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CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY -
UCL061211
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON
RT HON JACK STRAW MP, VISITING PROFESSOR IN PUBLIC POLICY
INAUGURAL LECTURE- 6 DECEMBER 2011
BRITAIN AND EUROPE
In October 1818 the Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh told his Prime Minister,
Lord Liverpool, that the Congress System which he, Castlereagh had been so
instrumental in establishing, amounted to “a new discovery in the European
government...giving to the counsels of the Great Powers the efficiency and almost
the simplicity of a single state”.1
The Congress System had been established towards the end of the Napoleonic
Wars by the allies, better to secure some longer term peace and stability across a
Europe ravaged by two decades of war. As Dr John Bew, the author of an excellent
new biography of Castlereagh, recites, faced with scepticism by his Prime Minister,
the anvil of events, and his own suspicion of the “abstractions and sweeping
generalities” of some of his continental allies, Castlereagh quickly abandoned his
more grandiose ambitions for “the simplicity of a single [European] state” and worked
the system in more limited ways to maintain a balance of power, and so protect
Britain’s world-wide interests.2
Roughly speaking, the Congress System did, from a British perspective, produce the
longer-term peace and stability which was its purpose, at least until the Crimean War
of 1853-56. But that stability came at a price, of standing by as unrepresentative, and
undemocratic regimes took the most barbarous actions internally to preserve their
power; in turn building up huge pressure, which from time to time could not be
contained, into civil insurrection and war. The final remnants of the system exploded
in the carnage of the First World War.
This lecture is entitled “Britain and Europe”. In it, I shall concentrate on the 65 years
since the end of the Second World War, and seek to offer my own assessment of the
progress which has been made, and the dangers which lie ahead. I opened with this
quotation from Castlereagh, for two linked reasons.
First, because when I was reading Bew’s biography, this passage leapt from the
page. Castlereagh’s style may have been dated; its sense, however, is
extraordinarily contemporary – I have heard exactly such sentiments, of the ambition
for something like a single European state, from many on the continent; and that
notion has strong resonance in many of the preambular paragraphs of key EU
treaties.3
1
Bew, John, Castlereagh (Quercus Publishing, 2011), p.454
Ibid
3
CONSOLIDATED VERSIONS OF THE TREATY ON EUROPEAN UNION AND THE TREATY ON THE FUNCTIONING OF
THE EUROPEAN UNION (2010/C 83/01). Preamble:
“DRAWING INSPIRATION from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, from which
have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person,
freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law,
RECALLING the historic importance of the ending of the division of the European continent and the
need to create firm bases for the construction of the future Europe,
CONFIRMING their attachment to the principles of liberty, democracy and respect for human rights
and fundamental freedoms and of the rule of law.”
2
1
Second, because the ultimate collapse of the Congress System is a reminder of the
drum beat of European history, that few political institutions, supra-national ones
included, are perpetual; the more entrenched they become, the greater stake
political elites have in them; but without periodic mechanisms to refresh the popular
legitimacy of those elites and their institutions, they can fail.
The Council of Europe
Let me turn first to the Council of Europe before I then go on to look at the European
Union.
We were instrumental in establishing the Council of Europe. Churchill had spoken
about the idea in 1943.There was all-party agreement in the UK. The Council was
agreed by ten West European states by the Treaty of London in May 1949. Its most
decisive achievement was the European Convention of Human Rights, signed in
1950. Its drafting was led by the Conservative jurist, David Maxwell Fyfe, who later
served Churchill first as Home Secretary then as Lord Chancellor.4 The
establishment of the European Court of Human Rights followed in 1959. Today, all
47 member states of the Council accept its jurisdiction.
