World leaders pose for a family photo during an informal EU summit, in Prague, on Oct. 7.LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP/Getty Images
The idea of European unity was born in war. War is unifying Europe again, though the fighting in Ukraine cannot take all the credit. The energy crisis it has created is the true catalyst.
In 1941, Italian communists Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi, imprisoned by Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini on the tiny Mediterranean island of Ventotene, reasoned that it would be folly to recreate Europe as it was whenever the Second World War came to an end. The European countries would inevitably slaughter one another again.
Their fear inspired them to write the Manifesto for a Free and United Europe. It was scribbled on cigarette papers and smuggled off the island. The document would have enormous impact on postwar Europe. In 1957, the Treaty of Rome begat the European Economic Community, the ancestor of today’s European Union (in honour of Spinelli, the main European Parliament building in Brussels is named after him).
Since the 1950s, efforts to intensify European unity have been tortuous. Some went nowhere or caused more problems than they solved, though others created a pathway to a common economic and political destiny for a group of wildly divergent countries (the EU has 24 official languages).
The European Coal and Steel Community was the first crack of the unity whip. The goal was to create a common market for coal and steel, one that would establish barrier-free trading for the commodities and, incidentally, break the heavy-industry stranglehold of Germany’s Ruhr region, which had been Hitler’s munitions factory. The ECSC worked.
Then came the Common Agricultural Policy, a highly flawed program still very much in play today that, in essence, used German industry to pay for French agriculture. After that came a series of enlargement rounds, bringing many of the former Soviet republics into the EU fold. This eastward expansion, which also created new NATO members, probably moved too quickly and enraged Russian President Vladimir Putin but was judged by the West as an overall success.
There was never any talk of common education and health policies, which was a failing. The biggie unification effort, of course, was the launch of the common currency – the euro – whose coins and banknotes entered circulation in 2002.
Instead of uniting the EU, the euro almost tore it apart when five countries – Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Cyprus – required bailouts to refinance their debt or rescue their banks. Greece came close to leaving the euro zone in 2012, triggering the European Central Bank’s emergency rescue mission. The austerity programs that came with the bailouts fuelled the rise of Euroskeptic populist parties that remain powerful forces in the EU. Two of them, the Brothers of Italy and the League, were part of the three-party alliance that won last month’s Italian election.
Brexit – the exodus of the EU’s second-largest economy and home of its leading financial centre – was the next near-existential blow. The only good news for the EU was that Britain’s departure was so drawn out, agonizing and costly that it snuffed out any me-too exit fantasies.
Today, the EU and several non-EU countries, such as Norway, are coming together like never before, with energy security driving the agenda.
So far, Mr. Putin has not been able to break the EU’s and NATO’s resolve to prevent Russia from winning the war (21 EU countries are members of NATO). The weapons and materiel from the EU countries, as well as from the United States and Canada, keep flowing to Ukraine, and their sanctions keep piling up, pushing Russia into recession. The EU is adding to the punishment by banning the import of most Russian oil and oil products in December.
At the same time, the energy crisis has the EU rushing to protect and reinvent its power markets. As the EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, said this week, the bloc’s prosperity “has been based on cheap energy from Russia,” referring to the seemingly endless natural gas shipped to Germany, Italy and other countries that used the fuel to become manufacturing leaders.
That cheap energy is gone. The Kremlin has been reducing the EU’s gas supplies for months. Before the war, Russia provided almost half the EU’s gas; today, it’s less than 10 per cent and may go to zero. The sabotage last month of the two Nord Stream pipelines – culprit to be determined – that connect Russia to Germany will ensure that Russian gas never returns to the European market in vast quantities.
The EU knows that its new mission cannot be left to individual countries alone. Collective efforts will have to be made.
New liquefied natural gas terminals and pipelines from gas-rich North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean will be built. Nuclear power will stage a revival, and the lives of existing plants, like the few still in service in Germany, will be extended. Renewable energy projects will be pushed like never before. Germany, Italy and other countries are spending hundreds of billions to subsidize crazy-high gas and electricity prices for households and businesses. Inevitably, some of this expense will be funded at the EU level as a common energy policy takes shape.
The EU has come full circle, it appears. Spinelli’s idea was to unify Europe to prevent war. Were he alive today, he would be pushing energy unity to prevent energy blackmail from Russia and to ensure that Mr. Putin’s desire to see the EU shatter as it freezes in the dark is never fulfilled.