Just back from Japan, from where I was closely following the UK election on Twitter (your best place for my day-to-day political commentary these days, though be warned they’re usually more jokey – and sweary – than here…)

After 30 hours offline, and 44 hours after the polling booths closed, the UK still doesn’t have a new government. As such, witness the wonders of my jetlag-inspired political guesswork!

I’d be surprised if this lack of a government lasted beyond Monday morning, largely because the next government will want to look responsible – and we had some serious global financial trouble on Friday for a variety of reasons (NY stock exchange hiccough, Greek crisis, UK election uncertainty, etc.). They’ll want to have a government before the markets open, if they can…)

Here’s what I currently reckon will happen, rejigged from a few comments on Twitter:

Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg’s playing this absolutely perfectly so far – he has solid offers to join coalitions from both Labour and the Conservatives, and significant policy differences with both, and has explicitly stated that the Tories – with more seats and more of the vote – should have the right to “seek to form” a government first.

But the Tories can’t get a parliamentary majority without Lib Dem support. At least, not a stable one. Not the sort of majority that they’d need to do, well, just about anything.

But Labour and the Lib Dems combined can’t get a parliamentary majority without other parties’ support either.

Clegg has also repeatedly mentioned “the national interest” and equated this with electoral reform (unsurprising, considering Labour got only 5% more of the vote than the Lib Dems, but 5 times the parliamentary seats).

The Tories are fundamentally opposed to the sort of Proportional Representation-style electoral reform that the Lib Dems want (usually single transferable vote) – which is hardly surprising, as it would almost certainly lead to a permanent Labour/Lib Dem coalition (there being very few other parties on the centre right that are likely to end up big enough to give the Tories the backing they’d need under such a system).

So, Clegg is giving the impression that he’s willing to work with the Tories – and probably is – but his one major condition is a deal-breaker for Cameron and co.

So I’m now fairly convinced that Prime Minister Cameron’s not going to happen. If Cameron rejects PR, as he must to keep his party behind him (there have already been dire warnings from the right wing of the Conservative Party about such a move, in the shape of Thatcher-era relic Lord Tebbit), then a Lib Dem/Labour/Scottish National Party / Plaid Cymru coalition has first dibs (SNP leader Alex Salmond has already openly proposed this).

Constituionally-speaking, Gordon Brown retains first right to try to form a government, as the sitting Prime Minister in a hung parliament. With Lib Dem, SNP and Plaid Cymru support, the coalition would have an outright majority – able to outvote the Tories and their allies on anything. As such, despite his unpopularity (and calls from within his own party to step down), Brown could yet remain as caretaker PM of a coalition expressly set up to bring in electoral reform.

This would actually be a very sensible option, for several reasons:

1) It would be constitutionally unprecedented for Cameron to form a minority government in the current circumstances – he is impotent until he has enough supporters to claim an outright majority. This looks to be impossible.

2) The constitution explicitly states that Gordon Brown remains Prime Minister, so using him as a figurehead for any new coalition is – constitutionally – the least harmful in the short term.

3) Anyone unhappy with Brown remaining as PM simply adds to the case for major constitutional reform with their objections.

4) This would also give both Labour *and* the Conservatives time to sort themselves out, as they are blatantly in a shambles at the moment.

So, what I’d suggest is a short-term multi-party national coalition *explicitly* for electoral *and* parliamentary/constitutional reform, as well as to maintain some form of stability in the midst of an ongoing financial crisis, keeping Gordon Brown as a figurehead Prime Minister for constitutional reasons alone, with an explicit promise that he will step down once the basic reforms are in place to have a fresh election under a new electoral system.

One final note: There’s nothing to say – constitutionally – that the Prime Minister has to be a party leader. Nor even that he has to be an MP… The question is, is there *anyone* who could be seen as a sufficiently impartial lynchpin to take on the task of leading a coalition of (at least) four parties?

Yes, it’s confusing. Too many Councils, all something to do with Europe. I get that it’s hard to keep track of them all – hell, I get confused myself sometimes.

But – and this is an important but – when the media is discussing these things, it should get them right. All too often, the media gets them muddled up and seems to have little understanding of where the distinctions lie, which does what, and where the sensible comparisons are.

The Council of Europe

It’s been around the longest, so you’d think people would understand it by now. It is not part of the EU – though every EU member state is also a member of the Council of Europe.

Founded in 1949, the Council of Europe focussed on fostering democracy, human rights and the rule of law. It has 47 member states (20 more than the EU) – and most often makes the news when its main court, the European Court of Human Rights (note: not an EU institution – that’s the European Court of Justice, and yes, that just adds to the confusion) features in a high-profile case.

The Council of Europe has a Secretary General, but not a President. It also – like the EU – has a Parliamentary Assembly which, unlike the European Parliament, is not directly elected, but is made up of members of the parliaments of its member states, their numbers (similarly to the European Parliament) based upon the population of the member state in question. The Council of Europe also – to add to the confusion – has a Congress, as well as a Committee of Ministers and a Commissioner for Human Rights (the European Union does *not* have a Commissioner for Human Rights).

The European Council

This is the body over which all the fuss is currently taking place, as under the Lisbon Treaty the European Council is to gain a President for the first time (although – as noted here recently – this position has very limited powers). It is not an official EU institution – yet is part of the EU. (Told you it was confusing…) It will only become an official EU institution after the Lisbon Treaty is ratified, though its role and powers will barely change.

The European Council is made up of the heads of government of the 27 EU member states, plus the President of the European Commission (and so, to some extent, it already has a president…) but – important to note, considering all the fuss that’s being made over its president – has no formal legilsative or executive powers. It only meets four times a year – twice at the headquarters of the Council of the European Union (to add to the confusion) and twice in the country of the member state that holds the Presidency of the Council of the European Union (yet more confusion) – in what are informally known as EU Summits. These started on an informal basis back in the early 1960s, first became formalised in the 1970s, and were included in an EU treaty for the first time in the 1987 Single European Act, and only gained a defined role with the 1992 Maastricht Treaty.

The European Council is – unsurprisingly, as it’s a formal meeting of the heads of government of the EU member states – the body that “provide[s] the Union with the necessary impetus for its development”, by allowing the heads of the member states to agree broad policy objectives for the Union to focus on. It has also adopted some of the higher-level powers of the Council of the European Union, such as the appointment of the President of the European Commission – again, because it is made up of the heads of government of the member states, and so it makes sense for these things to be discussed in the European Council (as the governments of the member states can veto candidates for the Commission Presidency, as well as other proposed EU legislation, it’s eminently sensible for them to try and agree a shared agenda before everyone starts work on pushing through candidates or policies).

Because of these powers – again, to stress, simply a natural offshoot of the European Council being made up of the heads of government of the member states – it can be seen as one of the EU’s most powerful bodies, despite not being an official EU institution. Some have compared it to the British Cabinet – though, as it meets only four times a year and tends to focus on broad, general policy objectives rather than specifics, this is being rather generous.

The proposed President of the European Council, therefore, will chair only four meetings a year, and act as a formal middle-man for the governments of the member states. He or she may well be able to propose solutions, suggest focuses for EU policy, and lend the EU a guiding hand, but – and this is a very important but – the President of the European Council will have practically no formal powers, and the job is very poorly-defined. He or she can suggest and try to persuade – but the final decisions will still be taken by the heads of government of the EU member states who make up the European Council, not by the person they have appointed (for just a two and a half year term, lest we forget) to help them reach agreement. It is an important position that will require a great deal of skilfull diplomacy, but it is not powerful one.

The Council of the European Union

This is the primary decision-making institution within the EU. The Council of the European Union is the same thing as the Council of Ministers. The latter is an informal name that was no doubt originally intended to prevent confusion with the European Council – but has only added to it. To make matters worse, it’s also sometimes referred to as the Consilium.

