Differing Paths to European Unity - New Possibilties for Europe in the Network Age

Extracts from speech by Lord Howell of Guildford, Opposition spokesman on Foreign affairs in the House of Lords, delivered at the Royal Institute of International Affairs at 1.30 on Wednesday, January 31st. 2001 

A battle is said to be raging over the future shape of Europe.
The battle lines have been drawn between the 'integrationists' and the 'inter-governmentalists'. Commentators are openly talking about 'a growing divide' between the two approaches.
On one side, so we are informed, stand the Germans, with their federalist hopes unabated, along with the Italians and the smaller member states, together naturally, with the European Commission.
On the other side, it is said, stand the French who reject the federal trend and made this all too clear at the recent Nice Summit.
Hovering in between is the British Government - although inclined to the inter-governmentalist camp, to judge by recent prime ministerial speeches.
Both sides claim that their way provides the answer to Europe's problems. In practice, neither model really works any more . A different and much more powerful pattern is emerging which overtakes the whole of this debate.

This new pattern - which is already largely in place - can best be described as the network order - the gigantic lattice-work of connections between national governments and administrations, non-governmental organisations, private corporations, international lobbies, agencies and institutions which today makes up the weave and fabric of international relations and which is dictating the new pattern of European unification. 
Failure to comprehend this new structure and the way it works , which has been vastly reinforced by online communications technology and the internet - could be fatal in the formulation both of Britain's European policy and British foreign policy generally.

It is commonly asserted that European problems require European solutions and likewise that global problems must be addressed through a framework of global systems and actions. All the emphasis, it is contended, should therefore be on further integration of national policies and further treaties, tortuously negotiated between national administrations , to underpin the process.
This 'government-centric' approach overlooks not only that these nineteenth and early twentieth century methods of agreement are cumbersome, and often undemocratic, and not only that the informality and speed of the network age is proving much more effective in establishing international agreements and standards than traditional bureaucratic procedures, with their long tail of regulations.
It also overlooks the fact that current practices are failing to solve the great international issues, whether at a European or global level. 
Not only are solutions for the major world problems, such as poverty disease, misery in Africa and parts of Asia, environmental desecration, water shortages, drug trafficking, globally organised crime and so on, further away than ever, despite the unending process of treaties, treaty amendments and internationally negotiated agreements. The contribution of the European Union in its present form to these issues has been increasingly feeble. 
Protection still rules in agriculture, and many other areas. International criminality flourishes. Immigration and asylum policies contradict each other. Entry to the Union for the Central European democracies still remains far away, despite frequent declarations that the Nice Treaty has removed the obstacles. Deep pockets of poverty persist, and worsen within the European area. Security cooperation in Europe, far from being enhanced by inter-government agreements, has been transformed into a storm of disagreements, with strong anti-American undertones. 
Most of the ideals so bravely embodied in the original European Community, and all the hopes about the contribution that restored European unity would make to world stability, prosperity and openness, are being ground to dust by the official machinery of the present European order.
To find progress in all these areas we have to turn away from EU institutions to the informal world of coalitions and alliances of interested nations and parties, often working with small or non-existent bureaucratic superstructures, without elaborate layers of legal support or massive treaties to encase them.
As the journalist David Ignatius has pointed out , in a ground -breaking article in the Herald Tribune, and as I tried to point in a recent book (The Edge of Now) , it is these new networks and groupings, setting norms and standards without legislated rules and regulations, which are having the swiftest impact. 
'Evidence that this approach works' he writes, 'comes from the recent success of the Group of Seven nations against money-laundering. All it took was publishing a list of countries that are havens for global criminals, and threatening to black list them'.
Global transparency and light-speed information circulation did the rest. The lawyers and treaty drafters were mercifully sidelined.

In short, civil society, made up of non-governmental organisations concerned with every aspect of the civic cosmos, commercial, social, cultural, humanitarian , has become a decisive international force. Working with nation states and with business and the corporate sector, it has become the major influence on both global policy and the shaping of Europe within the larger context. 

