Europe in transition. How can research contribute?

Ladies and Gentlemen;

I should like to thank the Norwegian Research Council for bringing us together here today. ‘Europe in transition’ is indeed a very good topic to start off with, and it is an honour to participate in this conference. Being a foreign policy researcher in my civil life, I certainly appreciate the crucial importance of academic and intellectual input for the deliberation and development of policy. I remember I used to hope that research-based knowledge was useful in real-life policy formulation. Now I know that it does!

I feel that in Europe today, such input is particularly urgent. So I call on you to hold more conferences like this one, write papers, articles and books, teach your students, give interviews, contribute to public debate on how Europe is changing today and how this affects Norway. We need your help to understand what is happening and how we should deal with it. Because as the country that arguably is the EU’s closest outsider – or even better, the ‘odd man in’ – Europe’s future is also Norway’s future. And the question about Europe’s future is to a very large part the question about the future of the Union.

That is the international change of greatest consequence to ourselves we Norwegians will face in the foreseeable future, whether we like it or not.

This is of course not a new or original insight. But in this country – the only one in Europe that has applied for membership three times, negotiated membership twice and then rejected it through popular referenda – we have developed a peculiar form of public debate on these issues. We typically begin with dividing ourselves into two almost equally big camps: The first one will then cheer any invention, decision or idea coming out of Europe as expressions of the uttermost wisdom. The other camp will correspondingly reject everything Brussels or the 15 member states does or says as expressions either of folly or of sinister plans for undermining everything we find worthwhile defending.

Time has come for a new approach to these matters. And this is what the government intended in its white paper on Europe – a long and complex document that basically says a few, important things, the most important one being that due to a series of decisions taken over the last decade, Norway is very closely involved in the process of European Integration, despite of the fact that we are not full members. We are a part of the internal market through the European Economic Area agreement, thus subject to the same rules and regulations for the flow of goods, services, persons and capital as are the member states. We are members of Schengen, we are in the final stages of negotiating accession to Europol; and we support the development of an European Security and Defence Policy, the ESDP, even to the extent that we have expressed our readiness to commit troops and resources to possible future ESDP operations. Furthermore, Norway is formally supportive of the upcoming enlargement of the European Union, and we have launched our own action plan for the applicant countries.

A few weeks back, the white paper was discussed in Parliament. For the untrained eye, little news appeared to come out of that discussion. There was remarkably little quarrelling among parties, hence the media showed little interest in reporting on what took place. But indeed the debate was sensational in a very different respect – I can not remember a parliamentary debate on Europe in this country that has been so unified in its analysis of the EU itself and on Norway’s relation to it. No-one suggested applying for membership at this stage. And no-one suggested that we should dispose of the institutional framework that has been build since 1994 and that has turned Norway into the EU’s closest outsider.

Indeed, we experienced full and explicit support for the ongoing strategy of active adaptation to all the EUs three pillars.

After all this may not be that surprising anyway – it has been the constant policy line of all the governments in office since the last referendum, including the one that was formed by three parties that all opposed membership in 1994.

The second, main point we made in the White Paper, was that despite of this broadly shared aspiration of adaptation to the processes going on within the Union, Norway is gradually being marginalized. In the economic field, for instance, the EEA agreement remains as important as it once was in absolute terms, but its relative role diminishes as very much of the Union’s new activities are taking place outside of the ‘traditional’ sphere of directives and regulations floating from the Commission to the member states. A new process-oriented approach is taking root within the Union – and we are not part of it through the formal arrangements found within the EEA.

The reason I mention all this is simple: as we now know that Europe’s future to a very large degree also shapes Norway’s future, regardless of formal membership, people in this country may and should legitimately take part in the debate about its future. And here I feel that we are lagging behind: public awareness of the grand themes of the European discourse with itself are regrettably low in this country.

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Ladies and Gentlemen,

I will now leave the specificities of the Norwegian debate for a few words on Europe as such – after all, this is today’s theme.

As the title of this conference has it, it is certainly the case that Europe is in transition. The great French historian Fernand Braudel built his revolutionary approach to the study of history on the tenet that historical time is not equal to chronological time. In some chronological periods, political and social change happens at a much greater pace than in other periods. As far as the political organisation of Europe is concerned, I think we are now in the middle of an era of rapid and substantial change – historical time is running faster than chronological time.

(The main trigger of the current phase of transition was of course the fall of the Iron Curtain. But it is perhaps only now, some ten years later, that the long-term, structural effects of that event are beginning to make themselves felt in international politics, and in particular in European and transatlantic relations. The focal point and main expression of that change is in my opinion the European Union, which is becoming an increasingly autonomous polity, internally as well as externally.)

