20 years after the Big Bang
It's glossed over now, but many in Europe were against the 2004 EU enlargement to the former Eastern Bloc at the time. Has ever-larger union come at the expense of ever-closer union?
Twenty years ago today, on 1 May 2004, the European Union had its largest enlargement in history. The so-called “big bang”accession of Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Malta and Cyprus (followed shortly after by Bulgaria and Romania) was the resolution of a decade-long debate during the 1990s over the future of the EU, and whether Europe should dive head-first into the reunification of its two halves that had been separated by the Cold War.
Today, people forget how heated this debate was in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, They also forget that reunification was driven mainly by political elites rather than the people (a 1989 poll by Der Spiegel found that the majority of people in West Germany wanted East Germany to remain a separate country). Former US Secretary of State James Baker has recalled that only the United States and West Germany were in favor of German reunification. The United Kingdom under Margaret Thatcher and France under Francois Mitterrand had serious reservations. The fact that it happened was “nothing short of a miracle,” and it happened because of US insistence.
The fall of the Berlin Wall happened to come just at the time when Western European leaders were already in discussions over whether to transform the European Community, an intergovernmental trading bloc, into the European Union, a confederal entity that would act as one state in many ways. Very quickly, a fundamental question had to be confronted: how big was this new union going to be?
How big is too big?
That question was not resolved by the time the Maastricht Treaty creating the European Union was signed in 1992. The full implications of what was happening in the East were not yet clear while those talks were happening, as the Soviet Union had not broken apart yet. There were some obvious countries that were intended to be brought into the union at that time: Sweden, Finland, Austria, Switzerland, Norway and Iceland (although the public in the latter three voted to reject joining, and the governments had to instead established pseudo-EU membership through EFTA). But the question over the newly-liberated Communist countries of the East loomed large. Was this a Western European Union, or one for the whole continent?
Today the answer might seem obvious, but at the time it was anything but. In fact, one of the main pre-existing bodies that were combined to create the EU in 1992 was called the Western European Union, and its tasks and institutions formed one of the bedrocks of the new European Union. According to contemporaneous accounts, there was actually some debate among the early drafters of the Maastricht Treaty in the 1980s about whether the ‘Western’ should be dropped or not as part of the name of a future confederal union.
This might come off as arrogance or even racism today, but the concern at the time was that this new union would only be able to function as a confederal union operating as a single unit if its geographic ambitions remained limited. The union they had just created in 1992 was designed for 12 member states. The EU is now more than twice that size. Could something that large really function as a pan-national union with governing structures that act as a state, with one currency and one single market? Or would the ambitions and achievements of the Maastricht Treaty eventually be eroded by ever-larger union, with member states of various cultures and geographies unable to agree on a common vision? The question, then as now, is this: could the EU enlarge itself to death?
Ever-closer union vs ever-larger union
Although Margaret Thatcher had opposed German reunification (for reasons of historical trauma that seem misguided and quaint today), the UK became the biggest champion of EU enlargement in the 1990s. There had always been discomfort with the Maastricht Treaty in Britain. Had it been put to a referendum in 1992 as so many at the time were demanding, it’s quite likely the UK would have voted to leave the European project back then rather than waiting until 2016 by which point it had become much more difficult. The treaty’s call for “creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe" became one of the most vilified phrases in British politics.
And so, when the ink on the Maastricht Treaty was still barely dry, the UK started trying to undermine ever-closer union by promoting ever-larger union. Washington was pushing hard for the Eastern bloc and Baltic countries to be quickly brought into the EU and NATO, in order to solidify their place in the Western world order before the Russians could change their mind. Successive British governments gladly acted as the European arm of that enlargement push within the European Council. But not everyone was so enthusiastic. France, Germany, Italy and other founding members were concerned that such a huge and rapid enlargement would make the European integration promised by the Maastricht Treaty difficult if not impossible. And there were concerns about how Western Europe could take on countries that were comparatively much poorer, as people watched the initial problems encountered with German reunification play out in the 1990s. The EU was already struggling to deal with the sudden addition of 17 million East Germans as EU citizens. Could it handle the 75 million other new citizens that would come with the 2004 enlargement?
Washington and London eventually won the debate, convincing Berlin, Paris and Rome that a rapid expansion of the single market for their goods would be worth any of the short- or long-term risks involved. It was also framed as a “moral imperative” for Western Europe, much as the subject of reunification had been framed to West Germans. The Eastern Bloc countries needed to be helped after decades of brutal Communist rule, and they needed to be protected from Russia. The West owed it to them after effectively abandoning them following World War II. They were the same arguments that we’re now seeing today with Ukraine.
