Posted on 12/14/2003 8:00:03 PM PST by witnesstothefall
It is galling to be driven by logic into the 'no' camp
The first committed anti-European I ever met, almost 40 years ago, was Douglas Jay. By a comic irony, he was then president of the Board of Trade in Harold Wilson's government. In Jay, I perceived all that seemed dismaying about little Englanders. His hostility towards Europe was merely one manifestation of a general distaste for abroad, which extended to matters cultural, culinary, climatic and social. Over the decades that followed, similar sentiments betrayed themselves in many Eurosceptics. They seemed oblivious of the fact that, if Britain failed to take its place in Europe, no possible alternative partnership was available, least of all with the US. A clever American diplomat said to me in the early 1990s: "Just remember that the US is interested in Britain only insofar as Britain is a player in Europe."
The first lines of Hugo Young's masterpiece, This Blessed Plot, encapsulated for many of us Britain's European experience: "This is the story of 50 years in which Britain struggled to reconcile the past she could not forget with the future she could not avoid." Tony Blair's commitment to Europe seemed one of the best reasons for supporting him, after watching the Conservative party devour itself, limb by limb, over an agenda that often seemed isolationist.
By now, of course, you will have guessed where this tale is going. Faith in Britain's destiny in Europe has been at the core of my own convictions all my adult life. Yet, suddenly, I find myself hitting the buffers. I can no longer support the government's case for signing up to the European constitution. This week, I join the referendum campaigners.
This does not, I hope, mean becoming a Eurosceptic. Britain's economic relationship with the continent has been a huge and vital success for the past 30 years, and must continue to be so. I reject the Eurosceptic view that the US is our natural partner. If Europe, over the next generation or two, can forge a credible defence and foreign policy identity, then it is critical for Britain to be part of it.
Yet today, we are not being asked to work over 40 years towards a common defence and foreign policy. We are invited to endorse a European constitution that aspires to these things now. It seems self-evident that the rush towards integration, towards Brussels hegemony, is moving far faster than the plausibility of European institutions is growing.
Signing up to the foreign policy provisions of the European constitution is a mockery. In defence, the field about which I am best informed, Europe shows a boundless appetite for creating common structures and bureaucracies, yet lacks the slightest willingness to provide forces to give them substance. Optimists, most of them in Downing Street, suggest that if the bureaucracies are formed, the substance will follow. There are no grounds to believe this.
Unlike the Eurosceptics, I feel no principled fear about losing national sovereignty, which has become an almost meaningless concept. If, over half a century or so, it becomes plain that Europe's institutions - above all, its parliament - have evolved to a point at which they can take the strain, well and good.
Yet today, it is not remotely credible that the European parliament can provide a democratic check upon the doings of the European executive, or that it is progressing towards doing so. Between 1979 and 1999, voting in European elections fell from 63% to 49%, despite compulsory participation in three countries. Against such a background, how can any society sensibly continue a march to closer integration, endorsing the accretion of new powers to Brussels?
Much the same is true of the euro. I have always believed that Britain will eventually belong to a single currency - but eventually is a long time. Today, with France and Germany systematically defying the provisions of the growth and stability pact, how is it possible rationally to endorse a structure in which this shattered agreement features unaltered?
My own fears and doubts, which have been growing for years, are significant only because they are shared by millions of other people who are not in the least anti-European. We have fought manfully to reconcile our European instincts with the reality of what is happening in Brussels, but the contradictions have become too great.
For me, the last straw was the publication last week of Gisela Stuart's Fabian pamphlet, about her experience as the Labour party's representative at the European convention. "Not once," she wrote in a seminal passage of her brave and deeply impressive piece, "in the 16 months I spent on the convention did representatives question whether deeper integration is what the people of Europe want, whether it serves their best interests or whether it provides the best basis for a sustainable structure for an expanding union."
These are damning words. This weekend's EU summit was frustrated by a mere tactical dispute about voting weights. Yet more and more of us feel, like Stuart, that emotional faith in the concept of Europe can no longer blind us to the rational objections to the European constitution.
Europe conducts its affairs in an increasingly fantastic spirit that would be admired by Lewis Carroll, but which becomes frightening when transferred from Wonderland to the political destinies of hundreds of millions of people. Some of us swallowed reservations about the Maastricht treaty because we accepted the assurances of British ministers,that its integrationist provisions would never be enacted.
Today, when those optimistic Tory "wets" have been proved so wrong, it is far harder to accept the European constitution merely by cherishing hopes that it will collapse under the weight of its own follies, together with wilful breaches by the usual suspects, led by France and Italy.
It is always painful to switch political course. It is especially so in the case of Europe, because it puts us in some rotten political company. Yet it no longer seems possible to support the European constitution - as Blair still seems willing to do - merely as an act of faith in a "tidying-up process".
In 1998, Hugo Young rejoiced that Britain's destiny in Europe was at last acknowledged by "a prime minister who did not fight it, and untroubled by the demons of the past, prepared to align the island with its natural hinterland beyond". Yet like Stuart, I no longer feel able to allow my heart to rule my head. Tony Blair's visionary determination to march ever onward into Europe, constitution and all, looks every day less like courage, more like hubris.
We must assume that Blair will refuse a referendum, for the very bad reason that he believes he would lose it. We shall sign up to an unwanted and unworkable constitution, which promises huge damage to the real interests of Europe. For those of us who still want to believe in the cause, it is a bitter pill to be driven by logic into the "no" camp.
· Max Hastings is a former editor of the Daily Telegraph and the London Evening Standard
I am perpetually amazed to hear sentiments from Brits such as "I feel no principled fear about losing national sovereignty." It's like a man having no 'principled fear' of waking up one morning without his testicles.
Brilliant. Remarkable.
(steely)
Umm... might you be looking in the wrong direction, old bean?
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