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English
Address by MARK EYSKENS, former Prime Minister of Belgium, at the Belgo-British conference. London, 21.10.05
It is a great honour, privilege and pleasure for me to be invited at this splendid dinner of the Belgo-British conference. You asked me to reflect on a dangerous subject: “one year in Belgium”. Living one year in my country is like spending a century in another State. Belgium is an intellectually disturbing nation for all those who haven’t spent at least a few centuries on its territory. When, as Minister of Foreign Affairs, I received a new ambassador, I always dissuaded him from trying to understand Belgium ; I recommended him simply to believe in my country as I do. Because it is a fine country with a high quality of life and still “un pays de cocagne”. He who really wants to penetrate into the core of the Belgitude, should be born in the Low Countries somewhere in the 16th century, when the tragic separation took place between the Northern and the Southern Provinces of the Netherlands. If that event had been avoided, the Netherlands would have become a big power in Europe, New Amsterdam would never have been replaced by New York and Dutch would have become a world language and ‘good bye’ would have been pronounced as ‘tot ziens’. Today I would have addressed you in this language. And you would have understood even less of what I will attempt to explain to you to night. Belgium is a wonderful country and if it were not to exist, it should be invented. All domestic conflicts are solved very peacefully. Belgium is a most tolerant country. Blood is never shed; words and saliva all the more. The father of surrealism in painting, René Magritte, was a Belgian and this was not only due to a lucky coincidence or sheer accident. Belgian has some surreal features, because it is an enigma, a mystery and a miracle. Churchill once said that the United States and the UK are separated by the same language. Belgium on the other hand is a country that is united by three, Dutch, French and German being our third national tongue. The Belgians are a very old tribe, already mentioned in the war memories or Julius Caesar when he wrote in his best seller - in fact a long seller, the de Bello Gallico: “omnium gallorum belgae fortissimi sunt”, a historical sentence which was translated once by an American professor, getting an honorary doctor's degree at my university: “ of all drivers the Belgians are the most dangerous ones”, being not a literal but nevertheless a correct translation. A few months ago I heard the Dutch prime minister Mr. Balkenende declare during a speech he delivered somewhere in Belgium:”the difference between both our countries is that in Belgium funerals are more amusing than weddings in the Netherlands”. I am just quoting the Dutch Prime Minister, but this is not my opinion. Weddings are also very funny in Belgium. Belgium is certainly one of the most prosperous countries in the world, in the north of the country. As a result, Belgium is also one of the most wealthiest countries in the solar system and probably in our milky way. Concerning the other galaxies I still have some reservations.. But our prosperity and well-being are possibly being threatened today by a number of challenges and handicaps which I will discuss later on. Belgium, like many developed countries in the world, has changed very dramatically under the influence of globalisation and the ICT-revolution ( ICT, which stands for Information and Communication Technologies), but also applies to India, China and Taiwan, the so called yellow peril. The past is hardly recognizable. A couple of years ago, trying to explain the striking difference between the past and the present, a professor who got an honorary degree from my university, this time a Brit, declared: ‘I remember the time when the air was clean and sex was dirty. Today it is the opposite’. Our political institutions are particularly complicated and we have worked out a constitutional and institutional structure which is a combination of federalism, unitarism and confederalism. A few years ago I paid an official visit to a French speaking African country . When one day I woke up in my hotel room, I found a morning newspaper slid under the door of my room with my photo on the front page and a title: ‘Visite d'un ministre belge’. Below followed an article devoted to Belgium, which started as follows : ` Le Royaume de Belgique est une république dont le roi s'appelle de koning’. In spite of its apparent paradoxes this sentence is entirely correct. Our three constitutional regions Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels form almost autonomous republics within the kingdom, with ministers who are only politically accountable to the regional parliaments and it is right that our king is not the king of Belgium but of the Belgians and that he is called ‘de koning’ at least by 6 millions Flemings. After having spoken to you, by way of captatio malevolentiae, allow me also to say something to our guests of to night.
Many reasons explain the present European malaise which was also expressed by the rejections of the European draft constitution in France and the Netherlands. We have to take into account the extraordinary complexity of modern society, which Kenneth Galbraith called the techno-structures and what I would like to describe as the rule of ‘they’ causing a new kind of alienation which oppresses free citizens in our societies. Indeed, “they” decide, they rule, they administer - the ministers, the eurocrats - they, the decision-makers in Brussels, they impose their will above the heads of our citizens. Call it ‘they-ification’. At least the impression prevails of an abstract way of governing and administering people and things. Brussels has decided, a message we hear daily, and the decision making seems as abstract as a non-figurative painting. It is extremely frustrating to our citizens. ‘They-ification’ has become a humiliating way of exerting political responsibilities by authorities with no profile, no face, no look, although many politicians show their faces every evening on TV.
