From then on I had been ever more preoccupied with the need to spell out and win domestic and foreign support for an alternative vision. It was by no means an impossible task, but the difficulties were legion. Within the Conservative Party there was a large minority of irreconcilable Euro-enthusiasts, willing to welcome almost anything stamped as made in Brussels. The Single European Act, contrary to my intentions and my understanding of formal undertakings given at the time, had provided new scope for the European Commission and the European Court to press forward in the direction of centralization. For their own different reasons, both France and Germany — and the Franco-German axis was dominant — were keen to move in the same direction. In the United States the Administration had made a crucial error of judgement in believing that promotion of a united Europe led by Germany would best secure America’s interests — though the experience of the Gulf War undoubtedly caused President Bush to question such assumptions.
In spite of all this, I remained confident that given singleness of purpose and strength of will the Bruges alternative could be made to prevail — for three long-term influences favoured it. First, the need to accommodate the newly liberated countries of Eastern Europe created difficulties for the narrow Europeanism of the federalists which their high-tax, high-regulation, high-subsidy system could not ultimately meet. Secondly, global economic changes, which dramatically widened horizons in finance and business, would reduce the relative importance of the European Community itself. Thirdly, not just in Britain but increasingly in other European countries, the popular mood was moving away from remote bureaucracies and towards recovering historically rooted local and national identities. It might take a decade. But this, I felt, was a cause with a future.
In my final speech to the House of Commons as Prime Minister on Thursday 22 November 1990 I taunted the Labour Party with its studied ambiguity on the large issues:
They will not tell us where they stand. Do they want a single currency? Are they prepared to defend the rights of this United Kingdom Parliament? For them it is all compromise, sweep it under the carpet, leave it for another day, in the hope that the people of Britain will not notice what is happening to them, how the powers are gradually slipping away.
I was not at that point to know, and indeed I would not have wanted to imagine, that precisely the same would soon be said of the Conservative Government led by my successor. I knew that John Major was likely to seek some kind of compromise with the majority of heads of government who wanted political and economic union. That had become clear from our exchanges when John was Chancellor.[64] Moreover, I could well understand that after the bitter arguments over Europe which preceded my resignation he would want to bind up wounds in the Party. But I was not prepared for the speed with which the position I had adopted would be entirely reversed.
In December the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, publicly advocated a distinctive European defence role through the Western European Union (WEU), which I had always distrusted, aware that others, particularly the French, would like to use it as an alternative to a NATO inevitably dominated by America. Then in March 1991 the Prime Minister announced in Bonn that Britain’s place was ‘at the very heart of Europe’. This seemed to me a plain impossibility in more than merely the geographical sense, since our traditions and interests diverged sharply in many areas from those of our Continental neighbours. For instance, in trade generally, and in agricultural trade in particular, Britain is both more open and more dependent on countries outside Europe than are our European partners.
I wanted to avoid appearing to undermine my successor. I knew that his position was still fragile and I wanted him to succeed. I had faced sufficient difficulties from Ted Heath not to wish to inflict similar ones. As a result and paradoxically, I found myself even more constrained in what I was able to say after my resignation than before it. But I could not in good conscience stay silent when the whole future direction of Britain, even its status as a sovereign state, was at issue. So although I had the gravest misgivings about the reported shape of the draft treaties being discussed by heads of government, I sought to be positive, setting out in public the kind of Europe I wanted, while giving the Government the benefit of the doubt for as long as possible.
In March 1991 I made my first major public speech since leaving office — in Washington at a meeting arranged by several American conservative think-tanks. I steered clear of the more sensitive areas for British domestic politics and concentrated on the European Community’s geo-political role.
A democratic Europe of nation states could be a force for liberty, enterprise and open trade. But, if creating a United States of Europe overrides these goals, the new Europe will be one of subsidy and protection.
The European Community does indeed have a political mission. It is to anchor new and vulnerable democracies more securely to freedom and to the West. This is what happened after the end of authoritarian rule in Spain, Portugal and Greece. So the offer of full Community membership must be open to the countries of Eastern and Central Europe just as soon as democracy and the free market have taken root. In the meantime, we must strengthen links of trade, investment and culture.
It was, of course, particularly apposite to make these points in the United States which had, more or less consistently over the years, been pressing Britain towards closer integration in Europe. That approach was based on a double illusion: first, the assumption that a politically united Europe would be friendly towards the United States, relieving her of some or all of the burden of defence. In fact, the most committed European federalists quite consciously seek to move away from America, to create another superpower that would be the equal of the US and, because it would have distinct interests, eventually its rival in world affairs. This has already had practical effects. The growing protectionism of Europe provoked a series of trade skirmishes across the Atlantic even when the Cold War restrained such rivalry. Since the collapse of communism, and the draw-down of American troops in Europe, disputes over trade have become more serious, as in the US-EU row over GATT. And almost every expression of the European Community’s foreign policy-making, from the 1980 Venice Declaration on the Middle East[65] to the Community’s early and futile interventions in the Yugoslav war, have been designed to distinguish Europe from the United States, sometimes expressly so. Over time, such disputes are bound to erode the cultural and diplomatic sympathies that have hitherto underpinned Atlantic defence cooperation. At the same time, these disputes are the inevitable results of the development of a united Europe along federalist lines.
The second false assumption made by US policy-makers was that such a European superstate, moulded from separate nations, separate cultures and separate languages, could be ‘democratic’ in the American (and full) sense of the word. I answered this point directly in my Washington speech.
The false political mission which some would set for the European Community is to turn it into a… United States of Europe: a Europe in which individual nations each with its own living democracy would be subordinated within an artificial federal structure which is inevitably bureaucratic. A Community lacking a common language can have no public opinion to which the bureaucrats are accountable.