Airstrip One

Failure at Copenhagen - 13th December 2002, 22.51

The European Union has entertained ambitions of "superpower status" and the developments of the next few years were planned to cement the arrival of Europe as a power in its own right. However, the discussion of competing models for this new power has demonstrated that there is no clear voice, no overwhelming vision for the future of Europe. The French and the Germans are trying to revive their old partnership in order to shape the final stages of integration. Romano Prodi attempted to revive the central role that the Commission enjoyed under Jacques Delors and found that he had aimed too high with a weak hand. The UK is distrusted as an American proxy and the other members are too small to to construct an agenda of their own.

Adrian Hamilton of the Independent lists these developments clearly and succinctly, linking them to the wider disillusionment that electorates in continental countries feel towards this imposition.

In order to assure that enlargement would be accepted, the European Union made 1 billion euros available to Poland and 300 million euros available to the other candidates. The EU concluded that further subsidies were required to guarantee entry for these countries and followed the same path that it had trod in the path with all other problems: state subsidies to allay grievances. Without further integration and greater financial resources, the EU will probably not be able to bear the ten additional member states.

On the issue of Turkey, the European leaders also met firm demands for accession talks with an attempt to defer the whole issue until December 2004 and another review. This indecision was greeted with anger by Turkey and may well lead them to consider other options. It was also a reaction by some states to perceived interference by the United States in the EU decision making process.

This summit provides further proof that the current structures of the European Union have no answer to the structural problems faced on the continent apart from the redistribution of taxes through subsidy and the siren call of further union. As the patience of German taxpayers has run out and as economic problems are now increasing, the project appears to have reached its endpoint: a static decline with an alliance of political classes unable to muster the moral resource necessary to democratise and relegitimise its goals.

This conservative, bureaucratic behemoth has years of life left and the drive for new membership will not die down whilst continental candidates can join but the EU's capacity for reinvention has been found wanting: and in this age of crisis, reinvention is necessary to survive.