Tempests rage. Winds howl. Peasants huddle terrified in hovels while ashen-faced statesmen race hither and thither before the storm clouds of history. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse are at full gallop. I do declare, Europe is interesting.
The emergence of Tony Blair as a shrill, born-again Eurosceptic is exhilarating for those who have laboured long in this barren vineyard. A man who has long appeased the worse tendencies in the Paris-Brussels-Berlin axis has seen the blinding light. He is transformed. Blair has secretly despised the politics of Europe. At last he has “come out” as Thatcher in a suit.
Today they are celebrating the Battle of Waterloo, ending 10 years of Napoleon’s domination of European politics. The same fate now beckons the latter-day Napoleons of the European Union. Once again nation states are asserting their variable autonomies. A chauvinist might add that once again it falls to Britain to reassemble what has been broken by the selfishness of France and Germany.
Friday’s fracas in Brussels shows both why a post-war European settlement was necessary and why the Treaty of Rome and its successors were the wrong sort of settlement. They sought to make of Europe a rigid proto-state and duly plunged it into eventual recession and acrimony. Such spitting fury as we saw was once a prelude to war. Now it is a prelude to what most of Europe knows must be reform. The old constitution and its partner in crime, the spiralling European budget, were meant as a majestic topping out of the ancien régime, the “ever-closer-Union” project. The first has vanished and the second is blocked.
Old sceptics should not gloat, yet. Huge vested interests are piled up behind the European treaties.
The streets of Brussels are like late Hapsburg Vienna. They throng with officials, commissioners, court mercenaries and pseudo-parliamentarians. The empire is their livelihood and they will fight to preserve it. Last week I heard spokesmen plead for the common agricultural policy as “vital to the security of Europe”, for trade protection as “vital to Europe’s jobs” and for a foreign minister as vital to Europe’s “voice”.
Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the council of ministers, is still incanting: “I really believe the French and Dutch did not vote no to the constitution.” Without burial at a crossroads with a stake through their heart these people will never die.
The European Union was a construct of indirect democracy. It was built on the insecure sand of intergovernmental treaties, which is why Brussels craved a “legal entity” constitution. It was only thanks to Britain deciding to hold a referendum and France following suit that the process was made to answer to public opinion.
The summit’s decision on Thursday to halt ratification was merely a tactical retreat for the old guard, to forestall the humiliation of a “rolling no” across Europe. The hope was that this would ease a return of a revised constitution.
This is unlikely to wash. So great was the Brussels democratic deficit that the monster of plebiscite was bound to escape its lair. It will not easily be put back. Any new constitution will have Europe’s opposition politicians screaming for votes. Further referendums will be hard to win. At the very least Brussels must be reduced in scope, national autonomy restored and ad-hoc treaties negotiated for different states. Karl Marx must be punching the air. A capitalist thesis has met its antithesis in popular revolt. But where is the synthesis? Cue Tony Blair. The British prime minister is clearly relishing his new realist garb. He has reached an awkward stage in a long career, his “legacy” moment. He is said to be obsessed by it. The Blair drama may be mostly written, but he can still stage manage the curtain call. Blair has never stinted on gesture. He has spent this month leaping in and out of planes as if history were measured in air miles.
Now comes the final act. Deflated by a messy election and a failure to deliver public services, he has a chance to rerun the Congress of Vienna and the Treaty of Versailles in one. His presidency of the EU council of ministers was billed as a non-event, a tidying up of constitutional modalities. It was a glory-free zone. Now Europe is on tenterhooks. Blair has a chance offered to no British leader since the post-war settlement. He can lead Europe to a new trading framework and the limited political institutions needed to police it. British diplomacy is thrilling to the chase. But can the prime minister hack it? In the past, Blair has done war but not diplomacy. Neither in Washington nor in Brussels (let alone in Paris) has he shown real statesmanship. He flies a lot, smiles a lot and then gets clobbered. In Europe he has failed to outmanoeuvre even such relics of the old politics as Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder. He cannot bomb them or send in the Royal Marines. He cannot turn to his friend George W Bush for help. Now he is on his own. He must be a diplomat in spite of himself.
So far, Blair’s response to the EU crisis has been exemplary. He is at last calling the spade a spade, not a 180-degree feedback shovelling experience. Three years ago he meekly signed the inexcusable 2013 CAP deal, knowing it would precipitate this year’s budget crisis. Now apparently it “makes no sense” to spend 40% of the EU budget subsidising just 4% of its people.
Meanwhile, Chirac has responded like the bully he is. He first demanded that other leaders continue with ratification so as to share his humiliation, then he tried to turn Britain’s flank by demanding an end to its £3 billion budget rebate. The rebate is, in itself, indefensible. But it was conceded to Margaret Thatcher in 1984 for a reason, to make up for France being subsidised for not doing what Britain had already done, restructure its agriculture. While Germany and others could question the rebate, for France to do so is sheer hypocrisy. It was France’s grabbing of a third of the entire farm budget that led to Britain’s special treatment in the first place.
The prime minister’s angry response is wholly justified, reinforced by the glowering presence of Gordon Brown, guardian of the rebate, at his shoulder. The rebate might be up for debate, he said, but only if France’s “rebate” was too, only if the whole crazy system was reformed. Thus inspired, Blair went into sceptical overdrive. He demanded that the commission’s new budget, led by farm subsidies, be limited to 1% of Europe’s gross income. He demanded that Europe’s subsidy brokers live within their means. He demanded that the CAP’s greasing of French politics should cease. France could no longer live on another planet from the rest of Europe.
The spectacle of a British prime minister charging through a breach in Brussels defences is not new. Thatcher did so in 1984 and John Major in 1992. But times have changed. However much the old guard protests, this month’s referendums and opinion polls demonstrate a widespread loss of faith in the old Europe. From left and right it is seen for what it is, a defunct coalition of romantics and mafiosi. France and Germany are under doomed leaders with realist successors in the offing. The Dutch and those in other smaller states across northern and eastern Europe yearn for leadership to help them escape the Franco-German axis.
Previous Euro rows have been within the existing treaty framework. This one is not. After last week there is a clear requirement for a new European treaty that does not “build on” Nice or Maastricht but goes back to basics.
It respects the political diversity of nations within and outside the present EU, thus embracing Norway, Turkey and Switzerland. It must reflect Europe’s variable web of cultures and currencies, confederations and border controls. Europe’s people have spoken. They may sacrifice autonomy in the cause of open markets and free trade, but only so far. They do not want a united Europe or an imperial bureaucracy. If I were Blair I would suggest a new headquarters located in Geneva or Prague or Vienna, anywhere but Brussels.
The task is Herculean. Two hundred years ago William Pitt gloomily rolled away the map of Europe for as long as Napoleon was on the loose. At Waterloo 10 years later it was unrolled. Today it is unrolled again, and briefly laid at Tony Blair’s feet. His legacy is what he does next.
