Imperial Dreams and Political Realities

By Gerald Vouga

European unification now faces a dramatic impasse. It was intended to eliminate national rivalries, and away back in the 1940s when much of the continent still lay in ruins there were many who earnestly desired an enduring framework for a new and peaceful Europe. But power politics overwhelmed that goal. One of the chief promoters of the European Economic Community, General Charles De Gaulle, explained France’s early rapprochement with Germany in the following terms: “The European Economic Community is a horse and carriage—Germany is the horse and France is the coachman.” 

Nostalgia for Charlemagne

Those with a nose for History soon suspected a new Franco German empire was in the making, with de Gaulle hoping to resuscitate a much older one: that of Charlemagne in the ninth century. Even some of the EEC’s leaders foresaw this. Bernard Connolly, author of The Rotten Heart of Europe, commenting on a bi-lateral summit in September 1978 between French President Valerie Giscard d’Estaing and German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, tells us it was no coincidence that it was held

“…at Aachen, principal seat and burial place of Charlemagne.  The symbolism was heavily underlined in both France and Germany; the two leaders paid a special visit to the throne of Charlemagne and a special service was held in the cathedral; at the end of the summit, Giscard remarked that: ‘Perhaps when we discussed monetary problems, the spirit of Charlemagne brooded over us.’” Connolly adds pertinently: “Such Euro-claptrap ignored the awkward fact that the empire of Charlemagne did not long survive Charlemagne (any more than the empires of Napoleon and Hitler, other would-be inheritors of the mantle of Charlemagne, long survived them).”

By the time of that Aachen summit the days of De Gaulle and the architects of European unity were long gone. Now they are even more remote. A few days after June 1, 2005, when the Dutch Nee followed the French Non in their referendums on the proposed EU constitution, Kenneth Clarke, an aspirant to leadership of the British Conservative Party and its leading Europhile, was interviewed on the BBC programme Hard Talk.

Although he deplored the way the Dutch and the French had rejected the proposed European Constitution (which he admitted he had not read), he declared emphatically that Europe’s present leaders, namely Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder and Tony Blair as well as Valerie Giscard D’Estaing, the principal author of the document, were “pygmies”, not to be compared, he said, with the stature of the founding fathers of the European project.

A poetic premier

Most European Union leaders make no attempt to refrain from disparaging public remarks about their fellows. They are equally scornful of their electorates. Before either of the referenda, Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxemburg’s present rotating head of the EU, declared baldly that if the document was rejected, it would simply have to be re-presented until it was accepted.

A more extreme example of contempt for democracy is France’s newly appointed Prime Minister Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin. A professional diplomat of aristocratic mien and an admiring biographer of Napoleon who deplores his hero’s defeat at Waterloo, Villepin is a mediocre poet given to declaiming his verse at political meetings. He has never run for elected office and does not trouble to conceal his contempt for the French Parliament and for most of those who bother to seek voters’ approval. “I am a man with a mission,” he boasts. “A modest policy is not what the French expect.”

The entire scenario of Villepin’s appointment is an object-lesson in the autocratic ways of French government. There was no discussion in the French Assembly. Very soon after the No vote Chirac summoned his Prime Minister Raffarin, demanded his resignation, and thereupon named Villepin as the new incumbent. A number of influential political figures had implored the President to make a different choice, warning that the appointment of Villepin would bring much of the population out onto the streets within three months.  Chirac ignored them.

The Constitution required unanimity for its approval and the fact is that those responsible for drafting it had never really contemplated placing it before the voters. It was supposed to be submitted to the approval of individual parliaments (as happened in Germany), that are notoriously easier to control than the electorates who put them there.

But Tony Blair’s announcement of a British referendum provoked the French president into anticipating his rival. Blair was, of course, motivated by internal political considerations and a somewhat healthier respect for public opinion than is common on the continent. At this point Chirac’s presidential immunity from prosecution on the charges of corruption outstanding against him must have gone to his head. Convinced that he could get away with yet another bluff, he thought the French electorate could once again be fooled. This time he was wrong.