President George Bush's inaugural address is a timely reminder - or should be - to the leaders of Western Europe and the European Union of what is really happening to government and the pattern of governance in democratic societies .
In the words of the new President , while 'Government has great responsibilities for public safety and public health, for civil rights and common schools - compassion is the work of a nation, not just a government'. 'Our unity' he adds ' is the serious work of leaders AND citizens'.
What George Bush is saying is that societies and communities are sewn together, and prosper both materially and morally, not through the initiatives and schemes of officialdom and Ministers, but through shared civility and good citizenship at the grass roots.
Or put another way, you cannot bind peoples together by forcing them together. Real unity is built from beneath, not by government programmes but by individual commitment.
Have the architects of European integration today forgotten this governing philosophy? Have they overlooked the fact that in the network age, with millions of individuals and communities vastly more empowered than ever before, the bonds and links between nations stretch far outside governments and official arrangements?
Have they understood that an enlarged European Union is going to cohere not because of the swollen acquis communitaire, the cascade of central regulations and directives and the long tentacles of the EU's institutions, let alone through more centralising Treaty reforms - but because peoples and interests at a non-governmental level, through a thousand interfaces, are uniting Europe across borders and allying national identities with global purposes?
Have they not, in a word, grasped that MORE government means LESS unity, and that in the network world this applies not just within nation states but even more at the supra-national level. The same forces which are rendering hierarchical styles of government obsolete within existing nations are working with equal or greater strength to disperse power at international and supranational levels, making the earlier EU model, with its heavy Brussels-centralised orientation, substantially out of date.
George Bush, so some have pointed out, seems to understand that leaders and governments are no longer the masters, if they ever were, but rather, in today's world, part of a greater system of government, an interactive network of democracy, the like of which we have never seen before. 
These are the principles that should inform the work of those who seek to shape Europe's future.

So what conclusions should we draw from this new phenomenon, in which the role of government is being so drastically revised, not merely domestically but on the international scene as well?
And in particular, how should we be handling the European issue?
The build up to the next great constitutional conference in Europe, in 2004, is already beginning. 
This has become ,and remains, almost the central preoccupation of politicians not just in the UK but throughout both in the member states and the 'accession states' - those who , for various ,motives, want to be in the EU 'club' but look uneasily on its development and wonder whether they will ever fit in, or be allowed to fit in.
It is extraordinary that Europe should have burdened itself with these agonies when the two other regions of the world with which it struggles to keep pace, the USA and a Japan-led Asia, are untroubled by such worries, being unchallenged and remarkably cohesive nation states. They may both have plenty of problems adjusting to the demands of globalisation and the network world, and of unravelling their own traditional structures of government and society. But at least they can concentrate their energies on these things and not be distracted by confused and flawed arguments in favour of submersion in an undemocratic and outdated hierarchical superstate.
For the European nations the issue will not go away. The project has gone much too far for the core nations - Germany and France - to reverse tracks. But for Britain, uneasily inside the Union but not the eurozone, for the would-be joiners of Central Europe and for those like Switzerland who are not even in the waiting room, the dilemma remains - how to achieve what the British prime minister, Tony Blair, calls 'positive engagement' with the Union without having to digest all its flawed logic.
The central task is to formulate a European policy of clarity ,strength and purpose, dedicated to the vision of a wider Europe, in which democracy and the civic order in its new pluralist guise are thoroughly entrenched. Such a vision carries us away from the old Franco-German integrationist 'project' - which is anyway now in deep trouble. This wider and more up-to-date perception need in no way be hostile to the innate value and purposes of the Franco-German rapprochement. Its aims were, and remain, to the benefit for all.

