Capitol Ideas/The Fantasy of a United Europe
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS THE FANTASY OF A UNITED EUROPE A s I realized on a recent visit to England, no subject has been more misleadingly reported than the putative emergence of a "United States of Europe."...
...Thatcher who put her tactless finger on the key issue when she said at Bruges in 1988: "We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at a European level, with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels...
...As I say, the Germans will derail the EC before too long by refusing to continue paying out to the poorer countries...
...The Bush Administration talks openly of trying to help Mikhail Gorbachev save the Soviet Union...
...Very few people in Europe outside the Brussels bureaucracy really understand these monetary complexities and bewildering acronyms (ECU, ERM, EMU...
...it is where one sleeps in hotels and dines in restaurants...
...Foley praised the veteran Republicans, as "the loyal opposition, always ready to put the future of their country ahead of narrow party or factional interest...
...A ruling theorem of U.S...
...In reality, the world seems to be moving in the opposite direction from that fantasized in Brussels and Washington...
...This is desirable, surely...
...This almost certainly applies to Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterrand...
...But how much longer will Germans facing tax increases go on paying for such boondoggles as bridge-rebuilding in the poorer parts of Spain...
...Notice that this vision of competitive deregulation can only be realized if the countries of Europe remain separate nations...
...establishment for a United States of Europe...
...foreign policy will be to try to forestall this fragmentation...
...TR THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1991 11 the goal is centralism, not competitive deregulation...
...A substantial transfer of authority will also be necessary in the field of fiscal policy...
...These were based in Guernsey, Jersey, the Isle of Man, and Luxembourg...
...The Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, even Canada, show signs of breaking apart...
...Something like this is the case in the U.S...
...Switzerland has not joined the European Community, and the Swiss franc will remain outside European monetary union...
...servatives seem to agree on...
...Civil War arose because Southern states were denied the right to secede...
...Taxes are too high—that's the problem...
...Which tells us that The 1990 Strange New Respect Award Chumps and Charleys, the Republican businessmen's club in Washington, D.C., was the venue for the 1990 Strange New Respect Award...
...Read on, regardless...
...Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and House Speaker Tom Foley took time off from their busy schedules to present the awards...
...Evidence for this was plentiful in the newspapers, but for some reason only in the fine print...
...In times of turmoil, Switzerland has always been something of a safe haven...
...He later challenged Mrs...
...The Swiss bond market is open for business—but only at a price...
...On top of salary, there is a family allowance, an education allowance, an expatriation allowance, a household allowance, and so on...
...Ladies and gentlemen, no matter what the Washington Post says ("Europe is sharply accelerating its progress toward greater union . . . single currency under a single monetary authority before the end of this decade . . . strengthen the European Parliament at the expense of national governments . . ."), there will be no United States of Europe...
...If capital and people really are going to be free to move where they will within Europe, the result will be a competitive deregulation of life throughout Europe and a decline of government power...
...Apparently, the other European heads of state don't have the slightest intention of surrendering sovereignty, but are merely playing along with the planners...
...Thatcher put forthright truth-telling ahead of tactful evasions, and then lost the support of Euro-wets...
...Does anyone think that one more layer of government is going to solve the problem of excessive government...
...As Michael Heseltine pointed out, monetary union entails "federalism by stealth...
...Michel said in accepting the award, "but then I don't know what it would take to make them happy...
...The consensus in the U.S...
...seems to be that a single European currency will soon appear, to be followed in due course by political union of the European Community nations...
...This is not social engineering but world engineering...
...foreign policy has long been that the world would be a safer place if it consisted of a few superstates transcending nationalism...
...The failure of Britain's Tories to grasp the unreality of the European Community has cost the party dearly...
...The 1997 date by which irrevocable decisions must be made is remote enough that dissembling pols can play along, knowing that they won't be in office when the crunch comes...
...Countries are fragmenting rather than coalescing...
...Ridley was on target, but he lost his job because he went on, recklessly, to compare Kohl to Hitler and misdiagnosed the EC as a German plot...
...Unlike a common currency (coexisting with national competitors such as the franc and the pound), a monopoly currency will prove feasible only if existing nations surrender control of their monetary and (to a large extent) fiscal policies...
...With unification behind it and faced now with the cost of rebuilding its eastern sector, not to mention feeding and housing the Soviet army, Germany is suddenly going to become very chary of ceding control of its economic policy to a coalition of non-German spendthrifts...
...In a Harris poll almost a quarter thought that Turkey was a member of the EC, and four percent thought Egypt was as well...
...The New York THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1991 13...
...In the shadow of the Gulf crisis the dictum appears to hold true...
...Companies will move to the parts of Europe where taxes are lowest, and so on...
...But a large proportion of Britons (62 percent) wish to remain a separate country...
...Those who try to stand in the way, such as the reckless Margaret Thatcher, will be swept aside by the forces of history and "reality...
...Thatcher's leadership of the Conservatives, bringing her down without elevating himself...
...Thatcher warned in Rome last October that in pressing ahead with monetary union the other European leaders were "living in cloud cuckoo land . . . people who get on a train like that deserve to get taken for a ride," and so on...
...Free trade, however, does not require the sacrifice of sovereignty...
...to work for "stability...
...Two things have contributed to the illusion of progress toward unity...
...Just in case you had this on your list of things to worry about, which I suspect you did not...
...This embarrassed Tory wets and Euro-federalists, who wondered (as the London Times put it) why she couldn't accept economic union the way other heads of state did'as so much diplomatic esperanto, waffle which can be agreed today and disregarded tomorrow...
