able to prevent the spread of abject poverty and the dramatic worsening of inequality. They are based on the principle that exports will help the economy to take off. But that is a myth. All known cases of economic take-off (Europe in the 13th century, the USA in the 18th century, Japan in the 19th and early 20th century, Brazil in the early 20th century, Thailand, Taiwan and Korea in the late 20th century, China today) began with an internal market and they all protected these markets before they were able to export. We do not know how to help internal markets to develop, which means that we are abandoning Andean America, the whole of Africa, most of the Arab world and part of Asia to poverty. Now that images circulate throughout the world, the image of our growing and insolent prosperity looks more and more intolerable to the majority of mankind that is excluded from it.
So there remains, in our world that has never produced so much, immense poverty and dramatically worsening inequality. That is enough to trigger angry reactions. Yet I do not think it is enough to drive people to suicide. Incidentally, most of the suicide terrorists of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were not poor. There was another factor involved.
I am convinced that it was chiefly a question of humiliation. There has always been a certain arrogance among the rich. But this becomes worse when the product they are offering is called democracy while quite clearly there is no democracy in the way they handle world affairs. Democracy is a product reserved for internal use by the rich countries. It is quite clear that the problem of debt and the volume of official development aid are hardly discussed democratically. As regards the use of force to resolve conflicts, the way the rich choose the places where they will or will not act (forget Africa) and how they do so (sanctions against Iraq) also creates a strong sense of humiliation.
True, in quite a few former third-world countries, the humiliation also springs from internal causes, starting with the fact that a few groups or families or corrupt, archaic and repressive regimes have appropriated almost the entire national wealth, particularly in the form of oil. Yet the West still stands accused of protecting those regimes.
The developing countries also sometimes question the ethics of the civilisation we have created. Not without reason many religious groups, and not just Muslims, perceive the quest for personal enrichment, which we regard as the only collectively accepted objective and the sole regulator of our economic and social systems, as devoid of any ethical or moral relevance. After all, our method of calculating the wealth produced includes accidents, pollution, crime and drugs.
Japan is moving ever closer to our form of society, although it played little part in its emergence. This is primarily an American-European endeavour.
The slight difference here is that Europe can contribute a culture that is deeply rooted in history, that is expressed most strongly today in its rejection of all forms of fundamentalism, whether it is religious, political or ideological and whether it now appears as Muslim fundamentalism or, conversely, as the kind of pure monetarism that generates inequality and poverty.
It will take us decades to create a more moral society and to control the economic instruments so that they are less likely to produce inequality. During this time, however, and from the outset, we must take intensive diplomatic action to ensure that we listen more carefully in our international relations and show more respect for the dignity of the developing countries and their peoples.
STRATEGY
This is where the question of Europe's role becomes acute. What is under attack in the United States is our common civilisation. Bin Laden said he wants to crush the 'Jewish and Christian crusader campaign'. We are the crusaders. We must show total solidarity in the face of barbarity. The problem for the future, however, is what image of society we want to project. In fact, Europe and the United States do not have exactly the same image nor do they behave in exactly the same way towards the rest of the world.
If we want to make western civilisation respectable again in the eyes of the rest of the world, we must establish a new solidarity in relation to its aims, do far more than we are doing today to reduce inequality at home and internationally, stop using the free market as a pretext for doing so little to fight the economics of crime, the laundering of dirty money, and the tax havens and, finally, restrict and tax money-making for its own sake, including speculation. In the final analysis, this means putting people before economics again, whereas under our current western rules, economics tends to come first and people second.
The fact that in the course of history all or nearly all the 15 Member States of the European Union have developed a far better system of social protection than the United States, together with higher-quality and more wide-ranging public services, forms part of this social model, which we see as more worthy of respect. All this needs to be consolidated and extended further, whereas only recently it was the fashion to reduce the scale of social protection and state regulation. Now, on the contrary, with the worsening inequality throughout the world, we must back up every means of combating inequality, beginning with the public services and social protection.
INSTRUMENTS
Europe seems to be aware of this, since less than a year ago it adopted a Charter of Fundamental Rights, which some people even considered too timid but which under these circumstances has proved to be premonitory and bodes well for the future. The real problem is that, although Europe has a society that is somewhat better regulated socially than the United States, because of its institutional weakness it finds it far more difficult to develop it in a convergent and homogeneous manner. Yet this will be one of its tasks in the coming years.
In this strategy aimed at the ethical regeneration of western civilisation, it will not be enough for each government to take national measures or the European Union to take European measures. The international organisations too will need to show a strong resolve: it is vital to have tougher and more respected common, international rules on economic and social matters, as in the field of security and the environment. Here Europe has a major responsibility. Since it is used to taking a multilateral approach and respects its rules, it is more capable than any other of giving a stronger impetus and persuading the United States little by little to introduce into its culture and practice the idea that Americans are not the only people in the world.
Reform of the UN should make the Security Council more representative, while at the same time strengthening and improving the legitimacy of its economic pole: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and also UNCTAD.
The UN needs to be given substantially greater responsibilities for peace and security, especially in terms of increased finance.
Here the European Union has a necessary role and it must become capable of playing it. It consists in imposing respect for multilateral rules and compliance with them. Commercial policy alone is not enough. The EU needs to take a firm and uniform diplomatic approach, together with exemplary military action in the service of peace, on the basis of respect for the constitutional state, democracy and human rights.
Tomorrow's world will be multipolar and multicultural. That means it will not know peace, security or a relatively harmonious development unless it adopts firm rules.
The European Union can exploit its great success in achieving peace and stability in Europe. It must speak with one voice in the international bodies so as to export this achievement to every corner of the world. To that end the external relations responsibilities assigned to the various Commissioners must be coordinated much more closely, the EU's High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy must be attached to the Commission rather than the Council and the three pillars must be merged, i.e. the Community method must be extended. In Doha last November, the Union gave one of its best diplomatic performances: the responsible Commissioner spoke on the basis of a constant dialogue with the Council and Parliament. The subject was commercial policy, but in fact they had entered the terrain of foreign policy.
This is the greatest venture of the early 21st century.
The main purpose of the Convention that is about to be adopted following the Nice European Council certainly lies here.