Category Archives: A bit of context

Polish PM Donald Tusk: New EU visionary?

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The way the (pro-EU) Guardian portrays it, he might well be with his speech as Poland took over the rotating EU presidency* yesterday:

Assuming the rotating presidency of the EU for the first time, Donald Tusk rounded on the leaders of Germany, France, Italy, and Britain over their handling of the sovereign debt crisis in Greece, immigration, EU spending and the budget. He charged them with posing as European champions while pandering to a new form of Euroscepticism for personal political gain, and of using fears about immigration to curb freedom of travel in Europe.

The passionate and optimistic defence of the EU from the Polish leader was completely at odds with the mood in Brussels and other EU capitals, where commitment to the union is being eroded by the rise of populist Brussels-bashing, squabbling leaders, and soaring mistrust between member states. In defiance of the gloomy European zeitgeist, Tusk said: “The European Union is great. It is the best place on Earth to be born and to live your life.”

And you know what? Think about it for half a moment, you’ll see it’s more or less true. Yes – even the “best place on Earth” bit. Greater equality, freedom, cultural and historical variety, opportunity, social support, comfort and safety than pretty much anywhere.

This is very easy to forget amid all the current talk of crisis and default. But it remains the case that the member states of the European Union are pretty much all still more prosperous and have better qualities of life than at all but a very few points in history (and those very few points *all* came within the last decade, during the boom before the bust).

Hell, you couldn’t get a better illustration of this point than to note that yesterday, 1st July, the day Poland took over the presidency, was the 95th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. One of the bloodiest battles of all time, leaving more than a million dead – with bones and artefacts still rising to the surface almost a century later – and a key reminder of the turmoil of Europe past.

1st July is also, nicely, the anniversary of the entirely peaceful, voluntary 1569 foundation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the largest, most diverse European state of the 16th-17th centuries – ruled by an elective monarchy held in check by a senate and elected parliament. Little-known in Western Europe, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth deserves to be far more widely studied – not least because it arose at a time that the western half of the continent was submersed in a series of bloody religious conflicts that would last the best part of a century, while it was not only democratically progressive, but also religiously tolereant and ethnically diverse.

Poland has shown Europe the way in time of crisis before, in other words. But she has also frequently been a little ahead of her time. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s elective head of state and bicameral parliament, not to mention its religious tolerance, would not become the norm in Europe for another three centuries. And then there’s Solidarity – a movement Tusk was a part of (along with current European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek) – which is now regarded by many as the initial rumbling that helped set in motion the collapse of Soviet communism, kicked off several years before similar popular movements came to prominence in the rest of the Warsaw Pact.

Is this broad view of Tusk coming too soon for a European Union currently caught up in introspection and blame-throwing? Is his sense of historical perspective a little too visionary for an EU whose leaders have not only spent most of the last two decades tinkering with details, but who are also currently more concerned with short-term worries? And is the six months of the rotating presidency anywhere near long enough to start pushing through any serious reform?

Time will tell. But it is, at any rate, a welcome and refreshing change to hear what to me sounds like a rational optimism coming from someone with real influence in the EU after months of hand-wringing and *years* of stagnation.

Sod Tony Blair as an elected President of the EU – if he handles the next six months well, perhaps Donald Tusk could be our man?

Update: I’m starting to have strong hopes for the Polish presidency. Now this from Polish Finance Minister Jacek Rostowski:

In more general terms, Rostowski argued, politicians have to “start thinking in terms of common European interest” and show solidarity – a mantra of the Polish EU presidency – amid signs of “growing estrangement” between northern and southern member states.

“The short-sightedness of some opposition parties in some countries regarding common institutions and programmes is breath-taking,” he said. “If we don’t hang together, we all hang separately.”

Update 2:Yet more good stuff from Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski:

it is not enough to be optimistic and positive. We also must be realistic. The EU does face painful decisions in the months and years to come. Poland will not accept that the answer lies in less solidarity, or “less integration”. That is the sure path to disintegration, leaving us all worse off – and with new divisions.

…Too many of Europe’s rules and regulations were designed for very different times.

…Europe will make a strategic mistake if it retreats into unhappy introspection.

…Thirty years ago the Gdansk ship-workers led the way and changed the world, as millions of Poles joined the Solidarity movement to insist on their basic democratic rights and freedoms. The Polish presidency wants to help the EU draw strength from the ambition and patient wisdom of that movement. Poland itself is an EU success story.

* Yes, this one still exists too. Branded as the Presidency of the Council of the European Union, as opposed to the Presidency of the European Council (Herman van Rompuy), Presidency of the European Parliament (Jerzy Buzek), or Presidency of the European Commission (José Manuel Barroso).

UK-EU trade, services and regulatory costs

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Just found an interesting response to my UK-EU trade post from a couple of months back, from what is a new blog to me, Brittopic.

It’s worth reading in full to see a few objections and some issues raised – notably about the British balance of trade and the nature of the UK’s service-driven economy.

Below the fold is what started out as a comment reply on that site, but which got too lengthy to post there. It ends with my (little bit) tongue-in-cheek advocation of Britain joining the Eurozone – something I don’t believe I’ve ever done before – simply because the Eurozone is a bit like the Gold Standard.

(And yes, before you ask I *have* read a newspaper in the last year. I’m off to Greece on Sunday, in fact, and spend a good 30% of my day job focused on Ireland…)

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UK trade, the EU, and the Rotterdam Effect

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XKCD: Duty CallsAs many of you know, I spend far too much of my (increasingly limited) spare time arguing with eurosceptics on the internet. Some are professional eurosceptics (recent discussions have included ones with Declan Ganley, founder of anti-Lisbon Treaty party Libertas, Nigel Farage of UKIP, and someone from American neocon thinktank the Heritage Foundation), others merely passing concerned citizens.

