The
suggestion that Britain should
join the euro reliably provokes
squeals of indignation. Calumny
is routinely heaped upon
the European Union and its
institutions, of course,
but these days also on any
lilly-livered minister who
dares show any enthusiasm
for anything European. Some
of the louder objections
are beginning to sound rather
hysterical. On BBC's Panorama
debate recently (March 2002),
the anti-euro faction claimed
that if Britain joins the
euro: "they" will
be telling "us",
and I quote: "how to
run our economy . . . how
to do our jobs", and
even "dictating how
we spend our money".
If these doom-laden predictions
are to be believed Britain
would be signing up to the
most gruesome kind of economic
Stalinism imaginable, mindlessly
administered by an army of
faceless Eurocrats in Brussels,
Strasbourg, and Frankfurt.
There is little
doubt who is being referred to in this Floydian
Us and Them distinction: "they"
are the euro-glitterati; they are the inept
Council of Ministers, the hand-wringing Central
Bankers, the autocratic Commissioners, the
wannabe parliamentarians, and all the other
wastrels and scoundrels who run Europe as if
they owned it. You see, they are the
enemy we vanquished in two world wars.
They are the people we saved by
winning two world wars. We, therefore, are
a bit better than them. It's a class
thing. (If you doubt that anyone seriously
takes this view, take a look here)
Baroness
Thatcher said recently that during her lifetime,
"all the problems have come from Europe,
and all the solutions have come from the English-speaking
world." (Ref)
This breathtaking arrogance is unfortunately
still simmering in every corner of Britain.
Quick to boil, this kind of prejudice is partly
a legacy of being on the winning side in just
about every military conflict since the American
Revolution—what we might call a History
of Victory that has left the ugly mark
of assumed superiority on our national character.
But there are also lingering memories of empire,
when Britain had it easy as the world's dominant
power. And let's not forget that the Englishman's
castle has a moat too—a twenty-mile-wide
strip of water between Dover and Calais that
has kept the European hordes at bay (and Britain
isolated from them) for a thousand years. Indeed,
it is ironic that the only country British
governments of every stripe fall over themselves
to appease, the country that is "Britain's
closest ally," and the last one to give
Old Blighty a sound military thrashing, is
a mere three thousand miles away. Strip
away the platitudes and rhetoric, and the British
schism over Europe is simply good old fashioned
xenophobia—something we're very good
at.
Some euro-skeptics,
teary-eyed with nationalist feeling, protest
that their beloved "sovereignty," which apparently
mostly resides in the pound, is too precious
to give away at any price. "What did
we fight all those wars for?" they want
to cry. But in their ardour they fail to realize
that the 19th century ideal of hermetically
sealed, self-ruling nation-states is long gone.
Lines on maps don't mean what they used to.
Globalization, love it or hate it, is a reality
that binds nations together more tightly than
they have ever been. The saying "either
we hang together or we'll hang together"
was never more true. Nevertheless, the nay-sayers
still cling to their romantic notions and it
compels them to overstate their case. They
claim, for instance, that we would lose all
sorts of freedoms by joining the euro. But
one has to ask, what freedoms? On a
personal level it surely makes little difference
what currency we use—money is money—indeed,
if anything we might enjoy more benefits
with the euro than we do presently: certainly
anyone with a loan would instantly be better
off as euro interest rates are not only lower
than Britain's, they are also more stable,
with obvious advantages. But even at the national
level, how much freedom does a government—any
government—have
these days when it comes to setting monetary
(or even fiscal) policy? All governments are
tightly constrained in their taxing, borrowing,
and spending, and governments everywhere have
much less latitude than they used to when it
comes to adjusting policy. Even rich countries
are punished by the markets when policy strays
from expected norms—a painful memory for Norman
Lamont, who was forced to devalue
the pound after trying to manipulate the
exchange rate in 1992. The world becomes more
interdependent with each spending round, and
the term "economic sovereignty" is
surely a misnomer. There's no such thing.
Europe's
detractors might also want to pause and consider
another uncomfortable truth: as soon as a critical
mass of people realize that adopting the euro
means more spending power, the new currency
will be exposed for what it is—plain old money—and
vote with their wallets. As the pundits have
been saying, you might keep Britain out of
the euro, but you can't keep the euro out of
Britain. Not for long, anyway.
Critics
of the euro do, however, highlight some important
questions regarding the European project. Clearly,
the European Union is in need of reform; not
least to improve its democratic credentials
and accountability. But despite these problems,
the EU is worth much more to us than it costs,
and our attentions should be focused on the
darker interests that threaten to undermine
the European project. As the writer George
Monbiot says: "Most of the
press is owned by multi-millionaires. Most
political parties are funded by multimillionaires.
What multimillionaires want is a better world
for multimillionaires . . . [But a] better
world for them tends to be a worse one for
everyone else." Most multimillionaires,
it seems, want Britain to stay out of the euro
(e.g. here).
Forgive me if I ask: why?
