It's History That's Tearing the E.U. Apart

Take note first of the "we" in the policeman's declaration -- it's we the French, not we the Europeans. And secondly, notice his appeal to the law: These easily mocked people with their passion for abstractions really do take some things seriously. Shame registered on the waiter's face because he realized that he had violated a social contract to which he owed his allegiance.

Sooner or later, of course, France will have to come to terms with the reality of the modern world: Its extensive social welfare system, its 35-hour workweek and its highly regulated economy cannot be sustained indefinitely. But many of the concerns that drove French voters to reject the European constitution make perfect sense. French politicians may have delivered enthusiastic encomiums to European unity for the past half-century, but it seems that the French people do indeed cherish their sovereignty -- particularly their protected national labor markets, as many have observed, but also their distinct cultural identity, their legal and educational traditions, and their social stability.

In all the millions of words recently written in opinion pieces in France, uttered by French television pundits and spoken by French politicians, no one has said the most obvious ones: To hell with Europe. That's right, to hell with Europe -- to hell with integration; to hell with the super-state; to hell with playing a role like the United States' on the international stage. No one has said, "It's a nutty idea. It will never work. It would put us in contact with people we've hated for thousands of years."

Intellectuals and public figures in France, from left to right, explain their votes by first expressing boundless devotion to the ideal of Europe itself: The people's vote against the constitution, they say, reflects only a tactical readjustment in the great vision. The fantasy of Europe has adopted so prominent a role in the consciousness of French intellectuals that no one will speak plainly of it. No one is prepared to express what the majority of French voters really feel.

But ask a French farmer or factory worker. You'll hear it: To hell with Europe.

According to those dismayed by the outcome of the referendum, last weekend's no vote represented a mix of incoherent sentiments, chiefly a frustration with unemployment, a rejection of market reforms and a widespread loathing of the government of President Jacques Chirac. These issues are all real. But unemployment in France is a long-term structural problem. It would be a problem whether or not the French voted for the constitution. As for Chirac? Everyone has always disliked him.

The one thing the vote surely expressed is the unwillingness of the French to cede any more of their national identity to the fantasy of a unified Europe. It is a fantasy, of course, of very old standing. Pope Innocent III's failed attempt to unify fractious medieval Europe was an expression of much the same fantasy. No effort to unify Europe has ever succeeded. Most have ended in blood.

That's because the treaties that established the E.U. work at cross purposes with the essential character of the nation-state system that has been evolving in Europe since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The modern nation-state is predicated, precisely as the term suggests, on this idea: one nation, one state. The nation includes those who share a particular historical, linguistic and cultural heritage. Unsurprisingly, it is difficult to cobble nation-states together into a grand transnational entity. Unsurprisingly, they do not take well to the prospect of large-scale immigration.

What seems obvious to me, sitting in darkened rooms at night after the Istanbul power fails, is obvious to the French electorate. The electricity supply here has been unreliable because my neighbors are diverting it, causing blackouts. Here, we do not have the law.

Nobody in the French elite has been prepared to say what the French electorate has said clearly -- that, even if the E.U. makes sense economically, it makes no sense historically. It reflects neither the will of a single nation-state, nor the will of an empire, based on the ability of a central political entity to dominate its periphery, nor does it reflect some form of established European identity with deep historic roots. Even the Austro-Hungarian Empire had in Austrian power -- diminished as it was after 1866 -- a stable and powerful center.

All of European history -- all of world history -- argues against a federation with no force to back it up and no way to impose its will on member states. The French voters recognized this even as the French elite failed to. The E. U. is in effect an empty empire. The only national identities up for grabs are the old national identities of the chief nation-states of Europe. And no matter how hard the E.U. bureaucrats try to turn the French identity into a European one, the people just aren't buying it.

Author's e-mail : claire@berlinski.com

Claire Berlinski, a freelance writer living in Paris and Istanbul, is the author of the comic spy novel "Loose Lips" (Random House). Her nonfiction book, "Blackmailed by History," which explores the reawakening of repressed conflicts in Europe, will be published by Crown Forum in 2006.