After Thatcher's Single European Act, there was barely any power left to sign away to what, in actual fact, has always been the EU.
What little there was, was almost entirely signed away by Major at Maastricht, when William Hague was a Minister and when David Cameron was having the first of his two goes, to date, at ruining the economy.
What little there was, was almost entirely signed away by Major at Maastricht, when William Hague was a Minister and when David Cameron was having the first of his two goes, to date, at ruining the economy.
Cameron really has lost the plot with his suggestion today that Labour wants to join the euro. Ed Balls is second only to Ed Miliband's mentor, Gordon Brown, in having kept Britain out of the euro.
In any case, no party now wants to join it. Not even the Lib Dems, as their Deputy Leader, the veteran Maastricht abstainer Simon Hughes, told the Any Questions audience on Friday evening.
In any case, no party now wants to join it. Not even the Lib Dems, as their Deputy Leader, the veteran Maastricht abstainer Simon Hughes, told the Any Questions audience on Friday evening.
Not technically true.
ReplyDeleteThe EU Constitution, which Gordon Brown enthusiastically took us into (in breach of Labour's 2005 manifesto promise of a referendum) established its first Constitution, legal personality and primacy over vast new areas of social and economic policy.
That was the real moment at which a superstate replaced a nation state.
You will never find anyone with any specialist knowledge of the field who regards that as comparable to Maastricht or the SEA. Thatcher's is the Mothership.
ReplyDeleteAs for Cameron's record on the EU Constitution and on Lisbon, the less said, the better.
Its not comparable, its superior in importance.
ReplyDeleteA state needs a Constitution and a legal personality, and its own foreign policy to be a state-thats what Lisbon gave it.
The amount we surrendered to the EU, has to be seen to be believed. When it comes into full effect, almost no national independence will be left us.
How does Cameron's record matter here? Saying that Gordon Brown disgracefully lied to the British people and surrendered our sovereignty, isn't to say Cameron is any better, is it?
How petty is that?
No, I am afraid that you are just wrong about this. Anyone who knows anything about the subject will tell you that it runs SEA (towering above everything else), Maastricht, the Treaty of Rome when Thatcher was in the Cabinet, and then all else is window dressing.
ReplyDeleteI have to say I don't think you're right about that David.
ReplyDeleteThe SEA brought in Political Co-operation (superceded by Amsterdam) and extended QMV in some areas in order to facilitate the Single Market. It also strengthened democratic legitimacy by increasing the scrutiny powers of the European Parliament.
But comparing that to Maastricht, in which the pillar structure was created, JHA and CFSP instituted, EMU founded (with all of its convergance criteria)... it was at Maastricht that the EC (an economic union for political reasons) became the EU (a political and economic union for political reasons). Maastrict represented the deeper and wider pooling of sovereignty. Since then it's largely been tinckering at the edges, but as your other correspondent notes one should not undervalue the post-Lisbon creation of a legal entity.
And you can't get away with your arguments from authority either (always a distastful tactic), as that was not how it was taught to me by the academics at Durham or at Birkbeck.
Anyway, the truth is, or course, more nuanced than one achievable by focussing only on the treaties. TREVI, EPC and Schengen all existed before the SEA, and did not become incorporated into the EU structures until Maastricht (or later). In other words, the EU's present competancies usually gradually developed intergovernmentally and became supranational once member states were content that they were beneficial and would be more effective via the community method.
You seem to be something of a universalist, sometimes, so it's a shame to see how trapped you are by the nationalist paradigm. I'm curious, have you read anything from the modern school of nationalist studies? The last 20 years have been rather fruitful you know, and I can't help but think you'd benefit from a stiff intake of Ernst Gellner and Anthony D. Smith.
Not as much as I should have done. But I am only a nationalist, if I am, in the sense that Attlee, Bevin, Morrison, Bevan, Gaitskell, Shore, Foot and Castle were, and Benn (the Elder, at any rate) still is.
ReplyDeleteNothing else compares to the concession of the principle of unanimity in the Council of Ministers. Nothing else ever could. In the House of Lords debate on Maastricht, Roy Jenkins rightly berated Margaret Thatcher for, "swallowing the camel and straining at the gnat."
