Sovereign State

Bland as bananas

Chris Jones

Nobody can decide quite where the Common Market came from. The EEC Commission's booklet The European Community: Facts and Figures, which contains many figures and very few facts, gives its founding fathers as Winston Churchill and George C. Marshall — a claim that was wisely not made while these two were alive. Walter Hal!stein, first President of the EEC Commission, later President of the European Movement, speaks with presidential pride about carrying on the traditions of Greek philosophy and Christianity.

Professor Hallstein is too modest to state Paul Einzig's view, that Hallstein himself was responsible for laying the foundations of the EEC by creating the Common Agricultural Policy. Marketeers prefer to take the long view, to talk of the need to replace the warlike nationalism of the past with the benevolence of European unity. Hallstein holds this view strongly. He points to the past aggression of his homeland, Germany.

Nobody disputes that Pan-Germanism was one of the most destructive forces of the last 100 years. But some say that Pan-Germanism was not a nationalist movement, but an international one — which turns the Marketeers' reasoning on its head.

This is pedantic: Pan-Germanism can be accepted as a nationalist movement, although to do so one must obviously accept the Pan-Germanists' own view of the true borders of Germany. What is more important is that the fullest flowering of Pan-Germanism, the Third Reich, provides us, especially in agricultural policy, with the nearest economic analogy to the EEC.

The man behind Hitler's New Economic Order in Europe was Walther Funk, a financial journalist who was later to become chief of the Reich Press Bureau in 1933, and minister of economics in 1938. The Funk plan for agriculture had two main features:

(1) Europe should be as much as possible self-supporting. C. W. Guillebaud, of St John's College, Cambridge, writing about the New Economic Order in the Economic Journal, December 1940, said: "What Dr Funk offers in this sphere is a stable system of agricultural prices based on present costs of production . . . anti divorced trom the general level at which food can be raised overseas with the aid of large-scale mechanised techniques." The CAP today is much the same, although levies and tariffs replace the Allied blockade.

(2) The near-deification of the German peasant. "Fundamental to the agricultural policies of the Third Reich was the welfare and security of the German peasant, who according to the National Socialist ideology represented the ultimate guarantee for the preservation of the German people" (Norman Rich, Hitler's War Aims).

This agrarian romanticism had flourished earlier in Britain, in a thankfully unlegislative form, under the influence of such poets as A. E. Housman and Rupert Brooke. Here are some more quotes: "It is in the agricultural sector that man continues first and foremost to be a man, a human being respecting the laws of nature."

"Family holdings must be given every chance to survive."

The Nazis again? Rupert Brooke? No. Those quotes are from the official bulletin of the Council of Europe, 1972.

The romanticism of the EEC's agricultural policies has seldom been remarked upon, yet it is the only thing that can fully explain the economic idiocies of the whole system. The Marketeers have not got the Nazis' excuse that Fortress Europe is under blockade. They do not — we hope — possess a fascist ideology that lets them ignore the millions starving in the world outside. Yet they go on producing food in the most uneconomic possible way. Sicco Mansholt's 1968 report Agriculture 1980 stated that 80 per cent of the farms in the EEC were uneconomic. Yet his proposals for rationalising agriculture were largely rejected at the time, and almost nothing has been done to implement them since.

Andre Dequae, Belgian member of the Council, by way of condemning Mansholt, said that not 1 per cent of the farms in Belgium conformed to Mansholt's standards. And Dequae clearly thought that Mansholt was deviating dangerously from the Fortress Europe concept, for he said (I quote from the bulletin's paraphrasing again): "World agricultural prices could never be taken as a norm since they would never be anything but dumping prices." Work that one out if you can.

And Dequae isn't just the Council's pet clown. The quotes above ("man continues first .and foremost to be a man," etc) are from his own Agricultural Policies in Europe, a later document than the Mansholt plan, and one which received a far more enthusiastic endorsement by the Council. Another line from it says: "Agricultural policies must be conceived for the farmer and not for an agricultural industry." Fine, but what about the consumer? The consumer isn't mentioned. Being a mere 90 per cent of the population, he doesn't count.

Does the EEC owe anything else to PanGermanism, or to any other aspect of late-Victorian romanticism? The first man to see a large part of Europe as a possible corporate entity was the German Friedrich Naumann, who worked on parallel lines to the Pan-Germanic movement. Quoting from Guillebaud in 1940 again: Naumann "looked forward to the creation of a Central European Economic Commission, staffed by experts, which would supervise the organisation of the area and adjust the claims of the various groups and interests." Democracy, naturally, had nothing to do with it.

The other obvious German legacy to the EEC is federalism. Professor Hallstein, for one, has made it perfectly clear that he thinks European federalism should be developed from the German mould, rather than the American. What Professor Hallstein seems to be saying is: all right, Pan-Germanism didn't work, it was a mistake, a disaster — so let's try German federalism instead. Obviously his knowledge of German political institutions is greater than ours — he was a Professor of Law in Germany throughout the Nazi era — but it is hard to see why they should be used as a model for the rest of Western Europe.

We will not hear much about European federalism during the referendum debate. The Marketeers know that the word scares the hell out of the British electorate. The most fervent supporters of European federation will suddenly become as bland as bananas, and do their best to look homely and pragmatic. Harold Will have to make sure none of his pipes goes missing.

But a European federation is what the EEC is all about. If it wasn't, the Treaty of Rome would have been torn up in Dublin — or years ago. Even the blandest Marketeer squeals if You mention touching the Treaty of Rome. They are still pursuing their old, old dream — one which could again become our nightmare.

Chris Jones, New Zealand-born, is a freelance writer and photographer based in London