What kind of Europe?

Based on a transcription from audio tape 

Thank you, Chair.

This is a special occasion for me, because it is the first time that I am back here at the Sciences Po to speak, after having been here many times to hear other people speak.

I would like to thank Bob [editor of the NYRB Robert B.] Silvers, because I am really back here at the Sciences Po with the help of the NYRB.

I would also like to say how much I appreciated the session we had yesterday, because it is a way of getting to know someone I have read but never met, Tony Judt. And I would like to thank his wife and those who spoke yesterday, who brought us closer to his work.

When I turned 50 last year, I received three of his books as gifts. I have read and re-read them in preparation for these sessions, and have benefited from that.

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As an historian, I think Judt would have agreed that the only constant in history is change. And what I see here is how the Sciences Po has changed.

Let me share with you one brief recollection, because one of you alluded to my country as one of those that caught Tony Judt’s interest – as he was interested in what he called “strange”, small states. And I agree that it may seem strange to invite me, Norway’s Foreign Minister, to come and talk about Europe, as my country rejected membership of the European Union by referendum – not once, but twice!

I voted in favour, just so you know. But I remember well what Europe was like in 1982, when I was attending law classes at the Sciences Po and we were given a test on the legal reforms of Napoleon, and I nearly failed. The professor took me aside and said, “I want you to know, young man, that for me, you are a great liability, because there is every evidence that you are going to pull my average down, and that will not look good”. So I asked the professor: “Are you aware of the fact that when these reforms took place under Napoleon, Norway was under Denmark?” Now, I had my “revenge”. It was a very courageous thing for a 22-year old to say.

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What kind of Europe do we have today?

I think part of the answer is that there is no one answer to this question, that is the unique and intriguing thing about Europe. What I will give you today are my reflections, or in Judt’s terms, a reappraisal.

For me Europe is like a kaleidoscope, you can rotate it and see different images, there are different pasts, and there are different futures.

Tony Judt wrote that Europe is fox-like, Europe knows many things. And he also wrote – in Postwar – that there is no overarching theme to expand, no single all-embracing story to tell about Europe.

To me, that is one of Europe’s strengths, because Europe has left behind the idea of one overall idea to organise thoughts, mind, history, present, past and future. But still, Europe is longing for a single story that can organise ideas and give some indications about the future.

Someone said yesterday that Europe was uniquely well-positioned to collapse under its own weight – or was it Belgium? Well, that does not really matter, it could be both.

When I go to Serbia these days in connection with my work, I hear that the Serbs have too much history to digest. Perhaps this is also Europe’s dilemma. 

I note that Tony Judt writes that post-war Europe is finally coming to a close. But I ask whether this is actually the case. As I see it, the post-war period is still with us.

One of the lessons from yesterday was that the past must instruct the present. This is an intriguing thought, because there is not just one past, and there is not just one future.

Judt also writes that the building blocks of the 20th century were all 19th century artefacts. And if that is true, perhaps the building blocks of this century – the 21st century – will be the artefacts of the 20th century. Europe will always be dragging history along.

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I would now like to share with you my observations on three points [based on Tony Judt’s remarkable works] before summing up.

First, in Postwar he makes the point that this is the period of Europe’s reduction – the reduction of the nation state, of the vision, of self-perception.

I remember that I took an exam at Sciences Po in 1983 entitled La France est-elle toujours une grande puissance? – Is France still a great power? Again, I felt somewhat strange as a Norwegian saying, “We have known for quite some time that this is not the case.” But you know you could organise your answer or your arguments in “two parts” [pro et contra], and try to argue what that was all about.

I think, as Tony Judt writes, that the European Union is all about the response to history, but it can never be a substitute.

And I think that the dichotomy between the nation states that are adapting to “reduction” and trying to live with the European Union and those that choose not to do so is the drama of our time.

Coming from a small state, I see that the hardest thing to adapt to concerns the conduct of the big states: How can there be a G20 with representatives of the European Union plus five “big” European states? And how can there be a common foreign policy when there are five big states that reserve the right to express themselves in contradictory ways because they have a past history to defend? A big challenge.

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History will always come back to haunt Europe. When I left the Sciences Po in 1985, I worked briefly as a journalist. I was sent to Stockholm to report on a conference arranged by the Baltic diaspora. It was a bit of a shock for me, because I – who was born in Norway in 1960 – had almost taken it as a fact that the three Baltic states were part of the Soviet Union and would remain there. But I learned at the conference that they were not. They sailed on a cruise ship to the shores of the Soviet Union where they could see the Baltic states, and then they went back having seen their homeland.

