Abstract
British negotiating tactics at the European Council of December 2011 were the predictable outcome of the underlying approach to the EU of the present British government and particularly of its largest component, the Conservative Party. Recent years have seen a consolidation of hostility in the UK towards the EU, both at the public and the political level. A referendum on British membership is in the medium term a real possibility, with no certainty as to its outcome. British attitudes towards the EU may change over time in a more favourable direction. Any such change will require concerted political action and leadership, which have hitherto been lacking.
Introduction
Future historians may well regard the European Council of December 2011 as an important milestone in the UK's increasingly difficult relationship with its partners in the EU. In return for his acquiescence in the drawing up of a new European treaty to save the eurozone, the British Prime Minister David Cameron demanded a number of new legislative arrangements within the Union which would allow the UK to ‘protect the City of London’ against the consequences of future European financial regulation. The response from Britain's partners was brusque. Britain had been vocal in calling for changes to improve the functioning of the eurozone; the treaty changes envisaged would have no impact on Britain as a non-member of the eurozone; and many European governments saw the City of London as a source of continent-wide economic instability, which needed to be reined in. Britain's partners decided to agree among themselves a separate treaty (the ‘Fiscal Compact’ of 2 March 2012) enshrining the measures that they thought appropriate to protect the eurozone. This treaty was eventually signed by 25 of the 26 other members of the EU, with Britain's role in its elaboration having been confined to that of marginal observer during the sessions of detailed negotiation. Never before had British isolation within the EU been so manifest. The triumphant welcome accorded to Cameron on his return to London after the European Council of December 2011 was a powerful illustration of just how welcome such isolation is to many within his party and within the influential mass media of the UK.
Recent history
To some British and Continental commentators, Cameron's intransigence at the European Council came as a surprise. Since it took office in May 2010, Cameron's coalition government had on the whole pleasantly surprised its partners in the Union by the constructive and measured way in which the new British government conducted its European business. Fears that British ministers would systematically attempt to block the work of the Union in pursuit of a radical agenda to reduce yet further British participation in the Union's legal and political structures proved throughout 2010, and even most of 2011, to have been largely misplaced. The participation of the traditionally pro-EU Liberal Democrats in the Coalition and the apparent lack of interest in European affairs of Cameron himself were widely seen as contributory factors to this initial relatively positive tone adopted by new British ministers in their dealings with colleagues from other Member States.
It was perhaps inevitable, however, that this harmonious beginning should give way, sooner or later, to a more confrontational relationship. Cameron's party remains in its membership and parliamentary representatives deeply sceptical of, and in many cases hostile to, the policies and institutions of the EU. There is no reason to believe that Cameron does not share this scepticism, even if he publicly articulates it less often than certain of his colleagues. The European policy sketched out in the coalition agreement of May 2010 (Cameron and Clegg 2010) reflects much more of Conservative ideas and attitudes than it does of Liberal Democrat. Cameron's government will not, for instance, join the euro in any circumstances; it will agree during its period in office to no measures implying further European sovereignty pooling; and the coalition agreement contains a commitment, since implemented, to pass an Act making mandatory a popular referendum on any future substantial European treaties agreed by future British governments. Nobody who read the agreement with an open mind could have seen it as other than a recipe for the consolidation and even reinforcement of the UK's current semi-detached position within the EU. It is indicative of the state of the European debate in the UK that many of those proclaiming themselves (relatively) ardent enthusiasts for British participation in the EU have accepted the agreement's self-marginalising provisions with resignation, or even with relief that these provisions were not yet more damaging.
In the early months of his administration, Cameron quietened European controversy in his party and the UK essentially by refusing to talk about European questions. He is not the first British prime minister, and unlikely the last, whose preferred European policy reflects an underlying desire to think and say as little about the EU as possible. It would, however, have been surprising if the Union's developing economic and political agenda, and the growing suspicions of many in his party that Cameron perhaps did not share their Eurosceptic zeal, had allowed him to maintain such silence indefinitely. The hope (or fear) of some commentators that pressure on Cameron from his Liberal Democrat partners in the Coalition would force him to adopt in the long term a more conciliatory attitude towards European questions is largely misplaced. Today's leading Liberal Democrats have not maintained the enthusiasm of their predecessors for the integrative workings of the EU. There are at least some Liberal Democrat Members of Parliament who believe that their party has been damaged in its electoral chances by what some voters saw as its excessive enthusiasm for the EU. The party's leader, Nick Clegg, initially appeared to endorse the negotiating tactics of Cameron at last December's European Council (Stratton et al. 2011).