We were, however, out of step in one important respect with most of our fellow
members. For years we did not acknowledge within our own domestic law the rights
which the Convention provided. That changed in 1998, when (I am proud to say), I
took through the Human Rights Bill to incorporate most Convention rights into UK
law. The Act came into effect on 2 October 2000.5
Well before the Human Rights Act came into force, however, judgements of the
Strasbourg Court had had a significant effect on the constitutional landscape and the
machinery of government here in the UK. It is, for example, now extraordinary to
conceive of a time when even the existence of our security and intelligence agencies
was not officially acknowledged – “not averred” was the term- still less was there any
statutory basis for the powers which they and Ministers supervising them exercised,
of intrusive surveillance, ‘phone tapping, covert entries and the rest. But that
continued to be the reality for five years after I first became an MP. Though there
had long been a healthy debate in the UK about the need for a statutory base for the
agencies, it was decisions of Strasbourg which forced the hand of Ministers.6
It is in the nature of the necessary separation of powers in democratic states that
courts may make decisions which are not appreciated by Ministers and the
Executive. Since judicial reviews in our domestic jurisdiction, and actions in the
Strasbourg Court have the executive as the respondent, that will be the inevitable
outcome of some of these courts’ proceedings.
In the UK the existence of the European Court, and since 2000, of the Human Rights
Act, has overall been beneficial to the quality of life of the law-abiding, if too, it has
been used sometimes by those who are criminals or terrorists. But in a democracy
the least meritorious must be accorded basic rights, even if they do not respect them
in others.
Across Europe, the Council of Europe and its constituent institutions, has helped
embed basic principles of common decency and treatment of others, and is
4
A position he continued to occupy under Anthony Eden and Harold MacMillan- http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/33301
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/42/contents
6
)- Disclosure of a range of information was decriminalised under the Official Secrets Act (OSA) 1989; the Security Service
(MI5) was placed on a statutory basis by the Secrity Services Act 1989; the Secretary Intelligence Service (MI6) and GCHQ
were placed on a statutory basis by the Intelligence Services Act 1994, which also set up a parliamentary committee to oversee
the work of the security and intelligence services...”A closer look at some of these developments reveals, it will be argued, that
they were not invariably imposed due to decisions of the ECtHR, although such decisions have had a significant impact on this
context.” [Civil Liberties and Human Rights- Helen Fenwick and Kevin Kerrigan (Routledge, NY & Oxon- 2011).]
https://www.mi5.gov.uk/output/statutory-basis.html
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/13/contents
5
2
continuing to do so. Of the ten original members of the Council of Europe six had
suffered occupation under the Nazis, one – Italy – had itself been a fascist state and
an Axis power. There was no rule of history which guaranteed that, post-war, these
states would become relatively mature democracies. Still more was that the case for
Spain, Portugal, and Greece, each with fascist governments until the mid-seventies7,
and the Eastern European states which were part of the Soviet bloc until the fall of
the Berlin Wall in November 1989.
The Council, and its associated institutions, have provided the platform for the
standards of human rights which EU members are expected to achieve.
Today, patient work by the Human Rights Commissioner, and the Monitoring
Department, is slowly securing improvements to the rule of law in countries like
Russia, much faster in Turkey, and even with recalcitrants like Ukraine is at least
giving authoritative publicity to the egregious defects in their judicial systems.
But the Strasbourg Court is far from perfect, and it has fallen victim to a
characteristic of supra-national organisations of all kinds, of widening its scope too
far, and with insufficient care as to how it sustains its own legitimacy.
The case of Hirst v UK [2005] illustrates my point well.8 Hirst claimed that the law in
the UK denying convicted prisoners, like him, the right to vote whilst incarcerated
was a breach of his human rights. By a majority – but with a group of mainly senior
judges against – the Court agreed with him.
As Justice Secretary it fell to me to decide what to do about this decision. I did not
agree with it on its merits. But I’ve disagreed with plenty of Court decisions, and
recognised my responsibility to implement them – as for example the Labour
Government was proposing to do in the case of Marper, which restricted the holding
of DNA indefinitely.9 My concern on this occasion went wider. It was that this was not
an appropriate category of case for the Court to decide; it should have been left to
the UK’s institutions to determine, under the “margin of appreciation”. Moreover,
even if I had been an enthusiast for implementing the decision, such was, and is, the
level of popular and Parliamentary opposition there was little chance of gaining a
majority for a wholesale change in the law before the last Election; even less now. I
formed an alliance with a senior Conservative MP, David Davis whose human rights’
credentials are impeccable.10
David and I sponsored a major Commons’ debate on the issue of prisoner votes in
February in 2011.The voting was ten to one in favour of our motion of opposition to
prisoner votes in the UK.11
David’s and my central point was that if the Strasbourg Court moved away too far
from the purposes for which it was established, and used the concept of the “living
law” to widen its jurisdiction in ways never anticipated by those who drafted and
agreed its founding treaties, it set itself up as a Supreme Court for member states;
but without proper legitimacy, and crucially without that democratic over-ride which is
a feature of every judicial system in every democracy in the world, however strong
may be the powers of their supreme courts.