The history of the 485-page constitution and its sorry demise is one of confusion, misrepresentation and misunderstanding right from the first. French No campaigners presented the document as a nasty “neo-liberal Anglo-Saxon” affair that would put an end to EU social provisions. Yet in the Anglo-Saxon homeland, the No campaigners had been saying just the opposite: the constitution would force Britain into the dirigiste straitjacket from which Thatcherism had mercifully freed the country.

Centralization unmasked

French statism has been the driving force behind European federalism from the outset. Far from being a brief and straightforward declaration of political principles, the Constitution codifies much of the EU’s legislation and the treaties which brought it into being. From directives about water quality to the prohibition of overtime for GPs, from the size of cucumbers to the shape of bananas, from the appropriation of national territorial waters to rules on immigration and asylum, decree-obsessed maniacs in Brussels have been indulging their fantasies for decades and forcing supine governments into huge expenditure on needless “one-size-fits-all” schemes.

Earlier on, British Prime Minister John Major tried to assuage fears of Brussels’ domination by invoking subsidiarity. This curious term, borrowed from ecclesiastical usage, means, to quote the OED, “the principle that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level”. It wasn’t a bad idea. But having promised it the EU nomenklatura promptly ignored it, and more recently it has specifically repudiated the concept.

The Constitution made no bones about EU supremacy and members’ total surrender of sovereignty through the implementation of common defence and foreign policy, the creation of common military forces, and a definitive pronouncement about the over-riding nature of European Union law and its sole interpreter the European Court. The EU nomenklatura’s conception of law and its application is modelled on French theory and practice and is contrary to some of the most important principles of the English Common Law. It would, for instance, abolish trial by jury and the presumption of innocence till proved guilty.

There have always been darker sides to the EU project. One of the most recent examples is to be seen in the work of Anna Diamantopoulou, who holds the important post of Social Affairs Commissioner.  She is the author of a secret directive proposing the institution of censorship over European media and advertising in pursuit of one of her ideological obsessions: she wished to ban sexual stereotypes of men and women. Another example is the case of Hans-Martin Tillack, a German journalist who had his home raided and his computer and files seized, he himself being grilled for ten hours because he was investigating allegations of EU Comission officials’ misuse of funds. Considering the fact that for several years the European Court of Audit has not approved EU accounts, and that the membership of one entire Commission was forced by the European Parliament to resign over accusations of corruption, such allegations are not to be taken lightly.

Then there was the legal case brought by Bernard Connolly, the author mentioned above, who had been fired from the European Commission for his criticisms. Daniel Hannan, a British Member of the European Parliament, tells us that “In giving his judgment, the EU’s Advocate-General pronounced that freedom of speech was not an all-encompassing right; criticism of the European Union, like blasphemy, lay outside its remit.”

The birth of the single currency

But the story of the darkest side of EU activities goes back much further and can be found in the book which provoked Bernard Connolly’s dismissal. This was published in 1995, and its author, an economist who worked for many years in Brussels as head of the European Commission’s unit responsible for monitoring the Exchange Rate Mechanism, described the machinations and intrigues leading to what eventually was to become the single currency.

It documents how the original European common market was transformed into a project for political union. Though opinions are divided over the future of both the Union and the Euro, there can be no doubt that the two are intimately connected. Connolly describes how the monetary politics which culminated in the Maastricht Treaty of 1993 were followed ten years later by the introduction of the single currency. He explains how the French State through its successive governments (and its civil servants, who pack the Commission) pursued its single-currency goal as a prerequisite for the political union it was determined to establish under Franco-German domination with France as senior partner.

If individual members of what was once simply a customs union could be persuaded to give up control of their own currency, hence of their financial systems, (money supply, exchange and interest rates), they would be surrendering their economic independence, almost without noticing it. By the time the Euro came into effect the peoples of the member nations had grown accustomed to the benefits of abolition of frontiers and of travelling without the need for passports or visas. Using the same coins and notes everywhere seemed a normal and welcome corollary of frontierless travel.

Ordinary folk, unfamiliar with the complexities of international trade, balance of payments problems, or the operations of central banks, could see only advantages in the great currency reform. So the new money was adopted with notable ease and a fair degree of enthusiasm, particularly by tourists who were the first to benefit.

