how many europes?

HOW MANY EUROPES? THE EUROPEAN UNION, EASTWARD ENLARGEMENT AND UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT

★ John Agnew University of California at Los Angeles, USA

Abstract Eastward enlargement of the European Union (EU) is rarely discussed in terms of the organizational and ideological condition of the existing Union. In this paper the debate over eastern enlargement is related directly to a shift within the EU from a dual focus on global economic competitiveness and the compensation of lagging regions to an increasingly singular focus on European competitiveness. Seen in this light, the goal of a single Europe with relatively similar levels of development everywhere is being replaced by an emerging threefold division of the continent into a ‘core’ Europe (itself increasingly differentiated across

Introduction In the immediate aftermath of the surprising collapse of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself there was considerable euphoria over the possibility of incorporating the newly liberated region into a revived project of European unification. After years of drift, and immediately before the end of the Cold War, the European Community, as it then was, underwent a renewed lease on life that had already led to the goal of the Single Market and was shortly to lead to the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 (Moravcsik, 1998). The new developments were mainly about ‘deepening’ the linkages and mutual dependence among existing members. But they were also about rejuvenating the ‘idea’ of Europe as an integrated entity, so the real possibility of carrying on the established pattern of admitting new members once they met certain criteria for joining was not discounted at the time. Indeed, there had long been a broader vision of ‘Europe’ as expressed, for

European Urban and Regional Studies 8(1): 29–38 0969-7764[200101]8:1; 29–38;017040

policy areas), a ‘peripheral’ Europe of potential eastern members perpetually on the road to full membership, and an ‘external’ Europe excluded from membership but open to use by businesses from the core. This geographical taxonomy rests on the growing reliance of the EU on a neo-liberal economic ideology that sees uneven development within Europe as helping the global competitiveness of the EU as a whole, using the model of the United States as its inspiration. KEY WORDS ★ eastern enlargement ★ European Union ★ neo-liberalism ★ uneven development

example, in French President de Gaulle’s image of an integrated Europe extending from the ‘Atlantic to the Urals’. The difficulties and dilemmas experienced in Eastern Europe during the ‘transition’ from authoritarian politics and planned economies to more democratic and liberal capitalist regimes, however, seemed to sour western elites on both the ease and the appropriateness of extending the ‘European project’ to the east. As accession became less abstract, the potential costs to existing members of admitting relatively poor states also loomed larger; particularly at a time of persisting recession throughout Western Europe. The ever-inflating costs of German reunification made the probable costs of bringing other post-socialist states into the EU appear astronomical and further dimmed enthusiasm for rapid eastward enlargement. Moreover, previous enlargements had been driven as much by threats to business in member states from American and Japanese competitors, particularly the need for larger protected markets for so-called

Copyright © 2001 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi

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‘Euro-champions’, as by devotion to the ideal of a ‘larger Europe’ (Hudson, 2000: 5). Finally, the history of the European Union has always been one of ‘fits’ and ‘starts’, with periods of intense activity followed by ones of stagnation. The period of the late 1980s was one of ‘renaissance’ but was followed shortly by a ‘plunge’ after 1991 (Ross, 1998a: 251). The possibility of eastern enlargement came along precisely at a time when the existing member states were adjusting to the new goals laid out in the late 1980s and beginning to focus on their interests in policy-areas exempt from integration rather than looking for a new challenge (Corbey, 1995). Together these circumstances created doubts that found expression in a new discourse about EU enlargement that is sceptical about the previously self-evident claims of Eastern Europe to full or even part membership in the EU. The terms of debate about EU enlargement have thus shifted from arguing the political-economic necessity of including large swathes of Eastern Europe in the European ‘homeland’ to a much more selective discussion involving the application of a range of criteria for membership of which macroeconomic ones (relative size of public debt, privatization of state assets, inflation rate, etc.) have become increasingly important (see, for example, Baun, 1999; Fairlamb, 2000; Hudson, 2000; Peel, 2000). At the same time, to a large degree, admission into NATO and other security groupings and the largely symbolic issue of membership in the Council of Europe have been seen as substitutes for EU membership on ‘the road to Europe’ (Smith and Timmins, 1999). Paths to membership through other arrangements (such as the European Free Trade Area or EFTA) are also on offer in some cases. The changed approach to Eastern Europe between the early 1990s and the present, however, augurs a fundamental reorientation of the European project as a whole away from a single Europe to a multi-tier, patchwork Europe with various ‘degrees’ of actual membership. To anticipate the main conclusion, I argue that this trend in public discussion about EU enlargement to the east represents a fully fledged victory for a neo-liberal vision of Europe in which uneven economic development across the continent is seen not as a temporary state of affairs to be corrected by policies from Brussels but accepted as an inherent feature of European Urban and Regional Studies 2001 8(1)

