Norman Davies is hoogleraar geschiedenis in Londen en Oxford. Hij schreef verschillende boeken over Polen. Zijn magnum opus is Europe. A history (1996). GroenLinks-Europarlementariër Joost Lagendijk reisde in juni 2001 naar Oxford om Davies uit te horen over de vraag welke landen kans maken op toetreding tot de Europese Unie, en welke niet.
Enkele passages uit dit interview zijn gebruikt voor het boek Brussel – Warschau – Kiev, op zoek naar de grenzen van de Europese Unie, dat Lagendijk in november 2001 samen met PvdA-Europarlementariër Jan Marinus Wiersma uitbracht. De volledige, Engelstalige tekst van het interview met professor Davies volgt hieronder.
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There seems to be a lack of debate in Great Britain on the future of Europe.
"Yes, I think that the debate on the future of Europe is very delayed. It is only just beginning, twelve years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is also a very technical debate. It’s like a seminar of political scientists working out some model, imagining how the future might be. Moreover, the debate is very centred on the British state and its interests. Nobody that I have been talking to is aware that Scotland, for example, has a very different view of Europe than England. And then they talk about the future of the national parliaments. When I ask 'how about the Scottish parliament?' then they say: 'what has that to do with it?'. So, it’s very narrow, very Anglo-centric. On the other hand, I’m not certain that the other members of the European Union have been eager to start this debate. The French and the Germans have also started very recently. They gave priority to the euro, and that is in my mind a very bad mistake. The Euro should come at the end of the process and not at the beginning."
So in your view the EU, in the nineties, should have focused on enlargement instead of monetary union?
"I am a historian who writes in hundreds of years or millennia. And I’m sure that, looking back in a hundred years' time, the key question will be which countries belong to the Union, the shape of the Union on the map, and not whether the European Parliament has slightly bigger competences or that the Council of Ministers has changed. The really big thing is what the map of Europe will look like, in twenty or thirty years."
To what extent will the future shape of the EU be determined by geography?
"I don’t think the geographical bias is very great these days. The fact, for example, that there is a sea between Spain and Morocco is not a great obstacle. On the contrary, the Mediterranean is a channel of communication. And equally, the fact that a country is contiguous with the EU, like Albania, doesn’t mean that it’s an automatic candidate, or the first candidate. There are other things much more important than that. And Russia is contiguous to the EU, it already has a border of more than a thousands miles with Finland. And yet I think that Russia is the least likely country to be able to join the European Union."
The political values of the EU include the rule of law, security, social protection, environmental protection. Is it likely that the applicant countries will be able to make these values theirs? Aren't they much more different from us than they claim to be?
"No, I don’t think so. I accept there is a problem, honestly. And this is a big problem of adaptation, a problem for the new countries, and for that, for the EU. But it is equally a challenge for the EU to adapt to the new member states. it’s not a one-way process. This is a Community and everybody has to adapt to everybody else. So it’s quite a complicated process of adaptation.
There is a famous Polish poem, saying that only those who have lost something can really value it. In other words, if you have been deprived of things, as they were two or three generations under communism, the hunger, the longing for the rule of law, for social protection, for security – political and economic security – is much stronger there than it is in a country like this where nobody really values anything because it has never been taken away from them. So, I think that the new countries, generally speaking, will prove to be very good Europeans. At last they can see that they can work for some desired goal, voluntarily, instead of being forced to accept whatever was being offered.
Having said that, there are considerable problems, for example with the rule of law. The communist system was a gangster system, in which there was a nominal law which was manipulated by the communist party, for its own benefits. And the comrades used to arrange things as they thought fit and ignore the law. And in all these countries there is a legacy of communism, especially in the political circles, where the ex-communists are still quite common. There is a considerable amount of people who still think in these gangsterish terms: 'if we can get it, we will have it' and 'if it doesn’t suit us, we will ignore the law'. Of course the country where this attitude still predominates is Russia. Russia was the chief gangster, it was training gangsters! And it is very difficult for Russia to think of joining a community where there are rules."
But Russia is not on the list of accession candidates.