The members of the Council of the European Union are the 27 government ministers of the EU member states for the relevant topic under discussion. If Agriculture, then the Agriculture ministers. If Finance, the Finance ministers, and so on. (The Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers, by contrast, is made up solely of the Foreign ministers of the Council of Europe’s member states, or their representatives.)

Because of the subject-specific, ministerial-level debates that take place at the Council of the European Union, it can be seen as the EU’s principle decision-making body – and can in some cases overrule the European Parliament (though under the codecision procedure, unanimity between the two bodies is usually required). It is here that EU policy is most often determined.

The Council of the European Union also – like the European Commission, and like the European Council will soon – has a President. This is the six-month rotating “EU presidency” (as it is often informally known), that flits from member state to member state in an order that’s about as clear as mud, but no doubt makes sense to somebody. However, just to confuse matters een further, the actual position of President shifts throughout these six-month presidencies, depending on the topic being discussed. If it’s Agriculture, then the Agriculture minister from the member state that holds the Presidency of the Council of the European Union is, for that session, the President. If Finance, the Finance minister, and so on.

This rotating Presidency of the Council of the European Union will continue after Lisbon’s ratification, and will exist alongside – not be replaced by – the Presidency of the European Council.

The Council of the European Union also – just to make matters even more confusing – has a General Secretary, who sits for a five-year term to help co-ordinate policy between the rotating presidencies and ensure some kind of continuity. The position was founded in 1999, and is currently held by Javier Solana, who is at the same time the High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy. After the Lisbon Treaty comes in, the latter part of Solan’s current job is to be separated out, merged with the European Commissioner for External Relations, become known as the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy – in which capacity whoever gets the gig will chair any Council of the European Union discussions on foreign affairs.

If you want comparisons to national governments, the Council is the closest the EU has to a Cabinet, as the power of executive formally lies with the Council of the European Union. However, the Cabinet analogy isn’t entirely right, because the Council also acts as the second (upper) chamber of the EU legislature – like the US Senate or UK House of Lords.

What this basically means is that the Council of the European Union is where most decisions get made – albeit after being pointed in the right direction by the European Council. Were Lisbon introducing a permanent President of the Council of the European Union, rather than of the European Council, then it would indeed be a position with the potential to wield a hell of a lot of power.

But it isn’t. So there’s no point getting all het up about it.

The quick version

Council of Europe
Not an EU body; concerned with democracy and justice

Council of the European Union
At once the EU’s Cabinet and Upper House of the legislature; where the decisions are made

Council of Ministers
The same as the Council of the European Union

European Council
The heads of government of the EU member states; an EU body but not an EU institution; effectively just a formalised old-school international summit, like the G8 or G20

A few vague thoughts towards predicting a new global geopolitics:

Globalisation has been the undeniable trend of the last half century.

As transportation and communication technologies have advanced, the world has got smaller. You can now get from London to Australia in a day where, two hundred years ago – at the height of the nation state – it would have taken several times that to travel from London to Edinburgh. A century ago, most goods in your local shop would have been local to your (more or less) immediate area – even with the expansion of 19th century Empires and the arrival in Europe of affordably-priced exotic fruits and out-of-season vegetables, delivered via early refrigerated ships. Now we have to go to specialist shops to get local produce – and local today often means little more than “from the same country”. As for the interconnectedness of the global economy, we have had the ultimate proof over the last year as recession has spread around the world.

Communities arise due to a combination of proximity and common interest – the latter more often than not following the former.

Up until the dawn of the steam age, most modern nation states were highly fragmented, with much autonomy among the further-flung regions. The steam train – and later, the telegraph – enabled more effective administration over longer distances, and so nation states became more coherent as entities.

The proximity of most peoples on Earth has, over the last half century – since the advent of the Jet engine and, more recently, the virtual proximity made possible by the internet – likewise become ever closer. The ability to administrate over far larger areas has similarly increased. Where two centuries ago – as the French national identity was beginning to solidify post-Revolution and under the auspices of Napoleon – it would have taken a week to travel from Paris to Marseilles, there is now nowhere on Earth that you cannot get to in a week, no matter your starting point. Two centuries ago it took six days to travel from London to Edinburgh; a century ago it took six hours; now you can get from London to New York in six hours.

At the same time, with the globalisation of the world economy, previously disparate communities – separated by many hundreds of miles as well as by language and culture – are now economically interconnected via the a combination of the complexities of global finance and the fact that their local shops are full of goods from other countries.

New technologies lead to new identities.

It is possible over the last few centuries to demonstrate that advances in travel and communication technologies have led to consolidation and centralisation of governance structures, as it has become ever easier to manage large areas from a central capital. At the same time, shared identities have arisen, as previously disparate communities (sometimes nominally already under the same administration, but usually for all practical purposes largely independent of each other) have suddenly found themselves in the same boat. Scottish and Cornish become British; Normans and Savoyards become French; Milanese and Sicilians become Italians. Old identities are retained, but the new proximity provided by innovative technologies allows a top-down governmental and bottom-up social coming together.

The EU was, at its birth, backward-looking – yet accidentally stumbled upon an idea far ahead of its time.

The EEC was formed in the 1950s not as a reaction to new technology, but as a means of preventing the violence that so often ensued from the clashing interests of nation states. It was the dawn of the jet age, the year (1957) that Sputnik’s launch heralded the even more advanced era of the space age – yet the advances in transportation and communication that the jet engine and satellite were in the process of bringing about were barely on the radar of the EU’s founding fathers.

Nonetheless, the coming together of the previously competing states of a continent to pursue shared interests was to be made far easier by these new technologies. In 1920, to travel from London to Athens took days. By 1960 it was a matter of hours. Europe had shrunk. The EEC was formed just on the cusp of this new shrinkage, and so was in an ideal position to capitalise on the possibilities that the new technologies provided.

Approaching the present.

With the arrival of the internet, the world has shrunk yet again – only this time only socially/culturally, as we can chat away to people of any nation from the comfort of our front rooms. But as long as the physical transportation of goods over the internet remains impossible, for physical commerce we remain reliant on 20th (and even 19th) century technologies.

This places a geographical limit on effective economic interaction – at least when it comes to the exchange of day-to-day goods. If it takes more than a few hours to transport your goods from A to B it’s usually more trouble than it’s worth, especially with rising fuel prices. Large organisations may be able to trade over far larger distances – using economies of scale to make sending a refrigerated container ship packed with New Zealand lamb halfway round the globe make financial sense – but for the small business (as most businesses are), local trade remains the most effective. The arrival of the railway and the aeroplane expanded the geographical limits of the small business’s economic potential, but we have yet to advance much beyond these limits, set now for more than half a century.

The geographical limitations of (economic) communities.

In practical terms, if a journey of more than a few hours is too long to be economically viable for small businesses, then the geographical limit of most small businesses is more or less continental. At the same time, the EU has done a good job of continuing the work of postwar reconstruction and improving Europe’s transportation and communications infrastructure, ensuring that the EU area is one of the most effectively interconnected on earth – rivalled only by the United States of America, which has the added advantage of a) having been a coherent nation state for 90 years before the EEC came into being, and b) working with a pretty much blank canvas.

But this is a minor issue – there is a far more compelling reason why socio-economic communities today still have geographical limits: time zones. It may well be possible to travel to the west coast of America in half a day, and to speak to someone in Los Angeles, Seattle or San Francisco at any time. But we still cannot get over the fact that there is an eight hour time difference between London and LA.

