EU is starved of common purpose

IT SHOULD be a time for celebration. Ten new members - including eight former communist countries - are about to join the European Union in May.

This will help to secure the EU's eastern frontier. It will weaken the still potentially malevolent influence of an unpredictable Russia. It will ensure that Western Europe's values of free speech and individual human rights become more widely entrenched.

Well, if this enlargement is a triumph, you would not guess it by looking at the current members' behaviour.

Indeed, even some EU enthusiasts are asking whether the forces tearing at the fabric of Europe's cohesion can be held in check: whether even the single currency - the glue now binding the union in its time of troubles - will hold.

'We are wondering whether we should be taking a closer look at how the single currency might break apart,' says a top economist at one of continental Europe's most powerful banks.

Earlier this month the fissures within the EU widened ominously when the European Commission, the EU's Brussels-based executive which currently spends about e100bn a year, announced that it would need more money for the enlarged union.

With more members, this is surely just common sense you might say. Unfortunately the six countries which provide most of the funds - including Germany, France and Britain - announced just before Christmas that Oliver Twist in Brussels could ask as often as he liked for more, but was not going to get it.

One explanation for their position is that much of the money that is now being spent on helping to finance roads and bridges and urban or rural regeneration is not proving effective in boosting the EU economy's long-term growth potential. It would be better invested in other things and focused more on the poorer newcomers.

The confrontation over the EU's budget amounts to a vote of no confidence in the EU Commission, a body led (if that is the right word) by former Italian prime minister Romano Prodi. The six are saying that more of the same is just not good enough - and that, for the most part, is what the Commission's new budget plan is offering.

An imaginative Commission should be leading the reform agenda, not just underpinning the status quo.

But the reformist six do not come to the table with clean hands. Germany and France want no change in the biggest and most egregious budget item, the Common Agricultural Policy. Britain wants to keep the rebate for which Margaret Thatcher battled.

Most importantly, the governments appoint the Commissioners - so if they are not up to the job, whose fault is that?

What is revealing about this clash is that the budget in question is for the years 2006-2013. Time enough you might think for a compromise to be forged for the common good. But it is precisely the absence of a sense of communal common purpose which is the heart of the problem.

There are plenty of symptoms of a union so dominated by a myriad of national self-interests - including the divisions over Iraq between Britain and its supporters on the one hand and France and Germany on the other - that it has lost its communal moorings.

Another symptom is France's unremitting but failing campaign to gather around it a cabal of likeminded supporters in a 'core Europe'.

The tensions over the national budget rules enshrined in the Stability and Growth pact between the Commission and France and Germany are another case in point. Britain's government deficit has now gone over the 3% limit set out by the Maastricht Treaty as well.

It is hard to have confidence that the summit meeting of France, Germany and Britain in Berlin last month will be the harbinger of more purposeful times to come, because there is little sense that this troika is bound together by a shared vision of the world and Europe's place in it.

Hopes that a new Commission president will alone be enough to transform a floundering union are just bubbles in the wind.