Category Archives: Best of 2008

The EU vs the national interest

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The Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent Bruno Waterfield has made an interesting contribution to a pamphlet by the Manifesto Club, No Means No! Essays on the Eve of the European Council Meeting.

Ignore the populist eurosceptic rhetoric of the title, there’s actually a lot of interest here. (Seriously, sensible eurosceptic chaps – I know you’ve got to try and attract attention and so some sensationalism is necessary to liven up what is a very dull subject, but if you’re going to win over undecideds rather than just preach to the converted, a little more subtlety is necessary. If it wasn’t for the fact that Waterfield asked nicely and sometimes joins in the comment-box discussions here, I probably wouldn’t have bothered reading past the title, and would have missed a lot of good stuff.)

The basic argument is as follows:

The EU has evolved, not as a federal super-state that crushes nations underfoot, but as an expanding set of structures and practices that have allowed Europe’s political elites to conduct increasing areas of policy without reference to the public…

The EU has never been about abolishing national interests, but always about managing them in a manner convenient for Europe’s political classes, in a public-free zone, with consensus arrived at through bureaucratic procedures derived from the secretive world of diplomacy…

The lack of accountability and the expediency of EU politics means that in many areas, including foreign policy, the EU’s inter-elite bureaucratic requirements have overridden principles of internationalism, democratic rights or justice. EU decision-making is essentially value free. Consensus comes first, meaning that principles can be traded off against the expediency of making deals, or ‘effectiveness’.

…the EU is not a system of representation or a public authority. It is a set of institutions and relationships organised for the convenience for national state bureaucracies

As such, Waterfield’s essay goes to the heart of this ongoing dispute about both the “democratic deficit” and future direction of the EU that’s a perennial favourite among those of us who like to blather on about the thing, and ends up effectively a short overview of the more secretive aspects of EU decision-making – and a very useful one at that. I do urge you to go have a look, while below the fold I’ll blather on at length.

Continue reading →

The failures of EU democracy

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So, will the European Citizens’ Consultation forum, launched yesterday in a variety of EU languages, actually prove a success?

Based on past attempts, I don’t hold out much hope – these things are usually either ignored (remember Timothy Garton-Ash’s European Story initiative? No? Precisely…), or quickly swamped by foaming-at-the-mouth British eurosceptics making “witty” comments and generally making their fellow countrymen look like a bunch of rude idiots (read the comments at Margot Wallstrom’s blog or on the Debate Europe forum recently?)

So, which is it going to be – ignored or hijacked by the anti-EU brigade?

Pessimist? Moi? Well, after five years of vague attempts to encourage constructive online discussion of the EU (albeit with precisely zero resources), and having witnessed the EU-focussed blogosphere expand by only a tiny fraction during that time despite several concerted efforts, I have good reason to be.

The EU, you see, is very, very dull and very, very complicated. Dull and complicated things are not the most attractive at the best of times. (And yes, I have indeed noted this before. Many, many times.)

How to make people want to discuss the EU more? Simple: give them some indication that their input is valuable. At the moment, there is none: “Come vote for an MEP (usually on a party list system) of whom you’ve never heard to go to Brussels and Strasbourg to vote on things over which they have little control (being proposed by the Commission and easily vetoed by the Council) and about which you’ll never hear (unless they make the tabloids)!” – Hardly the most rousing call to increased democratic engagement, is it? Yet that’s all the peoples of Europe have currently got.

Little wonder that European elections – and referendums – always end up so parochial. And little wonder that the EU itself continues to inspire so little interest among the people it supposedly exists to benefit.

EU problems and priorities

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A few more post-Irish Referendum thoughts – because the EU really, really needs to know what it is that it should be doing if it’s to work out what is the best way forward from its ongoing Constitutional/Lisbon Treaty navel-gazing. More suggestions for priorities gratefully received in the comments.

Two starting assumptions for this list:

1) Institutional reform remains necessary (largely thanks to the short-sightedness of the earlier treaties: it is, after all, entirely possible to have rules for a club of 6 or 15 that also work for a club of 27 – it’s just that the people drawing up those rules made them inflexible), but it’s not essential for the EU to continue to function

2) Neither the Lisbon Treaty nor the Constitution really dealt with what I see as the EU’s two biggest problems (the Common Agricultural Project and the dominance of Russia in the continent’s energy supply) anyway

So, on with a few vague thoughts on the main problems and priorities, in approximate order of importance: Continue reading →

Mayor Boris, eh?

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Gordon Brown, 2000: “Some people might think Ken Livingstone is funny, but saddling London with him for four years is no laughing matter”

Boris JohnsonThe same has repeatedly been said about the man Johnson over the last four weeks along with a number of wild allegations based largely on out of context quotation – much the same as the whole “Ken’s an anti-Semite” nonsense.

