Brusselswatch - dispatches archive

dispatches archive

Earlier articles by Daniel Hannan MEP. See also Dan Hannan's EU blog

What we can learn from Norwegians
A cynical comedy that is likely to end in ironic tragedy
Euro-judges rule in favour of integration (surprise, surprise)
The EU can work for Britain – if we quit
The Constitution is in force
Dissolve the people and elect another in their place
Are Euro-sceptics really Nazis?
French malaise
The cost of Europe
Time for regime change in Europe

What we can learn from Norwegians
Today, the Norwegian King will take his leave of the British Queen. Both are monarchs, but only one is sovereign. The word “sovereignty” is often used nowadays as a loose synonym for power, but it has an exact meaning. In Norway, the 1814 constitution vests supreme legal authority in the Crown. In Britain, the 1972 European Communities Act shares sovereignty with the EU which now accounts—depending on how you measure it—for between 50 and 80 per cent of our laws.

Sovereignty evidently suits the Norwegians. They are the richest people in Europe, with a GDP per head of £31,200 as against an EU average of £12,600. According to the UN, which measures infant mortality, literacy rates and so on, they are the healthiest and happiest people in the world.

We are forever being told that Britain is too small to survive on its own: a post-imperial state, a speck of land on Europe’s fringe, blah blah. This is bilge, of course: we are the world’s fourth largest economy and fourth military power. But it is instructive to consider the situation of a country that really is small, and really is on Europe’s fringe.

There are four-and-a-half million Norwegians, clinging to an icy strip of tundra on the uttermost edge of the continent. Yet, on every measure, they are outperforming their continental neighbours. At a time when France and Germany are struggling to comply with the Stability Pact, Norway is running an annual surplus of seven per cent. Its unemployment is less than half the EU’s. Its real interest rates are comfortably below those in the Euro-zone. Its inflation is low, its trade booming, its stock exchange soaring.

A people two generations away from subsistence farming have become Europe’s new elite. Like blue-eyed sheiks, they buy vast houses in Chelsea which lie empty between their occasional visits to London (Norwegians, in the main, being tremendous Anglophiles).

How have they done it? Much of the answer has to do with the deal they struck with Brussels. Norway is not in the EU, but the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). It participates fully in the so-called Four Freedoms of the EU’s single market—free movement, that is, of goods, services, people and capital. But it is outside the Common Agricultural Policy; it controls its own territorial resources, including energy and fisheries; it decides its own human rights questions; it determines who may settle on its territory; it is able to negotiate trade accords with third countries, and it makes only a token contribution to the EU budget.

At this stage, my Euro-phile friends protest that we are nothing like Norway. “Look at all the fish they have”, they say. Indeed. Look at all the fish we would have, but for the Common Fisheries Policy. “Look at their oil”, my friends go on. Well, Britain is the EU’s only net exporter of oil. In any case, Norway’s extraordinary economic statistics are unrelated to its oil wealth: for the past 14 years, Norwegians have been stashing away their oil surpluses in the “Petroleum Fund”, which now contains nearly £100 billion, just in case a future government should face unexpected liabilities.

“But what about trade?” protest the Euro-sophists. “If we weren’t part of the EU, we’d have no clout”. In fact, Norway benefits from all the preferential trade deals that the EU has signed with third countries. The difference is that, where it feels the EU is being unduly protectionist, it can go further. It has, for example, signed a free trade accord with Singapore, and is negotiating others with South Africa, Taiwan and South Korea.

“Alright then, what about our trade with the EU?” comes the rejoinder. “Surely that depends on our membership”. Brace yourself for an astonishing fact. Every EFTA country exports more, proportionately, to the EU than we do. Norway sells twice as much per head to the EU from outside as does Britain from inside. The EU accounts for 73 per cent of their exports, 52 per cent of ours. Oh, and their trade is in surplus, whereas we have run a trade deficit with the EU, over 33 years of membership, of some £30 million per day.

Norwegians must meet EU standards when they sell to the EU—as exporters the world over must do. But they are spared the expense of having to apply most of these regulations to their domestic commerce. You will sometimes hear that Norway has to assimilate thousands of EU laws, but these laws are generally of a technical and trivial nature. The 3,000 EU legal acts adopted in Norway since 1992 have required only 50 statutes in the Storting. And the people who make such a fuss of these 3,000 regulations neglect to mention the 24,000 that Britain has had to incorporate over the same period.

Then comes the last-ditch argument. “Norway may be content to be a tiny country, but we could never abandon our global role”. At the risk of stating the obvious, nations are generally more influential if they have a foreign policy in the first place. Norwegian diplomats are playing the key role in, among other places, Sudan, Israel, Sri Lanka and South East Asia. Being outside the EU, Norway can use trade and aid as instruments of diplomacy. Britain contracted out the whole shebang to Brussels in 1973.

Would the EU offer Britain as favourable deal as Norway? No: our terms would be better. This is partly because we are an existing member, with commensurate leverage, but mainly because of the trade balance. Since we joined, we have been in surplus with every continent in the world except Europe. It is not normal, in any transaction, for the salesman to have the upper hand over the customer.

It is just conceivable, of course, that our ex-partners would so resent us that they would seek to limit this commerce, cutting off their noses to spite their faces. I don’t believe this: our neighbours are, for the most part, long standing allies of Britain whose interests in any negotiations would be the same as ours, namely to maximise prosperity. But if I am wrong, and they really are that vindictive, what on Earth are we doing with them?

A cynical comedy that is likely to end in ironic tragedy
An elaborate farce will be played out in Luxembourg tomorrow. Barring a last-minute diplomatic hitch, Turkey will formally begin the process of accession to the European Union. Politicians from around Europe will make speeches about how much the EU will gain from Turkish membership and vice versa. But few of them will believe what they are saying.

