Sir Ralf Dahrendorf Interview:Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Page 5 of 6
You will be speaking later today on the Berkeley campus on how Europe is changing. Are you surprised by the "1992 phenomenon," the extent to which we seem to be seeing a much greater acceleration of the momentum toward European economic integration?
To some extent, yes, because after its initial period of great activity and progress, the European Economic Community really went into a long depression which coincided with the prevalence of such words as "Euro-gloom," "Euro-sclerosis," "Euro-pessimism" -- that is to say, people felt that Europe had become hopelessly rigid and had no future to go to. That was the period of the 1970s, essentially, and into the 1980s. And then something happened. It's as if people couldn't bear to live in that gloomy world any longer, and somehow new objectives were formulated for the European Economic Community. It had something to do with particular individuals. I think it had something to do with Jacques DeLors who is still president of the Commission of the European Communities. It had something to do with President Mitterrand and the discovery of the European interest by France (or perhaps rediscovery). It also had something to do with Chancellor Kohl who, in his own way, perhaps not exceptionally brilliant, but nevertheless in his stubborn way wanted to promote European cooperation.
And so this single European Act was invented, which didn't look like an awful lot at first, which has more preamble than substance, but which, in its substance, then suggests a date. It says, "By 1992, we want to have created a true common market, one which not only has dismantled tariff barriers within Europe, but many other barriers to the free movement of goods, of services, of capital, and of people. And suddenly, this '92 caught on. You know from the insurance companies and other financial institutions to the universities, which have this great exchange program which is pronounced under the name of ERASMUS (which is an acronym for something complicated), everybody seems to have found a new sense of purpose. This sense of purpose has communicated itself to the outside world; there is a degree of hope within Europe. There is a degree of apprehension outside Europe about this European development which helps make it real, I suppose.
What do you see as Germany's place in this new, evolving Europe?
I'm one of those who long believed that there cannot be a European Community unless it is strongly supported by the closest possible relations between France and Germany. And so, the answer to your question is that unless German political parties and German public opinion support the moves forward toward closer European integration, nothing much would happen
Will the German problem, in the sense of the division of Germany, be solved by not being solved, in a way? And what about the American role in all this? What is your sense of the importance of America's accomplishment in this postwar period? How important were we for Europe?
All important, I would say, and I'm one of those who have long admired this country, and continue to admire this country, for the kind of civil society and governmental institutions and economic strength which it's brought about. I haven't, I'm bound to say, always admired American foreign policy to quite the same extent to which I've admired the institutions of the United States. There's been a great deal of uncertainty about American foreign policy.
For a long time, of course, we had what I've sometimes described as the "Russian doll principle." That is to say, you take a big Russian doll, in which Americans and West Europeans are united (NATO), and you open it up and out comes a slightly smaller one, which is the European Community but which fits perfectly into the framework, and you open that and out comes Franco-German friendship as the inner one. So there was a sort of close relationship between the Atlantic community, the European community, and Franco-German relations.
This is perhaps no longer so evident, and the next stage in the process of European integration is -- here one is easily misunderstood -- to some extent a process of demarcation from the United States of America in Europe, and in that sense a response to American developments which are somewhat less open to the world, somewhat less multilateral, certainly, and perhaps somewhat more protectionist in the widest sense of the term. So, whereas one might say that in the past the United States has actively contributed to the integration of Europe, now its more a contribution by default. By no longer actively contributing, the U.S. forces Europe to get its act together.
In such an environment, will the Europeans tend to their own security, or are there no longer any security concerns for Europe?
Now you're raising another big and important issue. The simple answer to that is, there are security concerns despite the fact that it's harder to perceive them -- incidentally, it's harder to perceive them for Americans given Reykjavik and all that, which one has seen on television and perceived. But, it is by no means certain that Europe will get its own contribution to Western security as well organized as it should, and I am quite certain that the only way to guarantee Western security for Europeans is to keep NATO going and, in that sense, keep the Atlantic alliance going, hard though this may have become.
Next page: Lessons Learned
© Copyright 2001, Regents of the University of California