The PHARE Programme

Initiated originally to assist Poland and Hungary, and later other countries in Central and Eastern Europe, PHARE (Poland and Hungary: Aid for Restructuring of the Economies) has undergone considerable change over the years and became the most important pre-accession instrument financed by the Union to support the applicant countries of that region in their preparation to join the European Union. The PHARE programme became operational in January 1990. Before that, in December 1989, the Council of Ministers had adopted – on the basis of Article 235 EC – the PHARE regulation which forms the legal foundation of the programme. The origins of the PHARE programme, however, go back even further. It originated in the Community's responsibility for the co-ordination of G24 aid to Poland and Hungary. This mandate, which the European Commission obtained at the G7 summit in Paris in July 1989, was until then ‘the highest foreign policy accolade the Commission has ever had bestowed on it’. Never before had the Commission been responsible for the aid co-ordination of its Member States and third countries.

From 1989 to 1997 the programme's aim was mainly to provide support for the process of transition towards a market economy and towards democratic institutions in the Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC). It focused on technical assistance at government and ministry level in the areas of public finance, agriculture, the environment and privatisation.

The Preamble to the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe contains the expressions ‘transcend’, ‘common destiny’, ‘rights of each individual’ and ‘responsibilities towards future generations and the Earth’, and these words are framed by a conception of Europe as a ‘great venture which makes of it a special area of human hope’. While this does not quite attain the exalted level of an American belief in a ‘manifest destiny’, the intentions of the Président de la Convention, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and his colleagues are nonetheless apparent. The ‘new Europe’ is not to be understood merely as bureaucracy or as an expanded market, but as a vital entity, the bearer of intellectual, cultural and spiritual continuities. In this chapter, I explore some of the dimensions that such aspirations touch upon, once they are emancipated from high-flown intention and anchored in the matrix of tensions and contradictions that afflict all efforts to define and defend identity in an era of globalisation and religiously inspired terror.

The enlargement of the European Union (EU) to include ten new states prompted an immediate debate centring on such questions as migration, border controls, labour regulation, the common agricultural policy, the costs of regional subsidies and defence. Such debates are as important as they are inevitable. But enlargement also raised issues that go beyond the agenda of economic, monetary and political integration, issues that concern the limits and integrity of European culture as such. While the accession of Finland, Sweden and Austria during the 1990s increased the size of the EU, membership for the new states which joined in 2004 and for those seeking membership in the future raises questions more profound and far-reaching than those concerning the feasibility of the EU's current decision-making procedures. For most of those new states, membership of the EU is at the same time part of a ‘return to Europe’ in a broader sense. The fact that some of these states have Slavic populations, that some have immature democratic polities, or large peasant populations, or populations which have for centuries been within the orbit of orthodox Christianity or Islam, raises questions about Europe's internal cultural identity. Such questions have become more sharply focused as a result of the larger geo-political and cultural realignments of which Europe is a part.

To be sure, there is no logical reason why debate about European culture and identity should be dependent upon shifts in geopolitics.

After having discussed the need for ‘normative impulses’ for effective social and political integration in Europe, impulses that can only come about ‘through overlapping projects for a common political culture’, Jürgen Habermas, in the title essay to The Postnational Constellation, immediately reassures his readers that such projects ‘can be constructed in the common historical horizon that the citizens of Europe already find themselves in’. And a moment later he indeed identifies an already existing ‘normative self-understanding of European modernity’. What, though, is this self-understanding of European modernity, and what is its specificity?

Some have objected to Habermas, or to all those who try to identify normative underpinnings for European political integration, that such European self-understanding is either entirely indistinct from the general self-understanding of the West, i.e. a commitment to human rights and liberal democracy, or highly problematic, because it makes overly ‘thick’ presuppositions, which are untenable against the background of European cultural diversity, and risks reviving non-liberal European political traditions. The proposition made in the following attempt to reconstruct the normative self-understanding of European political modernity is different. It suggests, on the one hand, that the general, universalist commitment to liberal democracy is insufficient to understand Western polities. The commitment to political modernity does not lead unequivocally to a certain institutional form of the polity. It is open to interpretation, and the existing polities that share this commitment are indeed based on a variety of such interpretations.

The shape of the new Europe is best appreciated through a particular understanding of the old Europe. My use of these terms does not coincide with Donald Rumsfeld's contrast – designed to divide so as to better control Europe – between the key pioneers of European integration and newer members from Central Europe. Attention focuses instead on the historical sociology of European territory and institutions over the last century. What matters most of all is the national question, for reasons so obvious that they can be stated immediately with both bluntness and force.

The central feature that differentiated the old Europe of a century ago from its contemporary variant was the presence of multinational empires, most notably those of the Habsburgs, Romanovs and Ottomans. These authoritarian regimes were faced with the challenge of modernity, that is, with the complex intertwining of nationalism, democratisation and industrialisation, the precise contours of which we still do not fully understand. None was able to meet this challenge intact; all fragmented into a series of separate nation-states, albeit dissolution in the Russian case was much delayed by the empire being placed under new management at the end of the First World War. The tectonic shift caused by the ending of imperial rule in the European heartland resulted in vicious practices of ethnic cleansing, population transfer and genocide, all carried out in the midst of the fog of world wars. Accordingly, it is entirely appropriate to call twentieth century Europe ‘the dark continent’.

The Eastern enlargement of the European Union (EU) has important implications for our understanding of the meaning of Europe. Although the precise nature of this process is uncertain, the very fact that it is underway is in itself of major significance. Indeed the very term integration may be inadequate when it comes to the current scale of Europeanisation, which consists not of one but several logics and not all of which can be understood in terms of integration. Europeanisation is not leading to a society, a state or a clearly definable geopolitical entity that rests on a cultural foundation, as is often assumed. Moreover, there is not one ‘Europe’, but several. In this respect, what is central is the question of modernity, or modernities and their civilisational forms.

The categories that are used to make sense of Europeanisation tend on the whole to be either descriptive or normative – ‘widening’, ‘deepening’, ‘integration’, ‘convergence’ – and thus fail to appreciate the dynamics of a multi-directional process. There is relatively little theoretical literature exploring the wider significance of the Eastern enlargement, which is generally seen only in terms of intergovernmentalism and of institutional design. The constitutional debate instigated by the Convention on the Future of Europe in February 2002 has, to a degree, opened a wider perspective on the emerging face of a bigger Europe, but the issues at stake go beyond what can be addressed by a constitution.

There is a remarkable contrast between the expectations and demands of those who pushed for European unification immediately after the Second World War, and those who contemplate the continuation of this project today – at the very least, a striking difference in rhetoric and ostensible aim. While the first generation advocates of European integration did not hesitate to speak of the project they had in mind as a ‘United States of Europe’, evoking the example of the USA, current discussion has moved away from the model of a federal state, avoiding even the term ‘federation’. Larry Siedentop's recent book Democracy in Europe expresses a more cautious mood:

Does this shift in climate reflect a sound realism, born of a learning-process of over four decades, or is it rather the sign of a mood of hesitance, if not outright defeatism?