Germany's Foreign Minister, Mr Joschka Fischer, has defended his vision of a federal Europe and insisted that Germany has come to terms with its history. In a debate with the French Interior Minister, Mr Jean-Pierre Chevenement, published yesterday in Germany's Die Zeit and France's Le Monde, Mr Fischer rejected the French Minister's charge that Berlin was embracing a European identity to escape from its Nazi past.
"Jean-Pierre Chevenement underestimates the events since 1989. With the peaceful revolution of 1989, our history has resolved itself," he said.
Mr Fischer last month outlined his vision of a politically integrated Europe with a written constitution, an elected president and a two-chamber parliamentary system. As a first step towards such a union, he proposed that a group of European Union states should create closer ties - even if all other EU member-states did not approve.
Mr Chevenement, a political maverick who expressed support for Iraq and Serbia during the 1990s, dismissed Mr Fischer's proposals as a German dream of a revived Holy Roman Empire. In his newspaper debate with Mr Fischer, the French Minister repeated his claim that Germany's enthusiasm for Europe was a consequence of its Nazi past.
"Because Germany still demonises the nation, it tends to flee into the post-national. This leads it to dream of a kind of federation that holds together the different parts as regionally as possible, as was the case under the Holy Roman Empire," he said.
Mr Fischer insisted that, far from wishing to revive an imperial dream, he wanted to lead a revolution against what he described as "the ancien regime of Brussels". And he claimed that political integration represented Europe's only chance to defend its economic and social model against the pressures of global capital.
"The classical European nation state is, under the circumstances of globalisation, too small. This globalisation is, whether we like it or not, a reality. The question is: how do we approach it, how do we shape it, how do we hold on to what is important and valuable to us?" he said.
Although Mr Fischer's proposals do not represent official German policy, there is little doubt that Berlin favours enhanced co-operation between groups of EU member-states. The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported this week that the German Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schroder, clashed with Britain's Mr Tony Blair during a discussion on the issue at the EU summit at Feira.
According to the report, Mr Schroder pointed out that such enhanced co-operation already exists in the shape of the Euro-11 and the Schengen agreement that has abolished border controls between some member-states.
The French government has reacted cautiously to Mr Fischer's proposals but is expected to support a change in EU rules that would allow enhanced co-operation in some areas without the approval of all member-states.
Irish officials are uncomfortable with the prospect of a hard core of member-states forging ahead towards closer political integration but, if a fast track is created within the EU, the Republic will probably seek to join it. "We don't want it to happen but if it does, we want to be in it," said one official.