More worrying have been the unsupported assertions based on little more than the outdated 1980s belief that all Tories are evil – my parents are Tories, and I can assure you that they are not. More to the point, people were voting in the mayoral elections who weren’t even born when Thatcher was in power. Using her as the all-conquering bogeyman simply isn’t a viable electoral strategy any more. (It’s a bit pathetic it ever was, if you think about it – after all, it was the Tories, not Labour, who got rid of her…)

Ken did a halfway decent job over the last eight years , along with a bunch of very impressive achievements. I have little reason to believe that Boris can’t do similarly – and no reason to think he’ll be a disaster. His acceptance speech certainly started on the right bipartisan (even tripartisan) note, and he’s blatantly not a typical Tory no matter the colour of his rosette, educational history and accent. I’m hopeful.

Furthermore, anyone who thinks that Boris and Boris alone will be calling the shots in London simply doesn’t get how politics works. Or how the Mayor’s office works, for that matter – it simply doesn’t have as much power as everyone seems to think. Ken was just very good at giving the impression that all the successes were thanks to him and him alone.

All this hyperbole being spewed about Johnson from normally sensible left-wing sources* – not to mention the dismissal of over a million Londoners who picked him as their first choice as merely “doing it for a laugh” – is doing the British left no good at all.

Boris Johnson is not some monster – by painting him as such when he blatantly is not is going to rub off badly on you, not him. Just as it rubbed off on Labour badly when they tried the same trick with Ken back in 2000. (That certainly helped push me towards voting for the guy…)

If the left/Labour can’t get over the snide remarks, personal attacks and class prejudice that seems to imbue every aspect of their relationship with the Conservative Party – and, ideally, come up with some practical left-wing policies rather than populist and ill-considered appeals to the middle-classes and big business – they are going to continue to slide in the polls to the point of embarrassing defeat.

And serve them right. (Labour promising cuts to corporation tax while the Tories run to the defence of impoverished single mothers? Come on, guys…). The worry is the knock-on effect – not just driving people who care to the extremes of right and left, but meaning that the Tories don’t have to fight for power.

Boris had to fight, and fight hard – because Ken was a formidable and principled oponent. He’s not going to forget that in a hurry; he’s going to be fully aware that a sizable chunk of the capital don’t like him and that a sizable chunk of the country want him to fail. And it’s going to make him work even harder.

But the way the rest of the Labour party is going, the next election is going to be handed to the Tories on a plate. They won’t even need to bother knocking on doors at this rate. And power gained that easily is never going to engender respect – either from politicians or public. Labour have had a free run for most of the last decade or more, and just look what happened to them…

* I won’t link to any specifics as I hope they’ll see how silly they’re being soon, but have a gander at some of the tripe the Guardian’s been spewing over the last few days for an idea of the tone and content

On the EU’s “democratic deficit”

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I’ve been planning a long piece on this for months, ever since that whole openDemocracy thing I did back in the autumn (which is, it turns out, what got me shortlisted for that Reuters award thing, rather than this place), but haven’t quite found the time.

The short version (guaranteed to rile the eurosceptics): nope, the EU’s not democratic – and nor should it be if Britain’s interests are going to be maintained. (I’ll try and explain in more detail at some point, but it’s unlikely to be overly soon…)

Anyway, back to the original starting point for this post. Amongst the usual stuck record of eurosceptic complaints under Timothy Garton-Ash’s latest offering about the EU over at the Guardian’s Comment is Free yesterday (I sometimes read these things just to remind myself why I’m not slipping back into full-on eurosceptic mode, despite the repeated disappointments, annoyances and embarrassments that come with being pro-EU*), this little beauty leapt out, by poster “tooter”. It’s one of the best succinct rejoinders to the perennial “the EU’s not democratic” complaint I’ve seen in quite a while, and echoes many of my own views:

I think this “democratic deficit” thing is overdone. The appointees you are on about are put there by people we elect. Great chunks of our government is run in the same way – the House of Lords being the most glaring example, but there are others, Quangos, the Judiciary (!), the PM (!) to name but a few.

Take one example, the European Central Bank. I read over and over again, as an argument against the Euro, about sinister “faceless bureaucrats” who will run our economy for us from Frankfurt. Well the ECB is accountable to no less than FOUR of the European institutions.

Who is the Bank of England accountable to? Can anybody name even two members of the MPC without googling? Are they not, therefore, “faceless bureaucrats” running our economy from London?

What do the europhobes think we are living in now?

He/she later came back with a quick, even snappier follow-up, reiterating the point:

“We British have something called a “Parliamentary Democracy”, as do most of Europe. We never elect our Prime Minister, we elect Members of Parliament. It is these Members who choose the PM. The PM is an appointee. As are the entire House of Lords. As are the Judiciary. As are the Generals, senior civil servants, heads of Agencies and othe Quangos, the Cabinet, Chief Constables, Bishops etc etc

So, europhobes, how “undemocratic” is the EU again?

