This example could be multiplied again and again. Belgium and Holland, which have so much in common, split apart in 1831. Sweden and Norway, which have even more in common, split apart in 1905. It does seem simply to be a straightforward rule in modern times that countries which contain two languages, even if they are very similar, must in the end divide, unless the one language absorbs the other. It would be agreeable to think that we could all go back to the world of the Middle Ages, when the educated classes spoke Latin and the rulers communicated in grunts. But we cannot. Unless we are dealing with international cooperation and alliances freely entered into, we create artificial structures which become the problem that they were meant to address. The League of Nations, when the Second World War broke out, resolved to ignore the fact and to discuss, instead, the standardization of level-crossings.
Mr Chairman, I am sometimes tempted to think that the new Europe which the Commission and Euro-federalists are creating is equally ill-equipped to satisfy the needs of its members and the wishes of their peoples. It is, indeed, a Europe which combines all the most striking failures of our age.
The day of the artificially constructed megastate has gone. So the Euro-federalists are now desperately scurrying to build one.
The Swedish-style welfare state has failed — even in Sweden. So the Euro-statists press ahead with their Social Chapter.
Large-scale immigration has in France and Germany already encouraged the growth of extremist parties. So the European Commission is pressing us to remove frontier controls.
If the European Community proceeds in the direction which the majority of member-state governments and the Commission seem to want, they will create a structure which brings insecurity, unemployment, national resentment and ethnic conflict.
Insecurity — because Europe’s protectionism will strain and possibly sever that link with the United States on which the security of the Continent ultimately depends.
Unemployment — because the pursuit of policies of regulation will increase costs, and price European workers out of jobs.
National resentment — because a single currency and a single centralized economic policy, which will come with it, will leave the electorate of a country angry and powerless to change its conditions.
Ethnic conflict — because not only will the wealthy European countries be faced with waves of immigration from the south and from the east. Also within Europe itself, the effect of a single currency and regulation of wages and social costs will have one of two consequences. Either there will have to be a massive transfer of money from one country to another, which will not in practice be affordable. Or there will be massive migration from the less successful to the more successful countries.
Yet if the future we are being offered contains so very many risks and so few real benefits, why, it may be asked, is it proving all but irresistible?
The answer is simple. It is that in almost every European country there has been a refusal to debate the issues which really matter. And little can matter more than whether the ancient, historic nations of Europe are to have their political institutions and their very identities transformed by stealth into something neither wished nor understood by their electorates. Yet so much is it the touchstone of respectability to accept this ever-closer union, now interpreted as a federal destiny, that to question is to invite affected disbelief or even ridicule. This silent understanding — this Euro-snobbism — between politicians, bureaucracies, academics, journalists and businessmen is destructive of honest debate.
So John Major deserves high praise for ensuring at Maastricht that we would not have either a single currency or the absurd provisions of the Social Chapter forced upon us: our industry, workforce, and national prosperity will benefit as a result. Indeed, as long as we in Britain now firmly control our spending and reduce our deficit, we will be poised to surge ahead in Europe. For our taxes are low; our inflation is down; our debt is manageable; our reduced regulations are favourable to business.
We take comfort from the fact that both our Prime Minister and our Foreign Secretary have spoken out sharply against the forces of bureaucracy and federalism.
Our choice is clear. Either we exercise democratic control of Europe through cooperation between national governments and parliaments which have legitimacy, experience and closeness to the people. Or we transfer decisions to a remote multilingual parliament, accountable to no real European public opinion and thus increasingly subordinate to a powerful bureaucracy. No amount of misleading language about pooling sovereignty can change that.
Mr Chairman, in world affairs for most of this century Europe has offered problems, not solutions. The founders of the European Community were consciously trying to change that. Democracy and prosperity in Europe were to be an example to other peoples in other continents. Sometimes this view took an over-ambitious turn with talk of Europe as a third force brokering between two superpowers of East and West. This approach was always based upon a disastrous illusion — that Western Europe could at some future date dispense with the military defence offered by the United States.
Now that the forces of communism have retreated and the threat which Soviet tanks and missiles levelled at the heart of Europe has gone, there is a risk that the old tendency towards decoupling Europe from the United States may again emerge. This is something against which Europeans themselves must guard — and of which the United States must be aware.
This risk could become reality in several ways.
First, there is the question of trade. It is a terrible indictment of the complacency which characterizes the modern post-Cold War world that we have allowed the present GATT round to be stalled for so long. Free trade is the greatest force for prosperity and peaceful cooperation.
It does no good to the Western alliance when Europe and the United States come to regard each other as hostile interests. In practice, whatever the theory may be, economic disputes do sour political relations. Agricultural subsidies and tariffs lie at the heart of the dispute, which will not go away unless we in Europe decide that the Common Agricultural Policy has to be fundamentally changed. That will go far to determine what kind of Europe we are building.
For, as I have said before, I would like to see the European Community — embracing the former communist countries to its east — agree to develop an Atlantic Free Trade Area with the United States. That would be a means of pressing for more open multilateral trade throughout the world. Europe must seek to move the world away from competing regional trade blocs — not promote them. In such a trading arrangement, Britain would have a vital role bridging that Atlantic divide — just as Germany should provide Europe with a bridge to the east and to the countries of the former Soviet Union.
Secondly, we must modify and modernize our defence. The dangers on Europe’s eastern border have receded. But let us not forget that on the credibility of NATO’s military strength all our wider objectives depend — reassurance for the post-communist countries, stability in Europe, transatlantic political cooperation.
Communism may have been vanquished. But all too often the communists themselves have not. The chameleon qualities of the comrades have never been more clearly demonstrated than in their emergence as democratic socialists and varieties of nationalist in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. From the powerful positions they retain in the bureaucracy, security apparatus and the armed forces, from their places in not-really-privatized enterprises, they are able to obstruct, undermine and plunder.