Sovereign State (3)
Red herrings
Philip Vander Elst
We are told that the arguments of the anti-Marketeers are not to be taken seriously because theY come from such diametrically opposed sources as the Tribune Group and the National Front. But as we all know by now, the pro-Marketeers include such uncongenial bedfellows as Sir Oswald Mosley and the Maoists. We are asked to laugh at the 'Noes' who resist the EEC on socialist grounds because they do so in the company of such fervent evangelists of the free economy as Enoch Powell; but what about the ironic treat of watching a Tory Opposition effectively lending succour to the head of the most vindictive socialist government since 1951? How about having a giggle over the fact that social democrats like John Mackintosh devote all their energies to persuading Labour voters that socialism can be established on a wider scale within the Common Market, while Conservative leaders spend all their time telling us what a wonderful obstacle the EEC is to the left?
The reality, of course, is that the EEC's institutions and arrangements (with the exception of the statist Common Agricultural Policy) are neutral in themselves in so far as the conflict between socialism and the market economy is concerned. Their purpose and effect can be bent one way or the other depending on which political tendencies are preponderant within the Community. The same verdict applies to the ultimate goal of the EEC: the construction of a supranational European government accountable to a directly elected supranational European parliament. If the Liberal-Conservative forces are numerically superior to the combined strength of their socialist-Social Democratic rivals, the Europe of the future will remain — broadly speaking — a mixed economy (not necessarily a free one, alas) and vice versa. Having said that, Conservative ,supporters, especially if they are libertarian, have serious grounds for worry about the future political development of the Community, anxieties which have not yet impinged on the minds of Tory pro-Marketeers who seem hopelessly drunk on their own anti-Marxist slogans.
The major cause for concern is the strength of the left in Europe. Here one cannot do better than quote from a recent pamphlet of the Young European left ('The Left, the Referendum, and the Future of Europe') in which it is rightly stated that: "Socialists are in government in Germany, Holland, Ireland, Denmark and Luxembourg. In the recent election in France the Socialist candidate for President received 49 per cent of the popular vote — 10 per cent more than Labour obtained in October 1974," The authors of this document might also have added that the Social-Christian dominated coalition ruling Belgium, is as socialist in its policies (e.g. price controls, taxpayers propping up lame ducks) as the governments of the above-mentioned countries; the Italian Christian Democrats are in a comparable position. Thus at least two thirds of the member countries of the EEC are ruled by the supposedly 'moderate' Left. Nor is there much comfort to be drawn from the soothing argument that social democrats are not socialists. With the exception of the German Social Democrats (and that is ignoring their vocal youth movement) their counterparts in Europe are statist in that they are firm believers in state control as opposed to state ownership which they simply regard as an unnecessary and inefficient method of imposing state direction, not as something undesirable in principle which is the true libertarian position.
Furthermore, even if the prospect of nationalisation was the only bogey to consider — as Tory pro-Marketeers would have it — read what the Prime Minister said in the Commons debate on the referendum: "there is nothing in the Treaty (of Rome) or policies made under the Treaty that could preclude the Government from extending nationalisation of the present
private sector of steel or taking the whole of the private sector into public ownership if the House thought it right."
To turn the dagger further in the wound, France and Italy are saddled with two very strong Communist Parties which are quite likely to come to power in coalitions of the broad left in the not too distant future.
However ideologically bland the EEC may appear, there is ample reason to fear that both the present strength of the socialist movement in the Community and the Pmore tyrannical habits of the Latin countries — France, Italy, Belgium — will in the end stunt the growth of a genuinely outward looking, liberal Europe.
It is the incompatibility of so many of the traditions, institutions and reflexes of the Latin and Anglo-Saxon worlds, rooted as they are in very different histories, which makes the vision of a supranational Europe so unreal and indeed horrific, to many perfectly sane people. To dismiss this dimension of the argument and to discuss the EEC as if the only question it raised was simply a matter of taking the opposite line to the Communist Party of Great Britain, amid the plaudits of Fleet Street, is not just stupidly one-sided. It is also a sign of cultural illiteracy.
Philip Vander Elst is a freelance writer arid London correspondent of the German magazine, Criticon
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