EUROPE: Fighting phantoms
Why be hysterical about the Euro constitution?
ERO’s editorial comment
Of intellectuals and practicality
There are clever people in British public life; and then there are the lions of North Oxford, and similar, detached academic scrutineers; but cleverest of all is the singularity we know as Noel Malcolm. From Peterhouse to the Spectator, Dr Malcolm has now spent more than twenty years bringing that rare thing to right wing politics: an engaged and uncompromising intellectuality. This of course doesn’t stop him from being wrong on any number of issues, most notably the need or otherwise of British intervention in the various Balkan crises of the 1990s. But that Noel Malcolm is on the side of the angels is yet again demonstrated by his stalwart opposition to the proposed constitution in prospect for the European Union. It is a safe thing to say that a man who finds himself on the wrong side of the EU has a warm place reserved for him on the contemporary British right. But is this opposition a wise course for the Conservative party? And by wisdom we must mean, will it first benefit Britain, and will it second of all benefit the Conservative party? Without in any way dissenting from the view that the forthcoming EU constitution is a bad thing, which ideally shouldn’t happen, there can be little doubt that the Hollinger strain of the British right is busy setting us up for yet another inglorious defeat.
Dr Malcolm’s recent essay in The Daily Telegraph was a civilised effort, intended to show that not merely is the European constitution a constitution, but that it’s also not a constitution as we have historically known them. The first argument here made was that this document truly is a constitution — in the sense that it is going to give rise to a (European) state. And the second, somewhat contradictory argument was that, this constitution is in fact more of a partisan manifesto than an adequate legal foundation on which to hope to build a state. That constitutions obviously can be partisan hackwork is the lesson surely to be learnt from just about very codified paper effort on offer? We only have to look to our nearest and nearest neighbour, the Republic of Ireland, to see an example of a state that has employed specious political language in very constitution it has ever granted itself. ‘Ah but of course’, Hollingerites always interject at this point, ‘there is always the United States’. Indeed there is, and quite a vision ‘Tory’ opponents of the quasi-republican, absolutely federal EU constitution paint of the United States when they — bizarrely — choose to use her as an example with which to defend the British constitution.
Or at least we assume that the purpose of the Hollingerites is to defend Britain against the external threat. That they positively adore British virtues, rather than that they simply dislike the supposed vices of the continent. We certainly shouldn’t suppose that far from having any special regard for Britain qua Britain, they actually instead idolise the American Republic, and resist all things communitaire purely because of the challenge they represent to this ideology. Yet it’s awfully hard to do that sometimes, and it’s most difficult of all when we have to listen to their blether about the United States and its constitution. No doubt the US constitution would have been an awfully nice thing, if ever it had been observed in the way that its founders intended, but sad to say that’s not quite the way the world has panned out. Never mind trivia like civil wars and suchlike, think only on the language of the thing (for that’s the obsessive use the Hollingerites put it to in this debate). The really rather sternly Leavisite argument, when you think about it, is that, the Giscard text’s horribly badly written, and therefore politically a bad thing. Whereas the US constitution should be sung by the choir celestial, it’s such a work of art — and is thus [sic] politically a good thing.
It is hard not to wonder if many British Eurosceptics, fond as they are of loosely lauding the US constitution, have actually read the thing, still less if they know anything of its political genesis (clue: it wasn’t handed down on tablets of stone: it was a political wheeze, suiting the purposes of its time, just like any other paper constitution — and that’s just part of the reason why American judges can have the fun they have today). Purely as an example, here’s the unamended original that deals with the election of the president of the republic:
[Article II, section 1] The electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for two persons, of whom one at least shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves. And they shall make a list of all the persons voted for, and of the number of votes for each; which list they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates, and the votes shall then be counted. The person having the greatest number of votes shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed; and if there be mo re than one who have such majority, and have an equal number of votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately choose by ballot one of them for President; and if no person have a majority, then from the five highest on the list the said House shall in like manner choose the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by States, the representation from each state having one vote; A quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. In every case, after the choice of the President, the person having the greatest number of votes of the electors shall be the Vice President. But if there should remain two or more who have equal votes, the Senate shall choose from them by ballot the Vice President.
Poetry? Hardly. And more to the point, as the fact that this fairly sensible system has long ago been amended out of existence (and so wasn’t, for instance, available to prevent the Florida embarrassment), we come up against the great problem for all constitutions: they claim to set in stone that which they cannot, the political development of a polity. All any constitution does is provide a snapshot of the entity in question when the document was compiled. That’s why they can neither do the good their friends claim for them, nor the harm others fear of them. So it is with the European constitution too, for it binds nothing.
Judges make bad governors of men
American political stability — her disastrous, founding covenant shattering civil war notwithstanding — has been the consequence of her politics and politicians, rather than the mystical product of her constitution. So too has the still greater success of, differently constitutionally provided for, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and Denmark, and Norway, and Sweden, and on the largely protestant, north European and monarchical list goes. Plainly, absurd cultural imperatives can be divined to have been at work here, rather than chance interaction and geography, but the point remains: the US constitution transplanted to, say, Liberia, would not have produced for that country the stable, constitutional and ultimately democratic progress which the United Sates has enjoyed. Equally the absence of the US constitution has not prevented all the other countries cited above from enjoying democracy, stability and the rule of law, equal or greater to that which has prevailed in the US. Far from the US constitution having caused good things, its survival has in truth been the consequence of good times. In the absence, so far, of a catastrophic shock to the US body politic, her constitution has in effect been indulged. But make no mistake, its nominal survival is no more a mark of juridical seriousness than is, for instance, the continued existence of the Board of the Green Cloth here. Day in, day out, American judges use the rubric of a greatly attenuated American common law to contrive things that have never been anywhere near their constitution. Neither in the original, nor in any of the many variants to have come later, let alone in any statute law passed by actual living legislators in Congress. Constitutions, when all bundled together, are therefore bad things which all good Tories should deprecate.
