Jeux sans frontières

From here it looked as though the Nice summit was all grinning group photos and lofty communiques. But what really went on in the corridors and conference rooms of the Hotel Acropolis - and on the streets outside? Acclaimed novelist Christopher Hope went to find out

Special report: European integration

Christopher Hope
guardian.co.uk, Monday December 11 2000 00.52 GMT
The Guardian, Monday December 11 2000

Nice was always odd. It's odder than ever since the European Conference came to town. I got in one wet night before the summit. Only the Niçoise did not seem to be sharing the air of general excitement. Appalled perhaps by the tens of thousands of protesters who arrived at the same time as the presidents and prime ministers, the Niçoise had gone to ground. The town was in the hands of police and protesters.

The result was a curiously hemmed-in feeling. In a new Europe, that was tearing down national borders, Nice had turned into a town filled with checkpoints and border guards. An unaccompanied visitor without the right papers, and the right badges, was very exposed.

I got caught in a fracas near the station where a lot of people in Venetian carnival masks were lying on the tracks to prevent trains leaving. I had to make a diversion to get out and that took me up the road to the border with Monaco, where several anarchists told me that they planned to build a big white cardboard wall with office box-files because, they said: "The rich live in a ghetto there."

I hate walls, even cardboard walls, and building them seems an odd occupation for libertarians. I passed the LiberT'ea cafe and headed for the beach. How different a city looks when it's ringed by police. The beachfront was swept free of life though lights burned at the Westminster Hotel. The huge sweep of the Promenade des Anglais, along the Bay of Angels, was bare of tourists. The Nice seafront needs tourists. Without them, the neon palm trees and the illuminated Father Christmasses climbing the lampposts, and even the monstrous carbuncle of the Negresco Hotel, seemed forlorn.

This great stretch of the city had been changed into something called the Red Zone, and cordoned off. Presidents, prime ministers and their delegations from the 15 member states of the EU were staying there with their teams of bag-carrying lackeys. In the Red Zone, too, were the dozen heads of state of the applicant countries. A curious brooding hung over the Bay of Angels.

Odd, because this is the Cte d'Azure, the French Riviera, and it is supposed to be where you have fun. But if the delegates to the European Conference, as this EU summit is known, were enjoying the Cte d'Azure, it was a chilly, damp, Swedish fun they were having. I had to get my very own cortège to my hotel. Two outriders with blue lights. It was the only way through. At the hotel, I was given a badge and papers that would allow me past the riot police and to the summit itself, which was being held at the Acropolis across town.

Papers were not enough. What I hadn't got, I realised next morning, was a delegation. The delegates in the Red Zone travelled to the Acropolis the way they used to do in the old Soviet states of eastern Europe - in convoy, along tightly policed special corridors linking their hotels to the summit meeting rooms. Since many of the countries applying for EU membership were once Soviet satellites, this way of travelling must have brought on a flush of déjà vu .

No taxis were allowed in the Red Zone. The best thing was to walk to the Acropolis. I was joined by a man from La Stampa, the Italian newspaper, who also lacked a delegation. He was not pleased, not with Nice or Europe. I said that was the way it was, in the Midi, sometimes one had to improvise. He said no, it wasn't simply bad, it was insupportable. There was no transport, no cigarettes. It began to rain. That's when we saw the bus. The city had become a nightmare, said the driver, but we were heading more or less in the right direction. "I've been in Brussels for 20 years, covering European affairs, and this is the first time I ever went to a conference by bus," said the man from La Stampa.

I lost my Italian companion in the centre of town, when I got off to walk to the Acropolis. Riot police and demonstrators were thick around the beautiful arcades of the Gallery Lafayette. The cops wore protective armour and carried batons and teargas launchers. The demonstrators wore protective armour and carried face masks - and tools. Builders tools, sappers tools. Spades and chisels.

The last time I saw tools like that was in Berlin, in November 1989; the Wall was being taken down, stone by stone, by people with little hammers and chisels. Woodpeckers, they were called, and all night long the chink of steel on stone rang through the dark ness. In Nice, hooded protesters were using their tools to tear up cobbles and throw them through the windows of boutiques. One young man broke the glass of a bank and lit a fire in the entrance. He had the hood of his duffel coat pulled down over his face, which made it difficult to get the flames going well, but he managed. The police began firing tear gas. I walked on.

The mood inside the conference halls was striking. A sense of something unstoppable. A feeling that this summit was going to work, because too many people had too much at stake to see it fail. Europe may be a stumbling, uncertain creature, but it was going ahead.

The Nice summit looked backwards to the future. It was a kind of valedictory. The Yalta accords that carved up Europe into western and eastern fiefdoms were finished. The Berlin Wall was dead and buried. The divisions between western and eastern Europe were over. The 15 countries of the EU knew this. So did the aspiring joiners. A dozen countries wanted in and they wanted it soon. Thirteen, if you counted Turkey. Even Switzerland, that notorious non-joiner, was there.

