<http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,9115,1500035,00.html>
The week the monster turned on its creators Eurocrats had a vision of integration that would never work. But now there is a chance to rewrite the script Larry Elliott Monday June 6, 2005 Guardian The dream is over. For the past 17 years, large parts of the left and centre-left in Britain have believed in the vision presented by Jacques Delors at the TUC conference back in 1988. Fed up with Thatcherism, Delors said to the assembled brothers and sisters: do you want an alternative to mass unemployment and attacks on the working class? Then sign up to my vision of Europe. What might be called the "sensible left" duly signed up. It liked the talk of solidarity and internationalism, but there was more to it than that. The Delors vision also appealed to some of the less attractive traits of the left - the worship of power, the notion that there is always a big solution to the smallest of problems, and the feeling, identified by Orwell long ago, that there is something unseemly about loving your own country. Ever since, it has been urging that Britain fulfil its destiny and whole-heartedly back the "project". It has berated Gordon Brown for allowing the Treasury to put economic obstacles in the way of political engagement. It has turned a blind eye to sky-high levels of unemployment, seen simply as transitional costs on the way to the promised land. It has contented itself with the comforting thought that euro-scepticism, fanned by the Murdoch press, is something peculiar to Britain. The events of the past week have shattered this cosy little fantasy. In France and the Netherlands, opposition to the constitution was strongest among the poor, the young and the excluded. Even with Europe's political class scuttling around looking for scapegoats, nobody had the chutzpah to claim that it was the Sun - by some kind of cross-Channel infection - "wot lost it". The vote in France could just about have been shrugged off as the last roar of a nation of luddites against the inevitability of globalisation. But the Dutch? For these model Europeans to vote by almost 2-1 against the constitution was a hammer blow. The Netherlands is one of the countries the British left has always admired: liberal, tolerant, prosperous, generous. And now in open revolt against its political masters. The response from Brussels and the European capitals last week was to pretend that nothing had really changed. It was all a bit reminiscent of Eric Honecker hailing the brave socialist dawn as the Trabbies spluttered their way towards the iron curtain in the last days of East Germany. Some big lessons now need to be learned. The first is to understand how it was that in France and the Netherlands last week, and in Sweden in 2003, a big initial lead for the yes camp was turned into a resounding no vote by polling day. The reason is that those making the case for the euro and ever-closer union do so with the arguments and language of management consultancy. They talk of "the project" making markets more efficient. The "no" camp does not talk of "projects". It taps into the things that matter to people: the urge for security, identity, a sense of belonging. Like it or not, people love their own country more than they love the abstract notion of the European Union. A second lesson is that unless the prime minister is a secret masochist, there will be no referendum on the constitution in Britain. If the government were stupid enough to hold one, it would be lost by a landslide dwarfing that in the Netherlands. The odds on Britain joining the euro are longer than the odds on monetary union collapsing. The sensible left should stop whingeing about that and admit that Brown did us all an enormous favour when he came up with the Treasury's five economic tests. His argument has been vindicated by the anti-euro sentiment evident in the Netherlands last week. The chancellor said that joining the single currency when the economics were not right would foster a massive backlash when things went wrong, as they assuredly would. If voters in the loyally pro-European Netherlands have turned against the single currency and the European Central Bank, just imagine what it would be like here if the economic brown stuff hit the fan. Thirdly, the left has to wake up to the fundamental reason for the unpopularity of Europe. It is that the Delors model was perhaps appropriate for the Europe of the 1940s but not the Europe of the 21st century. Europe's social model, which was rightly envied from this side of the Channel in the 1980s, was only affordable if there was strong enough growth to generate the tax revenues to pay for the welfare state. Delors, with his rigid, inflexible command and control model, ensured that unemployment would be high, growth low and the costs of the social model unaffordable. Europe today is only socialist to the extent that the Soviet Union in the last years of Brezhnev was socialist. This, lest it be forgotten, is what the Keynesians, the greens and the anti-globalisers have long predicted. The non-sensible left has always had its doubts about the "project". The Keynesians said that the euro, far from leading to stronger growth, would actually become a job-destruction machine. Setting up a central bank with an inbuilt bias towards price stability in a world of low inflation would be like the British guns at Singapore in 1942 - powerful weapons pointing out to sea when the enemy was closing in from the opposite direction. The greens said forcing the pace of integration from the top down was not only economically daft but also anti-democratic. It would, they said, lead to political disengagement. The argument of the anti-globalisers was that despite all the talk of creating a social Europe, monetary union was actually a Trojan horse that would be used as a means of spreading neo-liberal ideas and big business values across the continent. The events of the past four years, culminating in the no votes of the past week, suggest that the Keynesians, the greens and the anti-globalisers were right. Europe has not grown; it has stagnated. Unable to see the damage wrought by the Frankenstein's monster they have created, Europe's elite argues that the solution to the problem of mass unemployment is for people to work longer hours and accept less generous benefits. Those on the receiving end have hoarded their money and nurtured their resentment. Finally, the left needs to realise that the priority now is a set of policies that will raise Europe's derisory growth rate. There is a lot of talk about Britain taking over the leadership of Europe, much of which sits oddly with a £5bn a month visible trade deficit and the loss of a million jobs in manufacturing since 1997. In macro-economic policy, however, there is no doubt that the British model is superior. Take Italy, which would be far better off outside the eurozone, with the flexibility to set its own inflation target and a floating currency to compensate for its lack of competitiveness. It turns out that there was a point to all those small currencies after all. They were the shock absorbers that allowed countries that were structurally very different to rub along together. Expansionary macro-economic policies should be combined with active labour market policies that have been shown to work in keeping the jobless total down in countries such as Denmark, Sweden and, until recently, the Netherlands. But that means accepting European countries should be able to pursue the goals of full employment and prosperity in their own way, rather than submit to a catch-all blueprint that lacks economic sense and political legitimacy. Those who say a retreat from the integrationist approach would mean Europe failed to punch its weight globally could not be more wrong. Influence is a function of success, not size. The only time Europe has had a real impact on American policy was in the 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson's Great Society was a homage to the generous welfare state made possible by rapid post-war growth in the nation states of western Europe. Europe will only wield influence once more when it gets its economy right. It now has the chance to do just that. [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- "Life sure is weird but what else am I to know?" [Jason Pierce]
