Which Europe? Which Britain?
A Question of Clarity

The silliest question one can put to a Britisher today is: are you for or against Europe? It is like asking: are you for or against the Atlantic.

The only questions worth a light are: what kind of Europe? Which begs the second query: what should be Britain's relationship with that Europe?

The continent has existed for many centuries and will presumable exist many more. Britain, a sovereign state for almost a thousand years, has always had a relationship with Europe, often peaceful and mutually beneficial, sometimes tense and occasionally bellicose.

For the past forty years a steadily expanding number of European states, Britain among them for the past twenty six, has been embarked on a joint project of historic and revolutionary proportions; structural, political, governmental and economic.

The basic data are not in dispute. Fifteen nation states, Britain included, have joined together in a union and created a series of increasingly powerful supra-national legislative, executive and judicial authorities to which substantial traditionally national powers have been transferred. The leachate of national competences to the Euro-structures has for the past eight years been steadily increasing in scope and speed.

And yet the most important question of all has racked the British Euro-debate since it really took off some seven years ago and eluded an answer for most of that time. This question is: what is the real and true end to this revolutionary process? What is the final Europe to be?

In Britain the most ludicrous situation has arisen even from the posing this question. The true and most passionate Euro-federalists have consistently denied that the end-game would be a single European mega-state with one government, one currency, one economy, one taxation structure, one legislature, one civil service, one judicial code, one external border, one defence policy, one foreign policy, etc. In other words, a wholly unified Federal Republic of Europe with the former nation states transfigured into about a hundred devolved Euro Regions or provinces.

The reason these details are ludicrous is that this is precisely what the British Euro-federalists know to be true and what they earnestly desire. The so-called Euro-sceptics have equally consistently warned that not a line of any treaty we have signed so far makes a whit of sense unlessthe above is the end-game.

The British Euro-federalists emerge like knights of the Round Table, denying the existence of the Holy Grail, the very treasure they truly seek: the sceptics for their pains have been dubbed xenophobes, narrow nationalists and all the usual smears. In truth, the bizarre dichotomy has emerged in Britain and only in Britain because the Euro-federalists have long realized that if their dream cannot be achieved stealth, guile, subtlety, dissembling and mendacity, it probably will not be achieved at all.

Then, in the last week of November and the first of December 1998, the veracity-dam suddenly broke in Europe. On the eve of the creation of the Euro, first one, then another, then a tidal wave of European leaders came out very publicly and said, yes, a single Federal Republic of Europe is precisely where we are going and always have been. The open admission has continued right up to and including Signor Romano Prodi, who used the occasion of his elevation to President of the Brussels Commission to repeat the policy aim in terms of the most laudable clarity.

Like all catharses, this new clarity must bring relief to all of us. At last the veil has been removed from the EU's final goal. This is the clarity that now must be conveyed to every voter in Britain: that from now on the choice before them is one and one only. That choice is:

(a) Do you wish this country to be divided into twelve Euro-regions and subsumed into the coming Federal Republic of Europe, or...

(b) Do you wish this country to remain a united sovereign self-governing nation state within the ambit of a parliamentary democracy elected by yourselves, and a constitutional monarchy?

Whatever the question on the ballot paper, however it is phrased, whether it mentions only the change from one piece of monetary paper to another, whatever the propaganda, the above two questions are the only ones the British people have to answer. Yea or nay. This is the clarity that those of us who favour the latter version of Britain must continue to trumpet across our homeland.

Thank you. You are visitor number since 14Jun99.
For comments on this page, please contact Briame Gerdan.
For further reading at this site, please return to Briame Gerdan's "Public" Home Page.