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 ike
the rest of you, I watched last week's U.K. election results with
deep gloom. This was not entirely native interest. The U.S. and
the U.K. tend to move in sync politically, though with a year or
two's lag now and then. In 1964 you got Lyndon Johnson and the Great
Society; we got Harold Wilson's socialists with their promise to
"seize the commanding heights" of the British economy. Your pendulum
then swung to the half-hearted managerial conservatism of Dick Nixon;
ours to the bossy corporatism of Ted Heath. In 1979 we elected a
fearless conservative, Margaret Thatcher; 20 months later, Ronald
Reagan assumed the U.S. presidency. Our conservative revolution
then passed into the hands of those with lesser conviction (or none,
some unkind people might say); so did yours. You ended up at last
with "triangulating" Bill Clinton sneering at "right-wing conspiracies";
we got Tony Blair preaching his "third way" and railing against
"the forces of conservatism" (though admittedly the lag there was
4 years).
So what happened on June 7th? In a nutshell: 35 percent of the British
electorate voted for either Blair's center-left Labour Party or
else for the Liberals, who are extreme left (no kidding: the Liberal
platform included a pledge to raise taxes). About half that
number, 18 percent, voted for the Conservative Party. 6 percent
voted for others, 41 percent did not vote at all. Ideologically
speaking, it was a landslide: Nearly three-fifths of those who bothered
to vote went for the center-left or far left. And in fact, since
most of those "other" parties (Welsh, Scottish, and Irish nationalists)
have socialist programs, and line up with Labour in parliamentary
votes much more often than not, that three-fifths is probably more
like two-thirds.
The main consequence of Blair's reelection will be on his country's
policy towards the European Union, most immediately on whether the
pound sterling will be abandoned in favor of the euro — that
is, the common European currency. The pro-euro forces have some
psychological advantage, since the losing Conservative Party made
"saving the pound" a key theme of their election campaign. The rejection
of the Conservatives seems to indicate that British people do not
care very much about "saving the pound." However, Blair has promised
a separate referendum on the euro, and while Britons may have had
other things on their minds in the general election, opinion polls
that isolate the euro issue show steady large majorities against
dropping the pound. In the 15-member EU, only three countries have
not adopted the euro: Britain, Sweden, and Denmark (whose voters
rejected it in a referendum last September). Euro coins and notes
go into circulation in January next year in the other 12.
In a way, the current of opinion against the euro is contrary to
the general sentiment of the British towards European integration,
which has from the beginning favored the "economic" side of the
thing — Europe as a free-trade area — while remaining
deeply suspicious of the "political" side — Europe as a mega-state
under federal government. The adoption of a single currency is an
obvious next step towards economic integration. In a second-hand
bookstore in Provincetown, Mass. once, I saw an arithmetic textbook
from the colonial period, full of exercises in converting from Massachusetts
currency to Rhode Island currency, and so on. The introduction of
a single currency in these United States made sound economic sense,
and the same would be true in Europe.
Nor can those anti-euro majorities be depended on. The British are
far less aloof from European affairs than they were 30 years ago
(when there is said to have been a newspaper headline reading: "FOG
OVER CHANNEL: CONTINENT ISOLATED"). Outside some tiny cliques of
conservative intellectuals and somewhat larger numbers of illiterate
soccer hooligans, deep national feeling is mainly confined to the
over-60s, who can remember WW2. The nation has bred swarms of buff,
breezy young technocrats — financial analysts, database modelers,
marketing consultants and the like — who are as comfortable
working in Milan or Frankfurt as in Manchester or Bristol. Even
less well-educated people have been acclimatized. My brother-in-law
is a truck driver in the English Midlands, who for years has been
making weekly trips into Belgium, Holland and north Germany. Europe
is not a strange place to him. When, after next January, these people
have become accustomed to handling euro-bills and coins, their resistance
will weaken. Blair, relying on this, will time his referendum accordingly.
