Europe’s Ode to Joy has become the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves
Like Yanis Vaurofakis, though sadly without his millionaire income, I have been liberated by the strange turns Europe has taken in recent years.
In the case of the former Greek finance minister, it was the euro crisis that set him free. Having given up wrestling with debt while attempting to persuade the Brussels establishment to pay attention to his strictures, he now tours the world, staying in grand hotels, expounding on how much he loves Europe and how much he distrusts the EU.
Greece continues to struggle its way out of the pit of despair into which it was cast in 2010, but Varoufakis, leading his own leftist faction in the Athens Parliament, has gone on to earn a well-deserved reputation as both a public intellectual and – in the manner of France’s Bernard-Henri Lévy – an unashamed champagne socialist.
My own, entirely unexpected, catalyst was Brexit, to which I was resolutely opposed. The surprise is that Britain’s departure has enabled me to see more clearly the realities of the EU, warts and all, without imagining myself a traitor to the Remain cause.
The UK formally left the EU at midnight on January 31. On New Year’s Eve, the transition period will end and we will truly be our own masters, whatever that turns out to mean. But for Europe, too, a page will have turned. The Brits will have ended their 47-year residency as the club’s bad boys, forever bitching about the size of the membership fee and the new rules they keep introducing. That role has now passed to just about everyone. The north hates the south, the east hates the west, and everyone hates the Germans.
It’s all too much. Whatever happened to the days when I would ask what the latest changes to the farm budget meant, only to be told two pence on a pound of butter? Oh for the time when a marathon session of the European Council ended with a 2% alteration in the system of weighted voting so that the Big Four (Germany, France, Britain and Italy) carried on running the show, but the smaller countries could still gang up and cause the occasional upset.
Europe was never, except in the abstract or in official communiques, about an ideal. It was about getting things done and moving on to the next thing, whatever the next thing happened to be. Rarely interesting, it was usually important, a bit like today’s responses to the Covid crisis. The point was to advance a practical agenda – nearly always rooted in money – with as little friction as humanly possible, which meant ministers and officials working through the night before coming down from the conference chamber to find the journalists asleep at their desks.
Verdi’s Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves would often have been more appropriate than Ode to Joy.
To me, in the 1970s and ’80s, the appeal of Europe was the bleeding obvious. It brought the continent together in a shared enterprise, Britain included. The press room, where I plied my trade, was the ground floor of a Tower of Babel made up of the Commission, Council and Parliament. Everyone, naturally, was out for themselves, but compromise was generally the outcome. If you wanted help for the miners of south Wales, you had to be ready to give something to the wine producers of Sicily or the cheesemakers of Normandy.
Europe was a business, run along business lines, with a bureaucracy which, while often too boring for words, churned out words by the million. It took charge of things, such as trade negotiations, market regulation and fraud investigations, that were hard work, requiring superhuman reserves of expertise and stamina. Frequently, the issues of the day had been issues for years, even decades. Only gradually were they resolved and integrated into the canon. From the point of view of the British, or any other national representation, Brussels did the hard work so that they didn’t have to.
That is gone now. The UK will have to conduct its own multi-annual trade talks, settle its own rules on the environment and pay its own subsidies to its farmers and fishermen. Let’s see how much we continue to exult in our regained sovereignty when discussions on agricultural tariffs with the governments of India, Argentina and South Africa drift into their seventh, interminable year.
In the end, of course, it all got to be too much. The single currency was the killer. It was a great idea, and at some point it was bound to happen. The problem was that the birth of the euro, in 1999, was probably about three decades premature. Everything went well for the first eight years, during which economic growth was the norm and anomalies could easily be swept under the carpet. It was when the American financial crash spread to Europe that the lie was exposed. Suddenly it was obvious that Germany was not the same as Italy and Greece could no longer hide the fact that it was playing by different rules to everybody else.
But that wasn’t the worst thing. Just as bad was the precipitate enlargement of the Union in 2004 to include ten applicant countries, most of them from the former Soviet bloc. Margaret Thatcher has to take a share of the blame for this. She was determined to weaken the structure by broadening it out to the point where it couldn’t properly function. She was not, however, alone. Everyone else went along, and the result was a stark division between the old western powers and the formerly Communist arrivistes.
No one knew it at the time, not least Tony Blair, but it was the sudden arrival of Poland, and later Romania and Bulgaria, that would bring Britain’s membership of the EU to an inglorious end. Blair, alone among Europe’s leaders, decided that there was no need to put a pause on the free movement of labour into the UK from the east. As a result, some three million Poles and others made their way to England, most of them hard-working and enterprising, causing Nigel Farage to feel uncomfortable on the 5.25 train home to Kent and giving a vital boost to UKIP.
We all know what happened next: the referendum, followed by four long years of tedious and frequently fruitless negotiation. Brexit was supposed to be an explosion of joy. Instead it was like a slow puncture. We are leaving with a hiss, feeling flat rather than exuberant. As we face both the ongoing coronavirus crisis and the looming economic recession on our own, with no obvious allies, the image is surely that of chickens coming home to roost.
That said, on the opposite side of the Channel, Europe, too, is staring into the abyss. It can no longer denounce the UK for its shortcomings. Blame for not getting things done, or for doing them badly or at half-cock, used regularly to be laid at the feet of the British. Now we see the Dutch, Danes, Swedes, Finns, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs and Slovaks lining up to fill the vacuum, with others in the wings.
Germany, as not only the biggest but the richest and best governed member state, is constantly under siege. Everybody wants its kilo of German flesh. France, meanwhile, is running to stand still, posturing as the western half of the Franco-German motor while only running on three cylinders. Italy has become a basket case, its hand ever out, its political class almost incoherent. Ravaged by Covid, Spain is not far behind, as are the so-called Vizegrad Group, led by Poland and Hungary, that demand ever more cash for ever less integration into the EU social and legal model.
To me, this is the stuff of tragedy. I am shocked and saddened. But with Brexit all but done and dusted, I no longer feel obliged to play up Europe’s virtues or exaggerate the missteps of (let’s be honest) the English as they sail off into an unknown and unknowable future.
I believe in Europe. I consider myself to be, by right, a citizen of Europe and a member of its extended family. I have faith ultimately in the European Union, which in an increasingly dangerous world I choose to believe is the best practical expression of our western heritage and shared identity.
The difference is that from now on, I plan to call it exactly as I see it. I have yet to receive my invitation to next year’s Davos Economic Forum (it must be in the post), or even to address the Politics Society at the University of Roehampton. But my opinions on Europe post-Brexit will be, as far as possible, neutral, unconstrained by old loyalties and frustrated ambition. Yanis Vaurofakis will be shaking in his shoes.