On Europe. Margaret Thatcher

1 Only in Britain does anyone still peddle such nonsense and expect to be believed. A fair-minded reading of recent history shows the way events are leading. Each new global development – the reunification of Germany, instability in financial markets, war in the Balkans, the rise of the American superpower – has served as a spur to create a politically united Europe. We are at or very near the point of no return. But Downing Street seems not to have noticed.

      Of course, in one sense the confusion about the European Union’s true goals is understandable. No one has ever seen anything quite like it before. States, we must admit, are always to some extent artificial creations. After all, without the machinations of Bismarck there would probably have been no united Germany – at least not one based on Prussia. And much the same could be said of Cavour and his project for a united Italy based on Piedmont. Even the oldest nation states – Britain and France – are the result of deals and diplomacy and to some extent remain together because of them. States are thus the work of man, not nature.

      This is even more so in the case of empires. They, above all, require able and committed elites employing skills and stratagems to sustain or expand them. Indeed, the fact that they are ultimately based on force not consent (though culture may supply some bonds in time) makes them supremely the fruit of artifice.

      But how does Europe fit into this pattern? The emerging federal Europe is not, of course, a nation state.2 It is, indeed, based upon the suppressing or, as the enthusiasts would doubtless have it, the surpassing of the concept of national identity. Its actions are often aimed at creating a kind of ‘nation’ of Europeans – hence the European anthem, flag, cultural and educational propaganda programmes and the like. But this process of nation-building, it is understood by all concerned, will take time. And it will certainly have to follow, it cannot hope to precede, the process of institution-building on which the Euro-enthusiasts have embarked. In fact, the EU’s priority is clear: first make your government, the rest will follow.

      Is the new Europe, therefore, an empire in the making? Here the parallels are closer, for its elite displays much of the arrogance and introversion of a supra-national ruling class. Yet Europe is clearly not an empire in other traditional and conventional respects. It is not a power possessed of great military might, or of over-arching technological supremacy, or of boundless resources – though again it wants to acquire or develop all these things.

      Europe is, in fact, more like a state or an empire turned upside down. It lacks so much that would provide the solid foundations of statehood or imperial power that it can only exist through the satisfaction of accumulated vested interests. You only have to wade through a metric measure or two of European prose, culled from its directives, circulars, reports, communiqués or what pass as debates in its ‘parliament’, and you will quickly understand that Europe is, in truth, synonymous with bureaucracy. It is government by bureaucracy for bureaucracy – to which one might add ‘to’, ‘from’ and ‘with’ bureaucracy if one were so minded. It is not that the actual size of the EU bureaucracy in absolute terms is so staggering – at roughly thirty thousand employees it has a smaller staff than Birmingham City Council, though this figure leaves out the much larger number of national officials whose tasks flow from European regulation. No: what makes Europe the ultimate bureaucracy is that it is ultimately sustained by nothing else.

      The structures, plans and programmes of the European Union are to be understood as simply existing for their own sake. Europe thus provides a new variation on Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’: in its version ‘I am therefore I do’ – though, like other multinational bureaucracies, it gets round to doing rather less and less effectively than it intended. Pope John XXIII was once asked by a visitor to the Vatican how many people worked there. He answered: ‘About half.’ This reflection may be applied to Europe too.

      The movement towards a bureaucratic European superstate – for no other term adequately serves to describe what is emerging – has huge implications for the world as a whole. Yet I am repeatedly struck on my travels outside Europe by just how little understanding there is of this. At least until recently, the main attention which the issue received in America or in the Far East related to the nuts and bolts of trade agreements. And when successive British governments – not least that which I led in the 1980s – were seen to be at odds with the rest of Europe, and particularly with the dominant Franco–German axis, that was put down merely to the quirks of history or to the ordinary jostling of national interests.

      That perception is now changing, particularly in Washington. And not a moment too soon. It is one of the great weaknesses of reasonable men and women that they imagine that projects which fly in the face of commonsense are not serious or being seriously undertaken. The creation of the new European superstate is a case in point. It is time for the world to wake up to it; if it is still possible, to stop it; if it is not, to contain and cope with it.

      THE EUROPEAN IDEA

      Bismarck, who makes several appearances in these pages and whose opinions on such matters should be taken seriously, knew exactly what to make of appeals to European idealism. ‘I have always,’ he observed, ‘found the word “Europe” in the mouths of those politicians who wanted from other powers something they did not dare to demand in their own name.’3 This too has been my experience.

      The concept of Europe has always, I suspect, lent itself to a large measure of humbug. Not just national interests, but (especially now) a great array of group and class interests happily disguise themselves beneath the mantle of synthetic European idealism. Thus we find an almost religious reverence for ‘Europe’ accompanied by a high degree of distinctly materialistic chicanery and corruption. I shall try to explain the low-mindedness later. But here it is the high-mindedness that accompanies it which concerns me, because it is actually the more disturbing in its consequences.

      It is often said that the origins of the European project should be traced back to the post-war determination of a number of Continental European politicians, officials and thinkers to build a supra-national structure within which future wars in Europe would be impossible. To this end, France and Germany would be locked together, initially economically, but by incremental steps politically too. And, of course, this impulse was indeed historically important. It was the basis of the first stage of the European plan – the European Coal and Steel Community established on 18 April 1951 – conceived by Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman. It was then manifested in the famous (or notorious) preamble to the Treaty of Rome, signed on 25 March 1957, which sought ‘ever closer union’. And it has persisted and grown in strength up to the present day, when a federal European superstate is on the verge of creation. One should add that this was not the only impulse at work throughout that period: it was not, for example, my goal, or as I then believed the Conservative Party’s goal, in the seventies, eighties and nineties. But the fact is that it is the ideas of Monnet, Schuman, de Gasperi, Spaak and Adenauer – not those of Thatcher (or even de Gaulle and Erhard) which have ultimately prevailed.4

      My point here, however, is that the impulse to create a European superstate was not simply that of avoiding war in Europe. It was a good deal older than that. Nationalism is often condemned as providing an excuse for the persecution of national minorities. But supra-nationalism should be still more suspect, because it provides a doctrine for the subjugation of whole nations. So it has proved in Europe. At the height of its power in the sixteenth century, the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire, for example, aspired to universal domination. The initials A-E-I-O-U (Austria est imperare orbi universo – Austria is destined to rule the whole world), the Habsburg motto, famously summed up that ambition. But, in practice, it was only partially and fleetingly realised. Then for a still briefer period, though with much bloodier thoroughness, Napoleon Bonaparte bestrode the continent of Europe. It is not simply that the language was French which makes the Napoleonic programme for European unity seem so contemporary. For example, among Bonaparte’s aims was, he said, to create ‘a monetary identity throughout Europe’. He later claimed that his common legal code, and university and monetary systems, ‘would have achieved a single family in Europe. No one would ever