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23rd October 2005
Article for The Japan Times
By David Howell
Published in JT 31st October 2005
Can the European Union Win Grass Roots Trust?
Some Lessons for Building an East Asian Community
LONDON, PARIS and ROME – European leaders have been holding a special meeting at
the invitation of British Prime Minister Tony Blair to discuss what he calls
‘the strategic issues facing Europe in the years ahead’.
Tony Blair wanted this to be a really informal gathering. The setting was the
delightful Hampton Court Palace just outside London, a sprawling Tudor Palace
built by Cardinal Wolsey – in effect the English Shogun of his day –during the
reign of quarrelsome King Henry the Eighth (1509-1547). Unfortunately he got the
wrong side of his increasingly impatient and somewhat brutal master – over the
matter of the King’s divorce (before Henry went on to marry five more wives) -
and was ousted. His Palace was grabbed by the King and remains a Royal
possession to this day.
‘Oh put not your trust in princes’ murmured Cardinal Wolsey ruefully on his
deathbed, quoting from the bible (Psalm 146). The question now is whether we
should feel the same about the political princes who have been gathering there
this time – around four hundred and eighty years after the Cardinal’s downfall.
Tony Blair clearly hoped that a pleasant day at Hampton Court, with its historic
background and beautiful parks and gardens, including a huge maze, will generate
all the trust and friendship needed to get the limping European Union back on
the way forward. He wanted no officials to be present – although some were bound
to slip in – and he wanted no-one to wear a tie. Conviviality was to be the
keynote – out of which harmony on the road ahead would emerge.
But what road is that to be? All the heads of state and governments may talk
about working more closely together and more European integration. But the words
seem to mean quite different things to different leaders.
Some want to revive the draft constitution for the EU, which both the French and
the Dutch rejected heavily last summer, and push ahead with political union in
Europe to make it, in effect, one political bloc under one Europe-wide legal
authority, heavily harmonised and centralised on many fronts, although with
frequent lip-service to diversity and national cultural distinctions.
Others, including the British, but by no means just the British, want less
vision and more practical detail. For example, Mr.Blair talks about more
co-operation on research and development, on universities, on illegal
immigration, on personal security for Europe’s citizens.
Others again want the smaller ands newer member states to have more say and are
still smarting under the whiplash of President Chirac’s tongue when, speaking
from the Presidential Palace in Paris, he grandly ordered the smaller states to
keep quiet over the Iraq issue an support for America. ‘The have missed’ he said
ominously ‘a great chance to stay silent’.
Then there are the Italians, whose feelings towards the EU seem to vary with
their domestic moods. Many Italians now blame their problems on the Euro
currency, which is widely disliked. A week ago in Rome a taxi-driver cursed the
Euro as he handed me my change. The sooner Italy escaped from it, he opined, the
better.
These numerous different approaches , may appear to have been seamlessly
interwoven in the chatty, tie-less conversations over lunch in the Tudor Palace.
In fact they conceal a fundamental divergence of view about the nature of
regional co-operation in Europe – a divergence which should be studied closely
by those in East Asia who are contemplating more ‘integration’ in an East Asian
Community.
This divergence is not between those who are pro- or anti the European Union. It
is between those who want light, practical and neighbourly co-operation, some of
it very close, within the European region, and those who want to build a new
political power in Europe, and to do so if necessary by stealth and without
waiting for democratic validation.
The latter – the power-builders- have on their side the heady vision of a United
States of Europe acting as a significant policy player on the world stage,
mounting an integrating army, using its bloc trade power to call the shots
internationally and above all, to be a counterweight to American hegemony.
The former want European togetherness to be part of a wider global network. They
want close integration in specific areas where it really works, such as regional
crime-busting collaboration. But they just do not want the full political union
which the dreamers demand, and they do not really want an EU with its own
foreign policy which might override the very varied and sometimes conflicting
foreign policy objectives of the individual member states.
The lesson for those wanting to build more regional co-operation in East Asia is
that they should be careful about copying the European model. Practical
co-operation on issues such as energy supply and the environment, and migrant
movements, make a lot of sense. Turning an East Asian Community into a political
union of some kind with its own personality ad foreign policy drive is quite
another proposition – and a dangerous one.
Besides which, such attempts at forced political intimacy never work for long,
as the EU example shows. Real feelings of unity have to come from below, not
from Government schemes imposed over the heads of the citizens.
The message from below is that people like international co-operation but not
too much, and not in too politicised a form. Would-be builders of East Asian
Community would do well to note that.
Ends
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