With office hours generally running from 9am to 6pm, we have a nine-hour window for normal economic activity. Working with a company on America’s east coast while based in London is feasible – the five-hour time difference allows a four-hour overlap, with the Americans starting work around 2pm London time – but working with a company based in Seattle presents problems, with only a one-hour shared office window. For effective working, you need to be able to communicate with colleagues pretty much all the time – losing more than about four hours every day from the nine hour working day will lead to growing inefficiencies. The technology exists to communicate with people on the other side of the world – but the fact remains that when you contact them, they may well be asleep.*

The continental United States is spread over four timezones. From the Atlantic to the Urals, Europe is also spread over four timezones. The same goes for Latin America. Africa is spread over five. Asia and Australasia are rather more spread out – yet if you take South East Asia through to eastern Australia, the time difference is only four hours again, yet covers Australia, Japan, the Phillippines, Indonesia, Thailand and most of China.

These are, geographically-speaking, all entirely practical economic units. Any small businessman on the east coast of America can easily trade with one on the west without needing anything much in the way of complicated planning. A shopkeeper in Portugal can phone a supplier in Turkey, and know he will be able to sort out his orders that same day – possibly even take delivery the same day, if he phones in the morning. But for someone in London to order a vital part from Japan, there remain serious practical difficulties – the nine-hour time difference compounded by a 12-hour flight time. By the time the Japanese supplier has got the message and sent the part, two days might well have passed – which in business terms can prove disastrous.

Today.

So now, by accident at least as much as design, Europe (or, at least, Western Europe) is, in terms of its infrastructure and and geography, about as coherent and sensible a socio-economic unit as most nation states were two centuries ago, before the arrival of the railways and telegraph – if not more so.

Having been working on coming together for longer than other parts of the world, the EU’s institutions, procedures and structures are further advanced. Yet they were not originally planned with the aim of taking advantage of new technologies – but of preventing the conflicts of earlier ages. The overriding feature of the way the EU currently works is the perennial clash between the institutional attempts to find compromises between conflicting national interests (the need for unanimity on substantial changes), and structural fluff designed to flatter the national egos (the hang-on of old school diplomacy that is the veto).

The big fear of the old developed (national) economies over the last decade has been the rise of the new economies of China, India and – to a lesser extent – Brazil. These nationally-focussed concerns have been passed on to the EU – the organisation’s member states have been trying to use the EU as a way of maintaining strength through numbers against the newcomers on the global scene. Technology has allowed for greater pooling of resources and more efficient ways of working, enabling the EU’s member states to maintain the hope that they can compete against the vast potential of India and China – a potential based largely upon those two countries’ huge populations and geographical areas, which on both counts rival those of continents.

Looking to a continental future?

Yet now there are signs of yet more new developments. In the last couple of weeks, two potentially hugely significant events took place – both of which took their inspiration from the European Union, and both of which recognise that continental-scale organisation (or, at least, organisation across several – but not more than four or five – timezones) is both desirable and practical.

First, in Latin America, the members of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA) decided to adopt a single currency – the SUCRE – explicitly modelled upon the euro. (And before you dismiss ALBA as made up of piddlingly insignificant countries, let’s not forget that the EU started out with just six member states, all still recovering from a devastating war, and three of which were tiny. Let’s also not forget ALBA’s more significant neighbours, who will be watching developments with interest.)

This was swiftly followed by fresh moves by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to create a regional bloc – including an EU-style common market and, potentially, a euro-style single currency.

Yes, ASEAN can also be dismissed as being made up of a bunch of relative lightweights – its most significant members probably being Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand, hardly global major players. But this new move shows far greater ambition – having been proposed by Japan, backed by China, and potentially including Australia, New Zealand and even the United States down the line. Any economic bloc including China and Japan among its members is a force to be reckoned with.

A new age?

And so we may be on the cusp of a major shift in global geopolitics and the structuring of the global economy. If these two new continental blocs get off the ground, the EU will have continental competitors for the first time. And the member states of the EU, until now using the benefits of membership to give themselves an economic advantage on the world stage, will find it even harder to compete as individuals.

Of course, timezone practicalities as well as national egos could still prevent the ASEAN plan from ever coing to fruition, but even a smaller-scale version of an Asia-Pacific version of the European Union would herald a major shift in the way the world works.

The upshot? The EU could well be about to shift from being a nice idea to being an absolute necessity.

* Yes, larger organisations can work on a 24-hour basis – but most businesses are not larger organisations. And for an economic community to benefit the most people within it, its advantages must be accessible to everyone without having to stay up all night.

A point that arose in the comments to the National identity vs European identity post the other day was that of citizenship, commenter Anoldun noting that

“We were informed we were now “Europeans” when the Treaty of Maastricht was ratified, but the people had nothing to do with wanting to be EU Citizens. They were not asked if they wanted this extra ‘identity’, they did not apply for any such forms to make them citizen’s of Europe and did not even ask for or want them. None of the Commonwealth Countries that fight and die with the British, have British identities or been made British citizens, if THEY wanted to become so they would have to fill forms in etc and if we wanted to give them different identities there would be much form filling and asking of questions. No such things took place when we were made EU Citizens, asked for Passports or have to have an Identity card to prove who we are. I have absolutely no sense of belonging to “Europe” Nosemonkey and certainly none with the EU.”

Citizenship is, of course, effectively a legal codification of a certain form of identity, usually based around the notion of a nation state. EU citizenship is unusual in this regard, to be sure – because despite having certain characteristics of a state, the EU is not one. (For more on the EU as a state, and the perennial fear that it may become a superstate, please see my series of posts on the subject from earlier this year: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.)

Citizenship as imposition

The complaint that EU citizenship has been forced upon us without our say is understandable, but if you think about it for a moment it’s also illogical. After all, the vast majority of us have had no say in what nationality we are, our citizenship having been determined by where we were born (or, in some cases, by that of our parents). I had no more say in being British than I did in being male, or having blond hair and green eyes.

The sudden creation of a new layer of citizenship over and above a national/state one is not a new idea, of course. It happened in the United States back after the American Revolution (the comparison that those who fear an EU superstate are likely to fear), but also rather more recently, with the British Nationality Act 1948. This oft-forgotten Act of Parliament made *every single person* in the British Empire a British citizen, whether they wanted to be or not – and considering this was the year after Indian independence, and shortly before the Empire disintegrated, it’s a safe bet that many had little interest in British citizenship, and if anything would have taken this as a patronising insult.

When it comes to EU citizenship, you may not identify yourself as European; you may not want to be European; but if you are a citizen of an EU member state then you are an EU citizen whether you like it or not – just as (in most cases) you are a citizen of that state whether you like it or not.

British citizen or British subject?

It’s also worth noting that the very concept of citizenship is continental European in origin (in the modern sense mostly via the French Revolution, though the idea does pre-date it) – and a very recent introduction to Britain. It’s a word that entered English via the Old French citeain, itself derived from the Latin civitatem.

Indeed, until the aforementioned 1948 British Nationality Act, there was no such thing as a British citizen – we were all merely subjects of the crown.

This, in effect, meant that we – as British subjects – had obligations to the state, but few rights.

This is because, contrary to popular belief in the power of the likes of Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, the one constant in British constitutional law over the last three centuries has been that no parliament can bind another. This includes binding future parliaments by legislation granting rights to the people – because, again contrary to popular belief, in Britain the people have never been sovereign – first sovereignty lay with the crown, now it lies with parliament.

This means that the “right” of the people of Britain to vote, to a fair trial – even to life – are all down to the whim of parliament, and can be withdrawn at any time. (For more on this, see this post on the nature of sovereignty, this post on the nature of the English/British constitution and how “rights” fit into it, and this Wikipedia article on the concept of parliamentary sovereignty.)

The benefits of EU citizenship

In contrast, EU citizenship has conferred rights with no obligations.