This was exactly what had been intended from the outset.  If the smaller countries of Europe surrendered control of their currency, they automatically lost control of their economic policies. This would henceforth be exercised by the European Union and its Central Bank and would apply uniformly to all.  This seemingly simple scheme, again based on the one-size-fits-all principle, can only benefit large countries—those strong enough to horse-trade with one another behind closed doors, and influence decisions by the European Central Bank whose executives are their own creatures.

A smaller country, finding its products uncompetitive, no longer has the possibility of recourse to its traditional instruments: it can neither devalue nor revalue its currency, raise nor lower its interest rates, encourage nor discourage foreign investment.  All it can do if it faces economic threats from abroad is to plead for help from Brussels, thus becoming still further dependent.

The political leaders of such countries were bought, just as the new entrants among the former communist countries are in the process of being bought today. The so-called cohesion funds, huge sums of money granted to member States ostensibly for investment in infra-structure projects to bring the poorer up to the same level as richer countries, were effectively the bribes used to lure national politicians with the seductive but spurious argument that you could only have truly free trade among equals. These were quick to see the electoral benefits to be garnered from “success” in negotiations with Brussels and the resulting thousands of kilometres of spanking new motorways and bridges and the impressive buildings constructed with “European funds”. All over southern Europe huge signboards testify to the ubiquity of EU generosity.

The budget débacle

What happened when European leaders met at the June summit to discuss the EU Budget from 2006-2013 served to confirm the worst fears of those who see Britain as an eternally perfidious Albion. The French in particular have always shared the opinion expressed by Sir Humphrey in the famous BBC series “Yes Minister”—namely, that it has been Britain’s policy for the past 500 years to promote disunity among the continental nations. When Tony Blair told his peers what he intended to do when he assumed the rotating presidency in July he was grasping the opportunity with both hands. The British Prime Minister, loathed for his loyalty to the U.S., insisted on Britain getting the annual rebate on contributions to EU funds which was won by Margaret Thatcher, and is now being refused on the grounds that the money is needed to finance the new entrants.

Britain is the second net contributor after Germany, and Blair sees some injustice in the fact that France alone receives 40 percent of the Union budget, which goes largely to her rich farmers. This is in accordance with provisions of the common agricultural policy (CAP) which spends close to half of the total EU budget on the 4% of the EU’s population still engaged in farming. It drives up food prices in Europe and particularly hurts farmers in the poor world, especially Africa.

Blair pointed all this out but Chirac refused outright to discuss the matter and with typical chutzpah accused Blair of selfishness. However, neither Chirac nor Schroeder is in a position to argue convincingly about economic questions. The bloated welfare provisions in both Germany and France have had negative effects on budget deficits and economic growth. Nor do unemployment figures above 10 per cent furnish convincing credentials for the economic and social policies of either country. Britain, however, has since its Thatcherite reforms had an increasingly healthy economy. Leaving the Exchange Rate mechanism and not joining the euro have also contributed to this prosperity.

But both Chirac and Schroeder face huge difficulties implementing reforms. The latter has in fact already met his nemesis in an important provincial election and it is widely predicted he will lose national elections in the Autumn. Chirac still has two years to go, but his electorate’s No vote, which was also a rejection of welfare reform, augurs ill for France’s economic future.

The French conservative daily Le Figaro draws gloomy conclusions:

“Seen from the heart of the battle, the European landscape looks like a French-style garden after a rugby match. The lawn is devastated, leaving bare earth. According to experts a season will have to pass before the grass grows again. ‘Europe? Closed down owing  to bankruptcy!’ ironizes Roberto Moroni, Italian Northern League minister. The eurosceptics are really the only ones to laugh at this sombre spectacle: the Constitution, symbol of political Europe, thrown in the bottom of a cupboard until 2007; no budget for the years 2007-2013; enlargement doubtful; and the single currency booed on the markets.  The conclusion of numerous diplomats is: ‘We have run aground’.”

Gerald Vouga is a long-time observer of the European scene.

August 2005