The EU, US and UK: Which way to go?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An Address to The Nixon Center, April 11, 2000
By Conrad M. Black
Chairman and CEO, Hollinger International Inc.
(For pdf version, click here)
America should stop trying to push Britain into the EU
Introduction
This presentation by Conrad Black is the prepared text of a speech he delivered at a Nixon Center dinner in Washington on April 11, 2000. We are pleased to share it with a wider audience. Mr. Black is a newspaper publisher, author, and commentator of global renown. He writes knowledgeably and authoritatively on many issues of public policy. In this essay he calls our attention to one of the most important.
Americans seem strangely oblivious to historic developments in Europe these days that could mean a profound change in this country’s relations with Europe as a whole, and with Britain in particular. The process of European integration is reaching a new stage, with not only Economic and Monetary Union but also the beginning of a common security and defense policy. No one seriously questions the wisdom and enlightened statesmanship of the U.S. policy that has supported European integration over many decades. But the contemporary phase of that process is bringing us into uncharted territory. It raises major questions about the future cohesion of the Atlantic Alliance and about the future of the "special relationship" that the United States has long enjoyed with Britain.
Conrad Black’s message to Britons is that, as they contemplate plunging deeper into European institutions, they should be fully aware of the real alternatives they have (including their close ties with North America). His message to us Americans is that we too have a huge stake in the decisions being made in European capitals, and that we have the right to speak up in defense of not only our own interests but the larger cause of Western unity. Pushing Britain deeper into Europe, Mr. Black argues, serves no U.S. purpose; indeed, in his view, it would do us serious harm.
Mr. Black embodies in his own background and career the strength of the tie between Britain and North America. But the imperative of that connection is, for him, not just a matter of wartime camaraderie or sentiment. The Anglo-American tradition embodies a very special conception of political and economic liberty, as well as a certain seriousness about international security and, indeed, about the moral unity of the West. He sees these Anglo-American values as thoroughly vindicated by history and, therefore, worthy of the most vigorous defense.
Conrad Black’s presentation here is witty, passionate, erudite, eloquent, original, and provocative. It ought to be an important part of the debate on both sides of the Atlantic.
Peter W. Rodman
Director of National Security Programs
The Nixon Center
April 2000
The European Union, Britain and the United States:
Which Way to Go?
Since the Eisenhower era, the United States has been urging Britain into Europe, initially to strengthen the resolve of the Europeans as Cold Warriors and more recently out of habit and to be a force for good government in Europe. These motives are understandable, but have nothing to do with the national interest of the United Kingdom.
Today, all polls in Britain show that about 70% of people in the U.K. do not want to go farther into the EU, although about half believe that the country may ultimately do so anyway.
Unlike many British Euroskeptics, I am both a francophile and a germanophile. I think and hope Eurofederalism will succeed for those countries with an aptitude for it but I don’t think Britain is one of them, nor do I think it is in the U.S. national interest for Britain to try to become one of them. The grandeur of the accomplishment in bringing ancient feuding European nationalities so closely together is obvious, but the appeal of the Eurocentric formula is not universal. The French and Germans, for notoriously well-known historic reasons, have social safety nets that have effectively become hammocks. Out of fear of the role of discontented mobs in their history, a role that has no real parallel in the history of the English-speaking countries, France and Germany have tax and benefit systems which, by Anglo-American standards, subsidize unemployment and disincentivize work.
Most of the institutions of the French state were devised by Richelieu, Colbert for Louis XIV, Napoleon and de Gaulle, great men but very authoritarian by our standards. And there is no indication that France is disposed to liberalize its institutions along lines we would recognize.
It is a cliché to say that Germany was too late unified, had great difficulty determining whether it was an eastern- or western-facing nation and that whenever it set out to assure its own security it made its neighbors insecure. Germany is now well unified in accepted if imperfect borders. The extension of NATO to Poland ensures that the eastern border of the Western world is not a German border and will entrench Germany in the West—a "European Germany" rather than a "German Europe," as Helmut Kohl used to say.
Unlike Britain, none of the largest continental European countries has durably effective political institutions. Those of Germany date from 1949; France’s from 1958; Spain’s from 1975. The Italians are still trying to reform their constitution. All have proportional representation voting systems and usually cumbersome coalition governments. It is understandable that these countries, unlike Britain, might feel that in moving toward federation they are not, in institutional terms, giving up much.
None of the continental European countries has a particular affinity with the United States and Canada or anything slightly comparable to Britain’s dramatic modern historic intimacy with North America.