Moreover there is the paradox of discontent in our contemporary society.
More and more citizens of Europe have become aware of the great vulnerability of ` our welfare state, albeit that in hardly half a century the real standard of living of the average (West)European citizen has been six-folded, whereas during his career he works one third less and lives fifteen years longer. Poverty has dropped to 5%, the quality and the `newness’ of goods and services which he uses and consumes have increased in an incomparable way. The health care is excellent and cheap -particularly in Belgium- and social security represents 25% op GDP. Many Europeans can afford to travel the whole planet in its most remote spots and are entitled to long holidays and several career breaks. In Europe large liberties of all kinds in many domains have been realized and the equality between citizens has strongly increased. And, as a cherry on the cake, the miracle of the Pax Europea was implemented, thanks to the wonder of the European integration. Since 1945 on this small Western European peninsula, peace between the nations has been prevailing, which never happened since the time of Julius Caesar.
Why should we complain? And yet people complain all the time everywhere. Oh paradox! Indeed, widely spread dissatisfaction and discontent, disarray and discomfort, fear and uncertainty, ‘acidification’ and dislike, individualism and egoism, collective selfishness and national greed are often supplanting real transborder solidarity and self-confidence. A strange sociological law has become self executing, which states that social peace and serenity decrease as the prosperity of a society increases.
Time is lacking to explain this paradox. It has to do with the excessive blowing up of bad news – that always drives out good news – by the media. Moreover, the so highly praised knowledge society also produces much ignorance. Another paradox of contemporary society!. What the citizen does know, increases, but what he could or must know, increases much more. Hence emerges an increasing gap between what is known and what is knowable. I have called this phenomenon the ‘law of decreasing relative knowledge’. The law is aggravated by the fact that over-information leads to disinformation. Due to their extreme complexity a number of dominating economic and social problems are summarized in a most simplistic way, which makes people think solutions are easy and simple.
Current discomfort however is not only the consequence of mass psychology. It results rightly from the broadly spread intuitive feeling of a coming misfortune. There is undoubtedly something to be worried about, the citizen realizes. The most pertinent explanation of the dissatisfaction paradox in a prosperous society refers to multi-faceted feelings of fear, which ends in a fear to lose what one likes. The apprehension of losing what was acquired in life: job, pension, comfort, security, an attractive future for the children and their children... The population in our welfare states is tempted by conservatism at a moment when innovation and creativity are more than ever needed. An inclination to conserve realisations and to discard changes arises which incites people to keep what they fear to lose, the result being that loss of what they have is more likely to occur. Consequently a self fulfilling prophecy will come true. A flood of changes in each area occurs. Tomorrow is no longer the projection of today or yesterday. What comes to us now is basically different and therefore more and more unpredictable. The course of events is no longer linear. The future looks like a big spider, which frightens most people. That many people are afraid of spiders is according to psychologists due to the fact that this ingenious animal does not have six legs, as an insect does, but eight. These two additional legs are by no means redundant. On the contrary, they enable the spider to move unexpectedly in unforeseeable directions. This capacity of surprising an observer makes its behaviour terrifying for an emotional witness. The future behaves like a big spider, about in the same way, due to its unpredictable evolution and forces the citizen of the 21ste century to live in an age of anxiety. The spreading of the new information and communication technologies (ICT), thanks to the invention of the fabulous device we call computer, has triggered off a worldwide revolution, whose consequences are difficult to overlook, let alone to assess. The information society gives birth to the knowledge society, creative knowledge becoming the most important factor of production. Ideologies of the past are disrupted by ICT. The Marxist-communist doctrine which is devoted to the expropriation of the factors of production, becomes completely inapplicable and obsolete as soon as information and knowledge drive the economy. Knowledge and creativity cannot be collectivised. Exit collectivism, which happened with the implosion of Communism and the explosion of the Soviet Union
Capitalism also wrestles with the impact of the ICT, to the extent for instance that private intellectual property is threatened mainly by means of Internet – an organic, not a structural phenomenon -- which creates totally new forms of market actions and services, through which supply and demand get directly connected without intermediaries. Consequently decollectivization and deprivatization do occur at the same time, which leads to disarray at the political level and as to the way our societies react to new challenges. Borders evaporate, internetization transforms the world into our village (the global village), markets become worldwide, companies delocate, mutual interdependence increases. Globalization is a fact of daily life and the media and most politicians only underline the negative effects of it.
