Architecture tells us a lot about ourselves, about our idea of God, about our relationship with our fellow men, and about our vision of Man’s destiny.
The great medieval cathedrals gave us an exalted spiritual view of Man’s place in a universe governed by an all-loving and all-seeing Creator.
The Age of Reason pictured civilized man in a neat, geometrically ordered landscape dotted with neo-classical structures at regular intervals — with no more than one small folly to each estate.
And in our own day, the vision of New European Man walking purposefully towards the Common Agricultural Policy was exquisitely realized in the Berlaymont building in Brussels.
What music would Goethe hear if he could look upon the Berlaymont, perhaps while acting as an adviser to the Commissioner responsible for developing a policy for European culture (which has languished so long without one)?
And what a climax of discord and disharmony! For the Berlaymont — its halls lined with cancer-causing asbestos — is to be pulled down.
Look at the architecture of the last fifty years — in particular, at the architecture that went beyond the modern to the futuristic. It was certainly very dramatic, but the one thing it no longer expresses is the Future. What it expresses is yesterday’s vision of the future — one captured by the poet John Betjeman in 1945:
But the Berlaymont school of architecture is a convenient symbol for the political architecture of the European Community. For it too is infused with the spirit of ‘yesterday’s future’.
Mr Chairman, the European Community we have today was created in very different circumstances to deal with very different problems. It was built upon very different assumptions about where the world was heading. And it embodied political ideas and economic theories that in the light of recent history we have to question. Today I want to do exactly that. In particular, I shall try to answer three questions.
First, how can we best deal with the imbalance in Europe created by the reunification and revival of Germany?
Second, how can we reform European institutions so that they provide for the diversity of post-communist Europe and be truly democratic?
Third, how can we ensure that the new Europe contributes to — rather than undermines — the world’s economic prosperity and political stability?
Our answers to these questions can no longer be bound by the conventional collectivist wisdom of the 1940s and fifties. That is yesterday’s future. We must draw on the ideas of liberty, democracy, free markets and nationhood that have swept the world in the last decade.
It was Winston Churchill who, with characteristic magnanimity in 1946, with his Zurich speech, argued that Germany should be rehabilitated through what he called ‘European Union’ as ‘an association between France and Germany’ which would ‘assume direction’. This could not be done overnight, and it took American leadership. In 1947, after travelling through Europe in that terrible winter when everything froze over, George Marshall, the then Secretary of State, promoted the idea of American help. Marshall Aid was administered by institutions set up ad hoc — it had to be, if only because most European states did not have adequate machinery, the Greek delegate being found one day simply making up figures for his country’s needs — and I expect there were others besides.
The initial impetus was for European recovery. It owed much to simple American good-heartedness. It owed something to commercial calculation: the prosperity of Europe, in free-trade conditions, would also be the prosperity of America. But the main thing was the threat from Stalin. Eastern Europe had shown how demoralized peoples could not resist cunningly executed communist takeovers, and Marshall Aid was intended to set Western Europe back on its feet. It was a prodigious success.
But we have found, again and again, that institutions devised for one set of problems become obstacles to solving the next set — even that they become problems in their own right. The Common Agricultural Policy is an example. As originally devised, it had a modest aim that was not unreasonable.
Yet we all know that the CAP is now an expensive headache, and one quite likely to derail the Uruguay Round. Because of agricultural protection we stop food imports from the poorer countries. They themselves are nowadays vehement supporters of market principles: it is from the Cairns Group of developing countries that you hear demands for free trade. Yet in the industrialized part of the world, the taxpayer and the consumer stump up $270 billion in subsidies and higher costs; and the World Bank has calculated that, if the tariff and other barriers were cut by half, then the poorer countries would gain at once, in exports, $50 billion. In case you might think that these sentiments are somehow anti-European, I should say that they come from an editorial in the economic section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 4 May.
Here we have a prime example of yesterday’s solutions becoming tomorrow’s problems. You could extend this through the European institutions as a whole. They were meant to solve post-war problems, and did so in many ways extremely well. Western Europe did unite against the Soviet threat, and, with Anglo-American precepts, became free and very prosperous. That prosperity, denied to the peoples of Eastern Europe and Russia, in the end caused demoralization among their rulers, and revolt from below. We are now in a quite different set of circumstances, with the Cold War over.
Looking at European institutions today, I am reminded of a remark made about political parties in the French Third Republic. Some of them had names which reflected radical republican origins from the 1870s, but years later they had become conservative. These radical names, ran the remark, were like the light reaching Earth from stars that were long extinct. Equally with the end of the Cold War we have to look again at the shape of Europe and its institutions.
Mr Chairman, let me turn first to the new situation created by the reunification of Germany. And let me say that if I were a German today, I would be proud — proud but also worried. I would be proud of the magnificent achievement of rebuilding my country, entrenching democracy and assuming the undoubtedly preponderant position in Europe. But I would also be worried about the European Community and its direction. The German taxpayer pays dearly for his place in Europe. Britain and Germany have a strong joint interest in ensuring that the other Community countries pay their fair share of the cost — and control the Community’s spending more enthusiastically — without leaving us to carry so much of the burden.
Germany is well equipped to encourage such financial prudence. Indeed I would trust the Bundesbank more than any other European central bank to keep down inflation — because the Germans have none-too-distant memories of the total chaos and political extremism which hyper-inflation brings. The Germans are, therefore, right to be increasingly worried about the terms they agreed for economic and monetary union. Were I a German, I would prefer the Bundesbank to provide our modern equivalent of the gold standard rather than any committee of European central bankers.
But there is an understandable reluctance on the part of Bonn to defend its views and interests so straightforwardly. For years the Germans have been led to believe by their neighbours that their respectability depends on their subordinating their national interest to the joint decisions of the Community. It is better that that pretence be stopped. A reunited Germany can’t and won’t subordinate its national interests in economic or in foreign policy to those of the Community indefinitely. And sometimes Germany will be right when the rest are wrong, as it was over the recognition of Croatia and Slovenia. Indeed, if the Federal Republic had led the way in recognizing these countries earlier, Serbian aggression might have been deterred and much bloodshed prevented. Whether rightly or wrongly exercised, however, Germany’s new pre-eminence is a fact. We will all be better off if we recognize that modern democratic Germany has come of age.