With the introduction of EU citizenship, for the first time in Britain’s history, British citizens/subjects have the right to vote, to free movement, and so on, rather than just the privilege – we are no longer dependant upon the whim of parliament.

In return, the EU asks nothing of us. We are not directly taxed by the EU, nor does the EU directly pass any laws that we have to obey – all go via the governments of the member states, all of whom can challenge every stage of the process. Nothing the EU does is done without the approval of the (elected) governments of the member states – and therefore our obligations remain to the member states we are citizens of, and not to the EU as an entity. This may sound like pedantry, but in a legal sense it is a vital distinction.

It is the ongoing power that the British parliament has to abolish any and all freedoms it so desires that is one of the key reasons why I became in favour of some form of supranational body that could, for the first time in the country’s history*, serve to guarantee the freedoms that we have all come to assume are our right.

EU citizenship being layered on top of national citizenship finally guarantees all British citizens the right to appeal to a court that lies beyond the British government’s jurisdiction, whereas before we were stuck with the House of Lords as the highest court of appeal – a House of Lords and a justice system presided over by the Lord Chancellor, a member of the same government against whose abuses we would have been appealing.

Because the trouble with the concept of sovereignty is that is implies *absolute freedom of action*. In a state where the people are sovereign – as in the US with its “We the people” opening to the Constitution and specific clarification of the people’s rights in the 9th Amendment – this means that the people are (legally) secure from governmental abuses of power. In a state like Britain, where parliament is sovereign, it means that the people have no guarantees about anything – no rights, only privileges, and no legal recourse if those privileges are withdrawn. (The same problem faced parliament in the 17th century – they wanted certain guaranteed rights, but the monarch was sovereign. The problem was only solved by a series of bloody civil wars, the constitutional shift finalised by a foreign invasion.)

The concept of EU citizenship rectifies that historical/legal/constitutional anomaly – this time without a drop of blood shed.

* The UN’s Universal Declaration on Human Rights (1948) and the Council of Europe’s European Convention on Human Rights (1950) were steps in the right direction, but the former is not legally binding, and the latter’s failings are made clear by the fact that the likes of Russia and Georgia are signatories, despite routinely breaching their citizens’ declared rights under the Convention.

My last post has been hijacked by the rather fervent supporters of the concept of an English Parliament to the extent that it’s impossible to discuss what it was really about – i.e. local/regional vs national identities.

For non-Brits, a quick overview…

The Campaign for an English Parliament and its political offshoot the English Democrats Party are English nationalist organisations that have arisen since devolution and the creation of the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly and Northern Ireland Assembly.

The argument is fair enough – Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland now have sole control over various areas of domestic policy (e.g. health, education), but in those same areas, England is still governed by the parliament of the United Kingdom in Westminster – which contains Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish MPs. This means that we have a situation whereby a majority of English MPs could oppose a policy (to do with, say, health) that would affect *only* England – yet the government could pass that policy anyway with the assistance of MPs from other parts of the United Kingdom, even though it would not take effect in their own constituencies.

It is a problem that has long been acknowledged in British politics, that should have been more adequately dealt with before devolution took place, and that has come to be known as “the West Lothian Question” after a 1977 speech by Scottish Labour MP for West Lothian, Tam Dalyell:

For how long will English constituencies and English Honourable members tolerate… Honourable Members from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland exercising an important, and probably often decisive, effect on English politics while they themselves have no say in the same matters in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?

As such – to keep the English Parliament lot happy (though I’m not sure why I should bother considering their wild hostility in my last post and decision to libel me with unfounded accusations) – here’s a dedicated post for them to rant at. (Which will probably be of little interest to anyone else…)
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In the comments to my National identity vs European identity post, where I’ve been arguing that it’s perfectly possibly to have a sense of belonging to multiple different groups, and thus to have multiple different identities, commenter WG notes:

I don’t see the point in this multi-ID thing.

One other point. The break up of Britain may well be a result of belonging to the EU. Wales, Scotland, and yes, even places such as Cornwall, may well decide that they will be better off under the EU and free of England. Whether this was intentional or no people such as myself have resigned ourselves to the ‘regionalization’ of England and expect other regions to break away. There is a growing sense that we are returning to the Essex/Mercia/Northumberland scenario.

As a Devonian, a Dumonii, I am afraid that I and many friends will never submit to EU rule. You see what a can of worms we have opened here. We are back to fighting Imperial Rome.

I’d agree that the EU makes such things possible (regional development funds and the like being able to fill the cash gap previously provided by nation state apparatus), I don’t necessarily see this as entirely down to the EU.
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The debate continues to rage in the comments to my history: starting assumptions post, much of it coming from EUtopia regular Robin, a man firmly convinced of the superiority of national identities over any “European” one:

your national identity comes readily to you but this EUropean identity seems manufactured by those who are stakeholders in this EU project or its supporters.I also pointed out that Europeans may not, depending on their nationality, have that much in common with other Europeans, and many will have more in common with nations outside of Europe

Some fair points there, for sure. But what about the claim that “your national identity comes readily to you” contrasted with “this European identity seems manufactured” – the implication seems to be that national identities are somehow organically-formed.

This certainly can be the case – true national identities are usually based on a closely-shared culture and language. Think the Basques or Celts or Roma – not confined within the borders of any one country, but with a definite sense of nationhood.

The rise of national identities

Nation states, however, are entirely different beasts. The histories of France and Germany – two of the Great Powers of Europe, and key personifications of the nation state concept – are dominated prior to the last couple of hundred years by centuries of internal conflict and power struggles as their various constituent parts battled for control. People in the 16th century may have felt “French” or “German” – but only AFTER they felt themselves Angevin, Bavarian, and so on. The same goes for Spain, Italy, Poland, Austria, Switzerland – pretty much every European state. Even England was formed from constituent parts, albeit rather earlier than many other future European nation states.

In every case, a “national” identity had to be superimposed over the smaller-scale, pre-existing identities of the units that were brought together to make up the new, larger nation state, to forge a sense of shared identity between Angevins and Provencals, Bavarians and Saxons, Catalonians and Andalucians, where previously there was not just none, but also frequently a sense of hostility and rivalry.

Much of the time this has been due to the perception of some external threat, either real or fictional – in the case of 16th/17th century France, the rise of the Habsburgs in Spain, the Spanish Netherlands, Austria, Northern Italy and the Holy Roman Empire; in the case of 19th century Germany, the perceived threat from Austria-Hungary to the south and Denmark to the north; in 1930s Germany, the perceived threat was the Great Depression, communism and “the Jews”. The reason for forging a new sense of unity is aimed both internally – to promote loyalty to the state in a time of crisis – and externally – to demonstrate that unity to your enemies, and make clear that your constituent parts are no longer potential allies.

As Robin is so keen on his English/British identity, let’s take that as a more detailed case study.

The rise of the British and English national identities

The British national identity has only been created during the last 3-400 years (first under James VI/I to try to mesh his Scottish/English subjects together – something that didn’t work – then after the Act of Union of 1707, mostly in response to the rise of France under Louis XIV to prevent the revival of the old Franco-Scottish anti-England alliance). Yet this British identity *still* hasn’t fully taken hold, with sizable chunks of the population still feeling Scottish/Welsh/English/Cornish/Irish/whatever far more than they feel British – a feeling heightened by the different cultures and traditions, languages and religions and even (in the case of Scotland) legal systems still in place in the various constituent states of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Just as the British national identity rose in response to a threat, so too did the English. The Danish/Viking invasions of the 9th/10th centuries first led to concerted efforts at defence, then to alliances, finally to the expansion of the old Kingdom of Wessex as the Anglo-Saxons fought back against the Danes. The Heptarchy – the old kingdoms of Wessex, East Anglia, Mercia, Northumberland, Kent, Sussex and Essex (not to mention smaller kingdoms like Bernicia, Deira, Surrey, Lindsey, the Isle of Wight, Hwicce, Magonsaete, Pecsaetan, Wreocensae, Tomsaete, Haestingas, the Middle Angles, and Cornwall which were mostly sucked into the major seven during the course of the Dark Ages) – was united as England not due to any inherent feeling of shared identity, but thanks to the Viking threat and Alfred the Great’s realisation that the best bet was safety in numbers. (A very similar idea to that which led to the European Union, in fact.)

