For the first time in my life I am a floating voter, but I’m not greatly enjoying it. That’s only partly because many older voters like me may not stay afloat long enough to vote in a referendum about Britain and Europe.
It’s also because the vote that perplexes me would be in a referendum which may never take place, and which if it did would present an unknown question about an uncertain choice in a still unpredictable situation. And that’s discounting the possibility, however unpleasant and improbable, that Alex Salmond might have contrived a situation in which voting about a united Europe coincides with settling arrangements for a divided Britain.
The last time we had a referendum on Europe, when it was Labour’s divisions and vote-catching that made it expedient for Harold Wilson, I knew what side I was on. I was on the ‘Scotland in Europe’ campaign committee along with such future pillars of society (if my memory is sound) as George Robertson and George Foulkes and had enjoyed broadcast clashes with such anti-marketeers as Robin Cook and Lord MacLeod. I even have a little souvenir tablet in Carrara marble to mark our victory.
The trouble is that the ‘Europe’ to which we now belong is not the one about in 1975. The ‘union’ now is very different from the ‘community’ then. That trouble is compounded by uncertainty not only over whether David Cameron could negotiate worthwhile improvements in Britain’s position in three or four years but about the outcome of German attempts to get some order and discipline into the ill-assorted countries corralled in the eurozone towards which Tony Blair was once shepherding us.
I’m sure we were right in the 1975 Yes camp, in the conditions of the time. But there were things which both sides couldn’t foresee and things they got badly wrong. It’s easier to see how dated some of the No arguments became. Robin Cook worried about the community as ‘a rich man’s club’; but many of the present eurozone troubles stem from the need to soak the rich in order to help Spanish building-workers unaccustomed to unemployment and Greek taxi-drivers ill-disposed to taxation. George MacLeod was also concerned about the Treaty of Rome having been drafted in the Vatican drawing-room; but today the prevailing and sometimes intolerant ethos of the union is secular liberalism.
We ‘Europeans’ also got some important things wrong, though we can’t be blamed for the most important one. None of us could foresee that in 20 years we’d be able to welcome Czechs, Poles, and Hungarians into the community, never mind Balkan peoples of far less political and economic maturity. None of us was voting to encourage the ridiculous proposal (happily still without German and French popular support) for the incorporation of Turkey, a state essentially Asian in both territory and traditions.
Some things, however, we can be blamed for. We underestimated the disadvantage that Britain was to suffer through having distanced itself from the original Treaty of Rome and exposed itself to de Gaulle’s veto of the 1960s. We were squeezed into a theatre where the royal box was full, the best seats were taken, and the management had planned its future productions. I think most British Europeans also underestimated the way political bodies and bureaucracies instinctively seek more power and try to set their bounds and budgets wider still and wider, as has happened with the EU institutions – even the ponderous and expensive travelling parliament with so little impact on British political life and public opinion. We overestimated the scope which belated British entry would have in restraining and redirecting these processes.
Most important of all, we misjudged the way that the Rome Treaty’s commitment to ‘ever-closer union’ would work out in practice, because we didn’t understand the way that France and Germany would reconcile national interests and individuality with the European idea. It wasn’t that we didn’t expect a special relationship to survive between these two old enemies; and most of us at some time or other spouted the oversimplified argument that the Common Market sealed a final peace between them. (It’s oversimplified because, although the original Coal and Steel Community was an act of courage and imagination in the post-war mood, the later development towards European union hasn’t so much brought Franco-German reconciliation as reflected that it had already been achieved.) But we failed to understand the distinctive German and French reasons behind their readiness to move towards the ‘ever-closer union’ – not just (as it seemed to most of us) as a state of mind but as a super-state.
The Germans’ trouble is that their old sense of duty and post-war sense of contrition have combined to make them ashamed of nationalism, even hesitant about expressions of patriotism. There are occasional bursts of chauvinism from individuals in the CDU and (with a distinctive Bavarian flavour) among its CSU partners but they only highlight the absence from German politics of a serious and democratic nationally-minded Conservative party.
Old-style German conservative nationalism was corrupted and dragooned by Hitler or (when some of its best elements saw the light too late) killed off after Stauffenberg regrettably misplaced his bomb in 1944. The attempts to create a new-style radical nationalist right are as disastrous as they are unpleasant, tainted by anti-semitism, thuggery, and even murderous race hatred. The result is that the Christian Democrats have settled comfortably as a pragmatic party of economic conservatism, always evident in their domestic politics and now in Mrs Merkel’s realism about the EU budget. That tincture of idealism which any great party anywhere needs has come from belief in a united Europe at least as strong as that of the Social Democrats and Greens whom President Hollande wants to see back in power in Berlin.
The trouble with the French is that their nationalism is something far subtler and quieter than the version crudely expressed by the Front National. They can feel themselves good Europeans because they genuinely think that their language, culture, and political traditions are the finest expressions of European civilisation. For them Paris is the cultural capital not just of Europe but of the world. They can’t help it.
But they are also a very practical people. They have made the most of their advantage as founder-members of the Common Market – ready, as President Hollande has shown, to complain about British cherry-picking while gorging themselves for decades on the fruits (and wines and crops) of the Common Agricultural Policy. What Britain also tends to forget is that they are also, despite such revolutionary streaks in their history as the July riots of 1789, a surprisingly bureaucratic people. Note the calmness with which the French accept the monstrous regiment of prefects (and sous-préfets) billeted into local government and administration, or the uniformity traditionally imposed on their schools. Note too how much smoother the European Commission’s enthusiasm for ‘directives’ sounds in French than when used with its harsher and provocative nuances in English.
It is these inherent political characteristics of continental Europe’s ‘Big Two’ that make Cameron’s task so difficult and his commitment (if he retains power) so questionable. They have determined the evolution of the community which now calls itself a union and Cameron cannot reverse the trend, although (as the budget negotiations showed) he can get some sensible decisions made when allies are available. All he can do in the face of pressures for ‘ever-closer union’ is to be awkward and independent, as Margaret Thatcher was, balancing the chances of reluctant concessions to Britain with the risk of alienating potential friends and allies – unless, that is, the eurozone creates such a mess that all the resistance of the union’s establishment to a ‘two-speed Europe’ becomes meaningless. That process has already gone some way now that the eurozone’s weaker members have had to accept economic dictation from outside; for there is now a two-tier eurozone.
What makes Cameron’s commitment to a referendum, if he stays in power, so risky and so unnecessary is that the eurozone has not yet worked out a long-term formula for survival or defined the surrenders of sovereignty to be imposed on its members, far less suggested its future relationship in the union with countries which find them unacceptable. Until they do it’s hard to see what Cameron will ask us to vote on.
Conceivably he could be put in a position where he has to admit that the union is moving in a direction wholly unacceptable to Britain and ask us to vote No, as I think I would. He has not been frank about that. But he wants us to have something we can approve of and vote for. I’d still like to but can’t yet clearly see what that happy solution could be. I’m much happier when I know what side I’m on.
R D Kernohan is a writer and broadcaster