If it is democratic accountability that you want, then that Council ought to meet in public and publish an Official Report akin to Hansard, no EU law ought to have any effect in the United Kingdom unless passed through both Houses of Parliament exactly as it had originated in one or other of them, the supremacy of British over EU law should be restored, and rulings of the European Courts should have effect here only by resolution of the House of Commons.
Yes, they were all nationalists, but that is not the only thing that they were. And nationalism is the least appealing thing about them.
ReplyDeleteI would advise starting with Gellner, who demonstrated that ‘nations’ are not natural, organic or ancient (as the current dying paradigm would have it), but are recent elite constructions, a result of early bourgeois ideological legitimation – nationalism is the artificial limiting of universal ideology within the power container of the state. Nation states were not created by nations, rather nations were created by nation states. Though the very beginnings of the process can be traced back a little longer in one or two cases, it is mostly recent and concurrent with the industrial revolution. States, captured by this new bourgeois ideology, created a mass public culture via the apparatus of the state during the dislocations of the industrial revolution. That eventually had many benefits to the common man, of course.
Gellner’s student A.D. Smith is a bit more nuanced. He focuses on the limits imposed on elite construction by pre-existing ethnic myths, and the need for nations to interpret and re-interpret subjective and selective versions of their history to legitimate themselves. I see you do that all the time, with your regular reference to ‘ancient institutions’ this and ‘hallowed traditions’ that.
Knowing this makes one stop thinking of the nation as a meaningful mediator. In short, politics should be about ideas and principles, not about identity. This is, I would suggest, your regular and core error (deontological problems aside).
So on to Europe then. It take your point about QMV being a crucial qualitative step, the point where Europe stopped being purely intergovernmental. As a nationalist that would concern you more than the later changes, even if those changes were quantitatively more significant. Your nationalism prevents you from seeing such a move as legitimate. Similarly, it prevents you from seeing how silly the final paragraph of your last comment is:
First, I have no need for EU legislation to have to be passed by national legislatures. I already elect a European Parliament at a European level for that, and European second chamber (The Council of Ministers as I still like to call it) is elected at national level to provide national scrutiny. Yes, I would like to see *all* EU regulations (including single market regs) so scrutinised, and I accept your suggestions for the Council, and have other democratic reform suggestions besides (as does the EU). But it would be completely, impossibly unworkable if every law had to be passed by every national legislature. Imagine if every UK law had to be agreed to by every County Council! Nothing would ever be achieved. You ignore this obvious comparison, and the possibility of democratic collective governance at a European level, because you believe the nation to be the natural and only legitimate loci of sovereignty. This is not so. You don’t really believe that European-level democracy should be strengthened, you want it abolished and to see a reversion to nineteenth century intergovernmentalism, so your attacks on EU democracy are disingenuous. You are using a seventeenth century ideological lens to assess twenty-first century complexities, and thus you fail.
Ben Myring.
ReplyDeleteYour whole analysis of nation states is wrong, and the rot sets in there.
Nation states arise from the very different national cultures that predominate in certain places.
It is because the cultures of Europe are so different that we cannot have an international union, unless it's a dictatorship.
Because the peoples of Europe do not all share the same language, culture, laws or ideas and therefore they don't wish to be governed in the same way.
This makes your County Council analogy particularly abhorrent; our County Councils exist within a country with a common language, culture and history, and centuries of democracy and liberty behind them.
The constituent members of the EU's Parliament obviously have none of these things in common.
That is why British law (Magna Carta, the 1689 Bill of Rights, common law, habeuas corpus, jury trial etc) is unique to Britain and could never have existed anywhere else in Europe.
Because we have a culture that is unique, and produces a unique set of laws.
EU legislation is not made in the European Parliament, and it is a joke Parliament(as you'd know if you read Christopher Booker and Peter North's monumental and essential history of the EU, The Great Deception).
It is beyond parody, and beneath contempt, to suggest that some left-wing revisionist critique of nation states means that the solution is to dissolve them all into an autocratic supranational Empire whose subject provinces don't even share a common LANGUAGE(and which is necessarily much more heavily influenced by lobbyists for big multinationals, because it's far easier for Wal-Mart to lobby one unaccountable, all-powerful executive, than 27 different Parliaments).