A ‘clash or civilisations’ seems to the European citizen no longer improbable and he undergoes the daily terrorist attacks on the planet with misleading resignation and fatalism. A hopeful future is no longer an acquired and guaranteed right. The citizen instinctively feels that the European model is threatened. What has emerged after the second world war from the ashes, burned by history, are not the cinders of the past but a societal system of living and working together in solidarity - the European model -- moulded by the post-war generation. This model, however, today seems stricken by the growing inefficiencies of its very complex functioning. The model moreover has become vulnerable due to its operational costs, the aging of the population , the inefficient working of labour markets and the perspective of the unpayability of the welfare state in the near future in a world of unrelenting competition.
A host of reasons and motives explains the present European lethargy at the level of European decision makers. The EU citizens expect solutions instead of constitutions. They do not care much about the contents, let alone the yes or no response to a European constitutional treaty. They prefer solutions to constitutions. They are indeed very concerned about the future (delocations, unemployment, security, problems of the ageing, greying and decreasing population, the too high government burden levied on the labour factor by means of social security contributions and income taxes...)
But adopting a wait-and-see attitude and putting the EU in hibernation up to 2006 (or later) does not seem justified, given the enormous political and socio-economic challenges the EU has to face.
1/ The governments of the 25 Member States, with the support of the European Commission, should as soon as possible elaborate a comprehensive European recovery and reform plan. Once this European recovery plan has been approved, European leaders should determine whether and which institutional improvements should be introduced to the current functioning of the EU, also taking into account the recent and future enlargement of the EU. It seems therefore advisable to reverse the sequence and to set out first a new European policy of reform and only further on to examine whether the institutional working method of the Union should be adapted by means of a minimal new treaty, if necessary. At least one institutional reform would be highly welcome, namely the devolution of a restricted taxing power to the European Parliament with a view to the financing of the European budget. A limited number of eurocents levied on gasoline in Europe by ways of a European VAT or excise tax would make it possible to finance the complete European budget without, as happens now, having to submit the EU-budget for approval to 25 national parliaments.
2/ The contents of a European recovery plan should at least contain 3 chapters:
- An urgent agreement has to be found between the 25 Member States as to the financing of the Union during the period 2007-2013. A step by step solution of the agriculture conundrum is the only expedient. Which implies that the common agricultural policy with its artificially high imposed prices and subsidies should be gradually dismantled (horizon 2013). Governments supporting investments in the agriculture sector remains of course justified.
- The program of Lisbon should be fully implemented and a drastic policy of modernisation of the European economy should be pursued stressing the need for R&D, innovation, better competitivity and higher growth.
*** At the same time the Member States must be supported by the Union and the Commission to tackle the vital problems related to ageing, the financing of the welfare state, the functioning of the labour market, unemployment and the degree of activity of the labour force.
3/ If a unanimous consensus on a far reaching reform plan were unfeasible, one could in accordance with the Treaty of Amsterdam and Nice organise among the willing member states a so called ‘enhanced cooperation’ of countries and governments who would be ready to make progress as to further cooperation and integration in some domains. The mere threatening with enhanced cooperation could exercise some pressure on all Member States to accept a compromise and strike a consensus.
4/ The core countries of Europe to day are, besides the six founding fathers, the Member States which have joined the European monetary Union ( = 12 countries). These countries have very converging economies and conduct within the EU an intensely coordinated monetary and financial policy. The accession of the United Kingdom to the EMU is still most desirable. This country is necessary in the heart of Europe if the core countries want to transcend the limits of a common economic and monetary policy, and develop a common defence and security policy along with a common foreign policy. For Great Britain, accession to the EMU is the arch-stone of its integration in the common market. Rate of exchange fluctuations between the pound and the euro disturb the market forces among Member States, and this occasionally happens also to the detriment of London. Further strengthening of the EMU without the UK bears the risk of the UK being isolated in the long run. The European countries on the other hand must show some understanding for the British attitude when the UK argues in favour of maintaining the Pound, given the role of London as a worldwide financial Centre and because of the privileged relations between Great Britain and the Commonwealth. The Member States of the EMU should confront the UK with an honourable compromise. An irrevocable and irreversible parity should be fixed between the pound and the euro. This would require a strong cooperation between the Bank of England and the ECB. Great Britain would become a full member of the EMU and take a seat in all agencies of the EMU (such as the ECB), but it would be enabled to keep (formally) the pound sterling in its relations with third countries. This solution, which of course is a compromise trying to reconcile the interests of both parties, would immediately and considerably increase the weight of the EMU inside and outside Europe.
