Mick Hartley

I’ve said before: Europe is an idea whose time has gone. Daniel Hannan says the same (from an article originally published in Die Welt):

It’s funny how quickly things go from being inevitable to being unthinkable. Take the euro. Abolishing the pound has never been popular in Britain. But, when the single currency was launched, three out of four people thought that Britain would end up joining it, even though they personally were against the idea. Pro-euro campaigners used to quote this statistic triumphantly. Once voters had accepted that membership was inevitable, they believed, it would be only a matter of time before they came to support it.

How different things look today. Almost no one now thinks that Britain will abandon sterling. The Bank of England has just invited people to submit designs for a new generation of coins, intended to last for the next 20 years. Even the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kenneth Clarke, probably the most Europhile politician in the English-speaking world, said last week that the euro had been a mistake.

Suddenly, the question is not who will be next to join the euro-zone – Britain, Denmark and Sweden have all comfortably outperformed the participating states – but who will be first to leave it. Italian shopkeepers are beginning to accept lire again, to the delight of their customers. Even in the Netherlands, commentators are beginning to mutter against the new coinage.

Remove the sense of fatalism from the European project and it begins to look surprisingly vulnerable. One of the more brilliant of the Eurocrats’ tactics was to cast their opponents as being on the wrong side of history. The political unification of our continent was presented, not simply as one among many competing ideas, but as Europe’s destiny. It followed that those who opposed it were old-fashioned, narrow-minded, unwilling to embrace the future. Since people don’t like to think of themselves in these terms, they tended to swallow their doubts and go along with the idea.

Not any more.

It’s an important point. There was never much enthusiasm for the EU here in Britain, but European integration was always represented as inevitable, as the way History was moving. Better climb on board, albeit sullenly, rather than get left behind. But that’s all changed. For baby-boomers the important thing was not to repeat the mistakes that led to two world wars, which were assumed to involve excessive nationalism, but for later generations that’s no longer an issue. Plus we can now admit that this was always a project that was going to appeal to politicians more than the people they govern. When your career goes belly-up in your home country, follow Kinnock or Mandelson and get a cosy job over in Brussels where you don’t need to bother with all that tiresome business of getting elected.

Hannan concludes:

I don’t believe that the EU will unravel tomorrow. A political system can survive for a long time without public enthusiasm, sustained by apathy, bureaucratic inertia and the self-interest of those who run it. But Europe no longer has the feel of an idea whose time has come. Take that away, and it can only be a matter of time before the institutions themselves begin to fall apart.

Maybe I have an exaggerated idea of the uniformity of the German press, after reading David’s Medienkritik, but it seems significant that this sort of commentary is now being published in one of Germany’s leading papers.