A Vote Against Fragmentation

By Dominique Moisi Dominique Moisi is deputy director of the French Institute for International Affairs.

CONTRARY TO THE PREDICTIONS OF EUROSKEPTICS, THE French have voted for the Maastricht treaty for a more unified Europe. It was not a resounding yes, but a significant one that is a tribute to the maturity and sense of responsibility of the French people. This yes comes as a relief in spite of Europe's continuing monetary turmoil and Britain's misgivings about the treaty. A French no would have unleashed a political earthquake upon the Continent, not only because of the centrality of France in the painstaking process of European integration, but also because of the timing of the referendum.

The international system is in search of a new order and guiding principles. Fast emerging is a competition between the logic of economics, entailing globalization, interdependence and regional integration, and that of politics, in which at present the reality of fragmentation seems to be gaining the upper hand. In this context, French voters had a responsibility that went well beyond France and its position within the new Europe. The issue could be summarized as follows: In post-cold war Europe, will democracy and stability spread from West to East, or will fractionalization, with all the strains it is likely to engender for the Continent and its people, spread from East to West?

Yesterday Western Europe was united in order to confront a Soviet bloc, artificially brought together by the Red Army. Today Western Europe has to be united to face the vacuum left by the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the powerful forces of fragmentation that the collapse of the Soviet empire unleashed.

Fragmentation in the eastern part of Europe was largely inevitable and the product of three forces: the weight of history, the legacy of communism and the democratization process itself. Unlike Britain and France, which have secure identities and stable boundaries, the nation-states of Eastern Europe are the relatively recent product of empire -- Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman or Russian. They have had tragic histories of lost freedom, submerged identities and shifting boundaries. Add to this the legacy of communism, which in the former Soviet bloc acted as a refrigerator, freezing all political, social and cultural evolutions, leaving pre- and post-World War II problems unresolved, accumulating economic and spiritual frustrations. The worst example of this tragic history is, of course, the former Yugoslavia, with its explosion of violence, where even the cold war freezer had not stopped the putrefaction that comes with ethnic hatreds. Contributing to the acceleration of the fragmentation process is the revival of democracy itself. In the years before 1989, democratic opponents to communist rule were united in their struggle against totalitarianism; now they are free to fight among themselves and are doing so with little hesitation.

The ultimate dilemma for Central and Eastern Europe -- not to mention the former Soviet Union, where the problems may be even more serious -- is that while democratic institutions can be established in a matter of months, it takes many years to move from centrally planned economies to decentralized free markets, and far longer still to create a modern, Western-type civil society with all the reflexive responses of democracy. Frustrated economically, in search of a political, if not national, identity, Eastern and Central Europeans are still looking to Western Europe as a model and as a solution for their political and security needs. They are banking on a predictable West and dreaming of joining not just a larger market, a Europe of shopkeepers, but a successful and dynamic democratic union. In Central and Eastern Europe, democratic forces would have voted for Maastricht because they see in an integrated Europe the best bulwark against nationalist temptations.

It was at this critical juncture that the French vote of Sept. 20 took on such importance. At a time when key nations in the West, such as the U.S. and Germany, are painfully searching for their new internal and international identities, the existence of a cohesive, integrated Europe is absolutely essential. The western part of the European Continent may have disappointed the East by the modesty of its help, the evidence of its selfishness and its display of diplomatic and military impotence in dealing with the Balkan crisis. But until French doubts about Maastricht materialized, the process of European integration in itself had not been an issue, notwithstanding the treaty's rejection by Danish voters.

In the present European atmosphere, dominated by a pervasive negative mood, pessimism could easily lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. But the French and other Europeans alike must be convinced that the divided Europe of the cold war will not be replaced by an impotent Weimar Europe marked anew by nationalism, xenophobia and, above all, economic depression. In spite of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the fragmentation in central Eastern Europe and the uncertainties in Western Europe, we are neither in 1914 nor in 1933.

In the end, the French people said yes to Maastricht because in spite of their hesitations, they were, in their majority, persuaded of the necessity and ineluctability of the continuation of the European integration process. They also voted yes because they were moved by a reflex of prudence, and a no vote would have opened the gate to the unknown.