This widening jurisdiction has produced another, practical, set of problems – namely
the overloading of the case load of the Court. The back log of pending cases now
stands at 140 000.12 Many of the cases it receives from Italy are about the
7
Francisco Franco died in 1975, Carnation Revolution took place in Portugal in 1974 and the Junta fell in Greece in 1974.
8
http://www.unlock.org.uk/userfiles/file/Votes/Hirst%20v%20UK%20Grand%20Chamber%20Judgement%206%20Oct%202005.pdf
9
http://www.bailii.org/eu/cases/ECHR/2008/1581.html
He it was who forced a by-election, so great was his opposition to our proposal for a maximum of 42 days detention before
charge in terrorist cases.
11
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmhansrd/cm110210/debtext/110210-0004.htm
12
http://www.humanrightseurope.org/2011/01/complaints-to-echr-on-the-rise/
10
3
extraordinary delays in the Italian system; petitioners then get faced with delays
almost as long in Strasbourg. Some reforms are in hand. But the Court needs to go
further. It needs to redefine the concept of the “living law” on a narrower basis. It
should accord a greater latitude – through the “margin of appreciation” – to member
states, not least to recognise the absence of any democratic override for their
decisions. It must filter cases better; and, certainly in respect of Article VIII cases
where unfounded asylum seekers try to block their otherwise safe return to their
countries on grounds that this would interfere with their right to a family life here, not
permit the use of “Rule 39” to stop their imminent deportation.
I do not want a train wreck from the current impasse over Hirst. I want Strasbourg to
succeed. But to continue to prosper it needs to return more closely to its core
purposes, do less, and do it better.
The European Union
Whilst we were instrumental in the founding of the Council of Europe, we came in
late through a side door of the European Union, to a structure moulded, not in our
image, but in the image of continental institutions with a different provenance.
Whether we could, or should, have embraced the Messina Conference (1955) and
the original Treaty of Rome (signed 1957) which followed is a moot point over which
historians will argue for many decades.
Given the freshness of the experience of the war, the very limited progress at the
time on de-colonisation, the profound connection still felt for those in the British
Commonwealth and Empire, whose people had fought at such cost for us, our strong
trade links with them, and the concern to sustain sterling as a reserve currency, the
odds were going to be stacked against any leader and government embarking on
that course. Nor was it obvious that the unstable French Fourth Republic was so
close to collapse, and that General de Gaulle would take power, as he did, in 1958.
De Gaulle’s inherent suspicion of the “Anglo-Saxons” put paid to both Macmillan’s,
and later Wilson’s applications to join in the sixties. Significantly, though, given the
later position of the Conservative Party, it is worth noting that in respect of the first
application (by the Macmillan government) in 1961 de Gaulle, “was determined to
keep us out, says the British diplomat, Michael Butler, ‘because he feared the UK
would gang up with Holland and Germany to create a Europe which was both too
federal and too closely linked to the United States.’”13
Whichever side of the argument one was on at the time, Ted Heath’s successful
negotiation ten years later for membership of the then European Economic
Community was heroic.
As it happens, I was on the other side. I worked in the “No” campaign in the 1975
referendum, which – two and a half years after we had joined – was established to
determine whether we should remain members, on slightly amended terms, or leave.
I learnt a lot in that campaign; not least about how widely measures of public opinion
may vary, according to the circumstances in which any question is posed. Before the
campaign started opinion polls suggested that a majority were on the “No” side. But
as people had to decide, as a choice was forced on them, their view changed. In the
event, and with an unusual homogeneity,14 the country voted two to one to stay in.15
Britain could have adopted a different course those years ago. Re-reading the
pamphlets from the “Yes” and “No” campaigns what’s striking is the similarity of the
13
Ziegler, Philip- Edward Heath (HarperPress, 2010)
The country voting yes in most of the 68 administrative counties, regions and Northern Ireland. Only Shetland and the
Western Isles voted against. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/june/6/newsid_2499000/2499297.stm
15
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11769554
14
4
argument on each side – each is promising prosperity, etc, if we stay in or leave,
and disaster if the opposite course was chosen. We stayed in.
