It almost slipped off my radar in the summer break, which Berlin dived into at the end of June: the German government seems to change course on its stance towards a multi-speed Europe or, as analysts like to put it, differentiated integration.
If this is really the case then here is some revolutionary news that will change the face of the union as we have known it.
So, what happened? In an opinion piece for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s leading daily newspapers, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle made the case for a hands-on approach towards different speeds for Europe last week.
It is worth quoting what I consider the essential passage of the piece:
“The dilemma is that in Europe 17 countries share a currency, but there are 28 in the Union. How can we move forward given this tension?
That will only be possible if we start thinking in new ways on integration policy. Reinforcing the eurozone means a clearer commitment by Europe to the principle of different speeds than was previously the case.”
To my knowledge this has so far been the most explicit statement on the need to embrace different speeds in order to engineer the widening gaps between the ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ of the eurozone by a member of the government over the past years. Up till now, the federal government carefully avoided to openly address the de facto decoupling of the eurozone from the wider union. Officials frequently pointed out that, according to the treaties, the euro was the currency of the whole union. With a few exceptions all EU members were ‘pre-ins’ to EMU. Obviously, such an approach reflects the destructive potential that multiple speeds might develop for the union as a whole. In the course of the crisis centrifugal forces have already stretched the cohesion of the union to its limits, and the eurozone is far from being a healthy core naturally taking the lead.
It is noteworthy that in his piece Westerwelle now uses the “17/28”, and not the “25 and a few odd outs” formula usually put forward by the government. Now, the question obviously is what to make of this? Arguably, this is a minister known for initiatives such as the “future of Europe group” that have never quite taken off. The newest declaration adopted in Palma de Mallorca this week went down almost unnoticed. It might well be that the minister’s move, regardless of its timeliness and strategic value, is lost in the silly season. Even more importantly, it depends on whether his message is supported in the federal chancellery. This is where all major strategic decisions have eventually been taken on the Eurozone over the past years. Clearly, the foreign office suffers from being marginalised even further over Germany’s ‘ Europapolitik’. It is possible that the minister and his aides in the foreign office now make an attempt to win back some territory over the strategic questions related to the future of the union. But will this initiative fly?
Politically speaking the contentious issue of multiple speeds is much more relevant for both insiders and outsiders of the eurozone than the initiatives of Guido Westerwelle to trigger an institutional debate on Europe’s future. In terms of substance there might well be allies in Paris on differentiated integration, certainly more so than on the institutional questions over which the German foreign office struggled to bring the French counterparts in. Interestingly, Jacques Delors has been promoting his ideas of rethinking EMU and reconciling it with what he calls “Greater Europe” on various occasions over the past months. Is he intellectually paving the way for the socialist leaders in Paris to find common ground on the future of Europe with Germany again?
It is difficult to tell whether the minister’s piece reflects the wider views in the government, and whether it turns into government policy in the fall. The federal elections could obviously make a difference if they brought a different coalition into office. But if we see more of the same in September, and if Westerwelle’s move is indeed part of the overall thinking in the German government (remember that Wolfgang Schäuble has a soft spot for differentiated integration too), we might see Germany starting to actively engineer a new kind of union under the next government.
“We must always have an eye on the part, but also on the whole” is how the foreign minister concludes his piece. Is Germany about to plot out in greater detail a strategy for a Europe of different speeds that balances the needs of the eurozone with those of the wider union? There will be tough issues to address in the coming months and years. The most important one is clearly whether it will be possible at all to reconcile the future economic and monetary union with the common market as a whole. And what is the glue that will bind the new layers of membership together? In terms of substance, process and alliances there is still a great deal of thinking to be done to make a union within the union work.