Britain decided to put its money where it’s mouth was, diving head-first into integration of people from the new EU states into their labour market. The UK immediately opened their job market to the accession states, whereas almost all other EU countries placed temporary restrictions on the rights of work of the citizens of these states to their countries. That resulted in a surge of Polish and other Eastern migrants to the UK, because it was the only country taking them with no restrictions in 2004. Public resentment about these new arrivals, and British media portrayals of them as parasitic, was eventually one of the main drivers of the vote to leave the EU in 2016. Paradoxically, enlargement’s biggest champion eventually saw their support blow up in their own face, with a revolt by their own citizens.
Nowhere is this more true than with the awkward story of Turkish EU accession, a process also championed by London. While Turkey had not been under Soviet domination, the reasons for offering Ankara membership in 1999 were the same: keep Turkey on side with the West. Washington was also pushing hard for this, fearing that if the prospect of Turkish accession weren’t kept alive Turkey would turn toward Tehran and Moscow. Erdogan eventually ended up moving Turkey away from Western alignment and closer to the Arab world and Putin, though there is a debate about whether this was inevitable or was a result of Turkey slowly realizing that its EU accession process had always been a charade. The process is now dead and it is hard to conceive of a circumstance in which it would be revived. Yet it cannot be officially ended for fear of provoking Ankara and driving it further into the arms of Russia. Ironically, despite the fact that the UK had been virtually the only EU country pushing for Turkish accession all along, during the Brexit referendum Tory government ministers claimed Turkish accession was being forced upon the UK and there was nothing they can do to stop it. Whether these comments by Defence Minister Penny Mordaunt were out of ignorance or mendacity is still unclear. But it was shocking for people in EU capitals to see the UK government, who was the one pushing enlargement on them despite their reservations all these years, suddenly pretending they had opposed it and were its unwilling victims.
A success story
So, in hindsight, who was right? Was Paris right that ever-larger union inhibited ever-closer union and made the EU unwieldy to manage? Or was London right that the expansion of the EU created a larger and more vibrant single market, better economic opportunity and more heft on the world stage? Well, they were both right.
Since 2004, the EU’s economy has grown by 27% - with much of that growth driven by dramatic transformations in the East. The economies of the Eastern EU countries grew on average 4% annually from the start of the accession process in 1994 until the global financial crisis of 2008. The economy of Poland more than doubled in the two decades since joining the EU. Those economies, in turn, became highly desirable markets for Western manufacturers, who have been able to export to them tariff-free as if they are sending goods within their own country since 2004.
But the economy isn’t everything. Observers have noted that while the Eastern EU countries made rapid strides in tackling corruption and establishing the rule of law during their accession process, once they were in the EU there was no longer any incentive to keep going. The moment accession was granted the EU lost the ability to maintain the rule of law, and enormous backsliding has been witnessed in Hungary, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. The power of national capitals once they get a seat in the EU Council has meant that it is impossible to use even the feeble tools the EU has at its disposal, such as Article 7, to stop a member state like Hungary from committing flagrant rule of law violations.
It has not escaped the notice of Western Europeans that the biggest troublemakers in the EU seem to be the new member states who entered two decades ago, prompting the often-heard phrase in Brussels, “if they don’t like the EU then why don’t they just leave”. Enormous resentment has built up over the fact that Eastern Europeans have benefitted enormously from a wealth transfer from West to East in the form of cohesion and regional funds, only to then turn around and vote for authoritarians who vilify the EU and use that wealth transfer to enrich themselves and their cronies. There is a reason why enlargement had ground to a halt before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The bad experiences of the 2004 enlargement caused Western capitals to slam the breaks on enlargement into the Western Balkans, leaving Serbia, North Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro and Bosnia (who would have thought they’d be EU members by now) in the lurch.
But of course, the story isn’t all bad. It is, in fact, mostly good. And there are the ‘best in class’ examples like Estonia who have built both thriving economies and thriving democracies since starting the EU accession process. But for the public in Western Europe, when it comes to the Eastern accession countries and the EU, all they seem to hear these days is stories about vetos, judicial interference and LGBT-free zones. It is one of the main things I hear from people in Western Europe outside of the bubble from people who don’t follow the EU very closely. They have an impression that countries in the East have taken Western money, enriched themselves, and then spit on the values they promised to uphold when they asked to join the union. I try to tell them that this isn’t the case, these are specific situations and Western Europe is not immune to such democratic backsliding either. But I can also see why they’d have this impression given current circumstances.