the future of Europe, indeed as an attractive feature of an ‘integrated Europe’ in which common rules of property and capital mobility prevail everywhere but that institutionalizes differences in incomes and standards of living between a core area, a peripheral Europe, and an external Europe. At least three Europes replace the two of the Cold War and the one of the original post-Second World War visionaries of a united Europe. Yet there is at least one alternative perspective. This would involve a more limited set of central policies, oriented to economic competitiveness and regional redistribution, but allied with greater leniency about other institutional, social, and cultural features of members and potential members that would allow for expanded membership without abandoning the goal of equalizing the costs and benefits of European integration across all states and regions. This is definitely not a recipe for creating a formal European federation, which would probably postpone accession of eastern applicants for even longer than now seems likely if the federation is based around a ‘core’ membership of France, Germany and a few other members. What the alternative approach does require is abandoning the ‘Monnet model’ of enhancing integration through the knock-on effects of previous decisions. This model – named for one of the founders of the movement for European integration, Jean Monnet, because of his belief that integration would not occur unless it took place ‘stealthily’ – not only limits popular input into EU decision making, it also leads to a lack of public debate about the nature of integration: i.e., of what is more and what is less important to the project as a whole (Ross, 1998a; Héritier, 1999). Currently, the bias is towards a marketization of the enterprise, with the criteria for the potential eastern members emerging as measures for the European Union as a whole. The question of EU enlargement, therefore, speaks to the future of the European Union as a whole.

EU enlargement and Eastern Europe Debate over eastward enlargement of the European Union in both EU documents and academic discussion has had two interrelated themes that have undergone subtle but important transformations

AGNEW: HOW MANY EUROPES?

during the course of the 1990s. The first theme concerns the qualifications of eastern applicants for full membership. The drift here has been from an emphasis on broadly political criteria to relatively narrow economic criteria, with NATO and membership in other organizations (such as the European Economic Area) increasingly held up as ‘alternatives’ to full membership in the EU. At the same time a geopolitical line has been more firmly drawn between a ‘Central’ Europe in tune with the European project and an ‘Eastern’ periphery ‘beyond the pale’ of integration into the ‘New’ Europe. The Cold War-era division of Europe into two has given way to a threefold division based on a political-economic ‘fault line’ dividing a potentially ‘European’ central zone from a more distant and less democratic East (Ash, 1997; Anderson, 1999). The second theme involves the increasing tension between the official EU position that eastern expansion can simply follow the model of previous expansions and the practical need to reform the objectives and organization of the EU in response to the ‘widening’ of the membership. Initially, the focus was on incorporating new members into the framework of existing Euro-agreements in much the same way that previous expansions brought in new members. Of course, the collapse of the existing regimes in Eastern Europe came as a great surprise, so the lack of a specific policy about how the accession of non-Western European states to the EU might be dealt with is not that remarkable. But with its 15 members straining to meet current tasks, a strain increased by the last round of reforms associated with the Maastricht Treaty, and the development of the European Monetary System and the new currency, the Euro, expansion is now seen as requiring a revision of the structures and policies, from voting procedures in the Commission to the Common Agricultural Policy, that were devised more than 40 years ago for the original Community of six members. Implicit in many of the proposed reforms is the idea of a Europe at various ‘speeds’ in terms of conformity to central norms governing economic growth, population mobility, regional development and social welfare and with the possibility of ‘opting out’ of policies that are either too or insufficiently rigorous for local standards (for example, EU environmental controls are insufficient for Denmark, Britain resists common passport controls and membership in currency union, etc.)