"I was just giving the extreme example of this problem. The same thing applies in all former communist countries, but to different degrees. For example, in Rumania, the problem is very bad, the problem in Poland is mixed. In Poland there has not been an effective purge of the old political class. On the other hand there were very few true believers.
Generally speaking, I don’t think the old gangsterism causes a problem. The situation is very similar to that of Spain or Portugal, twenty years ago. Where for the fascist regimes, there was no real rule of law. There was a very primitive idea of social protection, of the good of the people and so on. And yet in a space of, how long, twenty years, Spain and Portugal have adapted very satisfactorily to European law. And I would expect the same for the first wave of candidates from the east."
That could be a big wave.
"Certainly the leading candidates - Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia - should cause no anxieties."
So there is no invisible wall between the present EU and these countries, which would make it more difficult than we expect to have them in.
"No, I think not. The further you go the more difficult it becomes. For example, the problem with the rule of law is particularly severe in Turkey. This has nothing to do with communism. But nonetheless, generations of people living in a society which is much more used to violence and arbitrary government is a bigger problem there than in Central Europe."
In your book there is a graphic where you indicate that, in the discussion on Europe, there may be twelve or fifteen ways of dividing Europe. Now in the end you can say that if there are so many ways of making this division, no division is valid. Is that your final conclusion?
"There is no simple division, that is absolutely true. Intellectually it is easiest to divide Europe between Latin and Orthodox Christendom. But how much does that matter? In a country like Poland, which is still very religious, it matters a lot. But in Greece where only one in fifty persons ever go to church, it is no longer a problem. In the Czech Republic, equally, religion ceased to be a social factor many decades ago. Bohemia is nominally catholic, but it is very, very weak. Or Hungary, it is no comparison with Poland. So, that line on the map is not an equally valid line all the way along. And you could say that about all the other dividing lines."
Now, the one you mentioned was for sure, in the last few years, the most influential, because Samuel Huntington drew this line in his famous book 'The Clash of Civilisations'. Since then we might have thought that Huntington was no longer relevant, but now there is another influential American writer, Robert Kaplan, who repeats the same mistakes, one could say. In his last book, he starts his journey in Budapest and he says that, when crossing the Carpathian mountains in Rumania, he entered a different world. What makes this division so popular, in America at least?
"You must read the introduction to my book on Europe, where I spend quite a lot of pages on the American idea of western civilisation. It is a very old-fashioned 19th-century view. I have given lots of lectures on this subject, under the headline: 'West is best, East is beast'. It’s a scheme where everything that is great, advanced, created by genius, civilised, belongs to what they call the West. And everything that is backward, underdeveloped, uncivilised, primitive, dirty, belongs to the East. This very crude view is very strong in America. And especially among political scientists, people who ought to know better. And this is something which I oppose with heart and soul. In my view, for example, in many East European countries, culture is much higher valued then it is here. Simply because culture was the one thing they still possessed for themselves. And this was used to defend their inner identity against, whatever, Russian control, communist control, foreign values. And Poles, Hungarians and Czechs are much more civilised in that sense than the Germans or English. Here they think of culture as going for a night to the opera and enjoying themselves - a form of entertainment."
So the Huntington thesis is the last example of a whole row of Americans who make a strong division between western civilisation and the rest.
"I haven't analysed Huntington in great detail. I think he is probably right in thinking that the big blocks of the twenty-first century will be cultural blocks rather than economic blocks. But his knowledge of Eastern Europe is typically American: very, very low. And I don’t think he understands European problems very well.
One of the main features of European civilisation is diversity. The Netherlands are very different from Germany, Ukraine is very different from Russia, and so on. It’s true that the Orthodox world is very different again, but the Orthodox world is not uniform. Unlike the Catholic church, the Orthodox church doesn’t have one pope, one authority. They have a series of national Orthodox churches. So that the Russian Orthodox church is quite different from the Rumanian Orthodox church or the Orthodox church in Greece. And then there is the fact I already mentioned, that the legitimacy of the church varies from country to country. What is wrong is simply to say that the West is like that and the East is like that and they are very different. I once did a study, half serious, where I listed the characteristics of a typical East European country. A mainly peasant country where industry developed very late. A country where nationalism, the concept of the nation is very closely connected with religion. A country of economic backwardness with peasant life, folklore and all that. And I went on and on and on. Do you know which country I decided was the most East European?"
