The New Old World by Perry Anderson Page B

in the economic pitfalls it poses fornew or old members. Even if derogations of various kinds—from the Common Agricultural Policy, from the Structural Funds, from the single currency—were to be made for what were once the ‘captive nations’, a more fundamental difficulty would remain, of a purely political nature. To double its membership could cripple the existing institutions of the Union. Already the original balance of the Six or the Nine has been thrown out of kilter in the Council of Ministers. Today the five largest states—Germany, France, Italy, Britain and Spain—contain 80 per cent of the population of the Union, but command only just more than half of the votes in the Council. If the ten current ex-Communist applicants were members, the share of these states would fall even further, while the proportion of poor countries in the Union—those now entitled to substantial transfers—would rise from four out of fifteen to a majority of fourteen out of twenty-five.
    Adjustment of voting weights could bring the
pays légal
some way back towards the
pays réel
. But it would not resolve potentially the most intractable problem posed by enlargement to the east, which lies in the logic of numbers. Ex-satellite Europe contains almost exactly as many states as continuously capitalist Europe (at the latest count, sixteen in the ‘East’ to seventeen in the ‘West’, if we include Switzerland), with a third of the population. Proliferation of partners on this scale, no matter how the inequalities between them were finessed, threatens institutional gridlock.
Rebus sic stantibus
, the size of the European Parliament would swell towards eight hundred deputies; the number of commissioners rise to forty; a ten-minute introductory speech by each minister attending a Council yield a meeting of five hours, before business even started. The legendary complexity of the already existing system, with its meticulous rotations of commissarial office, laborious inter-governmental bargains and assorted ministerial and parliamentary vetoes, would be overloaded to the point of paralysis.
    In such conditions, would not widening inevitably mean loosening? This is the wager in London, expressed more or less openly according to venue, from the FCO to the
TLS
. In the long term, the official line of thinking goes, expansion must mean defederalization. Yet is this the only logical deduction? Here we encounter the final amphibology. For might not precisely the prospect of institutional deadlock impose as an absolute functional necessity a much more centralized supranational authority than exists today? Coordination of twelve to fifteen member states can just about operate, however cumbersomely, on a basis of consensus. Multiplication to thirty practically rules thisout. The more states enter the Union, the greater the discrepancy between population and representation in the Council of Ministers will tend to be, as large countries are increasingly outnumbered by smaller ones, and the weaker overall decisional capacity would become. The result could paradoxically be the opposite of the British expectation—not a dilution, but a concentration of federal power in a new constitutional settlement, in which national voting weights are redistributed and majority decisions become normal. The problem of scale, in other words, might force just the cutting of the institutional knot the proponents of a loose free trade area seek to avoid. Widening could check or reverse deepening. It might also precipitate it.
    Each of the three critical issues now facing the European Union—the single currency, the role of Germany, and the multiplication of member-states—thus presents a radical indeterminacy. In every case, the distinctive form of the amphibology is the same. One set of meanings is so drastic it appears subject to capsizal into its contrary, giving rise to a peculiar uncertainty. These are the