Maastricht Treaty and Schengen Accords

Topic: Indeed, do nation-states have a future in Europe, or do international agreements like the Maastricht Treaty and Schengen Accords suggest that Europe is moving toward permanent integration? Consider the history of race and nation, the thematic frames for this course, when answering this question. Maastricht Treaty → ____________________________________________________________ ● “the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 that gave birth to the European Union” (Judt 529) ● The Euro/financial struggles with the treaty: ○ “These terms, designed to insure that the new euro would be as inflation-proof as the Deutschmark itself, were not uni- versally popular—in the poorer member states it was widely and rightly feared that they would constrain public policy and perhaps even prevent growth. And so, in order to make the Maastricht conditions more palatable, cash bonuses were made available to recalcitrant governments: Jacques Delors, the Commission Pres- ident, all but bribed the finance ministers of Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland,promising large increases in EU structural funds in return for their signatures on the Treaty.” (Judt 715) ● Power of the Union: ○ “To be sure, the Maastricht Treaty made much play with 'subsidiarity'—a sort of Occam's 'the Union does not take action (except in the areas Razor for eurocrats, stating that which fall within its exclusive competence) unless it is more effective than action taken at national, regional or local level'. But even this had different meanings for different ears: in France it meant limiting the power of supranational bodies beyond Paris's control; for the Germans, it implied special privileges and powers for regional governments; for the British it represented a device for blocking institutional integration.” (Judt 715-716) ● THREE SIGNIFICANT SIDE AFFECTS OF THE TREATY ○ 1: Unforseen boost to NATO ■ “One of them was the unforeseen boost it gave to NATO. Under the restrictive terms of the Treaty it was clear (as the French at least had intended) that the newly liberated countries of eastern Europe could not possibly join the European Union in the immediate future—neither their fragile legal and financial institutions nor their convalescent economies were remotely capable of operating under the strict fiscal and other regulations the Union's members had now imposed upon all present and future signatories.” (Judt 716) ○ 2: European Public Awareness The Maastricht Treaty ■ “The second impact was on European public awareness. provoked an unprecedented level of interest in what had hitherto been the obscure workings of the European Union and its anonymous bureaucracy. Even though the Treaty was approved in every country where it was put to a national vote (albeit by just 50.1 percent in the French case) it aroused sufficient opposition to place the question of 'Europe' on domestic political agendas, often for the first time. For four decades, the institutions and rules of a new continental system had been quietly designed and decided in obscure Benelux towns with no reference to public wishes or democratic procedure. Those days, it appeared, were over.” (Judt 716) ○ 3: Coming together of Europe (especially the Western half) ■ “The third consequence of Maastricht was that it cleared the way for the coming together not, indeed, of Europe, but at least of its western half. The end of the Cold War, and the EU's commitment to a single market, removed the impediments to membership for the remaining members of the old European Free Trade Area.5 Sweden, Finland and Austria all duly applied, no longer constrained by their commitment to neutrality (or, in the Finnish case, by the need to maintain good relations with Moscow) and increasingly nervous at being left out of the common European space.” (Judt 716) ● Exclusion/requirements to join the EU ○ “Maastricht, with its rigid requirements for a common currency and its insistence that all aspiring member-states integrate into their systems of governance the acquis was the ultimate communautaire, the rapidly burgeoning code of European practices, bureaucratic exclusion zone. It posed no impediment to Nordic applicants or Austria, but presented an awesome hurdle for would-be candidates from the East. Committed by the EU in the terms of its own charter to welcome the new Europeans into its fold, practice sought to keep them out as long as possible.” (Judt 718) ■ “By any measure the gulf separating East and West Europe was huge: infant mortality in the Baltic states was twice the average of the fifteen EU member states in 1996. The life expectancy of males in Hungary was eight years short of the EU average; in Latvia, eleven years.” (Judt 718) ● Austrian Leadership against the EU: ○ “To avoid falling foul of the law, Haider was generally careful to avoid behaviour that would tar him too obviously with the brush of Nazi nostalgia. For the most part the Austrian (like Jean-Marie Le Pen) revealed his prejudices only indirectly— for example, by naming, as instances of whatever it was in public life that offendedpeople him, who just happened to be Jewish. Both he and his audiences were more comfortable with 'We Austrians should answer not to the EU, newer targets like the European Union: not to Maastricht, not to some international idea or other, but to this our Homeland'.” (Judt 743) Schengen Accords → ___________________________________________________________ ● Simplifying Border Crossings: signed in ○ Their greatest trans-national achievement of the time, the Schengen Agreement June 1985, is revealingly symptomatic in this respect. Under the terms of this dismantle arrangement France, West Germany and the Benelux countries agreed to their common frontiers and inaugurate a shared regime of passport control. Henceforward it would be easy to cross from Germany to France, just as it had long been unproblematic to move between, say, Belgium and Holland.” (Judt 534) ■ ■ “But Schengen signatories had to commit themselves in return to ensuring the most stringent visa and customs regimes between themselves and non- participating countries: if the French, for example, were to open their frontiers to anyone crossing from Germany, they had to be sure that the Germans themselves had applied the most stringent criteria at their points of entry. In