Quality | 2009.11.20
Better for Britain. Better for Europe. I'm backing Brown for EU president | Simon Jenkins
While Brown\'s qualities are being neglected at home, the clunking fist could be just the thing to save us from Lisbon\'s rotten treaty
There is only one candidate for president of Europe: Gordon Brown. He stands head and shoulders above the stage army of Belgians, Dutch, Latvians and others jostling in advance of next Thursday\'s EU summit . He is the dark horse, the man to watch. Expect a surprise.
Brown is long experienced in international relations, acknowledged as his one strong suit. His presidency would counterbalance the emerging Franco-German axis. He would be strong in standing up for the little states. He would be less indulgent of the monopoly capitalism of German industry and French agriculture, and less indulgent of Brussels\' own indulgence. He is precisely the big beast on the world stage that the job was specifically intended to create, not another Euro-pigmy.
In the current anti-Brown frenzy, the man\'s better qualities are being neglected. He is clearly unhappy with the rough and tumble of democratic politics, with the daily grind of public appearances, glad-handing and schmoozing. But these are not required in Brussels, where nobody is elected to anything and such populism as smiling at cameras and holding referendums are anathema. Brown, dark-suited and anonymous, is a natural oligarch, his governing style attuned to the post-democratic statism of 21st-century Europe.
For all that, the prime minister\'s instinct would be not to appease the gods of statism but to smash them. His frustration at the blandness of the place would be titanic. He would bellow and shriek, sucking health and safety from the padded corridors of power. There would be blood on the Aubusson . Fish and chips would drown the filet mignon and soccer songs the Odes to Joy. Translators would learn 27 words for shit.
If a Brown presidency were a success it would be a triumph for Europe. It might help rescue the meretricious gravy train that is today\'s EU hierarchy, perhaps even setting it on a path to usefulness. If Brown failed, nothing would be lost, since everyone knows it is not a proper job anyway. Since it was invented by the greatest boondoggle of the late 20th century, the Lisbon treaty, it has been a title looking for a purpose – which is why Tony Blair so wants it.
A Brown presidency would open a cornucopia of other benefits. By removing him abruptly from the British election scene, it would force the Labour party to find a new and more convincing leader in a time of economic difficulty. It would purge British politics of its hys terical cult of anti-personality, and make the next election more of a contest.
An inability to think laterally has long been the curse of the European movement. A sign of its intellectual insecurity is that it cannot handle scepticism, treating any but the most craven sycophant as an enemy. At the Nice summit that followed the corruption scandals of 1998-9, the EU\'s spin doctors declared that in future "decisions should be taken as closely as possible to the citizen". They lied, and knew it.
So did the public. Since 2005, few have dared ask Europe\'s citizens if they agreed with the Lisbon constitution, and those that did received bloody noses. The reneging of Labour and the Liberal Democrats on 2005 election commitments to a referendum showed the power of Europe\'s oligarchs to outflank democratic accountability. It is near impossible to ascertain what any European citizen expects or wants from what is to be an extraordinary sovereign power placed over them. Nothing in recent constitutional history has been more cynical – or more dangerous – than the fact that referendums voting yes to euro-integration are accepted and those that vote no are rejected.
The most frustrating aspect of this debate is its polarisation. Those in favour of greater federalism feel obliged to defend any European constitution and any commission antic, warts and all. They must defend stupefying waste and corruption, seen yet again this week in the Italian wind-farm mafia racket. MEPs who claim to check such corruption, and never do, are left free to steal from Europe\'s taxpayers.
If I were an integrationist, I would stop uttering flatulent vagaries about Europe "punching its weight in the world" and thunder from the rooftops against its scandals, which may yet bring the EU enterprise to grief. Yet we hear not a word. Brussels is like an office of the doctrine of the faith, tolerating no Francis of Assisi. Criticise it and you are damned as anti-European.
Meanwhile those who honour democracy\'s obligation to show scepticism towards power are driven to the extreme, into the arms of outright anti-Europeans. The noble word, sceptic, has become code for rejectionist. The case is no longer made for a European union stern in regulation and rigorous in accountability, but one that has nothing to do with the bureaucratic ectoplasm that is Brussels.
I sense this polarity no longer reflects a more nuanced European public opinion. Few people in Britain want to see a re-Balkanised continent. Nor do polls show them wanting more power to shift from national democracies to the institutions of the union. Though the European movement dares not put anything to a vote, most Britons would not regard Norway-Switzerland as a realistic model for their country.
Europe is certainly a commercial entity and needs formal structures to work as such. The tragedy of Lisbon is that it is a rotten treaty, slithering from the disciplines needed for freer trade to the phoney utopia of a level socioeconomic playing field across the continent. This will not work. It will propel the EU into constant friction with national parliaments, and stir public anger at being denied a vote on the new constitution.
Already Britain\'s anti-Europeans are advocating (in the Spectator) a strategy of disobedience with regard to undesirable EU laws and directives. This is the new realpolitik. Just as it was always inconceivable that France would conform to EU food laws, Spain to EU labour laws or Italy to EU transparency laws, so it is inconceivable that Britain would accept a Brussels diktat on whether or not to go to war alongside America.
The chaos that such bad treaties can induce is well illustrated by that foretaste of collective European foreign policy, Nato\'s out-of-area intervention in Afghanistan. European nations find themselves trapped in a nightmare conflict to which none but Britain would voluntarily have aspired. Big is rarely better, in diplomacy as in government.
Observers of European federalism since the 1990s scandals have watched it squirm from the democratic limelight towards a fantasy continent whose attempted integration defeated Charlemagne, the popes, Napoleon, Hitler and the Comintern. Nothing had been learned, nothing even about the failings of over-regulation, over-subsidy and over-centralisation – and nothing about democratic transparency. The language of the Lisbon treaty is that of an elite of 40 years ago, a smokescreen for the accretion of establishment power. David Cameron is right to keep open a determination to change it, as is indeed allowed by the treaty.
The only sensible response to Lisbon is not rejectionism but a ferocious scepticism, properly so called. A Gordon Brown presidency would be a weapon in that cause. Go for it, Gordon, pistols at dawn with the old foe, Blair. You would win.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]v/12/gordon-brown-eu-president
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