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(Laurent and Maresceau, 1998). These reforms could be positive if combined with a model of economic development devoted to the interests of the poorer regions. As they stand, however, they are framed as facilitating an increasingly fragmented Europe that is positively advantageous for largescale businesses: finding within a single European space a range of places that can be exploited to advantage because of differences in labour markets, technical innovation, and market access.

Shifting criteria for membership Beginning in the mid-1980s the European Community, as it then was, began negotiating a series of bilateral trade agreements with various countries in Eastern Europe: Hungary in 1988, Poland in 1989, the Soviet Union in April, 1990, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria in December 1990, and Romania in 1991, although ties went back further (Shlaim and Yannopoulos, 1978). The rapid pace of political change in Eastern Europe in 1989 and 1990 called for a more proactive response from the European Community to the region. The prospect of German unification gave particular impetus to securing a degree of regional political-economic stability. As a result the EC established the PHARE programme, designed to support reform in recipient states. Targeted initially to Poland and Hungary, the programme was later extended to include Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia in 1991 and Slovenia in 1992. As early as 1990, however, the scale of the transformation process made a more comprehensive response from the EC in the form of renegotiated trade agreements an urgent requirement (Kramer, 1993). Underpinning these new agreements, first focused on Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, was a mental map of Europe divided into concentric circles, each circle or belt seen as conforming less to reform possibilities, and hence prospective integration into the EC, with increasing distance to the east (Preston, 1997: 198). This emerged slowly during the early 1990s, but by 1995 was at the centre of negotiations over applications for membership. In the Copenhagen Declaration of 1993, the Czech and Slovak Republics (following the ‘velvet divorce’), Poland, and Hungary stated their intention of becoming full members in the ‘new’ European European Urban and Regional Studies 2001 8(1)

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Union (named as such also in 1993). The EU heads of government agreed that the associated countries in Eastern Europe should become members of the EU once they satisfied the political and economic criteria for membership. By and large, however, EU member governments had lost some of their earlier enthusiasm about extending full membership eastwards but nevertheless the ‘classical principles’ of enlargement were restated by the Copenhagen Council of 1993. This stated that: . . . membership requires that the candidate country has achieved stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities, the existence of a functioning market economy as well as the capacity to cope with competitive pressures and market forces within the Union. Membership presupposes the candidate’s ability to take on the obligations of membership including adherence to the aims of political, economic and monetary union. (European Council, 1993)

This was to prove an impossible task. Though it provided a clear set of goals to aim at and an externally imposed discipline on reform, it also imposed major obligations on the EU itself. In the White Paper presented to the Cannes European Council in June 1995 a more specific but much narrower approach to phased adoption of the Internal Market acquis of the EU was outlined. The onus for ‘making the grade’ was placed firmly on the applicants and no timetable for aligning applicants with the EU was put forward. Rather, the document focused on three elements of adaptation to the Internal Market required of applicants: legislation, administrative and technical structures, and technical assistance from the EU. The overall thrust, however, was upon the role of establishing the market mechanism as a prerequisite for accession to the EU. Partly this reflected the sense that many political changes, such as the goal of electoral democracy, had been achieved. But it also represented a substantial narrowing of the criteria. The dilemma for the EU has been twofold: the lack of consensus among EU members about expansion (for example, Britain favours rapid expansion as a barrier to ‘deepening’ of the EU; Portugal, Greece, and Spain worry about the impact of East European entrants on their take from the Common Agricultural and Cohesion Policies) and the European Urban and Regional Studies 2001 8(1)

