Britannia Radio

The article by Rachman here is one of the most persuasive I've read.  
His euroscepticism was - and remains real - but he has seen a spectre 
haunting Europe and it is resurgent nationalism.    I can sympathise 
with what he fears and what he says here though I am not convinced 
myself.  For I believe that the eurocrats are deliberately using the 
crisis to stir up revanchist sentiments so that they can play their 
trump card and get full-blown union.  I believe this would be worse 
than the scenario he paints.  But read for yourself and make up your 
own mind.

I find the Bronwen Maddox piece less profound and I am far from 
convinced that the eurozone members will have to bail out the east of 
Europe   I think self-preservation is too powerful a force.
Again,  read for yourself and make up your own mind.

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FINANCIAL TIMES 3.3.09
Euroscepticism is yesterday's creed
By Gideon Rachman

I am ready to retire as a eurosceptic. The European Union is in 
trouble. But rather than smirking - which would be the normal 
reaction of a sceptic - I am alarmed.

In January 2001, I arrived in Brussels with several firm and 
unfavourable convictions about the EU. I believed that most ordinary 
Europeans felt far more loyalty to their nation than to Europe. I 
thought that steadily enlarging the powers of Brussels was 
undemocratic and dangerous. I reckoned that in a crisis, nationalist 
instincts would come to the fore. I suspected that the EU's new 
currency - the euro - was liable to run into trouble. And I believed 
that the Brussels-based elite was a "new class" that had confused its 
own interests with those of the continent of Europe.

Eight years on, I look back at these old prejudices - and smile at my 
foresight. The past few years have provided a graphic demonstration 
of the feeble popular support for the European project. A proposed EU 
constitution was rejected in referendums in France and the 
Netherlands - then promptly repackaged as the Lisbon treaty and 
rejected again, this time by the voters of Ireland. But "Lisbon" will 
still be shoved through, one way or another. This is a pretty shoddy 
exercise.

The strain of the economic crisis is indeed opening up divisions 
within the Union. An emergency EU summit was called this weekend to 
combat protectionism. Several of the new EU members from central 
Europe are facing banking and financial crises - and the older 
members have refused to bail them out. The Hungarian prime minister 
warns of a "new iron curtain" descending across Europe. Robert 
Zoellick, president of the World Bank, is worried that Europe is once 
again splitting into two.

Arguably, all my darkest suspicions about the European project are 
about to be vindicated. So it is an odd time to renounce euroscepticism.

But it is precisely the threat to the EU that has focused my mind. 
Plans for a political union in Europe were always crazy. But the four 
freedoms already established by the EU - free movement of goods, 
people, services and capital - are huge and tangible achievements. It 
would be terrible to see them rolled back.

Yet the threat is there. The British prime minister has talked of 
"British jobs for British workers", the French president has urged 
car companies to invest at home rather than elsewhere in the EU, the 
government of Spain has launched a "Buy Spanish" campaign. State aid 
rules that prevent the promotion of national industrial champions are 
being cheerfully trashed. Despite the deliberately reassuring 
communiqué that closed this weekend's summit, a genuine assault on 
the European single market is brewing.

If Europe starts rolling back the four freedoms, the implications 
will stretch well beyond economics. Protectionism and nationalism are 
close cousins. The principles of consultation, co-operation and open 
borders within the EU have helped to repress the old, nationalist 
demons.

After the end of the cold war, the EU notched up another great 
achievement - its enlargement to include the countries of the former 
Soviet bloc. This was a painstaking, serious and generous exercise in 
spreading political and economic freedom across the Continent. It is 
hard to remain an unabashed eurosceptic when you see how much EU 
membership meant to countries such as Poland or Slovakia. Yet the 
central Europeans are now feeling abandoned and panic-stricken.

Division in Europe would be particularly unfortunate at a time when 
there is an urgent need for international co-operation on a global 
scale. The Brussels institutions are adept at finding "cross-border 
issues" that would justify an expansion in their powers. Quite often 
their case has been weak. But the international economic crisis and 
global warming have made their case far more effectively than any EU 
policy document.

The EU is the best example we have of international governance. If it 
starts to fall apart under the strain of the crisis, the outlook for 
solving other difficult global issues will be much darker.

