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foremost that journalists have lost sight of Europe’s history — the hundreds of years of bloody warfare that have now been replaced by endless committees, mountains of paper and peripatetic translators.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 the fact that it make 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 US 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 US, 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.
