Sovereign State

A continuing series of articles dealing with matters relevant to British membership of the EEC and the forthcoming referendum

Nicholas Faith on blind faith

Edward Heath's one major political legacy was, curiously, a non-party business. The one area of policy in which he captured and held that middle ground so sacred to the psephologists was over the Common Market. The result of his efforts has been to brand the anti-Marketeers as emotional, unstable, fringe folk, wild-eyed men incapable of rational discussion. Reason. moderation, solidity, are all on the side of the Market.

This myth is a really extraordinary affair, being virtually the exact opposite of the truth. Belief in the Market is surely precisely that — a creed, largely unsupportable by any objective evidence, political or economic. Indeed in the pioneering days twenty years ago when European unity really was an attainable object, the British supporters of the Market admitted to being a dreamy, idealistic band, their efforts sabotaged or sneered at by those very institutional forces, from the Times to the Foreign Office, which are today the shrillest supporters of the very different, very limited and very disappointing 'Europe' which actually exists.

To explain this curious fact consider the pre-war parallel of appeasement towards Hitler's Germany. This, like the European cause, was supported by all that was middle-of-theroad, decent, liberal, sound in the country. Opposition was left to such way-out eccentrics as Winston Churchill.

Support for both appeasement and Europe in their heyday (i.e. after the policies had become accepted doctrine) sprang from a mood of intellectual self-doubt and moral bankruptcy, among those who run so much of our official life, a feeling of despair at Britain's ability to stand up for itself, a willingness to make the best of a job which, realistic officials and supporters would admit in both cases, was largely bad. So it was that the doctrine that 'the bomber will always get through' led to a feeling that we could do nothing when faced with the Luftwaffe; that Britain's admitted unpreparedness in other armaments left us helpless when confronted by the German army; it never seems to have occurred to British officialdom at the time of Munich — though it did, most forcibly, to the German General Staff — that the German army itself was in no fit state to take on Czechoslovakia's defences.

The equivalent sentiment today is that, outside the Market, we will, economically, shrivel up and die. The only basis I have been able to discover for this extraordinary statement is that, once we leave, the Europeans will stop buying anything from us, and that, deprived of our biggest market, and without much scope for reverting to our former dependence on Commonwealth trade, we will have no one to whom to sell. This attitude, which at its mildest comes down to a feeling that Europeans only buy from us because we are in the Market, and not because of the quality or price of our goods, and at its strongest assumes total disaster, makes sense only on two extraordinary assumptions.

The first is that we will be cut off from European markets by a sort of Napoleonic

continental system. The second is that, in such an event, we could do nothing about it. Both ideas are so weird that only total defeatists, people at the end of their emotional and intellectual tether, could believe them for one moment.

First, the likelihood: at the moment we import over £1,000 million more from other EEC countries than we sell to them. It is highly unlikely that they will, collectively, cut off their nose to spite what is for them such an appetising commercial face. Second, neither Sweden (which stayed out of the Market to the loudly expressed belief by its entire industrial establishment that disaster would infallibly ensue) nor Norway, with its anti-Market referendum, has ever been remotely sorry about the decision. The EEC has behaved very well towards them for the simplest of reasons: commercial self-interest.

But, more fundamentally, there is the assumption here that we could never retaliate; that, while they would be able to cut us off without a Volkswagen, we would have neither the ability nor indeed the will to cut them off without a drop of Scotch. Which brings us back fair and square to the all-pervasive feeling of defeatism, of helplessness which hangs over the Market case.

But, let us ignore the economic case — marginal either way, and never really relevant to the argument, except when the Marketeers pretend that entry would produce for us benefits in export opportunities and increased investments, which it plainly has not — and return to political realities.

The Market originated in a series of honourable dreams. There were Federalists, looking to a truly united Europe; and there were old men, Monnet and Adenauer, whose lives and those of their generation had been blighted by two Franco-German wars, and for them the Market was a means of ensuring that such conflicts could not escalate in the future. In the latter narrow sense it succeeded (it also managed to ensure that the Germans paid very heavy reparations to the French in the form of payments under the Common Agricultural Policy, without any resurgence of national paranoia).

But the Federalists have suffered badly — it is the saddest sight in the world to see a true European trying to defend an institution so far removed from his ideas as the present mess in Brussels. And the pretence that a united Europe could somehow be a major, unified, economic or political force has slowly become more transparent as even the Six fail monotonously to agree on any of the major problems of the day, from energy to international monetary reform.

The original Six have duly adjusted their ideas to reality, treating the Market as some form of official religion, a nominal creed to which it is 'convenable', 'correct' to adhere, but which does not have any real effect on practical decisions. Adherence to the creed varies wildly: to see it at its most nakedly opportunist you have to go to France; while at the other extreme, there are in Holland, and, to a lesser extent, in Germany, remnants of the old true federalist religion, an ideal of which even non-believers should not speak ill.

But nowhere in Europe do you find any real equivalent to the extremes of internationalist unreality and national self-abasement which are the staple of the European argument here. Because of this non-rational approach by our Marketeers, our for-the-time-being fellow Europeans cannot understand what the fuss is all about. They are asking for mere nominal adherence to their religion, which will, of course, involve us in some cost and some more-or-less inconvenient change of our ways. No more than that. But, stripped of its hysteria, its defeatism, its extremes of emotional anti-patriotic flagellation, that is the case for going in. On the one hand, not made, on the other, totally unproven.