Editorial

Citation

Coleman, J. (1999), "Editorial", European Business Review, Vol. 99 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.1999.05499eab.005

Editorial

Edited by

John Coleman

Editorial

Widening and deepening: the priorities

By the time this issue appears the European Union will be in the middle of the Finnish presidency. It will be a time for some of the most crucial decisions of the twentieth century to be taken. They will make or break the world that future generations will inherit. The choice between widening and deepening has become inescapable. The President of Finland has just played a key role in solving the immediate crisis in Kosovo, which must augur well for the part that it can play in avoiding future Kosovos, not only in the Balkans but also in the Caucus region and elsewhere. To some degree it must be said that Finland, although not a member, came to the rescue of NATO. Certainly bombing alone was appearing increasingly unlikely to achieve the results it sought.

Germany claims to have played a vital role in one of the most difficult periods of EU development: Agenda 2000 in preparation for enlargement, the start of the Euro, the sacking of the Commission and most significant of all, the response to the Kosovo conflict. Europe, it seems, has set out on a rocky and dangerous journey along mountain paths, and has come to the most perilous part where the path runs across a ridge with terrible drops on either side. On the left is the abyss of disintegratation where the terrible and bloody lessons of a 1,000 years of history - culminating in the two world wars of the first half of the twentieth century - have driven home the idea that war on this old continent must be eliminated at all costs. The choice then is between the path of unity or plunging down to the right into the equally dangerous abyss of uniformity. Our traveller is suddenly struck by the truth of the ancient Greek myth of the Argonauts sailing between Scylla and Charybdis; that life always confronts us with two terrible alternatives. The rigidities of conformity can be no less disatrous than the anarchy of disintegration.

This is the lesson of Dele Oguntimoju's article. It is a warning about the dangers of imposed uniformity on peoples who are not alike. Particularly interesting is the letter he quotes from Sir Peter Smithers to The Times. Sir Peter is a former Secretary-General of the Council of Europe and has always been strongly pro-European. He was also PPS to the Colonial Secretary in the post-war period when Nigeria was constructed as a nation and although he agreed with it at the time he has come to see the enormity of the mistake. He sees the same mistake being made in Europe. Nigeria plunged into the abyss on the right hand side. Europe must avoid that mistake. In a fascinating article in Prospect (July 1999) Timothy Garton Ash argues powerfully that Europe set itself the wrong priorities at the end of the Cold War:

We were like people who for 40 years had lived in a large, ramshackle house, divided down the middle by a concrete wall. In the western half we had rebuilt, mended the roof, knocked several rooms together, redecorated and installed new plumbing and electric wiring, while the eastern half fell into a state of dangerous decay. Then the wall came down. What did we do? We decided that what we needed most urgently was a superb new computer-controlled system of air-conditioning in the western half. While we prepared to install it, the eastern half of the house began to fall apart and even to catch fire. We fiddled in Maastricht, while Sarajevo began to burn.

Yugoslavia may now be spilt milk but Europe will be culpable if it does not turn its attention to other areas of potential disaster and avoid them before they happen. A personal story may illustrate an example of where disaster might have happened. At a conference in Athens in 1995 I met a Greek businessman. He told me how he hated the European Union (Community then) and all its works. When he had finished his diatribe about it he added "there might be one good thing: belonging to the EC probably prevented war in the area". No mean thing, I thought as I recalled the many comments of people in Brussels who frequently said "Greece should never have been admitted!" Recently I went to Strasbourg and as we landed I saw Mr Shevardnadze's jet standing beside the plane I was in. Georgia had just been admitted to the Council of Europe, the Cinderella of the European institutions, which one day I hope will stand in its rightful position, leading Europe not being used as a second-rate ante-chamber to give a crumb of comfort to those in the other half of the European House. What must be clear is that we might have had problems far worse than Kosovo if Greece had not been admitted into the European Union. That logic must be borne in mind as the Finnish presidency confronts the realities of enlargement. Too much uniformity imposed too soon could destroy the whole European construction.

The same message underlies Aiden Rankin's contribution although it contains a deeper social analysis and questions "the liberal assumption of inevitable progress, moral relativism and equality", which can be oppressive for our neighbours who do not agree with those assumptions either within our societies or outside - of which "humanitarian war" is the final expression. A similar critique lies at the heart of Ziauddin Sardar's article in the last issue of this journal.

In contrast Helen McPhail's article "Recycling the enlightenment" views the liberal assumptions much less critically and lays great emphasis on the role of imagination in creating the New Europe. It emphasises the kind of altruism that needs to be developed if our societies are to be internally and externally cooperative. It tries to combine the positive development of science with human warmth. A.S. Neill wrote a book entitled Hearts not Heads in Education. Helen McPhail would like to see hearts and heads together in the New Europe.