The debate about the euro is, of course, not really about what it
is "about." With the single currency, the EU has gone pretty much
as far as it can go in purely economic integration. Further advances
must be political, involving the surrender of national decision-making
in fiscal and social matters to Euro-bureaucrats. That is a much
harder sell to Anglo-Saxons, to whom self-government means something
more than a cycle of street rioting followed by a shiny new constitution
every generation or two. (Britain in fact still has no written constitution.)
Our French and German neighbors have always been great system-builders,
with an annoying habit of taking everything to no-exceptions! conceptual
extremes that eventually blow up in their faces. We are by temperament
more practical. If something works, and obviously makes life easier,
we'll adopt it, but we won't use it as a basis for deducing large
general principles, or for abandoning other, conceptually inconsistent,
methods whose worth has been proved by centuries of practice. Clearly
the present state of comity among the nations of Europe is a great
and happy advance over the previous 1,500 years of recurrent warfare.
Clearly economic cooperation has worked. It is not clear to British
people, however, why it follows that, for example (this one from
a recent speech by the French prime minister, Lionel Jospin), Europe
needs a common welfare system. If a little of something is good,
it does not follow that twice as much is twice as good. The Europeans,
who are supposed to be much better cooks than the British (erroneously,
in my opinion--they are merely better restaurateurs), surely know
that you don't salt your stew on this principle.
The Celts, too, seem to be having second thoughts about Europe.
Until recently, Ireland was the most enthusiastic EU member. Last
week, however, the Irish rejected the Treaty of Nice in a referendum.
This pact (whose name contains the potential to baffle as many generations
of schoolchildren as the Diet of Worms) does not, as you might think,
oblige the European countries to be pleasant to each other. Its
purposes are to adjust EU voting procedures in favor of the bigger
countries, to start work on a European defense force, and to lay
some necessary groundwork for the eventual admission of 12 new members
into the Union. The Irish rejection is in part a natural reaction
to Ireland's much improved economic status. The EU has always been
a good deal for poor countries, since they receive "transfer payments"
— subsidies — from richer ones. The booming Irish economy
has, however, now brought Ireland into the ranks of the richer member
states. All but two of the 12 new candidate members are recovering
communist countries in eastern and southeastern Europe and the Baltic,
still very poor. Further, the European Commission recently reprimanded
the Irish for the pro-growth, low-tax fiscal policies that have
brought the country her new prosperity, on the grounds that those
policies were unfair to other member states trying to maintain higher
rates of taxation. This annoyed the Irish; and the defense proposals
go against the grain of their traditional neutralism.
Lurking behind all this are larger issues, some of which, in the
prevailing structure of taboos, are like the things Tam O'Shanter
saw: "Which even to name would be unlawful." Europe is the homeland
of the white non-Moslem peoples, which are hated over large parts
of the world, from the Cincinnati ghetto to the mosques of Teheran,
from the shanties of Zimbabwe to the college campuses of Delhi and
Beijing. The Europeans are, further, declining in numbers and, even
more obviously, and notwithstanding those muddled and contentious
proposals for unified armies, in self-confidence and the willingness
to defend themselves. They may have brought a happy end to their
own wars, but other regions still have a lot of very old-fashioned
history to be worked out, and much of that working-out will involve
ethnic conflict and the settling of ancient scores. In Arabic, Europeans
are still referred to by a word that means "Crusader." The Chinese,
at the merest provocation, will start shrieking at you about the
Anglo-French burning of the Summer Palace in 1860.
Shall Europe, with her feeble birth rates and vitality-sapping welfare
systems, ever be able to present a determined, united front towards
those who wish her ill for reasons of racial or historical grievance?
Stronger political union and a common defense would seem to be necessary,
but will they also be sufficient? Single nations, when faced with
these kinds of challenges, have survived — when they have survived
— by making appeals to patriotism. Is there enough of a European
patriotism to be of service when history takes a wrong turn, as
sooner or later it surely will? If there is not such a thing, can
it be created? If it can be, will the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic corner
of the continent subscribe to it? Probably the answers to these
questions will not become pressing until our children's or grandchildren's
time; but they are beginning to be shaped today.
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