Indeed, almost the only people who are taking the EU at its word are the Turks themselves. Unaccustomed to the way of doing business in Brussels, they innocently believe the promise made by the existing members last December that Turkey would be admitted once it had met certain criteria. Since then, the EU has been shaken by the French and Dutch No votes on the constitution – results that the Eurocrats blame chiefly on anti-Turkish feeling. France and Austria have responded by promising to hold referendums on Turkish membership. 70% of Frenchmen and 80% of Austrians plan to vote No, and it takes only one veto to block the application.

Yet the Turks remain blissfully optimistic. The European Parliament was swarming with them last week, polite men in spectacles and dapper suits. I fell into conversation with one, an MP from the ruling party, in a bar. "Come off it," I told him. "It's never going to happen, is it? I mean, look at what this Austrian chap, Schüssel, is telling his voters: that you can't come in because no one wants to pay for you."

My Turkish friend smiled gently. "Das ist für die Gasse," he said. It was a clever answer. The phrase, which roughly translates as "that's for the gutter", was used in the 1920s by a previous Austrian chancellor, Ignaz Seipel, to describe the anti-Semitism that his party preached but never practised. By quoting it, the Turkish MP was at once signalling his familiarity with European history and delivering a neat put-down to Mr Schüssel.

My friend's European outlook is not surprising: like many Turks, his ancestors had fled the Balkans with the Ottoman janissaries. As we spoke, I kept thinking how much more urbane he and his colleagues were than many of the MEPs already here. Spend a day in Strasbourg and you will come across religious fundamentalists, unapologetic Stalinists, nutty monarchist parties. You will find fascists, indicted criminals, apologists for the IRA. Yet these same MEPs presume to treat the Turks like half-civilised brutes.

Last Wednesday, my colleagues insisted that, before it is allowed in, Turkey acknowledge its role in the Armenian massacres of 1915 and recognise the Greek Cypriot administration's jurisdiction over the whole island. No other country has had such conditions attached to its membership. No one demanded that, say, Belgium come clean about its atrocities in the Congo. And asking Ankara to make further concessions when it was the Turkish Cypriots who accepted the EU's reunification plan and the Greeks who rejected it seems grotesquely unfair.

Ah, you say, but these are Western Turks. Behind them stand hordes of Anatolian peasants, barely literate and vulnerable to Islamism. After all, haven't they just voted for a religious party? This is a strange criticism. For years, the West has been lecturing Ankara about its illiberal attitude to religious pluralism. Now, when Turkey finally rescinds some of its most oppressive anti-clerical laws, we throw our hands in the air and shriek about fundamentalism.

The funny thing is that we risk creating the very thing we fear: a Turkey oriented towards Mecca. Refusing the Turks now would be one thing. But stringing them along for another 10 years, extracting humiliating concessions, making them assimilate hundreds of thousands of EU laws and then, after all this, turning them away – that would be calamitous. Today, Turkey is an inspiration to Muslims everywhere who believe in democracy. Ten years from now, we may have turned a loyal ally into a snarling rival, an Iran on our doorstep. We are stumbling towards a truly epochal mistake.

Euro-judges rule in favour of integration (surprise, surprise)
Eighteen months ago, Daniel Hannan was one of 25 MEPs to launch a legal challenge against the proposal to establish state-funded European political parties.

The legislation provided for trans-national parties, to be supported by the taxpayer, contesting elections on a common and binding manifesto across the EU.

In order to qualify, a party would need to “accept the values of the EU, as set out in the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms” – a clause evidently designed to bar Euro-sceptics from recognition.

Daniel, with a small group of pro-sovereignty MEPs, challenged the legislation, arguing that it was incompatible with the EU's stated commitment to democracy and pluralism. As a Polish Euro-MP, one of Daniel's fellow plaintiffs, observed: "This is exactly how the communists maintained themselves in power in my country. They didn't ban elections – we had elections every four years. They just banned their opponents from contesting the elections".

Now, eighteen months after the challenge was launched, the Euro-judges have turned it down on a technicality, arguing that, since the plaintiffs had brought the case as individuals, they had no proper status before the court. In order to have such status, the MEPs would need to try to establish a trans-national party themselves – then, if they were refused, they might be allowed to claim that they had suffered discrimination.

Obviously, as Euro-sceptics, the plaintiffs are unwilling to do this: the whole basis of our philosophy is that the democratic process should be played out within nation-states, not in Brussels. So the legislation will go ahead.

Commenting on the ruling, Daniel said:

“I'm afraid I'm not surprised. The European Court sees it as its role always and everywhere to support deeper integration, and rarely lets the dots and commas of the law stand in its way. But it is extraordinary that the Euro-judges should have taken a year-and-a-half to ponder this case before disqualifying us on a technicality. How can any citizen have confidence in such a system?”

Under the new rules, Labour is joining the Party of European Socialists, the Lib Dems the European Liberals and the Greens the European Greens. But the Conservatives and the UK Independence Party have been frozen out.

Daniel added:

“Democracy means being allowed to vote for whomever you please. Once we start disqualifying parties on grounds of their opinions, we are on a very dangerous road. Six years in politics has been enough to teach me that court cases are uncertain and expensive. But if I'm not prepared to take a stand for democratic pluralism, what am I doing here?”

Click here to sign a petition calling for all parties to be allowed to contest European elections on an equal basis.

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The EU can work for Britain – if we quit
If you ask an MP from any party where he stands on the EU, he is likely to say something like: "I want a Europe of democratic nations, working together, but keeping their own identities". Fine. Who doesn't? The trouble is that such a Europe is not on the menu.

When we politicians talk about "a Europe of nations", we are being both presumptuous and dishonest: presumptuous, because it is not in our gift to dictate how other countries relate one to another; and dishonest, because we are holding out to our electorate the prospect of something that is not on offer.

