The Guardian view on Cameron’s European diplomacy: tilting at windmills
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Version 0 of 1. Euroscepticism is not a list of demands that, if met, would thereby lead to a happy state of satisfaction with a newly ordered continent. It is an inchoate, mobile, ever shifting cloud of discontent with the way things are which fastens first on this detail, then on that, which denounces one policy only to move on, if that policy is amended, to another supposed evil. This is true throughout Europe, but nowhere more so than in Britain or, to be more precise, in England. That is why David Cameron, as he embarks on a round of diplomacy with our partners over his government’s demands for changes in the way the European Union is run, faces such a difficult task. He has to dissipate a mood, to alter a consciousness, and to relieve a condition of permanent grievance among a significant proportion of the population which has actually very little to do with what happens in the union or with what policies it does or does not adopt. It would be going too far to say that reform of the EU and dealing with the complaints of its critics are two entirely different things, but they overlap only fitfully. Take the phrase “ever closer union”, from which the British government now says it wants disassociate itself. It is a statement of aspiration that sits on top of the vast and ambiguous multinational enterprise that is the EU rather like a feudal family’s heraldic motto does on the gates of its far flung estates. It means different things to different people, different degrees of desirable integration in different areas. We already have a two-speed, asymmetrical Europe. But no nation in Europe joyously looks forward to its final and complete extinction in a superstate. There will always be Europe, there will always be nations, and the balance will be set by a complex future history that, in the nature of things, we cannot yet know. Why then insist on repudiating a sentiment that everybody understands is not a precise aim, but more an admission, or an agreement, that the EU is a developing collective vital to our joint existence? It would bring us, even in Eurosceptic terms, no substantive advantage. But then there is a peculiar lack of substance, as well as a great deal of vagueness, about exactly what it is that Britain wants. In part, that is because, just as was the case before the election, the prime minister wants to avoid the kind of detail that would enable his party’s right wing to fasten on to his failure to ask for enough, and he also wants to avoid laying out demands that he knows he has no chance of getting accepted in Europe. In part it is because, even where there is some detail, there is a great deal of doubt, as with benefit tourism and abuse, that the phenomenon Britain is complaining about actually exists, at least on anything like the alleged scale. In part it is because on other issues, such as subsidiarity, the system as it stands already offers remedies, as with the Lisbon treaty’s provisions for national parliaments to pronounce on legislative proposals by the European commission, but Britain is acting as if it does not. Finally, in terms of protecting London as a financial centre, the precedent of the banking union suggests that it will not be too hard to craft a solution that would assuage British anxieties about the City’s future. The foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, speaks as though Britain has big grievances that must be redressed, and says his legal advice suggests that the European treaties will have to be changed. He must know that Britain’s grievances are to a considerable extent imaginary, and that there is absolutely no chance of treaty revision. Mr Cameron has to take a larger and less combative view. He has painted himself into this corner, and it is now his duty to get his country out of it. He will have to create the illusion that he is getting a lot of important concessions while for the most part not actually getting them. He will have to manage opinion in the party, the country, and Europe, where some of his natural allies, like Poland, are losing patience. With luck and skill he may be able to turn a potential disaster into an exercise that, as happened in 1975, will demonstrate that a convincing majority endorse our membership of the EU. Such a result would bury the issue for 10 or 20 years. It would not bury Euroscepticism, which will always be with us. But it would put it in the corner where it belongs. |