Until the French referendum, on 29 May, the European project was protected by an aura of inevitability. In 50 years since the Treaty of Rome, there had been many setbacks, even periods when the project seemed to have lost all its momentum. Yet each time the machine had started to move forward again. No one who had followed the post-war history of Europe could doubt the destination: a United States of Europe.
Nor could one doubt the cultural basis of the project. The new Europe was based on the Franco-German alliance, and on the political traditions of France and Germany. It was not democratic or, in the English sense, liberal. It was administrative, with power at the centre, operated by a bureaucracy and by a political elite. The agencies of Europe are all interlocking — the Commission, the Council of Ministers, the Parliament (which is elected on a party list system which gives control to the party managers), the European Court of Justice.
Not all, but the great majority, of the members of these bodies share the same vision of the future of Europe. Many of them have worked together for most of their adult lives. They are a caste of oligarchs, bound together by a common belief system, a common experience and common privileges. Many of them, as individuals, have considerable charm and ability.
Europe was marching towards a bureaucratic prison camp
The system is not democratic, but consists of the centralisation of power by a bureaucratic elite. John Strachey, a Labour intellectual in the period of the Attlee Government of the late 1940s, once said that "the gentleman in Whitehall really does know best". The gentlemen in Brussels really believe that they know best. In some ways such a system is benign. In the terms used by the ancient Greeks, it may not be a democracy, but it is not a tyranny either.
The intellectual ancestors of the Brussels machine are not the great tyrants, like Julius Caesar or Adolf Hitler, but the great administrators, like Colbert, or the anonymous civil servants who held the Roman Empire together for 400 years. In terms of German history, the reference point is Bismarck and the Hegelian concept of the state.
The project has been largely guided by the French, with Germany providing the ultimate economic and political power. After the war, Germany adopted the constitution of a Federal Republic, with certain modest powers being exercised by the individual states, the Länder, such as Bavaria. The Bavarian conservative, Franz Josef Seranes, used to compare Bavaria’s role in Germany with Britain’s role in Europe. He used to tease his British acquaintances by arguing that Bavaria did not have an independent air force, and therefore Britain did not need one.
The treaty for a European constitution was supposed to distinguish between the powers reserved to the centre and those reserved to the states. That is the purpose of all such constitutions, of the US Constitution, the German and so on. In fact, the proposed European constitution was so badly drawn that it was wholly centralising — all power flowed to the central institutions. That reflected the real nature of the European project and the degenerate quality of the third generation of its leaders, both among European bureaucrats and politicians. In this respect the constitution was shameless.
Big battles ahead
This view has been questioned, but becomes clear when one reads the list of so called ‘competences’, which are the powers given to the centre or to the individual states. There is a list of ‘exclusive competences’ which belong to the European Union as such. The states would have, in theory, no claim to these powers, though it would have taken another 20 years for the union actually to bring them under complete central control.
The other competences are described as ‘shared competences’; the union has the right to decide how they should be shared, but only when the union did not choose to act would the nations be free to do so. There are no ‘exclusive competences’ for the nations, and the ‘shared competences’ are defined by the union.
The constitution is, therefore, a scheme for transferring power to the centre. Power now belongs, largely, to the people, to the parliaments, to the national governments; it would be transferred upwards to the central organisation. This could only be prevented if the treaty was not ratified, and that depended on the referendum process. Originally Tony Blair did not intend to hold a referendum in Britain.
However, he faced two elections, the European election in June 2004, and the general election in May of 2005. He came to the conclusion that he might lose both if he had to fight on the basis of ‘no referendum’ and ‘ratify the treaty’.
He, therefore, postponed the issue by promising a referendum, and, as with the euro, had the good fortune that other events made it possible both to avoid an election on Europe and to avoid a referendum. The French and Dutch saved him. But, of course, there will be big battles ahead. May 29 was not Dunkirk, a successful retreat. It was more like Alamein, ‘the end of the beginning’. Europe still has to be set free.
Lord Rees-Mogg is Editor-in-chief of The Fleet Street Letter. He is the former Editor of The Times.
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