Sovereign State

EEC versus the West?

Lionel Gelber

Ifpolitics and economics did not interact as much as they do there would be less confusion

about the nature of the European Economic Community. In regard to the renegotiated terms of entry, one point should be emphasised: as long as the Community exists, its components will be subject in public affairs to collective processes that transcend their own. Such, it is true, are the demands for wider international co-operation that national sovereignty is not what it used to be. But Community membership can forbid the British people from modifying it through their own representative institutions and thus with democratic consent. Voluntary co-operation is one thing; involuntary co-ordination quite another. Other major Community members do not have the same governmental traditions as Britain. Hers cannot be flouted without loss.

For the Community, moreover, its pioneers envisaged a many-sided status. They proclaimed that success in trade could entitle it to speak as an equal to the lords of the earth and even be numbered among them. Yet the EEC has been made secure by the North Atlantic Alliance with the United States in the van and by other non-European means, American and Canadian. The Community is unable to stand fully on its own feet. And there may be grave trouble in the West before it can.

Lately, however, a more realistic school of thought has begun to take over behind the scenes. It perceives what lack of oil can do to grandiose aspirations and how Western Europe is also being hit by economic stress. Rather than let the entire venture collapse, votaries as heterodox as these would be satisfied if the Community survives as no more than a regional customs union or, as a unit, signs an intercontinental treaty for freer trade. And these are solutions which have had exponents for many years.

Still to be heard from, though, are the more orthodox champions of a tight-knit Community. They cannot lightly abandon the great. part they have wanted it to play. If storms assail the EEC they will try to sit these out. Economic and monetary union might thus have to be postponed. So must any pooling of national sovereignties by which such an undertaking can alone be overseen.

By the same token a merger of British and French deterrents cannot be overseen if sovereignties go unpooled. The past few years, nevertheless, have revealed how the Community might conduct its own sort of policy without a joint instrument of that kind. But on this crucial theme there has been a strict tab000 among Community zealots. Nor is that surprising. Much will have to change before Washington permits the British to share with the French whatever-American nuclear secrets they possess or Moscow lets West Germans have a finger on the trigger.

As for Britain, indecisive though her people have been, she has had a second hour of decision. There will, over this topic, be no third. Opponents of re-adherence to the European Community have always been disparaged as Little Englanders. But a political credo of 'Europe first' may be as parochial today for Britain as 'America first' was yesterday for the United States. Not that more governing organs of an intrusively Eurocentric type will have to be adopted at once. This, under current economic conditions, would be impracticable. A start, however, has been made.

The British housewife and the average man mostly assess so complicated a project by its effect on the cost of living. A handful of parliamentarians, left, right and centre, have had an opportunity to explain that much else is also involved; other serious critics could, on both sides of the Atlantic, obtain no adequate hearing. The fact is that from the civil war in Northern Ireland, by which England itself is now afflicted, to the class war which so hampers British industrial productivity, Britain has had too much on her plate. Yet now she will also have to vex herself unremittingly over a new series of vital questions upon which the United States, as the main prototype of a free progressive union, has had a Supreme Court upon which to pronounce.

It may be that the West will henceforth avoid the disruption which loomed when, during the autumn of 1973 major European allies, whose safety is under-pinned by the United States, withheld from their own American guarantor facilities for an airlift to the Middle East.

Portugal alone enabled this to proceed and, if no American base in the Azores is available on another similar occasion, a substitute will have to be obtaine. But it is imperative for the Wes that Russia, operating through Arab client

states, should be denied a more solid footing in the Middle East. There had at first been no oil embargo and, through its diffidence, Western Europe did not afterwards forestall one. letting 'down the United States over the Middle East, it might have shaken its own defence. The chance of such a result did not appear to botherj major West European capitals.

What did this brief tell-tale episode signify? It could have arisen, despite preliminary anti-Is rael talks within the European Community, from an accidental misunderstanding. It might also have been a spontaneous clue to an ever-recurrent tension between the United States and her own European allies. There had been no time for a preconcerted rejection of the American request. By refusing it, all the same, the chief European allies of the United States were thus doing what comes naturally. And for the United States, as leader of the West, this mortifying experience raised an unanticipated danger. Even while loose-knit, the European Community may serve as a neutralist, anti-American Third Force. Amorphous as a unit the EEC may be. Before it congeals institutionally it can, through a neo-Gaullia regional consensus, still dislocate the West. Here, if misjudgement is to be averted, the zigzags of recent history should be recalled. The absence of a precedent with origins of such complexity made it difficult to stave off the first world war. But the, second world war, only twenty years after an ordeal from which -civilised society never recovered, could easily have been prevented if the atmosphere in the West, political, journalistic and academic, had been less obtuse. Infinite damage was wrought by a vogue of pundits who, attributing as much blame for the war of 1914-18 to the victors as the vanquished, not only vindicated German self-pity but augmented a renewal of American isolationism and endowed British appeasement with some of its misguided rationale.