British trade patterns are also clearly distinguishable from those of the other EU countries. Almost twice as much of Britain’s trade, as a percentage, is with North America than is the case with other EU countries as a group and it is rising more quickly than British trade with the EU. Britain’s share of trade with the EU has actually declined recently, and if exports shipped on through Rotterdam and other European ports outside the European Union and overseas investment earnings are included, the EU’s percentage of British exports is probably about 40 and less than 10% of the UK’s G.D.P. Conversely, the exports of a number of countries to the European Union, including those of the United States, have risen considerably more rapidly than have Britain’s in recent years. Over the last ten years, direct net investment in the United Kingdom from the United States and Canada has been 1.5 times the corresponding figure for EU investment in Britain. And British net direct investment in North America has been more than double UK investment in the EU. These trends are continuing, impervious to EU preferences.
Now that the World Trade Organization is administering the Uruguay Round of trade liberalization agreements, the EU’s common external tariff has fallen from 5.7% to 3.6%, not a prohibitive barrier to Britain if she were not in the EU, given its more bearable social costs and provided Britain retains control of its own currency. Since the Uruguay round, attempts by the EU to limit imports from non-members can only be sustained if unanimously upheld by multi-national trade panels, which is practically almost impossible. The fear of being frozen out of Europe by vindictive Community bureaucrats is still invoked by British Euro-advocates but is now a complete fraud.
The annual cost of Britain’s adherence to the European Union is nearly £10 billion in gross budgetary contributions, though almost half of this is returned in EU spending, most of it, to quote a former Conservative chancellor, "on things which the UK government would not choose to spend money on." Higher food prices in the UK because of the Common Agricultural Policy cost that country rather more than £6 billion annually, though about half of that is rebated directly to British farmers. The overall cost of the EU to Britain then is between £8 and £12 billion, or around 1.5% of G.D.P. plus a £3 billion trade deficit. There are also the costs of regulation, and the heavy political costs of eroding sovereignty and the tacit encouragement of provincial separatism as Scottish and Welsh nationalists envision receiving the sort of direct grants that have benefited Ireland.
The British do not wish to strip their Parliament to clothe, jurisdictionally, the institutions of Europe. They do not want to go back to pre-Thatcher taxing, spending and industrial relations policies, and they do not want their historic relationship with the United States and Canada subsumed into the much less intimate relationship that Europe has with those countries.
But there is no credible version of Eurointegration that does not involve a massive transfer of authority from Westminster, which has served Britain reasonably satisfactorily for centuries, to the institutions of Brussels and Strasbourg, which are, by Anglo-American standards, rather undemocratic and inefficient as last year’s budgetary shambles illustrated when the entire Commission was fired by the normally docile European Parliament. Nor is there any definition of Eurointegration that does not run a large risk, as Jacques Delors infamously promised the British Trades Union Congress ten years ago, of imposing European pre-Thatcher taxing and spending levels and industrial relations. And I fail to see how any aspect of a special relationship with the United States and Canada could survive monetary union and its sequel, a common European defense and foreign policy.
It is often informally acknowledged that pan-European requirements will be invoked to justify a relative Thatcherization of individual European countries once monetary union has been achieved. This is commendable, but Britain has already been through the necessary rigors of Thatcherization and many in that country wonder why they should, as monetary union would require, bear much of the pain while others do the same. Nor is it likely to happen quickly. As has been remarked, almost all continental European governments, because of the proportional voting system, are multi-party coalitions incapable of decisive action. De Gaulle was the only continental leader in fifty years who was as effective as Thatcher or Reagan and his undoubted talents were not concentrated in social or economic affairs. Jacques Delors used to accuse Britain of "social dumping" because it hadn’t overburdened its employers with the full cost of the Euro-welfare state. Monetary union means harmonization. I don’t think anyone seriously imagines that European Monetary Union will cause British taxes and social spending to be harmonized downwards.
The steady cascade of Euro-directives and European Court of Justice decisions absorbs the sovereignty of the EU member states into the Union gradually. There are now 50,000 Euroregulations, filling over 230,000 pages, applicable to Britain. Monetary union would deliver monetary policy to a supranational authority and severely erode national control over fiscal policy. The next step, a common foreign and defense policy, would reduce national sovereignty in the member countries virtually to the level of local government.
It is now almost 40 years since President Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, said "Britain has lost an empire but not found a role." No one who cares about Britain is unaware of how difficult this task has been and still is.
Mr. Churchill soldiered valiantly on with the theory that Britain could be the world’s third great power. This effort essentially ended with Eden and Suez. Harold Macmillan worked hard on the special relationship, especially with President Kennedy, and produced the metaphor that Britain was a Greek Empire within the Roman Empire. This, understandably, was not a formulation popular with the United States.