Most of the time, I can point them to a post on this blog where I’ve already covered their concerns in detail. Sometimes I haven’t covered it yet. In a recent discussion with @ArnieEtc, I asked for suggestions of pro-EU myths. He responded with a classic eurosceptic complaint about a perennial pro-EU claim – one that I frequently make myself, but one which I’ve never explored or justified in any detail:

@ArnieEtc, 3rd Nov 2010: “The favourite [pro-EU myth] of mine is where europhiles insist that 70% of our trade is with the EU, so it’d be suicide to leave. This is a myth for two reasons – firstly, you can have free trade with the EU without being a member (EEA). But more fundamentally, it’s a deliberate manipulation of statistics – a lot of our world wide trade goes via Holland, as you get very good shipping links there. But because that involves goods being moved from the UK, to Holland (even though they only stay there for a few days), some pro-EU commentators use that to bulk up EU trade figures, and make it look like there’s more genuine intra-EU trade than there really is.”

I’ll come back to the EEA in another post, as it’s a far more complicated situation to explain – first, let’s take this claim that official statistics over-inflate the UK’s trade with other EU member states.

Is there any truth in it? Well, as with all the best euromyths, yes. Some.

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France, the Roma, and the Divine Right of States

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In the 17th century, Britain fought a civil war over the principle that no one – not even the King – should be above the law. This conflict resulted in the destruction of the concept of divine right in Britain and the gradual emergence of the system of constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy that has formed the basis of so many constitutions ever since (yes, even some of those without monarchs involved).

But at its heart, the English Civil War laid down the concept of the rule of law. This was such a good principle that pretty much the entire world runs on it now, in one form or another.

This idea that no one should be above the law was the first principle of the emancipation of the people. Without this fundamental concept, the subsequent developments in Western ideas of liberty and democracy (primarily via the French and American Revolutions, both partially inspired by aspects of England’s Civil War rhetoric) could never have progressed – for without the rule of law, we are nothing. We survive merely upon the whim of others. All we have and all we are can be taken away in an instant, and there is nothing we can do about it.

In 21st century France, all the Roma have is being taken. Systematically. By the state. Which in turn pleads that it is merely supporting the rule of law, because “they” are in the country illegally. Even though, in most cases, the French state has no idea precisely who “they” are, because “they” don’t deserve to be tried on a case-by-case basis to determine who is and who is not in France illegally. “They” don’t deserve to be presumed innocent. “They” are just a group of undesirables. “They” don’t have names, or rights. “They” are automatically guilty, merely by being of a particular ethnicity. “They” merely need to be removed.

And yet France has the gall to complain when the European Union’s Justice Commissioner points out the similarities between their current actions towards the Roma and the ethnic persecutions of the Second World War?

In 17th century Britain and 18th century France and America, the call was for no monarch to be above the law. In the 21st century the call should be that no government – or, to be precise, no state – should be above the law.

I’ve long argued that this is one of my key reasons for favouring some form of supranational governmental structure:

I for one would welcome legal restrictions on the ability of the state to interfere in our lives through unjust laws. I would like there to be lines in the sand, over which no government can step.

The Economist’s new Charlemagne has the best overview of the background to the current crisis over France’s explusion of the Roma, while The European Citizen has the best overview of the implications of French treatment of Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding’s strongly-worded speech:

Meanwhile, France is hitting back in a manner that only further underlines the fundamental problem – the French government’s belief in the divine right of states: “That is not how you talk to a large state,” says the French Europe minister.

In the old days, no. No it wasn’t. Because if you talked to a large state in a manner they disliked, they were likely to vent their anger through force, just as the monarchs of old did before them. And look how well that turned out for France, back in 1870-71, 1914-18 and 1939-45…

This is why the English Civil War was fought. It’s why the French Revolution started. It’s why the American Revolution happened. “The rule of law” isn’t just about words written in some dusty textbook – it’s about core, fundamental principles. It always has been. It’s about the rights of man – hence Thomas Paine’s use of that phrase as the title of his most famous work. In another, Common Sense, he likewise noted “in America, the law is King”.

This is a principle that the EU has been trying to bring to Europe, a mere two centuries late.

How big does a state have to be to be above the rule of law – laws that France has signed up to, lest we forget? Laws that this very French government recently reaffirmed through the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty? Principles that every member of the UN and Council of Europe has signed up to via the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and European Convention on Human Rights (both of which exist independently of the EU, in parallel to its own rules, so important are these principles considered)?

If France can get away with breaking internationally-agreed laws designed to protect not just ethnic minorities but individuals of any race, colour or creed just because she’s large, can an even bigger country get away with breaking laws designed to protect France? A bigger country like, say, Germany? Remember how that went, France? The Nazis also won an election – does that mean they had the right to invade?

Just as one of the prime motivators of the English Civil War, French Revolution and American Revolution was to escape the oppression of kings, so one of the prime motivators for the formation of what has now become the EU was to protect Europe’s many peoples from the oppression of states, from governments who believe they have some kind of divine right to do what they like because they’ve got the largest army, but also – in the modern world – because they received more votes in an election.

Sorry, chaps – but the rule of law is not trumped by who has the most votes, just as it isn’t trumped by who has the most soldiers, or the biggest stick. Being voted into office doesn’t mean you can do what you like any more than being king means you can do what you like. We’ve progressed beyond that stage.

Or, at least, I thought we had.

The European Council, the Council of the European Union, the Council of Ministers and the Council of Europe: A guide

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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

First Europe, then… the world?

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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.

National identity vs European identity

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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.

Nosemonkey on history: Some starting assumptions

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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.

A bit of historical context

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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?