I too am intrigued by the answer to this. Because the arguments against the EU employed by eurosceptics who have moved beyond petty patriotism (which, to be fair, is an increasingly large proportion these days – and to be clear I mean patriotism in the strict sense, with no nasty connotations) increasingly revolve around criticisms of inefficiencies and failures that are also invariably present at a national – even local – level of government. Because, after all, no system of government ever devised is perfect.

Yet when it comes to the EU, for the eurosceptics it seems that nothing less than perfection will do.

Or am I being incredibly unfair and/or missing the point?

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* By the way, I really, really need a better term than “pro-EU” to describe my attitude to the whole thing. Because as should be clear to regular readers I’m not a loyal cheerleader for the EU by any means, and advocate fairly radical reform. I remain a supporter of a European Union of some kind, and of close cross-border political and economic co-operation – and in some case integration – of the kind the EU helps facilitate, but not necessarily this European Union.

In the good old days, this would have labelled me a eurosceptic in the true sense (inasmuch as I am sceptical of the benefits of a number of things the EU is doing) – but now that that term has become synonymous with “anti-EU”, what’s left for those of us who are neither europhiles nor eurosceptics, but occupy that vague middle-ground of being largely in favour of EU membership while wishing the whole thing was just a bit, y’know, better? Because that does, after all, account for the attitude of the vast majority of the British population – it seems very odd that there’s not a term for us all…

Blogging about blogging

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Someone got in touch to ask some questions about citizen journalism and the July 2005 London terrorist attacks. My response ended up getting rather lengthy as I went off on one, so I reckoned I may as well post it. Could prove interesting to some, even if it is another of those blogging about blogging things I thought I’d stopped doing. Continue reading →

NATO, Russia and Europe

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Hunting around for a handy overview of just what’s been happening at the NATO Summit in Bucharest, depending on who you read you’ll get some wildly different ideas. I’ve been confused for much of the morning. Here’s a brief indication of why:

Der Spiegel‘s “Germany Puts the Brakes on US Expansion Plans” is countered by the International Herald Tribune‘s “NATO backs U.S. missile defense plan for Europe”

EU Referendum‘s claim that “NATO has thrown Ukraine and Georgia to the bear. President Bush’s attempts to put them on track to future and very distant membership of NATO has failed” is then contradicted by Radio Free Europe‘s report that “pro-NATO forces in Ukraine and Georgia celebrated the announcement, which offered stronger-than-expected support for their entry bids”

Repeat for pretty much every issue under discussion at the summit (for which, see this very handy round-up).

People always like to look for tangible, obvious outcomes from these things. But this is international diplomacy. Worse than that, it’s strategic military international diplomacy where all but one of the permanent members of the UN’s Security Council are involved (and we know how infrequently that lot manage to get along). Making compromises left, right and centre – leading to a stalemate in which, well, the status quo has largely been maintained – was the only sensible course of action. The thing was always going to end up a waste of time and money.

NATO flagBut the real fun is that despite the fact that NATO is now overseeing operations in Afghanistan (that well-known North Atlantic power) and looking to a more global role, this summit has made one thing increasingly apparent: the Cold War may have ended, but NATO’s principal opponent remains Russia.

Pretty much every compromise on the European front, every bit of backing down, appears to have been done to placate the Kremlin – because the principle areas to which NATO is looking to expand its influence (largely under the prompting of the US) lie in former communist countries, be it Ukraine and Georgia or Croatia and Albania.

As you’ve no doubt noticed, there’s been a growing tension between Russia and the West in recent years – from ex-FSB men assassinated in London to the resumption of patrols by Russian nuclear bombers through the vendetta against the British Council in Moscow. Then there’s the war of words with Belarus, Europe’s oft-forgotten fanatically pro-Moscow wildcard (a country that misses the USSR so much its secret police are still called the KGB and there are constant rumours that it is planning to formally merge with Russia), cyber-warfare against Estonia, and the ongoing standoff over Kosovo’s independence. Even the EU’s (and NATO’s) difficult relationship with Turkey is getting caught up with the Russian situation thanks to the Russo-Turkish partnership in the Bluestream and Nabucco pipelines, both of which are helping to make Europe increasingly reliant on Russian energy supplies.

The relationship with Russia, in other words, increasingly seems to dominate all European diplomacy. Where during the Cold War the presence of the USSR may have ensured that western Europe and the EU was operating under the constant fear of nuclear attack, Moscow’s then lack of engagement in western European affairs allowed everyone to get on much as they pleased. Since the end of the Cold War – and especially since Putin came to power – Moscow’s long-sought-after engagement with the West has if anything caused even more problems.

