APRIL 1999   

This 1999 seems really to be a turning point for Europe that with luck could bring more unity, efficiency and democracy. But caution, no move must be wrong, since the passage is the utmost delicate and it is always possible bad slip.

We have had in the first three-months period of this year a series of events having started-off new mechanisms that nobody will be able to stop anymore: the launching and the first troubles of the unique currency; the forced resignation of the Committee under the charge of a misappropriation denounced by the Parliament; the nomination of the Italian Romano Prodi for president of the Union for next five years and half; the end of negotiation for the so called Agenda 2000; the terrible war in Kosovo that, once again, has put in light at what extent Europe needs a foreign policy and a common security policy; finally the preparations for the new European Parliament that on the basis of the Treat of Amsterdam will have control and direction powers, more incisive than formerly. Partly as a consequence of the calendar, partly for a cause-effect relationship, all these events are linked each other and, as when you shake a kaleidoscope, they can potentially bring to a substantially and apparently Union, different from the one we have known till now. The Euro has been an historical event, rising at the same time satisfaction, new expectations and some anxiety. Great satisfaction for it was since the Charlemagne times Europe have not enjoyed anymore an unique currency and since the pegging already fixed to the common currency it has allowed many countries, featured by traditionally unsteady currencies, to reach steadiness and to overcome without damages the several storms and to found over more solid basis the trade exchanges within the Monetary European Union. New expectations, since everybody is aware that the Euro cannot be the target of the European integration process, since it needs to live and prosper a political support, that is an organism to which the European Central Bank and the super technocrats must refer to. Finally some anxiety since the unique currency, presented as a rival against the dollar, having the role of reserve currency, soon begun to lost ground with respect to the green bill, as it were not able to give enough warranties to markets. Many has individuated the cause of this malaise in the conflict - ideological and practical - among the central bankers that are compelled, according to the Maastricht Treat, to struggle mainly against inflation and the Left governments leading the stronger countries of the EU, rather keen to turn up the tap of the expenditure to struggle against unemployment. It has been taken note of the fact that only one rate of interest for eleven countries applying different economic policies, and passing through different cyclical crisis, and so having different management of the currency, may run, in perspective, only if the Union will go on closing up and harmonising its own behaviour: in other words, if at the end of the tunnel it is half seen, even if confusingly, the perspective of the federal Europe. Only two months after the coming into force of the Euro, a scandal broke out 

1999 has in store a series of passages and crucial decisions regarding the future of the Union