A Europe of Endless Bargaining
Why has the German approach, with the French in willing compliance, with its hard core concept, it's Europe of concentric circles and its abiding dream of a nation-free Europe, been so all-prevailing,at least up to now, carrying all opposition before it and indeed marginalising all alternative European visions, successfully depicting them as 'anti-European'?
The answer is that German policy has been consistent, driven by conviction and drawn from the deepest memories and lessons bitterly learned, in fact from the German soul. Half-hearted, nervous British policy, enfeebled by a deep lack of self-confidence and by a mood of weary defeatism, never had a chance by itself against this determination and will.
But technology is doing democracy's work. In a network world wide new opportunities to change direction and move on now open out. The old European structure, with its enormous achievements, must now be reconstructed to match entirely new conditions.
The new unlocking insight may be that in the network age there is no settled and complete European structure. The language of Europe-building is peppered with 'completions' and 'solutions' - next steps forward to certain integrationist goals and systems, towards which 'momentum' must of course be maintained - hence all the unending metaphors about buses, trains and boats missed.
But this is now quite the wrong way of approaching the Europe issue. In the informational paradigm the process of endless bargaining and negotiation - about relationships, coordination of policies, development of new initiatives, new coalitions with NGOs and with the private sector, ad hoc response to new emergencies and crises, may itself be the European 'solution', debate fuelled by light-speed interactive technology and conducted by a pluralistic mass of bodies and empowered individuals, not just by Ministers and Governments. 
This kind of Europe, far from lurching from Treaty to Treaty, amidst growing conflict and tension between economic consolidation and political and cultural fragmentation , will be a club or network of web communities in permanent session about its internal relationships, evolving common interests and procedures. The Intergovernmental Conference of EU member states, convened from time to time to decide Treaty changes, will increasingly include civil society's organisations - the clearing house or hub of Europe's new nervous system. 
Thus the often declared strategy of Tony Blair's Labour Government - to get closer to the prevailing European integrationist orthodoxy and thus show a degree of commitment which the previous Government is alleged to have lacked - therefore seems to contain a basic error, as well as running into constant practical difficulties as the Europe in question adjusts all the time to the new technology of communication.
Good Europeans should not now be cosying up to the past but building on it and replacing it. There is no need to sound anti-European or xenophobic in doing so. What has been achieved in past decades is magnificent and deserves deep respect.
But the successful pursuit of European enlargement to embrace the real heartlands of Europe now demands a different approach.

First, the language, which sets the tone and context for fresh policies, must be changed.
It is diversity and sufficient agility to make unending adjustment to global requirements, and not some solidly crafted European uniformity, which must be both hymned and protected and it is the goal of an enlarged Europe of free and independent nations , bound together in a whole variety of ways and interests, which must take priority over the narrower aims of deeper old-style regional political integration and bloc building .
The idea that unity and uniformity in every field have to be achieved, and a bloc solidarity welded together, has to be turned on its head. This kind of unity does not make markets, it paralyses them. Europe prospered from the sixteenth century onwards, leaving 'united' China far behind, precisely because it was not fused and unified, nor comprehensively dominated by state officialdom - despite the internal centralism of parts of it, - for example, France . The lesson of history is that the true market dynamic, the impulse for the discovery process, is difference and disunity. 

Second, a determined re-sifting of the acquis communitaire must be launched to comb out the practices and policies which are either out of date or frankly socialistic and hostile to free market liberalisation and network Europe.

Third, EU policy must be made consistent with, not antagonistic to, the aims of global free trade as upheld by the World Trade Organisation. Many dedicated Europe-builders have always believed and hoped that EU integration would pave the way to global free trade . But now these rhetorical hopes must be matched with policy. Open regionalism must become the reality.