During the Cold War it was America who stood guard and kept watch, now Europe (both the EU and non-EU countries) has to be constantly on the alert for far more subtle Russian encroachments than columns of Red Army troops or falling H-bombs – encroachments largely economic, and mostly achieved through that strange form of diplomacy at which Putin so excels: smiling with fangs.

With such a large, unpredictable neighbour to the east – especially one with the ability to shut down a sizable chunk of the European economy on a whim (as has already happened to Ukraine) – little wonder there seem to have been few major advances at this latest NATO summit. In fact, I can barely see the point of holding these things until Russian attitudes to the West shift further in the direction of friendly cooperation (no signs of that any time soon) – because Russia’s never going to accept public humiliation, which is how the current regime seems to see any kind of outside involvement in what remains of the bear’s sphere of influence.

So the real points of interest after such standoffs between Russia and the West are never going to be the big issues. We’re not suddenly going to have a Kremlin change of heart on any of the major issues any time soon. And if and when such a change of heart comes, it’s certainly not going to come at one of these big public summits – far too humiliating. Where such shifts in Russian attitudes – either pro-engagement or heading towards hostility – are first going to be seen is in the details. The precise wording, the precise terms of any diplomatic agreement between Russia and the EU, US, NATO or individual European countries – the small print that the journalists rarely have time to scan in their rush to hit deadlines and get an angle that gives the subs a good shot at an interesting headline – that’s where we’ll first spot the changes when they come.

These summits are, in other words, little better than MacGuffins. The real diplomacy is going on off the radar, with lots of little standoffs in places like Armenia, Moldova, Azerbaijan and Central Asia.

NATO may well be starting to look globally – but Europe needs to do the same to keep tabs on just what its unpredictable neighbour is up to, because Russia has more ability than any other state to screw Europe over. If Russia’s got its fingers in a lot of pies, we need to be keeping an eye on all of them, and not get distracted by the occasional fuss over the more obvious ones like Ukraine and Georgia (both of which have had high-profile popular pro-democracy uprisings in recent years, which are always of appeal to the press). To do so would be to fall for the oldest trick in the book.

The state of British EU news coverage

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I may well have only made the shortlist for the UACES-Reuters Reporting Europe Award because the selection panel felt that in this day and age they needed a web-only publication to be sufficiently down with the kids (at least, I assume that’s why I’m on there alongside people like the Europe Editors of the BBC and The Economist…) – but the fact that I am on there at all demonstrates one of the fundamental problems at the heart of Britain’s turbulent relationship with the EU.

A Sun classicBecause, you see, the Reporting Europe Award is designed “to honour a leading journalist whose writing and reporting on Europe has made a real impact”. Now, by no stretch of the imagination am I a leading journalist. Nor have I had a huge impact, even in the small world that is online discussion about European and EU politics.

But think about it a moment. Bar Mark Mardell, by far the highest profile Europe/EU-focussed journalist in the UK (and my fellow shortlistee) thanks to occasionally cropping up on the BBC news of an evening while we’re all sitting down to our tea, how many high-profile Europe-focussed journalists are there in the UK? How much coverage of European politics is there, for that matter (even when the French President popped over for a visit, most coverage was focussed on his good-looking new missus rather than anything he said or did)? In particular, though, how much coverage is there of EU politics: the goings on in Brussels and Strasbourg at the Parliament, Council and Commission? Continue reading →

EU reform: Impossible, a superstate, or multi-tier?

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Richard North at eurosceptic blog par excellence EU Referendum draws my attention to this piece in the Times by William Rees-Mogg, which contains the line:

Most Eurosceptics want Europe to be reformed, not destroyed

This is something of which I remain firmly convinced – but not our man North:

Oh dear! After all these years, and all the failed attempts at seeking “reform”, has it not yet dawned on the man that the EU is incapable of reform[?]

Ignoring the fact that this ignores Rees-Mogg’s actual contention (he doesn’t profess to be in favour of reform himself, merely that a majority favour reform over withdrawal – an unfortunate reality for the withdrawalists of EU Referendum), a question:

How can hardcore anti-EU types maintain that reform is impossible yet simultaneously believe that the EU is heading towards a superstate – which would, in itself, be an immense reform?

North points to an old article in which he explains his logic for rejecting the possibility of EU reform. Yet his “proof” is to refer to an old Milton Friedman article looking at the United States’ Food and Drug Administration, in which Friedman claimed the institution’s very set-up prevented change. Even were this not itself a somewhat dubious contention, backed up more by assertion than by evidence, a monolithic US government agency being compared to a multi-part, multi-country international organisation hardly strikes me as overly fair.