difficulty of using the same criteria as in previous enlargements because of (a) the greater complexity of the post-Maastricht and post-EMU EU and (b) the lower economic base from which the new applicants must move compared to the poorest previous ones in a much shorter period of time if accession was to occur during the 1990s or early in the new millennium (Preston, 1997: 204). In its ‘Agenda 2000’ statement of 1997, the European Commission proposed that five Eastern European countries had satisfied the criteria for opening membership negotiations: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovenia (European Commission, 1997). This was endorsed by the European Council in December 1997. Negotiations have been on a bilateral basis, even though this elicited opposition from some members who prefer multilateral negotiations. What is most remarkable about the ‘Agenda 2000’ is the degree to which ‘transition to a market economy’ has become the single mantra for success closely followed by a variety of macroeconomic indicators, not dissimilar to those associated with accession to the EMU and the Euro (small government budget deficits, low inflation, etc.). According to the ‘Agenda’, Hungary and Poland are the most advanced in the process of transition to a market economy with the Czech and Slovak Republics not far behind. Estonia is seen as equally advanced but weak with respect to its ability to withstand competitive pressure. With ‘effort’ Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic are seen as capable of adopting a large part of EU legislation (the acquis communitaire) in the medium term. Although ‘it is a taboo . . . to deny ultimate membership to the applicant states . . . there are many who would quietly rejoice were enlargement to be almost indefinitely postponed’ (Spencer, 1998: 61). This sentiment is reflected in the increasingly selective approach to membership and paralleled by increased debate inside and outside the European Commission about alternatives to full membership in the EU even for those countries with whom negotiations for entry have begun (see, for example, Fritsch and Hansen, 1997; Croft et al., 1999). These include integration at the level of EFTA (the European Free Trade Area) as a path towards ‘eventual’ full membership in the EU (a path followed by many previous new members such as Sweden, Austria, and Finland), or integration at the level of the EEA (European Economic Area), in


which the Internal Market Programme would be extended to the prospective members but the Common Agricultural Policy and Cohesion Policy and so forth would not apply. Expansion of NATO has taken on a symbolic role as a partial substitute for EU membership, indicative of a ‘welcome’ from ‘the West’ irrespective of its actual security relevance for the countries in question (Brown, 1999). Czech, Polish, and Hungarian membership in NATO since 1998 is widely seen as giving them recognition as favoured candidates for membership in the other, and more important European ‘club’: the EU. The widespread adoption of the term ‘Central Europe’ to distinguish those more qualified for NATO and EU memberships from the others represents a clear demarcation between those who can look forward to some sort of integration into ‘Europe’ and those who increasingly cannot (see, for example, the European Commission, 1998). For countries such as Romania and Bulgaria, not even the possibility of EFTA or NATO membership is raised. They are rarely if ever mentioned in Commission documents. They have fallen off the map of potential entrants, as has most of the Balkans and the whole of Europe to the east of Poland and Hungary, save tiny Estonia championed by its Finno-Ugric brothers/sisters in Finland (Steil and Woodward, 1999).

Neo-liberalism and deferring reform of the EU If enlargement of the EU to the east has been increasingly defined in terms of largely macroeconomic criteria and limited to an evershortening list of acceptable supplicants, at least part of the answer lies in the deferring of reform of the EU as it exists that would be mandated by rapid eastern expansion. The official position has been that the eastern expansion of the EU could follow the path of previous expansions. Unfortunately, this became more and more untenable during the course of the 1990s. There is thus a profound tension between the official Commission point of view and the practical realities facing the EU in preparing for the accession of new eastern members (Price et al., 1999). The major problem is that of dealing with a possible quantum leap in political-economic diversity among members at the same time that other

