POLITICS
EEC and Nato: vive la difference
NOEL MALCOLM
Devotees of Euro-harmony have had a miserable time for the last two or three weeks. First the Delors Committee issued its proposals for economic and monetary union, which were promptly dismissed by the Prime Minister and described by Mr Lawson as 'in effect requiring political union, which is not on the agenda for now, or for the foreseeable future'. The Chan- cellor insisted that Robin Leigh- Pemberton, the Governor of the Bank of England, had signed the report 'in his personal capacity only'. (Those who read the list of names on the last page of the report, which includes 'Robert Leigh- Pemberton', may doubt even that. Or is this the operation of a directive on the harmonisation of Christian names?)
Then there was another set of 'Thatcher heads for EEC row' headlines, when it was revealed that the Government was prepar- ing to dig its heels in on the European Commission's plans for worker participa- tion on company boards, which are due to be published later this month. This dis- agreement is part of the wider battle over the so-called 'social dimension' which Mrs Thatcher has been waging during the past year. Last month she was supported by a rattle of small-arms fire when the newly formed Bruges Group launched its second front on the Continent, demanding a Hayekian free market version of 1992. But the big guns which are turned against her on this issue include the governments of both France and Germany, by comparison with whom Lord Harris's brave band of economic freedom-fighters must seem like cockleshell heroes indeed.
Any arguments about worker participa- tion were quickly dwarfed in potential significance by the row between Germany and Britain over short-range nuclear weapons. Here is an issue which is obvious- ly local and short-term in some of its causes (the complexities of German coalition poli- tics, and the slump in popular support which has left Helmut Kohl skidding and slewing through one U-turn afterinother). But it also raises the possibility of a long-term shift in West Germany's foreign and defence policies, in response to the pervasive Gorbification of German public opinion. In the eyes of some commenta- tors, the Federal Republic is facing its most profound crisis of identity since the war: will it continue to see itself as part of Western Europe, or will it seek a new
identity as an eventually re-unified Ger- many, living on the piano nobile of Mr Gorbachev's common European home?
In these circumstances, Mrs Thatcher was bound to come in for criticism. Her visit to Mr Kohl was preceded by tactlessly uncompromising statements to both Parlia- ment and the press; and for many people the idea of getting Mrs Thatcher to counsel a country during its identity crisis must have seemed rather like getting Alf Gar- nett to work for the Samaritans. Whatever her other virtues, the Prime Minister is not a natural diplomat. Her critics would go further and say that she is proving danger- ously blind to the imperatives of large- scale, strategic diplomacy: now is the time, they would argue, for her to be as concila- tory as possible towards the European Community, and to support any projects for European unification which would help to bind Germany more closely to the West.
Anyone who doubts these large-scale diplomatic arguments is liable to be de- scribed as lacking a sense of history. I suspect, however, that people who claim to be exercising their sense of history here should themselves be described as living in the past. In the late 1940s and early 1950s the arguments which led to the foundation of Nato and the Common Market were closely intertwined, part of a web of geopolitical strategy which aimed both to strengthen Western Europe against the communist threat and to prevent any fu- ture wars between Germany and her west- ern neighbours. Nato and the EEC be- longed to a whole series of projects during this period (among which the most intri- guing also-ran was the 1950 Pleven plan for a European Army). Moves towards both military and economic integration were encouraged by the United States, which in a sense had begun the whole Euro-process by insisting on an Organisation for Euro- pean Economic Co-operation to adminis- ter the Marshall Plan.
But that was 40-odd years ago. Gradual- ly, during the intervening decades, the web has unravelled. Nato and the EEC are now
very different creatures, with no necessary congruence between their long-term aims. The EurOpean Community already in- cludes one neutral country (Ireland), and during the next ten years it may be joined by Sweden, Finland, Austria and even Switzerland. That Moscow has made friendly noises about the possible accession of Austria and Finland to the Community is less surprising than it may seem: it is in Russia's interests to have a Europe which is both economically virile (as a trading partner and investor) and a geopolitical eunuch.
There is something rather odd about the idea that sudden British concessions on European integration will pull West Ger- many back from the brink and prevent her from leaping off into a non-aligned, mitteleuropaisch abyss. If these were such conflicting pulls and impulses, we should not expect to find them co-existing so happily in the mind of Mr Genscher, the West German Foreign Minister. Today he is in the news for his dove-like policy on nuclear weapons; not many years ago he was in the news as co-author of the Genscher-Colombo plan for greater Euro- pean integration, which not only foresha- dowed the Single European Act but also called for much closer European co- operation 'on security matters'. The West Germans are not undergoing any crisis about whether or not to identify with 'Europe'. If, as is possible, they gradually cease to identify with what they regard as the strategic policies of America (as embo- died in Nato), they will find that a growing identification with Europe is a help.
One of the things which both de Gaulle and Mrs Thatcher have understood is that it is quite possible and quite proper for a country to take part in different forums, at different levels, among different or similar or overlapping groups of other countries, in order to discuss different aspects of the national interest. The idea that all such discussions must be co-ordinated in a single monolithic structure is a recipe for increas- ing tensions, not reducing them. Mrs Thatcher might not be the ideal counsellor for a nation undergoing a psychological crisis. But when we see her first of all saying one thing while wearing an EEC hat, and then something rather different while wearing a Nato helmet, we should take this not as a sign of schizophrenia but as a symptom of lingering sanity.
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