Mr Chairman, in 1996, when the arrangements agreed at Maastricht are due to be reviewed, and probably a good deal earlier, the Community should move in exactly the opposite direction to that proposed by the European federalists.
A Community of sovereign states committed to voluntary cooperation, a lightly regulated free market and international free trade does not need a Commission in its present form. The government of the Community — to the extent that this term is appropriate — is the Council of Ministers, consisting of representatives of democratically elected national governments. The work of the Commission should cease to be legislative in any sense. It should be an administrative body, like any professional civil service, and it should not initiate policy, but rather carry it out. In doing this it should be subject to the scrutiny of the European Parliament acting on the model of Commons Select Committees. In that way, whatever collective policies or regulations are required would emerge from deliberation between democratic governments, accountable to their national parliaments, rather than being imposed by a bureaucracy with its own agenda.
But need this always be done in the same ‘single institutional framework’? New problems arise all the time. Will these always require the same level and type of cooperation in the same institutions? I doubt it. We need a greater flexibility than the structures of the European Community have allowed until very recently.
A single institutional framework of its nature tends to place too much power with the central authorities. It is a good thing that a Common Foreign Policy will continue to be carried on under a separate treaty and will neither be subject to the European Court nor permit the Commission to fire off initiatives at will. If ‘Europe’ moves into new areas, it must do so under separate treaties which clearly define the powers which have been surrendered.
And why need every new European initiative require the participation of all members of the Community? It will sometimes be the case — especially after enlargement — that only some Community members will want to move forward to another stage of integration.
Here I pay tribute to John Major’s achievement in persuading the other eleven Community heads of government that they could move ahead to a Social Chapter, but not within the Treaty and without Britain’s participation. It sets a vital precedent. For an enlarged Community can only function if we build in flexibility of that kind.
We should aim at a multi-track Europe in which
Supporters of federalism argue, no doubt sincerely, that we can accommodate this diversity by giving more powers to the European Parliament. But democracy requires more than that.
To have a genuine European democracy you would need a Europe-wide public opinion based on a single language; Europe-wide political parties with a common programme understood similarly in all member states; a Europe-wide political debate in which political and economic concepts and words had the same agreed meaning everywhere.
We would be in the same position as the unwieldy Habsburg Empire’s parliament.
That parliament was a notorious failure. There were dozens of political parties, and nearly a dozen peoples were represented — Germans, Italians, Czechs, Poles and so on. For the government to get anything through — for instance, in 1889 a modest increase in the number of conscripts — took ages, as all the various interests had to be propitiated. When one or other was not satisfied, its spokesmen resorted to obstruction — lengthy speeches in Russian, banging of desk-lids, throwing of ink-wells and on one occasion the blowing of a cavalry trumpet by the Professor of Jurisprudence at the German University of Prague. Measures could not be passed, and budgets could only be produced by decree. The longest-lasting Prime Minister, Count Taaffe, remarked that his highest ambition in politics was the achievement of supportable dissatisfaction on all sides — not a bad description of what the European Community risks becoming.
And because of the irresponsibility of parliaments, the Habsburg Monarchy could really only be ruled by bureaucrats. It took twenty-five signatures for a tax payment to be validated; one in four people in employment worked for the state in some form or another, even in 1914; and so many resources went to all of this that not much was left for defence: even the military bands had to be cut back, Radetzky March and all. Of course it was a tremendous period in cultural terms both in Vienna and in Budapest. We in England have done mightily well by the emigration, often forced, to our shores of so many talented people from Central Europe. But the fact is that they had to leave their native lands because political life became impossible.
This example could be multiplied again and again. Belgium and Holland, which have so much in common, split apart in 1831. Sweden and Norway, which have even more in common, split apart in 1905. It does seem simply to be a straightforward rule in modern times that countries which contain two languages, even if they are very similar, must in the end divide, unless the one language absorbs the other. It would be agreeable to think that we could all go back to the world of the Middle Ages, when the educated classes spoke Latin and the rulers communicated in grunts. But we cannot. Unless we are dealing with international cooperation and alliances freely entered into, we create artificial structures which become the problem that they were meant to address. The League of Nations, when the Second World War broke out, resolved to ignore the fact and to discuss, instead, the standardization of level-crossings.
Mr Chairman, I am sometimes tempted to think that the new Europe which the Commission and Euro- federalists are creating is equally ill-equipped to satisfy the needs of its members and the wishes of their peoples. It is, indeed, a Europe which combines all the most striking failures of our age.
The day of the artificially constructed megastate has gone. So the Euro-federalists are now desperately scurrying to build one.
The Swedish-style welfare state has failed — even in Sweden. So the Euro-statists press ahead with their Social Chapter.
Large-scale immigration has in France and Germany already encouraged the growth of extremist parties. So the European Commission is pressing us to remove frontier controls.
If the European Community proceeds in the direction which the majority of member-state governments and the Commission seem to want, they will create a structure which brings insecurity, unemployment, national resentment and ethnic conflict.
Insecurity — because Europe’s protectionism will strain and possibly sever that link with the United States on which the security of the Continent ultimately depends.
Unemployment — because the pursuit of policies of regulation will increase costs, and price European workers out of jobs.
National resentment — because a single currency and a single centralized economic policy, which will come with it, will leave the electorate of a country angry and powerless to change its conditions.
Ethnic conflict — because not only will the wealthy European countries be faced with waves of immigration from the south and from the east. Also within Europe itself, the effect of a single currency and regulation of wages and social costs will have one of two consequences. Either there will have to be a massive transfer of money from one country to another, which will not in practice be affordable. Or there will be massive migration from the less successful to the more successful countries.
Yet if the future we are being offered contains so very many risks and so few real benefits, why, it may be asked, is it proving all but irresistible?
The answer is simple. It is that in almost every European country there has been a refusal to debate the issues which really matter. And little can matter more than whether the ancient, historic nations of Europe are to have their political institutions and their very identities transformed by stealth into something neither wished nor understood by their electorates. Yet so much is it the touchstone of respectability to accept this ever-closer union, now interpreted as a federal destiny, that to question is to invite affected disbelief or even ridicule. This silent understanding — this Euro-snobbism — between politicians, bureaucracies, academics, journalists and