You see the way I reckon it, yes, with current attitudes from the various member states, radical reform is unlikely – just have a gander at the failed compromises that are the Treaty of Nice and Lisbon Treaty, both unsatisfactory to all parties but the best they could manage.

There are several different trains of thought among EU member states as to what the EU should actually be – and whenever efforts to reform come up, as they do on average once a decade, reconciling all these different desires has indeed proved impossible.

But as all major reforms – even after the expansion of qualified majority voting that the Lisbon Treaty brings – still require unanimity, this makes the appearance of an EU superstate all but impossible as long as less integrationist countries remain members (and it’s not just Britain that isn’t keen on ever-closer union).

“OK”, you might think. “So you admit EU reform’s impossible?”

No. Because I reckon the current situation is going to change. How much longer are the likes of France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg – the core of the original EEC, and still more or less the most enthusiastic member states – going to put up with the frustration of their plans being thwarted? How much longer are those countries who aren’t keen on merging their economies much further going to put up with the perennial drives for greater integration from euroenthusiasts?

We’ve already had countless rhetoric-heavy spats over various aspects of EU reform – not just between Britain and Brussels (as with Thatcher’s battle for the rebate), but between numerous other less fervently federalist member states and the expansionists.

Sooner or later, these clashes are bound to result in an official suggestion of a two-speed or multi-speed Europe – maintaining the union while allowing everyone more or less to go their separate ways.

The idea of a multi-speed Europe is not a new one, and is increasingly gaining ground. Over the last few years, it is a concept that I’ve seen crop up time and again, from House of Lords debates to The Economist, former French president Jaques Chirac to former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, former Commission president Romano Prodi to the EU’s own website.

As Prodi said in an interview last year:

it is good if you can go forward together, but you cannot go at the speed of the last wagon.

We already have a two-speed Europe. Euro and Schengen are examples of this and they are very important projects. Moreover, a two-speed Europe does not mean that countries that are in the second group cannot move to the first. Two-speed Europe sometimes means more choices.

So, while anti-EU claims that the EU is heading towards a superstate seem to be backed up purely by decades-old (mis)quotes from the likes of Jean Monet (and the occasional modern superstatist aberration like Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker), my hopes that genuine EU reform may be on the cards seem to have rather more to support them.

So then, how can this whole “the EU can’t be reformed” thing – the mantra of all withdrawalists – be justified? The Lisbon Treaty itself is an acknowledgement that the current system is not up to scratch – and an acknowledgement that getting a satisfactory compromise is increasingly difficult (being as it is an unsatisfactory attempt to rectify the previous unsatisfactory compromise that was the Treaty of Nice).

Especially since the failure of the constitution there is an increasing consensus throughout the EU – both among the populations of the member states and increasingly among the EU machine itself – that some serious, radical changes are needed, beyond the mere stop-gap measures that the constitution (and Lisbon Treaty) aimed for.

Introducing a new, multi-tier, multi-speed system (on top of the existing two-tier Eurozone and non-Eurozone countries) is the most obvious – and, most importantly, easiest – way to give everyone what they want. I see no reason why it won’t eventually happen – the only question is how long is it going to take?

EU blog directory

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Skip straight to the EU Blog Directory

I missed my blog birthday. Two days ago was the fifth anniversary of the birth of this blog. Since that time, the world of EU politics blogging has changed massively.

EU blogsBack then, in March 2003, I wasn’t aware of any other blogs attempting to cover the same subject (though I think A Fistful of Euros may have started by then) – most people were obsessed with something or other going on in Iraq, if I recall. The technology was clunky, there were no blog search engines, no RSS feeds, no WordPress – nothing that makes blogging so easy these days. Little wonder I gave up so quickly, leaving the thing to stagnate for a year after a mere three posts. But hey, I revived it, so it still counts as this blog’s real birthday, I reckon – even if regular updates didn’t start until August 2004.

Anyway, time for an overview of EU blogs, I reckon. Please note – this list is sadly not comprehensive, and a number of blogs that appear not to have been updated in the last couple of months have been left off. I’ve also left off blogs with more of an emphasis on individual countries rather than EU politics as a whole.

If you have an EU politics blog and you’re not present here or on my Netvibes RSS roundup, drop me an email via nosemonkey [at] gmail.com and I’ll add you. I plan to keep both this and the RSS roundup regularly updated.

And so, without further ado… Continue reading →

The state of EU debate

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In the comments to yesterday’s post, pro-EU blogger Evil European notes that

In the UK media, debates on Europe and the European Union have not moved on in over 30 years

Our deal eurosceptic blogging friend Richard North of EU Referendum was saying similar things the other day, but about the online debate:

“How many active blogs are there, dedicated to fighting the intellectual case for euroscepticism? Come to think of it, how many think-tanks are there, dedicated to exploring the case for leaving the European Union? Where at all is that intellectual case being argued?”

