Does the European Union have a final frontier - Essay Example

Does the European Union have a final frontier? Regionalization is used to describe the conglomeration of people, trade, and ideas in a group of countries with similar economies or cultures. It is often used in a trade or economic sense. Through regionalization, people have become connected economically, politically, socially, and culturally. Although regionalization can have a potentially negative impact, it has often resulted in economic growth as a result of rising profits from exporting goods and services to other countries. One of the leading examples in the world today of this phenomenon is the European Union. This economic, cultural, and political bloc of 27 countries is on the cutting edge of integration. Currently, the EU is a prosperous and stable region with great potential. But one of the great existential questions facing it is: how much more? Should the EU expand to include Turkey? The former Yugoslavia? Georgia and the Caucausus? These are troublesome questions, which this essay will explore. The truth is that for all the benefits of regionalization, the EU needs time to consolidate its gains. Expansion should not be a priority for the EU. Regionalization has done an incredible amount to increase business productivity and trade and make many people richer. One of the founding economic theorists of globalization is David Ricardo who focused on distributing income among landowners and workers. He also had a lot to say about wages and prices. One of his big contributions was the idea of comparative advantage which involves countries with different advantages trading with one another in free markets so that both maximize their benefits. This underpins much contemporary regionalization and trade theory. What one country can do well, it can often do better with the help of its neighbours. Thus we see the process unfolding in Europe and Southeast Asia. Regionalization is not simply about economics: it is also about the cultural and social shifts that accompany the reduction in tariff and the easing of travel, communication, and trade. It is about the way people from all across the world and in a geographic neighbourhood can come together to have a conversation and to collaborate on numerous projects and cultural products. Cultural products are commodities too and they can be exchanged more easily in an open marketplace. But despite all these benefits, it is important to remember that regionalization brings many structural changes that need time to be consolidated. It is not an effective approach to rush these matters. Changes regarding regionalizaiton need time. As the EU looks to its frontiers, the temptation to expand will always be there, but patience is required. Few changes in European Union history promise to be as dramatic as those brought in under the Lisbon Treaty. Ratified in 2009, the Treaty makes sweeping changes to the governance of Europe, amending previous treaties and changing institutions. It is a controversial document and in various forms has been rejected by voters in some countries (Duff, 54). Nevertheless, it is now the law of the land. But how will the Treaty shape and change Europes institutions and role in the world? Will these sweeping changes affect the size of Europe, where Europe decides to draw its boundaries? The truth is that the institutions of the EU are sure to change due to the Lisbon Treaty, perhaps most dramatically in terms of international affairs. The new High Representative for Foreign Affairs will unify Europes foreign policy. This will have a significant impact. It’s important to ask the question, What is power on the international scene? Part of it must surely have to do with purely military force (Kagan, 12). The US is the lone power in the world with the ability to conduct expeditionary warfare on multiple fronts across the globe whenever it wants to. As was demonstrated in the Balkans in the 1990s, Europeans aren’t able to project a credible military force even within Europe. Therefore the Europeans resort to the only thing they have for managing international conflicts, international institutions such as the UN. Some argue that expanding Europe and including Turkey and other countries would expand the EUs foreign policy influence. But there is a powerful counterargument: overreaching could result in collapse. The success of European integration and solving the "German problem" has a lot of Europeans, Kagan says, to believe that they live in a Kantian paradise where international institutions can banish war forever (101). Americans have a different historical reality, and think of the world as a Hobbesian jungle where hard power rules. Now because of the Lisbon Treaty, Europeans will be taking more responsibility for their actions as a unified state. They will be entrenching their new system. This will give them a lot less energy to expand. Hopefully, this will lead to the EU supporting the US in various actions rather than being a peanut gallery of criticism, with various European foreign minister sniping away (Nergelius, 89). Now Europe is left with two options: either they follow the US or be a silent partner. "Rather than viewing the US as a Gulliver tied down by Lilliputian threads", says Kagan, "American leaders should realize that they are hardly constrained at all, that Europe is not really capable of constraining the US" (100). The main reason he reaches this conclusion is because he thinks of power only in a military sense. But power is also economic power, something he doesn’t spend very much time talking about. Europe is economically strong enough to trouble the US as and when it wants to, especially when it comes to important trade issues that can seriously affect American technologies and industries. However, by expanding to new frontiers, that power is drained away. Also, nowadays with the American Economy in so much trouble, it is important to look at the ways military power and economic power are interwoven—especially since Kagan thinks "...the US can sustain its current military spending levels and its current global dominance far into the future" (97). With America’s massive debt and deficit it is hard to imagine how it can also continue to police the globe without some serious economic restructuring. If you can’t pay for your military equipment you can’t fight with it. Europe, of course, is in a similar situation. But with unified foreign policy they can pool their international resources more efficiently, projecting more power with less money (Nergelius, 203). Unless, of course, they expand their frontiers. There are a lot of good analogies to help paint his picture of the differences in the ways that America and Europe view world-wide threats (A bear roaming in the woods is viewed differently by a man with a rifle as opposed to a man with a knife). There are also many differences in how the two see their role in the world. The Americans want to exert influence their culture and projection of force, many in the EU want to expand territorially. The second is clearly a much more expensive and riskier way of influencing the world. The Lisbon Treaty will also sharpen these distances, changing the foreign policy institutions of the continent. The next question to consider is whether the Lisbon Treaty will make the EU more transparent and democratic. Unfortunately, this is very unlikely. To begin with, the Treaty was basically rejected by referendum and forced on Europeans. Although the new vote weighting mechanism is helpful there are still a number of pressing issues relating to democracy that the EU must deal with and deal with promptly (Breut, 69). The Lisbon Treaty does nothing to address the issue of tax harmonization which, if implemented, would result in a massive loss of sovereignty and democracy (Goodspeed, 90). And it does not definitively answer the question about where the EUs final boundaries should end. Europeans have a dream to expand the influence of their continent wider and wider. They believe that their culture and way of life is worthy of export. The biggest problem however is that the EU has expanded too quickly already and must work hard to consolidate its gains. The Euro has only been around for a decade. Europe may yet expand into the Turkey or the Caucasus, but these changes will take time. It is important not to rush. Works consulted Bruel Cornelia, Mokre Monika, Pausch Markus (eds.). Democracy needs dispute: the debate on the European Constitution. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2009. Duff Andrew. Saving the European Union: the logic of the Lisbon Treaty. London: Shoehorn, 2009. Goodspeed, Timothy J. "Tax competition and tax structure in open federal economies : evidence from OECD countries with implications for the European Union," ZEW Discussion Papers 99-39, ZEW - Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung / Center for European Economic Research. 1999 Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 2006 Kagan, Robert. Of Paradise and Power. New York: Vintage, 2004. Krogstrup, Signe. "Are Corporate Tax Burdens Racing to the Bottom in the European Union?" EPRU Working Paper, February 2004 Nergelius, Joakim. The constitutional dilemma of the European Union. Groningen: Europa Law, 2009. Oates, W.E. Fiscal Federalism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972. Tsoukalis, Loukas. What Kind of Europe? New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 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