It must be a country in the West.
"Ireland. Western Europe is not uniform. Portugal is the most westerly country of Europe. But it is completely different from say the Netherlands or Sweden. And yet there is this idea, this very American idea, of the advanced West and backward East. And there is quite a strong tendency in America, among academics who have studied this, to oppose the extension of the EU to the East, because they don’t want this trash from the East."
If I understood you well in your book and in some articles you wrote, for you there may be such an invisible wall of real cultural difference between the former Soviet Union and Central Europe. Would that mean that, for instance, the discussion whether Ukraine and Belarus will one day join the EU is a fake debate?
"There is big difference between Poland on the one hand and Ukraine, Belarus on the other hand. But there are lots of problems. There are problems of quality and problems of quantity. Greece for example was in many ways a typical East European country, difficult to adapt, but because it was very small the EU could take in nine or ten million Greeks without meeting big problems. But taking in fifty million Ukrainians is an all together bigger problem. Poland is an interesting problem, because Poland is probably the least different, qualitatively, politically from Western Europe. But at the same time it is very big. It’s three times as big as the Netherlands. Every aspect of admitting Poland to the Union is magnified because of the size of the country. You can say similar things of Belarus or Ukraine.
Belarus is probably the most damaged country in Europe. There is no idea how damaged it was by the Second World War. Everybody thinks Russia was the most damaged country in the war, but Russia was hardly touched. It was the western republics of the Soviet Union. The biggest mortality in the war was in Ukraine, in Belarus and in the Baltic States, not in Russia. Under communism, equally. In Belarus, Stalin killed the entire educated class. If you go to the Academy of Sciences in Minsk, they have a private museum - it is probably closed now, because they don’t advertise these things to foreigners – about the first professors that were appointed in the nineteen-twenties, sixty percent of whom were killed by Stalin. This was a small country whose intelligentsia had only just been formed. And they simply shot the lot. And the country was then destroyed in the Second World War, and in come Russians and communists who completely smash all the native traditions. So it is not surprising that such a country has terrible difficulties restarting itself. On the other hand, it’s quite small. Qualitatively the problems of adapting Belarus to the EU are huge, but because it is a small country it is not too difficult. The EU by that time will be four-hundred million, why not add another ten million.
Ukraine, however, which has fifty million inhabitants, is a really big problem. Ukraine is the critical area. So yes there are big variations in the damage inflicted by the communist system and by the war. There are questions on scale and all."
But there is no predetermined reason why Ukraine won’t be able to join the EU one day?
"There are very special problems, connected with Russia. Moscow sees the former states of the Soviet Union in a very different light than it sees other countries. They talk about the 'near abroad'. They did nothing to stop Poland joining NATO, they don’t stop Poland trying to join the EU. But they will do everything in their power to prevent Ukraine to do the same. This Russian imperialism is still very strong. And if Putin stays around a long time it will get stronger. It could well become a major problem.
Russian imperialism also has economic implications. The economy of the Soviet Union was centrally planned from Moscow in such a way that all the republics were dependent on Russia, for example for their energy. Ukraine is extremely rich in resources, and yet economically it is terribly poor, because all of its wealth has been sucked into Russia for two or three centuries. And this is still going on at the present time. The Russians are starving Ukraine with energy. The whole business of Gazprom, turning on and off the taps, where they build their pipelines, whether they allow the Ukrainians to have access to energy and so on. And this is a major problem for Ukrainian recovery. If Kiev cannot have an independent energy base, then its ability to make sovereign decisions is much reduced. And on the other hand, if mister Putin falls under a tank tomorrow, and Russian attitudes change, then the chances for the countries of the near abroad would improve."
Now there are people, quite influential people I guess, especially in the German and French foreign ministries, who one year ago wrote a report saying that because Russia will never be member of the European Union - there are very good reasons for that, of course - we should not push Ukraine to join the EU either. The Russians would not accept that. We need Ukraine and Belarus as a sort of buffer states between the EU and Russia. And this has nothing to do with what Ukraine does or does not, but it is a geostrategic imperative not to isolate Russia. What do you think of this kind of reasoning?