At that conference I interviewed the Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukowski. His message was that the Soviet Union would be dissolved by the year 2000. And I was thinking, if you have been in the Gulag, you may want change so much that it may get in the way of your ability to assess the situation objectively. Bukowski was wrong. The Soviet Union did not collapse in 2000. It happened in 1991!

So history comes along and surprises Europe. The notion of Europe is changed by the interaction between unexpected changes and the political ambition to organise.

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The third point in Tony Judt’s work I would like to comment on is the withering away of master narratives of European history, the absence of an overarching ideological project of left or right beyond the desire for liberty and freedom.

Now, I take issue with this in the sense that I think Judt also did when he was trying to revive social democracy as a story. And that brings me to the last point in this introduction:

I think what stands out among European structures today – in addition to the European Union –is the distinctly European model for organising society. Coming from Norway, I refer to it as the “Nordic model”.

I remember that, when I travelled with Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland in the 1990s, we were told that our Nordic model is doomed, it will not survive in the globalised world because the state is too big, the unions are too strong, the taxes are too high and the elites are too weak.

Then, those voices faded, and now we hear that it is these states that are performing the best. They have the most adaptive economies, they have the most highly educated populations, and the fact that the unions are strong makes transitions and changes easier.

So I think this model is a distinctive component of a building block for the kind of Europe we are seeking.

I retain three points from the work of Tony Judt when I reflect on the future: the reduction of states and the emergence of a union, with no master narrative beyond European integration, and the profile of a model.

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So what kind of Europe will we have as we move forward?

Let me just remind you that change can come as surprisingly as it did in the Bukowski prediction. And as we speak, European leaders are assembled in Brussels to deal with something that seems to be quite momentous, they are discussing the future of the single currency. I will come back to this, as I believe it could bring another kind of surprise.

I have been reflecting on the notion that the present is instructed by the past because this is complicated in Europe, and let me make a point: In the late 1980s, the European Union, then made up of twelve states, decided to develop the internal market, which has subsequently been deepened.

The Treaty of Maastricht was drafted on the assumption that that those countries that founded the Union and those that joined in the 1980s would go more deeply into a political union.

But then “history came along” once again, the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed. But as enlargement became the target, this discussion of deepening was still the framework for the institutions that Europe was shaping.

I remember Jacques Delors telling the Nordic countries at the time: “You cannot join this time, because we are going deep. But we want to organise a much more sophisticated cooperation in the market.” But again, “history came along”, and we had this debate: should it be enlargement or deepening?

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The reality is that we had enlargement in deepening, and that I think is the big dilemma. I believe that the Nobel Committee made a big mistake in not awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union for the way it succeeded in the enlargement.

It was done by necessity and by choice. A fantastic thing. The NATO and EU enlargements secured stability in those very difficult years.

But the challenge is that it has left us with something that has been enlarged and deepened in the same project, making the European Union too big, too diverse, too distant from its citizens and too ambitious for its capacity and for the readiness of its citizens.

The big problem of Europe today is not the second enlargement of new members from Eastern and Central Europe. It concerns Greece, which joined in the first round of enlargement, which was in 1981 – demonstrating, as I see it, that Europe today is suffering from three major “digestion problems” – enlargement, currency and foreign policy.

Tony Judt writes that it took 60 years to digest the post-war, and today Europe is struggling to digest enlargement, to digest a treaty.

I see this as a foreign minister from outside the European Union. There is a major effort now to build an institution for a common security and foreign policy. And Europe is good at building institutions employing a lot of people in Brussels. It proves to be much harder to build a common policy.

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The third digestion problem concerns the euro.

As regards currency, Europe is agreed on a policy, but the institutions are weak, so there is a kind of dilemma between the two, and in 2011 we ask whether the European Union is ending up as a big and complex technocratic adventure?

When I visit Brussels and walk around the streets of the EU headquarters, I ask myself: Is this the birthplace of the future, or is it the graveyard of the past?

What worries me is that Europe today is failing where it actually should excel.

On the one hand, it is losing touch with its citizens – and losing, or failing to fulfil some of the fundamental contracts governing democratic legitimacy.

