Enlarged debate needed on the EU experiment

WorldView:Now that Romania and Bulgaria have joined the European Union, bringing the membership to 27 states, it is conventionally understood that further enlargements will be delayed until the union's future shape and structure are determined. Germany's EU presidency will seek to find a way to revive the constitutional treaty, preparing the ground for an expected renegotiation next year.

The big question facing all concerned is whether this enlargement has qualitatively and irreversibly changed the nature of the EU. At this scale and with the prospect that further enlargements might bring its membership to 35 or even 40 states, could it become the "federal superstate" feared in much Eurosceptic rhetoric but still sought in whole or in part by significant political actors? Has it the capacity, resources and political commitment to do so? Or has the growth in its membership from 15 to 27 since May 2004 put an end to such an ambition, necessitating a different way of understanding the EU's nature and imagining its future?

The thought that this might be so has contributed its fair share to the enlargement fatigue so prevalent in most of the EU's six founding members on its 50th anniversary. On this account, the new members add so much more diversity to the system as to undermine its capacity for united action, effective governance and common values.

New structures must be put in place to arrest such trends before any more accessions - including new arrangements to allow a core group to integrate further than the others can or want to. The EU should determine its final borders, hone its central institutions, bolster its common currency with more powerful macroeconomic policies and facilitate the emergence of pan-national political parties, as well as media and political accountability to tackle its democratic deficit.

This vision unacceptably extrapolates the three centuries of state-building which followed the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia on to the EU, according to several of its critics. They say this vision is state-centric, expecting the EU to become a kind of Westphalian federation or imperial superstate with a central government in charge of a given territory. But this is both unrealistic and undesired.

Far from moving in that direction, the EU is becoming a polycentric polity penetrating rather than controlling its neighbouring environment. It increasingly resembles a neo-medieval empire with soft and fuzzy borders, overlapping jurisdictions, multilevel and multicentred governance, and a blurred or fragile pan-national demos, according to Jan Zielonka of St Anthony's College, Oxford.

In his book, Europe as Empire, The Nature of the Enlarged European Union (Oxford University Press, 2006), he argues that it is not becoming an empire comparable to 19th and 20th century models, but resembles those common in the Middle Ages before the rise of nation states, democracy and capitalism.

While the Westphalian type of state is about concentrated power, hierarchy, sovereignty and clear-cut identity, the neo-medieval empire is about overlapping authorities, divided sovereignty, diversified institutionalised arrangements and multiple identities. Hard external borders are counterposed to soft and regularly shifting zones, and military impositions or containment are counterposed to the export of laws and modes of government.

Argument by historical analogy has its perils but can be illuminating if carefully conducted. These are alternative models of political order rather than empirical blueprints. They are intended to help us identify two paths for integration, and to determine which is more probable and why.

Zielonka takes full account of how circumstances have changed since the Middle Ages by stressing the "neo-" aspect of his description and drawing on other authors who have used it. He takes care to avoid retrospective extrapolation of later statist assumptions. He notes that the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy underwrote the European order at that time - just as the EU and the US do today. And he acknowledges that Europe from the 12th to the 15th centuries was not free of war, even if this was much more characteristic of the early modern and modern periods of its history.

Zielonka is from Poland. His study is valuable for looking at the EU and its enlargement systematically and confidently from the central and eastern European perspective. He adopts a critical attitude towards the mainstream academic, policy and journalistic literature on the subject, of which he has an impressive command.

Such literature usually assumes the EU's eastern enlargement is a routine institutional adaptation that will not change the nature and course of integration fundamentally.

Zielonka disagrees. He argues that the end of the cold war has ushered in an entirely new period of Europe's history and that we need to come to terms with this transformation.

It is partly an argument that eastern enlargement has highlighted the shortcomings of the conventional accounts and partly a marshalling of the evidence that their accession reinforces changes already under way.

Many others have sought a third way, between federalist and sovereigntist understandings of what the EU is or ought to be. They are tired of the rhetoric that constantly pitches supranational against inter-governmental models, European against national democracy, superstate against union of states.

Kalypso Nicolaidis, a colleague of Zielonka's at Oxford, refers to these false choices as a tyranny of dichotomies. They assume a "zero-sum" relationship between these alternative models, in which one must supersede or preclude the other. But maybe it is better to take a different, "both-and", approach to what is after all an unprecedented political experiment.

In that case, the EU would not supersede national democracy, for example, but would orchestrate and harness it in a new set of relationships between the European and the national. Nicolaidis dubs this a "demoi-cracy". In it, the various different national democracies are entangled with one another rather than rubbing each other out. This is a transnational pluralism rather than a new supranational demos expressing the values of one European people.

If that is so, this jumbo enlargement does not subvert existing values and structures, but rather clarifies and defines them more satisfactorily. We badly need such ideas and the debates to be involved if we are to find a better way to understand and conduct this experiment.