Fortunately, before the first world war and its dire sequel, a countervailing process had been at work — one that enabled English-' speaking allies to fight side by side in 1917-18 and then, after Pearl. Harbour, do even more. As a positive accomplishment the AngloAmerican factor which emerged at the turn of the century was for the next fifty years, the most important of modern diplomacy. Fashionable historians, nevertheless, either ignored it or long failed to set it in perspective. Much that, all the world over, put scattered peoples in touch was previously taken for granted. A Pax Britannica had kept the seas open since the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte and through this many non-European countries either achieved independence or could move towards it. Only in such a world order (despite a post-Revolutionary war with Canadians as well as the British, bloodshed at home and continuing Anglo-American disputes) was the United States able to concentrate on her own expansion.

In the West it was France and Britain that paid the main price for the first world war. During the second world war it had been the British people that held the fort until their American partners were similarly plunged into all-out strife. Between the English-speaking peoples a special relationship had, though, been special quite a few decades before its great advocate, Winston Churchill, coined the phrase. Thus, too, the foundations wer laid for a transatlantic power structure in the West but one that must always have a profound sense of mutuality.

No longer, then, can defence be planned within traditional frontiers. Two European wars during the first half of the twentieth century had demolished the classic balance of power irretrievably. There is now a global balance that keeps two coalitions led by nuclear-armed superpowers, a Eurasian and a North American, at bay. Yet the West should never let itself be as harassed by intramural anxieties as its gargantuan rival—those over China and those over the captive states of the Soviet imperium. If it is, if the power structure of the West deteriorates, its capacity to hold its own may diminish irreparably. That is why the faintest glimmering of a Third Force should have aroused so much more disquietude in 1973 than it did. The West had not built up its power structure over night. The toll, in blood and treasure, has, over many generations, been an incalculable one.

The United States herself has, for instance, long urged a European Community enlarged through Britain's entry. Behind an approach that could be self-defeating there is the continental mould within which, as sheltered by the Royal Navy, American primacy first took shape. And a curious anomaly has lain at the heart of American promptings. Many felt the Anglo-American factor had been outdated and yet its persistence was assumed. Before the Bonn Republic overshadowed France, America, like the Community's own lesser components, fancied that, as a counterpoise, Britain could shift back and forth..With the Anglo-American factor as a postulate, that is to say, it would maintain in the Community a pro-American stance. But how will Britain do this if, against the rest, Paris and Bonn exercise joint control? The EEC, moreover, is also subject to adverse economic trends. And what will Britain gain if she finally renounces her untrammelled oceanic heritage for the irksome constraints of a continental role?

Irony dwells, then, in the Community tasks that the United States assigned to Britain. For prewar folly the one was at least as responsible as the other. Britain owed her postwar decline to the wartime strain of standing alone against Hitler — until Russia and the United States, having been embroiled, could massively gird their loins, when power told it was inevitable that, after the second world war, the Anglo-American factor should be downgraded. Yet unfinished business might still be its lot — and for a reason that few admit. If a large Community magnifies the spectre of divergence in the West, a smaller entity may be more circumspect. By abstaining from the EEC Britain can thus be the one that best gauges its optimum size. And if that is so there may bide in the Anglo-American factor, with all manifest disproportions, a scarcity value which is still unique.

Before the first world war Britain was supposed to have the casting vote for peace in Europe. Something like the same role she may again exercise, despite her shrunken might, if divisions arise within the power structure of the West. As a signatory of the North Atlantic Alliance she has had to retrench. What she can still also utilise is a flair for co-operating widely with others. But this, too, the Europeanisation of Britain would extinguish.

Within the Community France and the Bonn Republic are, of course, the ones that carry most weight. And if it is essential that the power structure of the West be preserved, any differences in attitude should be singled out.

Towards the end of 1974 there was a meeting at Martinique between the Presidents of France and the United States which could have clarified what the British people, by revalidating its membership in the EEC, will ceaselessly be up against. In the news of that dual conclave dissension was hushed. France and the United States had, for once, Heads of State who were well-disposed towards each other. Messrs Ford and Giscard even agreed over a dialogue with oil producers and how petrodollars should be handled. France, nevertheless, is only to exchange information with the International Energy Agency and its sixteen members; she . will not join it. Now it is her Arab friends that must not be offended. But even French anti-neutralists have long purveyed a neutralism of their own.

In France every Prime Minister must So rely on Gaullist and other anti-American support that no Atlanticist President, if Mr Giscard is one, dare voice his own convictions. And the situation would be the same if M. Francois Mitterrand, with or without Communist backing, were ever invited by M. Giscard to form a government.

Nor do France and English-speaking countries have the same concepts of democracy. General Stehlin, an expert and public figure, has recently been disgraced for having divulged how superior to French models would West European allies find new American aircraft. And competition over aircraft sales was an item on the Presidential agenda at Martinique about which no agreement could be attained.

At Martinique, too, the United States, always cultivating the goodwill of France more than that of other allies, took as recompense for her abandoned French bases a mere bagatelle. NATO had become the operational machinery within the North Atlantic Alliance; General de Gaulle shunned the former but stuck with the latter. And when he evicted its military branch, the political command of the Alliance as a whole also departed for Brussels. Henceforth in the West all were handicapped (even when France herself collaborated with her own allies) by a lack of adequate space for manoeuvre.