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projects, particularly monetary unification, not only require large amounts of political capital from existing members but also complicate the adhesion of new members without a recent history of sophisticated monetary and financial organization. The possibility of nearly doubling its membership over a short span of years raises troubling questions for the goals and organization of the EU. One is the legitimation crisis associated with the lack of popular control over the Commission and its organs (Mann, 1998; Ross, 1998a; Banchoff and Smith, 1999). This is exacerbated by the addition of new members. Another, and directly opposed to the first, is the relative efficiency of EU organs when all members have fairly equal representation. A third is the strong disparity in incomes and standard of living between the prospective eastern members and even the poorest regions and population segments of western states (Dunford and Smith, 2000). This will introduce a contrast in wage rates and living conditions into the EU that will make the objectives of Cohesion Policy extremely difficult to implement without reducing or eliminating regional development funds entirely for existing members. Moreover, without significant reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (the CAP), extending current levels of price supports to new eastern members will put an enormous strain on the total EU budget (Redmond and Rosenthal, 1998). Finally, to receive support for expansion from some existing members, side-payments or policy allowances will also have to be made, thus further fragmenting what is already a fragile set of ‘core’ principles governing common policies at the heart of the European integration process. The official position remains deaf to these practicalities, yet the existing members do not, leading to the late-1990s situation of increased discussion of a Europe à la carte irrespective of official pronouncements that only ‘full’ membership is possible for new members or allowable for existing ones (Laurent and Maresceau, 1998). Rapid and comprehensive incorporation of the countries of Eastern Europe into the EU, so enthusiastically predicted in many circles in the early 1990s, has faded away. By 1999 not only was the list of prospective members much reduced to a limited number of Central European states, the main criteria for admittance had become economic European Urban and Regional Studies 2001 8(1)

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ones, particularly the neo-liberal one of ‘transition to a market economy’. Without far-reaching reforms of the EU itself it is not clear that the adhesion of new members will do anything other than exacerbate already wide disparities in economic and social wellbeing between parts of Europe. Yet there are significant political barriers to building a more solidly institutionalized and democratic EU. The vision of a single Europe may be increasingly sacrificed to one of three: a core Europe, itself increasingly divided in its degrees of conformity to common policies; a peripheral Europe perpetually ‘on the road’ to membership but shunted into various half-way houses for an extended period of time; and an external Europe excluded even from discussion of the merits of membership, desperately searching for some way of demonstrating its European ‘credentials’.

The EU and uneven development The EU project can be seen historically as an effort by Western European elites to overcome their divisions so much the better to regain their power in relation to the rest of Europe and thus their centrality in world affairs (see, e.g., Delors, 1991). From the outset two sets of objectives have been in delicate balance. On one side, a European-scale entity provides a gigantic market in which the most efficient producers can emerge to go head-to-head with those from the United States and Japan. But on the other side, this process must be insured by a territorial compact in which those places and people that suffer the consequences, in loss of jobs and decreased incomes, will be compensated through new investments and pay-offs of one kind or another. Reorganizing uneven development from a national to a Europe-wide scale, therefore, has always been a major part of the ‘European project’. It has rested, however, on a continuing commitment to those countries and localities that would inevitably lose as this process took its course. The adoption of neo-liberalism represents a retreat from this balance: endorsing uneven development as an inevitable condition that will be ameliorated through market mechanisms (comparative advantage, interregional and international migration, etc.) rather than through direct intervention. European Urban and Regional Studies 2001 8(1)