5/ A Europe built around a core corresponds to what I have often called a Saturn-model, that is to say a huge planet in the middle, surrounded by rings, however supposed to converge sooner or later to the centre. The countries on the outer circles would be in a situation of transition. The rings around the centre would be occupied by countries which did not yet join the EMU, or countries which do not immediately fulfil all required conditions such as Romania and Bulgaria, later on also the Balkan countries and Turkey. The Saturnian model has the great advantage of putting the fierce debate on the enlargement and the borders of Europe in a totally different context, much more flexible and dynamic. The Saturnian model however should not give the impression that the core countries would opt in favour of a Europe made of two or three different classes. The positioning on the rings around the core planet would anyway be transitory and must aim at facilitating the overall convergence.
6/ The EU will be more and more confronted with the impact of globalisation and the competition of new, low cost industrial states such as China and India. It is obvious that each economic and social reform policy would be facilitated if the EU authorities would recommend it and propose to coordinate it. But it is still more important that the European economy should evolve more dynamically and especially be more inventive and innovative. A EU-effect, e.g. in the framework of the Lisbon strategy could be instrumental. One should however not forget that a European growth effect implies the enlargement of the common market in good conditions. The enlargement of the EU and of its growing internal market, on which 500 million inhabitants buy also more traditional consumption and durable goods and services can powerfully stimulate the economic activity (which happened after the accession of Spain and Portugal). This argument is certainly to be considered with respect to a very populated country such as Turkey.
7/ Europe has been an example of continental unification for 50 years. Gradually, a tendency will arise towards more and more intense intercontinental cooperation and integration, particularly due to successive scientific and technological developments. A growing Atlantic community could be the first case of implementation. As the trade rounds and the functioning of WTO produce more and more efficient results, the possibility and opportunity will be growing to develop a free trade area between the EU and the US through a step by step process. The European experience has taught us that such a free trade zone only correctly operates if it is transformed into a customs union, in order to prevent the diversion of the trade flows. A customs union requires however intense economic cooperation which sooner or later compels partners to set up an economic community, with the characteristics of a unified internal market. Such an integrated market however can only function smoothly if rate of exchange fluctuations are stopped between the members of the economic community. At the end of the day it is logical that an Atlantic Monetary Union or AMU would emerge between the USA and the dollar on the one hand and the EU and the euro on the other. No doubt, this is of course a long-term prospect, which, however, should today already be recommended as a great design.
8/ Europe, its leaders and population are confronted with a crucial choice between the Europe of the past -- the real old Europe -- and the one of the future. The Europe of the past, as from the Schumanplan until the end of the cold war, has developed thanks to the heroic attempt to reconcile France and Germany by making a war impossible and establishing a definite Pax Europea. In view of this historic achievement a totally new methodology was developed i.a. by Jean Monnet : economic integration and the communautarian method. The European integration has also been strongly promoted by the threatening expansion of the Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin involuntarily also belongs to the founding fathers of the post-war unifying Europe. These pages of history however have definitively been turned. The cold war in Europe was defensive in the first place and proud of its own realisations, each comparison with the alternative model behind the iron curtain giving support to the way of living in Western Europe. Since the implosion of Communism and the explosion of the Soviet Union, however, the international and continental situation in Europe has been totally modified and reversed. Defensive demarcation of borders has been replaced by offensive border crossing and by removing frontiers in a widening Europe . General de Gaulle spoke of a Europe stretching from the Atlantic ocean as far as the Ural’. The definition and limitation of Europe in purely geographical terms should at least be completed with other criteria of ‘European belonging’, which have to do with the European social model and the scales of value it is based on. Moreover, ICT and its cross-border effects have given rise to a concept of society based on ‘informatism’ and no longer on ideologies like socialism and liberal capitalism. This evolution has many crucial consequences such as the deterritorialisation of scientific, economic, financial, cultural events.... The enlargement of Europe should be taken into consideration and assessed in the light of this revolutionary development and judged and tested on the basis of a plural criteriologie. The historical vocation of Europe to be realised in the course of the 21st century, is to become the lever of a step by step intercontinental convergence and unification. Europe has to be re-invented, given the speed of overwhelming changes. The strengthening of that new Europe is an essential condition in order that during the second half of the 21st century the world village may take shape. The United Kingdom should and will play a crucial role in that Europe of the Future.
