Goodbye Brussels

By Charlemagne

IT has been 17 years since I first set foot in Brussels, arriving for a half-year internship at the European Commission. Back then, there was a faintly provisional feel to the European project. The European Parliament had rather few powers and worked out of a borrowed building in Strasbourg normally used by the Council of Europe. The Berlaymont building, headquarters of the European Commission, was an asbestos-ridden ghost, closed off and hidden within a shroud of plastic sheeting and scaffolding. The single currency was still years away. There was a theoretical European Currency Unit (a basket of real currencies) and it seemed like a quaint joke that bar prices at the Nouvelle Rotonde, a commission coffee shop, were listed in ECUs as well as Belgian francs. If memory serves me, the only thing that cost exactly one ECU was a draft Belgian beer. Brussels itself was shabby, grey and somehow provincial and exotic all at the same time. From its clanking yellow trams to its ramshackle clubs and semi-legal bars, I liked it very much.

I arrived for a second time in January 2005, and was struck straight away by the self-confidence and solidity of the place. Brussels was a prosperous international city, more or less. The parliament had built itself not one but two Babylonian complexes of glass, steel and marble: one in Brussels, the other in Strasbourg. The Berlaymont gleamed and hummed. My wallet was full of euros. The banknotes looked like play money after years using dollars in Asia and America, but the currency was hailed all around as the EU's greatest achievement, fuelling growth across a booming continent.

The new EU constitution had just been approved, and was going to be a triumph, acclaimed by voters in referendums across the block. Books were being published with names like "Why Europe will run the 21st Century". It is hard to imagine such confidence now, in a Brussels that feels weary and wary about the future.

Today is my last day as Charlemagne, and almost my last day in Brussels. On Monday, I will swap pseudonyms, take the Eurostar to London and turn into Bagehot, writing a weekly column on British politics. I will miss this blog, and especially its readers. You are too shrewd a bunch for soft-soap and compliments, but your comments have transformed the blog, for the better. I read all of them, and do not consider an idea stress-tested until it has run the gauntlet of the comments section. Thank you for your courtesy and engagement with each others' ideas.

My final print column appears on Friday. Charlemagne's Notebook will take a pause for a few weeks, and will be back in trenchant form under my successor towards the end of the summer. I will be blogging on Bagehot's Notebook from Monday. See you there.

To end, some thoughts about how we got from the confidence and hubris of 2005 to the Euro-gloom of 2010. They were commissioned by E!Sharp, a Brussels policy magazine, for their issue out next week. Here is my piece for them:

BACK in February 2005, a few weeks after arriving as a journalist in Brussels, I wrote a newspaper piece about the striking mood of “seriousness and self-confidence” that hung about the EU capital.

The European Commission was to be heard, boldly making the case for large-scale immigration by economic migrants to offset the greying of Europe. The euro was hailed as a huge success, bringing many EU countries the lowest inflation and interest rates they could remember. Spain was gearing up to hold a referendum on the EU constitution: a document so inspiring and so significant that France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Ireland, Belgium, Portugal, Poland, Denmark, the Czech Republic and even grumpy Britain had all pledged popular votes on it.

In Barcelona, I watched Jacques Chirac tell a pro-constitution rally that the treaty would allow Europe “to take giant strides forwards in terms of defence”. This, beamed the then French president, offered a “very desirable balance” to the current system based on NATO. His host, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, focussed on Spain's booming economy, and the billions in EU aid that made it possible. Now, said the Spanish prime minister, it was “time to say thank you”.

My timing was lucky. A few months later, and I would never have witnessed this high point of confidence. Arriving when I did, I experienced some of the most significant events in recent EU history, the long-term impacts of which have yet to be felt. Four are linked to the doomed constitution.

The first two were things that happened: the No votes in France and the Netherlands. They were different forms of rejection – one a reflection of French exceptionalism and the French public's dislike of free market capitalism, the other more straightforwardly Eurosceptic. Both – looking back – were linked to globalisation, and a sense that ordinary French and Dutch voters no longer fully recognised themselves in the enlarged EU, or believed that they controlled it.

The third seismic event was something that did not happen: Britain cancelled plans for a referendum on the constitution. That would surely have been lost, prompting moves by an ad-hoc core of states to push ahead with deeper integration.

The fourth event also matters because it did not happen: namely, Irish voters did not reject the Lisbon Treaty a second time. The first Irish vote was a blow to Brussels, but not a catastrophe. In contrast, a second Irish No would have exposed the EU establishment at its ugliest, with calls for Ireland to be expelled from the Union, or at least bullied senseless. Shortly after the first Irish No in 2008, I found myself at a gala dinner in Brussels. Sitting on a gilt armchair in a panelled stateroom, I was told by the head of a Brussels think-tank that the Irish result proved the idiocy of putting EU treaties to the people. “Fucking voters,” he declared, languidly extending one arm so the hovering steward could refill his champagne glass. “I mean, fucking voters, what do they know?” I still wish I had walked out.

Inside the Brussels bubble, the constitution remains a success story. Conventional wisdom says nothing was lost by ratifying the constitution in disguised form through parliamentary votes, as the Lisbon Treaty. But Europe lost some of its innocence when it rammed the constitution through. Back in 2005, lots of leaders genuinely wanted to put the treaty to voters: they thought its grandeur would inspire popular approval. They are sadder and wiser now.

The treaty inspired my fifth seismic event: the June 2009 ruling by the German constitutional court in Karlsruhe that core areas of lawmaking had to remain under national control, because the EU enjoys only second-class democratic legitimacy. Germany's partners are slowly waking up to how governments in Berlin feel bound by that ruling.

I was in time for two more events whose consequences have yet to play out. The Copenhagen climate summit in December 2009 woke the EU from its dreams of bestriding a multipolar 21st century as a normative superpower.

Finally, overwhelmingly, there is the financial and economic crisis. I am sadly sceptical that the EU will emerge unscathed. As I leave Brussels, I sense little of the self-confidence of 2005, nor the buzz of new ideas: only the same old ideas being dusted off, but this time in a Europe where democratic deficits are much harder to ignore than before.

But in truth, my scepticism is not really towards the EU, but towards Europe as a continent, which feels too old, tired and anxious to compete. I only hope I am wrong.