"This attitude is cowardly. Because mister Putin says he doesn’t want anything, we must not frighten these Russians? Frighten these Russians?! They've got nuclear weapons and all the rest. Why should we be concerned whether they are frightened or not?
I think the policy of the EU and the USA is to assist in the development of Ukraine. We will see where that leads. But no to do so is – there's an old word for it - appeasement. That’s my idea on that attitude. I know it’s quite strong. It’s very strong in the USA. Not in the present administration. I think the leaders of American policy to Russia at the present time are pretty tough. I know Condoleezza Rice, and she is no soft touch. But there certainly is a group of people in America who want to treat Russia as a special case: let's be kind to Russia, lets not force them to do this, let's lend them billions of dollars, let they spend it on making rockets or whatever they do.
Now the future of Russia. So long as Russia is the biggest country in the world, bigger than the entire EU, and so long as it is directed by imperialistic politics, as you can see in Chechnya, so long as it still has this desire to dominate its neighbours, it simply doesn’t qualify for EU membership. It doesn’t mean, however, that Russia will never be in a suitable state. My view on that is that Putin is engaged in a campaign to restore a Russian empire in a new form. Not a Soviet empire, not a czar's empire. But this campaign will probably fail. I don’t think they any longer have the means to coerce any country, militarily or by depriving people of information so that they will do whatever Moscow is saying. If the campaign of rebuilding the Russian empire fails, as I think it will do, Russia will quite probably split up. Take for example the far eastern republic which is further from Moscow than Vancouver is from Ottawa or further than Madrid is from Moscow. Vladivostok is a natural member of a Pacific community. The Japanese are simply waiting to have their four little Kuril islands returned to them before they invest. This will mean billions and billions, because the far east of Siberia has all the resources Japan is looking for. So, I don’t think that Moscow will be able to keep that together. And if the Russian colossus falls into several pieces, then it is quite possible that a much reduced and democratic Russia, in the future, could begin to qualify for membership of the EU. But I think then we are talking about a time span of fifty years or more. I’m not opposed to Russia as Russia. The problem is the Russian political system and the legacy of this appalling tyranny that they have had for so long."
That would mean that in the meantime the EU should keep the door open for Russia. Even if, at the moment, they don't even want to apply for membership themselves. However, some people insist that the ultimate eastern border of the EU is the Polish-Ukrainian border.
"I think this is a big mistake. I think Churchill said: 'Never say never'. It’s very important to have an open, generous policy to Russia. To treat them as well as possible. But it is like dealing with a gangster, so don’t let him get in your pockets. We should say: when you behave properly, our relations will be even better. But if you start another war against Chechnya, you know, we are not going to be very happy about that. We are not going to give you another eighty billion dollars if you use it for building planes. That is what they are doing now. They are pouring money into buying up companies in Hungary, in the Czech Republic and to some extent in Poland. They don’t have money for that, but they are borrowing money from Germany, from anyone that will give it to them. So, I think you should have a tough line with Russia, but never exclude it completely."
From what you said it is clear that for the next ten years Ukraine won’t be entering the EU. Poland will, in three or four years. Then the Polish-Ukrainian border will become the Schengen border of the EU. Which will mean high fences, electronically controlled. It would make it impossible for many Ukrainians to cross the border.
"Isolating anybody - any person or country or community – has very damaging effects. Obviously, psychological effects. People resent being physically excluded. But also economic and political effects. I think that there could be quite a conflict over this when Poland enters the EU, because the Poles are going to want to maintain a good commercial, political and cultural flow between them and the countries to the east. Whereas some people much further away might think it's a good idea to build a big wall. I think a very rigid frontier would be a mistake.
Of course there has to be a frontier. But it has to be a compromise between an electrified fence and an open ditch. That could be a tricky problem. I think the consequences of excluding the countries to the east of the Union will be much more serious than the problems of having a semi-porous frontier."
Discussing this issue with Bronislaw Geremek, who agreed with you, I provocatively said to him that ten years ago he would have said that Poland was more of less the end of the future European Union. Now he wants to keep the door open to Ukraine, and he admitted that part of the reason is that Poland doesn't want to be the frontier of the EU. Nobody in fact wants to be the frontier country, so they want to get others in to be the frontier.