opening the internal frontiers between some EC member states, therefore, the Agreement resolutely reinforced the external borders separating them from outsiders.Civilized Europeans could indeed transcend boundaries—but the 'barbarians' would be kept resolutely beyond them.” (Judt 534) “Thus the Schengen Treaty (1985) was a boon for the citizens of participating states, who residents of now moved un hindered across open borders between sovereignBut states. countries outside the Schengen club were obliged to queue—quite literally—for admission.” (Judt 718) European Union cont. / Examples within States / MISC. → ______________________________ ● Scotland (dependence on the UK): ○ An independent Scotland, then, was a perfectly plausible proposition— particularly in a European Union in which it would have been by no means the smallest or the poorest nation-state. Whether the majority of the Scottish population, having secured much of the appearance and some of the limitations of substance of independence, would ever wish to go further is less certain. The geography, demography and resources which have kept Scotland dependent upon the UK that in Scotland as are still there; and by the end of the Nineties there seemed reason to suppose elsewhere the engine of nationalism was running out of steam . (Judt 706) ● Enlargement of the EU: ○ “Nonetheless, for all the justified skepticism of the beneficiaries, the formal implications of the EU's 'big-bang' enlargement were real enough. When the accession treaty, signed in Athens in April 2003, came into force on May2004, ist the European Union grew at a single stroke from fifteen to twenty-five members (Bulgaria and Romania were held back, their accession anticipated for 2007). Its population increased by one-fifth (though its economy was expanded by less than 5 percent); its land mass by almost as much.” (Judt 723) ● EU Lacking sustainable funding: ○ “But whereas conventional governments are free to raise money to meet their anticipated costs, theEuropean Union had and has very few revenue-raising capacity of its own. Its income derives from fixed rates of customs duty, agricultural levies, a Union-wide indirect sales tax (VAT) and, above all, contributions from member-states capped at just 1.24 percent of Gross National Income (GNI). Thus very little of the EU's income is under the direct control of the Union's own administration—and all of it is vulnerable to political pressures within the separate member-states.” (Judt 725) ● Issues with poor nations in the EU Greece or Portugal which had striven ○ “The Union's smaller states—both those like mightily and at some cost to meet the pact's terms and those such as the Netherlands and Luxembourg which feared for the stability of what was now their currency too—duly cried foul, but the lesson was clear.” (Judt 727) ● Separate States, but one Union: remained completely ○ “The member-states of the European Union, by contrast, independent and separate units in a voluntary association to which they had, over time, conceded a randomly accumulated set of powers and initiatives without ever saying what principle lay behind the arrangement and how far this common undertaking was to go” (Judt 728) ● Lack of care from citizens about the EU ○ “Why were Europeans, 'old' and 'new' alike, so profoundly indifferent to the affairs of the belief that they had no European Union? In large part because widespread of a influence over them. Most European governments had never held a vote to determine whether or not they should join the EU or the euro-zone—not least because in those countries where the issue had been put to a national referendum it was rejected, or else passed by the narrowest of margins.the SoUnion was not 'owned' by its citizens—it seemed somehow to stand apart from the usual instruments of democracy.” (Judt 731) ● EU following WWII / the underlying benefits of the EU ○ “The advantage of the European idea in the decades following World War Two had thus lain precisely in its imprecision. Like 'growth' or 'peace'—with both of which it was closely associated in the minds of its proponents—'Europe' was too benign to attract effective opposition. Back in the early Seventies, when the French President Georges Pompidou first took to speaking airily of a 'European Union', Foreign Minister Michel Jobert once asked his colleague Edouard Balladur (the future French Premier) what exactly it meant: 'Nothing' replied Balladur. 'But then that is the beauty of it.' Pompidou himself dismissed it as 'a vague formula . . . in order to avoid paralyzing doctrinal disputes'.” (Judt 733) ● EU moving forward: ○ “Finally, while the European Union has neither means nor mechanisms to prevent its member-states coming to blows, its very existence renders the idea somehow absurd. The lesson that war was too high a price to pay for political or territorial advantage had already been brought home to the victors after World War One, though it took a second war to convey the same lesson to the losing side. But just because a third intra-European war would have been catastrophic and perhaps terminal does not mean it could not have happened, at least in the early post war years. By the end of the century, however, the elites and institutions of the European Union were so intertwined and interdependent that armed conflict, while never impossible, had become somehow inconceivable. That is why Europe was such an object of desire to aspirant members like Latvia or Poland, an escape route out of their past and an insurance policy for the future. But it is also, ironically, why the EU's own leaders proved so fatuously helpless when confronted with the reality of war in the Balkans.” (Judt 733-734) ● Who is a European (NATIONALISM?) ○ “Who are Europeans? What does it mean to be European? What is Europe—and what kind of a place do Europeans want it to be?” (Judt 752) ● LAST PAGE OF THE EPILOGUE: ○ “The new Europe, bound together by the signs and symbols of its terrible past, is a remarkable accomplishment; but it remains forever mortgaged to that past. If Europeans are to maintain this vital link—if Europe's past is to continue to furnish Europe's present with admonitory meaning and moral purpose—then it will have to be taught afresh with each passing generation. 'European Union' may be a response to history, but it can never be a substitute.” (Judt 831)