businessmen is destructive of honest debate.
So John Major deserves high praise for ensuring at Maastricht that we would not have either a single currency or the absurd provisions of the Social Chapter forced upon us: our industry, workforce, and national prosperity will benefit as a result. Indeed, as long as we in Britain now firmly control our spending and reduce our deficit, we will be poised to surge ahead in Europe. For our taxes are low; our inflation is down; our debt is manageable; our reduced regulations are favourable to business.
We take comfort from the fact that both our Prime Minister and our Foreign Secretary have spoken out sharply against the forces of bureaucracy and federalism.
Our choice is clear. Either we exercise democratic control of Europe through cooperation between national governments and parliaments which have legitimacy, experience and closeness to the people. Or we transfer decisions to a remote multilingual parliament, accountable to no real European public opinion and thus increasingly subordinate to a powerful bureaucracy. No amount of misleading language about pooling sovereignty can change that.
Mr Chairman, in world affairs for most of this century Europe has offered problems, not solutions. The founders of the European Community were consciously trying to change that. Democracy and prosperity in Europe were to be an example to other peoples in other continents. Sometimes this view took an over-ambitious turn with talk of Europe as a third force brokering between two superpowers of East and West. This approach was always based upon a disastrous illusion — that Western Europe could at some future date dispense with the military defence offered by the United States.
Now that the forces of communism have retreated and the threat which Soviet tanks and missiles levelled at the heart of Europe has gone, there is a risk that the old tendency towards decoupling Europe from the United States may again emerge. This is something against which Europeans themselves must guard — and of which the United States must be aware.
This risk could become reality in several ways.
First, there is the question of trade. It is a terrible indictment of the complacency which characterizes the modern post-Cold War world that we have allowed the present GATT round to be stalled for so long. Free trade is the greatest force for prosperity and peaceful cooperation.
It does no good to the Western alliance when Europe and the United States come to regard each other as hostile interests. In practice, whatever the theory may be, economic disputes do sour political relations. Agricultural subsidies and tariffs lie at the heart of the dispute, which will not go away unless we in Europe decide that the Common Agricultural Policy has to be fundamentally changed. That will go far to determine what kind of Europe we are building.
For, as I have said before, I would like to see the European Community — embracing the former communist countries to its east — agree to develop an Atlantic Free Trade Area with the United States. That would be a means of pressing for more open multilateral trade throughout the world. Europe must seek to move the world away from competing regional trade blocs — not promote them. In such a trading arrangement, Britain would have a vital role bridging that Atlantic divide — just as Germany should provide Europe with a bridge to the east and to the countries of the former Soviet Union.
Secondly, we must modify and modernize our defence. The dangers on Europe’s eastern border have receded. But let us not forget that on the credibility of NATO’s military strength all our wider objectives depend — reassurance for the post-communist countries, stability in Europe, transatlantic political cooperation.
Communism may have been vanquished. But all too often the communists themselves have not. The chameleon qualities of the comrades have never been more clearly demonstrated than in their emergence as democratic socialists and varieties of nationalist in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. From the powerful positions they retain in the bureaucracy, security apparatus and the armed forces, from their places in not-really- privatized enterprises, they are able to obstruct, undermine and plunder.
The systems of proportional representation which so many of these countries have adopted have allowed these tactics to succeed all the more, leading to weak governments and a bewildering multiplicity of parties. All this risks bringing democracy into discredit. If Eastern European countries which retain some links with a pre- communist past, and have some sort of middle class on which to draw, falter on the path to reform, how will the leaders of the countries of the former Soviet Union dare to proceed further upon it?
We can help by allowing them free access to our markets. I am delighted that Association agreements have been signed between the European Community and several of these countries. I would like speedy action to include the others in similar arrangements. But ten years is too long to wait before the restrictions on trade are removed. And I would like to see these countries offered full membership of the European Community rapidly.
Above all we must offer these countries greater security. Russian troops are still stationed on Polish territory. Moreover, it is understandable that the Central and Eastern European countries are alarmed at what conflict in the old USSR and the old Yugoslavia may portend. Although I recognize that the North Atlantic Cooperation Council has been formed with a view to this, I still feel that the European ex-communist countries are entitled to that greater degree of reassurance which a separate closer relationship with NATO would bring.
But, Mr Chairman, most of the threats to Europe’s and the West’s interests no longer come from this continent. I believe — and I have been urging this on NATO members since 1990 — that the Americans and Europeans ought to be able to deploy our forces under NATO outside the area for which the present North Atlantic Treaty allows. It is impossible to know where the danger may next come. But two considerations should make us alive to real risks to our security.
First, the break-up of the Soviet Union has led to large numbers of advanced weapons becoming available to would-be purchasers at knockdown prices: it would be foolish to imagine that these will not, some of them, fall into the worst possible hands.
Second, Europe cannot ignore its dependence for oil on the Middle East. Saddam Hussein is still in power. Fundamentalism is as strong as ever. Old scores are still unsettled. We must beware. And we must widen our ability to defend our interests and be prepared to act when necessary.
Finally, the European Community must come to recognize its place in what is called the New World Order.
The ending of the Cold War has meant that the international institutions created in the post-war years — the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, the GATT — can work much more effectively. This means that the role for the Community is inevitably circumscribed. Within Europe, a wider role for NATO and the CSCE should also be reflected in more modest ambitions for the Community’s diplomacy. In Yugoslavia, the Community has shown itself incapable of dealing effectively with security questions. Outside Europe, GATT with its mandate to reduce trade barriers should be the body that establishes the rules of the game in trade. The Community must learn to live within those rules. All in all, the Community must be prepared to fit in with the new internationalism, not supplant it.
Mr Chairman, I end as I began — with architecture. The Hague is a splendid capital, and how much we should admire the Dutch for keeping it together so well, as they have done with so many other of their towns. The Mauritshuis is a testimony to the genius which they showed. It was here, and in Amsterdam, that so much of the modern world was invented in the long Dutch fight for freedom.
Dutch architecture has its own unmistakable elegance and durability — it was copied all around the north European world, from Wick in northern Scotland to Tallinn in Estonia. Some architecture does last. Other architecture does not. Let us make sure that we build a Europe as splendid and lasting as the Mauritshuis, rather than one as shabby and ephemeral as the Berlaymont.
