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At the moment the EU is veering between two possible responses to the crisis, each of which forces fiscal policy
away from the populations of its member states. Either European leaders will find some stopgap to further
centralize revenue and expenditure, without consulting their citizens. This might alleviate the crisis in the short
term, but will eventually cause the populations of the wealthier members to rebel, as indeed the Germans and
Finns already seem to be doing. Or, more likely, the EU will continue to edge towards a system in which a fiscally
sound German-Polish-Baltic-Scandinavian core dictates to a more shaky periphery, which will likely bring popular
rebellions there. At the moment Greek voters can change the parties who rule them, but cannot change fiscal
policies. These are decided in Berlin. Thus we have the emergence of pantomime republics.
What the EU states should be doing instead, as Simms maintains in a recent essay for Chatham House, is
exploiting the crisis to take the bold step of creating a European democracy that would function as a great power.
Historically, Simms argues, successful political unions among states are established not in good times but in bad,
by people conscious of earlier failed attempts to build them and determined to do better next time. He cites the old
Holy Roman Empire and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as examples of dysfunctional entities with weak
central institutions and odd voting laws from which the American Founding Fathers learned when they designed
their Constitution. Europe is now experiencingif only Europeans would realize it!the same sort of salutary
shock that the Founders confronted in the late eighteenth century: an unregulated relationship between the parts
and the whole, while the enemies are drawing near (Simms has in mind a resurgent Russia, a global China, and a
nuclear Iran).
Thus Simms concludes that the solution must be a new Constitutional Convention, whose members are invested
with the authority to begin again from the foundations and produce a lapidary statement of basic institutions and
rightsrather than the ponderous EU treaties Europeans tend to vote down when given the chance in national
referendums. Simms is likely right that gradualism has played itself out; a new beginning may be the only way
forward. But it is unclear how to get from a group of democracies to one democracy, especially when the citizens
of those democracies do not know what is in it for them. Simms imagines a new Party of Democratic Union that
will win future elections, control the European Parliament, and thus force action from the ground up. But for all the
reasons Krastev gives, the chances of this are slim.
A more plausible alternative is to encourage the European elites to propose a new constitution themselves. If not
likely, such an approach is at least possible. The creativity will have to begin in Berlin, since at this point only
Germany is important enough within the EU for its own national elites to double as European elites. This is not a
part German leaders have embraced. In the current crisis Prime Minister Angela Merkel has played a brilliant
tactical game, allowing the problems of others to fester to the point where only Germany can determine the
solution. This narrow approach indulges German voters in the dangerous fantasy that European imitation of
German austerity would solve the problem.
Germans are now behaving a bit in European politics as red staters do in American politics: they profit from the
larger union they think they want to undermine. The German boom of the last decade depends precisely on the
euro and the market it provides for German exports in countries such as Greece, and on the fact that the euro in
international markets is likely cheaper than any German currency would be. Merkels approach, consistently
pursued, will emphasize the symbolic character of non-German sovereignty by producing more pantomime
republics. Eventually, domestic politics in Germany and on the European periphery would undo the European
system that has given Germany such political and economic power.
As the Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski noted in an impressive speech in November, Europe cannot do
without German leadership. And this means nothing more dramatic than realizing that, without a major political
reform of the EU, Germany will find itself with far less world power and far less reach into European and global
export markets. What might such a constitution look like? Symbolic sovereignty and pantomime republics would
be replaced by a dual democracy, with executive and parliamentary authority and revenue collection located at
two distinct points, the European capital and the national capitals. A convention of European elites would have to
decide, and set down in a brief constitution, which sorts of authority, and how much taxation power, would be
located in each. The new arrangement would have to endorse a clear giveaway-takeaway mechanism, so that
voters would know that they cannot be taxed for the same policy at both levels of government.
Just where those lines would be drawn would have to be decided by Europeans (although I agree with Simms
that European solidarity without a European army will be difficult). The arrangement would have to be endorsed,
country by country, in a referendum. Since it would be a new beginning rather than just another treaty, however, it
would have to start with Berlin. The German lead would have to be followed by other countries that are fiscally
sound and growing, which at this moment means a new core around the Baltic Sea. Countries that vote it down
would simply be left out, with the option of revoting later, rather than being allowed to torpedo the entire project (as
happened with the earlier attempt at a European constitutional treaty in 2004-2005). Governments would have to
inform voters that they would not be giving away sovereignty, but endorsing sovereignty at two levels, confirming
national power at home while gaining democracy at a higher level.
Europe cannot simply turn around, as Americans sometimes imagine, and hop backward rock by rock to the other
shore of the river, becoming again a collection of nation-states That was where this journey began, lets
remember, with the Great Depression, World War II and the Holocaust. The whole purpose of European
integration was to make such events impossible, a goal in recent decades emphasized by the growing
demilitarization of Europe itself and the Europe-wide commemoration of the tragedy of Europes Jews. There is no
way back, only a way forward: either with or without a constitution.
But a viable constitution is unlikely to emerge from either a democratic process or from the blueprints of analysts,
however brilliant, from European peripheries such as Bulgaria and Britain. There will have to be a German who
will pick through their ideas and those of many others, and rally German elites toward a European solution. For
Americans this is no mere spectator sport: the consequences of a European failure will reach us soon enough. If
the Europeans cannot get the balance between global finance and domestic politics right, that is bad news for
democratic capitalism around the world.
Timothy Snyder is Professor of History at Yale University and Permanent Fellow at the IWM. He frequently
contributes to the New York Review of Books and to other leading American and European magazines and
newspapers. In 2010 he published Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Most recently he helped Tony
Judt to compose a thematic history of political ideas and intellectuals in politics, Thinking the Twentieth Century.
Tr@nsit online, 2012
This piece originally appeared in The New York Review of Books blog, NYRblog (blogs.nybooks.com) Copyright
2012 NYREV, Inc. This work may be used for private purposes only. No copies of this work may be reprinted or
distributed electronically, in whole or in part, without written permission from The New York Review of Books.