But Macmillan seemed ultimately to feel that Britain’s place was in Europe. By then the U.S. administrations were urging Britain into Europe to reinvigorate the continental Europeans as Cold Warriors. You may recall that Harold Wilson was initially Euroskeptical, tepidly pro-European in his second term but always ambiguous. Edward Heath did his best to deconstruct almost any relationship with the United States and while advocating a Common Market did his best to promote practically unlimited European supranationalism. Margaret Thatcher rebuilt the American relationship, demonstrated that Britain could have some influence on U.S. policy making and that Britain retained some autonomous moral authority in the world.
John Major started out believing Europe could be placated with gestures stopping well short of integration but discovered otherwise and is now a rather energetic Euroskeptic. Tony Blair has said he will pool sovereignty without surrendering it and will be governed by the national interest in monetary union and other Euro-questions.
I have been laboriously elaborating the difficulties Britain has had coming to grips with European unification. It is starting to have an impact on the U.S. as well.
Eurointegrationists do not seek the dissolution of the Atlantic alliance. It is just that some of the more influential Euro-advocates seek to reconfigure the alliance on lines that are unlikely to be acceptable to the United States. This is the updated version of Harold Macmillan’s Greek and Roman metaphor. Like a great St. Bernard, the United States will provide the muscle while Europe holds the leash and gives the orders. Even those in Britain who wanted to deny the United States the right to attack Libya from British bases in 1986 believed the U.S. should continue to have the privilege of guaranteeing Western European security. During the Cold War the perceived greater European risk because of the proximity of the U.S.S.R. was assumed to offset the greater American defense burden. Now that that risk has virtually disappeared, there is neither the need nor inclination in Europe to increase the burden. And it is hard not to think that any move to do so is more likely to be motivated by a desire to be a rival, rather than a stronger ally, for the United States.
The United States has long been irritated by the European habit of trying to fashion a Mideast policy by awaiting American initiatives and then staking out positions more favorable to the Arab powers. This has contributed absolutely nothing to the peace process and it is likely to become more troublesome. The U.S. government is also concerned that the EU’s shabby, arms-length treatment of Turkey will destabilize that crucial country and the entire region, though there has been some relative moderation lately.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An Address to The Nixon Center, April 11, 2000
By Conrad M. Black
Chairman and CEO, Hollinger International Inc.
(For pdf version, click here)
America should stop trying to push Britain into the EU
Introduction
This presentation by Conrad Black is the prepared text of a speech he delivered at a Nixon Center dinner in Washington on April 11, 2000. We are pleased to share it with a wider audience. Mr. Black is a newspaper publisher, author, and commentator of global renown. He writes knowledgeably and authoritatively on many issues of public policy. In this essay he calls our attention to one of the most important.
Americans seem strangely oblivious to historic developments in Europe these days that could mean a profound change in this country’s relations with Europe as a whole, and with Britain in particular. The process of European integration is reaching a new stage, with not only Economic and Monetary Union but also the beginning of a common security and defense policy. No one seriously questions the wisdom and enlightened statesmanship of the U.S. policy that has supported European integration over many decades. But the contemporary phase of that process is bringing us into uncharted territory. It raises major questions about the future cohesion of the Atlantic Alliance and about the future of the "special relationship" that the United States has long enjoyed with Britain.
Conrad Black’s message to Britons is that, as they contemplate plunging deeper into European institutions, they should be fully aware of the real alternatives they have (including their close ties with North America). His message to us Americans is that we too have a huge stake in the decisions being made in European capitals, and that we have the right to speak up in defense of not only our own interests but the larger cause of Western unity. Pushing Britain deeper into Europe, Mr. Black argues, serves no U.S. purpose; indeed, in his view, it would do us serious harm.
Mr. Black embodies in his own background and career the strength of the tie between Britain and North America. But the imperative of that connection is, for him, not just a matter of wartime camaraderie or sentiment. The Anglo-American tradition embodies a very special conception of political and economic liberty, as well as a certain seriousness about international security and, indeed, about the moral unity of the West. He sees these Anglo-American values as thoroughly vindicated by history and, therefore, worthy of the most vigorous defense.
Conrad Black’s presentation here is witty, passionate, erudite, eloquent, original, and provocative. It ought to be an important part of the debate on both sides of the Atlantic.
Peter W. Rodman
Director of National Security Programs
The Nixon Center
April 2000
The European Union, Britain and the United States:
Which Way to Go?
