Yesterday’s draft constitution for Europe was the eighth bid to fashion a “union” of European states in just half a century. As I grazed its parched prose my senses were alerted only by Britain’s negotiator, Peter Hain, telling me to trust everything to him. Until then I was mildly of his persuasion, that this was just a bit of “tidying up”. Mr Hain’s arrogance left me in no doubt. Not only should there be a referendum on the constitution but there should be one every day on whether Mr Hain should be got out of bed. For Tony Blair to display this man as Britain’s answer to Jefferson, Madison and Adams beggars belief.
I have always bought part of the European agenda. The free trade area that emerged from the postwar coal, steel and farming cartels was a good thing. It saw its apogee in the Single European Act of 1986 and came to a grinding halt halfway through the Maastricht treaty. Since then protectionism and corporate statism have become lodestars of European partnership. No UK government has done a thing to reverse it.
The architects of the new Europe refer to themselves as the founding fathers of a united states of Europe. I wonder how many of them — let alone Mr Blair or Mr Hain — have read the American Articles of Confederation, the 1778 Constitution or the Federalist Papers. American federalism was never intended to give Washington more power to interfere in states’ affairs, quite the opposite. It arose from a war of independence against the incompetence and insensitivity of government, British government. True, the federal Constitution was to help the Union conduct foreign policy. But it regulated only inter-state affairs, not state affairs. In Washington a congress of states was to control the presidency. Students of Montesquieu and Locke kept that ghost of colonial governorship, the President, chained by states’ rights.
If European integrationists recruit America to their cause, two can play at that game. I might cite Europe itself. In the year 800, Charlemagne stood on the steps of Rome and was crowned by the Pope as first Holy Roman Emperor (another precedent oft cited by European unionists). His Frankish imperialism ushered in perhaps the most barbarous era in Europe’s history. Hundreds of thousands died with him.
Where Charlemagne failed, others were sure they could succeed: Innocent III, the Habsburgs, the Romanovs, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin. Each conquered Europe by the sword and ruled by fear and bureaucracy. Each thought he could turn evil means to good ends. The papal hierarchy replicated the forms of the Roman Empire. The Spanish Inquisition blended ideological and political loyalty along lines adopted by later autocrats. The tsarist gulags were refilled by the Bolsheviks. The Austro-Hungarian police state was reused by the Nazis. Millions died defying the Europeanist ambitions of rulers in Madrid, Paris, Vienna and Moscow.
Europe’s few moments of joy and freedom have come with the throwing off of a supranational yoke, rarely in putting it on. Liberation came with the freeing of the Low Countries from Spain, of Italy from Napoleon, of most of Europe from Hitler and of the eastern states from the Soviet Union. We encourage peoples everywhere to defy supranationalism, in Tibet, East Timor, Kurdistan or Yugoslavia. Yet no sooner is a small nation born than we are eager to see it “overruled”. Europe’s ruling elite cannot stand smallness, let alone sovereignty. It derides small states as “unviable” (unless they are tax havens) and craves a “strong leader of Europe”. Every Eurocrat I have met suffers from a Napoleon complex.
The record of such constitutions in achieving stable government is appalling. They failed in former India, China and Soviet Russia. They failed in British creations such as the Federation of Malaya and the Central African Federation. The history of international relations shouts the same message, that trade treaties work but political integration does not. It runs against the grain of identity. It leads to the unwarranted accretion of power to the centre, an ever more intrusive civil service — and prison camps.
This is all relevant for a reason. We should never ask the architects of a European constitution what is new. We should grab them by the throat, slam them against the wall of history and ask: “What is not old?”
The American federalists were out to affirm individual and territorial freedom from central authority. Yesterday’s European constitution is their antithesis. It glories in what it calls central “competence”. It begins with a bizarre catalogue of platitudes, including a claim to “respect the national identities of member states”. It then asserts that states must “unreservedly support” the self-declared competences of the Union, and “refrain from action contrary to the Union’s interests”. Almost every article seeks to enhance central power, not just in defence and foreign affairs but in economic, social, legal and employment policy.
The draft has such classic imperialist touches as a public prosecutor able to arrest and imprison citizens for disobeying central competences. Article 1-35 allows Brussels “the power to enact delegated legislation”, enforceable by a court that can override national courts. Another measure suppresses participation rights in Brussels for smaller member states, to aid executive “streamlining”. Who cares for little Slovenia? cries the constitution. Imagine an American federalist saying that to Rhode Island or Delaware.
The scale of Brussels intervention in the domestic affairs of member states is already beyond anything conceived by America’s founding fathers. Members must defer to Brussels on the state of their beaches, the planning of their roads and the size of their vegetables. They are now faced with vague measures embracing “economic and social cohesion”.
American states jealously guard their right to determine social and employment matters, and determine the legal framework within which they operate. They run their own welfare programmes and levy their own taxes. The European constitution’s much-vaunted “subsidiarity protocol” demands that before intervening, Brussels must merely show that a “Union objective” can be “better achieved at Union level”, rather than by a member government. Any Eurocrat could do that before breakfast.
The body language of the current European debate is the opposite of that which infused America’s federalists. The draft constitution could have been written only by oligarchs steeped in the production of big government, not its consumption. They will never have paid VAT or received a Euro-directive. Most have spent their careers away from nation states, if not actively fighting to reduce their sovereignty. Such people have an institutional distaste for national politics, and instinctively for democracy itself. One assured me, ten years ago, that “national parliaments will soon have no more power than a local council”.
I notice that whenever Britons go to work in Brussels, a scepticism towards supra-state government becomes a professional enthusiasm for it. Power runs in the blood and in the salary. Likewise did medieval popes invite the brightest monks to Rome, and send them back as bishops. The author of the constitution, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, lacks only a cardinal’s cap to be a priest of Mother Church. He could hardly have less in common with the argumentative rebels of the American Revolution. A new European Union needed an Erasmus to expose its faults and a Luther to pin Reform to the doors of Brussels. It has neither.
H.G. Wells distinguished “communities of will” from “communities of obedience”. The former were the restless, individualistic nations of the north, the latter the Roman Catholic and Mediterranean south. It is a good distinction. The US Constitution is a document of will, this week’s draft is a document of obedience, which is presumably why it is being so little discussed in “Napoleonic” Europe. The naturally obedient do not naturally protest.
Britain over the past 15 years has come ever closer to the community of obedience. A silver lining on the Iraqi cloud may yet be Mr Blair’s bosom-attachment to America and alienation from continental Europe. He may have to give British electors their say, and that say may be “no”. That should keep the nation aloof from this dangerous adventure, still in Europe’s true fast lane, free in the community of will.
sjenkins@thetimes.co.uk