  wrecking the Committee leaded by Santer. The events, even a little comic, of the French commissioner Edith Cresson and her dentist promoted for remuneration reasons and expertise of Aids have been only the feather that breaks the camel's back of a situation having get worse over time. Over years and mainly under the ten years management- authoritative and centralist - of Jacques Delors, the Committee has acquired ever more powers, but the bureaucracy had become more and more inefficient, more arrogant and, as it has revealed by the parliamentary committee of enquiry, even the most dishonest. Even more power to a not elective organism, and formed by personages named by the member governments more on the basis of patronage than meritocratic criteria, was deemed inadequate to the new conditions.
Even more the Committee was criticized because it kept expensive and obsolete projects, for having obscure and not uniform expenditure criteria, for it took up problems that, after the emphasis put by the Maastricht Treat on the subsidiary principle, must be left to the national authorities, or even to the regional or local ones.
Furthermore, it started on to circle, in the backstairs of Brussels, few edificant stories about favouritism, irregularities concerning funds and confusion between public interest and private ones. At a certain point, the bubo burst. In a first moment, the Committee succeeded in avoiding a vote of censure by the Parliament demanding for a inquiry that have been entrusted to five sages; but when they delivered their sentence, rapping on many commissioners, Santer and his men must draw the conclusions and give their collective resignation, being not precedents in the history of the United Europe. Governments took immediately measures, nominating in double quick time a new president in the person of Prodi, and engaging as soon as possible in the complete composition of the new Committee that - save new incidents - will guide us till the end of the 2004. But rules have changed radically. First of all, the Parliament now has the power not only to give or to give not its “beneplacito” to the new president, but also to pick holes in every named commissioner's work. Second place, Prodi himself is not compelled to accept passively the collaborators the member countries will propose to him (picking them up often and willingly among old politicians to be removed from the national scene and awarding them with a billionaire sweetener), instead he will choose into a shortlist and distribute the portfolios according more to skills and competencies than the political weight of the countries they belong to. Finally, the Parliament, being aware of the Committee's power and how it has already fallen a prey of the anxiety to conquer new slices of it, will supervise more rigorously the work of the Committee and won't miss one anymore. It's evident that in this kind of situation the governments and the parties that are getting ready in fifteen countries to elect the European parliament at the same time, will have interest in sending to Brussels more valid and capacitated names than formerly. There's even who foresees that the Parliament could, should the need arise, turn into a constituent assembly to finally give the Union a fundamental law going beyond the several treats and allowing to correct the lot of anomalies nowadays present in the European construction. It will be, at least partly, Prodi to govern all these spurs and to try to direct them toward a positive target. For Italy it has been a success obtaining again, after a quarter century and after the unfortunate presidency of Franco Maria Malfatti, the first chair that is by now much greater and powerful than formerly. Now the operation is ended successfully, it is not important to state if it had been carried out only in the national interest, or also to remove from the roman political scene a personage having become a tough opponent for the Left majority. It's important that Prodi is- as he is- a convinced Europeanist and a strong man in achieving his own purposes. If then, in the delicate passages, he will remember he's also Italian (as Delors remembered he was French), it could make it easier for our country a series of delicate passages it must face, since we have not yet carried out the re-arrangement of our public accounts. Nevertheless the Committee's has not prevented the Fifty to carry out, in the established times, the financial reforms required to start again the integration process and to prepare the field for the opening to East. The complexity in negotiation, carried on at the same time over three fronts (agricultural policy, structural funds, and direct contributions to the Union's balance), with reciprocal compensations, has not allowed the involved governments even to evaluate at the instant if they were among the winners or the defeated. The fact is that in a night of negotiation with the knife among the teeth, all have reached something and all must give up to something: those who drawn the shortest straw maybe were the Germans, who aimed to obtain an immediate cut of their net contribution of 11 billions Euro to the Union balance and instead had obtained a much less cut and in addition by instalments. But Germany, as president on charge of the Union, had the responsibility to ensure the success of the Agenda and- if it did not want to loss part of its prestige in Europe - must give up to act still for a few time as an official payer.
For the union getting ready to make the new countries enter it, it is still required a series of structural and organization reforms the same hard to carry out; but the first obstacle was jumped with more easiness than foreseen, and it can be conjectured that the pressure coming from Warsaw, Prague, Budapest and from the other involved capitals for an acceleration of the process will not go unheeded. The incorporation of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into NATO, occurred just at the eve of the war in Kosovo, has indubitably turned more urgent the “dossier”, since those states have accepted to act as a bulwark, military level, at East in Europe on and now have the right to see their economic integration starting-off. Kosovo, even more than Bosnia, has been a trauma for Europe, since it had taken the diplomatic initiative producing the Rambouillet negotiation, but ended undergoing the greater dynamism (and, if we want, also the simpleness, of the American initiative), ended then with the bombing of the Yugoslavia. The entire event has proved once more that, till it won't speak with only a voice, and won't fit itself with the required instruments to practice an autonomous foreign policy, the European Union will keep on being on tow of Washington even when it does not share at all its decisions. Furthermore, it has stirred up over all Europe a latent anti-Americanism, fed by the role of policeman of the world the United States have assumed, a certain roughness in managing allies and now also by the Catholic Church starting to charge Americans faults they do not have. The only way to avoid these feelings grow and degenerate at an extent to endanger a transatlantic alliance, still needed for the world security, is that the European Union succeeds in talking with the United States on an equal footing. So it has become impelling that it names its Mr. PESC, a great prestigious man enabled to represent its foreign policy interests, and it performs even on a military level an effort so to turn it - potentially— more autonomous. Also that is becoming a quite obliged passage, a matter it cannot be postponed.
The greater unknown regards the size of the managing group that must govern all these changes. The European Union is to enter the third millennium under the aegis of the socialism since the majority of the European Council is Left-wing (11 heads of government out of fifty, more two Christian democratic leading wide coalition governments) and left-wing majority will be also the new Committee presided by Prodi. If also the European parliament that will be elected on June 13th will reflect this trend, it would be expected for the next five years a driftage, maybe softened by the state of necessity and by the on force treats, toward a more dirigiste Europe, more keynesian, less inclined to unchain the market forces. But the new doctrine of the European socialist party is all but clear. At the Congress of Milan, where as a remedy against unemployment it has been privileged the so-called “ Clinton remedy”, it seems it has prevailed the pragmatic and substantially liberal trend of Tony Blair. But getting to the point, maybe it counts more the several Jospin, Schroeder and D'Alema, keeping loyal to the social democratic trend, even if time by time they show to be available to adequate it to new conditions. But who, among them, has the leadership capability, the broadmindedness and the authority the founding fathers of Europe had, and once more required nowadays to bring the union to new configuration?
Maybe Blair, but his vision of Europe is very restrictive, and surely it does not coincide with the German, Italian and neither the French one.
Anyhow 1999 it's a fundamental year; a year plenty of decisions and seemingly of conflicts, a year that will weight over the coming on. A year when the union must finally get a decision to make what it is competence of a federal state, that is the foreign policy, the economic policy and the performance of the unique market and set apart all matters where it has wasted its energies. We will benefit from it, all who are Europeanists and who are not.

 

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