But that’s just the creation of England as an entity – not Englishness as an identity. As Robin rightly notes, just because you can identify a geographical area with some common features (like England back in the 9th century, or Europe today), doesn’t mean that there is any sense of shared identity among the people of that area.

English national identity took several centuries to emerge after England’s unification – there were early hints under Edward I as he battled the Welsh, Scots and French (again, the threat of war being a the key), though most historians now agreeing that it was first fully conceived during the reign of Henry VII as a more or less entirely political, top-down attempt to reunify the kingdom after the Wars of the Roses. (One of the key manifestations of this new “English” identity was Henry’s entirely PR-driven decision to name his first-born son Arthur, after the legendary English King, made newly popular by Thomas Mallory’s Le Mort d’Arthur, published the very year that Henry seized the throne and brought the long-running civil wars of York vs Lancaster to a close. How much better a symbol of England’s unity could there have been than for a new King Arthur to take the throne? Shame he died, really…)

“Englishness” was maintained as an idea by Henry VIII, first to secure his throne and then (almost by accident) during his dispute with the Papacy and subsequent Reformation. It was further solidified under Elizabeth I as she tried to unite her religiously-divided country in the face of the constant threat of Spanish and French Catholic invasions (trying to create a sense of national identity that could override the Catholic identities of some of her subjects). But even that didn’t work – witness the Civil War that erupted 40 years after her death.

Local vs national identities

Even today, there are sub-categories beneath “Englishness” that many people within England will pick as their primary “identity”: Scouse; Geordie; Brummie; Yorkshireman; Northerner – and so on. (Some of the pre-English kingdoms have retained some sense of identity remain – notably in Cornwall (mostly due to the older Celtic national identity that pre-dates Cornwall as an entity); others have been entirely forgotten – how many people in modern-day Lincolnshire perceive themselves to be Lindseyans?)

All of these local identities are far more natural in origin than the “English” or “British” “national” identites that lie above them as a broader unifying concept – and such smaller-scale identities will always exist – because before both English and British identities arose, the most important identities were (quite naturally) local – the village, the town, and at a push the county.

And little wonder – until the 19th century, let’s not forget, it would take at least a week to travel from London to Edinburgh or Penzance. The only other “Englishmen” you’d be likely to meet – unless you were a politician or noble – would be at the local market or the county fair. Why should someone from Devon feel any kinship with someone from Yorkshire? They would never meet, and even if they did they would speak differently, have different customs and traditions – and after the Reformation sometimes even different religions. (The conversion to Protestantism was a decidedly localised affair in England, despite being a top-down, state-ordained decision – there are even records of neighbouring villages in early 17th century Somerset, less than five miles apart, where one was Catholic, one was Protestant – they went on to join different sides in the Civil War, one supporting Parliament, the other the King…)

This argument about not meeting people from far away and having little in common with them when you do, of course, you could use against the concept of a “European” identity today – what does a Yorkshireman have in common with a Romanian?, etc.

Only today we are far more likely to encounter people from other EU member states than our forebears ever were to meet a fellow Englishman from the other side of the country. You can drive to Romania in a couple of days – a journey time that, when the English national identity was being formed, wouldn’t have got you even a quarter of the way from Cornwall to London. It’s quicker to fly from London to Romania today than it would have been, back in the 16th/17th/18th centuries when national identities were forming, to ride to the next town.

An attempt at a conclusion

All this, of course, goes to explain my belief that that broad, higher-level senses of belonging – at national or European level – are less important than lower-level, “primary” identites.

Yet even this isn’t entirely true – because senses of identity are entirely personal things. You can pick a bunch of people who were all born and raised in the same village, and yet there will still be a wide range of opinions among them as to what their primary identity (or identities) may be. Some may pick their national identity as most important, others that of their local area, still others their religion or their class.

Because if the case study of the manufacture of Britishness and Englishness has proved anything, it shows that the top-down imposition of a broad identity will only ever meet with limited success.

A broad identity can be a positive unifying force – the creation of a sense of “Britishness” in particular has prevented war within the island of Great Britain for the last three hundred years – though it can also cause conflict – as in Northern Ireland, where the imposition of the concept of Britishness continues to meet with violent resistance.

As such, although I don’t see a “European” identity as a threat to my own sense of identity or place, I can see how others might. And although I agree with Robin that there have been efforts to artificially create such a European identity – just as the English and British and French and German and Spanish and Italian (and so on) identities were artificially created before it – I don’t agree entirely. The growth of a European identity is also partially natural and organic as the economies and societies of Europe grow closer together, and as improvements in technology and transportation bring Europeans from different countries into more regular contact with each other – just as a sense of “Britishness” grew organically during the course of the last few hundred years as Britain’s infrastructure improved and people from Devon and Yorkshire and Scotland encountered each other more regularly, and grew to see the things that they had in common as well as those things that were different.

Some pre-English and pre-British identities have been lost; others have survived. The same will doubtless be the case in Europe if the European identity takes hold. But the process will be a long one. More than a thousand years after the formation of England, the Cornish still feel Cornish; seven hundred years after the conquest of Wales, the Welsh still feel Welsh; three hundred years after the Act of Union, the Scots still feel Scottish.

And so, in short, while I have no wish to impose a European identity on anyone who doesn’t wish it, I honestly can’t see how it can be seen as a threat. And likewise, I can’t see how any attempt to break down the perceived barriers between peoples of different identities in pursuit of a common good can be a bad thing. The creation of a European identity is not an aggressive movement, like the creation of a German identity was in the late 19th through to the mid-20th century – it is a positive attempt to bring together a continent whose entire history has been marked by warfare and conflict.

I can only see this as a good thing.

With a new(ish) emphasis on history, it’s probably an idea to outline where I’m coming from.

My approach to history is not coherent enough to be defined by any one term, but has probably most been influenced by the French Annales School, most notably the work of Fernand Braudel and the concept of the longue durée (first developed by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre). To boil a complex concept down to its fundamentals, this means that to understand both past and present, I believe that a long, wide view is necessary – one that takes into account as much as is feasibly possible of what might influence a society/culture. In short, while the minutiae of history can be fascinating, they cannot be understood without the wider context.

Taking this approach, nation states can be seen as little more than recent developments within a far larger entity, emerging over the course of the last thousand or so years (though only crystallising firmly during the last few hundred) of a Western/European civilisation that can more or less coherently be traced back to Ancient Greece. They are interesting, but not fully understandable without looking at the wider picture – not even the most powerful and oldest of them.

As Arnold Toynbee noted in his masterly A Study of History,

English history does not become intelligible until we view it as the history of a wider society of which Great Britain is a member in company with other nation states, each of which reacts, though each in its own way, to the common experiences of the society as a whole. Similarly, Venetian history has to be viewed as the history of a temporary sub-society including Milan, Genoa, Florence, and the other ‘medieval’ city-states in Northern Italy; Athenian history as the history of a society including Thebes, Corinth, Sparta, and the other city-states of Greece in the Hellenic Age.”