Thirty six years on, the world has changed, and so has the EU – now with 27
members rather than 9. It is much larger, more pervasive institution than even its
founders could have envisaged, but one now facing a near-existential crisis beyond
their worst fears.
I decided more than two decades ago that the “In” or “Out” argument over the EU
was long past. We were in. Our institutions, our markets, our businesses, our people
had meanwhile not just adapted to that new reality, but in many ways embraced it.
That has happened not least because of the cultural, social benefits of membership,
as well as any economic benefits, whose value, whilst difficult to measure, is
immense.
I still have my first passport, issued in the early nineteen sixties. At the back there
are two pages which the bank had to endorse whenever one had drawn foreign
currency – including French francs, or the Deutsch mark. A maximum of £50 was
allowed for any one transaction, £250 over a year, without special permission. The
EU – like the Council of Europe – has some noble achievements to its credit; free
movement of people, and labour, of capital, of goods; alongside all of these, the free
movement of ideas, and magnetic attraction of the models of liberal democracy
which have spread south and east across most of Europe.
The EU has not only changed in size in the 40 years since the UK got agreement to
join, but also in the way in the scope and manner of its operation. The 1975 “Yes”
campaign literature, and the associated pamphlets from the British Government, are
replete with re-assurance that we would not “have to obey laws passed by unelected
“faceless bureaucrats” sitting in their headquarters in Brussels”.16 “For a few
commercial and industrial purposes there is a need for Community Law”, but
“English Common Law is not affected”17 and “The [British] Minister…can veto any
proposal for a new tax or new law if he considers it to be against British interests.”18
Such vetoes are now available in respect only of taxation, criminal justice policy,
social security, treaty changes and EU funding.19 A move to qualified majority voting
was inevitable if the EU, at 15, then 25, now 27, was not to grind to a halt. That
began with Maastricht; the arrangements are now in the Lisbon Treaty.20
Driving these changes has been the expansion in the ambition behind the European
Union – for an “ever closer union” and everything that goes with that.
However, a key feature of the pursuit of this ambition - of which the current euro
crisis is the most serious but not the only example - is that this has been led
principally by Europe’s political elites, who have sometimes been less than careful to
ensure that what they have been doing on behalf of the peoples of Europe has had
their active knowledge and consent.
16
“Britain’s New Deal for Europe, HMG, 1975
“Yes” pamphlet, Britain in Europe, 1975
Ibid
19
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3595155.stm
20
By which measures may be passed if a vote is passed by a majority of countries (55% if acting on a proposal from the
Commission or from the High Representative or else 72%) and a majority of the EU population (65%).Lisbon Treaty:
http://register.consilium.europa.eu/pdf/en/08/st06/st06655.en08.pdf.
-Until 2014 voting is governed by the Treaty of Nice: The following conditions apply to taking decisions:

Majority of countries: 50% if proposal made by the Commission, or else 67%, and

Majority of voting weights: 74%, and

Majority of population: 62%.
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/en/treaties/dat/12002M/pdf/12002M_EN.pdf
17
18
5
The two groups have not necessarily been in the same place. Research in other
European states [e.g. Hooghe 200321] suggests that the publics there have wanted
to “Europeanise market-flanking policies, and elites do not”. Two sets of opinion data
for the UK over the last 12 months suggest that, by surprising margins, the public
here want the UK to work “closely with the rest of the EU” on counter-terrorism,
policing, illegal migration, international trade, defence, foreign policy, and relations
with the BRICs. In a commentary the IPPR note “that all this suggests that while
voters clearly lack knowledge of and support for the EU as an institution, they still
recognise the case for a supra-national body at the European level covering a wide
range of issues”.22
Let me put that in my own words. The British public, like their counter-parts across
Europe, recognise that we live in an inter-dependent world, and have actively to
cooperate with other nations, especially those in Europe; their concern is about the
institutional structure which has been established to deliver that – the EU.
Political elites are a feature of every political system. They are a natural
consequence of leadership in a complex society. One characteristic of leadership is
to take those being led into territory in which they have not been before, to make
difficult, and in the short-term unpopular, decisions with the hope of vindication in the
longer term. Most high level political decisions are no more suitable for plebiscitary
endorsement than are military decisions.
