010358 How Mad Cows Threaten European Unity

By Kerry Capell, INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS - The carnage is mounting fast in Europe. Thousands of cattle, pigs, and sheep slaughtered and burned to contain the spread of mad cow and foot-and-mouth disease. Farmers ruined. Public fear bordering on hysteria. But there's another kind of damage affecting Europe's body politic--not quite as visible, certainly, as the funeral pyres of animal carcasses popping up across Europe, but harmful nonetheless. It's the subtle destruction done to Europe's idealistic insistence that it can solve its common problems together.

Crafting a common policy in times of crisis is just the sort of thing the European Union was set up to do. But the double whammy of mad cow and foot-and-mouth is actually reinforcing old national divisions and breeding mistrust. Granted, the only way to stop these diseases is to seal off borders to the movement of livestock. But it's the way that countries are protecting themselves, and the rhetoric they are using, that reveals how fragile the idea of union is. “Never before have Europeans been more dependent upon one another,” says Dominique Moisi, deputy director of France's Institute of International Relations. “And never before have we distrusted one another more.”

Consider what's happening between Britain and France. French Agriculture Minister Jean Glavany calls foot-and-mouth “this evil imported to us from Great Britain,” even though the disease has yet to cross the English Channel. Meanwhile, this Continental revulsion is giving fresh ammunition to British Euroskeptics, who don't want Britain to join the monetary union and generally distrust the EU bureaucrats in Brussels. The Euroskeptics point out that thousands of British slaughterhouses have had to close because they could not meet stringent EU health requirements. That Brussels edict, in turn, helped spread both diseases by obliging farmers to truck animals cross-country to the few slaughterhouses still operating.

So you see, it's all Europe's fault. This Euronoia is being milked to the max in the runup to the British general election. Conservative Party leader William Hague recently blasted Britain under Prime Minister Tony Blair as a “foreign land” that had surrendered control of British farming to Brussels.

Meanwhile, the hysteria is spreading. Poland, Lithuania, Bulgaria, and Slovenia--which all want to join the EU--have banned livestock imports from the EU even though there's no evidence foot-and-mouth has infected any Continental herds.

The animal plagues may also bankrupt European agricultural policy, the lavish subsidies of which have been an invisible but vital glue to European unity. The budget of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy is already on the brink of collapse due to the compensation doled out to farmers and producers hit by mad cow disease. Now the EU promises to cover half the costs of eradicating foot-and-mouth. This will be difficult if the disease is limited to Britain but nearly impossible if it reaches the Continent.

Funding these fresh payouts could become a hugely contentious issue: Germany is using the current crisis to call for reform of agricultural subsidies. Yet France, Germany's long ally in supporting agricultural policy, has no intention of calling for reform.

Other signs of dissension are showing up. The Netherlands is threatening legal action against the European Union for requiring member governments to bankroll the slaughter of healthy older cattle as a prop for beef prices, which have collapsed because of consumer fears of mad cow disease. The Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark resent the heavy hand of the French, who are pushing the plan. It's all quite a fracas--and the kind of disunion that makes a tighter European Union harder to achieve.

RETURN TO HOME PAGE

E-mail: sflanagan@sprintmail.com