It is not surprising that the German question has been in many ways at the heart of matter in Nice. Years ago, in the old Soviet Union, someone asked me: "If we were free to come, would you have us?" It was in Germany that this question was answered when the old line between east and west was erased. Germany chose reunification and the cost was great. But the cost of keeping out the old DDR was much greater.

Nice turns a lot of assumptions on their heads. Europe needs more Europeans; put another way, Europe needs more immigrants. There is the new scramble for Europe and members are going to squabble over the takings. That is only natural. And the auguries are muddled.

In the halls of the Acropolis, one thing seemed commonly held: it is better to fudge than fight. But no amount of fudging hid the different natures of different countries. Anyone watching the various heads of states and their retinues, effortlessly reflecting what might be called their defining tribal tics, saw that no one was going to mash them up into some sort of Euro-stew. In fact, if there was a paradox inherent in European expansion it was this: the more the union grows together, the more distinct become the national traits of its members.

Some have likened the Nice summit to a long, late-night poker game. It isn't really. Poker is sedentary. Watching Jospin and Blair and Schroder pulling up to the Acropolis in their home-grown limousines, flying their national flags, followed by their national teams of negotiators, carrying briefcases hewn from the hides of patriotic and, one supposes, entirely sane French, British and German cows, what you really see are teams of athletes fit and smiling, and ready to knock hell out of the opposing teams. Summitry is a bruising contact sport played by consenting adults. It is ice hockey for politicians.

Blair looks good on ice, he stays calm at high speeds. Maybe it helps that after years of coming to Europe and complaining, he leads a goverment that wants to amount to something in Europe instead of railing against it. Because what Nice makes clear, all over again, is that Europe, however you define it, is the only game in town.

For the rest there are vexed questions of detail. How do you adjust the machinery to open the club and still allow each country to punch at more or less its fighting weight? How to assign Germany greater clout, to reflect its central position, its numbers and its muscle, without seeing it throw that weight around? How do you stop big states ganging up, or smaller countries using their veto to block any move they don't like. What about defence? What is the point of a European Union that needs to call on the US every time a fire breaks out in its own backyard?

But these are, in a sense, minor matters. Something was happening in Nice that has not happened in Europe since, perhaps, the Middle Ages. A Europe where borders increasingly disappear. Where citizens of two dozen countries move and work where they choose. Where to make room means giving ground.

For the moment Europe is 15 strong and family photos are restricted to members only. Estonian television had been excluded from even attending the ceremony because, an official explained apologetically, "you're not in yet". "I think that's discrimination," said the Estonians. It was. And it was what this Nice summit was meant to fix. Declarations of love were all very well, but when would Europe name the day?

What was not touched upon in Nice, except by the people in the streets, were the people in the streets of the countries that make Europe. Though they made their presence felt. As the heads of government arrived for the photo shoot, as Jacques Chirac smiled (a brave move for a man whose former chief of staff had just been flung into jail on charges of siphoning off public money), the unmistakable acrid touch of tear gas wafted down the air conditioning system, and I had the rare pleasure of seeing politicians biting back tears.

One might say about tear gas what Trotsky once said about foreign policy. You may not care about it, but it cares about you.

This is the great unanswered question of summits such as Nice - where are the people in all this? Unconsulted, unpersuaded, and uncertain. Perhaps that was the good service the cagouled ones with their trenching tools did us. They reminded everyone that Europe was not made of delegations and motorcades. The politicians and the European commissioners were in their redoubt behind massed ranks of riot police, and the only people on the streets were tearing them up.

The people on the streets may not like the Europe we have but even they, to judge from their slogans and banners, want more rather than less of it. Their banners were eloquent and very European: "Free Catalonia", "Basques Forever", "Free Occitania" . . . Occitania? That's a new one. I live there and we don't, as yet, have a liberation army.

What Nice exposes is that the two-tier Europe some people talk about is here already though not in predictable form. One is governed by politicians and guarded by the police, and the other contains the people who are nowhere to be seen and whose views on these enormous events are hard to elicit.

For an instant, as I was leaving, the two Europes seemed to collide on the giant television screens in the press centre. The screens showed footage of the leaders' deliberations, beamed live from the Acropolis. On the screen, a spokesman for one of the 27 countries present was talking without sound about matters European, maybe it was the charter of human rights, the veto, the banana wars with the US, the rapid reaction force, or qualified majority voting . It did not matter, the sound was off. His suit was blue, his manner grave.

Below him, a second monitor that had been showing, for reasons unknown, old episodes of Dallas, suddenly changed the picture and we got for several glorious minutes a ripe piece of erotica. Two well-fleshed people on a rumpled bed made vigorous love; their bed trembled, the sheets fluttered, while all the time above their embrace, the blue-suited spokesman opened and closed his lips. A knot of journalists gathered around the monitor. This was more like it. Then a cameraman, entering in the spirit of things, did what came naturally, he lifted his camera and began filming the film.