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One Europe?
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18005 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1990 |
2,582 Words |
| Author
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Terry McNeill
Terry McNeill is chairman of the Department of Political
Science at the University of Hull in Great Britain. |
Yesterday the "common European house" was a Gorbachev catch-phrase; today the upheavals in Eastern Europe that have sent communist regimes tumbling and bulldozed the East-West divide make it a realistic objective. But how should it be erected?
The problem is multidimensional and has at a minimum security, economic, military, geo-strategic, and institutional dimensions. First, there is the problem of replacing the present adversarial alliance structures with a comprehensive system no longer focused on superpower confrontation. This new structure must be geared to the no less complex task of maintaining order in a period of possible turmoil and conflict in the liberated East.
Related to this is the problem of reshaping military strengths, doctrines, deployments, and purposes in away that will make them compatible with peace rather than war.
The economic dimension is itself multithreaded and has within it various subsets of questions, such as how to revitalize bankrupt rust-belt Comecon economics and how best to ease Eastern Europe's painful transition from planning to market without creating new forms of dependency. Also to be considered is how to balance and adjust to the dramatically increased weight of the new German superpower.
At the institutional level, there are also a number of distinctive issues; for instance what institutional path should one Europe follow? Should the aim be to
(a) create universal EC membership on similar terms;
(b) allow different degrees of integration appropriate to different levels of development (the concentric rings approach);
(c) seek greater commonality through the medium of a variety of associated but functionally distinct institutions(a Europe a la carte);
(d) last but not least, determine where the Soviet Union - half-European, half-Asiatic, half-democratized, half-Stalinist - fits in, with its unbalanced , semi-Third World, semi reformed economy, and its history of cultural and intellectual semi-detachment from the rest of the continent?
Does the Soviet Union, or more correctly Russia, belong within the European
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