EU has to learn new skills as it tries to tackle Ukraine crisis

Worldview: The common European cultural space cannot be firmly defined and delimited; its borders are necessarily open, not because of our ignorance, but in principle - because European culture, indeed Europe itself, is not a 'fact'. It is a task and a process... Europe and its cultural identity thus depend on a constant confrontation with the new, the different, the foreign.

These are among the principal findings by a distinguished reflection group of intellectuals and political figures asked by Romano Prodi to report on the spiritual and cultural dimension of Europe. They resonate strongly in a week when three developments have underlined the issues with which their work has been concerned over the last two years: the European Union's active mediation in Ukraine's political crisis; the transfer from NATO to the EU of responsibility for Bosnian peacekeeping; and the French Socialist party vote in favour of the EU's constitutional treaty.

Each of these involves an encounter with novelty and difference, contributing to the development of an EU foreign policy, which is one of the major tasks it has set itself in dealing with a rapidly changing world order. Ukraine and Bosnia-Herzegovina are certainly part of Europe, although not (yet) of the EU. What has happened over the last 15 years, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, is that the EU has increasingly hegemonised the continental sense of Europe through the enlargement that took central and eastern European states into membership.

Their desire to "return to Europe" enabled them to undertake a fundamental transformation in their political, economic and social structures in preparation for EU accession, without reverting to the aggressive nationalism which created the Balkan tragedy in the 1990s. It is all too easy to overlook the absence of conflict between Hungary and Romania or Slovakia, Bulgaria and Macedonia, Poland and Ukraine during that time, as if it were simply contingent and happenstance.

As the American writer Elizabeth Pond puts it: "The new paradigm is not, after all, the atrocities of the former Yugoslavia, or even the old balance-of-power jostling. It is an unaccustomed reconciliation in the heart of Europe." That dynamic has now spread to the Balkans.

Ukraine had a peaceful separation from the Soviet Union in 1991, without resolving the fundamental tension between its western and eastern orientations which have exploded in the last fortnight. They can best be resolved or at least channelled constructively by a willingness to learn the lessons of power-sharing internally; and a readiness by Russia, the EU and the United States to agree on an external equilibrium of power capable of protecting Ukraine's autonomy and respecting its democratic rights. There is some cautious room to hope that has been realised as desirable and possible this week without a disastrous outbreak of violence.

The 12 members of this reflection group were brought together by the Institute of Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. Chaired by Krzysztof Michalski, the IWM's rector and professor of philosophy in Boston University and the University of Warsaw, its other members are: Kurt Biedenkopf, Silvio Ferrari, Bronislaw Geremek, Arpad Göncz, John Gray, Will Hutton, Jutta Limbach, Ioannis Petrou, Alberto Quadrio Curzio, Michel Rocard, and Simone Veil. As lawyers, philosophers, economists, historians and current or former politicians they bring authority and wisdom to the subject.

I learned during a fellowship at the IWM in 1998 that it played a crucial role in bringing together intellectuals, journalists, social science researchers and political figures from central, eastern and western Europe from the early 1980s when it was founded, through the dramatic changes after 1989. It continues the work through the period of formal enlargement. This process is a central feature of their report and the intense consultations, public debates and commentaries which went into it (accessible at http://www.iwm.at/r-reflec.htm). It makes an illuminating contrast to the pessimism about Europe's identity expressed in these pages by Desmond Fennell (November 23rd).

They ask how enlargement to include the countries of the former Soviet empire will alter the conditions of European solidarity, what role Europe's religions, including Islam, will play in the European public sphere, and what tasks will emerge from Europe's growing role in the world. "Faced with growing diversity and the rigours of establishing a more demanding kind of unity, what forces can hold the expanded, redefined European Union together?"

They argue that the political and strategic elements which originally inspired European integration from the 1940s and 1950s - the shock of the second World War, the mounting threat from the Soviet Union and the economic dynamism of post-war development - gradually gave way to economic goals, which came ever more to the fore. But economic integration does not in itself lead to political integration because "markets cannot produce a politically resilient solidarity".

In recognition of this, the constitutional process culminating in the treaty agreed last June was entered into, posing the question of how much integration it requires and what will be the forces of cohesion producing them. A mere list of common European values will not suffice, precisely because they are subject to a diversity of interpretation.

That is why they define Europe's cultural space as open in principle, not firmly defined and delimited. Cohesion will arise from its achievements in tackling the kinds of problems on its agenda this week effectively, rather than from creating a cultural identity counterposed to national ones. It is a future-oriented project, drawing on diverse pasts and cultures that must be constantly renewed, not relying on some fixed essence or list of values as nations do.

The same applies to its religions, which can bring people together, instead of separating them. Islam must be understood in its European context, not in a frontal confrontation with an abstracted "Christian Europe".

The report insists that the countries of central and eastern Europe bring to the common table their political experience of revolutionary change, which "were proof of the strength of the solidarity of a civil society". That enriched Europe and this is why the new members, despite their economic weakness, "should be taken in as equal members in the Union".