For almost two hundred years, we have known which political communities were the most important in Europe: it was the nation states. The quintessential modern image of the world – the so-called Westphalian model – was state-centred. States and great statesmen were the actors to be reckoned with. That was the predominant theoretical approach – the modernist paradigm of political science – and has remained so until recently – essentially indeed until the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Now this paradigm is being challenged by three new developments in particular: globalisation, regional integration, and the growing impact of non-state actors in international relations. No other place on earth is more affected by all three of these changes than Europe, including Norway. The European Union is the main focus as well as source of political change in Europe today. To put it in the terms of political science, the Union is the major variable to watch, both cause and effect, both independent and dependent variable, of current European transition.

The great debate to follow now is therefore the so-called debate on the future of Europe, which has emerged in the wake of the German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer’s speech in Berlin in May of last year. The last installment came from the French Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, two weeks ago. The key concept on which at least continental opinion now appears to converge, is of Europe as a "federation of nation-states". This is a compromise formula which very elegantly epitomises the transition from old Europe to new Europe now underway. The European Union is turning increasingly federal – this is the new element, but the old element, the "nation-state" remains the main building bloc.

This is exactly one of the points made by Jospin when he said he "fully supported" the idea of a "federation of nation-states". Let me quote him at some length in English translation:

From the legal point of view [the concept] may seem ambiguous. But I believe it is politically sound, because Europe is an original political structure, a unique precipitate, an indissoluble mixture of two different elements: the federalist idea and the reality of European Nation States. This is why the concept of a "federation of Nation States" so aptly reflects the constituent tension which underpins the European Union. There are nations, strong vibrant nations for which identity is important, which constitute the wealth of our continent. And then there is also the determination of these nations to unite.

Jospin’s speech, as well as the previous contributions to the debate on the future of Europe, highlights that "federation" is a very flexible concept. Empirically, there are highly centralised versions, e.g. Russia, as well as highly decentralised ones, e.g. Switzerland. Normatively, various countries hold equally differing conceptions, from the highly despised British conception of a "European super-state" to the Germans’ fondly held notion of decentralised Wirtschaftswunder. Even theoretically, there is no one answer to the question: "What is a federation?". The only thing we can say quite safely is that a federation is an constitutionalised compromise between centralisation and decentralisation that is especially designed to safeguard democratic procedures and cultural diversity. Still, I think that many years and treaty-revisions will pass before the Union finds a final political shape, if it ever does.

However, I also entirely agree with another point Jospin made, that the most important thing is what policies Europe produces, not how its institutions are framed. Results are more important than procedures – with the two provisos that decisions must have democratic legitimacy, and decision-making structures must reflect European diversity. Exactly these two provisos are at the core of the debate: how can European decision-making be made more democratic, and what will be division of competence between the European and the national level. I as a representative of the Norwegian government do not have any official opinion on those issues. But I want to say this much: I do not think it is necessarily in Norway’s national interest, either outside or inside the European Union, to resist a development towards a more united, democratic and effective Europe. Some Europeans think that this is what is meant by making Europe more federal. The important thing is how it is done rather than if it is done.

The term "federation" has not been used widely in the debate in Norway. Now that it is placed at the very heart of the debate about Europe’s transition by people like Fischer, Schröder and Jospin, it is time that the Norwegian debate, too, catches up. Europe’s transition concerns all of Europe, regardless of geography and institutional affiliations. That is why the debate is so important to Norway, and why it should be conducted here too. The debate must be an open one. We must share with our voters the problems that multi-level governance face us with. We must get across to the Norwegian public what Europe’s transition means. The stakes are high. If we do not stay informed, conscious and ready to adapt, the result could ultimately be Norwegian provincialism and isolation from the rest of Europe. This is a situation from which nobody stands to gain.

Avoiding such a situation depends, among other things, on having access to good analyses. In order to understand and relate to Europe’s transition, we need your analyses and your maps. Who else but you academics and researchers can take the lead in discussing it, telling us where it hails from, what it means, and what role it does and should play in our debates? This is my concrete challenge to you here today: let us see some maps which compare the visions formulated by Europe’s leading politicians, and let us put Norway on that map. When we have those maps, we may also have a more informed discussion of Norway’s position in future Europe. I have seen many a fine map drawn up by today’s participants previously, and I trust that we will be treated to some fine new ones today.

Thank you for your attention.