So, as expected the mere mention of the word “sovereignty” was enough to get at least one person foaming at the mouth. Luckily some people managed to understand the premise of my thought experiment. More cider diaries may follow.
Two readers have [independently] sent me links to this Economist article. I think it crystallises the contradiction in many Brexiters’ worldview.
Britain’s attitude towards Europe is marked by one central paradox. On the one hand, Britons take pride in their unique place in European history, particularly during the second world war. From some angles, the country seems obsessed with its “bulldog” strengths: small, plucky, indefatigable. On the other, the same commentators who revel in past triumphs behave as if the country were a shrewish backwater: unable to hold its own in the cut-and-thrust of Brussels parley, forced to its knees by all-powerful Eurocrats. The current debate on the European Union reflects the anomaly particularly well.
The debate therefore turns on Britain’s influence in Brussels. Many there are willing to expend quite some effort binding their cantankerous, Anglo-Saxon island neighbours into the European project. The Dutch, the Scandinavians—and to a lesser extent, the Germans and East Europeans—would make considerable sacrifices to keep Mr Cameron sweet. They like his fiscally conservative, free-market credo, and want to keep him inside the tent if at all possible.
That Britain holds such sway amongst the majority of its EU neighbours (Mr Cameron’s fellow travellers represent some 60% of the union’s population) may come as a surprise to London’s declinist commentariat. But it represents the tip of the iceberg. Elsewhere on the continent, politicians are baffled at the notion that Britain’s membership implies a loss of sovereignty. From abroad, it appears to give the country power beyond its size.
The remarkable aspect of Britain’s euro-dominance is not just that the press at home barely clocks it. It is that the country achieves it without bothering. The UK is hopelessly under-represented in the European institutions. In 2010 only seven British candidates made the final stages of the Commission’s fast-stream recruitment programme (out of 323 available places). Poor language skills erect a solid barrier between Whitehall’s mandarins and their counterparts in Brussels, Paris and Berlin.
Anti-Europeans speak nostalgically of Britain’s buccaneering Victorian heyday—without acknowledging that despite the eurozone crisis, the rise of the BRICs and a long economic slump, the country still plays a leading role in the world’s largest trading bloc. Without noticing their strength, its diplomats and politicians have influenced many existential characteristics of today’s European Union: the single market, the Lisbon agenda, European defence cooperation, myriad consumer protections and energy regulations. But unless they act accordingly, Britons’ reputation as “little Englanders” may prove dangerously self-fulfilling.
Read the whole article.
It is a paradox, yes. Generally, the sceptics want to be in a union of the European states, just not this one!
I’m not sure about the “influence” argument, though. It seems to say that yes, the EU is not as we would wish it to be, because we find ourselves in a minority of one on certain issues and have policies imposed on us as a result. However, we should not leave, because then we would lose the ability to object to those policies being implemented in an important market of ours. The ability (in other words) to raise the same objections that were ignored…
Perhaps if those countries that apparently support our position were to speak up and make that support more visible, we might be able to shape the EU as we and they wish. Perhaps they need the threat of losing the UK in order to galvanise them into action?
Two points then.
1) “sceptics” seem to be doing that rather old and pointless thing of setting the best against the adequate;
2) I wonder whether the gap between who we think are our allies and who are our allies is due to a lack of interest in media coverage of the nitty-gritty of EU machinations and/or a lack of transparency in the deal-making. The contradiction that The Economist points out rears its head in your comment. Either we are in a minority of one or we have the same interests as several other members, on any particular issue. Maybe our friends would be more publicly friendly if we weren’t being so belligerent the whole time!?
1) Whilst I admire and appreciate the wonderfully concise and pithy nature of the comment, BE, could you perhaps explain what you mean a bit more?
2) I do think both of those factors are significant. The media consistently ignore the EU until there is a sudden crisis which apparently appears from nowhere. I don’t for a moment believe that is ever the case -it is like the sudden furore (which you have previously noted) erupting when a new law comes into force and (it seems) the media and the opposition suddenly think the read the law to see what it says. Equally, an EU summit is an exercise in lawmaking by horsetrading, a long way from the Athenian ideal.
What you have to remember here is that Britain still has the potential to be a mindbogglingly disruptive pain in the arse for most of Europe. The reason is simple: the original plan for the EU was for it to supplant nation states with a huge collection of mini-regions, each of which would be small enough that it couldn’t cause enough trouble to start a war.
This was the main thrust behind the regionalisation programme; stealthy fragmentation of nations under the noses of the member states. Unfortunately, whilst this was of the utmost importance, it had to be done quietly without the member states cottoning on, and so was left to functionaries in these member states. We gave the job to John Prescott and in doing so, Blair did us all a very big favour. Prescott was and remains an incompetent, philandering, binging mess of a man; a man less likely to get anything done cannot be imagined.
A second pillar of the EU strategy was the Euro. The ECB and Euro are very carefully designed such that the ECB cannot easily be the lender of last resort; it cannot easily magic money out of thin air to solve problems. As designed, Euro states would get themselves into debt and thus beholden to the centre, and would have no choice but to surrender sovereignty to the EU in return for debt forgiveness. The death-knell for that particular Cunning Plan sounded first in 1973 with the Black-Scholes Equation (which allows the accurate modelling of derivatives) and then in the 1980s, as the rise of the IBM PC clones gave us fast, effective computers on which to run mathematical models of finance.
Before this, if a country got into debt there was a certainty that nobody wanted to lend to it, but an uncertainty about how bad things actually were. This is why the 1970s in Britain were such a horror; we’d dug outselves a debt hole which we couldn’t borrow our way out of (borrowing to invest in industry, to buy our way out) because nobody could model how things might go. Trades Unions were merely a symptom of crap government; they didn’t help matters but they weren’t the actual cause of the woe.
The Euro debt model depended on this uncertainty. Without it, and with debt commoditisation being invented, countries like Greece were free to dig themselves into enormous trouble without this unsettling the markets to any real degree; there wasn’t a slippery slope near disaster, just firm land and a cliff edge. No spur to ceding sovereignty gradually, just happy borrowing until it all goes bang.
The net result of all this is that the EU Grand Plan has failed. We’re not going to get a united states of Europe at all, ever, and the leaders of the EU are not en-route at all, but marching on into blank white map with the occasional “Here Be Dragons” sign. They don’t know where they’re going, they don’t know what to do, and they’re just reacting to crises as they happen. They are driving blind.
What they fear is someone getting off this particular coach to nowhere; if that happens then there’ll likely be an unseemly rush to follow that first one, and this might well leave Germany, France and a few others sitting there in a very reduced EU looking like a right bunch of tits trying to hang on to the tattered remains of their dignity, plus then they have to work out precisely what they’re going to do next.