The idea that the EU might abandon its founding ideology in order to humour Britain is one of our more enduring self-deceits. It lay behind Harold Macmillan's original application in 1961, which was launched on the basis that "the effects of any eventual loss of sovereignty would be mitigated if resistance to Federalism on the part of some of the governments continues, which our membership might be expected to encourage".

Even in Macmillan's day, this was wishful thinking – although, with the EU not yet five years old, it was perhaps excusable. It is less excusable today, when we have half a century of evidence to the effect that the Treaty of Rome means what it says about "ever-closer union". Yet still we delude ourselves, imagining that the other members are on the verge of coming round to our point of view.

The funny thing is that there is always some apparently plausible reason for believing this. Every enlargement round, for example, was hailed as likely to lead to a looser Europe. In practice, of course, the EU has deepened each time it has widened: the accession of Spain and Portugal led directly to the Single European Act, that of the Nordic countries to the Amsterdam Treaty, and that of the ex-Comecon states to the European Constitution.

Alternatively, we are asked to believe that a domestic change of government somewhere on the Continent will lead to a more decentralised Europe. Absurd as it now seems, Jacques Chirac, Silvio Berlusconi, José-María Aznar and even Gerhard Schröder were all written up in advance of their elections as likely British allies.

Now we are being proffered a new reason for optimism. "These recent 'No' votes in France and Holland will change everything," we are told. "The EU can't just carry on as if nothing has happened." Oh yes it can. It did after Denmark's "No" to Maastricht and Ireland's "No" to Nice; and it is doing so today. Most of the institutions that the constitution would have authorised are being set up regardless - the European Defence Agency, the External Borders Agency, the Human Rights Institute, the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the European Public Prosecutor, politico-military structures, a collective security clause, a space policy, a diplomatic service.

What else does Brussels have to do to shake us out of our complacency? In its refusal to accept the verdicts of the French and Dutch electorates, the EU has demonstrated beyond doubt that it will allow nothing to divert it from deeper integration, neither its own rule book nor the expressed opposition of its peoples. Surely the time has come to admit to ourselves that the EU is set on full amalgamation.

The pertinent question is not what kind of Europe we might ideally like, but how we should work with the one actually on our doorstep. Are we content to submit ourselves to a European polity with its own president, constitution and military and policing capacity? And, if not, what kind of relationship ought we to have with it?

My sense is that most British people want to retain our trade links with the EU, and to accompany them with close inter-governmental co-operation, but not with political assimilation. Is it feasible to have our cake and eat it? Absolutely.

Consider, as an example, the members of the European Free Trade Area (Efta): Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Lichtenstein. Each of these countries has struck its own particular deal with Brussels, but the main elements are the same. They participate fully in the four freedoms of the single market – free movement of goods, services, people and capital. But they are outside the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies, they control their own borders and human rights questions, they are free to negotiate trade accords with non-EU countries and they pay only a token sum to the EU budget.

Unsurprisingly, they are much richer than the EU members. According to the OECD, per capita GDP in the four Efta countries is double that in the EU. Euro-apologists are, naturally, quick with their explanations. "You can't compare us to Iceland," they say, "Iceland has fish." So, of course would Britain, but for the ecological calamity of the CFP. "We're nothing like Norway," they go on, "Norway has oil." Indeed; and Britain is the only net exporter of oil in the EU. Then my particular favourite: "But Switzerland has all those banks." Yes. And London is the world's premier financial centre – although it is, admittedly, being slowly asphyxiated by EU financial regulation.

I am not arguing that Britain should precisely replicate the terms struck by these Efta nations. On the contrary, we could do far better. We are a larger country for one thing, and, unlike the Efta states, we run a massive trade deficit with the EU. Indeed, the easiest way to answer Tony Blair's claim about the millions of jobs that depend on the EU is to point to the astonishing fact that the Efta nations export more per head to the EU from outside than does Britain from the inside. Efta stands as a living, thriving refutation of the assertion that we must choose between assimilation and isolation.

We can call it renegotiation, or associate membership, or leaving the EU and striking a different kind of deal with it. What we call it matters less than the content. It is perfectly possible to enjoy full access to EU markets while freeing ourselves of the accompanying costs of membership. If 4.7 million Norwegians or 280,000 Icelanders are able, through bilateral free trade accords, to furnish their peoples with the highest standard of living in Europe, how much more could Britain achieve?

The Constitution is in force
You may have got the impression that the European Constitution was dead: that the French had felled it, and the Dutch pounded a stake through its heart. If so, think again. The constitution is being brought in, clause by clause, as if those two countries had voted “Yes”.

You’d be amazed how many EU leaders believe the constitution can still be ratified in its current form. Three countries – Cyprus, Malta and Luxembourg – have endorsed it since the two “No” votes. All right, these may not be the mightiest nations in the EU, but their approval means that 13 out of 25 states have now said “Yes”.

“This is a strong signal that a majority of the member states thinks that the constitution correlates to their expectations”, said the Commission President, José Manuel Barroso as the result came in from Luxembourg. “The constitution is not dead”, added the Grand Duchy’s comical Prime Minister, Jean-Claude Juncker. The European Parliament has duly set up a committee to examine how to proceed with implementation.

The view that the constitution can be salvaged tout entier is, admittedly, a minority one. Most European leaders accept that it is no longer possible to proceed with formal ratification. So they have come up with an alternative wheeze: they are simply behaving as though the constitution were already in force. Numerous institutions that have no legal basis outside the constitution have been, or are being, established regardless. These include:

The Fundamental Rights Agency, a Vienna-based institution charged with monitoring racism, xenophobia and discrimination across the EU.
The European External Action Service, an EU diplomatic force with representation in third countries and in international organisations.
The European Space Programme.
The European Defence Agency, whose remit is to harmonise arms procurement.
An EU criminal code, accompanied by a European prosecuting magistracy called Eurojust.
A mutual defence clause, which arguably makes redundant the cornerstone of the Nato alliance.
A common European asylum policy based on harmonised rules on the assessment of claims and the rights of refugees.
EU politico-military structures, and the deployment of uniformed EU troops in Macedonia, the Congo and Bosnia.
An External Border Agency to monitor the Union’s “external frontiers” (as opposed to the borders between its members, now considered “internal frontiers”).
A Foreign Minister: the silky Spanish socialist Javier Solana.
The Charter of Fundamental Rights, which has no binding force outside the constitution, but which Euro-judges are already treating as justiciable.

