The
battle for Europe
As
Britain prepares to vote on EU membership, both friends and enemies
of the project agree that it is in trouble — yet draw radically
different conclusions about what to do next
MAY 25, 2016 by:
Tony Barber
Pope Francis pulled
no punches in November 2014 when he addressed the European Parliament
on the EU’s deepening malaise. “In many quarters we encounter a
general impression of weariness and ageing, of a Europe which is now
a ‘grandmother’, no longer fertile and vibrant. As a result, the
great ideas which once inspired Europe seem to have lost their
attraction, only to be replaced by the bureaucratic technicalities of
its institutions,” the pope said.
Just a few weeks
ago, Francis revisited his theme. In a Vatican speech that sounded
almost like an Old Testament lament, he asked: “What has happened
to you, the Europe of humanism, the champion of human rights,
democracy and freedom? What has happened to you, Europe, the home of
poets, philosophers, artists, musicians, and men and women of
letters? What has happened to you, Europe, the mother of peoples and
nations, the mother of great men and women who upheld, and even
sacrificed their lives for, the dignity of their brothers and
sisters?”
In these remarks he
had in mind the EU’s stumbling and, in some countries, defiantly
mean-spirited response to the refugee and migrant emergency that
erupted last year on the bloc’s southern borders. However, the pope
is not the only world leader friendly to the EU who worries that the
28-nation bloc is in the grip of some more profound crisis, or
combination of crises. These range from economic stagnation, voters’
disenchantment with traditional political parties and the rise of
national populism to the no longer inconceivable prospect that the EU
will one day be as irrelevant to Europe’s future as the Holy Roman
Empire was by the time Napoleon did away with it in 1806. In Britain,
meanwhile, voters are preparing for a June 23 referendum on whether
or not to stay in the EU, a decision that is certain to have
substantial consequences for all Europe, especially if the verdict is
to leave.
All four books under
review recognise that the EU is in deep trouble, but they differ in
their proposed solutions. Brendan Simms and Giles Merritt hold that
much closer integration, at least among France, Germany and the rest
of the 19-nation eurozone, is essential to restoring Europe’s
fortunes. Chris Bickerton doubts that this is a realistic prospect,
contending that the EU is floundering and losing its appeal because
of a lack of democracy and accountability in Brussels and — a
particularly valuable insight — because of a broader mistrust that
separates citizens from political elites in practically every member
state. For his part, John R Gillingham is relentlessly negative about
the EU, asserting that it is unravelling at a precipitous rate and
that, if it is to survive, it will have to abolish the euro and
renationalise its political institutions.
As Simms observes in
Britain’s Europe, an entertaining and cogently argued book, the
life of the EU and its predecessor, the European Economic Community,
established by the 1957 Treaty of Rome, has coincided with the most
peaceful and prosperous era in European history. But this is no
guarantee that all will be well forever. “The failure of the
European project, and the collapse of the current continental order,
would be not only a catastrophic blow to the populations on the far
side of the Channel but also to the United Kingdom, which would be
directly exposed to the resulting storms, as it always has been,”
Simms warns.
A history professor
at the University of Cambridge, Simms writes that the political and
social systems of England, and later Britain, have always been shaped
by military, political and economic pressures originating in
continental Europe. It started with the emergence of the 10th-century
English state in response to Viking invasions. Centuries later, the
threat of Louis XIV’s France prompted the 1688-89 Glorious
Revolution, which sealed England’s future as a parliamentary
democracy, and the 1707 Anglo-Scottish union, which created the UK.
In the post-1945 era, the cold war division of Europe and the EEC’s
launch exerted a decisive influence over British security and
economic policies.
Simms refers more
than once to the pithy phrase of Winston Churchill in 1913, when he
was First Lord of the Admiralty — Europe is “where the weather
comes from”. The storms of 1914 and 1939 proved Churchill’s
point. But the other organising theme of Simms’s book is that
Britain has repeatedly shown, especially in the 20th century, that it
can prevail in the harshest circumstances without sacrificing
democracy and the rule of law. In the author’s opinion, this
experience has made British history and political culture so
distinctive that, even though the UK ought to stay in the EU, it is
unlikely ever to give up sovereignty to the extent required to create
a unified Europe.
The best way
forward, Simms says, is for the eurozone to engage in “a single
collective act of will” and establish a federation, just as the UK
emerged in 1707 and the US came out of the constitutional convention
of 1787. Furthermore, Britain should welcome a strong, united
eurozone because it would serve the most enduring English and British
interest down the ages — namely, the elimination or at least
reduction of dangers emanating from the continent.
It is an eloquent
argument, but one suspects that it will not completely convince
Bickerton, a political scientist also at Cambridge. He builds a case
in The European Union: A Citizen’s Guide that Europe’s
fundamental problem lies in its flawed methods of democratic
representation. “Hostility towards the EU today is part of a much
wider crisis in European politics which does not arise from the EU as
such. It is really a crisis of politics tout court, driven by
hostility to the very [national] political institutions that an
earlier generation of Eurosceptics had believed they were defending,”
Bickerton writes.
