Beware angry EU empire at the door
IT was 2002 and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the former French president, had put the word “federal” into a draft of the EU constitution. He liked it. But it would create trouble in Britain. So, as he explained later, he replaced “federal” with “community”, which in French “means exactly the same thing”. The constitution was voted down in two referendums, but it was soon revived as the Lisbon Treaty.
The eurocrats have been good at getting their way. But the officials who cling to the dogma of an EU superstate face ever more vocal resistance. And if they don’t listen, they will bring the whole European project crashing down.
This week, Britain could vote to cast off these officials. It would be doing so, however, just as the limits of their power are becoming visible. In the past few years, the EU was meant to embrace fiscal union of the eurozone and a quota system for refugees. These are urgent priorities. Yet they are not happening, because governments will not play ball.
The eurocrats see full political union as the only way to contain dangerous nationalism in Europe. But EU members such as Britain and the Eastern European states that joined a decade ago view the single market as a capitalist vehicle for prosperity. They have no desire to give up more of their sovereignty — which is why Britain supported their accession.
This narrative has been lost in the referendum debate. All voters see to the east is a huge population of would-be immigrants, partly because the Blair government failed to impose transitional controls. Yet Britain’s strategy was to use the eastern bloc to make the EU impossible to unify. And it can still work.
There is a blueprint for the reform the EU needs. Sergio Fabbrini, a politics professor at LUISS university in Rome, argues that whereas the euro countries need to unify, the rest don’t. So the EU must allow for the coexistence of two distinct projects: the integration of the euro states and the wider sphere of the single market. The single market would be reformed to roll back the authority of EU courts over areas such as home affairs.
When Fabbrini presented his book, Which European Union? Europe after the Euro Crisis in Brussels, to the European Parliament, some members were intrigued. But when he faced the European Commission he felt, he told me, like a man presenting a heresy to the Catholic Church. And when British Prime Minister David Cameron opened his renegotiation, EU constitutional reform was off the table.
There is a growing recognition of the need for change among EU elites. EU president Donald Tusk, Poland’s former prime minister, recently said “forcing naive Euro-enthusiastic visions of total integration . . . is not a suitable answer”. Others are coming around. Staunch integrationists such as German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble and Hubert Védrine, former French foreign minister, have acknowledged that the EU must adapt. Former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta argues for reforms like those Fabbrini suggests.
Unlike the eurocrats, these politicians can see the mainstream parties that brought them to power are losing ground. A fascist is in the running for France’s presidency. A recent Pew Survey found that about half of people in Germany, Sweden, Spain and the Netherlands have an unfavourable view of the EU. In France it’s nearly two-thirds. In Hungary and Poland, voters have installed aggressively nationalist governments that loathe Brussels diktats. In the Netherlands and Germany, newspapers plead with Britain to stay to avoid domination by euro-ideologues. There is a strong basis for an alliance, even if Cameron was too incompetent to build it.
On the other side are the committed federalists such as European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, whose likely response to a Brexit is to push for more integration. Without the economic heft of Britain there to rally his opponents and make a sensible case for reform, Juncker could well get his way. Britain would be faced with an antagonistic, vengeful and protectionist empire on its doorstep, full of angry, unemployed voters and boiling nationalist forces pulling against the centre. It will be deeply unstable.
It is to avoid this awful geopolitical scenario that I will reluctantly, despite my hatred of the undemocratic, meddling, incompetent and arrogant bureaucrats of the EU, vote to remain. If Britain stays in, it has a chance to reform the EU in its interests. I know that few Brits share the view that the EU might be able to change. I accept that it might not. But I believe that if it doesn’t bend, it will break. And then we’ll get a Brexit anyway. — © The Daily Telegraph, London
If it doesn’t bend, it will break. And then we’ll get a Brexit anyway