Every time such a proposal comes before my parliamentary committee, I ask: “Where in the existing treaties does it say we can do this?” “Where does it say we can’t” reply my colleagues, giggling at their own cleverness like Mr Toad in Wind in the Willows.

Thus has the EU got to where it is. It extends its jurisdiction on the basis of summit communiqués, Council resolutions and Commission press statements. Several years can pass before it gets around to regularising these power-grabs in a treaty.

True, there are one or two aspects of the constitution that cannot be brought in through the existing legal framework, notably the new voting system an end to the rotating presidency. But these things can easily be rushed through in a miniature intergovernmental conference: all 25 governments have, after all, already agreed to them.

How do the Eurocrats justify going ahead in defiance of public opinion? By telling themselves that the referendums don’t count. The French and Dutch, I keep hearing, did not really vote against the constitution, but against something else: Chirac, or Turkey, or Anglo-Saxon liberalism. It is a variant of the Marxist idea of “false consciousness”. The people plainly misunderstood their true interests. They must be brought to see why the constitution is desirable. And, in the meantime, the project must continue.

It is in this context that we should understand those who claim, with Mr Juncker, that “the French and Dutch did not truly vote against the EU constitution”. We may find such statements hilarious. We may howl and retch with mirth at the collective act of hallucination taking place in Brussels. But, when the laughing stops, the constitution will be in place.

Dissolve the people and elect another in their place
In the last of these bulletins before the French referendum, I predicted that, if our neighbours voted "No", the EU would ignore the result and implement the constitution as though nothing had happened.

Two weeks on, the Brussels elites have followed the script to the letter. To British eyes, it is the script of a comedy: José Manuel Durrão Barroso, Jacques Chirac, Barbara Windsor and Sid James present Carry on Regardless. We smirk when we read the joint statement issued by the heads of the Commission, Parliament and Council calling on all countries "to proceed with ratification". We snort amusedly when we are told that the French and Dutch were really voting against something else: against Turkey, or against Chirac, or against Anglo-Saxon liberalism - against anything, in fact, except the proposition actually on the ballot paper.

We throw back our heads and laugh freely when we see the Eurocrats insisting that the Poles and Danes and British must be allowed their chance to vote "Yes". And when they go on to describe their comprehensive defeat in two referendums as "a short-term difficulty", we clutch at our sides, we howl and retch. But, when the laughter dies away, they will be left with their constitution.

This week, the European Parliament voted through dozens of Bills that cited the constitution as the source of their authority. One which happened to catch my eye was a report proposing that the British and French representatives on the UN Security Council be merged into a single EU seat. The judicial basis for such a development, said the report, was "the European Constitutional Treaty, which creates a legal personality for the Union and a European Minister for Foreign Affairs". No one was so indelicate as to point out that, without the constitution, the EU has no treaty-making powers. Instead, we carried on as though nothing had changed.

The man whom the constitution would have made Europe's Foreign Minister, Javier Solana, is comporting himself as if he were already in office. "What we have to do is continue", the silky Spaniard told MEPs. "The worst that could happen is if you, or the leaders or citizens of the European Union, enter into a psychological paralysis". You may think this preposterous; you may find Mr Solana risible. But it is he, not you, who is in a position to decide what happens next.

Almost to a man, Commissioners and MEPs have decreed that the process should continue. The EU is going ahead as though the French and Dutch electorates had voted "Yes", harmonising criminal justice, creating a European Public Prosecutor, establishing a diplomatic service, treating the Charter of Fundamental Rights as justiciable. The constitution is not being smuggled in through the back door; it is swaggering brazenly across the porch.

Forgotten, now, are the apocalyptic threats that "Yes" campaigners made before the votes. Then, they argued that rejecting the constitution would mean rejecting the entire process of European construction. A "No", they said, would undo fifty years of peaceful collaboration. Now, though, they seem reluctant to follow their own logic. If the "No" votes really were, as they claimed, a "No" to the EU, they ought surely to be repatriating powers to the national capitals - starting with those parts of the constitution that they had implemented in anticipation of the referendum results.

Instead, once the results came in, the Euro-sophists shifted their ground. Now they insist that the voters, in their ignorance, got the wrong end of the stick. Here, for example, is Jo Leinen, the chairman of the European Parliament's Constitutional Affairs Committee: "The French were voting against President Chirac and the Raffarin administration, not against the European Constitution. France must have a second chance".

Most Euro-zealots see history in deterministic, almost Marxist terms. To them, the goal of a united Europe is not simply desirable but inevitable. It follows that "No" votes are simply a bump on the road towards a fixed objective. The idea that politicians should respond to their constituents' wishes, rather than the other way around, would strike them as unconscionably populist. The role of elected representatives, as they see it, is to make voters understand their true interests. As Hans-Gert Pöttering, the amiable leader of the largest group in the European Parliament put it: "It is regrettable that the French have not been convinced of the advantages and usefulness of the constitution... the ratification process must go on". In other words, the French and Dutch must be cured of their false consciousness; and, in the meantime, we should ignore them.