The question, however, before us, is twofold. Is the ‘European constitution’ really a constitution at all? And, whether it is or isn’t, how should we best go about its necessary deprecation? As our answer we should appreciate where we have gone wrong on this score in the past.
Who failed Britain?
Our friends the Hollingerites would have us believe very intently that this is indeed a constitution we see before us. Dr Malcolm is merely the most elegant exponent of this view. This being the case, it has to be resisted. Inevitably - you will remember that this was the reason cited every previous time too - this European development has to be resisted because it means the final rise of Europe, and thus the end of anything which can meaningfully be called Britain. In Noel Malcolm's opinion, it, if brought into being, will mean the transfer of supreme constitutional authority from Britain to the new Euro-state. Much like a kingdom not being able long to endure two kings, there in this imminent future will only be one source of sovereignty, and it won't, in this country, any longer be British. This view is, naturally, preposterous.
It is self-evidently fraudulent to say that the European constitution will bring not merely a state into being, but a state that by the simple act of existing will dissolve all the component nation-states which predated it. This, in point of fact, is a prime example of the deficiency of the Hollingerite critique as regards all things EU. It's not the sheer wrong-headedness of this opinion (though we'll come back to that), so much as it is the revealing willingness always to attribute malice and deceit to others.
Contention number one of the Telegraph school of Euroscepticism is that 'the Europeans' are always lying. It doesn't matter whether it's about issues great or small, if a representative of, or advocate for the EU makes a political point of any sort, it is axiomatically hedged with dishonesty. In part this attitude is informed by a particularist urge to see more starkly the evidence of original sin in others than in ourselves. Mostly though what causes this delusion is bewilderment: for if things are as Hollingerites so plainly see them to be, yet the rest of the world can't see them to be likewise, how to account for this discrepancy? The answer, as every vanquished fanatic alleges of his foe, is that the Europhiles employ vile trickery to cheat the British out of their birthright. Thus when the Telegraph calls the Euro constitution 'federal', and the paid employees of the Commission respond, 'read it: it's not', the Hollingerites scream 'devilry!' 'You say it's not federal, but you're fibbing!' is the kindest explanation they can arrive at. Yet there's the thing: if this were a federal, and federalising, document we were confronted with, why doesn't it say so? Oh it's 'cosmetic', the absence of the word, says Dr Malcolm. There's another explanation why this document doesn't say what it could so easily have done, and applying our razor, we see that it doesn't term itself thus because it isn't.
From the British perspective, there is far, far too much multi-lateralism in the modern EU, and things are set to get progressively worse with this constitution. But the thing to bear in mind - since it's what means that the EU is nowhere near being a state - is that the executant actors everywhere and always for these policies, once agreed upon, are the national states. The EU may, in theory, collectively propose, but it is the individual states that dispose. Giscard's constitution does not change that. It doesn't say it's going to change it, and nothing it does say will.
What Eurosceptics of every stripe have to face up to is the sorry truth that our opponents' success in convincing the public has not been down to their innate wickedness, but largely due to our perennial inadequacy. The sin of the Hollingerites is that they are blindly, vainly going to lead us again to familiar failure.
Theatrical gestures
Since it is fantasy to conclude that the European constitution is going to result in the abolition of the British state, and its redundant absorption (along with all the other former member nation states of the old EU) into some 'Euro state', federal or otherwise, what will be the domestic political consequences of maintaining this ludicrous political position be? Inescapably, the discrediting of the entire anti-EU movement.
Now there is nothing wrong with hard and punchy rhetoric. Indeed this webzine's secular patron saint, the Edwardian peer Lord Willoughby de Broke, rightly supposed that in a mass democracy this would be the only effective manner through which to effectively convey any political message. Where the Hollingerites go wrong with their preferred scare story is not in the hyperbole, but in the wolf-crying. They've tried this tune so many times before that were it going to work, it would have done so by now. Employing a discourse of weakness and retreat does nothing to win converts to the cause of antagonism to the EU. Every general election since we joined the Common Market, other than the defeat of Edward Heath in 1974, has proven this: the more visibly 'pro-European' party wins. The way out of this dilemma is simple. Instead of wildly exaggerating what the European constitution will entail for Britain, what realistic Tories need to do is downplay its significance. We need thereby to egg on such genuine federalists as there are at home and on the continent. Because of the legacy of anti-marketeer ineptitude, our delivery from the EU is only going to come when it finally does overreach itself. The way to encourage it to do that is by us doing as little as possible. Any other course of action, and we will, through our own exemplary stupidity, needlessly prolong our membership of the EU. And that is where the problem lies, in the very fact of membership - not in the phantoms that membership might yet supposedly bring down on our heads.
Only a very foolish Eurosceptic, and an extremely unTory one at that, could believe that a referendum, which we would almost certainly contrive to lose, thus pointlessly legitimising the European project for a few more unnecessary years, is the right way forward. Which brings us back to the Hollingerites and their solidly tin ears. Save us from our friends, for they certainly won't save us from Brussels.
Back to the vomitERO has returned from its fortnightly July holiday ready to celebrate the ongoing triumph of traditionalism inside the Tory party; the happy irrelevance of pretty much everything written about contemporary British art in the post-war period, other than by angry gay men; and, the need to read much, much less. In short, the terror continues.
ERO, July 30, 2003 10:10 AM