"I think the Polish perspective has changed. When Poland was cut off by the Iron Curtain from the rest of Europe, they looked to the West. That was where they wanted to be, that was paradise. They had of course a very idealistic picture of what Western Europe was like. And nobody looked eastward at all. The East was always something to be forgotten. But now that they are a free country, and they can form their own policies, they increasingly see the importance of these countries to the east. They also have a very interesting psychological structure. The Poles always had a feeling that they were small and less significant than the great Germany next door. And now they see that a country like Lithuania looks to Poland as the Poles previously looked to Germany. The Lithuanians think that Poland is very rich, very powerful, with a great cultural tradition. And the Lithuanians long to be in the same club as Poland. Of course the Poles think: well, that's rather good. This is our history. Poland and Lithuania once had a history together. So Polish attitudes are rather ambiguous. Poland doesn’t have a frontier with Russia, you see."
Kaliningrad…
"With the exception of that Russian enclave, Poland’s eastern neighbours are Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania."
What should happen with Kaliningrad? It is becoming more and more of an issue. Everybody starts to realize that it will be encircled by the future EU.
"I have never been there. Kaliningrad is an anachronism, a remnant from a distant past. It is still a militarised region. If the Russians would demilitarise it, then, I think, the neighbouring countries would look very differently at it. No longer being a potential source of attack, Kaliningrad could become a special economic region in association with the EU. Think of Switzerland: a different place, but nonetheless a country with a special status. But so long as Kaliningrad is a Russian military base, you can forget it. It is not possible."
Let's move south now and discuss Turkey's candidacy for the EU. That will really be a hot debate once Turkey has passed the barrier of the Copenhagen criteria. Although a majority of EU politicians is in favour of Turkey's accession, there is a lot of doubt and even resistance. I was surprised that former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt states in his new book on Europe that it was a big mistake of the EU to offer membership to Turkey. Was it a big mistake?
"Somewhere in the introduction of my book on Europe, I have written that there are three countries which have a very ambiguous relationship to Europe. They are all on the periphery and they all have imperial traditions. One is Russia, one is Britain and the third one is Turkey. And that's one of the reasons why Britain has problems with the idea of Europe. Turkey is a good example. I think it would be, again, a big mistake to exclude Turkey forever. I think the possibility of Turkey joining should be there. Of course it is like a marriage, where each side has to agree to the conditions. And neither side is yet ready to make such a decision. I think that Turkey's muslim past is the least of the problems. In fact the modern Turkish Republic has, culturally, been very European, very consciously European, keeping religion out of political and social affairs. The Europeanising of social life and cultural life is very interesting. For example, I have a Turkish woman student. She speaks perfect English, her mother speaks perfect English and her grandmother speaks perfect English. Three generations of muslim women who culturally are very European. Very surprising, you wouldn’t find that degree of international awareness, especially among women, in most parts of Europe."
But that is a small elite, of course.
"That is a small elite, yes. But nonetheless, attitudes very often spread out from the top. So I don’t think Islam is a problem. I think, again, there is the question of exclusion. If the prospects of excluding Turkey are quite serious, you would drive Turkey into the camp of the Islamic world. And probably push Turkey to regress in many ways, and possibly to become an unfriendly instead of a friendly neighbour. But the problems are political and economic. Turkey is in part a European country, and I think in due course it could well become a member."
You don’t think that all the changes that they would have to introduce to become a member of the EU are going against the interests of so many, not only the army, that they will turn their eyes to the east instead? Then they don’t have to reform, there they can call the terms.
"I think that is the problem for Turkey. This is very much about how Turkish history has been in the last five-hundred years with Russia. What is going to happen in the big territory around the Black Sea between Russia and Turkey? What is going to happen to Georgia and Azerbaijan and Armenia in particularly, places traditionally connected with Turkey? A big oil game is going on there. Where will the pipeline go? And who will control it? Will the Turks feel more affinity with the Turkic people in Central Asia, Uzbekistan, than with their European neighbours? That’s all part of the game. The outcome is not clear, and it would be a big mistake for the EU to force an outcome, which will be unfriendly to us. It is in our interest, I think, to have Turkey within our club. Then it will be a bridge to these countries further away."