There can be something of an unspoken, unwritten compact between leaders and
the led that, in return for a greater good, some aspects of national life and public
policy should be “beyond the reach or pressure of voters”, to pick up a rather stark
phrase of David Miliband’s in a lecture he gave in May.23 David was talking of
“European integration and trans-atlanticism” which, he said, had in Germany, over
time, become “non-negotiable articles of faith”.
In different areas I have seen this “compact” operate in the UK. Take capital
punishment or abortion – two issues, which in some systems – for example the US –
can be the focus of furious partisan dispute. Here, an understanding amongst the
elite to treat them as matters of “conscience” has effectively removed them, first from
inter-party argument, and then from active political discourse altogether.
Elites can operate successfully in this way provided that their decision-making has
legitimacy. In national jurisdictions, elections to national parliaments secure that. In
Germany, for example, it remains open to parties to bring issues of European
integration and atlanticism back within their reach, just as here in the UK abortion or
capital punishment could become live issues again at the polls.
In the European Union, by contrast, legitimacy is much more problematic.
The need to fill the perceived “democratic deficit” was one of the major arguments in
favour of a direct franchise for the European Parliament (EP) and more recently, an
extension of its powers of “co-decision”. The dismal truth, however, is that the longer
the EP has been established, the less has been voters’ regard for it. Turnouts in EP
elections across the EU have slumped – from 62% in 1979, to 43% in 2009, with that
in key states like Germany and France showing declines rather greater than the
average.24 Where once the UK’s turnout – 32% in 1979 – made us the outlier, we are
not now far off the average. As turnouts have fallen, so it has become easier for
parties that do not enjoy success in national elections to become represented
21
http://masterue.usal.es/practicas/Sistemas%20de%20partidos/Hooghe.pdf
IPPR, Will Straw, Euroscepticism in the UK (London, October 2011).
23
Miliband, David- Europe Between America and China (The Polish-British Roundtable, Krakow; May 12th, 2011)
24
http://www.ukpolitical.info/european-parliament-election-turnout.htm
22
6
making the discourse in the EP more extreme, less representative, and less
productive.
There is much academic literature on the subject of legitimacy in the EU.25 Some
scholars have argued that there is a relatively new European polity which shows
similar or even identical levels of democracy to those of established liberal
democratic states [Zweifel, 200226]; some argue that such legitimation is not
necessary at the European level [Majone 199827]; others argue that whilst the EU
may not suffer all the democratic insufficiencies for which it has been accused, it
does bear one central democratic shortcoming – the absence of public contestation
for political leadership and over public policy.28
All this research was conducted before we reached the current, acute, stage of the
euro crisis. I cannot be certain, but I suspect that any new data would tend to confirm
the third view I mentioned – of a significant democratic deficit because of the
absence of public contestation for leadership or policy. Indeed a characteristic of the
collective leadership at an EU level in the last two decades has been of great
reluctance to submit even major treaty changes to a popular vote for fear that the
electorate will give the wrong answer, or, to use the Leninist explanation for avoiding
the populace, display a "false consciousness”.
There are always good reasons for not submitting proposals to plebiscite. I have
deployed some of them myself. But there may be adverse consequences; in the
case of the euro, serious ones.
I thought that I would need to spend some time in this lecture with a detailed
exegesis as to why I believed that the euro was fundamentally flawed in its
execution. That was before Jacques Delors’ interview with the Daily Telegraph,
which was published last Saturday. In that he lamented that the EU “Council of
Ministers should have made it its business to police the eurozone economies and
make sure that the member states really were following the criteria of economic
convergence. This did not happen…there was a reluctance to address any of the
problems.” “The finance ministers did not want to see anything disagreeable which
they would be forced to deal with.” Then the global credit crisis struck, and all the
defects were exposed. “29
25
E.g. de Vries, Walczak and Rosema, Dual Legitimation in the European Union: The Impact of European Integration Attitudes
in National and European Elections- (Paper prepared for the Piredeu Conference, Brussels, November 2010).
26
Zweifel, Thomas D. 2002. … Who is Without Sin Cast the First Stone: The EU’s Democratic Deficit in Comparison. Journal of
European Public Policy 9: 812-40.