I do not make the parallel with Marxism lightly. Obviously the EU cannot be compared directly to the totalitarian states of the Iron Curtain: it does not take away our passports, or throw us into gulags. But it has in common with the old Soviet Bloc a belief that the end justifies the means - that the ruling ideology is too important to be be dependent upon election results. As in the Comecon countries, there is now a large apparat whose position depends on the maintenance of the status quo. The referendum results might seem to us to de-legitimise the project; but Brussels functionaries have never been especially interested in public opinion. To them, the goal of closer integration is self-legitimising. They will continue to pursue that project, whatever their peoples think, because, in truth, they are not programmed to act in any other way. (This also explains, by the way, why so many Eastern European apparatchiks are now passionate Euro-philes: with its 25-man politburo, its rubber-stamp parliament, its special passports and reserved shops for senior officials, its five-year plans, its black limousines, the Evropeiski Soyuz seems like a home from home.)

I worry that the jubilation on this side of the Channel that has followed the "No" votes is premature. "The whole system is breaking apart", people say. "It can't work". That is what we said about the USSR and, in the long run, we were right. But it wouldn't have been much fun to have been born in, say, 1910 and lived through the process of it not working. It is possible that the EU is, as it were, in 1989; but it may be only in 1956, with the first stirrings of popular revolt. There's a deal of ruin in a Union.

Are Euro-sceptics really Nazis?
The easy reaction is outrage. How dare Margot Wallström link national sovereignty with the Holocaust? How dare she insult the 70 per cent of Britons who oppose the EU constitution, the 50-odd per cent Frenchmen who plan to vote “non”, the millions more around Europe who, for decent and democratic reasons, want to uphold their parliamentary traditions?

The Swedish Commissioner first claimed to have been misquoted, then doctored her website to remove the offending passage from her speech. But I have in front of me a copy of her original words at a ceremony to mark the liberation of the Terezin ghetto in the Czech Republic: “There are those today who want to scrap the supra-national idea. They want the EU to go back to the old purely intergovernmental way of doing things. I say those people should come to Terezin and see where that old road leads”.

Outrage, as I say, is easy. Any comparison between Nazism and Euro-scepticism, even an indirect one, is disgusting. But we all make mistakes. Mrs Wallström said something stupid and hurtful, and obviously wishes she could take it back. And, in fairness to the Commissioner a visit to Terezin would throw almost anyone’s sense of judgment out of kilter. Known to the Germans as Theresienstadt, it was a holding camp for “privileged categories” of Jews: intellectuals and First World War veterans. Because it contained many writers and artists, a substantial corpus of its inmates’ work has survived. To study those poems and paintings today, to see the schoolwork of the children who passed through the camp on their way to Auschwitz, is almost unbearable. In the circumstances, Mrs Wallström might perhaps be forgiven her lapse.

It is important, however, to challenge her main assumption, namely that the EU is the best way to prevent genocide. For this belief forms the basis of the entire European project. It is the last-ditch argument of all my Euro-enthusiast friends. Whenever I complain about corruption in Brussels, or the iniquities of the Common Agricultural Policy, or the undemocratic nature of the EU, I am told: “Even if you’re right, these things are a small price to pay for sixty years without conflict.”

If European integration really were a prophylactic against war, that might justify a good deal. But is it? Although Euro-zealots insist that the EU has been the main cause of peace in Europe, it is surely at least as accurate to see the EU as a symptom of a European peace born out of the defeat of Hitler and the spread of democracy, and guaranteed by the Atlantic alliance.

When Commissioners speak slightingly about “nationalistic pride”, as Mrs Wallström did at Terezin, they distort history. Much of the resistance to the Nazi tyranny was inspired by “nationalistic pride”. Genuine patriotism is neither selfish nor inward-looking. During the Second World War, many British people saw themselves as fighting, not only for their own country, but for the freedom of nations everywhere. We had, after all, gone to war in the first place over Poland; and the liberation of Europe’s peoples was a constant refrain in Churchill’s speeches.

British patriotism has often taken the form of active sympathy with other nations. In the Nineteenth Century, we championed national movements in Greece, Hungary, Italy and the South American republics. In the Twentieth, we twice embarked on ruinous wars because the sovereignty of a friendly country had been violated. It is a little hard now to sit and be lectured about being bad Europeans.

The most terrible wars of the modern era have mainly been caused, not by national rivalries, but by trans-national ideologies: Jacobinism, fascism, Communism, Islamic fundamentalism. The nation-state is often the focus of resistance to totalitarianism, precisely because it is the unit in which representative government works best. The supra-nationalism which Mrs Wallström invokes has never yet found a way to coexist with democracy. The Habsburgs and the Ottomans, the Yugoslavs and the Soviets, ruled supra-national states. But as soon as their peoples were given the vote, they opted for self-determination.

The EU, the outstanding supra-national entity of our age, also has inherent anti-democratic tendencies: it is run by unelected commissars who are happy to overturn inconvenient referendum results. It is founded in the belief that its ruling ideology is more important than the parliamentary and legal systems of its constituent parts. Once again, we face an “ism” that claims to be bigger than the nation. That, surely, is the true betrayal of Europe’s heritage.

French malaise
The Euro-sophists are getting in their excuses in advance. This vote in France, they say: it isn’t really about the EU constitution at all. If the French vote No on 29 May, it won’t be a rejection of Brussels, but of Chirac and his ministry. That’s the trouble with these wretched referendums, you see: people will insist on voting on the wrong question. In fact, they go on, the French don’t think the constitution goes far enough. What they think – and they’ve got a point, dear boy – is that it enshrines a British view of Europe. Odd to see you antis lining up with these ultra-federalists.

Most British commentators, including a fair number of Euro-sceptics who ought to know better, seem to have swallowed this line. It makes for good copy, and allows the writer to flaunt his knowledge of French politics. But it bears very little relation to what is actually happening across the Channel.

Let us deal, first, with contention the French and British No campaigns are pushing for opposite things. It is certainly true that the bulk of French opposition to the constitution comes from the Left (although by no means all of it: if there were not also substantial scepticism on the Right and in the Centre, the Yes campaign would be miles ahead). “Et alors?”, as the French say. So what if French socialists and British Tories have different visions of employment law, social policy or human rights? These are questions for general elections. What is at stake in the referendum is whether national parliaments should decide such matters, or whether they should be settled at EU level. On this issue, the French and British No campaigns – and, indeed, the Danish, Dutch, Czech and all the rest – are united.

