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Thursday, Sept. 13, 2007 JAPAN TIMES
Europe's quarrelling crew
By DAVID HOWELL
LONDON — The European Union is again entering stormy seas. Like a ship
with a mutinous crew it is drifting dangerously while above and below
decks arguments rage about how Europe should be run. The EU has weathered
past crises and often emerged stronger, but this time the rocks ahead are
very large, and blinkered policies being steered by some of Europe's
leading statespersons have made the chances of striking them very
substantial.
Fingers are once more being pointed at Britain as being at the heart of
the trouble, and it is undeniable that British objections to parts of the
currently proposed European Reform Treaty are causing much of the tension.
But this time it is not the British who are wholly to blame. The real
cause of all the aggravation is the determination of certain EU leaders to
push ahead with plans that transfer substantial further powers away from
member states and into the hands of central EU institutions. This was
tried before, a few years back, when EU leaders put forward what was
labeled a new constitution for the EU — which received a resounding "no"
from both French and Dutch voters when it was put to a referendum (and
would have done so from the British as well if the whole project had not
then been dropped).
This time the EU's leaders — or some of them — have tried the same thing
again with the new "reform" treaty, but carefully dropping the
constitution label while leaving most of the contents within it unchanged.
Predictably, growing numbers of voices are calling for the treaty to be
subject to a referendum, like the last one which it so resembles — and not
just in Britain but in several other member states. So far, new British
Prime Minister Gordon Brown has resisted the referendum pressure on the
grounds that Britain's sovereign powers in vital areas such as foreign
policy, social policy and the administration of justice are protected by
legally watertight "opt-outs" from the proposed treaty.
But the pressure on him is growing daily from all sides, not just from his
political opponents and not just from those who were always opposed to EU
membership. The claim that this is a different treaty from last time, and
that therefore a referendum is not needed, is sounding thinner and
thinner, especially when leading European figures are all saying the
opposite and insisting that it is 90 percent the same as before. And many
respected legal authorities have claimed that the opt-outs are not so
watertight after all.
To handle the situation Brown has made a skillful but risky move. He has
told the other EU leaders that there must be big additional concessions to
Britain by diluting further the integrating aspects of the new treaty. If
these are not granted he has hinted that he may be pushed into a
referendum after all.
This has infuriated the treaty's chief architects, notably German
Chancellor Angela Merkel. The scene is thus set for a shipwreck. Either
these key concessions are made — which would probably include dropping the
idea of a powerful figure to conduct EU foreign policy collectively, and
many other provisions as well. Or the British will hold their referendum
and will unquestionably vote no to the new treaty. This would then take
the EU straight on to the rocks, leading to disorientation and possible
breakup.
This would be a tragedy, and one that would have been unnecessary and
completely avoidable, had Europe's leaders been ready to settle for a more
modest tidying up treaty to adapt the EU to its ever-growing membership
(now 27 nations). Most of the peoples and nations of Europe are fully
ready for their governments to work closely together and develop a wide
range of common regional policies.
But what they do not want and will not have is a more centralized and
integrated European bloc, with many of the trappings of a state, including
a growing degree of protection against outside competition and other
pressures. Merkel's persistent push to bring this about has therefore been
nothing short of reckless. It has put at risk decades of practical
cooperation in Europe which most people were ready to see continue as
before.
Britain is one of several European countries that holds strongly to this
"practical" and pragmatic view of the EU, not because it is
"anti-European" but for the hard-nosed reason that a Europe that is too
centralized and protected, too fond of welfare and not committed enough to
vigorous innovation will just not be able to compete with rising Asia.
Already it is apparent that the world's riches are gravitating eastward.
In recent days the world's most powerful investors with the most money to
spend — from the Middle East, from Russia, from India and from China —
have been meeting at Dalian, in northeastern China, to plot the global
economic future.
If Europe wants to stay afloat in this new global economic sea, it will
have to spend more time letting enterprise have its head and less time
arguing on the bridge about who should hold the tiller and in which
direction the EU should be steering.
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