Europe: Sovereignty Crisis, or Sovereignty Opportunity?
Charles Crawford senses big movements afoot in the EU, and thinks Britain will soon have some big choices to make.
4 Aug 2011, 17:52
Europe: Choices to make
One by Joschka Fischer catches the eye. Fischer was Germany’s Foreign Minister from 1998-2005 and well before that a member of nasty student Marxist group Revolutionary Struggle (with dashes of Proletarische Union für Terror und Zerstörung - Proletarian Union for Terror and Destruction) thrown in for good measure). Strengthened by that elevating experience he went on to lead Germany’s Greens and achieved high office.
Now under the Project Syndicate rubric The Rebel Realist Herr Fischer looks at the Eurozone crisis. He draws far-reaching conclusions (my emphasis):
The markets issued an ultimatum to Europe: either embrace more economic and financial integration on a federal basis, or face the collapse of the euro and thus the EU, including the Common Market. At the last moment, Merkel chose the sensible option...Crikey. Big stuff.
[T]he two-speed Union, which has been a reality since the first rounds of enlargement, will divide into a vanguard (euro group) and a rearguard (the rest of the 27 EU members).
This formalized division will fundamentally change the EU’s internal architecture. Under the umbrella of the enlarged EU, the old dividing lines between a German/French-led European Economic Community and a British/Scandinavian-led European Free Trade Association re-emerge. From now on, the euro states will determine the EU’s fate more than ever, owing to their common interests.
Second, this jump into a monetary fund and economic government will lead to further massive losses of sovereignty for the member states, in favor of a European federal solution. For example, within the monetary union, national budget laws will be subject to a European supervisory body.
… If the euro is to survive, genuine integration, with further transfers of sovereignty to the European level, will be unavoidable. This historic step cannot be taken through the bureaucratic backdoor, but only in the bright light of democratic politics. The EU’s further federalization enforces its further democratization.
The point, of course, is that further EU federalization enforces further un-democratization. So what if national parliaments in the countries which perforce form the new so-called Vanguard step out into the bright light and vote to strip themselves of power? The ensuing Vanguard-level structures thereby might be proclaimed as legitimate. But they’ll enjoy at best only a trite, fleeting, formal legitimacy; they can have no intrinsic, sustainable, substantive legitimacy.
The net result? A transfer of substantive power and sovereignty to an EU uber-elite of unelected and for all practical purposes unaccountable politico-technocratic autocracy, many of whom will be former Marxist friends of Joschka Fischer. Many of us might see that as a bug. For the Fischers of this world it’s the main feature.
Something like this probably has to happen now, given that the economic and psychological costs to many European capitals in letting the Eurozone disintegrate are intolerable, just as watching different EU member states get sucked into a debt death-spiral is also unattractive.
What about the United Kingdom? These changes imply wholesale revision of EU core treaties. They have unambiguous consequences for each member state’s sovereignty (howsoever defined). So, thanks to the UK’s shiny new ‘referendum lock’, the Westminster government of the day will have no option to call (and perhaps welcome) a national referendum.
The policy choice will be stark. The intrusive undemocratic mechanisms needed to make the Eurozone Vanguard work will be trivially unacceptable to British opinion. So at best we’ll opt sullenly for the Rearguard.
But more importantly, it is hard to see how a two-speed Vanguard/Rearguard EU might actually work in practice. The highly integrative taxation and governance/control/audit and above all legal regimes needed to make the Vanguard survive must spill over into running the Rearguard part of the EU space as a whole.
How, for example, will the key thing the EU wants from us, namely taxpayers’ money, be allocated? Should the UK be expected to continue to put money into a central pot which then supports plump Vanguard farmers in France as well as relatively deserving thinner farmers in Poland? Tax and regulatory competition? Won’t the European Court of Justice emit stern judgements favouring the Vanguard rather than the Rearguard?
Hurrah! We’ll vote massively to keep our sovereignty - then watch aghast as Vanguard legal mice nibble it away.
As the Fischer piece helpfully makes clear at the start, the Vanguard vision builds on three explicit principles: (a) greater (sic) stability, brought about by (b) financial transfers which (c) are done in the name of mutual solidarity.
The whole project therefore rests on the final one: mutual solidarity. And this is where Fischer’s youthful extreme Marxist instincts bubble back to the surface.
What he is saying is that the people/regions who create wealth in Europe are nothing but cows to be milked for the benefit of anyone who needs it. Solidarity is a one-way street. Even if the recipients of solidarity don’t deserve it – nay, especially if they don’t deserve it – they get it anyway.
Hmmm. That idea sounds … familiar:
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour … after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! (K Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875)
Important and unfathomable issues affecting the highest principles of governance, democracy and morality as evolved in Europe for the past 400 years or so are coming our way fast
Quick! Get out the microscope, to study where in Whitehall the contingency planning for these momentous upheavals is being done.
The author
Charles Crawford
Charles Crawford is a former British Ambassador to Sarajevo, Belgrade and Warsaw.
Full profile →
Comments (1)
Subscribe to this posts's comments feed
That's one (valid) reading of the possibilities - the other is that increasing integration will force democratisation of the existing EU technocracies. After all, only by subjecting the governance of Europe to democratic structures similar to existing domestic ones can any extant political group hope to exercise power.
The primary reason that parts of the EU are partly undemocratic now is to prevent the authority of elected mandate moving out of national structures (didn't work but that's the cause). If that's going to happen anyway, I suspect the nations will insist on a democratic, two-house + head, structure.
On your conclusion, I agree that a lot of continental Europe political rhetoric is coloured by language that now seems quaintly or threateningly (depending on your POV) founded in Cold War ideology. But that doesn't mean that centralised management of resources (tax mainly but also commodities, energy etc) for the EU as a whole would necessarily advantage the rich over the poor. It's entirely possible that an EU-wide system would be no more iniquitous than our own existing tax system.
It comes down to whether or not you believe that national governments will be able to work together to get a new system in place or whether they will be so log-jammed that the bureaucrats end up being the only ones who seem to be able to get anything done.
Finally there is always the third option - that this current crisis passes, times are tough but not apocalyptic, and no major change is put in place at all. I personally think that that's the most likely outcome: a muddling through and acceptance that while things ain't perfect, real change is too hard and/or disruptive to get done.
If there's one thing the EU is really good at, after all, it's a fudge.
05/08/2011 15:32