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The German preponderance in the EU

Christopher Hyland, 14 July 2014

The former French president Francois Mitterrand, in a phrase annexed from the novelist Francois Mauriac, was effusive in stating his distrust of German reunification: “I love Germany so much that I am glad there are two of them”. But now that Germany has been (re-)unified*, it has gained an ascendancy in the EU that must, whatever German intentions, be troubling. There are two Germanies again: the Federal Republic – possessed of the largest economy and population in Europe – and the EU that has increasingly become its doppelgänger.

There is, I might as well say now – since this isn’t always the case, and the obvious is in constant need of restatement – no intention in the foregoing to impute a diabolical congruence between the worst parts of German history and the current EU project. No nation is as masochistic as Germany in remembering its grandparents’ crimes. But Bismarck’s aperçu is pertinent: “I have always found the word ‘Europe’ in the mouths of those politicians who wanted from other powers something they did not dare to demand in their own name”.

Germany, above all things, wants there not to be another European war – but this desire is, understandably, shared by the rest of Europe. (And, anyway, as war fades from memory, it seems less likely – though it becomes statistically more probable). So, what Bismarckian desiderata might Germany unconsciously be pursuing under its no-doubt sincere rubric of ever-closer-union and transcontinental harmony? The natural desire of any state to have its own way.

Germany, for example, has pushed hard to increase democratic participation in EU structures. This sounds nice. But as the most populous state in the Union, any move towards democratisation of the formal structures of the EU – an oft-proposed panacea for EU-ills – must tend to increase German influence. That is one reason why the German-dominated European Parliament’s recent arrogation of the power to nominate the holder of the office of President of the European Commission was so disturbing. The spitzenkandidaten system represents not just, as was argued by David Cameron, a shift of power away from national governments and towards the European Parliament. It is also, by that very fact, a shift of power from national governments towards Germany.

It doesn’t matter that Jean-Claude Juncker is a Luxemburger, and that Angela Merkel, really, would quite happily have gone for someone else if she could have escaped domestic censure. Juncker, judging by his recent emollient remarks on the prospect of UK repatriation of competencies, may not even be the dipsomaniac-federalist chimera that the tabloids constructed. What matters, to be slightly Marxist for a moment, is the nature of the power relations within the EU. Once Germany (re-)endorsed the spitzenkandidaten principle, Juncker’s nomination became a fait accompli.

This is a mistake – within the logic of the EU itself. A supranational organisation, intended (at least, in rhetoric) to temper nationalism through commerce and state-to-state negotiation, will not succeed as long as one state demonstrably exercises a preponderance of influence over the others. Germany, which arguably cares most about the European project, needs to reconsider the means by which the EU is reaching its end.

*A minor, but principled, argument centers on which term one uses. ‘Reunification’ implies that East and West Germany had previously been one state. They hadn’t. The late (and former Chancellor) Willy Brandt spoke of ‘reunification’ as a lebenslüge: a lived lie – in this case, a shared amnesia about the destruction of German sovereignty in 1945. To imply a continuous shared history was, he argued, to obviate the necessity to remember why the Federal Republic only began in 1949.

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