There were, admittedly, one or two French politicians who would have liked the constitution to go even further, notably the Centrist leader, François Bayrou. But they quickly fell into line behind the Yes campaign once the referendum was called, for the good reason that, from their point of view, the constitution represents a considerable improvement on the status quo. As during the Maastricht referendum in 1992, there is now a near-unanimous line-up of French politicians in favour of closer integration.

Which brings us to the question of whether the referendum is really a rejection of the political class by everyone else – or, as they say in France, of the pays légal by the pays réel. Yes, of course it is. Of all the stereotypes that the British have of the French, one is outstanding in its accuracy: they are grumpy. And they have plenty to be grumpy about, being governed as they are by a self-serving cartel. The point is that they have accurately clocked that European integration is making their government even less accountable. They have grasped that the constitution, by transferring more powers from national parliaments to EU institutions, will remove decisions still further from the people.

To put it the other way around, voting against the constitution means voting against a system of governance that elevates technocracy over democracy. The point is well made in that masterpiece, The House at Pooh Corner:

“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”
“What’s for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?”
“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully.
“It’s the same thing,” he said.

If you feel that administration is already too remote at home, you are hardly going to want to transfer powers to even more distant institutions. If you have had enough of unelected commissars and énarques in Paris, you don’t want to pushed around by another set of commissars and énarques in Brussels. Pooh nodded thoughtfully. “It’s the same thing”, he said.

The French governing class is the chief beneficiary of the European system. For most of the EU’s history, French civil servants have dominated the Commission. Indeed, the timing of the Commission annual recruitment was timed to coincide with French exams. The very bureaucrats whom the French resent at home, in other words, are also the people who run Brussels.

French souverainistes have been quick to make the connection. One of my friends in the Vendée is campaigning under the slogan “Do yourself a favour: vote no” (Faites-vous plaisir : votez non”). “People are fed up with the whole racket,” he told me. “With the unemployment, with the corruption, with Chirac, with their boss, with their wife or their husband. So I am inviting them to say no to the lot of them”.

This also explains, by the way, why the Left is leading the No coalition this time, whereas the Right – in the shape of Philippe de Villiers and Philippe Séguin (who has since gone over to the Dark Side) – led the anti-Maastricht campaign thirteen years ago. When the socialists were in power, anti-politician feeling was concentrated on the Right; now it is the other way around.

We do not yet know the result of course. My sense, having spent a week with the No campaign in the Camargue, is that they are ahead. But I could be wrong; I often am. In 1992, many voters were moved at the last minute by the pathos of President Mitterand’s announcement that he had cancer. And even so, it was the closest imaginable result. Indeed, the voters of mainland France narrowly rejected Maastricht, but the result was tipped by massive Yes votes in outre-mer and from French voters resident abroad. French Guyana registered a Yes vote of 74.2 per cent, Martinique of 67.4 per cent, Guadeloupe of 72.1 per cent, and there were similar results in the rest of France’s colonial archipelago.

Quite why this should have happened has never been adequately explained. These are after all – at the risk of stating the obvious – non-European territories, many of which have a strong tradition of backing the Communist party, which was against the treaty. Could it simply be that the counts took place far away, in different time-zones, and with few scrutineers? It would certainly explain why President Mitterand was able to assure John Major that there had been a narrow Yes vote long before the polls had closed.

But let us hypothesise, for a moment, that the souverainistes carry the day. What would happen next? Would the EU tear up the constitution, go back to the drawing board and try to come up with something better? Not a chance. This would not, after all, be the first time that the project had been rejected. It happened when the Danes voted against Maastricht, when the Irish voted against Nice and, indeed, when the markets voted against the ERM. On all these occasions, the EU simply carried on as before. There is no Plan B in Brussels; Plan A is simply resubmitted over and over again until it is bludgeoned through.

Don’t take my word for it. Large parts of the constitution are already being implemented today, even though ten national referendums are still outstanding. The Charter of Fundamental Rights is being treated as justiciable, even though only four states have ratified the constitution that gives it binding force. Substantial elements of the proposed harmonisation of justice and home affairs are being carried out in anticipation of the referendum results. Now the EU is launching its own diplomatic service, despite the strong possibility that at least one country will reject the constitution that gives it a legal basis.

It is little wonder that the French, in common with every other nation in Europe, feel taken for granted. When people complain that politicians are all the same, that it doesn’t matter how you vote, that the élites will go ahead and please themselves regardless, they are not simply letting off steam; they are accurately appraising the conduct of European policy over the past half century. The founders of the EU deliberately designed the system that way. They knew that their project – the merging of Europe’s nations – would never come off if it had to be periodically referred to the national electorates. So they evolved a method whereby harmonisation could be effected in smoke-filled rooms (or, these days, smoke-free rooms) and then presented to the peoples as a fait accompli.

A No vote, on its own, will not be enough. As long as the same governments remain in power, they will pursue their existing European policy, even if it must formally be done through the old treaties rather than through the constitution. The only way to change the direction of the EU is to alter the complexion of national parliaments – to put majorities in place who believe in decentralisation and democracy. The trouble in France is that, with the exception of Philippe de Villiers’ Mouvement pour la France, there is no such party. But in Britain, happily, there is. That is why the decisive vote in this country is not the putative referendum next March, but the intervening general election.

The cost of Europe
I have found it: the philosopher’s stone of politics, the fiscal elixir or life, the magic formula that has eluded democratic governments for centuries. There really is such a thing as a pain-free spending cut.