The global role/regional development trade-off As long as membership remained largely available to countries with histories of industrial and financial development at a world standard, this trade-off remained resolvable. Each could gain some competitive advantage even as it lost elsewhere. The previous accession to membership of Ireland, Portugal and Greece, however, illustrates the problems and possibilities associated with a larger expansion to Eastern Europe. The main advantage each had was lower wage rates rather than much in the way of existing industrial plant or expertise in particular services. Through massive infrastructure investments, however, the EU has helped to develop each of these economies towards a European norm. The difficulty is that these investments cannot be made on the same scale in eastern Europe without bankrupting the EU and creating resentments among existing members. But something else has also happened to the European project over recent years beyond increased demands on the central budget from poorer members. It has become increasingly dominated by a neo-liberal vision in which the mere adhesion to ‘market principles’ is seen as miraculously leading to large increases in economic growth. This is signalled by the way in which the debate over accession by eastern countries into the EU is increasingly dominated by fairly narrow economic considerations. Meantime, the political goal of the EU, to compensate and ameliorate for losses by means of redistribution, is increasingly downplayed relative to the overall economic ‘success’ of the European Union in the world economy (see, for example, Jacquemin and Pench, 1997). Enlargement of the EU to the east, therefore, has come at a particularly inauspicious time in the evolution of the EU. Trends within the existing EU point to the increased polarization between member countries and regions within countries across a range of economic indicators (Hardy et al., 1995; Croft et al., 1999). Though the Maastricht Treaty significantly upgraded the role of regional policies, available funds are still relatively small. At the same time, the Single European Market has tended to work very much against this, exacerbating core–periphery differences within countries and across the EU


countries as a whole. Enhanced competition following from the revitalization of the EU due to the Maastricht Treaty has had two effects. One is to select between ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ locations according to existing potential. The second is to build up economies of scale in the superior locations, institutionalizing initial advantages into permanent ones. As MacKay (1995: 162) puts it well: ‘To a certain degree, success and failure are self-perpetuating’. But only if nothing is done to counter the market process. In theory, market assumptions may produce spatial equilibrium; in practice markets rarely seem to (Agnew, 2000). Empirical evidence for this negative reading of the neo-liberal position in relation to both current EU members and eastern prospective ones comes from a number of recent studies, among which the most carefully crafted are Dunford (1998) and Dunford and Smith (2000). ‘What is clear’, say Dunford and Smith (2000: 194), ‘is that differentiation is more apparent than convergence, and that, as in the EU [so in the expanded EU] convergence will only occur through faster improvement in peripheral territories and for marginalized people.’ In particular, in the years since 1990 the countries’ regional uneven development has increased significantly in eastern Europe with capital-city regions and western border regions as centres of capital generation and accumulation and the increased peripheralization of other areas. A ‘development divide’ within Europe is emerging in the absence of integration of the eastern countries into the EU with a growing gap between the two sections of the east, on the one hand, and the more developed parts of the EU on the other. But this process is paralleled by a deepening division within the EU between richer and poorer countries and regions in employment and economic growth rates over the period 1986–96 (Dunford and Smith, 2000: 190, Figure 6).

Uneven development and the devaluation of place To the extent, therefore, that the EU is dominated by adoption of a neo-liberal image of development and less committed to redistribution among countries and across regions, the expansion to the

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east will enhance rather than reduce country-bycountry and interregional differences. This will represent a true departure from the original ‘compact’ upon which the project of European unification was based and abandonment of the idea of creating a single Europe. In its place will be a Europe of institutionalized uneven development. Not only the potential new members will be affected. Even ‘core’ Europe will be subject to the new project, one closer to the American model of dramatic regional differences in incomes and unemployment but much more competitive globally as a result of the ‘shake out’ possible in the larger market provided by the reduction in barriers to trade and capital mobility. This ‘Brussels’ Europe (Emerson, 1998: 227) of the present EU, plus perhaps some new central European members, will be flanked to the east by a tier of excluded states available as sites for low-cost assembly by firms head-quartered in the EU. Justified in cultural–political terms as a fault line between two ‘civilizations’ rending the geographical Europe (as in Huntington, 1993, and other accounts, for example, Emerson, 1998), this offers a largerscale vision of uneven development beyond that already emerging within the confines of the EU itself. The new EU, however, is probably not the one that the countries of eastern Europe have wanted to join. Their current enthusiasm should be tempered by what might well be in store for them if they succeed. Indeed, instead of lining up to join and reorienting their economies according to stringent EU directives, they might be well advised to trade more with one another and re-establish the organizational linkages with one another that they rashly abolished in the immediate euphoria of the end of the Cold War. Such a ‘half-way house’ might prove to be a better destination, at least until the EU reassesses its current neo-liberal vision of spatial economic logic. At the same time, however, the current terms of debate about EU enlargement must be challenged by an alternative to the institutionalization of uneven development at a Europe-wide scale. First, the neo-liberal rationale for uneven development must be debated as empirically and morally problematic (Dunford, 1998; Hart, 1998). Second, an alternative conception of the EU as coexisting alongside rather than replacing existing countries and regions must be developed (for example, European Urban and Regional Studies 2001 8(1)

