‘Outie’ or ‘Innie’? The EU belly button

pete quentin, 15 November 2007

Apparently David Miliband was felt today by the ‘hand of history’, when delivering a speech to the College of Europe in Bruges. You would have thought that hand belonged to Baroness Thatcher given her famous speech of September 1988 at that location, when she laid out the fundamentals of British euroscepticism.
Instead it seems it was Miliband’s “personal history”, of a family history embroiled in continental strife, which directed his proclamation that the EU should not become a superpower but a global “role model” (yet more school boy language from the Foreign Secretary, who only recently childishly described the world as “rather a scary place”). This is skewed on a number of levels but more importantly acts as an opportunity to raise the points made by Thatcher in 1988 and their continued relevance to Britain’s place in Europe today.

Firstly, Miliband’s speech contained much of merit, about the power EU member states have to stabilise their local neighbours and the need for a more robust European approach to the projection of power beyond the continent. But it does not necessarily follow that these argument translate to the enhancement of the European Union as an institution. He made three core assertions:
European states should improve their military capabilities and that this is best served by a defence capabilities review and the EU increasing its capability to coordinate the deployment of hard power. How do you project such hard power without the structure and authority of a superstate – which Miliband claims no to be proposing? Surely responsibility for the provision of security within and without a territory is THE definition of a state.
Miliband went on to promote the fledgling (and foundering) Emissions Trading Scheme, despite vast evidence that it is failing dramatically, not least because of its inability to artificially provide the scarcity required for a genuine market to operate. A comprehensive investigation of the scheme was produced by Open Europe and can be found here.
Finally he recommended to the College that the Single Market should be pushed out beyond the borders of the Union and into the Middle East and Africa – an admirable assertion, but I wondered if he has passed that one by President Sarkozy yet! Not two days ago the French President lamented that “economic values seem to win the day” and suggested Europeans’ “profound identity crisis… [is] linked to globalisation and the commercialisation of the world” and the EU’s record of external trade speaks for itself!
So, Baroness Thatcher’s speech (which can be found here on the Bruges Group website) made nineteen years ago offers a vision of Europe and the European Union that remains of enduring relevance, calling for an emphasis on the continent’s political and historical diversity to direct its development as an example of liberty, democracy, private enterprise and free trade for the rest of the world.
Ironically this call for an outward not inward looking Europe is now being used to try and mask over the constitutional wranglings that continue to haunt the EU elite and it is here that we find the real motivation for Miliband’s own bold vision of a “global Europe”. The government is all too aware that a domestic Reform Treaty debate has the potential to become a messy and costly one, and desperately wishes to deflect attention away from it by continually appealing for a shift in focus away from “institutions rather than ideals”. In other words ‘enough already with your awkward institutional complaints and leave us to get on with our foreign policy posturings and all those bold and outward-looking ideals’.
The government has managed to frame the constitutional debate as one of dull technicalities and abstraction, irrelevant to all but the lawyers and of no significant impact to Britain’s future. Worse still the sceptical opposition have been complicit in the act, fuelling it further with detailed deconstructions of where and how the documents of the Treaty irrevocably associate us with the European behemoth. You could not imagine a better way to turn voters off the issue! Let us remind ourselves that this is not an issue of red-lines and opt outs, but that the very need for them should make us question whether or not the EU is developing in a direction we support and if it remains a club we wish to be a part of.
“Let Europe be a family of nations, understanding each other and better appreciating each other, doing more but relishing our national identities no less than our common European endeavour.”