Germany’s EU

The European Coal and Steel Community, the antecedent to today’s European Union (EU), was founded in 1951 to stabilize Europe upon Germany’s resurgence. Skip forward to 2013, and the keys to the EU’s future are in German hands.

Over the past 62 years, “Ever Closer Union” became the EU’s “E Pluribus Unum.” The “bicycle theory” of European Union (EU) development in the post-Cold War era held that so long as the union “kept pedaling” it wouldn’t “fall off.” Expansion bred stability, and became its own prime directive. New member countries and new initiatives were the union’s binding agents. EU critics past and present, in keeping with critics of all strong centralized government, called this self-justification that bred inefficiency and waste. At its worst, the unbalanced foundation it set for the union’s disparate economies contributed to the Euro crisis.

Today, the EU has pedaled to its limits. If you’re not an EU-watcher, you could be forgiven for missing Croatia’s accession this month. It made only brief news. Croatia’s poor debt situation was compared with the rest of Europe’s. Accession promised political stability,  but fewer hopes for economic growth.

With the bicycle theory “pedaled-out,” EU stakeholders talk up the potential of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations. U.S. support for the EU’s expansion has been uneven in the past, but it has a timely economic stake in seeing TTIP succeed. The launch of TTIP negotiations is a tangible U.S. endorsement of the EU, amid questions of whether the union could (or should) survive the eurozone crisis. A comprehensive TTIP would bring concrete economic benefits to both sides at a time when each needs to bolster growth.

Germany’s role reversal within the EU – from being the historical subject of its constraint to being wooed as its economic and political leader – is another major change in the union’s culture. Timothy Garton Ash – a historian best known for chronicling the emergence of central and eastern Europe from communism into democracy – addresses the issue in the current New York Review of Books. Ash notes that fears that a re-unified Germany would come to dominate Europe economically have, in part, been realized. What is remarkable is  the attitude of neighboring countries towards Germany’s leadership role has been welcoming. Ash quotes a much-cited 2011 remark by Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski: “I will probably be the first Polish foreign minister in history to say so, but here it is: I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity.” For its part, Germany seems warier of its history than its neighbors and one-time enemies. Ash describes in detail the premium the German public and its leaders place on politics driven from the center. He also recounts how without the interventions of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Germans may have been happy to see the country remain a decentralized “Greater Switzerland”; at Europe’a geographic center, but at arm’s length from the EU. In Ash’s telling, following World War II, there hasn’t been much of the historical German drive for political domination of the continent left for the EU to contain.

The question of containing German domination, therefore, seems to have shifted to combatting German reluctance to lead. This is an oversimplification. Germany’s economy is trade -dependent. As an exporter, it benefits from a healthier Eurozone. The TTIP shares many of the goals that the post-WWII Marshall Plan — jobs, growth, political stability —  with an urgency that’s primarily economic and secondarily strategic. A recent New York Times op-ed cited expectation that a successful TTIP would produce a million new jobs and add 0.5 percent to U.S. and EU GDP over ten years. In the article, Harvard Professor Richard Rosecrance argues for “a need to reconsolidate the West” against a rising Asia; the near-term economic motivations lead to a longer-term geostrategic goal.

Economic stability has been an important EU deliverable, so Germany is responding to the economic incentives within the TTIP. Economic instability was at the root of Europe’s last great conflict. U.S. policymakers talk more often about the EU’s low-growth “socialist” economic model than about the long-term absence of great power conflict it has helped to prevent. The EU’s approach to TTIP, under German leadership, is following precedents — from partnership with the U.S. to a shared desire for economic stability — that date from last century. That’s a good thing.