27
Majone, Giandomenico. 1998. Europe’s ‘Democratic Deficit’: The Question of Standards. European Law Journal 4: 5-28.
28
Føllesdal, Andreas & Hix, Simon. 2006. Why There is a Democratic Deficit in the EU: A Response to Majone and
Moravcsik. Journal of Common Market Studies 44: 533-562. p.556
29
The Telegraph, Jacques Delors: Euro would still be strong if it had been built to my plan (Saturday 3rd December)
7
As Delors’ comments indicate, it is not any alleged “faceless Brussels bureaucrats”
who are to blame for this failure. Were it, the remedy would be easy – unmask them,
hold them to account. The failure is altogether more subtle, and more pervasive. It
flows from the method of doing business which the European political elite has
developed, of believing that there will always be a form of words to paper over
divisions, and – to echo Delors’ phrase – not to do anything “disagreeable”. The
fatal flaw in the design of the euro - that any single currency needs some of the fiscal
institutions of a single state behind it - was highlighted well before the euro was
agreed, as Delors concedes. Not to have addressed the current account balances
building up inside the Eurozone before the crisis unfolded was irresponsible.
30
Respective current account balances
How anyone could have considered the bond spread before the euro began and
thought that a convergence of yields was going to continue forever in the ramshackle
system established is beyond me.
31
The clearest, most prescient warnings of a catastrophe round the corner were
advanced well before the 2008 crash. For example, Paul de Grauwe, in the book
Economics of Monetary Union showed, using 1999-2005 data how the single
nominal interest rate across the euro-zone was masking great differences in the real
interest rate in different member states, which in turn was fuelling the extra-ordinary
real estate bubble which occurred in countries like Spain and Ireland. The author
30
31
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2011/02/weodata/weoselgr.aspx
House of Commons Library, 17/11/11.
8
said of this: “the danger is that when the crash comes, the economy will go through a
wrenching deflationary adjustment”.32
But the elites either would not, or could not, heed the warnings.
Would plebiscites on the euro have avoided the system’s design faults? They may
have. What elections and referenda do is to subject leaders, and policies, to the
most intensive stress-testing. If the euro had passed, it would have been altogether
better designed. If there had been “no” votes and the system had not gone ahead,
the disaster through which Europe is now living would have been avoided.
What approach should the UK now adopt?
1. Whatever mistakes have been made in the past, it is in our interests that the euro
system should be repaired with as little damage as possible. Schadenfreude is not a
policy.
2. We are not members of the eurozone. Nor will we be. But we have a huge interest
– direct and indirect – in how the eurozone seeks to resolve this crisis. We should
not hector our European partners – such an approach was never persuasive – but
we should set out our analysis of what has gone right, and wrong, for the EU; the
likely consequences of a closer fiscal union; and our own vision of the European
cooperation we need for the future.
3. From the time that Labour abandoned its “leave now” policy after the 1983
election there has been a broad cross-party approach that we do best for our nation
in Europe when we are fully engaged, not on the sidelines. As a new Home
Secretary in 1997 I came to negotiating inside the EU with some caution. But I
quickly spotted that, partly because of the strength of political elites on the Continent,
and the more personal nature of alliances than we are used to with our very strong
institutions in the UK, it is possible to make a good deal of progress on things which
matter to us. I can think of many examples. I’ll give one. I doubt that I could have
successfully guided the Foreign Ministers Council to agree – at 27 – formally to
starting accession negotiations with Turkey, unless Tony Blair, I, and all my
colleagues had been truly inserted into the system. The Shadow Foreign Secretary
Douglas Alexander spelt out the need for such an approach in an important speech
he gave last month.33
I think the senior leadership of the Conservative Party has now worked this one out;
but they have lost a lot of time and influence meanwhile.
4. The academic evidence is now strong that the euro – even during its benign
period – has not produced the benefits anticipated. It is the single market, not the
euro, which has been the driver of greater growth, and inter-dependence between
member states. The Euro needs repair, for sure, but policy makers need to
concentrate on how the single market can be made to operate more effectively.
