The Berlin-Paris Axis

It seems that Chancellor Merkel is moving fast after being given a definite right-wing mandate last Sunday. Details have emerged that she and President Sarkozy are planning a whole smorgasbord of Franco-German joint institutions, schemes and policies designed to kick-start the stalling ‘European project’. Whatever the result of the Irish vote yesterday, it looks like the French and Germans are going to grab the ideal of European Unification by the scruff of the neck – they are prepared to go it alone, even if (or perhaps specifically because) it means leaving other ‘major’ EU players like Spain, Poland, the UK and Italy to fall by the wayside.

This is certainly a way of reasserting the geopolitical dominance of the ‘original and best’ EU member states – not without reason are the EUcentric hubs of Brussels, Strasbourg, Luxembourg and Frankfurt on/near the new axis. Spain is, as a French diplomat (in name if not in demeanour) points out in the article, still wallowing in recession, the UK is doing its level best to put the brakes on every aspect of EU homogenisation (at the same time as demanding the Presidency for Tony Blair), Poland is still hugely economically underdeveloped, and Italy is currently being shaken by Berlusconi scandal after political impasse after natural disaster after Mafia gang war.

Essentially what Sarkozy and Merkel are doing is pressuring the other countries to make their minds up whether they want in or out where the EU is concerned. Not just the Irish, the UK, the Poles and the Czechs – all European citizens. Half-hearted membership (i.e. raking in EU subsidies then flicking the V at Brussels along Irish lines) is no longer an option, according to this new narrative. ‘If you don’t like it, you can leave’, &c &c. Presumably what this should entail is some greater level of differentiation between the EEA (which some countries, like the UK, would dearly love to join instead of the EU) and the EU itself other than just the single currency, ECB and nominal supranational authority in Brussels. An interesting experiment, certainly, but I’m not sure quite how radical any of these proposals will end up actually being in practice…

~ by Marius Ostrowski on October 3, 2009.