Would Britain be what she is today without the Anglo-Saxon, Viking and then Norman invasions? Without the impact of the Roman Catholic Church? Without the medieval revival of classical learning and introduction of advanced mathematics and algebra via European contact with Arab scholars? Without the centuries of warfare with France? Without the huge upheaval sparked by Italian Renaissance thought and the German/Swiss ideas that shaped the English and Scottish Reformations? Without the proximity of the Dutch Republic in the 17th century, offering sanctuary and a base for dissidents and propagandists? Without the Glorious Revolution, itself a Dutch invasion that was part of a wider European unease about the rise of France’s Louis XIV? Without the competition for global trade and territories with the other European imperial powers? Without the upheavals of the French and American Revolutions and the Napoleonic Wars? Without the rise of truly global trade and increasingly powerful economic competitors through the 19th century? Without the vast upheavals of the First World War, Great Depression, Second World War and Cold War?

In this approach, Europe can be seen as a more or less coherent entity for much of the last two thousand years – albeit an entity whose borders have shifted and remain ill-defined – and Western/European society/culture as something distinct from that of its near neighbours in North Africa, Asia and the Middle East (even while, thanks to such close proximity, sharing some elements and – on the borders – some overlap). Meanwhile, the borders of Europe’s constituent states have been in constant flux – even those of Britain (first the heptarchy, then Wessex, then England, then England and Wales, also taking in much of Northern France until the loss of Calais in 1558, then the merger with Scotland, the addition of Ireland, the loss of Eire and addition of Northern Ireland to the United Kingdom – not to mention the various far-scattered overseas territories like Gibraltar and the Falklands).

The defining influences on this Western/European society/culture have been (to massively over-simplify) Ancient Greece (especially Athens), the Roman Empire, Judeo-Christian religion, French courtly life, and British parliamentary democracy. Its influence in turn has spread worldwide via the various European empires, so that aspects of Western/European society/culture have embedded themselves around the world – most obviously in the Anglosphere, but also in Latin America, India/Pakistan/Bangladesh, and various parts of Africa and South East Asia.

Within Europe, its influence roughly coincides with the continent’s geographic borders – halting more or less with the Mediterranean to the South, and fading to the East over the Russian Steppes, where it slowly merges with other societies/cultures both on the Russian fringe and within Russia itself.

In short, you can understand pretty much any European country without knowing anything much about the history of China; you cannot understand pretty much any European country without knowing something of the history of its neighbours. Not even the big beasts of Britain and France, long the two most influential European states (with apologies to Spain), and certainly not the more recent arrivals on the European scene.

This is why I find Europe – however ill-defined that term might still be – a worthwhile and coherent unit of study.

Two articles from the Washington Post have, over the last few days, finalised a new content idea I’ve been having for a while for this place.

First up came a quick overview of the ongoing dispute between Greece and Macedonia over who “owns” Alexander the Great, and then today up pops an article about yesterday’s elections in Moldova, describing the failure of the Communist Party to win as a victory for “Pro-West parties”.

Of course, it’s all a lot more complicated than that – not just the present-day politics, but also the history, in both cases stretching back centuries. And the press, with precious little interest in “foreign” news at the best of times, rarely manages to give much historical context beyond the superficial. (“Oh yeah, Moldova – that used to be Communist, right? Or is it still Communist? God knows – but it’s probably something to do with the Cold War. That’ll do.”)

But, let’s face it, few of us – even those of us who studied history at university – have a solid enough grasp of Europe’s past to know the basic backstory to *every* ongoing dispute. We can always make guesses – neighbours are always likely to come into conflict, after all – but the specifics are often lost. Hell, there’s a good chance that – thanks to the usually national-focus of most history teaching in schools and universities – that large chunks of European history are entirely unknown by many readers, be it the Early Modern big beasts of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Spanish Netherlands, or the lost realms of Europe, the Venices, Savoys, Anjous, Brandenburgs, Wallachias, Achaeas, Trebizonds and the rest.

With all the politicians off on holiday for the next few weeks – and being, as I am, bored rigid with all the petty political squabbles – this looks like a good time to start adding to this site’s long-neglected “Culture” and “History” sections with a few (hopefully) handy introductory articles providing a slightly more coherent and considered bit of context to current events than you’ll find on Wikipedia. Plus, just for fun, the odd look at more obscure and forgotten bits of Europe’s history and culture, like my piece on wannabe European states from a while back. A good excuse to expand my knowledge and justify sitting back with a few books – expanding my knowledge was the whole point of starting to blog, after all.

Sound good to you? Or should I stick to politics?

The MP expenses scandal has rocked Westminster for over a month now (with more revelations *still* emerging). Many MPs have found their careers cut short – among them Speaker Michael Martin (a man who never should have got the job back in 2000, but that’s beside the point).

As is the way of things these days, public and press outrage over the perceived piss-taking by MPs of all parties has led parliament to jump to entirely the wrong conclusion. In hunting for a scapegoat, they picked on Michael Martin; in the process, they tarnished the office of Speaker itself with smears designed primarily to hit this man they had collectively decided to blame. “Oh,” they said, “If only we had someone like Boothroyd or Weatherill this never would have happened!” Yet despite professing that it was the man, not the office, which had been found wanting, it looks as if the next Speaker is intended to “update” and “make relevant” an institution that has doing very well, thank you very much, without any meddling from mere gadfly politicians.

Altering the office of Speaker is not what is required. That way lies failure and recrimination down the line. Because we cannot do constitutional reform – not when it’s hasty; not when it’s carried out by politicians; and most especially, it would seem, not when it’s carried out by the lot we’ve got at the moment. (Remember the half-arsed attempt to reform the House of Lords, that has left us in an arguably worse situation than we had before? The dismal attempt to abolish the office of Lord Chancellor? The various residual angers and squabbles over devolution? The back-of-an-envelope creation of a supreme court? The constant renaming of government departments, often at vast expense and with no discernible impact? The gradual downscaling of both the Cabinet and parliament, hand-in-hand with the politicisation of the previously stringently impartial civil service?)

The office of Speaker has been brought into disrepute? One Speaker’s failures over a nine-year period is enough to destroy the respectability of a position that has existed (more or less) since the 14th century? By the same logic, shouldn’t we abolish the office of Prime Minister about now?

What we need is not to alter the office of Speaker and “make it more relevant”, as seems to be the buzz phrase at the moment. We need someone respectable, unimpeachable, with an intricate understanding of the rules of parliament (something Martin never had), a sense of the history of the place, and an ability to stand up for what’s right in the face of overwhelming opposition from a chamber full of shouty, petulant MPs.

Few of the candidates can live up to this:

- Margaret Beckett is a party animal through and through, heavily implicated in the expenses scandal
- Sir Alan Beith is another party man – and to have former deputy leader of any party take over such a high profile position at this stage is just silly, even if he is only a Lib Dem
- Sir George Young is a former Secretary of State, and therefore he too has too much of the party man about him
- John Bercow is both incredibly smug and, with only 12 years in the Commons, too inexperienced
- Parmjit Dhanda only entered the Commons in 2001, so just cannot be taken seriously no matter how intelligent and earnest he may seem
- Anne Widdecombe is more a TV personality than a politician these days, and is stepping down at the next election anyway, so really – what’s the point?
- Sir Alan Haselhurst put £12,000 on his expenses for gardening over four years, based on a figure just £1 below the receipt threshold every month throughout that time, so surely can no longer be a contender
- Richard Shepherd is a man of principle, no doubt, but with the ongoing difficulties over the positioning of the UK within the EU I can’t see the Commons going for one of the most fervent of the Maastricht rebels (plus he’s a friend of Robert Kilroy-Silk, which must show poor judgement, surely?)