The political background
An interesting foretaste of the domestic pressures to which Cameron is subject on European matters and his manner of dealing with them occurred in the autumn of 2010. At issue was the European budget, traditionally a question of great political sensitivity in the UK. In the late summer of 2010 the Council had adopted by majority vote, against the objections of the UK, a European budget for 2011 with an increase of 2.9 % compared with 2010. Under questioning in the House of Commons, Cameron unwisely appeared to suggest that he would use the next European Council to reverse this decision. When this reversal predictably proved impossible, Cameron attempted to present himself as having forced his colleagues in the European Council into accepting an increase in the budget of ‘only’ 2.9 %, the figure for which their governments had in the main voted and which the UK had originally opposed. This volte-face carried little conviction with Cameron's most radical Eurosceptic colleagues. Cameron in his turn then tried to placate them by promising them a particularly unyielding approach on the much more important forthcoming question of the new financial framework for the budget, to run from 2014 until 2020. The negotiations on the framework will in any case be extremely difficult. They have been made no easier by this undertaking of Cameron's, an undertaking to which he will certainly be held both by his colleagues in the House of Commons and by the Labour opposition. In general, Cameron has shown over the past two years little aptitude or indeed appetite for extending his room for manoeuvre on European questions.
In the autumn of 2011, Cameron was put on notice by a substantial rebellion of his backbenchers on a European issue that they were growing restless at what they regarded as his failure to bring about in government a central feature of the Conservative manifesto before the general election, namely the repatriation of powers from the Union to the UK. Their principal demand was for a referendum on British membership of the EU, a proposal against which Cameron has firmly set his face, at least before the next general election, due in 2015. By way of compensation for his critics, Cameron publicly described himself shortly after the rebellion as a ‘Eurosceptic’ (Maddox 2011) who thought that European integration had already proceeded too far. His intransigence at the European Council of December 2011 was no doubt partly motivated by his desire to reassure the rebels and other backbenchers that he shared their aversion to any British participation in the deepening of European integration. 2012 is unlikely to see any lessening of the pressure on European issues from his party and the press. It is moreover highly unlikely that the Labour Party will be pressing the Coalition to adopt a more emollient stance in European negotiations. The commitment of New Labour to a leading role for the UK within the EU was never more than skin-deep. In opposition, the Labour Party has said little about European questions. The direction in which its views are tending are demonstrated by the recent remark of Ed Balls, a candidate for the Labour leadership in 2010, that Britain would not join the euro in his lifetime (Eaton 2011); and the well-publicised argument deployed by the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, against Scottish independence, that such independence, if ever achieved, would be compromised by Scotland's likely need to join the euro if it wished to remain in the European Union (Helm and Boffey 2012).
Over-optimism from British pro-Europeans
Over the past 20 years, pro-Europeans from all political parties in the UK have given way to a number of complacent assumptions, such as that the Conservative Party would rapidly emancipate itself from the infantile disorder of Euroscepticism; that the New Labour government was working quietly behind the scenes to facilitate British entry into the euro; that Tony Blair would triumphantly win a referendum on the Constitutional Treaty; and that the Conservative Party in government would pursue a more pragmatic European policy than its electoral rhetoric might suggest. The common thread in all of these miscalculations has been the complacent assumption that history and events were ineluctably moving in a pro-European direction. Until then, British pro-Europeans could afford to view with lofty indifference the vulgarities of radical Euroscepticism.
The outcome of this complacency is plain to see. Over the past 20 years, pro-Europeanism in the UK has declined from being the intellectual mainstream of political discourse in this country to a distinctly minority position and not infrequently a persecuted one at that. The British political and public debate now seems to revolve only around the appropriate degree of suspicion or hostility towards the EU—essentially whether semi-detachment or final estrangement is the best course for our country. The view of the Union implicit in the coalition agreement, for instance, is one which could well lead in the medium term to the natural conclusion that Britain has no place in the EU. When such central values of the Union as sovereignty sharing, community of interest and joint institutions mean so little to the British government, the question will pose itself with increasing urgency, just why does it believe that Britain should continue to be a member of the Union?