Then there is the Bonn Republic. It gravitated towards the West strategically under the auspices of the North Atlantic Alliance and to that Britain has been making her contribution. The EEC rounds out the jab in other spheres but, so as to do so, does not require Britain as a member. And while the Bonn Republic may be less awkward than France for others to get on with, it too offers a clouded picture.

Under her constitution West Germany still pursues that reunion with East Germany which a deal with Russia can alone provide. And yet against a Soviet advance to the Atlantic the Bonn Republic is nowadays the chief European bastion. As long as Russian has China to preoccupy her in East Asia a greater Germany in Central Europe is not on the cards. The idea might be revived, though, after any post-Mao reconciliation between Peking and Moscow. To have the two Germanies reunified but neutralised would again be the Kremlin's minimal formula. The Soviet Union might thus break up the North Atlantic Alliance and remove from the West the West European sector of the global balance — one for which, in a global contest, rival camps vie most. Nor could such a disaster be resisted by the North Atlantic Alliance with nuclear weapons.

But even if Moscow leaves the European status quo unaltered the Bonn Republic, as a pillar of the West, may not always be consistent. During August 1974 chancellor Helmut Schmidt granted Italy's floundering economy a loan which, it was believed, might further exclude Communists, the most effective of Italian 'political parties, from office. Yet as neutralism penetrates and weakens the southern flat of the North Atlantic Alliance, there have also been indications that West Germany would do less than ever to expedite another wartime passage of American supplies to the Middle East. The need for Arab oil thus intimidates Western Europe more than the threat of Russian missiles and, as Bonn emulates Paris, co-operation in the West may dwindle.

Britain, with oil from the North Sea, will have no such excuse. She also begrudged the use of British facilities for the American airlift to the Middle East in 1973. But this, with other Ministers at Downing Street, may not happen again; the global stakes are too vast. Even now, though, Community transactions imply logrolling and bargains struck between components of the EEC. Once Britain is enmeshed with them beyond recall she must adapt her priorities accordingly. And neither for her nor the West is the prospect reassuring.

Perhaps, in summing up the British phase of the Western dilemma, the counsel of two great seventeeth century figures should be cited.

John Milton reminded Parliament that it represented a nation that was not slow and dull, but of a quick ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beyond the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can -Soar to. But what, after this concluding hyperbole, was the sort of environment in which so creative an intelligence could stretch itself to the -utmost? Look to your moat was Halifax's admonition. It was, he asserted, the, first article of an Englishman's political cileed that he believed in the sea. Nor must so maritime a view be construed narrowly. Today it should encompass transatlantic bonds such as bind together the power -structure of the West; that also gather within their all-embracing fold countries, at once so distant and so industrially progressive, as the Antipodes and Japan. Nothing, at any rate, could go as much against the grain as for Britain to let herself become a mere outer island province of a semi-continental grouping and do so irrevocably.

There are, after all, still alternatives to such a fate. Now that the American congress has passed the Trade Reform Act, GATT (the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs) may conduct fresh negotiations for liberalised trade. A few years must pass before anybody can determine what the result will be. One observation might, however, be made. No upheaval in Britain's status like EEC member'ship will overcome her trade defects. If Britain is to benent trom any new treaty negotiations, she must take West Germany as an example — a country where concord between employees and employers, with unions and management in consultation, did most, until the present economic setback, to ensure productivity. But even now business can still be done with EFTA (the European Free Trade Association) which at one juncture revolved around Britain and which consists of smaller European countries that have not joined the EEC. Nor can the Community itself debar British goods =less privileged though their tariff charges may be — if it signs a new universal treaty for freer trade.

Two other questions must be touched upon. Western Europe, it has often been claimed, will offer British manufactures the biggest available outlet for sales. But the argument for the European Community as a home market loses some of its promise when the Bonn Republic, while stemming inflation, suffers from unemployment and when, in France, inflation as well as unemployment is so rife. Certainly trade statistics demonstrate that Britain's chief markets are still well beyond the European Community and not solely within it. And then, in addition, if trade barriers are further lowered would Britain be exposed to a flood of imports from the United States, Japan and the EEC itself? She well might. But reciprocal trade competition with countries of the European Community is, in any case, a prerequisite for Community membership. The advantage of freer trade with yet more industrial countries is, of course, that all other great markets will be as open to British sales. And there is always the plight of poor countries for richer ones to consider, Britain's condition, infirm though it is at the moment, may not always be so. Yet as a member of the EEC she would not only lose autonomy from a politico-strategic angle but tnat entity might grasp rights to her North Sea oil. The European Community, drawing oil from the Persian Gulf, is now vulnerable to its primitive codes. Britain, with Norway, is happlily detached. A Community that must live on bended knees, or tries to exploit its own ignominy, should be as circumscribed as possible. And that is another reason for Britain to stay aloof.

Lionel Gelber is a Canadian historian and writer on international affairs. His new book, Crisis in the West, will shortly be published in London (By Macmillan) and New York (St Martin's Press).