In his view, this —
quite apart from the EU’s disputes over everything from refugees to
Greek debt — is what makes unlikely a great leap forward in
European integration. “After all, the EU is only as strong as its
member states. And if they cannot command the authority of their
citizens, then the EU is as threatened as they are,” he says.
In what is a lucid,
helpful guide to the EU’s structures and operating methods,
Bickerton observes that another troubling issue is the lack of
transparency in the way the EU makes laws. Behind closed doors the
European Commission, national governments, the European Parliament’s
main political party groups and thousands of lobbyists cut deals,
ensuring that about 80 per cent of laws sail through the EU
legislature with a minimum of public debate. One might wish for the
parliament, as the EU’s only directly elected institution, to stand
up for more openness. Instead, Bickerton says, the opposite is true.
As in some Faustian bargain, the parliament sells its soul as the
representative body of the peoples of Europe in order to maximise its
influence as an organ of the EU’s hybrid lawmaking system.
For all the EU’s
faults, Bickerton leans to the view that Europe would be a more
unstable place without it. “To argue that life would be better
without the EU implies a heroic effort of constructing afresh a new
model of existence for Europe and for the countries that make it up.
In a risk-averse age, replacing the EU with something else is perhaps
the riskiest of all projects,” he says.
Merritt is no more
enamoured than Bickerton with the EU’s lack of openness,
commenting: “Distant, remote, inscrutable, politically
unanswerable, untouched by the new austerity, and seemingly
indifferent to criticism, the EU institutions have increasingly fewer
friends or even sympathetic ears”. However, he says it is not all
their fault: “Blaming Brussels for Europe’s weaknesses is to
shoot the messenger. The member governments are in the EU’s driving
seat, and they have been making a poor job of driving.”
The founder of
Friends of Europe, a Brussels think-tank, Merritt has decades of
experience in the EU capital and an undimmed passion for a united
Europe: “the case for genuine political integration”, he writes,
is “no longer a theoretical goal but a practical necessity”. His
book’s chief virtue is that, with chapters on Africa, Asia and the
digital revolution, it places the EU’s challenges in broader global
and technological contexts. He rightly emphasises that, for the sake
of Europe’s younger generations, the vital task is to inject more
dynamism into the economy so that Europe, which at times seems to
display a “cultural resistance to becoming more
innovation-friendly”, can hold its own in an increasingly
competitive world.
Merritt pinpoints
the shortcomings of the commission, which he describes as staffed by
virtually unsackable officials immersed in “a culture of arrogance
and inertia”. As for the EU legislature, it “isn’t a real
parliament: it can’t raise taxes, it can’t declare war, and it
doesn’t provide the EU executive with any sort of democratic
legitimacy. That’s the nub of the EU’s problem: when things go
wrong, there’s no mechanism for ousting those who have been
responsible for taking far-reaching political decisions on behalf of
the people of Europe”.
Such criticisms have
force because the author making them is a devout EU supporter. By
contrast, Gillingham — an American historian of modern Europe and
an outspoken critic of the Union — has written a book whose anti-EU
animus submerges its more perceptive passages. The chapters on EEC
history up to the early 1980s are a useful corrective to much writing
on the EU, insofar as they stress the importance for Europe’s
postwar development of non-European factors, such as expanding global
trade and the protection provided by Washington’s leadership of the
western alliance.
Once the book turns
to events after 1985, however, everyone and everything involved with
the EU comes under sneering attack. The ideas of Jacques Delors, the
commission’s most influential president, who served from 1985 to
1995, are “invariably woolly and tedious, as well as
contradictory”. Jean-Claude Juncker, Commission president since
2014, is an “apparatchik” who is well-versed in “Orwellian
policymaking”. There is a “pervasive culture of corruption” in
Europe and “the so-called European Dream is dead”.
Gillingham’s
polemic might have carried more weight if his book were not riddled
with basic errors of fact. He wrongly describes Antoine Pinay as
Charles de Gaulle’s prime minister in the 1960s (Pinay was premier
in 1952-53 and finance minister in 1958-60). He misdates the start of
François Mitterrand’s term as French president to 1978 (it was
1981). He incorrectly says Silvio Berlusconi first became Italian
prime minister in 1992 (it was 1994). Bizarrely, he states that
Pascal Lamy was “president of the IMF” (no such job exists, and
Lamy was director-general of the World Trade Organisation).
Gillingham has a
point when he asserts that the EU’s “present sorry state was not
predetermined, but due to a history of unsound thinking, bad
attitudes, poor policymaking and inertia”. However, one does not
have to be a blind admirer of the EU to recognise the argument of
Simms, Bickerton and Merritt that Europe, including Britain, might be
in even more trouble without it. In less than a month we shall know
whether a majority of Britons agree.
Britain’s Europe:
A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation, by Brendan Simms, Allen
Lane, RRP£20, 352 pages
The European Union:
A Citizen’s Guide, by Chris Bickerton, Pelican, RRP£8.99, 304
pages
Slippery Slope:
Europe’s Troubled Future, by Giles Merritt, OUP, RRP£16.99, 288
pages
The EU: An Obituary,
by John R Gillingham, Verso, RRP£12.99/$19.95, 288 pages
Tony Barber is the
FT’s Europe editor
Photograph: Reuters
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