EU unloved and mistrusted, even by French
The Telegraph
By Niall Ferguson
25/03/2007
Last week I went to Paris for lunch (it is, after all, almost as near to London as Manchester and in every way nicer). I took the Eurostar. I paid with my Société Générale credit card. I bought my Metro ticket with euros. In making my travel plans - train not plane, Metro not taxi - I was mindful of the European Union's new commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions. In the restaurant, my French was rather rusty, but the waiters were happy to speak in English. They were probably Polish anyway.
So you can understand why (especially after three delicious courses and a half-bottle of Bordeaux) I felt ready to toast the Treaty of Rome, the founding charter of the present-day European Union, signed fifty years ago today.
Who could possibly wish to return Europe to its pre-1957 state of fragmentation? Twice in the previous half-century the continent had torn itself apart. When peace finally came in 1945, whole cities lay in ruins. People were starving. Currencies were reduced to worthless paper.
As I took my post-prandial stroll along the banks of the Seine, I thought of Paris in 1940. To get a sense of those dark days, just read the opening chapter of Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française, written in the short space between the Nazi occupation and her deportation to Auschwitz: "Great guns were firing; they drew nearer, and every window shuddered in reply\u2026 Street sellers' carts lay abandoned, full of fresh flowers\u2026 A shell was fired, now so close to Paris that from the top of every monument birds rose in the sky."
Today, the Germans in Paris are harmless tourists, queuing for tickets to the Louvre.
So totally has life in Europe been transformed that you might expect the European Union to be universally adored at 50. Yet only 46 per cent of its citizens have a positive view of the EU, while more than a third believe their country has not benefited from EU membership. Support for the EU is lowest in Britain, where just one in three people regards membership in a positive light, and barely one in four trusts the European Commission or Parliament.
Does this merely illustrate the truth of the old saying that no good deed goes unpunished? Or are Europeans right to be somewhat Euro-sceptical?
Take the issue of the avoidance of war, invariably cited as one of the principal achievements of European integration. True, Jean Monnet - one of modern Europe's founding fathers - was delighted when he overheard one soldier say to another in a French café: "With the Schuman Plan (which established the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951), one thing is certain: we shall not have to go to war."
Monnet firmly believed that by pooling their sovereignty, France and Germany could avoid a fourth war inside a century. At the same time, as the Cold War intensified, he hoped that a west European federation could ward off "the danger that threatened" from the east.
Yet the EU cannot credibly be portrayed as the principal guarantor of Europe's peace. The European Defence Community set up in 1952 was strangled at birth by the French National Assembly precisely so that member states could retain their own armies and defence policies. Meanwhile, it was the American-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization that (in the famous phrase of Nato's first Secretary General) kept "the Soviets out, the Americans in and the Germans down". One reason three out of four Europeans say they want a common security and defence policy is precisely that they've never had one.
What about the claim that the European Union has generated the continent's present prosperity? This is certainly not to be underestimated. True, in terms of raw output per capita, the United States is still ahead, but by a range of other measures it is Europeans who are better-off. Whereas the average American worked around 1,800 hours in 2005, the average Austrian, Dane, Dutchman, Frenchman or German worked fewer than 1,500 hours. Since 1950, working hours in these European countries have been reduced by between 11 and 17 per cent, whereas Americans have cut their annual workload by less than 4 per cent.
At the same time, well-rested Europeans seem to work more efficiently when they do clock on. At least six EU countries have higher productivity (measured by gross domestic product per hour worked) than the United States. Europe is also fairer:
income inequality is greater in the US than in any EU country. And Europe is healthier too. According to recent research, Europeans are living as much as fifteen months longer than Americans. There is even evidence that they are growing taller too. Whereas the average American 60-year-old is about an inch taller than his or her German counterpart, among 20-year-olds it's the other way round.
Yet Europeans are probably right not to give the EU much of the credit for their high standard of living. For one of the paradoxes of European integration has been that, even as the EU has expanded its range of responsibilities, so too have national governments. Government expenditure today is a much larger share of gross domestic product than it was back in 1957. To take just a single example, Britain's National Health Service cost 3 per cent of national income at the time of Treaty of Rome; today the figure is 7 per cent. As is obvious from the Paris newsstands, who will be France's next president matters much more to Frenchmen than who will be the next president of the European Commission. (Significantly, when presidential front-runner Nicolas Sarkozy took a swipe at the euro earlier this month, 71 per cent of voters agreed with him.)
