thinking, the better. There is a strong case for amending the 1972 European Communities Act to establish the ultimate supremacy of Parliament over all Community law, making clear that Parliament can
Britain would not be alone among Community countries in protecting the ultimate supremacy of its domestic law. Germany, for example, does not acknowledge the power of Community law to override its constitutional law, as the Federal Constitutional Court made clear in the Maastricht Treaty case. France likewise maintains the ultimate supremacy of its constitutional law, and its
We in Britain should also set out rules relating to conflicts between Community law and Acts of Parliament which unintentionally arise (as in the
It is not possible to predict precisely where this process of negotiation would end. Whether Britain would be part of an outer tier Community membership, whether we would have some kind of association agreement similar to that enjoyed for years by the European Free Trade Area (EFTA) countries, and later by the European Economic Area (EEA) countries, or whether the European Union would be transmuted into a series of bilateral or multilateral agreements between countries under new treaties in some version of ‘variable geometry’ — all of these are possibilities.
In any case, it is not the form but the substance which is important. What is clear is that a point has been reached — indeed it was reached even before Maastricht — at which the objectives and perceived interests of the different members of the Community radically differ. A clear understanding that this is so and that our strategy for 1996 must be planned accordingly is the essential foundation for success.
Nor do I believe that such an approach is incompatible with the long-term interests of other European countries. If it is allowed to continue on its present course the European Union will fail at all levels. It will exclude the post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe by imposing conditions for entry which they will not be able to fulfil. It will condemn the south European countries to debilitating dependency on hand-outs from German taxpayers. It will be a force for protectionism and instability in the wider world.
If the Franco-German bloc decides to go ahead with the recreation of a modern equivalent of the Carolingian Empire, that is its choice. The consequences will almost certainly be traumatic. In a world of re- awakened nationalism it is hard to imagine Frenchmen accepting in perpetuity their country’s relegation to being a German satellite — any more than it is easy to conceive German taxpayers providing ever greater subsidies for failing regions of foreign countries, as well as housing, health and other benefits for immigrants driven by economic necessity across Germany’s borders, and losing the assurance of the Deutschmark to boot. All this against the background of a shrinking share of world trade and wealth, as investment and jobs moved away from Europe. At some point, the electorates of those countries will rebel against policies which condemn them to economic disruption, rule by remote bureaucracies and the loss of independence.
There is only a limited amount that Britain can do alone to prevent these unwelcome developments. But it is not inappropriate to quote the aspiration of Pitt the Younger to the effect that Britain ‘has saved herself by her exertions, and will… save Europe by her example’. In the meantime, the best service which can be done by those committed to the ideals I set out at Bruges — of freely cooperating nation states which relish free enterprise and welcome free trade — is to gather together all those politicians, jurists, economists, writers and commentators from the different European states to relaunch a movement for transatlantic cooperation including a wider Europe and the Americas. As I urged at the end of the Bruges speech:
Let us have a Europe which plays its full part in the wider world, which looks outward not inward, and which preserves that Atlantic community — that Europe on both sides of the Atlantic — which is our noblest inheritance and our greatest strength.
CHAPTER XIV
New World Disorder
EUPHORIA PUNCTURED
By contrast with European Community affairs, the overall path of events in foreign policy at the time I left office continued initially much as I would have wished. That may seem strange, even callous, in view of the fact that preparations were under way for a war in the Gulf whose exact course we could not predict. Yet I was convinced that the action taken was both right and necessary and that the West or, as we tactfully preferred to describe it, ‘the international community’, would prevail over Saddam Hussein and reverse Iraq’s aggression against Kuwait. Moreover, the crisis had led to a re-establishment of that vital ‘special relationship’ between the United States and Britain which I regarded as central to my approach.
Of greater long-term importance, however, was the end of the Cold War, or again more precisely if less tactfully, the defeat of Soviet communism in that great conflict, without which indeed the relatively smooth passage of events in the Gulf would have been impossible. I had unsuccessfully resisted the reunification of Germany. But the course of events which led to the landslide victory of Solidarity in the Polish elections of June 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall that November, the overthrow of the Ceausescus in Romania in December, the election of Vaclav Havel as President of a free Czechoslovakia in the same month, and the victory of non-communists in elections in Hungary in April 1990 — these I regarded as tangible and profoundly welcome results of the policies which Ronald Reagan and I had pursued unremittingly through the 1980s. And I had no doubt that the momentum was sufficient for the process to continue, for the time being at least. Where that would leave Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union it was as yet impossible precisely to say. I knew enough of the complex history of these regions to understand that the risks of ethnic strife and possible attempts to change borders were real. At least the rejuvenated Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), the result of the Helsinki process, could provide, we then thought, a useful diplomatic framework for resolving disputes. Events have, however, disappointed us.
I had seen for myself in Ukraine how strongly the nationalist tide was flowing against the old Soviet Union.[79] As I told Jacques Delors at the outset of that final European Council I attended, I did not believe that it was for West Europeans to pronounce upon the future shape of the Soviet Union or its successors — that was for the democratic choice of the peoples concerned.[80] But the fact that I did not believe we could see into the future, let alone be confident in shaping it, did not diminish my satisfaction at the changes which were taking place. Millions of subjects of the Soviet Empire and its client states who had been deprived of their basic rights were now living in free democracies. And these new democracies had abandoned their aggressive military alliance, armed with nuclear weapons, against the West. These were great human and security gains. Neither then nor later did I feel any nostalgia for the diplomatically simpler but deadly dangerous Cold War era.
The increasing preoccupation of a weakened, fitfully reforming Soviet Union with its own huge internal