Since the Eisenhower era, the United States has been urging Britain into Europe, initially to strengthen the resolve of the Europeans as Cold Warriors and more recently out of habit and to be a force for good government in Europe. These motives are understandable, but have nothing to do with the national interest of the United Kingdom.
Today, all polls in Britain show that about 70% of people in the U.K. do not want to go farther into the EU, although about half believe that the country may ultimately do so anyway.
Unlike many British Euroskeptics, I am both a francophile and a germanophile. I think and hope Eurofederalism will succeed for those countries with an aptitude for it but I don’t think Britain is one of them, nor do I think it is in the U.S. national interest for Britain to try to become one of them. The grandeur of the accomplishment in bringing ancient feuding European nationalities so closely together is obvious, but the appeal of the Eurocentric formula is not universal. The French and Germans, for notoriously well-known historic reasons, have social safety nets that have effectively become hammocks. Out of fear of the role of discontented mobs in their history, a role that has no real parallel in the history of the English-speaking countries, France and Germany have tax and benefit systems which, by Anglo-American standards, subsidize unemployment and disincentivize work.
Most of the institutions of the French state were devised by Richelieu, Colbert for Louis XIV, Napoleon and de Gaulle, great men but very authoritarian by our standards. And there is no indication that France is disposed to liberalize its institutions along lines we would recognize.
It is a cliché to say that Germany was too late unified, had great difficulty determining whether it was an eastern- or western-facing nation and that whenever it set out to assure its own security it made its neighbors insecure. Germany is now well unified in accepted if imperfect borders. The extension of NATO to Poland ensures that the eastern border of the Western world is not a German border and will entrench Germany in the West—a "European Germany" rather than a "German Europe," as Helmut Kohl used to say.
Unlike Britain, none of the largest continental European countries has durably effective political institutions. Those of Germany date from 1949; France’s from 1958; Spain’s from 1975. The Italians are still trying to reform their constitution. All have proportional representation voting systems and usually cumbersome coalition governments. It is understandable that these countries, unlike Britain, might feel that in moving toward federation they are not, in institutional terms, giving up much.
None of the continental European countries has a particular affinity with the United States and Canada or anything slightly comparable to Britain’s dramatic modern historic intimacy with North America.
British trade patterns are also clearly distinguishable from those of the other EU countries. Almost twice as much of Britain’s trade, as a percentage, is with North America than is the case with other EU countries as a group and it is rising more quickly than British trade with the EU. Britain’s share of trade with the EU has actually declined recently, and if exports shipped on through Rotterdam and other European ports outside the European Union and overseas investment earnings are included, the EU’s percentage of British exports is probably about 40 and less than 10% of the UK’s G.D.P. Conversely, the exports of a number of countries to the European Union, including those of the United States, have risen considerably more rapidly than have Britain’s in recent years. Over the last ten years, direct net investment in the United Kingdom from the United States and Canada has been 1.5 times the corresponding figure for EU investment in Britain. And British net direct investment in North America has been more than double UK investment in the EU. These trends are continuing, impervious to EU preferences.
Now that the World Trade Organization is administering the Uruguay Round of trade liberalization agreements, the EU’s common external tariff has fallen from 5.7% to 3.6%, not a prohibitive barrier to Britain if she were not in the EU, given its more bearable social costs and provided Britain retains control of its own currency. Since the Uruguay round, attempts by the EU to limit imports from non-members can only be sustained if unanimously upheld by multi-national trade panels, which is practically almost impossible. The fear of being frozen out of Europe by vindictive Community bureaucrats is still invoked by British Euro-advocates but is now a complete fraud.
The annual cost of Britain’s adherence to the European Union is nearly £10 billion in gross budgetary contributions, though almost half of this is returned in EU spending, most of it, to quote a former Conservative chancellor, "on things which the UK government would not choose to spend money on." Higher food prices in the UK because of the Common Agricultural Policy cost that country rather more than £6 billion annually, though about half of that is rebated directly to British farmers. The overall cost of the EU to Britain then is between £8 and £12 billion, or around 1.5% of G.D.P. plus a £3 billion trade deficit. There are also the costs of regulation, and the heavy political costs of eroding sovereignty and the tacit encouragement of provincial separatism as Scottish and Welsh nationalists envision receiving the sort of direct grants that have benefited Ireland.
The British do not wish to strip their Parliament to clothe, jurisdictionally, the institutions of Europe. They do not want to go back to pre-Thatcher taxing, spending and industrial relations policies, and they do not want their historic relationship with the United States and Canada subsumed into the much less intimate relationship that Europe has with those countries.
