Calls for the transformation of Europe into something resembling a larger version of Switzerland have grown louder of late. Although European “neutrality” was a periodic Cold War bugbear, it now seems less offensive. Who would object to a prosperous, peaceful, stable and relatively liberal, multilingual polity? For centuries Europe and Europeans warred with one another and with the rest of the world in between exploiting large portions of it. Wouldn’t a Swiss model be better for all concerned?
Switzerland is officially neutral but it is well armed and not as well insulated from the rest of the world as it looks. Nevertheless, a Swiss fantasy may lurk somewhere in the minds of those partaking in the latest triple crown of Euro-Atlantic summitry, beginning two weeks ago with NATO and the U.S.-EU and ending now with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
The reason for that has as much to do with Europe as with the current state of Europe’s three large “extra-European” neighbors: Russia, Turkey, and the United States. All three are European powers, formally speaking. All are also home to frustration over the ways they are depicted by Europeans—feared and courted one day, disparaged the next. All, in other words, are as ambivalent about Europe as Europe is about them and about itself.
The Swiss are to be envied in this respect. Their country represents a successful multiple marriage of convenience which is honored both within its borders and by its more powerful neighbors. As insular as some Swiss can be, it is rare to hear them theorizing over the nature of Swiss-ness or the architecture of the Swiss project. If Europe is to pursue a Swiss model, it will have to do away with such things. Europeans will have to let Europe just be Europe.
That in turn will mean scrapping three visions of Europe that have guided policies for the past several decades: the Atlanticist, the Gaullist, and the Federalist. The Atlanticist vision held that Europe and America form a community of shared values and interests that is, in principle, open to others. The Gaullist vision held that the nation-state, and national sovereignty, remains the essential guarantor of a world order upheld by alliances, of which the Franco-German and the North Atlantic are just two. The Federalist, or (Jean) Monnet, model was of a relatively closed supranational entity that fosters a united community within its borders, and alliances (or “partnerships,” as it sometimes opted to call them) beyond. Top of the list is the one with America.
In visual terms, the Atlanticist vision was a series of ever-widening concentric circles; the Gaullist vision was a kind of planetary system; and the Federalist vision was some combination of the two (in the 1960s a version of it was called “dumbellism”). The three visions were not necessarily mutually exclusive, although they tended to rub against one another uneasily.
The interesting thing that happened after 1989 was that all three visions continued to exist side by side, as it were. NATO and EU enlargement proceeded but at different speeds and rested upon different rhetorical bases: NATO remained wedded to an Atlanticist concept until only very recently while the EU vacillated between Gaullist and Federalist concepts, admitting new members on the basis of inclusion into what Mikhail Gorbachev once honored as the common European home, while at the same time hinting that the EU was destined to acquire more trappings of the nation-state. New or aspiring members of NATO and/or the EU did their best to accommodate themselves accordingly, although to many of them, membership simply meant an insurance policy against war and/or poverty.
Meanwhile there is the OSCE, the successor to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which celebrates the 35th anniversary of the Helsinki Final Act that established it. Nowadays the Final Act is credited with playing a vital role in the peaceful end of the Cold War by securing simultaneous agreement to respect national sovereignty and human rights on both sides of the Iron Curtain. That curtain exists no longer and the number of sovereign “nations” has grown considerably. This year’s OSCE summit takes place in Kazakhstan, which did not exist as an independent state in 1975 and is regarded today by many people as not exactly European.
Can Europe succeed as a beacon, a community, and a state all at the same time? Perhaps, but its conversion into a larger version of tiny, alpine Switzerland is not realistic. As Ramon Grau San Martin, a former president of Cuba reportedly said when the Swiss constitution was proposed as a model for his country: “fine, but here we have no Swiss!”
By Kenneth Weisbrode
The author is a diplomatic historian and author of The Atlantic Century (Da Capo).
Copyright 2006-2010 The Diplomatic Courier™. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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