And you see populist right-wing groups popping up in all the countries in response to this, because the consequences of the financial crisis are not being handled in Brussels. They are being handled back home. People are then coming back – as Tony Judt also noted in his writing – and blaming state institutions and the national context for this.

So, Europe is struggling – I am not saying finally failing – but struggling with this dilemma of democratic legitimacy.

The other place where it is failing, where it actually should excel, is in the technocratic governance of the single currency. It created a single currency, a very advanced project, and we are now seeing major failings in the way this was constructed. And the only way, it seems to me, that Europe can get out of this is to continue the narrative that it is developing through crises. Because there will be crises.

I often ask myself where we were in August 2008. What were we thinking before the financial crisis and before Lehman Brothers went bankrupt? Is this such a moment now?

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So, what kind of Europe?

We live with a global narrative of a power shift to the East and to the South. I have seen this, as I have observed, in the ongoing round of the WTO negotiations. I am also in charge of WTO issues, such as foreign trade.

In 2003 the ongoing disputes in the global trade negotiations were settled by the EU and the US. My first task as foreign minister was to go to Hong Kong in December 2005 to a WTO ministerial, where we made progress on a compromise between the US and the European Union, conceding a bit to India and a bit to Brazil.

In 2008 in Geneva, the WTO negotiations failed. And at that point it was no longer about the European Union and the US. It was about India, China and Brazil telling all the others that there would be no solution without them.

We see Europe absorbed in its internal problems. It is no longer a leading voice on climate change, no longer setting the global agenda on trade.

After being over-represented in the G20, its voice and vision in the G20 are also waning, and people now talk about the “G2” and so on. And as Martin Wolff has observed in the Financial Times, the financial crisis is accelerating the arrival of this future.

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But then, and this is my final point, Europe still has a major strength in this globalised world, which is never – as Tony Judt wrote – going to be a “flat” world, because people do not live in flat worlds. And they do not live in globalised worlds either. They live in very local realities, where they wake up in the morning and go to work, and go home to their neighbourhoods in the evening.

And there Europe, paradoxically, has the strength of its past and history and its achievements.

It has, if it so chooses, a political toolbox of values and experience that may be uniquely suited to shape the kind of Europe we want. Democratic structures, the rule of law, universal human rights, a vibrant civil society, the European model. It is essential that these are not crushed by the free market, liberalist response to the crisis, which would mean dismantling the safety net.

From a Nordic perspective the social welfare arrangements that make up this safety net are not just a political objective, but also an objective of policy, They make the economy more effective by taking care of people and making them secure. They help us maintain the strength of civil society, and the role of universities, culture and innovation.

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The East and South that are emerging are not as stable and solid as they may appear. We see China and Russia governed by “power verticals” that look impressive, with high-digit growth, but we know they are vulnerable.

So the challenge will be to strike a balance in Europe between the Brussels framework of one market, one economy, perhaps one currency, and a more multifaceted Europe that takes greater account of regional differences. But I also think that we need to revive sub-regional realities in Europe that can deal with realities closer to people.

We are doing this in the North. We have the Baltic Sea cooperation, the Barents Sea cooperation, the cooperation in the Arctic Council, and the “old” Nordic cooperation, which deals with cross-border cooperation and is therefore very relevant for the people.

Norway’s big adventure in this has been to re-learn how to live next to Russia. We have a common border with Russia, which was in a way part of the Cold War East-West border for 70 years – but now we need to learn to live together.

And Southern Europe will have to work on the “Mediterranean Union”, to reflect on the fact that after the “Arab Spring” there will be an “Arab Summer”.

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And I will end here. For me the European Union and Europe are more of a political idea than a geographical entity.

And the values that are enshrined in this European vision should be open to Tunisia and Egypt as they emerge as democracies. They should be open to Turkey as it strives to decide where it belongs. And who knows, perhaps one day they should be open to Russia.

And we can go back to the fact, that in the 1980s – and the past continues to haunt Europe – the model that is governing Europe today was devised with the vision of a divided Europe. The Maastricht Treaty was, as I said, devised on the basis of a vision of a West that would go deep.

Then came enlargement. In my view, the notion of enlargement in the broader sense, i.e. enlargement of values, inclusion and so forth, is also the only approach that will enable us to live in a multicultural Europe.

My vision from a “strange”, small state in the North, is simple:  Europe can be the continent that succeeds in inclusion in a way that will be a major strength in the global community.

Thank you.