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Hudson, 2000). This would not only allow for the elaboration of a division of labour between the various territorial entities, allowing for local and national differences in economic and cultural preferences, it would also lead to a re-emphasis within the EU on its primary goals of enhancing economic competitiveness while helping reduce spatial and social inequalities. Third, local and regional economies have distinctive assets that can be brought to bear for their own development if they rely on local initiative rather than presuming that top-down corporate planning is the only path to steady economic growth (for example, Storper, 1997). Current thinking is too oriented to an isolated territorial conception of ‘Europe’ that trades only within itself rather than to creating conditions within Europe for regional development strategies combining local capacities with global orientations. In other words, there is still an autarkic conception of Europe within the practice of neoliberalism that sees Europe as a self-contained space for the distribution of economic development. Fourth, and finally, the eastward enlargement of the EU must not be seen as simply a repeat of previous expansions. Given the magnitude of the economic disparities between east and west, this enlargement is qualitatively different in offering the possibility of a renewed EU that rather than simply trying to turn itself into a ‘superstate’ provides a model of social reform oriented towards the difficult task of reducing economic gaps while encouraging a range of political and cultural choices across Europe as a whole (Therborn, 1997; Hudson, 2000).

Conclusion It is a commonplace of discussions about the EU that it represents a novel type of institution based on an ‘alternative means of organizing human beings’ (Linklater, 1998: 218) to existing states. It is a great ideological hope and organizational prototype for the whole of humanity. If Europeans can sink their differences after what they have done to one another in the 20th century then there is hope for all. It is partly in this spirit and in the hope also of economic salvation that most of the countries of Eastern Europe have applied to join the EU. This claim on behalf of the EU, however, rests on the view that the European Urban and Regional Studies 2001 8(1)

space it contains is in the process of reconfiguration such that where you are within its limits does not matter. Akin to the most romanticized and misleading versions of globalization, this signifies that ‘the identification of boundaries – and associated notions of “here” and “there”, “far” and “near”, “outside” and “inside”, “home” and “away”, “them” and “us” – is more problematic than ever’ (Scholte, 1996: 49). Yet, within the EU and in relation to its expansion to the east, this is anything but true (Ross, 1998b). National identities and national differences on EU policies remain strong. If anything, country-bycountry and interregional economic differences are becoming more not less important. In the context of increasing inequality, the goal of a single Europe begins to retreat from the horizon, replaced by a vision of multiple Europes stratified by the roles they can perform as headquarters locations, branchplant economies, or labour-reserve areas in turning European business as a whole into a global economic force. Alternatively, however, engaging with economic, political, and cultural differences need not signify abandonment of the goal of a ‘single’ Europe. Rather, accepting and valuing local and regional differences could be central to regional and local economic vitalization. In the contemporary world economy the ‘one size fits all’ philosophy of corporate capitalism that seems to inspire current EU thinking is less and less viable. Economic growth in many places is now powered by making use of historically sedimented skills, crafts, traditions, and capacities. Turning poorer regions into branch-plant economies for richer ones is not therefore the only option for either the potential eastern members or existing ones. But changing the terms of debate will require changing the way that the EU makes its policies by abandoning the government by stealth and subterfuge that currently substitutes for democratic accountability. The questions of EU eastward enlargement, the purposes of the EU, and the working of EU institutions, then, are closely related ones.

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Correspondence to: John Agnew, Department of Geography, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA 90095-1524, USA. [email: [email protected]]