What's more, when you compare the performance of all the different European economies, it is hard to find a clear "EU effect" on growth. Between 1973 and 1998, for example, non-members did just as well as new members and better than founding members. And it is at least arguable that Western Europe would have achieved equally fast growth if everyone had joined the alternative European Free Trade Association set up by Britain and others in 1960 - but abandoned by Britain in 1973. Growth after 1957 was determined more by national policies and by global economic conditions than by European integration.
As we mark its 50th birthday, then, let's remember what the Treaty of Rome actually did. It committed six countries to create a customs union (with a single external tariff and gradually reduced internal trade barriers) and common agriculture, transport and social policies.
That was all. And the institutions it established (the European Commission and Court) were designed merely to achieve these quite limited goals.
Much has happened since those days, of course. The six have become twenty-seven. Thirteen of them have acquired a common currency. European law now reigns supreme. And the customs union has become a (still imperfect) single market. Yet at root the EU remains not the federal super-state of conservative nightmares, but a confederation whose primary concern is trade policy.
The "Open Skies" deal reached with the United States last week on transatlantic air routes is far from perfect, but it is a great deal better than any individual European state could have hoped to achieve by negotiating solo.
The real reason that the EU is unloved is the often glaring discrepancy between its aspirations and this somewhat prosaic reality. And yet Europe's leaders persistently refuse to see this. No sooner have they quietly acknowledged that they have no chance of making Europe "the most competitive and the most dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world" by 2010 - the goal set at Lisbon in 2000 - than they embark on an equally unrealistic plan for a 20 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions by 2020.
Am I the only person in Europe wondering how cheaper transatlantic air fares are going to help achieve this? Oh, what the hell. The next time I want lunch in Paris, I'll take the US Airways Shuttle.
www.niallferguson.org
telegraph.co.uk
The Telegraph
By Niall Ferguson
25/03/2007
Last week I went to Paris for lunch (it is, after all, almost as near to London as Manchester and in every way nicer). I took the Eurostar. I paid with my Société Générale credit card. I bought my Metro ticket with euros. In making my travel plans - train not plane, Metro not taxi - I was mindful of the European Union's new commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions. In the restaurant, my French was rather rusty, but the waiters were happy to speak in English. They were probably Polish anyway.
So you can understand why (especially after three delicious courses and a half-bottle of Bordeaux) I felt ready to toast the Treaty of Rome, the founding charter of the present-day European Union, signed fifty years ago today.
Who could possibly wish to return Europe to its pre-1957 state of fragmentation? Twice in the previous half-century the continent had torn itself apart. When peace finally came in 1945, whole cities lay in ruins. People were starving. Currencies were reduced to worthless paper.
As I took my post-prandial stroll along the banks of the Seine, I thought of Paris in 1940. To get a sense of those dark days, just read the opening chapter of Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française, written in the short space between the Nazi occupation and her deportation to Auschwitz: "Great guns were firing; they drew nearer, and every window shuddered in reply\u2026 Street sellers' carts lay abandoned, full of fresh flowers\u2026 A shell was fired, now so close to Paris that from the top of every monument birds rose in the sky."
Today, the Germans in Paris are harmless tourists, queuing for tickets to the Louvre.
So totally has life in Europe been transformed that you might expect the European Union to be universally adored at 50. Yet only 46 per cent of its citizens have a positive view of the EU, while more than a third believe their country has not benefited from EU membership. Support for the EU is lowest in Britain, where just one in three people regards membership in a positive light, and barely one in four trusts the European Commission or Parliament.
Does this merely illustrate the truth of the old saying that no good deed goes unpunished? Or are Europeans right to be somewhat Euro-sceptical?
Take the issue of the avoidance of war, invariably cited as one of the principal achievements of European integration. True, Jean Monnet - one of modern Europe's founding fathers - was delighted when he overheard one soldier say to another in a French café: "With the Schuman Plan (which established the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951), one thing is certain: we shall not have to go to war."
