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Rome
Yorkshire Post - 19
March 2007
Fifty years ago on Sunday, a dozen years after the end of the second devastating war in half a century, a year after Britain and France had carried out a humiliating retreat from Suez, a year after the bloody suppression of the Hungarian uprising by the Soviet Union, a new order began in Europe. The Treaty of Rome between six states of “old” Europe brought into being what we now call the European Union.
To the east of those states the Soviet Union, Stalin not long dead, ruled a satellite empire with crushing brutality. States like Hungary and Czechoslovakia, which had been, for centuries, part of the cultural and political heartland of Europe under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and eastern European countries like Poland, were run by Communist puppet regimes secured by Soviet armies of occupation.
Today those countries have found a new nationhood. They are democratic countries, many belonging to NATO. And the European Union, born from the rubble of world war and in the teeth of cold war is now a free association of democratic 27 states which number 493m people and account for 30 per cent of the world’s gross domestic product.
The transformation of Europe is the greatest peaceful re-making of the map not just for centuries but for millennia. The European Union has not been the sword which protected western Europe from Communism- that huge achievement belongs to NATO- but it has been the ploughshare which has offered drawn almost irresistibly country after country to seek membership as an anchorage both for its democracy and its prosperity.
Bulgaria and Romania are only the latest. Turkey, where the aspiration for membership has driven political change, looms as a distant – and controversial- member. The argument about where the boundaries of Europe should be ends up being futile, not least because the power of Europe is as much the power of an idea as the power of a location.
I doubt if the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome will occasion much celebration in the UK. Rather the opposite! A Europe which is failing the test of globalisation; a Europe which is funking the challenge of economic modernisation; a Europe which is alienating its citizens; a Europe which is possessed of an out-of-date obsession with building institutions; a Europe, in short, which has lost its way – that is the prevalent British view, proclaimed almost with relish.
The generation of “Thatcher’s children” have grown up more inclined to think of Europe as threatening Britain’s success through too great a fondness for harmonisation and red tape than to remember the long post-war years of being the “sick man of Europe” which had, in the pithy words of American Secretary of State Dean Acheson, “lost an empire and not yet found a role.”
But it is worth remembering that two of Europe’s greatest achievements have happened over the past decade when she has, by common consent, struggled to come to terms with the economic changes demanded by globalisation. These were the enlargement to embrace 10 new states, mainly from central and eastern Europe (which was a consistent goal of British policy); and the launch of the single currency managed by an independent European Central Bank.
Europe has been built on a fundamentally liberal model: customs union; single market (one of Mrs Thatcher’s great demands with huge, though rarely acknowledged, implications for pooled decision-taking); common policies on competition and state aids; single currency; independent bank – in short, a rules-based market economy governed by law.
The tasks ahead will call for an equal effort of imagination and political determination. Europe needs to be at the front of action to combat climate change using the most economically efficient mechanisms. She needs to show that she can face the challenge of the new world players like China, India and, eventually Brazil by generating ideas and translating them into jobs in the knowledge economy. She needs both to liberate business to compete and to address the need to modernise welfare states which have grown up to serve the needs of one of the most blessed and advantaged generations in history – the “baby-boomers” of the ‘40s and ‘50s.
Europe, which 100 years ago ran a huge part of the globe, also needs to be at the forefront of the development agendas for the Third World and, with her large Muslim populations, privileged links with Muslim states (the Middle East and North Africa) she has no choice but to work to prevent an irretrievable “clash of civilisation between a secular, democratic West and a religious but politically fractured and often inchoate world of Islam.
The Union, as such, cannot deploy armies: Britain and France are the only European countries whose forces have any claim to global reach. But Europe can deploy “soft” power – a much-needed capability in a world of recurrent political and social break-down.
The Continent of Europe has been rebuilt from the ashes of war, holocaust, fascism, Nazism and Communism. The European Union has been an extraordinary success. The new Europe is a wholly different animal from the original construct of the Six, despite the 170,000 pages of legislation which represent the book of common rules. The challenges ahead are huge, however familiar the cliché it is to say so. But no-one should begrudge the Continent, old and new, the celebration for an astonishing road travelled.
© Yorkshire Post
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