But there is no credible version of Eurointegration that does not involve a massive transfer of authority from Westminster, which has served Britain reasonably satisfactorily for centuries, to the institutions of Brussels and Strasbourg, which are, by Anglo-American standards, rather undemocratic and inefficient as last year’s budgetary shambles illustrated when the entire Commission was fired by the normally docile European Parliament. Nor is there any definition of Eurointegration that does not run a large risk, as Jacques Delors infamously promised the British Trades Union Congress ten years ago, of imposing European pre-Thatcher taxing and spending levels and industrial relations. And I fail to see how any aspect of a special relationship with the United States and Canada could survive monetary union and its sequel, a common European defense and foreign policy.
It is often informally acknowledged that pan-European requirements will be invoked to justify a relative Thatcherization of individual European countries once monetary union has been achieved. This is commendable, but Britain has already been through the necessary rigors of Thatcherization and many in that country wonder why they should, as monetary union would require, bear much of the pain while others do the same. Nor is it likely to happen quickly. As has been remarked, almost all continental European governments, because of the proportional voting system, are multi-party coalitions incapable of decisive action. De Gaulle was the only continental leader in fifty years who was as effective as Thatcher or Reagan and his undoubted talents were not concentrated in social or economic affairs. Jacques Delors used to accuse Britain of "social dumping" because it hadn’t overburdened its employers with the full cost of the Euro-welfare state. Monetary union means harmonization. I don’t think anyone seriously imagines that European Monetary Union will cause British taxes and social spending to be harmonized downwards.
The steady cascade of Euro-directives and European Court of Justice decisions absorbs the sovereignty of the EU member states into the Union gradually. There are now 50,000 Euroregulations, filling over 230,000 pages, applicable to Britain. Monetary union would deliver monetary policy to a supranational authority and severely erode national control over fiscal policy. The next step, a common foreign and defense policy, would reduce national sovereignty in the member countries virtually to the level of local government.
It is now almost 40 years since President Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, said "Britain has lost an empire but not found a role." No one who cares about Britain is unaware of how difficult this task has been and still is.
Mr. Churchill soldiered valiantly on with the theory that Britain could be the world’s third great power. This effort essentially ended with Eden and Suez. Harold Macmillan worked hard on the special relationship, especially with President Kennedy, and produced the metaphor that Britain was a Greek Empire within the Roman Empire. This, understandably, was not a formulation popular with the United States.
But Macmillan seemed ultimately to feel that Britain’s place was in Europe. By then the U.S. administrations were urging Britain into Europe to reinvigorate the continental Europeans as Cold Warriors. You may recall that Harold Wilson was initially Euroskeptical, tepidly pro-European in his second term but always ambiguous. Edward Heath did his best to deconstruct almost any relationship with the United States and while advocating a Common Market did his best to promote practically unlimited European supranationalism. Margaret Thatcher rebuilt the American relationship, demonstrated that Britain could have some influence on U.S. policy making and that Britain retained some autonomous moral authority in the world.
John Major started out believing Europe could be placated with gestures stopping well short of integration but discovered otherwise and is now a rather energetic Euroskeptic. Tony Blair has said he will pool sovereignty without surrendering it and will be governed by the national interest in monetary union and other Euro-questions.
I have been laboriously elaborating the difficulties Britain has had coming to grips with European unification. It is starting to have an impact on the U.S. as well.
Eurointegrationists do not seek the dissolution of the Atlantic alliance. It is just that some of the more influential Euro-advocates seek to reconfigure the alliance on lines that are unlikely to be acceptable to the United States. This is the updated version of Harold Macmillan’s Greek and Roman metaphor. Like a great St. Bernard, the United States will provide the muscle while Europe holds the leash and gives the orders. Even those in Britain who wanted to deny the United States the right to attack Libya from British bases in 1986 believed the U.S. should continue to have the privilege of guaranteeing Western European security. During the Cold War the perceived greater European risk because of the proximity of the U.S.S.R. was assumed to offset the greater American defense burden. Now that that risk has virtually disappeared, there is neither the need nor inclination in Europe to increase the burden. And it is hard not to think that any move to do so is more likely to be motivated by a desire to be a rival, rather than a stronger ally, for the United States.
The United States has long been irritated by the European habit of trying to fashion a Mideast policy by awaiting American initiatives and then staking out positions more favorable to the Arab powers. This has contributed absolutely nothing to the peace process and it is likely to become more troublesome. The U.S. government is also concerned that the EU’s shabby, arms-length treatment of Turkey will destabilize that crucial country and the entire region, though there has been some relative moderation lately.