To be fair, he’s been saying this on and off for the last few years. The only trouble is, the majority of the online anti-EU lot rarely go for reasoned debate – my experience tends more towards being called a traitor or accused of being in the pay of the Commission by the eurosceptics who turn up here (at least, by those who aren’t previously aware of me). Even the more intelligent anti-EU bloggers – the likes of Devil’s Kitchen, Tim Worstall, Elaib Harvey (all current or former fully paid-up members of UKIP) – have a tendency to play to the gallery with quick witty put-downs more often than they do provide detailed critiques. Richard North likewise seems to enjoy pandering to his audience’s preconceptions and prejudices, which – judging by EU Referendum’s very active message boards – often tend very much towards the lunatic fringe.

Having said that, us few pro-EU bloggers have hardly done a great job of proving the benefits of EU membership over the years. This is partly due to the utter impossibility of proving the economic case thanks to the complete lack of verifiable figures – but also because we spend most of our time trying to counter misinformation and misconceptions, mostly deliberately spread about by eurosceptics. But it’s also because a lot of the self-appointed defenders of the EU I’ve spotted around the net seem to be overly idealistic, decidedly naive, and often completely unencumbered by any detailed knowledge of the issues involved. Online, many of them tend to be students – decidedly younger than the mostly middle-aged anti-EU brigade – and lacking in both real-world experience and debating prowess.

As I say, this is sadly nothing new. Back in January 2005 (following a previous bit of pondering by me the previous month), North wrote the following:

The cause of Euroscepticism is not best served by this ranting as it presents us with the added difficulty of having to overcome the “loony-fringe” label before we are even able to get the message across.

Which all sounds decidedly reminiscent of eurosceptic complaints following the “Referendum Rally” back in the autumn:

oh, my dear. The crowds, the people… the fucking idiots… If we get on TV – and there was sod all worth broadcasting, more’s the pity – you can bet they’ll be in the front of the shot. There was a conspiracy theory group waving the biggest banners of the lot and handing out a professionally-produced anti-EU ‘newspaper’ which, going by its hysterical and, shall we say, idiosyncratic take on all things political, was produced on Planet Fayed. They’re all in it , you know. All the party leaders, including Cameron, are Marxists. To a man. And woman, if she’s a fast-track senior police officer. Redwood [ I am not making this up... they are ] is the Euro-bastards’ chief spokeman. All Brussels goons put in positions of power… to destroy us. Utterly, utterly barking.

The pro-EU camp may not have anything quite this bad – but every time the likes of ex-Europe Minister Dennis MacShane get up to defend the Union, I weep a silent tear. Every time the likes of the dishonest, reviled Peter Mandelson or repeatedly rejected Neil Kinnock is picked to be the UK’s EU man in Brussels, I despair. (Current suggestions of Tony Blair for EU president and the abysmal Patricia Hewitt as the next UK Commissioner almost start to make me a conspiracy theorist, so ideally suited to they seem to make the people of Britain hate the EU even more.)

Three years ago, I wrote the following, and it sadly still stands:

Neither side of the EU debate are happy. It seems as though none of those purporting to speak for either the anti or the pro camps are particularly in tune with what the people they claim to represent actually think.

This is largely because there simply haven’t been many (any?) places where reliable information about the EU can be easily found, or where EU politics can be discussed rationally and calmly. The few dedicated EU news sites all have backers with an agenda, either financial or political (EurActiv receives funding from the European Commission, for example, while EU Observer is run by the wife of leading Danish eurosceptic MEP Jens-Peter Bonde). Try going on to EU Referendum’s message boards and arguing the pro-EU case, or saying anything positive in response to a post at Commissioner Wallstrom’s blog. Try doing a Google search for “EU debate”, and I come top of the list – a wonderful indication of the paucity of discussion out there. The BBC has recently been blasted for it’s appalling lack of coverage of EU affairs and, as I noted the other day, with lack of information comes lack of interest and lack of participation. This in turn, as I’ve discussed before, spells the death of democracy.

This is all a problem that is thankfully increasingly becoming recognised, though not yet acted on quickly enough. The European Commission’s most recent addition to the world of online EU debate – the Debate Europe forum – is looking vaguely promising. Yet already there arises the danger of it being swamped by the lunatic fringe, with post topics like Muslim invaders beginning to appear.

Because the trouble is – and as I’m sure I’ve argued before – the EU is so damned boring that it’s really only the obsessives and nutters who can be bothered to talk about it. When it comes to the web, the more dedicated members of any forum come to dominate and shape that forum in their own image – “newbies” and less regular participants quickly feel daunted by the cliquishness and get scared off, compounding the problem. For any meaningful dialogue and debate to kick off about EU issues – online or elsewhere – this problem has to be overcome. Because in the media as well, it is often to the extremes that journalists hunting for a quote turn.

