POLITICS

We don't want to leave the party yet; we just want to know where the door is

BORIS JOHNSON

Her Majesty's Government winced. 'No, no,' he said, slugging his champagne. 'I think that's a terrible idea.'

We were at the London house of the ambassador of one of the more important EU countries. For we are entering the sea- son of the EU Intergovernmental Confer- ence, and this was an ecumenical gathering of Sceptic and Enthusiast MPs, diplomats and others.

I was proposing a notion which is attract- ing support across Europe. Mr Bill Cash says the idea is 'fundamental'. So does Mr Christopher Jackson, a former MEP. The Gaullist Minister for European Affairs, M. Alain Lamassoure, has floated it, as well as a host of German academics. The plan is even supported by the Advocate-General of the European Court of Justice, Mr Fran- cis Jacobs.

It is simple. It would only take one para- graph. The idea is a get-out clause. That's right: a codification, in a new and succinct Treaty article, of the procedure for leaving the Community.

As Mr Jacobs, an immensely distin- guished and by no means Euro-sceptical judge told me last week in his office in Lux- embourg, the Treaty of Rome suffers from an interesting little defect. 'Legally, you can't withdraw. There is no provision for withdrawal,' he said.

Let us put the case for rectifying this anomaly in the most lurid possible terms; and let me begin with the response of one foreign diplomat at that party. Like Britain's FO Minister, David Davis, this man will be part of the High-Level group which begins preparing the IGC at Messina on 2 June. Naturally he had considered the get-out clause, he said, chuckling into his pasta shells. But, he added, 'I think every- one who founded the Community thought it was so wonderful that no one would want to leave.'

Well, yes, that is the point. For that was precisely the spirit in which the founders of the United States drafted their own consti- tution. It was not envisaged that any con- tracting state would break away. No article provided for secession, and there was a dis- pute over whether such an act was legally possible.

By the end of that particular argument, the Union dead numbered some 360,000, while some 258,000 had lost their lives fighting for the Confederacy and their right to be apart. And I defy you to say, given the uncanny similarity between the develop- ment of the European Union now, only 38 years after its foundation, and the painful birth of the United States, that the parallel is wholly absurd.

The coming disputes over how to appor- tion the votes of the big and small EU member states (perhaps the key wrangle of the IGC) closely resemble the first rows between little Connecticut and big New York. In the growth of the powers of the European Court, there is a direct echo of the early cases establishing the supremacy of the American Supreme Court. For Van Gend vs Loos 1962, read Marbury vs Madi- son 1803.

Like the Americans 200 years ago, we Europeans are discovering that it is difficult in practice to distinguish a federation from a unitary state. I do not say that some European equivalent of General Sherman will one day be despatched down the Chan- nel Tunnel at the head of a WEU task- force. I do not predict that Gettysburg and Nashville will be fought again in Tunbridge Wells and Basildon. I do not mean to say that this opacity surrounding Britain's right to leave the European Union may one day, in 20, 50 years' time lead to war. What I say is that this is a chronic ambiguity which might be played upon by skilful anti-feder- alist propaganda, when it could be so easily cleared up.

Other federations make such provisions. Under Article One of the Federal Consti- tution of the Swiss Confederation, it is the- oretically possible for a canton to secede, though the matter would have to be agreed by the Swiss parliament and the people at a referendum. Even the Soviet Union used to have an explicit secession clause. According to the Declaration of the Rights and the Peoples of Russia, of 2 November 1917, the Soviet Union recognised the equality and sovereignty of all peoples 'up to and includ- ing secession and the formation of an inde- pendent state'. You might object that the last example shows the limited value of such a clause. After all, the Kremlin has not exactly bent over backwards during the last 80 years to honour this promise to its subjugated peo- ples, notably the Chechens. And yet the Soviet Union is now broken up, and I won- der if that founding get-out clause, which was so much a feature of Soviet propagan- da, did not expedite the process.

The Foreign Office riposte is that in the modern European Union, such an amend- ment would not be worth the expense of negotiating capital. Such a clause would apparently be superfluous. 'Look, old boy, no one doubts that Britain could leave the Community if it wanted,' said Our Man in King Charles Street, responsible for the forthcoming 'Son of Maastricht' negotia- tions. Parliament would simply repeal the 1972 European Communities Act, inform our partners that European Law no longer applied in this realm of England. Britain's armies in Brussels would strike camp and be gone.

Secession from the Community is not unheard-of. The European Community has already lost 341,700 square kilometres of territory, when Greenland, which is a part of Denmark, broke away on 23 February 1982. It would nonetheless be at the very least psychologically and politically impor- tant to codify that procedure, which, in the case of Greenland, was bitterly controver- sial. Those in favour of European Union point out that a secession clause would be a reassurance to those alarmed by the pace of integration. For the sceptics, the clause could be presented as a vital counter- weight to the further loss of veto rights in the 1996 conference.

But my chief point (and more significant- ly, the point of Advocate-General Jacobs) is that the present position is legally unclear, and that lack of clarity could one day prove embarrassing. As things stand, there is no reason why Britain should leave the Union. The point is that if we were ever forced to consider that step, the Union will almost certainly have evolved in such a way that it will be worth having such an exit for- mula, in black and white in the Treaty. ca va sans dire, as the diplomats say, mais ca va mieux en le disant.

Boris Johnson is associate editor of the Daily Telegraph