GREAT DEBATE
Coming to terms with Europe?
Lionel Gelber
The Spectator has served notice that while the case against Britain joining the European Community may still be argued in its pages, it will itself no longer express its own opposition editorially. The ayes rather than the noes have a majority at Westminster, it is pointed out by Mr George Gale, and so the inevitable must be accepted. But laments are called for when a great cause loses an advocate who has had something fresh to say and said it compellingly. Not is this all. The self-denying ordinance of The Spectator can be deplored for yet another reason. It may not be the end of the affair when Britain accedes to the Community. The clarifying voice of The Spectator will still be needed if a demand arises for Britain to extricate herself from Community toils — for her, thus regaining independence, not only to resume the British role in world politics but to help restore the comity of the West.
No crude violation of a treaty signature should be contemplated. With all their vicissitudes, however, opinion polls show that a considerable segment of the British people still recoil from the prospect of Europeanisation. And it will not be in the interest of the Community itself to lock within its own fold a substantial British minority that feels trapped, that seethes with discontent, that yearns to escape. Better than an unhappy marriage would be divorce by mutual consent and this is a step for which The Spectator could peg away editorially. Few are the other opinion media which, on past performance, might do the same.
The hope is cherished, moreover, that an enlarged Community will adopt the sort of parliamentary institutions which have evolved in Britain. Yet, as ultras of the Left or Left and Right sap the foundations of society, we do well to remember that, among the principal components of the European Community, no brand of representative democracy is more than skindeep. Nor will Britain's problem be solved if a European Parliament has a Council of Ministers responsible to it and which, subduing the Brussels bureaucracy, acquires real powers. For even if that body models itself on Westminster — a big if ' — the scope of its British prototype may still be reduced. What the State Legislature does in Boston or what the Provincial Legislature does in Toronto is, as measured by Westminster's historic range, exceedingly constricted.
Another troubling feature marks The Spectator's altered course. It is consoled by a covert ministerial belief that Britain might achieve the leadership of a European Community which her entry would do most to expand. The idea that she could run the show is, alas, as wishful as it was when first purveyed by those who supported Mr Harold Macmillan. With what and with whom, it may be asked, will Britain be able to assert predominance? She does not carry more weight than others when as a producer she is less able than before to deliver the goods; when her economy sags under inflation and lags through strikes; when she is so handicapped by over-taxation and so harassed by the tragic dilemma of Ulster; when presumed competitive advantages of access to the Community market may be wiped out by the charges, levies and additional costs of imported foodstuffs imposed by Community membership. It was, above all, as pivot of an oceanic system that, on an ever more crowded isle, a comparatively large population maintained high standards of life and manners. But it is only as a federal union that the Community may regulate its affairs effectively and pursuing wider aims, speak as one. In such a continental merger Britain must cut herself off from overseas sources of strength — Commonwealth, American, other far-flung affinities. Abroad she would have renounced the right to play a traditional part and within the Community she would lack the means.
Disputes over currency and trade have brought home to some Americans how, under an economic perspective, it was a mistake for the United States to foster, in the shape of an enlarged European Community, a permanent economic rival. Politically and strategically the situation could be still worse. Neutralist trends might tend even more to detach Western Europe from its American guarantor. These are explicit in the residual Gaullism of Pompidou — from the perverse antics of the French in the Middle East to a cooperation with NATO which is still halfhearted. They are implicit in that Ostpolitih of the Bonn Republic which could provide Russia, today or tomorrow, with a sinister Westpolitih of her own. Scandinavian neutralism should not be overlooked. Nor would it be prudent to ignore how the Western alliance can be impaired on land and on its Mediterranean flank if in France or Italy, with the extreme Left so numerous, there is ever a Popular Front.
The Franco-German feud was robbed of its military sting when the European Community, underwritten by the Atlantic Alliance, consisted of the original Six. Upon enlargement that entity, with nascent delusions of grandeur, may reach beyond such modest limits. Emboldened to go off on its own (and drag Britain along) it might subject the Atlantic nexus to unprecedented strains. This may occur, moreover, at a juncture when, behind the facade of a localised détente, Russia is seeking a consolidation of the European status quo so as to outflank the West with more ease on the sea, in the Middle East, in the IndoPacific theatre and beyond.
There is no quarrel with an everdeepening unity between the Six. When, though, the Community is enlarged the unity of the West may suffer and that must come first. Already Mr Brezhnev, as predicted, has changed his tune about a larger Community while Peking, diverging from Moscow in so many other respects, favours it. Unremitting hostility from such quarters would have been less suspect.
Yet be that as it may, The Spectator will not keep mum over developments to which the Europeanisation of Britain might contribute and, if this is so, can scarcely avoid the basic issue. A perpetuation of their status quo is what many of the British people prefer. As an alternative there should be discussed a new initiative for freer trade which may appear on the world horizon in 1973 or 1974. Topics as crucial as these are, for Britain, variations on a single theme and must be treated as such It is hard to imagine The Spectator muzzling itself editorially over any of them. For Britain and the West the stakes are high. About them The Spectator cannot fail to make itself heard.
See also, Letters to the Editor, p.738-9
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