Monnet firmly believed that by pooling their sovereignty, France and Germany could avoid a fourth war inside a century. At the same time, as the Cold War intensified, he hoped that a west European federation could ward off "the danger that threatened" from the east.
Yet the EU cannot credibly be portrayed as the principal guarantor of Europe's peace. The European Defence Community set up in 1952 was strangled at birth by the French National Assembly precisely so that member states could retain their own armies and defence policies. Meanwhile, it was the American-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization that (in the famous phrase of Nato's first Secretary General) kept "the Soviets out, the Americans in and the Germans down". One reason three out of four Europeans say they want a common security and defence policy is precisely that they've never had one.
What about the claim that the European Union has generated the continent's present prosperity? This is certainly not to be underestimated. True, in terms of raw output per capita, the United States is still ahead, but by a range of other measures it is Europeans who are better-off. Whereas the average American worked around 1,800 hours in 2005, the average Austrian, Dane, Dutchman, Frenchman or German worked fewer than 1,500 hours. Since 1950, working hours in these European countries have been reduced by between 11 and 17 per cent, whereas Americans have cut their annual workload by less than 4 per cent.
At the same time, well-rested Europeans seem to work more efficiently when they do clock on. At least six EU countries have higher productivity (measured by gross domestic product per hour worked) than the United States. Europe is also fairer:
income inequality is greater in the US than in any EU country. And Europe is healthier too. According to recent research, Europeans are living as much as fifteen months longer than Americans. There is even evidence that they are growing taller too. Whereas the average American 60-year-old is about an inch taller than his or her German counterpart, among 20-year-olds it's the other way round.
Yet Europeans are probably right not to give the EU much of the credit for their high standard of living. For one of the paradoxes of European integration has been that, even as the EU has expanded its range of responsibilities, so too have national governments. Government expenditure today is a much larger share of gross domestic product than it was back in 1957. To take just a single example, Britain's National Health Service cost 3 per cent of national income at the time of Treaty of Rome; today the figure is 7 per cent. As is obvious from the Paris newsstands, who will be France's next president matters much more to Frenchmen than who will be the next president of the European Commission. (Significantly, when presidential front-runner Nicolas Sarkozy took a swipe at the euro earlier this month, 71 per cent of voters agreed with him.)
What's more, when you compare the performance of all the different European economies, it is hard to find a clear "EU effect" on growth. Between 1973 and 1998, for example, non-members did just as well as new members and better than founding members. And it is at least arguable that Western Europe would have achieved equally fast growth if everyone had joined the alternative European Free Trade Association set up by Britain and others in 1960 - but abandoned by Britain in 1973. Growth after 1957 was determined more by national policies and by global economic conditions than by European integration.
As we mark its 50th birthday, then, let's remember what the Treaty of Rome actually did. It committed six countries to create a customs union (with a single external tariff and gradually reduced internal trade barriers) and common agriculture, transport and social policies.
That was all. And the institutions it established (the European Commission and Court) were designed merely to achieve these quite limited goals.
Much has happened since those days, of course. The six have become twenty-seven. Thirteen of them have acquired a common currency. European law now reigns supreme. And the customs union has become a (still imperfect) single market. Yet at root the EU remains not the federal super-state of conservative nightmares, but a confederation whose primary concern is trade policy.
The "Open Skies" deal reached with the United States last week on transatlantic air routes is far from perfect, but it is a great deal better than any individual European state could have hoped to achieve by negotiating solo.
The real reason that the EU is unloved is the often glaring discrepancy between its aspirations and this somewhat prosaic reality. And yet Europe's leaders persistently refuse to see this. No sooner have they quietly acknowledged that they have no chance of making Europe "the most competitive and the most dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world" by 2010 - the goal set at Lisbon in 2000 - than they embark on an equally unrealistic plan for a 20 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions by 2020.
Am I the only person in Europe wondering how cheaper transatlantic air fares are going to help achieve this? Oh, what the hell. The next time I want lunch in Paris, I'll take the US Airways Shuttle.
www.niallferguson.org
telegraph.co.uk