Now coming back to the earlier question of geography. When you discuss the issue of what is Europe, what is the EU, then you say that the core thing is the community of values. It’s the list of things that people, or countries, have to agree with. Then people always come up with two examples: Israel and the Maghreb countries, like Morocco. What is your reaction to that? The Israeli could claim to be quite European, in democratic terms for instance. But on the other hand it is part of the Middle East. So a membership is going too far. The same with Morocco. Why couldn't Morocco to through the same development as Turkey does? Is there geographically, culturally, mentally, more of a border, even though the strip of water between Spain and Morocco is quite small?
"I’m not very certain that Israel is a democracy. It is a very peculiar modern creation. The Jewish state, a state created for one nation, is in its essence not democratic, in my view. It reminds me of Northern Ireland, where they created a state in 1920 where the Protestants would always have a majority and the Catholic minority would always be discriminated against. Quite comparable to the situation in Israel. There are a lot problems with Israel. It is a client to the United States. It’s totally dependent on the United States. It receives fifty percent of all the USA foreign aid. It is also a military state, which is in a state of war, suspended war with all its neighbours. With the present internal set-up in Israel, the international position of Israel, the military position of Israel, it simply rules itself out. Again, it is a very small place. It isn’t a huge strategic problem, once the nature of Israel has changed. But until that day, it falls into the category of 'never say never'."
Wouldn't it be a classical example of imperial overstretch to take in countries like Israel and Morocco?
"I think the EU will enlarge as far as is possible, but I cannot see the conditions for that lasting indefinitely. I feel that we may have ten, twenty, thirty years, where expansion can take place, and then it will stop. In fact it may well reverse in some way. The big problem is Russia. What will happen in Russia? It could well be that within ten years there is a hostile competition between the EU and Russia. Not inevitably, but it is quite possible. It’s possible that in the Middle East we could have a hostile Islamic world, which forms a barrier, but on the other hand we may not. I think those two regions, Russia and the Middle East, are constraining problems which are unlikely to be overcome. I cannot see in the foreseeable future that the EU is going as far as Ukraine. Ukraine will be the absolute last candidate. And I think Turkey will be the last one in the Middle East. Possibly, if Israel makes peace with all its neighbours and forgets about being an American client state, then it could be a little appendix."
Last question about the Maghreb countries. The focus on Ukraine and Poland is understandable, but it is also typically Northwest European. We traditionally look to the East. But a lot of people in Spain, Italy and Greece, they look to the Mediterranean as the Mare Nostrum. Does 'never say never' also mean that one day North Africa might join the EU?
"Certainly, never say never. I think the real barrier is not the Mediterranean, but the Sahara desert. Five-thousand miles of sand, where you can hardly drive a car. You can get on a surfboard from Morocco to Spain and you can roll. Communications are very easy. And historically, North Africa has been part of the Mediterranean world. Its links with Europe have been interrupted for quite a long time. But I can see that, with modern communications, the North African countries could grow closer to Europe and be well-qualified partners. They are not very large populations. Not like Turkey or Ukraine. So they are very manageable countries. So, it is something less then never say never: always say sometime."
In what way would the EU have to adapt to the applicant countries?
"The acquis communautaire is growing and growing and the EU constantly expects the applicant countries to jump over, without making practical arrangements to enable them to do so. Take for example the Common Agricultural Policy. The CAP is in a mess in any case. But everybody knows that if it isn’t changed before Poland enters the EU, Poland will bankrupt the CAP, within seven days. This means that the EU has to change its agricultural policy. Not just for itself, but in order to facilitate the entry of Poland. The same thing can be said about regional policy. There are countries like Spain, which have greatly benefited from the regional funds and are now worried about a big country like Poland drawing up all this money. This is not an insolvable problem. What it means is that the EU and the Spaniards have to sit down with the Poles and share the cake."
But what the Spanish want to do is to sit together with the other EU governments and sort it out before the Poles come in.
"Do you want to have the Poles in, or do you want them out? If you want them out, OK, that's the way to keep them out. But then you have a serious problem. If you want them in then you must adjust the EU's structure to make it possible."
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