A Final(?) Letter To Valery Giscard d'Estaing
Debate Between Patrick Martin & John Martin
Thwarted By A Surge Of Democracy
Bringing Europe Closer Together?
France pulps copies of EU treaty
French pressure dilutes services directive
Britain gained entry to the European Union under its one thoroughly post-Imperial Prime Minister. Edward Heath disarmed European suspicions by his own authenticity. He was overthrown by the rebellion of a Labour movement, many of whose leaders wished a few years later that they had done a deal with him. He was succeeded as Prime Minister by a Labour Government, which was at the mercy of a Labour movement which was anti-European on the ground that the EU (its name then being the EEC, European Economic Community) would prohibit the full development of socialism which they thought was about to happen in Britain. Heath was ousted from the Tory leadership by Thatcher during the five years when the Labour movement was busily digging its own grave. Thatcher came to power in 1979 and set about using Britain's membership of the EU to subvert it from within. Her general outlook was adopted by the Labour Party after four successive defeats, and the Blair Government has carried on her work of subversion since 1997.
British policy towards Europe for twenty years has been to gain opt-outs for itself on social measures, to prevent the formation of an EU foreign policy, to avail of the collapse of the Soviet system to extend EU membership eastwards indefinitely, and to press for 'reform' of the European economy.
The British Labour Party was apprehensive thirty years ago that EU membership would be an obstacle to the further socialist development of Britain. For the past eight years that Labour Party has been doing its damnedest to destroy the social structures built into post-1945 Europe by agreement between Christian Democrats and Social Democrats.
The first European combination of 6 states was workable. It would still have been workable with Britain and Ireland if they were European in outlook (as Ireland was for a while under Haughey), and with Spain as reconstructed by Franco. But, with Britain playing Imperial games once more (with Ireland back in its pocket), and with an array of new Member States from the east—post-Soviet states and therefore states without history or orientation—it ceased to be workable.
The European project was hijacked. It was taken away from its founders, and now two of its founders have voted against the way it is being reformed.
Anthony Coughlan of the Irish Sovereignty Movement was jubilant about the French referendum in the Irish Times (31 May). Ten years ago he was jubilant on Radio Eireann about British withdrawal from the ERM under pressure from the currency speculators, saying it proved that "you can't buck the market".
Well, if you can't buck the market, socialism is off and Thatcherism is all that is possible. And Coughlan has been closely allied with British Eurosceptics in recent years.
The Irish Sovereignty Movement (ISM) was directed against Europe—though it failed to protest against the imposition of the smoking ban as an administrative measure introduced under a European decree without proper domestic legislation.
Anti-Europeanism led in practice to alignment with Britain. And the founder of the ISM, Raymond Crotty, did not merely align himself with Britain in practice—he actually appealed to Britain to take Ireland in hand once more because it was unable to look after itself. He did this in an article in the (London) Times on 3rd July 1972, in which he said that Ireland had been debilitated economically and culturally by independence, which "put a political boundary through the British Isles resource market". And he appealed to Britain to "apply its own scholarship to researching and studying" Irish affairs. Which it did. Witness Professor Foster and Peter Hart.
Coughlan sees the French Referendum as aborting the EU, and the Euro along with it. And what does he think should happen now. The way is open, he says, for "a saner, more rational way of organising our continent". This is to be done "on the basis of the balance of power".
The "balance of power" is Britain's strategic approach to Europe, put in place under William of Orange and continued ever since, with the exception of about forty years after 1945, when it was put in abeyance by the outcome of Britain's bungled 2nd World War. It involved preventing any long-term stability from being arrived at in Europe through the operation of the internal forces on the Continent. Britain, from the time when the Whigs took it in hand under William, saw itself as a world power and not as part of Europe. Its European policy was to give some support to the weaker powers to 'balance' them against the stronger, and thus keep Europe in a permanent condition of actual or latent warfare, thereby maximising its own freedom of action in other parts of the world. All its Great Wars were balance-of-power wars—the 1690s, the early 1700s, the 1750s, 1793-1815, and 1914-19. The emergence of the Bolshevik state out of the chaos of the 1914 war made the game problematical, and the massive expansion of Bolshevik power after 1944 took it off the agenda for over forty years. The collapse of the Soviet Union put it back on the agenda, and it has been the object of British policy since 1990 to restore it fully.
Anti-Europeans have said that the European project was always a political project, though it masqueraded as economic. It was in fact overtly political from the start, and the economic measures were a means. The originators of the project—statesmen and intellectuals in France, Italy, Germany, and Benelux, knew in 1945 what Britain had been doing in Europe since 1900: balance-of-power games, first against France, then against Germany (1905-1919), then against France (early 1920s), then against Germany again in the late 1930s. The purpose of the European project was to bring about a degree of political unity (essentially between France, Germany and Benelux) to ensure that Britain could never again play that game. It now looks distinctly possible that it will be played again. And Anthony Coughlan wants it to be played.
He may have some esoteric meaning for the phrase. In the real world of history and politics it is the way Britain has understood Europe since the Battle of the Boyne.