‘More Europe’ is a mindless slogan

by Samuel Brittan

Financial Times
December 15, 2011

David Cameron’s veto of the proposed new European constitution was the right decision, possibly for the wrong reasons. As has been explained ad nauseam, the British prime minister was heavily influenced both by the perceived need to satisfy his Tory backbenchers and by one interpretation of the needs of the City of London. It is difficult to say whether the proposed rules would have done more to promote much-needed banking reform or to harm the legitimate interests of the City as a top export earner and source of employment. But as the European Union has been lurching for years in the wrong direction, a line had to be drawn somewhere and this is where the opportunity arose.

A statement frequently repeated by Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, and Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, is: “Without the euro there can be no Europe.” This is a banal untruth, uttered with an air of spurious profundity designed to embarrass people not on board for their project. Europa in Greek mythology was a beautiful princess carried away by Zeus, who approached her in the form of a white bull. Early medieval scholastics attached her name to the western end of the Eurasian land mass. Despite the attempts of conquerors, Europe has never for long been united under a single leadership. The nearest approach came with the largely Germanic Holy Roman empire of which it was famously said that it was “neither holy, nor Roman nor an empire”.

I am not an archetypal eurosceptic. My father was born in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, and my mother in Kaunas, the temporary capital of that country when Vilnius was occupied by Poland. I draw my inspiration from the more sceptical and empiricist European thinkers. And for choice I prefer to take my holidays in continental Europe. These personal details need not in themselves be decisive. Nicholas Kaldor and Thomas Balogh, the two Hungarian economists who advised the UK’s Wilson government of 1964-70, were notoriously opposed to the EU (even though that government applied unsuccessfully to join). They feared that it would be an obstacle to socialist planning. In fact, it has proved even more of an obstacle to genuine free market reform.

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