...Small countries are warlike, nationalistic, intolerant, jealous, tribal, ethnic, violent, internecine, dangerous, strife-ridden, and so on...
...Free trade and capital movement,by Tom Bethell combined with the sovereignty of existing nations, will therefore create a "federal" Europe without further help...
...The optimistic vision of a new Europe has been best articulated by Norman Macrae, former deputy editor of the Economist...
...Yet, as Alan Sked points out in a recent issue of the National Interest ("Myths of European Unity"), "a strict account of modern European history shows that wars were brought about largely by the refusal of supranational, dynastic states—the Ottoman, Hapsburg, and Napoleonic empires—to allow for national self-determination...
...The plan is for Europe to have a single currency by 1997...
...Seventeen unelected reject politicians with no accountability to anyone, who are not responsible for raising taxes, just spending money...
...Mitchell graciously replied that he hoped Michel would stay on in the House of Representatives "for at least another decade," an apt expression of the nonpartisan, cooperative spirit that has infused the Democratic leadership since George Bush came to town...
...According to Karl Otto Pohl of the Bundesbank: "A monetary union presupposes considerable shifts in the responsibility for economic policy to a central authority and hence a far-reaching reshaping of the Community in political and institutional terms...
...They have done so many times in the past, but none more urgently than in the summer of 1990...
...It was Mrs...
...They remind us that "Tax Problems Plague Euro Entrepreneurs," to give a Daily Telegraph headline on the same day...
...T's skirts...
...Both were long overdue for the award, it was felt, but their steadfast support for the 1990 tax increase, labeled "deficit reduction" for public consumption, made them hard to overlook for another year...
...It is where using foreign money is fun, because all money is spending money...
...I am here using "federal" in its original and correct sense of treaty-linked sovereign states...
...who are pandered to by a supine parliament which also is not responsible for raising taxes, already behaving with an arrogance I find breathtaking—the idea that one says, 'Okay, we'll give this lot our sovereignty,' is unacceptable to me...
...Thanks to the overwhelming tendency of journalists to travel in flocks to the same conclusion, I once again find myself with an "exclusive' on my hands...
...All along the French have been more interested in using the EC as an instrument of subsidy for their farmers, meanwhile paying Brussels in the coinage of hypocrisy...
...On the day I left England, a real-world reminder was tucked away in the back pages of the Financial Times...
...What's more surprising is the never-ending enthusiasm within the U.S...
...While the country threatens to break apart, the paper worried, "the West sits by, reluctant to offer hand or word...
...It goes back decades, and is based on the idea that those fractious countries that have already dragged us into two world wars would all along have been at peace if only they had been one big country, like the U.S...
...It is a system of decentralized power...
...But our grandchildren will have reason to thank us...
...The (London) Spectator noted the suspicion that "'Europe,' to the average Briton, is the place advertised in holiday brochures...
...Surprise...
...A major thrust of U.S...
...Since the New Deal, however, the tendency has been for the word to be construed in the opposite way, denoting a set of nominally separate jurisdictions all alike dominated by a central authority...
...Governments today wield excessive power all over the world, and the best hope of freeing people from the bondage of toiling for the unproductive legions on public payrolls is to bring government closer to the people by multiplying the number of countries...
...What's supposed to happen first is free trade within the twelve countries of the European Community, by the end of 1992—a desirable goal, of course, and incidentally one of the few economic ideas that liberals and conTom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...This might lead to a gradual interweaving of Europe's economies and societies," the Economist recently wrote, "while avoiding the "'A manager at age 40 can expect to earn about $96,000 a year—before taxes...
...They pay a progressive EC tax, which is very low by European standards, but often their tax bill is lower than their added allowances...
...When Francois Mitterrand says that the goal of Europe is "federal," he means the kind of centrally controlled power that Thatcher was warning against...
...Swiss Safe Haven Dictum Holds True," was the headline...
...Eurocrats are excused from Belgian or national taxes...
...A roar of approval then went up from the assembled Chumps, who sang a few choruses of "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" before heading off to the bar...
...Some conservatives may not be happy about this," Rep...
...Delorsian threat of supranational government...
...Understanding that sovereignty was at stake, Mrs...
...David Brooks, Wall Street Journal, December 14, 1990...
...Of interest also were the "Offshore Managed Funds...
...Second, some of the poorer countries, such as Spain and Portugal, have gone along gladly because they are net beneficiaries of the European Regional Development Fund, an industrial-policy cash transfer scheme, with Spain getting over 30 percent of the money...
...Likewise the U.S...
...It's only a matter of time, apparently, everything having been planned by the great and the good in Brussels...
...Recipients were Republican leaders Bob Dole of Kansas and Robert Michel of Illinois...
...Times recently offered a prescription for preserving Yugoslavia, and the Washington Post followed with an editorial entitled "Saving Yugoslavia...
...today, where the dominant influence of the federal government largely eliminates the competitive advantage of minimal regulation or taxation at the state level...
...Nor is free trade what animates Jacques Delors, the French socialist president of the European Commission, his highly paid Eurocrats,' and the New York Times Editorial Board...
...A few months earlier Nicholas Ridley, her secretary of state for industry, was even more tact12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1991 less, saying of the EC: "When I look at the institutions to which it is proposed that sovereignty be handed over, I'm aghast...
...Meanwhile, they found it convenient to hide behind Mrs...
...The effect of subjecting them all to one overarching set of homogeneous laws will be to ensure that competition between them will be eliminated...
Vol. 24 • February 1991 • No. 2