Which leaves us with two genuinely decent candidates: Sir Michael Lord, and Sir Patrick Cormack. Both Tories? Yes. Both with Knighthoods? Yes. Between them, they have 65 years in the House (39 of those Cormack). Lord, like Shepherd, was a Maastricht rebel – but I wouldn’t discount him for that, as it does, after all, show some independence. More impressively, however, Cormack was a Poll Tax rebel – one of the very few Tories to refuse to support that most unpopular of policies, and was also the first MP to force a debate on the Yugoslav crisis in the 1990s – much against the wishes of the then government (which was, yes, Tory again).

Yes, I’m biased here – I used to work for Cormack. This does, however, also mean that I’ve seen his character up close and know him to be a man with a genuine, passionate belief in doing the right thing. The Telegraph’s Ben Brogan seems to see much of the same in him that I do.

If you want to return a sense of decorum to the Commons, what better than someone who knows the place inside out, with four decades’ experience? What better than someone who’s been through ten general elections and seven Prime Ministers, who’s seen countless MPs come and go – and yet has, throughout, watched the institution of parliament endure, despite all the scandals, all the infighting, all the failures and ill-considered reforms?

We don’t need a big media star – the Speaker should never *be* high-profile, that was part of the reason Martin had to go – we need someone who can command quiet respect. We don’t need rapid reform – we need someone with a sense of perspective who can take a step back and calmly assess, because that is what the Commons has been lacking above all during the last few weeks. Cormack would be ideal.

Which is, of course, why he almost certainly won’t get it. When was the last time MPs voted for something to do with the running of parliament that actually makes sense?

And so time for the annual reminder of why St George is the ideal symbol for Britain’s European legacy.

For those coming in late, the superstate series so far:
- The danger of Jean Monnet
- Why EU superstate conspiracy theories are nonsense
- Four points and a question for eurosceptics who believe in the advancing EU superstate
- EU competence creep, the spectre of the superstate, and how governments actually work

As I’ve set out several times, I don’t see an EU superstate as a realistic possibility at any point in the next hundred years – not even the next three hundred years. For me, this isn’t a problem. Our grandchilren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren are unlikely to have any of the same concerns that we do today – and as the Anglo-Scottish union of 1707 has proven nicely, national/cultural identities are more than capable of surviving political union (hell, in Scotland’s case the national identity has arguably got even stronger since the Acts of Union). As such, if – over the course of the next few centuries – it proves to be in the best economic interest of the peoples of Europe for a “superstate” of some description to emerge from the present EU, so what? We’ll all be long dead.

But if such a superstate were to emerge, what would it look like? On one of those previous superstate posts (all of which have got healthy discussions in the comments – despite various sidetracks into insane detail about trucking and jam), helpful contributor French Derek argues that

“a federal state of 27 nations, each with their own languages, cultures, economic models, etc would be impossible to govern”

However, there are two cases where something similar to this has come about – Russia and India. Could these provide us with a vision of a future European superstate and clues about a model to follow?

Where the EU is made up of 27 member states with 23 official languages (and a bunch of other, less widely-used ones ranging from Cornish in the UK and Frisian in Denmark/Germany through more widely-used unofficial languages like Russian, Ukrainian and Romani), the Russian Federation is made up of 21 semi-autonomous republics (plus various self-governing cities, oblasts, okrugs, etc. making up a total of 83 federal subjects) and has 27 official languages), while India is made up of 28 states (and a few additional semi-autonomous regions) with 29 languages spoken by more than a million people (and 122 spoken by more than 100,000). Neither country – much like the EU – could be considered to be ethnically or religiously homogenous.

But the fact remains that both federal states continue to function, despite insanely complex internal demographics (far more so than the United States of America – the federal model most often used as a point of comparison with any future EU superstate). Naturally, the size of their populations are not entirely comparable – Russia’s population is c.145 million (about a third of the EU’s 500 million) and India’s c.1.17 billion (about twice the EU’s population), while the US’ population of c.300 million is about two thirds that of the EU. But still – India’s size is similar at 1.3 million square miles as opposed to the EU’s 1.6 million (compared the the USA’s 3.6 million and Russia’s 6.7 million) – so who’s to say that either population or geographical area is a factor in the functioning of an effective federal state?

Of course, in the case of both Russia and India (as well as, arguably, that of the US), their current situation came about after centuries of war and conquest – unlike the EU’s entirely peaceful formation – and whether either Russia or India can be considered to be effectively governed is another matter entirely. But Russia, India and the US nonetheless are all examples of large federal states that manage to work – in India and the US with more or less effective democracies that have both seen minorities elected to the highest office in the land (Obama in the US, obviously, but also Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, a Sikh). In both India and Russia (and arguably some parts of the US as well, with the various secessionist movements), the various federal states and regions have often retained a strong sense of identity and autonomy – just as have Scotland and Wales (among others) in the much smaller federal state that is the United Kingdom. Both India and Russia also retain some violent paramilitary nationalist/minority elements that occasionally cause trouble (much like in the federal state of Spain with ETA, or the UK with the various Irish republican groups of the last few decades).

So large federal states with complex demographics can exist and function with the constituent parts retaining their own national/cultural identites.

But can they hold together? India was far larger than it now is when under British rule – once the Raj left 60 years ago, Partition tore the country in three in a bloody horror the tensions of which remain to this day. With the end of the Cold War and fall of the Communist Party, various parts of the old USSR (Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, etc. etc.) broke away from Russia – and other regions, most notably Chechnya, have continued as part of the federation only under threat of force. The United States was torn apart by civil war less than a century after its formation.

Indeed, it’s arguable that Russia and India continue to hold together largely due to fear of “the other” – the perceived threat of the West in Russia (hence the rampant popularity of the nationalistic Putin and co), and the genuine threat of Pakistan in India (the threat of India in turn acting as a unifying device for the fragile federation of Pakistan). The United States originally came together thanks to the threat of Britain, while England emerged from the Heptarchy under the threat of the Vikings, France from the threat of England, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, modern federal Germany from a series of unifying wars with various neighbours under Bismark – and so on and so on.

In all cases, the sense of identity – “I am Russian”, “I am Indian”, “I am American”, “I am English”, “I am French”, “I am German” and all the rest – emerged due to a growing sense that another group of people were both somehow different and a threat. (Welsh national identity is a prime case in point – such a thing didn’t even exist until England started to invade what is now Wales, with the entire region made up of little more than warring tribes and principalities until they were given a unifying force, and existed as one kingdom only once – and then for just seven years – until the English conquest was completed and Wales in its current form was created. The same unifying, nationalising effect can also be seen in Scotland, where medieval English invasions likewise fostered a sense of Scottish national identity that helped bring the warring clans together.)

But what is the European Union’s threat? Who is “the other” for the EU that can foster a sense of European identity? With the current ongoing arguments over Turkish EU entry – not to mention the rise in tensions between Islam and the West of the last decade, the Islamist terror attacks in Madrid and London, and the perennial Europe-wide tensions over immigration – is “the other” for the EU going to be Islam? With the increasingly frequent stand-offs between the EU and Moscow over energy supplies and the autonomy of states on the European fringe, could it be Russia? For a while under the Bush administration and in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, it even looked like it might be America.

But whatever the “threat” – real or simply perceived – might turn out to be, it is hard to see a truly European identity begin to emerge without a greater sense of what being European is *not*. “We are American because we are not British”, “We are English because we are not Viking”, “We are Welsh/Scottish because we are not English” – this is how national identity has always begun.

So, while I disagree that the EU is too big and complex to form a superstate, I do maintain that such a thing remains unlikely. You can legislate to create political and economic integration, you can forge agreements between different territories and different cultures – but you cannot legislate or negotiate to build a sense of identity. Without that sense of identity – “I am American”, “I am Indian”, “I am Russian” – none of those three existing sprawling federations would be able to hold together. Of the EU’s 500 million citizens, how many really feel “European” to the extent that an American feels American, a Russian Russian or an Indian Indian? Hell – we can’t even agree on what Europe is – how can we know what it is to be European?

