Kohl hopes to see one currency for Europe
By Gwynne Dyer
The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows One Big Thing. -- Sir Isaiah Berlin, 1953
LONDON (JP): Many of his European Union colleagues secretly think that German Chancellor Helmut Kohl is a peasant. He speaks no language but German, he's overweight, his tastes are unsophisticated, and he is no intellectual. Worse, he goes on and on about the same tedious subject when they have twenty other urgent matters to discuss.
The officials are still clearing up the mess after the chaotic summit of the 15 European Union heads of government in Amsterdam last week. It ended in the wee hours of June 18 with hastily scribbled deals and compromises that now have to be turned into legal language (in a dozen different languages) -- but it's already clear that the Treaty of Amsterdam won't do what it was supposed to do.
The failure to sort out issues like who gets a veto, and over which EU policies, and how many European Commissioners each country gets, would normally matter little. But up to ten Eastern European countries are waiting impatiently to join the EU, and it will be paralyzed if it lets them in before reforming those rules.
In practice, they cannot join until the EU mounts another maximum effort at reform -- and gets it right. Given everything else on the European agenda, we may be talking about a three-or four-year delay. That means that Kohl will become even more persistent and tedious about his pet project, Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). But he does have his reasons.
EMU means literally the move to a single European currency, the 'euro', which will replace the pounds, francs, marks, liras, and escudos that have served the individual member countries for up to a millennium. (1,250 years, in Britain's case.) This is portrayed as a move towards economic efficiency and competitiveness, but of course it is nothing of the sort. It is an intensely political project, and it is almost entirely Helmut Kohl's baby.
The thing that distinguishes Helmut Kohl from the Tony Blairs, Lionel Jospins, Jose Maria Aznars and Wim de Koks who run the rest of the EU -- all intelligent, serious, industrious men who worry about the economy and unemployment and immigration policy and the rest -- is that he remembers the War.
Really remembers it: Kohl was just too young to be dragged into one of the battalions of teenagers conscripted for the last- ditch defense of Germany's wrecked cities in 1945, but he grew up amidst the ruins. Then he spent most of his adult life in a divided Germany with six foreign armies and thousands of short- range nuclear weapons in its soil. So he can be forgiven for suspecting that history has not stopped.
Helmut Kohl is the last 'European', the last member of the generation who believed that Europe must unite or go back into Hell, to hold power in a major European country. His colleagues all think they are 'Europeans' too, but they really don't believe it could ever go that wrong. Kohl does, and that makes him different.
He lived most of his life in a Europe that stood on the brink of a Third World War and oblivion, so it was not until 1990, when Germany was united, that he began to think about how to secure the longer-term future. In 1993, he came up with the idea of a single European currency.
There are a hundred practical downsides to a single Europe- wide currency, but there is one shining upside. If the EU ever buys the Trojan Horse that Kohl has built for it, then it will have to develop a real federal political system to run it. You can do a great many things by consensus, with vetoes all round, but running a common currency is definitely not one of them.
Kohl may not realize it, but the need to run a common currency was one of the key things that turned the fractious Thirteen Colonies into the federal United States in the decades after the American Revolution. He certainly does know about the 'Zollverein', the customs union among the many German kingdoms, principalities and free cities that paved the way for a united Germany. And he knows exactly what the 'euro' would do to Europe.
After the failure in Amsterdam last week, with Eastern Europe effectively locked out of the EU until past the end of the century, Kohl will bear down even harder on the EMU project. He is willing to sacrifice everything for it, and he may well end up doing so: his political position in Germany is crumbling under the assaults of those who mistrust the 'euro', but he keeps right on going.
Is he right? Is the shiny new techno-Europe doomed to slide back into its vicious, self-destructive past if it does not unite? (And it will not unite, at this late date, without the 'euro').
Nobody knows. But if history hasn't stopped, then there is a powerful case to answer. Europe's future looked pretty secure in 1890, too, but 1914 was only a quarter-century away.
Most people don't think on these time-scales. Kohl does. He may think slowly (or so his critics say), but he thinks long thoughts. The 'euro' is scheduled to debut in eighteen months' time, but if it doesn't make that deadline, it probably won't ever happen. Whether it does or not gets settled next month.
With the integration of Eastern Europe into the EU now postponed beyond the edge of vision, Kohl has only one hope left: that he can somehow get the 'euro' -- any 'euro', however compromised and mutilated -- past the guardians of fiscal probity and national sovereignty. The point is to get the Trojan Horse through the gates.
His opponents are honorable people, intelligent people, serious people. But philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin's distinction between foxes and hedgehogs remains relevant.
In full, what he said was: "There exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision...and on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory. The first kind (are) the hedgehogs, the second (are) the foxes." Helmut Kohl is a hedgehog.