Within the bubble, there is a general concesnsus that the 2004 enlargement was a good and inspiring thing. But there is also frustration with the sclerosis that has been caused by not fully updating how the EU works in order to accommodate a doubling of members. The constitution-turned-Lisbon-Treaty was supposed to make these adjustments, and it did somewhat such as moving most issues in the Council from unanimity to qualified majority voting. But the painful process of its ratification means the provision to reduce the number of commissioners so not every country has to have one was undone (thanks Ireland) and unanimity was kept for issues of foreign policy, which has given Viktor Orban immense power during the Ukraine war. The Commission college’s enormous size of 27 commissioners has made it unworkable, forcing the Commission to create two de-facto levels of commissioner (vice presidents and regular commissioners) and creating the need for the president to behave in a top-down manner that relegates the commissioners to something akin to an assistant. The Parliament also, at 720 seats, has become unnecessarily large. Treaty revision is badly needed, but the trauma of the Lisbon Treaty experience 15 years ago has made national governments afraid to go near it again.
So, do EU governing institutions function less well today because of enlargement than they would have if there had been no Eastern enlargement? One could make the argument that they probably do. But at the same time, the Eastern enlargement brought in a huge influx of talented and ambitious people who have given the European project energy it probably wouldn’t have had otherwise. Just like with Eurovision, the entry of enthusiastic Easterners into a stagnant Western European institution meant that Western Europeans were saved from themselves. Eastern Europeans know more about how the EU works (because they’re taught EU civics in school) than their Western counterparts who have been members since the says of the European Community (because the Western education systems didn’t update for the federal level of government the EU became after the 1990s). The quality of Eastern members of the European Parliament is generally better than that of Western Europe because the role is taken more seriously, and it isn’t considered a demotion to move from national parliaments to the European Parliament (for smaller Eastern countries it’s considered a promotion). It’s generally true that the bigger and more Western a country is, the worst its MEPs are. That’s certainly the case for France and Italy which have, in my opinion, the worst MEPs in the legislature (they barely show up).
Should the EU stretch into Asia?
The elephant in the room during this year’s 20th anniversary of the big bang enlargement is the question of Ukrainian accession. President von der Leyen and the 27 national leaders have given the green light to start accession talks with the three former Soviet republics of Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia. Though few will publicly express disagreement with the unprecedentedly rapid pace of Ukrainian accession being pushed by von der Leyen (at the urging of Washington) for fear of not sounding supportive of Kiev, privately people have a lot of doubts. Ukrainian accession to the EU wasn’t even something that was on the table before the war, nobody I know was envisioning Ukraine being part of the union some day, let alone Georgia which is technically in Asia. But suddenly we’ve got people demanding that it should happen tomorrow.
According to a recent ECFR survey, whether you think Europe should dive head first into a new big bang of enlargement depends on whether you come from the West or the East. A majority of respondents in Germany, Austria and France believe the EU should not pursue enlargement at this time. A majority in Poland and Romania think the opposite.
But the concerns over stretching the EU across the steppes into the Caucasus make the concerns 30 years ago over the big bang enlargement look like peanuts. The enlargement question has become even more existential when it comes to these countries because it has profound implications for what the EU will become. The attitude toward the Western Balkans has been ‘not now, but eventually’ for some time, with the thinking being that they could be absorbed without much impact on the union as a whole (and in any event it wouldn’t make sense to leave that part of Europe as a strange black hole in the middle of the union).
But the accession process for those countries remains blocked while that of Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia speeds ahead. And those three provoke much more profound questions. Can the EU handle adding such an enormous amount of territory (Ukraine would become the largest EU country by area)? Can the Common Agricultural Policy continue to exist with the addition of the “bread basket of Europe”? (The universal answer from experts is no). What will it mean to take on a country of 40 million people, bigger than Poland (the largest of the big bang entrants), 40% of whom are native Russian speakers? Can the EU afford to take on a war-torn country as a member state? Will it mean perpetual military conflict with Russia? And when it comes to Georgia, is the EU ready to take on a non-contiguous state that’s actually in Asia? (One could argue it already has one with Cyprus). Does Georgian accession make Armenian accession inevitable? Is the EU ready to have a land border with Iran?
Perhaps the biggest question is, at what point is the EU ‘complete’? Was the European project ever supposed to encompass the entire continent? Would it ever be feasible to have a confederal union of everyone in Europe? Is that desirable? In the rush to support Ukraine, many of these questions have been brushed aside. But they will need to be confronted. The big bang accession was a decade-long process during which these questions were examined, and the answer was that yes, we can handle this expansion. And in the end, the European Union has benefitted from the big bang far more than it has suffered from it. But this time around, accession may be moving ahead as a geopolitical tool without anyone asking the important questions. And that could spell disaster for the European project. As President Macron noted in his Sorbonne speech last week, our Europe can die. And there is a real risk that it could enlarge itself to death if things aren’t carefully thought through.