Fourth, the Nice Treaty is said to have removed the obstacles to enlargement, but has it? It is often argued, not least in London, that the smaller states of eastern Europe cannot be allowed too much of an equal say in EU affairs in case they outvote the bigger nations on crucial matters.
The answer to this is not to rig the voting procedures against the smaller members, as Nice tried to do, let alone to limit the veto in favour of alleged 'efficiency' in pushing through new measures. Democratic structures should be designed to resist, not to promote, that kind of executive efficiency. 
The right course is to limit, not extend, the issues and powers governed by the EU majority voting regime. There was no hint of that kind of democracy at Nice. 

The fifth task is to set in train a well-argued set of proposals for both circumscribing and repatriating powers in many fields , especially environmental and social, which in the information technology age can be better handled in a decentralised way at national level, or handled outside the traditional government structure - powers which were originally taken to the centre in a past age, when that seemed the best solution.
The way to do this - unwelcome as it is to many - is to draft Treaty amendments for the next IGC which will stabilise its confederal and nation-based character against a background of perpetual change and prevent the further drift of powers to the centre - the so-called 'competence creep'.
The existing treaties of course provide a 'constitution' of sorts but they are invariably out of date before the ink is dry on them. The issues of the network age - e-commerce, new security threats, electronic money, borderless trade, instantaneous capital movements to the most favourable tax climates, problems of capturing revenue on electronic trade and 'weightless' products, non-governmental links and interfaces - bound ahead of those labouring in the Treaty amendment vineyard, so that their grapes are always rotten and their wine always undrinkable.
Amendments are required to make the Treaties work for, rather than against the network Europe now evolving clarify and to restore the role of national parliaments as the source of Union legitimacy. 

There needs to be a shift in the whole verbiage of Europe-building away from 'momentum', inevitability, trains, buses , variable speeds and the rest towards settlement combined with adaptability - an absolute, legal, halt to hierarchy construction and pyramid power building and the entrenchment of a much less ambitious and much more flexible and open European organisation. No-one can say that this is an anti-European or negative policy approach. It would be far the most positive expression of European engagement yet to come from British policy-makers. It would be shifting the whole European unity concept into the informational era. 

The sixth task is to insist that the application procedures should be open to all European states west of the former Soviet Union bloc. At the same time the full force of the acquis doctrine should be modified and the concept of second class status for new applicants should be categorically rejected. The whole process should be given the maximum acceleration. 

Despite the Nice agreements, the present time-table is drifting away into the new millennium because the main obstacles are not mere matters of institutional juggling.
They are matters of fundamental philosophy lying behind the Treaty-based, government-centred approach that has ruled European development for too long and which is now out of date.
In a Europe of networks designed to achieve real results and carry forward European ideals the nation state, far from being unnecessary, becomes the ever-more vital component part of the new pattern.
This is not just a tired repeat of the Gaulliste conception of the Europe des Patries but something entirely novel.
The state becomes both the partner of the new pluralism and the guarantor of the property rights and personal security in which the new network age can flourish.
Even more essential is the role of the state as the means of holding to account the new powers now residing in the hands of non-government bodies and coalitions. Accountability of international organisations for their actions - not just governments, but media controllers, internet service providers, lobbies and pressure groups of every kind - is the new key issue of the age. 
The next phase of Treaty amendment in Europe should have this thought to the forefront, and the UK should be taking the lead in the necessary amendments. These should aim, above all, at bringing the process of calling to account both public and private bodies, the new barons, at the closest possible level to the people, which means their in national legislatures.

Finally, the nation state is the fount of both security and identity. It provides the focus for loyalties and for societies to understand their own roots and characters - where they come from and how they grew - in a way that integrated supra-national constructs and multilateral organisations can never do.

True European unity does not make states redundant. In the network age , well-ordered and stable states become the bedrock. As Martin Wolf has observed ' failed states, disorderly states, weak states and corrupt states are shunned as the black holes of the global economic system'.
British foreign policy makers should approach the next round of European development with that thought in the front of their minds.
Neither more integration nor conventional inter-governmentalism will be adequate guides on the new international map. A deeper understanding, a deeper humility on the part of governments and a deeper imagination and creativity are now required.
ends