The
European debate in
Britain has no
sense of history
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
March 23, 2005
LONDON - A deep and disturbing
malaise has descended on Britain's European debate and
one powerful reason for that is that the agenda and the
discourse are set by journalists and not by historians.
The politicians too often seem to be fearful of
challenging the journalistic agenda and spelling out more
than a day-to-day, nuts and bolts vision of
Europe
Although Prime Minister Tony Blair
promises to use the same formidable energy he deployed to
win support around the world for the invasion of Iraq to
ensure a hostile British public votes 'yes' on the
European constitution, once the May election is safely
won, many wonder if it is already too late. Blair has
conspicuously failed to fight the European corner and has
run scared before the tabloid press and its anti European
crusade. The recently published diary of Piers Morgan,
the former editor of the Daily Mirror, records that in
his ten years as editor he had "22 lunches, 6 dinners, 6
interviews, 24 further one-to-one chats over tea and
biscuits" with Blair. What Blair got out of it is
unclear, other than giving a populist editor the feeling
that he had the power not the prime minister. It is not
just the tabloid press that is dangerously Europhobic-
recently the BBC was criticized by an independent
commission for badly simplifying European
issues.
But, as Mark Leonard, a former
Blair advisor, writes, in his sharp, short but highly
cogent, new book, "Why Europe Will Run The 21st Century",
"The historians tell a different story from journalists".
It is first and foremost that journalists have lost sight
of Europe's history- the hundreds of years of bloody
warfare that have now been replaced by endless
committees, mountains of paper and peripatetic
translators. This is, admittedly, the most difficult kind
of story to write interesting copy on.
Second, many journalists are also
temperamentally given to look at our world through
American eyes. So we misunderstand Europe's power. Europe
does not and will probably never have America's military
might- why should it? -we are never going to fight
America- but the power of Europe is definitely there.
Europe's strength is that it is a network rather than a
state.
Europe has, what Leonard describes
as, "an invisible hand". Its power comes from its quiet
law making on half the laws that Europeans live by, on a
range of issues from agriculture to monetary policy. Yet,
contrary to myth, it does this with a number of civil
servants that is only about the same as a major city like
Manchester or Berlin. European common standards are
implemented mainly through national parliaments and
institutions.
Its foreign policy is also quiet.
Rather than relying on the threat of military
intervention to secure its interests, Europe relies on
the threat of not intervening, of withdrawing the chance
of entering Europe or at least forsaking Europe's
friendship. The U.S. may have the power to change
governments in Iraq or Afghanistan or to focus the mind
of Colombia on its drug traffickers, but with Poland the
EU changed the country's laws from top to bottom and
right now is engaging in successfully transforming
Turkey, a state once riddled with corruption, torture and
maladministration. This is the "Eurosphere" that could
extend eventually to encompass Russia, Israel and even
Morocco.
A provocative essay by the British
diplomat, Robert Cooper, in Prospect magazine, broke the
ice on this debate by wondering out loud if the EU was on
the verge of becoming a new empire, a new imperial power.
The U.S., he argued, is not the world's leading imperial
power. It skims the surface with its relationships with
those nearest to it. It sends its troops in a crisis but
otherwise depends on loose forms of trade agreements. But
the EU is becoming "a cooperative empire, a commonwealth,
in which each has a share in the government in which no
single country dominates and in which the governing
principles are not ethnic but legal," all part of a
voluntary movement of self-imposition.
This doesn't mean that Europe isn't
immune from the mistakes of hubris. Right now, it is
making a big one by overlooking democratic Taiwan and
deciding to lift its arms embargo of dictatorial
China.
Despite that, on most issues and in
most countries Europeans have risen to the challenge of
the observation of the war historian, Michael Howard,
"War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a
modern invention." But in backwater Britain both
journalists and politicians still need to get a grip on
their sense of history and the singular possibilities
that are offered by an expanding and more far-reaching
Europe.
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Copyright © 2005 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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