- all governed from Brussels;
- all enforcing the same conditions at work;
- all having the same worker rights as the German unions;
- all subject to the same interest rates, monetary, fiscal and economic policies;
- all agreeing on a common foreign and defence policy;
- and all accepting the authority of an Executive and a remote foreign parliament over ‘80 per cent of economic and social legislation’.
Mr Chairman, such a body is an even more Utopian enterprise than the Tower of Babel. For at least the builders of Babel all spoke the same language when they began. They were, you might say, communautaire.
Mr Chairman, the thinking behind the Commission’s proposals is essentially the thinking of ‘yesterday’s tomorrow’. It was how the best minds of Europe saw the future in the ruins after the Second World War.
But they made a central intellectual mistake. They assumed that the model for future government was that of a centralized bureaucracy that would collect information upwards, make decisions at the top, and then issue orders downwards. And what seemed the wisdom of the ages in 1945 was in fact a primitive fallacy. Hierarchical bureaucracy may be a suitable method of organizing a small business that is exposed to fierce external competition — but it is a recipe for stagnation and inefficiency in almost every other context.
Yet it is precisely this model of remote, centralized, bureaucratic organization that the European Commission and its federalist supporters seek to impose on a Community which they acknowledge may soon contain many more countries of widely differing levels of political and economic development, and speaking more than fifteen languages. ‘C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la politique.’
The larger Europe grows, the more diverse must be the forms of cooperation it requires. Instead of a centralized bureaucracy, the model should be a market — not only a market of individuals and companies, but also a market in which the players are governments.
Thus governments would compete with each other for foreign investments, top management and high earners through lower taxes and less regulation. Such a market would impose a fiscal discipline on governments because they would not want to drive away expertise and business. It would also help to establish which fiscal and regulatory policies produced the best overall economic results. No wonder socialists don’t like it.
To make such a market work, of course, national governments must retain most of their existing powers in social and economic affairs. Since these governments are closer and accountable to their voters, it is doubly desirable that we should keep power at the national level.
Mr Chairman, in 1996, when the arrangements agreed at Maastricht are due to be reviewed, and probably a good deal earlier, the Community should move in exactly the opposite direction to that proposed by the European federalists.
A Community of sovereign states committed to voluntary cooperation, a lightly regulated free market and international free trade does not need a Commission in its present form. The government of the Community — to the extent that this term is appropriate — is the Council of Ministers, consisting of representatives of democratically elected national governments. The work of the Commission should cease to be legislative in any sense. It should be an administrative body, like any professional civil service, and it should not initiate policy, but rather carry it out. In doing this it should be subject to the scrutiny of the European Parliament acting on the model of Commons Select Committees. In that way, whatever collective policies or regulations are required would emerge from deliberation between democratic governments, accountable to their national parliaments, rather than being imposed by a bureaucracy with its own agenda.
But need this always be done in the same ‘single institutional framework’? New problems arise all the time. Will these always require the same level and type of cooperation in the same institutions? I doubt it. We need a greater flexibility than the structures of the European Community have allowed until very recently.
A single institutional framework of its nature tends to place too much power with the central authorities. It is a good thing that a Common Foreign Policy will continue to be carried on under a separate treaty and will neither be subject to the European Court nor permit the Commission to fire off initiatives at will. If ‘Europe’ moves into new areas, it must do so under separate treaties which clearly define the powers which have been surrendered.
And why need every new European initiative require the participation of all members of the Community? It will sometimes be the case — especially after enlargement — that only some Community members will want to move forward to another stage of integration.
Here I pay tribute to John Major’s achievement in persuading the other eleven Community heads of government that they could move ahead to a Social Chapter, but not within the Treaty and without Britain’s participation. It sets a vital precedent. For an enlarged Community can only function if we build in flexibility of that kind.
We should aim at a multi-track Europe in which ad hoc groups of different states — such as the Schengen Group — forge varying levels of cooperation and integration on a case-by-case basis. Such a structure would lack graph-paper neatness. But it would accommodate the diversity of post-communist Europe.
Supporters of federalism argue, no doubt sincerely, that we can accommodate this diversity by giving more powers to the European Parliament. But democracy requires more than that.
To have a genuine European democracy you would need a Europe-wide public opinion based on a single language; Europe-wide political parties with a common programme understood similarly in all member states; a Europe-wide political debate in which political and economic concepts and words had the same agreed meaning everywhere.
We would be in the same position as the unwieldy Habsburg Empire’s parliament.
That parliament was a notorious failure. There were dozens of political parties, and nearly a dozen peoples were represented — Germans, Italians, Czechs, Poles and so on. For the government to get anything through — for instance, in 1889 a modest increase in the number of conscripts — took ages, as all the various interests had to be propitiated. When one or other was not satisfied, its spokesmen resorted to obstruction — lengthy speeches in Russian, banging of desk-lids, throwing of ink-wells and on one occasion the blowing of a cavalry trumpet by the Professor of Jurisprudence at the German University of Prague. Measures could not be passed, and budgets could only be produced by decree. The longest-lasting Prime Minister, Count Taaffe, remarked that his highest ambition in politics was the achievement of supportable dissatisfaction on all sides — not a bad description of what the European Community risks becoming.
And because of the irresponsibility of parliaments, the Habsburg Monarchy could really only be ruled by bureaucrats. It took twenty-five signatures for a tax payment to be validated; one in four people in employment worked for the state in some form or another, even in 1914; and so many resources went to all of this that not much was left for defence: even the military bands had to be cut back, Radetzky March and all. Of course it was a tremendous period in cultural terms both in Vienna and in Budapest. We in England have done mightily well by the emigration, often forced, to our shores of so many talented people from Central Europe. But the fact is that they had to leave their native lands because political life became impossible.