The two parties are currently arguing about whether it is possible to trim £12 billion a year from government expenditure. The Tories say that it can be done with a few nips and tucks, and that we won’t feel a thing. Labour says that slicing off such a sum will mean patients sleeping in corridors and leaky school roofs and unemployed civil servants holding out their bowler hats on street corners.

I was pondering these claims when I noticed something: £12 billion is precisely the amount that we pay the EU each year. Quite a coincidence, when you think about it. I mean, Michael Howard and Oliver Letwin are accused of lying because they think that £12 billion can be wrung from the entire budget. If Labour does not actually call them shysters, the epithet is implicit in its poster campaign. And yet here we are meekly handing over an identical sum to Brussels. If ever there was a painless excision, a tax cut with no losers, surely this is it.

For some reason, though, the question of our financial tribute to the EU has disappeared from the political agenda. It seems such an Eighties issue, redolent of Galtieri and Soft Cell and Rubik’s Cubes and those hideous leg-warmer things that girls used to wear. To the extent that we think about it at all, we tend to assume that the sums are fairly small, and are a sort of admission fee for our participation in the single market. After all, the whole thing was settled when Margaret Thatcher got us our rebate. Wasn’t it?

Not according to Treasury figures. In the 20 years since the rebate was negotiated, we have contributed £170 billion gross (£50 billion net) to the EU budget. A billion here, a billion there: pretty soon it starts to add up to real money. Our annual financial transfer to the EU is equivalent to the entire Home Office budget. If we stopped our payments, we could give the whole country a 60 per cent cut in council tax. Or, if we preferred, we could abolish capital gains tax and inheritance tax and still have enough left over to scrap stamp duty.

It is true that £12 billion is the gross figure. The more commonly cited sum is our net contribution, which last year amounted to £4.2 billion. But why commentators should prefer this second measure is a mystery. They don’t do it in any other field of public life. No one argues, for example, that income tax, rather than being 22 pence in the pound, is in fact zero, because the whole sum is “given back” in roads, schools and hospitals.

So what if £8 billion of EU funds is spent in the UK? It does not go on projects that we would have chosen for ourselves. Indeed, it is often devoted to schemes whose chief purpose is to glorify the EU: public works where the blue flag will be prominently displayed next to busy roads, for example. Sometimes, the money is spent more or less overtly on advertising, as when the organisers of an exhibition cash in simply by printing the twelve star symbol on their programme. Sometimes it disappears into private bank accounts.

Ah, say the Euro-apologists, but that’s our own fault. The funds may be allocated by Brussels, but they are often disbursed by national authorities. This is true. But, precisely because the money is not seen as ours, it is rarely treated with much respect. Quangoes and local councils spray Euro-grants about with abandon, and the Commission carries on signing the cheques in the fond belief that it is buying popularity. Thus, to quote an example from my own patch, Brighton Council recently advertised for a six-month EU funded project “to study the impact of gender mainstreaming in the field of waste management”. No councillor would dare spend his constituents’ money on such a scheme. But, when it’s Europe’s money, who cares?

Only, of course, it isn’t Europe’s money. It’s ours. It has simply been sloshed through the various tubes and compartments of the Brussels machine, leaking all the way, before coming back to these shores. This criticism applies even when the money goes on impeccably worthy projects. As an MEP, I like to think that I have helped a number of honourable applicants to open the Commission’s spigots. But I never do so without wondering what their youth orchestras or training schemes have to do with Brussels. If we had hung on to our own resources in the first place, we should be able to pay for all these things with several billion pounds to spare.

If £12 billion really were the ticket price for single market membership, it would be hard enough to justify. In the 20 years since the rebate, we have run a total trade deficit with the EU of £220 billion – a deficit we have had to make up through our healthy surpluses with every other continent in the world.

In reality, though, the EU budget has nothing to do with international commerce. I recently wrote in these pages about the happy condition of Iceland which, through its membership of the European Free Trade Area (EFTA), is fully covered by the four freedoms of the single market – free movement, that is, of goods, services, people and capital. Its payments to Brussels amount to just 0.07 per cent of the island’s GDP. The other three EFTA countries also make only token contributions. Yet every one of them exports more per head to the EU than does Britain. Luxembourg, meanwhile, which is easily the EU’s wealthiest state, has been a massive net beneficiary from the budget. Indeed, for most of the 32 years of our membership, Britain and Germany have been the only significant net contributors. Some admission fee!

Our budget contribution does not purchase market access. Rather, it funds the CAP, the CFP, the EU’s overseas aid budget, the structural funds and so on. Withdraw from these things and we would truly get our money back – including the two million-odd pounds that we handed over while you were reading this article. It’s worth a thought.

Time for regime change in Europe
It was hardly the speech we had been hoping for. George W Bush, as any fule kno, is a conservative hard-man, a scourge of international lawyers, a unilateralist. If he has one guiding principle in foreign affairs, it is a preference for national democracy over supra-national bureaucracy. On Kyoto, or the International Criminal Court, or the UN, he takes the robust view that elected politicians are preferable to unaccountable fonctionnaires. Yet here he was in Brussels lauding perhaps the most backward and anti-democratic project in the Western world.

European integration, he says, is a force for peace and freedom on Earth. Really? Where, exactly? In Iran, where the EU is cosying up to murderous ayatollahs who, among other things, recently sanctioned the execution of a teenage girl? In China, where it is collaborating with a Communist tyranny in developing satellite weapons systems? In Cuba, where it has a soft spot for the Castro regime? Or perhaps within its own borders where, through the proposed constitution, it plans to transfer yet more powers from elected national assemblies to unelected Brussels commissariats?

One of the mysteries of modern diplomacy is America ’s continuing public support for a development that seems so inimical to its own interests. In every other field, Washington has adjusted to the realities of the post-9/11 world. During the Cold War, the State Department was prepared to back several odious dictators on grounds that they were anti-Communists (“he may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch”). George Bush, however, takes the more modern view that indulging these tinpot tyrants is not in fact in America ’s interests, since unstable regimes tend to export violence, however nominally pro-Western their leaders. Better, he reasons, to deal with free democracies than to prop up local strongmen in the name of “stability”. When it comes to the EU, however, Washington is still frozen in the Cold War, preferring to humour remote elites than to encourage democratisation.