The question is, how to do it without simply banning the lunatic fringe from taking part? It’s something we’d all – from all sides – no doubt love to do, but we all know it wouldn’t really be a solution. After all, it’d just mean we’re all part of the conspiracy…

I guess what I’m hoping for is some neutral middle-ground. Somewhere untainted by association either with the anti-EU extremes or the EU itself, where opposing opinions can be criticised in restrained, respectful tones, not hysterical hyperbole. Is this possible – or is it just as much of a pipedream as a fully-functional EUtopia?

EU-apathy

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“Not enough people care enough”.

Thus spake arch-eurosceptic Richard North of EU Referendum yesterday with regards to the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty and the distinct lack of any significant public outrage. It hits the nail right on the head, but don’t expect too much resignation from that quarter just yet.

As I’ve argued in more detail elsewhere, no one cares about the EU. Sure, if you go up to them and chuck half truths like the classic “80% of our laws come from Brussels” or “EU regulations cost us £66 billion” then they may get temporarily miffed that Johnny foreigner has some say over how our country is run. But the annoyance is fleeting – not least because even the most credulous person will be aware that self-confessed eurosceptics and withdrawalists are hardly the most impartial source for EU statistics, and that – thanks to a combination of the EU’s complexity and abysmal record-keeping – there’s no way of verifying such claims.

But the overwhelming EU-apathy (rather than EU-scepticism or EU-philia) of the majority of the population is not through mere laziness. Being apathetic is an entirely rational choice. Because the major concern for the average person is not sovereignty, the place laws come from, or where their tax money goes. All these are, effectively, abstract notions that affect their lives not a jot. What matters to them is their daily lives – and on this, to most people, the EU appears to have little impact.

“So a chunk of my tax is going to the EU – so what?”, they think (or would if they could be bothered). “It’s not like if we pulled out I’d be paying any less – the government would just waste it elsewhere. Westminster or Brussels, what’s the real difference? I’m highly unlikely to have voted for the person who takes the final decision in any case – and the vast majority of all laws are drawn up by unelected civil servants no matter where they stem from.”

Because of this, the general attitude is a resounding “don’t know, don’t care” – and it’s an entirely rational ignorance.

Of course, pointing to the ignorance of the population is no justification for anything. That way lies the rationalisation of dictatorship, slavery, wife-beating, whatever – it’s the age-old reasoning behind every bit of oppression in history (it’s for their own good, you know…).

But, of course, the people DO care about things. Just not the EU.

Instead, what matters most to the people (at least in the UK) is, apparently immigration (43%), crime (41%), health (36%), defence and terrorism (22%), with Europe scoring a paltry 4%. On immigration, EU membership enables far closer co-ordination with our neighbours to prevent illegal immigration than would be possible with a series of bilateral agreements. The European arrest warrant and moves for closer co-operation between EU police forces should soon (hopefully) make all these scares about foreign criminals a thing of the past, as well as enable swifter justice for offenders who flee to the continent. Health policy is barely affected by EU membership, though through the EU’s influence we will shortly all be able to use the health services of all other member states, should we so wish (and the UK’s odd policy of allowing foreign non-taxpayers to use the NHS for free is nothing to do with the EU, if you were wondering). Finally, though the EU has little to no say in the UK’s defence policy, EU-wide anti-terror legislation and coordination has led to far speedier crackdowns than any individual member state could have managed on their own (remember the 21st July wannabe London bomber arrested in Rome? Just one of many…)

The thing is, in a democracy you need to get people to back your position in large numbers. This is something the anti-EU brigade have singularly failed to do at election after election, during which time all three major parties have become more or less pro-EU membership. The EU could well be the worst thing that’s ever happened to this country but the people, it would seem, are still not sufficiently against it to say enough is enough despite decades of anti-Brussels propaganda in every major newspaper in the land (Sun, Times, Telegraph, Mail, Express, News of the World, and occasionally the Mirror). Hence UKIP leader Nigel Farage’s failure to support the Lib Dems’ call for a referendum on EU membership, despite that being precisely what UKIP is supposedly aiming for down the line.

Plus, of course, getting people to vote for a radical change is very hard indeed. The status quo is pretty much always preferred, up to the point that either our daily lives are adversely affected or the alternative seems just so damned wonderful as to be irresistible. At the moment, although the EU does affect our daily lives, for the most part this impact is unnoticed and for the most part more or less beneficial; the idea of an ex-EU Britain, meanwhile, remains vague and worrying. Who would vote to be the unpopular kid at school who has to play on his own when they could be part of the clique?

