The Penguin History of the World

Maastricht raised difficulties in several countries. The Danes rejected it in a referendum the following year. A similar test in France produced only a slim majority in its favour. The British government (notwithstanding special safeguards it had negotiated) was hard-pressed to win the parliamentary vote on the issue. In the governing Conservative Party a split that had appeared over the matter was to cripple the party when it next faced the electors. European voters still usually thought in terms of protecting or damaging traditional sectional and national interests, and these loomed larger as economic conditions worsened in the early 1990s. But Maastricht was in the end ratified by fifteen member states. Debate continued over allegations of encroachment on the independence of member states by the Commission at Brussels and the comparative fairness or unfairness of individual countries’ use or abuse of the Union’s rules.

While the Maastricht process was created in part by the need felt by many member states – and especially France – for a deeper integration into Europe of the new and powerful united Germany, it soon took on a much wider significance. With Communism gone in eastern Europe, the need for a truly European Union – as the Community called itself after Maastricht – stood out. It is a testimony to the strength of the institutions created over half a century of European integration that the EU managed both to introduce a common currency (the Euro, from 2002), alongside an EU Central Bank and deeper co-operation on criminal justice, foreign policy and military affairs, while moving rapidly towards agreeing membership for central and eastern European countries. In 1995 the Cold War neutrals Austria, Finland and Sweden joined, while the big step eastwards came in 2004, with the accession of ten countries, among them Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and – most astonishingly of all – the former Baltic Soviet republics Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In spite of continued disagreement about its constitution, budget and plans for further expansion, the EU, with its 461 million population, had taken giant steps towards becoming the all-European union that its founders had envisaged.

Economic circumstances had changed, too. For all its importance, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) did not mean what it had meant in the 1960s; in some countries it was evolving from an electoral bribe to large numbers of smallholders to a system of subsidy for fewer, but much richer, agriculturalists. Within the new Union, too, national responses were not what they had been in the 1960s and even later. Germany now provided the driving force and much of the Union’s financial support. Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s greatest triumph, German reunification, had confirmed Germany’s natural position as Europe’s major power. Yet this had been costly. Germany was driven into deficit on its trade account and dissatisfaction with the terms of reunification began to be heard. As time passed, more was also heard of the danger of inflation, an old nightmare for Germans, and of the load carried by the German tax-payer as former East Germans moved to the west and unemployment rose. Economic recession cast long shadows in most member states of the EU in the 1990s, reminding their peoples of disparities and differences of economic strength between them. Everywhere, too, fiscal, budgetary and exchange problems came in the 1990s to undermine the confidence of governments.

There was thus plenty for politicians to take into account. Views were changing everywhere. For the French, for example, the deepest root of the European impulse had always lain in fear of Germany, which their statesmen had sought to tie firmly into first the Common Market and then the Community. As the German economy grew stronger, though, they had been forced to recognize that it would have the preponderant share in mapping Europe’s future shape. De Gaulle’s ideal of a Europe of nation-states gave way among Frenchmen to a more federal – that is, paradoxically, more centralizing – view of a Europe consciously built so as to give a maximum of informal and cultural weight in it to France – through, for example, appointments at Brussels. If there were to be a European super-state, France could at least try to dominate it. None the less, the French decision in 1995 to rejoin NATO was a clear break with the ways of de Gaulle.