What is especially worrying is that the speech that the President delivered on Monday seems to have been toned down. Early drafts apparently included a specific endorsement of the proposed constitution, which was taken out after a ruckus in the White House. The idea of such an endorsement may have come from Peter Mandelson, who had been in Washington the previous week. Mr Mandelson no doubt remembers how useful it was during the 1975 Common Market referendum to have the Commonwealth leaders publicly calling for a “Yes” vote. If the leader of the English-speaking world were to say something similar today, it would surely sap the morale of anti-constitution campaigners.

Equally, though, there is a horrible possibility that the idea emerged in Washington without any European encouragement. Plenty of Americans – including a good many Republicans who ought to know better – go along lazily with the idea that European integration must be a good thing, since it means that American forces will not have to intervene to sort out European wars again. Others argue that, whether or not it is a good thing in its own terms, it is better, from a US point of view, to have the Brits inside sticking up for the Atlantic alliance. (This argument seems more reasonable, but ignores the way in which the British representatives in Brussels go native: their participation, in other words, has far more impact on Britain ’s orientation than on Europe ’s.) Still others see the process as an echo of their own early federation, and look on the European constitution as equivalent to the American one. After all, did not its principal author, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, describe it as “our Philadelphia moment” – a reference to the drafting of the US Constitution in 1786?

The briefest glance at the document would disabuse them of any such idea. The US had the enormous good fortune to draw up its constitution in an era when notions of personal freedom and limited government dominated Western thought. Alas, the EU constitution, too, is a child of its time. Where the US constitution is chiefly concerned with the rights of the individual, the European constitution is chiefly concerned with the powers of the state. Where the US constitution (in my version) is eleven pages long, the European constitution (in the official English publication) runs to 438 pages. Where the US constitution restricts itself to delineating the authority of Government and establishing a proper balance between federal and state jurisdiction, the EU constitution busies itself with such minutiae as marine biology and the status of the disabled. Where the Declaration of Independence offers “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights (which forms part of the constitution) guarantees the right to “strike action”, “non-discrimination” and “affordable housing”.

President Bush, who is currently reading a biography of Alexander Hamilton, can hardly have failed to spot these differences. Perhaps he takes the view that, if the Europeans want to lumber themselves with a top-heavy and illiberal system of governance, that is their business. He ought, though, to ask himself whether the European constitution is in his own country’s interests.

Anti-Americanism was built into the foundations of the EU. Even as US troops fought their way across occupied Europe, the future patriarchs of the EU were discussing the need to “contain” or “counterbalance” American power. For the next fifty years, the immediacy of the Soviet threat pushed such thoughts to the back of European minds. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, EU leaders have been speaking openly of the need to develop a powerful EU in order to prevent “a unipolar world”.

I saw an early sign of the new mood when, as an undergraduate in 1992, I worked with the “No” campaign in the French referendum on the Maastricht Treaty. Alarmed by the opinion polls, the Socialist Government launched a poster showing a cowboy in a stetson hat squashing the globe, and carrying the slogan “faire l’Europe c’est faire le poids ” (“building Europe gives us weight”). It worked. Today, similar sentiments are routinely trotted out as an argument for voting “Yes” to the constitution.

Every superpower is resented, of course, as Britain once learned. But there is more to this than envy. Anti-Americanism in Europe has an ideological basis. Consider the areas where EU policy is most directly at odds with that of the US: Iran, China, Cuba, Israel. There is a common theme linking these countries: in each of them, the EU favours stability over democracy. It has spent a decade appeasing the mullahs in the vain hope that constructive engagement would stimulate internal reform in Teheran. Not only is it planning to lift its arms embargo on Beijing; it is actively co-operating with China on a new satellite navigation system called Galileo, designed explicitly to challenge the “technological imperialism” of America ’s GPS. Having fiercely opposed US attempts to isolate Cuba economically, it has now withdrawn its support for anti-Castro dissidents. It boasts of having been Arafat’s chief sponsor.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the EU should itself be on the point of adopting a constitution that strengthens the rulers at the expense of the ruled. When American critics accuse the EU of hypocrisy for cuddling up to Third World tyrants, they are missing the point. Europe ’s apparatchiks have never been wild about democracy (or “populism” as they call it). When they get a result they dislike – as when Danish and Irish voters rejected EU treaties, for example – they ignore it. It is only natural that they should extend the same way of thinking to, say, Iraq or Palestine.

Why on Earth, though, should President Bush go along with their agenda? At home, he has worked to diffuse power, to localise decision-making, to curtail judicial activism. His foreign policy, too, has been guided by a belief that it is better to deal with democracies than with juntas. He has no time for international quangoes. Yet, in supporting the EU constitution, he would be endorsing a project based on the idea that technocrats are better guardians of the public weal than the rogues who have conned people into voting for them.

Perhaps the President wants to reward Mr Blair for his support during the Iraq war. If so, he has found a clever way of doing so. Mr Bush’s direct electoral endorsement would do his British auxiliary no favours; but helping him win the referendum would allow him to retire as one of the most successful of all Prime Ministers.

The President has good reason to feel grateful to Mr Blair, who unwontedly swam against the current of public opinion over Iraq. But, before bestowing this particular prize on his friend, Mr Bush might care to cast his eye over Article I-15 of the proposed constitution: “The EU Common Foreign and Security policy shall apply to all aspects of foreign policy and all questions relating to the Union ’s security. Member States shall support the Common Foreign and Security Policy actively and unreservedly in a spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity”. It is worth asking whether, if this clause had already been in effect, Britain would have been allowed to join the invasion.