Brendan Simms: Can Angela Merkel forge a United States of Europe?


Cometh the hour … regardless of anti-German sentiment, Chancellor Merkel must seize the initiative (Picture: Reuters)
Famously, Chancellor Kohl regarded German unification as a prelude to a much larger European unification
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In June 1900, the British commander of the international expeditionary force against the Chinese Boxers, Admiral Seymour, found himself in a bit of a fix. He exhorted the Kaiser’s contingent to come to his aid with the immortal words “The Germans to the front”, words that went around the world. Many Germans claimed they had rescued the day. On the contrary, British and French spin doctors replied, the Germans had been cowering in the rear for so long that Seymour had had to shame them into doing their duty.

One is reminded of these exchanges today as Europeans dispute whether Berlin should take the lead in the eurozone. For every French socialist party motion condemning Chancellor Angela Merkel for dominating the Continent on behalf of “German savers and German trade surpluses”, there is a Radek Sikorski, the Polish defence secretary, who calls upon Germany to stop skulking at the back and seize the initiative before the European project collapses completely.

Anti-German sentiment is growing exponentially in southern Europe, especially Greece and Spain, whose peoples are rebelling against the austerity regime supported by Germany. More recently, Germanphobia resurfaced in France. In Paris, the socialist senator Marie-Noelle Lienemann invokes the spirit of the Second World War Free French leader General Charles de Gaulle against German suggestions that France should balance its books. Even where it is not so explicit, much of the rhetoric against a “German Europe” draws on memories of Hitler’s attempts to control the entire continent 70 years ago.

This time, however, it is different. Far from wishing to dominate Europe, the German elite see the European project as both the apotheosis and the transcendence of their national aspirations. Famously, Chancellor Kohl regarded German unification as a prelude to a much larger European unification. The Basic Law, the German constitution, is bookended by a preamble that announces the intent to “serve world peace” as “an equal member of a united Europe”, and the final paragraph — revised after unification — which states that it will be superseded by a new constitution freely agreed to by the German people. In other words, the potential surrender of sovereignty to a democratic single European state is written into the very core of the German political DNA.

Where the Germans can be faulted is in their lack of boldness in pushing forward the political unification of Europe on a democratic basis. Too much in hock to the traditions of the Holy Roman Empire and the EU, they see political union as a process. They still fail to grasp the historical truth that successful unions such as Britain’s union of England with Scotland and Ireland and America’s union of states have been events. Berlin’s current strategy of postponing joint debt liability and political union until convergence criteria have been achieved will crush the southern and western periphery economically long before they reach the finishing line.

Eurozone political union will happen only if the pooling of debt, and a subsequent “debt-ceiling”, is accompanied by the simultaneous establishment of a common parliament which is responsible for it. The periphery will be able to grow again, while the regulatory structure of a single state ensures that they are not allowed to run up such vast debts again. There is no reason in theory why this solution should not be promoted by any eurozone leader, or political party, but in practice the task must fall to the Chancellor of Germany, the largest and most powerful country — Angela Merkel.

Frau Merkel needs to level with the German people and the other peoples of the eurozone by calling a constitutional convention of representatives specifically elected for that purpose. They should work out an Anglo-American style constitutional union with a popularly elected executive president, an assembly elected by population, and a Senate representing the member states. This package would have to be put to the electorate of the eurozone on the same day in every participating country. Populations would then be free to decide whether they wished to go forward together or to hold on to an increasingly illusory sovereignty. It is the only solution with the democratic legitimacy to create a Union Bond covered by the entire tax base of the Union, and to extend the fiscal reach of the state into areas hitherto unaccustomed to it.

This new Union would be a fusion of political cultures in which the German element will be hugely important and rightly so. Parts of it will need to learn the German willingness to balance books and pay taxes. These qualities are not unique to the Federal Republic, however. Some northern members of the eurozone are more “German” than the Germans themselves. Moreover, Germans would not dominate. The total population of a single eurozone state including Poland and other latecomers would be close to 400 million, of whom less than a quarter would be German. A German vote in the assembly would count the same as a Greek or an Irish vote, while the smaller acceding polities would actually be over-represented in the Senate, as is the case with the less populous US states.

Last week, one British journalist described Frau Merkel as a potential European Abraham Lincoln. What we require, however, is not somebody to defend the current union — which is broken beyond repair — but to create a new one. The better analogy is with the 19th-century Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who created the Second German Empire out of the ruins of the old and ineffective German Confederation. Today, the eurozone needs a democratic Bismarck, probably though not necessarily from Germany. If we get one, the sight of more Pickelhauben helmets in newspaper cartoons will be a small price to pay.

Brendan Simms is Professor of the History of European International Relations at Cambridge and author of the recently published Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present (Allen Lane).



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