That is not to say that the democratic problems with the Union have 
gone away. They certainly exist - and they are serious. The drive 
towards a federal union will doubtless be revived at some point, and 
should be opposed when it is. But that is not today's problem. The 
threat over the next year will be the disintegration of the EU.

If you compare Europe with most other bits of the world, it still 
looks pretty good - prosperous, peaceful, free, a little on the dull 
side. But part of the EU's problem is that its main achievements do 
seem technocratic and boring. "Defend the single market" is not the 
most inspiring of slogans.

But the "four freedoms" represent important rights: the right to live 
and work anywhere in Europe; the right to make a business deal 
without the government stopping you; the right to hop on a train to 
Paris or a plane to Madrid without being hassled at immigration.

In the coming years, the real threat to these freedoms will come from 
national governments in a panic - not from the dreaded bureaucrats of 
Brussels. On the contrary, it will be up to an enfeebled European 
Commission to try to hold the line.

Strangely enough, I now feel a certain protective warmth towards the 
embattled eurocrats in their Brussels skyscrapers. This would have 
been hard to imagine when I arrived in the city all those years ago. 
But it has finally happened. I love Big Brother.
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THE TIMES    3.3.09
EU must pay price to keep Eastern poor relations in the family

Bronwen Maddox: World Briefing

The crisis in Central and Eastern Europe has been triggered by the 
world's financial turmoil. But the European Union was already set for 
an unpleasant showdown between its older members and its newer ones. 
Any recession - never mind one as acute as this - would have driven 
home the point that the east wants more than voters in the west want 
to pay.

The leaders of the first to join the EU club never wanted to admit, 
though, that the expectations of the newcomers were bound to be 
dashed. They didn't want to be thought to be condemning them to a 
second-class wing of Europe. Nor did they want to spell out to voters 
how big the bill might be - and how funds might be diverted from 
their own countries to meet it. The blunt truth is that the 
newcomers' hopes of becoming Spain, or the Irish Republic - poor 
countries transformed in a decade or so by the EU - were never 
realistic. Spain and Ireland joined a club of a few rich countries, 
and their own people's income was about two thirds of the average. In 
contrast, former communist countries joined a loose, large club only 
half of which was wealthy in any sense. Their people were 
comparatively far poorer than the Spanish and Irish. The magical 
transformation was never going to happen.

The oddity now is that this crisis - one that threatens the stability 
of banks across Europe and might cause some eastern governments to 
default on debt - creates pressure for Western Europe to help. It 
won't want to. But the intertwined finances give the east a case that 
the west can't afford to stand back.

The EU's decision five years ago to take in eight former communist 
countries, plus Cyprus and Malta, was one of the most generous 
gestures it has made. The spirit was admirable. But the idealism 
glossed over the difficulties, particularly on the economic side. The 
new members made big changes before they joined - but less so 
afterwards. Romania and Bulgaria, joining in 2007, have rubbed in the 
point that the EU has few sanctions if countries renege on reform. 
Romania, again, and Hungary, are now struggling with heavy debt 
because of reluctance to reform state industries and benefits. 
Others, such as Estonia, the Czech Republic and Poland, have better 
claim to be unlucky casualties of the collapse of export markets. 
Even there, debts were casually taken on in euros while the income to 
meet them was in national currency, now sliding. Leaders and their 
people wanted to act as if they were already as rich as the rest of 
Europe, without income to match.

Even before this crisis the EU bill for helping these countries was 
large. A European Commission report last month ("Five years of an 
enlarged EU") notes that in 2007 the new states received a fifth of 
the ?99 billion that the EU gives to countries. That is set to rise 
between 2007 and 2013 to 35 per cent. The report blithely asserts 
that this "cannot be regarded as an unbearable burden" by old member 
states as it is only 0.2 per cent of their gross domestic product. 
The old members may not see it that way. To get the east out of this 
crisis the bill would have to be even larger, if only to rescue the 
banks from foreign currency loans.

There is a strong case to be made for the rescue. But it can't be 
made in the airy tone in which the Commission has written its 
assessments of enlargement, which makes taboo any suggestion that the 
move was risky or expensive or overoptimistic in what it led the 
newcomers to expect. It was all of these. It was also worth doing.

The only argument which will now persuade Western European voters 
that they should pay even more is that, otherwise, Europe faces 
dangerous disintegration. For once, though, that kind of alarmist 
talk is justified.