Don’t write off the European Union yet

It’s not all bad news. It just looks that way. According to veterans of the Brexit wars, Covid-19 will be the final nail in the coffin of the European Union. The myth of a United States of Europe will, we are assured, now give way to a restoration of national sovereignty in which Britain, as first among equals, will proudly point the way.

Five years from now, the story goes, the single currency will be history. Sterling, the deutschmark and the French franc, if not yet the lira, will once more rule the roost. The Schengen agreement on open borders will be seen as a bizarre and unnatural aberration. Newly restored frontier posts will be confirmed, along with customs checks. Governments, in their chancelleries, will make their own decisions, co-operating where appropriate by way of ambassadors online and plenipotentiary. In short, the Europe that took shape in the nineteenth century will quickly re-establish itself. Monarchies will enjoy renewed esteem, along with parasols, mutton-chop whiskers and bowler hats.

Do I exaggerate? Of course. Outside of carriage-driving, bowler hats have probably had their day. But the enemies of the European Project are convinced that for the EU it can never be glad confident morning again. History’s wheel has taken a decisive turn, they say. The light at the end of the tunnel? It is the bonfire of the vanities.

But has our continent, in the form of the European Union, truly lost the will to live? I say not. The triple assault of Brexit, mass-migration and the coronavirus, coupled with the chronic weakness of the euro, has certainly dealt it a grievous blow. But if it learns from its mistakes, many and various though they be, it can yet recover and confound the critics.

First, and most vitally, it has to acknowledge what has gone wrong and admit that some – though not all – of the responsibility for what has happened is rooted in a muddled, asymmetric understanding of the very concept on which the union is based: solidarity.

There was plenty of solidarity on display when the UK invoked Article 50 and said it wished to resign its membership. Governments fell over themselves to denounce the traitor in their midst. But behind the scenes, there were murmurs of understanding, even of agreement. It was fear of the possible consequences – an unravelling of 60 years of hard-won integration – that held the 27 together and drove the resulting hard bargain.

No such sense of unity was on display when hundreds of thousands of mainly Muslim refugees, mixed in with disparate groups of economic migrants, began to wash up on the shores of Italy and Greece in 2012. Rome and Athens were left to cope on their own.

France, offering only rhetoric, washed its hands of the business, closing its southern ports to ships carrying men, women and children rescued from the Mediterranean. Britain, clearly, wanted no part of a joint effort. It wished only to retreat to Dover and pull up the drawbridge. When Germany’s Angela Merkel took pity on those who found themselves stranded in the Balkans and admitted close to one million of them in 2015, the result was a dramatic rise in support for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland and an equally dramatic fall in support for the country’s traditional parties of government, the Christian Democrats and the SPD.

The former East Bloc nations, led by Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, joined the EU for three reasons – to escape Russian tyranny, to claim hundreds of billions in aid from the West and to export their unemployment. But having secured all three objectives, they were adamant that they would not accept a single Muslim immigrant. The EU’s future, they insisted, now depended on its endorsement of the idea of a white, Christian Europe.

At the same time, in Rome and Athens, an anti-European mindset that had been set in motion by the euro crisis of 2008-12, was confirmed and reinforced.

Evidence of a structural disparity between the economic performance of the nations of northern Europe, for whom the single currency was always intended, and that of the more volatile countries of the Deep South, on whom it had been imposed, began pouring in during the aftermath of the financial crash. Once again, it was Italy and Greece that complained the loudest, but Spain and Portugal, as well as Ireland, quickly added their voices to a mounting chorus of protest.

In Brussels, the chief concern was less to prop up the Club Med group than to ensure the continued existence of the euro. Billions of euros were despatched to Greece, which was threatening to default and bring back the drachma, but only with a blizzard of conditions and obligations that, while cowing the government in Athens, caused support for the European Project in the country that gave Europe its name to fall practically to zero.

But time passed, and the economic situation began to ease. Even in Greece, there were, by 2019, signs of recovery. The biggest problem remained Italy, a nation of 60 million people, formerly prosperous, that through a series of missteps, seemed perennially to be on the brink of bankruptcy.

Now the East and the South were converging. The Viségrad four, personified in the nationalist defiance of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, joined Italy, dominated by the populist Five-Star movement and the hardline League party, in demanding simultaneously the right to manage their own internal affairs and the release by Brussels (i.e. Berlin) of vast sums with which to rebuild and expand their economies.

