Barroso’s twisted logic is anathema to Britain
Friday, 11 November 2011
November 11 2011 12:01AM
Far from drawing closer to the EU, disentangling ourselves is a better (and quite feasible) plan
This week José Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Commission, made it clear that there has been no pause in the federalising ambitions of the Commission.
In fact there have been two reactions to the euro crisis. Some eurosceptics believe Britain could use its bargaining power to insist on a recovery of national powers. The opposite view, which President Barroso takes, is that the crisis underlines the need to transfer further powers to Brussels. As he put it: “One of the issues we have to address is this: how can we have a more effective way of responding to this situation? For that, more integration and more discipline at the European level is needed.”
When asked about the British reaction this week, the President commented: “Oh, the British what can I say?” This duly got a laugh. The UK is seen as irrelevant.
The common view in Britain is that we are fortunate not to be equally involved in the euro crisis, because we did not choose to become members of the eurozone. But President Barroso denies that Britain had a permanent right to opt out of the euro. He said that all European countries “have a legal duty to join”; there is, for him, no such thing as a permanent legal right to an opt-out. Perhaps the Barroso doctrine can best be summed up in his statement that “the euro is the norm for Europe”. He even suggested that the European Court of Justice would impose the law if that became necessary.
(anyone care to predict the conseuences here if the ECJ ordered us to join, against out will? The man is boners Idris)
The British are likely to be irritated by the “heads I win, tails you lose” logic of Mr Barroso’s argument that we must accept fiscal integration because the eurozone is defective and needs additional powers; and that we must also accept fiscal integration because the euro has been such a success. But by now this is familiar European double logic. What matters is the real issue: Mr Barroso maintains that Europe’s nation states have committed themselves to the loss of the power to tax and spend, the core of national sovereignty.
Under British law this ought to trigger a referendum, which is now required when new powers have been transferred to Brussels. At this stage it would be wrong to put too much confidence in assurances that there will be a referendum. The Lisbon treaty which developed from a draft for a federalist constitution for Europe was garlanded with promises of referendums that have never happened.
A federal budget would create a United States of Europe; we are very close to that already. So close, indeed, that a new argument is being used by those who sympathise with that concept but know that the majority of public opinion is against them. They argue that it would no longer be possible for Britain to leave the EU because we are so closely involved, tied to Europe by so many thousand webs of law and trade. There is a one-word answer to this argument, and it is “Ireland”.
Before Irish independence was signed in 1923, the Anglo-Irish legal systems and trade connections were totally integrated more so than Britain and Europe today. Yet by a process of changing what needed to be changed and using the existing institutions where they had proved effective, a system of Irish governance was rapidly established whose independence is not in serious doubt.
The level of interdependence of the nations of the EU has been much greater than was necessary or efficient. Europe is much too closely integrated, with too little democratic independence.
One defect of the EU has stood out in this euro crisis. It was caused by a lack of confidence after a banking panic. This crisis at first focused on the smaller countries Ireland, Portugal and Greece. There is one power that had the resources and trust to have stopped this first phase before it moved on to Italy and Spain. That country is Germany, which took a negative view of the prompt and substantial assistance by the European Central Bank that alone could have forestalled the crisis.
In the 19th century, Britain acted as the lender of last resort to a wide variety of trading partners; on the whole we got it right. In the 20th century the US took over the role; J. P. Morgan became the greatest banker in the world. Since the ERM of the 1980s, the European leader has been Germany. Whether because of memories of inflation or the pressure of politics, Germany has not done the job as competently as it performs most commercial dealings.
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