In our last little discussion of the likelihood of an EU superstate (in amongst and partially as an offshoot of the rather silly sidetrack about jam), Josef noted that

there is a concern that this is how the EU will form itself into a “superstate.” Not through a series of demi-democratic treaties, but through a sort of slow, suffocating creep of boring, incomprehensible, impenetrable legislation. If you write a follow up post, Nosemonkey/J Clive, then I’d be interested to hear your take on this.

This is always a danger with any democratic system which relies largely on a more or less bureaucratic civil service to get things done. We like to think that all new legislation is debated and scrutinised by our elected representatives, dissected in minute detail and put to a vote considering only the best interests of the people – but it rarely happens like that.

In the UK, the vast majority of primary legislation is passed in the form of statutory instruments – new laws drawn up by civil servants and government ministers and put onto the statute books without (most of the time) parliament so much as being informed. In the UK in 2008 alone, there were 3,399 statutory instruments passed – that’s more than nine new laws a day that have come into existence without so much as a by your leave from an elected official. (That’s about average for the last 20 years, by the by – the number of statutory instruments began to creep up under Major, but have remained relatively constant since the mid-1990s, despite various claims that Blair used them more than any previous Prime Minister as another way of bypassing parliament.)

The vast majority of these statutory instruments are amendments to existing Acts of Parliament, fiddling with the details (most of them minor). Our last little debate got sidetracked on the use of apple geranium in jams other than those made with quince. Hardly the sort of thing – the logic goes – that it’s worth wasting parliament’s time with, and so precisely the sort of thing that would be sorted out in a statutory instrument. If the approval of British MEPs was needed for each of the law changes that statutory instruments bring in, then every one of the British parliament’s 646 MPs would have to go through more than five of the things every single day of the year – as well as all the major legislation, dealing with constituency concerns, being part of the government, holding the government to account and so on. (Remove those MPs who hold government office, it’d be more like 7 statutory instruments each to scrutinise and research the utility of per day – that’s a full-time job…)

In the EU, we have much the same problem. Having accepted the general principle that area X is best dealt with at EU level, it is impractical for MEPs to then scrutinise every subsequent tiny bit of legislation to ensure that it meets their high standards, and vote on every tiny clause about different types of fruit preserve in full session at the European Parliament. Because just as we, the people, delegate our powers of decision to our representatives at Westminster and Brussels/Strasbourg, so our representatives then delegate powers of drafting new laws to the various civil servants, be they in national civil services or the European Commission.

(At which point it’s worth noting that most EU legislation is not actually drawn up by the Commission – the EC only has a staff of c.38,000 – less than a third of that of the UK Department of Work and Pensions alone, and nowhere near enough to do everything that the Commission is accused of doing. Instead, pretty much all EU legislation is drawn up by the civil servants of the various member states, checked by civil servants in other member states, and then rubber-stamped by the Commission once it’s been looked at my enough bureaucrats in enough member states.)

And so in the normal course of events, yes – dozens of new laws will likely come into force every week without having been so much as glanced at by an elected official. But such developed social systems as ours could not possibly function any other way – unless you think that the civil service should be elected, and that it’s a practical possibility to find several hundred thousand people willing to campaign for such a thankless job (not to mention several hundred thousand people willing to turn out and vote on what would prove to be an almost daily basis as retirement and transfers necessitate by-elections to fill vacant posts…) And in any case, the general principles are already always voted on by elected representatives at both national and EU level – as long as they are doing their jobs properly, they shouldn’t vote through sweeping new powers that would allow unelected bodies or people to suddenly advance major changed without anyone checking them first. (Though that’s not to say that there isn’t always a danger that this could happen, as we found out in the UK only recently with the – thankfully defeated – Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which would effectively have made parliament obsolete and allowed any government minister to make any law they liked, when they liked.)

When it comes to the EU, the real fear of competence creep was epitomised by this glorious clause (Article 308 EC):

If action by the Community should prove necessary to attain, in the course of the operation of the common market, one of the objectives of the Community, and this Treaty has not provided the necessary powers, the Council shall, acting unanimously on a proposal from the Commission and after consulting the European Parliament, take the appropriate measures.

In other words, the EU could grant itself whatever powers it liked. Or, at least, it could after unanimous agreement from the governments of the member states in the Council, and after being passed by the elected representatives of the European Parliament – but most anti-EU types conflate Council, Parliament and Commission into one monolithic-sounding “EU” to make these things sound more scary.

So, for more powers to pass to the EU, even with the existence of the “competence clause”, you’d still need unanimous agreement between the governments of all 27 member states, plus a majority in the European Parliament. Hardly that scary – but even so, the Lisbon Treaty amended that same article (now Article 352) to clearly delineate (in line with the subsidiarity principle introduced with Maastricht back in 1992) just where competences lie between the EU and member states, as well as explicitly excluding common foreign and security policy as an area where the competence clause could be used to grant the EU more powers.

Oh yes, and Article 352 also introduced a new clause obliging the Commission to involve national parliaments in any moves to grant the EU more powers. So that’s unanimous agreement by all 27 member state governments, passing a vote in the European Parliament, and passing votes in the parliaments of all 27 member states before the EU can claim any major new powers for itself. Hardly a major worry.

In the meantime, life will continue as normal, with dozens upon dozens of minor changes to minor laws being brought into force merely by civil servants via statutory instruments and their equivalents across Europe – and then (despite some of the claims made in our last comment thread that alterations to jam legislation would require ratification by the Council, Parliament, and so on) amended just as easily if they turn out not to be workable.

Is there a danger that some of these laws will be bad ones? Of course there is. But at least they are generally being drawn up by civil servants who are experts in their field (rather than members of parliament who tend to be generalists), and at least they can be corrected with ease.

Is there a danger that such civil servant-drafted laws could slowly grant more power to institutions that we aren’t willing to give them? Well, a poorly-worded new law always has the potential to be misinterpreted. That’s what we have judges and courts for – if such poorly-worded laws are found, they can be challenged and struck down, if a simple amendment isn’t enough. After all, both the existing Article 308 and the proposed new Article 352 explicitly state that both the Council and the Parliament have to approve any new EU power-grab – and treaty law will always take precedence in such cases.

In short: Modern western liberal democracies are very complex systems, packed full of checks and balances that have been worked out over the course of many centuries. The EU is not a true liberal democracy, but shares many of its forms and functions. As such, I remain confident that there are enough checks and balances in place to ensure that the only way the EU will gain more powers is if the member states of the EU want to delegate more powers to it. It will not -can not – happen by accident. Unlike in the British system, where bad laws like the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill can easily slip through parliament if the government has a sufficient majority and MPs are sufficiently cowed, the EU has 27 additional chances of spotting them before they get anywhere near the statute books – something that the Lisbon Treaty would only have underscored by bringing national parliaments into the equation as well. Once again, it’s hardly the stuff of an impending superstate.

My jokey post on the “danger” of EU founding father Jean Monnet prompted a response from the usually well-intentioned and often thought-provoking eurosceptic Ken of EU Realist (on whom I don’t mean to pick, but he’s provided me with most of the standard anti-EU lines in one handy package).

We’ve started having at it in the comments there, where he has again restated the classic anti-EU conspiracy theory:

“the basic plan [is] to unite Europe under one government… there is nothing else on the table and… each succeeding treaty follows that exact plan”

As such, a response to this, the classic EU superstate conspiracy theory, originally posted as a couple of comments there:

It all starts with Ken’s claim that “Monnet`s misquote ['Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose but which will irreversibly lead to federation'] …Epitomises the aims and the methods to be employed in order to bring about a united Europe”

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