No Nixon-in-China moment for Britain

The UK can still contribute to a sustainable EU with its “referendum lock” – it will just have more bargaining power.

As a member of an EU group of “wisemen” for the best of the last two years I have (re)learned that it does not pay trying to reinvent politicians – especially when you are neither wise nor a man. When it comes to day-to-day politics we academics are better off listening, translating and embellishing.

The Federal Trust invites us to ask: “Under the Coalition Government with its mixture of differing attitudes towards Europe, can the British be persuaded to move on from their historic position of isolation and play the leading part in the centre of the European community that the major European nations would like them to take on?” Tempting isn’t it? But “centre”, I do not think so! Cameron is unlikely to give Britain its Nixon-in-China moment. And nor would others in Europe accept the prospect. Instead let us ride with this government’s (pragmatic) flow.

This government has certainly tempered its opposition rhetoric to take a more pragmatic attitude to Europe in the last few months. This was inevitable, in a Clegg-cum-Hague government. The rest of the EU will look at a post-European Union Bill UK with a mix of resentment, relief and admiration. With a stroke of the legislative pen, London will have significantly increased its bargaining power in Brussels, an unappealing prospect in the shadow of the Irish referenda saga. How cunning, as the nosemonkey blogger so aptly puts it.

A “referendum lock” before further transfers of power to the EU and  “national sovereignty” safeguards  to keep authority over laws in Westminster can be used to great effect both at home and abroad. But there are pragmatic safeguards in the Bill, too: ministers have the final say on what EU laws are significant enough to merit being caught in the net, no referendum will be needed for enlargement, say to Turkey, and the bill can be repealed at any time through simple majority. From such a position of strength, the government can afford to own up to its pragmatism.

First, in words and deeds, it can use the “sovereignty fix” to rebuke the supranational fix elsewhere in Europe more intelligently and in more subtle terms that the rest of the EU expects them to. This means waking up the British public to a world where “parliamentary sovereignty” is irredeemably shared or at least constrained. And it means recognizing that both postures, sovereignist and pure supranationalist,  have to do with an obsession with oneness: we need one polity (national or European) in order to have democracy, effective governance and so on.

But it is precisely pluralist Britain who should resist these two sides of the same coin about the EU. As many EU scholars but too few EU politicians recognize, the EU rests on a fascinatingly precarious balance. That is why it must be thought of as a federal union not a federal state, a “demoi-cracy” in the making.  A Britain that handles sovereignty questions maturely in Westminster will be best placed to defend this precarious balance in Brussels.

Second, if ad-hoc pragmatism is to serve Britain in Europe, the government needs to appear constructive and propose broad and mobilizing goals for the EU. Working out what the franco-british deal on defense implies for the EU as a whole is a good place to start. So is the issue of UK vs EU representation in international institutions like the UN, IMF or G20 – think leadership, rotation, alliances. And so is the challenge of developing an EU that is better owned by its citizens and public opinions.  On these grounds, the UK is best placed to articulate an alternative to the deluded prospect of a new core Europe, leaving its periphery behind.  The UK is most strikingly both, core (defense) and periphery (euro), but so are many member states. And those with the pretention to be the real core, headed for a federal Europe, have little to show for it these days. 

Instead, and as I have argued elsewhere, the UK can champion an ambitious yet pragmatic goal for the EU, that of “sustainable” integration. Helping governments to act for the long term and support each other through unpopular short-term measures is the EU’s greatest comparative advantage. The goal ought to be an EU focused on sustainability in all realms of policy making, from finance and green growth, to defense, migration policy and global governance. Cameron may never be a Nixon-in-China for Europe but he can certainly do with a dose of EU solidarity and resilience as he contemplates the choppy waters ahead.

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.

Kalypso Nicolaïdis is director of the European Studies Centre and a Fellow at St Antony's College at the University of Oxford

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