A feature of the political elites in Europe has been intellectual arrogance. It’s a more
modern-day version of the late Douglas Jay’s famous assertion that “the gentleman
in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know
themselves”.34 Policy makers across the EU need greater urgency to solve the
problems that have been created, but also must show honesty about what has gone
wrong. In repairing the problems they must be clear what the roots of such
32
33
34
De Gauwe, Paul, The Economics of Monetary Union (OUP, 2007), p.201
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/interactive/2011/nov/14/douglas-alexander-speech-policy-eu
Jay, Douglas- The Socialist Case (Faber & Faber, London;1937), p.317
9
shortcomings were and ensure mistakes are not repeated as they lay the framework
of what appears to be tighter, if not complete, fiscal union among eurozone
members.
Critically, as a large part of the EU enters into a still deeper union, and the demands
for a referendum, at least in the UK, grow louder, the political elites must be certain
that they carry the support of their electorate and do not, in repairing a fiscal and
monetary crisis, instigate a democratic crisis that has the potential to threaten the
institutional fabric of the EU and its member states. The seeds I am afraid are
there, as we can see from the vulgar megaphones used by the popular press in
Greece, and Germany. The Greeks did fiddle their national statistics egregiously;
and though they were victims of the Nazis in the war (as were many other EU
member states) Germany has changed fundamentally since then. On the other side,
whilst it’s true that German taxpayers are resistant to “bailing out” countries less well
governed than theirs, it is also the case that whilst Germany practiced prudence at
home it was indifferent to (and its banks complicit in) profligacy abroad. To export
cars, Germany also had to export credit. When Wolfgang Schäuble, the German
Finance Minister complains of the “unsustainable levels of debt and deficits” in other
states he might do well to examine the beam in his own eye, as well as the moat in
others’.35
5. Shimon Peres, President of Israel, once observed that “if a problem does not have
a solution it may not be a problem, just a fact.”36 Our absence from the euro is an
accomplished fact. There are (mainly) upsides to this; but some downsides too. We
should avoid falling into the trap of suggesting that we are “outside” Europe or the
EU as a result. We are not. We cannot expect to be involved in the detailed
decisions on the euro – save where they may directly impact on our interests. But we
remain a major economy in Europe, a major market for the eurozone, and there is
plenty else on which we should be engaged, from trade, the single market, through
to defence, security, foreign policy – and the future size, and shape of the EU itself.
6. In my view, any discussions about the future make-up of, and high-level
engagement within, the EU must include relations with Turkey. I commend the
stance taken by Prime Minister Cameron and Foreign Secretary Hague on this. I am
well aware that because France and Germany have changed their positions from the
constructive approach they took in 2005 progress on Turkey’s EU membership is at
a snail’s pace. But we should use all the influence we have to unblock some of the
chapters – it is for example absurd to block the Economic chapters, given Turkey’s
decade-long progress – and seek a consensus so that the Greek Cypriots can no
longer subordinate Europe’s critical strategic interest in Turkey to their narrow
sectarian interests.
7. Last, we should seek to do in the EU what we are now seeking with the Council of
Europe and the European Court of Human Rights. The British public’s view of the
priorities for European cooperation – which I quoted above – are a good indicator of
what should be the new agenda – EU action to cope with the rise of Asia, in the
prevention of terrorism, climate change, the Arab spring; major foreign policy
challenges like Iran; less tinkering with matters which should be left to member
states. There is, for example, no reason why the hours of junior doctors should be
determined at EU level (as they have been through ECJ judgements in SiMAP and
Jaeger).37
35
36
37
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/97b826e2-d7ab-11e0-a06b-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1feHlgneA
http://www.analects-ink.com/weekend/020308.html
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200304/ldselect/ldeucom/67/6706.htm
10
The very term “democracy” was itself one of abuse in Castlereagh’s era for the
political elite of the time. Indeed, he would have regarded a “democratic deficit” as an
advantageous feature of the Congress System he helped establish. He saw
democracy as a severe threat to the established order, and balance of power, which
he was so anxious to preserve. But it was the failure of this system to adapt to the
popular will, if it ever could, which led to its slow decay, and then collapse. I am not
so apocalyptic about the future of the European Union. It is a union of democratic
states. But it too has to recognise the great dangers of pursuing policies which lack
popular legitimacy, and respond in how it operates, as well as what it does, far
better, if it is to avoid a similar ultimate fate.
-
ENDS -
11