Written by Henry Hill | 30 October 2011
Posted in Comment - Politics

Photography: European Parliament

If you’ve so much as glanced at a newspaper in the last few days, you’ll have noticed the ‘Back to the Nineties’ coverage about the backbench rebellion on the EU referendum vote. Once again, the Conservative back benches have resurrected their talent for taking an issue only a vanishingly small percentage of the electorate care about and tearing the party to pieces over it.

The revolt was about bringing the UK two options: either withdrawing from the EU, or ‘substantial renegotiation’ of our position within the Union. I’ll be examining why withdrawal from the EU is a bad, bad idea in my next article, but here I want to look at why the supposedly moderate ‘solution’ of substantially renegotiating our position in a manner entirely advantageous to us is little more than a ridiculous dream.

British eurosceptism – both the hard-line ‘better off out’ and the more moderate ‘renegotiate’ branches – are based on one fundamental assumption: that whatever we do, the EU is damn lucky to have us. You can see this in the naïve belief that the EU will accept whatever relationship with it we feel is best for us.

For example, a lot of the ‘Better of Out’ers (or BOOs) believe that even if we left the EU, we would still be permitted access to the common market because ‘a trade war isn’t in anyone’s interests’. Yet the idea of the market is that trade within it is free and external trade is subject to the Common External Tariff. Allowing the UK unfettered access without participation in EU institutions thus completely defeats the point.

States that wish to be part of the common market without EU membership can do so, via the European Economic Area. Three countries – Iceland, Norway and Switzerland – are currently taking advantage of this amendment. The problem with it from the perspective of a British sovereignty obsessive is that EEA states have to comply with lots (perhaps the majority) of EU regulations while having zero input into those regulations – an outcome surely unacceptable to the Conservative right.

A ‘two-speed’ Europe, the other favourite of British Eurosceptics, also poses problems. The current problems in the Eurozone stem from Europe not being integrated enough – there was no central fiscal policy imposed on the single currency. The current European financial crisis – which Eurosceptics are claiming as verification of their claims – is in fact the product of exactly the kind of multi-speed solution they claim to favour.

In light of that, any future European Union (if it survives) is bound to emerge more integrationist than ever. For how long do British Eurosceptics think that the rest of Europe would put up with the UK acting as a break on their ambitions?

Britain is almost unique in having no really significant pro-European sentiment in its politics. While other European states do have their Eurosceptics, they also have their Europhiles. For example, in Poland the Conservative’s allies in the anti-EU Law and Justice Party were handsomely defeated by the right-liberal Europhiles of Civic Platform, and in Ireland the centre-right Fine Gael government is very pro-European.

Why would integrationists in the rest of Europe allow Britain to chain them to a failed ‘two-speed’ solution that benefits only the UK? To think they would is evidence of a sort of delusional hubris in British thinking still left over from our days as a world power. As Europe heads towards further integration, it might end up being the rest of Europe rather than the Conservatives demanding the UK hold a referendum on whether it was part of the project or not.

There are a fair number of the hard-line Eurosceptics who want the EU to actually fall apart. This would allow us the benefits of being outside the EU without any of the problems of being excluded from the EU’s governance and trading structures, so it can appear quite appealing. Yet the impact this would have on Europe’s global influence would be terminal.

Gone would be the carrots with which we could tempt our less liberal neighbours towards more tolerant policies. Gone would be the economic muscle with which we could impact global trade. Gone would be the diplomatic and potentially military muscle with which Europe could continue to compete in a world of rising alternative superpowers.

All that would be left would be a collection of fractured and gradually enfeebled nation states, with ever shrinking global influence and no means to economically compete with the wider world. As for Britain, we’d be stripped of any real choice in our future destiny. We’d be facing a future either as a neglected satellite of the US, or a faded and forgotten third-rate power.

America or irrelevance: I don’t think it’s unpatriotic to say that Britain deserves better than that.

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