So yes, by misrepresentation of what the Lisbon Treaty is and does you can briefly get up some anger and excitement from the general population – hence all the calls for a referendum a few months back. But for most people it’s hard to stay angry for long, especially about the EU – after a while, they tend to realise that they don’t really know that much about what it is they’re getting angry about and start to lose interest. (Everyone thinks they know what they’re talking about when it comes to immigration, crime, health, terrorism and the like, because we’ve all got more or less direct experience of them all – while most people are more or less aware that they know nothing of the workings of the European Union, because it’s simply too vast, complex and packed with jargon to make sense of.)

Plus, of course, the EU is simply not interesting enough to be worthy of anyone’s attention – which is precisely why it only ever makes the papers when there’s some new scare over a (usually misread) bit of EU legislation. Bureaucracy is boring, and the EU is nothing if not a bureaucracy – albeit a far smaller bureaucracy than many assume (around 25,000 people work for the European Commission – less than a fifth of the number who work for the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions…)

Of course, the pro-EU camp has precisely the same problem. “There’s a democratic deficit!”, they’re told. “The EU doesn’t listen to the people!”

There’s only one problem with this: based on the atrocious turn-out at pretty much every EU election ever (accompanied by a steady decline), the people have nothing to say.

States of mind

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With Kosovo having just declared independence this weekend, it’s time for a look at some of Europe’s other wannabe countries.

Following Vladimir Putin’s largely fair comments about European double-standards over Kosovan independence, it’s certainly worth looking at other wannabe European countries that the EU could technically recognise, once the precedent’s been set. And if not the EU, why not Russia, just to piss Brussels off?

Some are more economically viable, some less; some are more uniform in their national identity, some more controversial; some are more of a joke. But all, really, have similar claims to independent status as Kosovo – and many are associated with the European Parliament’s European Free Alliance group. There’s a surprisingly large number of aspirant Utopias:

Utopia, the ultimate dream state
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President Blair… Christ alive…

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Allow Tony Blair to become the EU’s first permanent president and I’m very likely to turn anti-EU again.

My feelings have already been succinctly summed up by Ari – a Finn, lest anyone get the idea this is yet another disillusioned Brit:

“Admittedly a lot of people in a lot of different countries know Tony Blair, which can’t be said for most possible candidates. Alas, he’s known for making a disastrous mistake and then not owning up to it, i.e. for showing bad judgment and not being particularly trustworthy. That sort of fame isn’t really a desirable quality in a candidate.”

Plus, of course, despite being supposedly very pro-EU, during his ten years in power Blair repeatedly failed to do anything to convince the country that being pro-EU is sensible – spending most of his time continuing John Major’s “wait and see” approach, despite being in a significantly stronger position than Major ever was throughout his time as PM. Had Blair wanted to he could, with his huge Commons majority and the inexplicable love the country had for him during his first term or so, have used his extraordinarily strong position to have pushed the EU on the UK, or at the very least to try and convince the country that closer engagement is a good plan. Instead, he did nothing.

This lack of action continued even on the continent. During the UK’s last (rotating) presidency of the EU, Blair was so invisible and uninvolved that one MEP even put out a jokey “Missing: The President of the European Union” press release. In fact, Blair’s only real engagement with Brussels during his time in office was to try to use the EU to bypass Westminster and force laws upon us that he never would have been able to get past his own MPs.

On top of that, of course, so hated is Blair in the UK that to have him as the EU’s official figurehead for (most likely) five years is merely going to further entrench British anti-EU feeling. Though he’d have been a good spokesman for the EU ten years ago, now he’d be like using Gary Glitter to advertise a primary school.

Not that the only other “name” candidate is much better. Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker is so rabidly, blindly pro-EU that he makes me feel decidedly uncomfortable, still advocating the kind of total political integration that most people gave up on back in the 70s, still advocating a “United States of Europe”. It’s hard to think of anyone with views more likely to drive British europhobes into a foaming rage, or to finally convince moderate eurosceptics that there really is no hope for the EU.

So who else is there? Well, what about Romano Prodi? He’ll most likely be available soon, judging by how his luck’s been failing him in Italy. As a former president of the European Commission he’s got the experience of running things at the top of the EU (during which period he oversaw the introduction of the Euro and expansion from 15 to 25 member states). As a two-time Prime Minister of Italy he has plenty of experience of juggling the multiple interests of tenuous coalitions, essential for anyone trying to keep all 27 EU member states happy while simultaneously trying to get agreements with non-EU powers.

Blair’s experience of diplomacy, in comparison, consists largely of two options: agree entirely with everything George Bush says, or launch an invasion. Jean-Claude Juncker’s, coming as he does from a principality only slightly larger than Greater London with a population less than that of Bristol, is non-existent. And yet these are the two front-runners for a position created largely to help in the EU’s diplomatic relations? Christ…