All this, it should be noted, before the coronavirus struck. Today, three months in to the greatest crisis to have hit Europe since the Nazis or the depths of the Cold War, the demand for help and succour is coming from every quarter (though again, most obviously, from Rome). And the EU has been found wanting.

The truth of the matter is that the present emergency is too big a problem for a Union that, outside of the currency, the single market and the customs union, has only limited authority.

It was Michael Gove who said during the referendum campaign that most new laws impacting Britain were made in Brussels, not Westminster. This was not true. If he thought it was true, he was wrong. If he didn’t, he was being misleading.

Here is a list of the policy areas that are not included in the treaties: defence, national security, the police, criminal law, most civil law, the courts, prisons, education, health (including disease control), culture, media & sport, housing, transport, pensions, social care, local government – in short, nearly all of the areas in respect of which governments are  routinely elected and judged.

The reason the EU did not play a pivotal role in responding to the current health emergency is that it had no power beyond rhetoric. Its ill-fated common procurement scheme failed precisely because Brussels had no statutory authority and lacked all the necessary contacts.

All of which points to a way forward out of the morass.

Europe, the EU as an institution, must learn to do what it can do and leave what it cannot do to others. That is what the principle of subsidiarity is all about. As it is, the Commission, led by Germany’s Ursula von der Leyen can only urge member states to act generously and in concert. It cannot require them to do anything. If Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and the Scandinavian block, don’t wish to invest hundreds of billions of their hard-earned euros in a series of high-risk “coronabonds,” that is an end to the matter.

Von der Leyen and her colleagues on the thirteenth floor of the Barlyamont Building can draw up all the plans they like, but while the Commission proposes, it is Berlin that disposes. The North has agreed to help. It has agreed to pump billions into the system. But it is not prepared to sign blank cheques at a time when the needs of their own populations, in the grip of Covid-19, have never been greater.

On the face of it, then, solidarity is a dead letter, or a dead duck. Where once it was One for All and All for One, today it is sauve qui peut. The jigsaw is back. This is where reality has to kick in.

The European Union that emerges from the Covid crisis, next year or the year after, has to rediscover the practical limitations of its power. It cannot go on like this, with its grasp far exceeding its reach. It must then embark on an urgent programme of reform.

There are only two possibilites. The first, as delineated by Emmanuel Macron, is for increased integration, leading to full fiscal, economic and political union. At that point, the member states would become, in theory, no more than regions, or provinces, of Europe’s United States.

But how likely is that? Angela Merkel’s successors would have no more authority than, say, Nicola Sturgeon in the present-day UK. Viktor Orban would be no more independent of Brussels than the Mayor of London is of Whitehall.

The second possibility, which I favour, is that the core nations of the Eurozone (Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Austria, Slovenia and – if they are willing – Spain and Portugal) should enter into an agreed form of fiscal union, leaving the rest, 18 in number, as members of the single market and customs union.

For all 27, the Schengen agreement on open borders would remain, as would the right – depending on the availability of jobs – of EU citizens to live and work in the member state of their choice. There would still be a European passport. There would still be regular summits in Brussels to discuss matters of mutual interest (of which there would be many). Europol would continue to function, as would Euratom, the Erasmus academic exchange scheme, the Galileo satellite navigation system and the European Space Agency.

Protection of the environment, the single market and the customs union would become the key concerns of the European Commission, with the single currency left to the ECB under the political direction of a Eurozone Council. Mutual defence could be dealt with by a revived Nato, the European contribution to which would have to increase substantially.

There would still be a European flag, and Ode to Joy would continue to ring out on ceremonial occasions. But the authority of individual countries to go their own way in such matters as criminal law, education, healthcare, public housing, policing and prisons would not be challenged, subject only to the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The European Court of Justice would not disappear, but it would be scaled down, with its future remit clearly defined. The European Parliament would probably have to scale back and, within the strict limits of a revised, all-encompassing treaty, become more like a Senate, confirming appointments, interrogating the Executive, inquiring into scandals and issuing expert reports on the issues of the day.

How likely is it that a new, looser Europe might arise out of the ashes of the current model? I don’t know. But how likely was it that the European economy would be shut down and the people of Europe confined overnight to their homes by a virus? Beyond that, who could possibly defend the current model?

Change when it comes can come quickly – almost overnight – and something like the EU I have outlined above would have the support of millions of people, from Lisbon to Zagreb and from Valetta to Stockholm. Who knows?

It might even one day allow the United Kingdom to submit an application to join, and to lead. So let’s get on with it. Let’s drop the pretence and let’s get Europe done.