Big idea - The European empire
James Harkin - The Guardian--written May of 2006

The EU is on an eastward roll and gobbling up everything before it. Until a few years back, it was a little club of 15 countries in western Europe. Thanks to its eastward turn, it now has 25 members, with Bulgaria and Romania - subject to a few conditions - due to join next year.

The new European Union generates about a quarter of the world's GDP and more than a fifth of global trade. It is already the biggest economic bloc in the world and the largest single market. But just what is it? For decades now, political scientists have struggled to do conceptual justice to the organization's many-layered web of overlapping jurisdictions. It can't be a union of completely sovereign states, as its constituent countries have signed away some of that sovereignty as a condition of joining up. But it can't be on the way to becoming a European super-state either, as its centre is so shaky and its lack of democratic legitimacy so stark. Not for nothing did Jacques Delors once call it an "unidentified political object".
 

In his new book Europe as Empire, the Oxford academic Jan Zielonka has come up with a novel solution to the problem. Europe, he cheekily suggests, is best characterized not as a state at all but as a hulking great empire, a juggernaut movingly slowly but determinedly east and south. While intellectuals in western Europe sniff that the EU's expansion might be incompatible with its underlying values and those in the east fume against it as a harbinger of decadence and moral decline, Dr Zielonka suggests both are looking at the matter the wrong way round. The wave of enlargement that followed the fall of communism not only made the EU bigger, he argues, but fundamentally changed the character of the union.
 

Unlike the nation state, he points out, the EU is not rooted in any particular territory or homeland and does not see its existing borders as set in stone. Its expansion eastwards is no more than an astute act of foreign policy by an empire on the rise: faced with potential instability at its margins, it simply overran itself and swallowed the problem. Many more countries, he points out, are hovering on the margins of the EU and waiting to be digested when the time is right.

The EU, he notices, has become closely involved in the affairs of the fledgling Palestinian state. Israel, Lebanon and Jordan are all culturally close to Europe, and might also be tempted to join. Many in Ukraine, too, are warming to EU membership. And if Ukraine joins, what is to stop the EU from reaching as far as Belarus, or even Russia itself?

Dr Zielonka sees the expansion of the European empire as essentially benign. But labeling the EU's mission as an imperial one is not enough to solve the problem of its lack of legitimacy. Dr Zielonka is too easily pleased. He gets excited about "hybrid multilevel European governance in concentric circles" - a long way from bringing the EU closer to the people and hardly a slogan that is likely to catch on. Without firm roots, the problem with empires, even benign ones, is that they tend to overreach themselves and collapse from within.