The Eurosceptics have browbeaten us. It's time we stopped cringing
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/08/eu-elections-europe-eurosceptics-commissioner Version 0 of 1. There is a European election in two weeks' time. Or, to put it more accurately, there are two of them. There is the one in Britain. And then there is the one taking place pretty much everywhere else in Europe. Being insular, we naturally assume it's the 440 million continentals who are out of step with us. In fact, it could be our 60 million who are out of step with our neighbours. In Britain, the European election is overwhelmingly seen through the prism of domestic politics. To our political class, the elections on 22 May are significant only as a staging post on the marathon run-in to the 2015 UK general election. By contrast, their impact within Europe is ignored. Since the poll is therefore seen merely as a rehearsal before the real thing, in a year's time, there is lot of talk about the Ukip vote. But the talk is all about Ukip's impact on the domestic battle, as it was yesterday, with the publication of data suggesting a higher proportion of Ukip voters may stick with Ukip in 2015; it is not about what Ukip's performance may mean for Britain's interests in Europe. To a degree, of course, every country has its own version of this disjunction. All politics is local. So the European elections in Germany will in part be a verdict on Angela Merkel, and so on for all the member states, right down to Malta. But to say that all politics is local means there is always a local dimension to politics. It does not mean that the entirety of politics is exclusively local. Only in Britain do the political parties and much of the media think about politics in this way, and refuse to take the European dimension seriously at all. This might be merely frustrating were it not for one big thing. That big thing is very big indeed. It is that the European dimensions of these elections actually matter, even in Britain. In fact, these 2014 elections matter more to Britain than any European elections have done for decades. We ignore them at our peril. It is time to engage with the Europeanness of the European elections. There are two main ways of making this case. The first could fashionably be dubbed the Piketty argument, after the French economist who wrote, with several colleagues, last week that the individual European nations, especially but not solely the eurozone nations, need to develop a more coherent economic and social model that is nevertheless open to globalisation. Without such a consensus, Europe risks a protectionist race to the bottom fuelled by resurgent political nationalism across the EU, he warns. But Thomas Piketty's argument is in fact just part of the much wider debate currently occurring, in multiple forms, in much of the rest of the EU as the elections approach. Largely unreported here, it is a massively important yet almost classical political debate between Europe's social democratic, economic liberal and conservative groupings – but also involving more radical extremes of left and right – about the way European nations can best and most safely adapt to globalisation and the aftermath of the economic crisis. It is in the UK's public interest to be part of such a process, not to stand so completely apart from it. The main problem with the big argument is not that it is asking the wrong questions – it is in fact often broadly asking the right ones – but that it is not going to happen here any time soon. Britain seems very happy outside the eurozone. But Britain also lacks the collective political will to encourage or embrace any European model that goes beyond the single market. Britain could bring a lot to these debates and to the robustness of any outcomes. Instead, we rage alone in our cell. As a result, our parties are at best half-hearted participants in these EU groupings. Labour, for instance, has discouraged active cooperation during the election campaign with the European socialist group, of which it is, nominally at least, a member. The Tories long ago broke away from the main conservative grouping because it is too committed to the EU. The Lib Dems, as usual, keep quiet about their often anti-state partner parties. The result, frustratingly, is that we are putting our fingers in our ears to block out an argument in which ideally we ought to be taking part. In the absence of the bigger debate, however, the second way of arguing for the importance of the European dimension of the elections is national self-interest. These elections will elect the parliament and then, after a horse-trading session between national governments, the European commission for the five years to 2019. These are the years during which Britain may have to negotiate – particularly if there is a Tory government – a new relationship with the EU that would be put to a referendum, probably in 2017. It therefore matters hugely to Britain that the new parliament and the new commission are ones with which a future government can negotiate a deal for which a majority will vote ensuring Britain remains in the EU, as all three main parties say they wish. That's why, if only from self-interest, we ought to care more about which EU-wide group wins these elections. It's why we ought to be engaged with the arguments between the centre-right's Jean-Claude Juncker or the centre-left's Martin Schulz, on which the Guardian reports today. It's why, if we don't fancy either Juncker or Schulz, we ought to be debating in public whether heavyweight reformers like Christine Lagarde or Pascal Lamy might be more desirable successors to José Manuel Barroso, as observers such as the Centre for European Reform director, Charles Grant, argue. It is one thing to be sceptical about aspects of European integration and to opt out of individual projects such as the single currency. But that process has gone much too far. Britain has been browbeaten into not taking any aspect of the European dimension seriously. It is high time we stopped cringing and rejoined the international debate. |