Over the past 20 years, an experiment in political schizophrenia has been carried out in the UK. This has involved a grudging political acceptance by the British political classes of the rational need for Britain to be part of the Union, but this acceptance has been offset by ever deeper public and popular hostility to the Union and everything it stands for. A certain tenuous unity within the main political parties could apparently be maintained by this systematic split-personality approach. Some participants in the debate privately believed that when the ambiguities inherent in Britain's tortured relationship with the EU were finally resolved, it would be to their advantage. Those from the Eurosceptic side of the argument may well turn out to be right in their analysis. Britain is today teetering on the brink of resolving its incoherent European policies in favour of at best long-term semi-detachment, and perhaps complete separation from the EU. The Coalition's European policy has been all the more insidiously threatening to Britain's position in the EU because, in the Coalition's first months at least, the policy was carried out discreetly. Initially, the Coalition did not seek confrontation with its European partners for the sake of confrontation, but nevertheless worked remorselessly to shift the intellectual and political basis on which European debate is conducted in the UK.
Democracy and Europe
A favoured complaint of British and other Eurosceptics is that European integration is proceeding undemocratically, with insufficient consultation of national voters. What is usually meant is that democratically elected governments in Europe do not always allow themselves to be browbeaten by sectional or demagogic currents of opinion to pursue the irrationality of short-term nationalistic policies. Notoriously, referendums are vulnerable to precisely the eddies and incoherence of public opinion which representative democracy is designed to avoid. The EU is very definitely a product of representative democracy.
If, as is entirely possible, a referendum takes place in the next 5 years on British membership of the EU, it is by no means clear what its outcome would be. An unsuccessful attempt by a future Conservative government radically to renegotiate the terms of British membership of the Union might well be the trigger for such a plebiscite. Advocates of continuing British membership within the Union would no doubt argue powerfully during this referendum against the risks and uncertainty inherent in Britain's seeking a new relationship with its European neighbours. There will equally be many voices arguing that Britain can negotiate with the Union a new set of trading relations that will isolate the UK from the integrative perils of such enterprises as the single European currency, the Schengen arrangement and shared financial regulation. One entirely possible outcome of any referendum would be a narrow majority for Britain to remain within the EU, but only as a marginal member, committed firmly to remaining outside the major policy areas of the Union, and notably outside the eurozone. It should not therefore be assumed that a referendum would definitively resolve the underlying ambiguities of Britain's position within the EU. Much would in any case depend at the time upon the relative economic situations of Britain and the eurozone. An economically successful eurozone, more firmly based than it is now upon the principles of mutuality and solidarity, would provide an attractive reinforcing argument for those campaigning in favour of Britain's continued membership of the EU.
Conclusion
The preceding analysis does not represent an optimistic prognosis for Britain's role within the EU for the short term. Nothing however is fixed for ever in the political attitudes of British parties, British opinion-formers and British electors. It should not be forgotten that only 20 years ago, the Conservative Party was demonstrably a more enthusiastic advocate of British participation in the process of European integration than the Labour Party. Margaret Thatcher's downfall in 1990 was at least partly caused by the Conservative Party's rejection of her uncompromising European policies. The frenetic hostility of the British press to the EU is also a relatively recent development. As patterns of newspaper ownership and political orientation change over time, it is possible that the tone of European reporting in the British press will gradually become more objective and less tendentious. There is no guarantee, or even likelihood that Britain's economic performance outside the euro will in the coming years be better than that of the eurozone countries. Those who value Britain's position within the Union, and who recognise the jeopardy in which it currently stands, may eventually conclude that concerted political action by them, outside the existing party political framework, is the only way to arrest or even challenge the growing political consensus in the UK about the wickedness and incompetence of the European institutions, about the imminent collapse of these institutions and about the wide range of alternative alliances open to the UK outside the shackles of the Union. Such concerted political action might well provoke a more positive response than the conventional analysis of British attitudes towards Europe would suggest. There is an underlying fair-mindedness and realism in British public opinion which should not be forgotten in face of the anti-European diatribes and misreporting that fill the columns of many British newspapers. A condition however of this British fair-mindedness and realism's being allowed to function in the European debate is that much greater leadership and commitment be shown by those in the UK occupying high political positions.