History tells us that the Coalition will be more cooperative in the EU than many observers care to admit, even if the policy is to lump it but not like it.
Britain’s European Policy? It would, some might say, be a good idea to have one. Except that we have had one, or maybe two.
The first British policy on Europe – that of the 50s – was to stay out of the new European Community. Churchill and Eden have taken some historical stick for not having more foresight. But they had lived through two world wars, both had fought in one of them, and the precedent of history did not point to the new Common Market venture having much staying power. And, economically, British trade with Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States dwarfed our trade with the countries of the original six.
The two Harolds, Macmillan and Wilson, soon sought to put that right. It was not their fault that de Gaulle kept Britain out for a decade. But, just as hard headed calculation had kept us out, so it was equally hard-headed calculation, not visionary idealism, that took us in. In the 60s and again, under Heath, in the 70s, time and again ministers and officials looked at the options: going it alone, sticking with and developing EFTA, seeking a North Atlantic Free Trade Area with the United States and Canada. Each time, they were forced to the often reluctant conclusion that the new European Community was already too powerful politically and economically for us, and our EFTA partners, to ignore. Soundings were taken of the Americans, more than once, about NAFTA. The answer was, as we pre-Assange diplomats were wont to report: “You’ve got to be joking”.
So British policy became one of “if you can’t beat them, join them” and then, as we realised that the European Community was as much a politically federalising project as an economic one: “we don’t like it, but we’d better lump it”. We would be worse off out than in. We had nowhere else to sit except, occasionally and uncomfortably, on the sharp knees of the Americans. We would mark out our thin red line and use our veto to prevent the spectre in the night of ‘federalism’ from overtaking us, even as, in our own country, we introduced a federal system of national government.
But British political leaders are, on the whole, innovators; lumping but not liking it has never been enough. Even Britain’s two most eurosceptic Prime Ministers, Thatcher and Brown, can, between them, take credit for the single market, agricultural reform, trade liberalisation and the liberalisation of financial services. And Major and Blair, while pushing that same agenda, also took Britain into a closer and more operational foreign policy and security relationship with our European partners than seemed likely only twenty years ago.
The Cameron coalition looks set to follow much the same course. The rhetoric will be more reluctant, the reality practically cooperative. The perversity of British public debate means that they will disguise each step forward taken in tandem by aiming the odd kick at their European companions. But William Hague’s early foreign policy speeches showed, by omission, that there is very little that can be called British Foreign Policy that does not require cooperation and, dare I say it, integration with our European partners.
And, it being as always the economy that counts, there are already detectable signs that the government are supping with an ever-shorter spoon at the table of EU economic governance. The eurozone will survive, probably with its present membership, and certainly in one form or another. An umbilical relationship with the eurozone does not necessarily have to take the form of membership. There are other models.
But I would rule nothing out. When, at a public meeting with Foreign Secretary David Miliband about two years ago, I suggested that Prime Minister Cameron might be the man who would take Britain into the euro, Miliband baulked. He disputed my contention that Cameron might become Prime Minister. Maybe the other shoe, too, will drop.
This piece is published in 'What future for Europe?', the accompanying pamphlet to Policy Network's conference on the future of the EU on 11 February 2011
Sir Stephen Wall was the UK permanent representative to the EU from 1995-2000 and head of the Cabinet Office’s European Secretariat from 2000-2004. He is the author of A Stranger in Europe
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