As the last few minutes of England’s match against Ukraine wound to a close on Tuesday evening, a friend of mine looked beamingly up at the screen and said: ‘You see, we can’t win if we’re not in Europe.’
His sustained enthusiasm for the grand projet in these dark times is admirable. He even described the Greek, Portuguese, Irish and Spanish bailouts as ‘a blip’: ‘Are you really going to ditch this whole thing on the basis of one bad year?’
Thankfully he is able to deliver these lines with a hint of a smile, unlike his intellectual sympathisers in the Place Lux. But he, along with many of those who see themselves as the sensible ones within our parliamentary parties, genuinely believes that our long-term interests lie in a gradual move towards continental federalism.
But gawping at those ‘who believe’ has been the undoing of eurosceptics of all stripes since we entered the common market. As long as Nigel Farage, with his unpleasant bullying tactics, remains the poster-boy of scepticism about the EU in its current form, Britain can never come to a satisfactory conclusion about the merits of our present journey.
If and when this debate ever truly moves into the public sphere – spurred on by an increasingly diverse group of backbench MPs – I hope those on both sides of the argument have the honesty to confront their opponents’ valid anxieties.
My friend points out that a federal Europe would have a 300 million-strong labour force. It would have the military capacity of the US. It would provide a hefty diplomatic counterweight to the rising dominance of countries who live under the rule of oligarchs and autocrats.
And he is absolutely correct. Britain outside the EU would be smaller, less capable of exerting hard power, less capable of backing up its commercial interests with promises of lucrative investment or market access, or threats of withdrawal.
Europhiles point to the increasing frustration and disdain with which Britain is treated during European summits and in the continental media as evidence that a policy of hesitance – combined with the occasional lecture directed at those who are far deeper in than we are – is isolating us from our closest trading partners.
And again, they are absolutely right.
But Britain within a European state would be no more welcome at the table – unless we decided to do away with hundreds of years of political and cultural skill-sharpening; a mindset that causes our bargaining position to rub up so uncomfortably against our neighbours. However strong, rich or influential a European state might be, we would never find our place in it.
The problem is not that we are dithering on the touch line as our imperious managers tell us to get onto the field, but that we have signed for the wrong team. Our relationship with Europe is a friendly and competitive one, but not comradely. My friend was right – we can’t win if we don’t engage – but nor can we do so in a role that doesn’t fit.
The fever of excitement that surrounded European integration, particularly in the ten years between the introduction of the Euro and the financial crash, may continue to blur politicians’ perception of this, but it hasn’t altered the public’s.
Another Europhile friend of mine frequently quotes the 19th century Italian statesman Massimo Taparelli and his famous saying ‘We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians.’ We are on our way to creating Europe, so the thinking goes, but we’ve got to make people believe in the project to keep it all going. It worked for Germany and Italy – and indeed the UK – and this is just the next, unstoppable step.
In fact, the quotation ran: ‘L’Italia è fatta. Restano da fare gli italiani’ – ‘We have made Italy. It remains to make Italians’. We could learn a little from Taparelli’s circumspection – and the forces that have shaped his mistranslation. Creeping inevitability is the fruit of hindsight. The future is not so certain.
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Patrick Macfarlane writes the Blue Labour column on Progress and edits BlueLabour.org
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Photo: European Paliament
The EU will not have the military strength of the USA this century, or probably ever. And no bad thing. since it is happy to sponsor oligarchs and autocrats in its satrapies, especially in the Balkans. Badinter acted for the EU when he wantonly recognized the internal boundaries of Tito’s Yugoslavia, artificially balanced between Serbs (partitioned at least three ways) and others, as international boundaries. Bismarck, who united Germany through careful diplomacy, not, as he boasted, through iron and blood. (AJP Taylor, Bismarck, a life) said the Balkans were not worth the life of a single Pomeranian grenadier. MacFarlane (se, stesso!) mistranslates the Taparelli quotation: restano must refer to Italians, since it is 3rd person plural. So it means, the Italians wait to act…..Farrell’s Life of Mussolini, not to mention Mack Smith, make it clear that Italy had barely been unified – certainly not by Taparelli’s superficial Liberal successors. Watch the film Salvatore Giulian (dir – Francesco Rosi) if you don’t like reading (eg Il Gattopardo by Lampedusa) about the persistent self-activity (not the victimhood Danilo Dolci would have us perceive) of the Mezzogiorno and its spearhead, Sicily. “Rome, unique object de mon ressentiment”….This swindling did not work that well for Italy… and German history to 1945 is not that great an example. As for the UK, its two (or starting from the 1707 union rather than from 1801) three centuries of successful multinational integration rested on many sources never to be available to the EU – a monarchy tamed by Cromwell (and descriebd by Wolfe Tone in 1791 as in effect a republic), a language common to all postfeudal social classes throughout the three kingdoms….and on and on.
Europeanist projecteering, even if not wholly the project of the Vichyite Uriage Euro-civil servant staff college (see Laughland), has roots at least as shallow and superficial as Liberal Italy of 1870-1922. No one has yet made Italians. Italian civil society is almost as resistant to its ill-rooted state as the Pakistan portrayed in Anatol Lieven’s “Pakistan – a hard country”……
Let MacFarlane devise a constructive alternative to the current doomed set-up, broadly along the free trade lines of the 1972-5 vision of Europe promised to Britons. We could win a referendum with a question focussed around such an alternative. Labour ideology, having abandoned pretensions to socialism in the mid80s, and jaded with the DeLors worship of the late 80s, having been submerged by glib ‘narrative’-mongering with only cut-price Greenery as a sub-plot, needs a rebirth. Is Cruddas up to it? If he stopped dropping references and started critical thinking, he might….
I think the question we should be asking ourselves as a nation is not “where do we fit in Europe, how do we engage with it?” but rather “how can we lead Europe, and shape its future to our advantage?”.
The first and most important answer to this question is “not from outside”! The traditional core of Europe – Germany, France and the Low Countries – are the current powerbase in the EU, but their strength is being undermined by a growing perception that they wish to create a two-tier EU, with a strong core and a dependent periphery, to take the EU back to an exclusive club of wealthy countries. Britain must make more of its unique position as a champion of the accession countries, and those like Turkey aspiring to join, by challenging this return to a small Europe.
The Labour government’s decision to allow uncapped migration from across the expanded EU in 2004 has given Britain significant standing in the eyes of ‘new’ Europe. While old Europe threw up caps and quotas to try and act as if nothing had changed, Britain welcomed the cultural and economic benefits of a dynamic new section of the work-force, building a reputation as a country which is fair and open. Britain must transform this goodwill into firm political capital, and transform that capital into leadership.
The British psyche is trapped between desire to project our influence and power on the world, to shape its events and have a meaningful say in its governance, and recognition of the limitations of a small island nation in fast-changing global society. The latter is part of our reticence towards further EU integration – we’ll be swallowed up, disenfranchised – but we must understand how we can make Europe work for us. As a leading nation, with a loud voice, operating within a body of 500 million people – that is how we can make a difference in the modern world!
Really, it’s not that “we can’t win if we’re not in Europe”, but that we can’t challenge and change Europe to what we want and need it to be from the outside. The only choice for Britain and Europe is to lead.