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Page 11

In the past, European integration was based on the "Monnet method" with its communitarization approach in European institutions and policy. This gradual process of integration, with no blueprint for the final state, was conceived in the 1950s for the economic integration of a small group of countries. Successful as it was in that scenario, this approach has proved to be of only limited use for the political integration and democratization of Europe. Where it was not possible for all EU members to move ahead, smaller groups of countries of varying composition took the lead, as was the case with Economic and Monetary Union and with Schengen.

Does the answer to the twin challenge of enlargement and deepening, then, lie in such a differentiation, an enhanced co-operation in some areas? Precisely in an enlarged and thus necessarily more heterogeneous Union, further differentiation will be inevitable. To facilitate this process is thus one of the priorities of the intergovernmental conference.

However, increasing differentiation will also entail new problems: a loss of European identity, of internal coherence, as well as the danger of an internal erosion of the EU, should ever lar areas of intergovernmental co-operation loosen the nexus of integration. Even today a crisis of the Monnet method can no longer be overlooked, a crisis that cannot be solved according to the method's own logic.

That is why Jacques Delors, Helmut Schmidt and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing have recently tried to find new answers to this dilemma. Delors' idea is that a "federation of nation-states", comprising the six founding states of the European Community, should conclude a "treaty within the treaty" with a view to making far-reaching reforms in the European institutions. Schmidt and Giscard's ideas are in a similar vein, though they place the Euro-11 states at the centre, rather than just the six founding states. As early as 1994 Karl Lamers and Wolfgang Schauble proposed the creation of a "core Europe", but it was stillborn, as it were, because it presupposed an exclusive, closed "core", even omitting the founding state Italy, rather than a magnet of integration open to all.

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      Cf.  Morgenthau, The German Character * Le mémorandum d'Alexis Leger * The Briand Memorandum * Kalergi, European Spirit must Precede Europe's Political Unification * La Construction de l'Europe selon Jean Monnet * Plan Fouchet * L'Union Européenne selon Altiero Spinelli * Mitterrand and Kohl urge European Political Union * Il Manifesto di Ventotene

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