Britain Hedges on the Euro

...What is more, if Britain does decide later to join the EMU, its application might not be automatically approved by the countries now willing to take the risk, or unfavorable entry conditions might be imposed...

...The EU has failed, for example, to concentrate on the issues most Europeans want to see at the top of the agenda, like fighting unemployment, poverty and social exclusion...

...The ferocious turbulence in the Balkans notwithstanding, there is recognition here that European unity means national conflicts of the kind that twice convulsed Europe in the 20th century will not recur...

...It is not of shopping days till Christmas, though here, as in the United States, that begins ever earlier each year...

...There IS another dimension to the prevailing attitude...

...Despite years of trying, Britons even still have trouble adjusting to the switch they had to make to European standard metric measures...

...As pundits have repeatedly observed, a single currency means a single monetary policy and a single monetary policy means a single economic policy over which Britain, if it joined, would have limited control or, possibly, no control at all...

...A great many people here, though, feel this would not be an undesirable consequence...

...Very well then," she replied, "I'll have a pound of kilograms...

...It cites opinion polls indicating that less than half the people clear across the EU think their country's membership in the organization is worthwhile...

...From January 1, 1999, the euro will serve alongside the national currencies of 11 of the 15 European Union (EU) nations that have opted to become part of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) at its creation...

...Indeed, at a recent important meeting of EU finance ministers, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown was humiliatingly shown the door because the euro was on the agenda and attendance was limited to representatives of the soon-tobe euro nations...

...dollar...

...The story is often told of an old Cockney woman who asked her comer greengrocer for a pound of onions...

...We call them kilograms now, love," she was told...

...That is when the euro, the new European currency, becomes legal tender throughout most of Western Europe...

...Most Britons complain about the fat cat salaried EU officials in Brussels, whom they believe to be largely answerable only to themselves...

...Since their taxes help fund the organization's massive budget, they are wary of plans to integrate as many as 10 mostly cash-hungry East European nations into the EU over the next few years...

...But much more is at stake for Britain than whether the local gas station is required to sell fuel by liters rather than gallons...

...Its important decisions are still made that way, and this is said to account for the continuing "gulf between European decision makers and European citizens" on priorities...

...Nevertheless, the idea of a united Europe remains a virtual crusade for many within the government ministries, business circles and intellectual communities of the EU nations...

...They resent the power of the European Court to overrule British courts, as it did recently in the case of three Northern Ireland Catholics dismissed from their jobs for security reasons...

...If European citizenship is going to work," Demos warns, "it has to prove that it is giving the majority of people something they need and something they cannot get at a national level...

...Most of all, they are leery of what the phalanxes of European bureaucrats are up to—of the existence of 80,000 pages (so far) of EU regulations for "harmonization and standardization...

...Prime Minister Tony Blair says a single European currency is a marvelous idea...

...No, this countdown is to the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1998...

...consigned to oblivion...

...And the euro will become a reserve currency, perhaps one day outmatching the U.S...

...It will be the most significant event in the process of European integration since the European Economic Community was created 40 years ago...

...There is approval of the way cross-border travel and trade everywhere in the EU community has been shorn of many previously troublesome formalities...

...Then, if it seems advisable, a referendum will be held on whether or not the country should make a belated application to join the euro bloc...

...Alone among the major countries of Western Europe, Britain, though it is a member of the EU, has turned its back on those prospective advantages...

...But he has decided that Britain should first monitor how things are working out across the English Channel...

...They point out that once the euro is up and running, exchange rate speculation could leave the isolated pound sterling vulnerable to currency market raids...

...There is no mechanism for an orderly withdrawal from the EMU once a qualifying nation has made the elaborate commitment to be part of it, and the British government, wary of the possible downside of the euro revolution, has decided not to take any chances for the moment...

...That includes Britain, even among those who agree with Tony Blair's wait and see policy on the euro...

...In a new report entitled Rediscovering Europe, the Blairite British think tank called Demos says the European Union has failed hugely to turn a latent "Europeanism" into popular support for European integration...

...Norman Gelb reports regularly for The New Leader on British affairs...

...Whitehall is concerned that France, Germany, Italy and some other countries that have signed up have not done nearly enough to bring their budget deficits under control...

...At first, mostly banks and large businesses in the participating countries will perform their transactions in euros, while ordinary people and lesser enterprises gradually get used to the new currency's legitimacy, availability and fixed worth...

...It could define whether the country will be obliged to remain on the periphery, part in, part out...

...In these sceptered isles there is even a muted, cautious pride at being European as well as British...

...Instead, it spends half of its huge budget on its controversial Common Agricultural Policy "ensuring an adequate income for farmers," to the distress of 90 per cent of the Europeans...

...They are not alone...

...Thus, although travel, cultural exchanges and trade have brought them considerably closer to the French, Germans and other Western Europeans on a one-to-one basis than they were before the European Union's formation, the new bureaucracy has deepened their distrust of the One Europe concept...

...As ?-Day gets closer, however, nervousness about such a course of inaction is intensifying here...

...It believes their failure to make necessary structural economic reforms, notably in the area of massive social welfare expenditures, could undermine the stability of euro economies, leaving the EMU—and Britain, if it joined—vulnerable to fearsome inflationary pressures...

...The British public generally is suspicious of greater European integration, and even of many of the measures the country has already been obliged to accept as a member of the European Union...

...European] citizenship will only acquire meaning when it translates into real entitlements...

...The costs and complications of cross-border economic activity among them will be significantly reduced...

...The benefits of a single currency could be enormous for countries involved...

...It reinforced the worry that if Britain were part of the EMU, the official legitimization of the euro next New Year's day would signal the greatest surrender of British sovereignty ever...

...The workings of the increasingly barrier-free single European market will be substantially facilitated...

...In fact, a shudder ran through Whitehall when the Austrian government, taking its six month turn at the presidency of the European Union, recently urged the standardization of taxes across Europe...

...In the year 2002, the euro is scheduled to rise to the status of the only legal tender in those nations, with the mark, franc, lira, et al...

...It is understood that Britain is condemning itself to exclusion from some important decision making about the future of a united Europe...

...Europe's Tax Anschluss," the London Times feverishly called the proposal...

...One reason for this the Demos report finds, is that people feel they were not part of the EU's creation, that "it was brought about behind closed doors in chancelleries and conference centers by policy elites...

...A dedicated Europhile, he has not found it easy to resist this major step toward greater European integration...

...British economists have also issued words of caution...

...That could turn out to be a watershed moment for Britain with regard to its place in an integrated Europe...