Europe's Changing Union

While the European Union is required by solemn treaty to become much more tightly integrated over the coming years, that may or may not actually happen.

The Union is expanding. Next year Austria, Sweden, Finland and Norway will probably join. But, much more difficult, the Union must respond to the urgent appeals from Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary to be allowed to come in.

Germany's governing Christian Democratic Party proposed several weeks ago to organize the Union around a nucleus consisting of five -- France, Germany and the Benelux three -- moving toward increasingly close integration, with the other members following more slowly, depending on their wishes or circumstances.

Prime Minister Edouard Balladur of France replied with another variation on that theme. There was an immediate protest from Britain, where Prime Minister John Major countered with the concept of flexible cooperation--in effect, a kind of smorgasbord at which each country could choose for itself the areas in which it was prepared to integrate.

These difference are fundamental. On one side are the countries -- with Germany and France at the top of the list -- that see the European Union above all as a political instrument to ensure that there will be no more war and no more division on their continent. On the other side are those, led by Britain, that believe the sovereign nation-state is the natural and proper unit of political life, and that the Union ought to be limited to a useful commercial relationship.

The integrationist side of the argument has suffered severely from the Union's inability to pull together a joint European policy capable of ending the savage war in the former Yugoslavia. But the integrationists still seem to have the initiative, and they have now reopened the constitutional debate on the next Europe. The decisions on the four eastern countries, and whether and how to bring them into the Union, will establish its character for decades to come.

-- The Washington Post