Battle of ideas about Europe lies behind shift in terminology

WorldView:From "absorption" to "integration". Behind this terminological shift concerning its capacities lies an important battle of ideas and policies about the definition of Europe and the future enlargement of the European Union.

The argument has been played out over the past year and a half following rejection of the EU's constitutional treaty in the French and Dutch referendums. This week's EU summit in Brussels went along with the change in vocabulary, alongside more stringent rules for further expansion of the union.

"Absorption capacity" was revived after the two referendums in a flurry of concern over public disenchantment with EU enlargement - especially on whether Turkey might eventually join. The term connotes an organic uniformity to which newcomers are expected to assimilate rather than a unity capable of accommodating multilateral diversity.

Hostility to enlargement, it is widely assumed, drove a significant segment of French and Dutch opinion. But opinion polls in both countries afterwards found only 3 to 6 per cent of voters were worried about enlargement or Turkey joining. These worries were dwarfed by those concerned with lack of information, loss of sovereignty, unemployment, poor economic performance and hostility to government.

Two-thirds of French voters wanted the document renegotiated to make it more social; the same proportion in the Netherlands wanted it to defend Dutch interests better.

The argument about absorption capacity was enthusiastically taken up by those opposed to Turkish membership on cultural or religious grounds. One result was that the European Commission accepted a tougher framework for negotiations on Turkish accession in October 2005 - including this phrase.

During Austria's EU presidency in the first half of this year, it became bound up with that country's historical attitude to Turkey. Along with France, Luxembourg, Germany and Finland, Austrian public opinion was least enthusiastic about further enlargement in a November 2005 Eurobarometer poll - a new one to be published in January will show less enthusiasm all round.

Following a French and Austrian initiative the June 2006 summit requested a report on absorption capacity for consideration at this one. The term was taken from an older document, the criteria for central and eastern European enlargement set out at the June 1993 Copenhagen summit. Conceptually it sat awkwardly with those universal political, economic and legal values. It took a new convulsion, this time over allegedly incompatible religious and cultural values with Turkey, to revive its current usage.

Several political strands fed into this debate. The notion of absorption finds favour with members of the European People's Party in the European Parliament. Most of them are Christian Democrats who argue that Europe's civilisational unity precludes predominantly Muslim members. A Hapsburg, anti-Ottoman bloc may be discerned here, bringing together Austria's historical and geographical neighbours.

France's attitude runs parallel, but on different tracks. Paris has an abiding reservation about EU enlargement since Mitterrand saw the end of the cold war would alter the balance struck between French and German power in the 1950s. His price for enlarging towards central and eastern Europe was the deeper economic and political integration achieved in the Maastricht treaty of 1992.

But since then French leaders and voters have struggled with a larger EU membership in which their overall influence has been reduced. This coincides with a wider crisis of confidence in their international role pervading their public discourse.

In this context "absorption capacity" tends to be used interchangeably with the very French notion of cultural assimilation into a unified public space.

That too is challenged by the failure to handle the cultural divides in French society, especially the substantial minority of North African and mostly Islamic immigrant communities. Republican assimilation worked very well during the century of industrialisation from the 1850s and the "trentes glorieuses" from the 1950s to the 1980s. It no longer works effectively in a more interdependent and globalised world.

But French policy-makers persist in projecting these values on to the wider European setting as they try to develop an alternative conceptual vocabulary. Thus on left and right it is demanded that the EU should define its geographical borders, the better to develop a genuine space for deeper political community.

Geography looms large in France's political culture, making it more natural for lines to be drawn on Europe's map that would exclude Turkey and North Africa. Nicholas Sarkozy makes this most explicit, but he is certainly not alone. It is a reactionary, dysfunctional position which prematurely closes down the debate about enlargement.

This could be as dangerous a development for Europe as the Iraq war has been for the US, if it results in a parting of the ways with Turkey. It is essential that the current impasse in French and European politics not be allowed dictate such a future.

A third strand of argument has a broader appeal which can help escape such an outcome. It has to do with the need to deepen integration among the existing membership before opening it further. There has been a direct relationship between deepening and widening the EU ever since Ireland, Britain and Denmark joined in 1973.

The European Commission skilfully deconstructed the absorption issue into three main elements: ensuring the EU's decision-making, political and budgetary capacity to maintain its integration; ensuring candidate states meet accession conditions more rigorously; and enabling better communication of the rationale and benefits of future enlargement, mostly by member-state governments.

This strategy has allowed the commission to win the argument made in its paper for this summit that "the EU's absorption capacity, or rather integration capacity, is determined by the development of the EU's policies and institutions and by the transformation of applicants into well-prepared member states".

The summit conclusions accept the terminological shift. In it the burden of adaptation is shared rather than unilaterally imposed - even if the process remains quite asymmetric in terms of power, and the word absorb is still used to qualify the pace of enlargement.

The paper goes on to argue - progressively - that "the term 'Europe' combines geographical, historical and cultural elements which all contribute to European identity. The shared experience of ideas, values and historical interaction cannot be condensed into a timeless formula and is subject to review by each generation".