The triumph of perfidious Albion

Charlemagne

Jun 2nd 2005
From The Economist print edition

How Britain unexpectedly emerged victorious from votes on the EU constitution

IT IS perhaps tactless to point it out, but France's rejection of the European Union constitution is, in lots of ways, a triumph for Britain. For at least 50 years, the British have had two main goals in Europe. The first was to blunt the drive towards European political union; the second, to prevent Franco-German domination of European politics. With the death of the constitution both goals have been achieved at once. Michel Barnier, who was expected to lose his job as French foreign minister after the referendum, commented gloomily that “this is the first time in 50 years that the French and Germans have diverged in Europe on a fundamental issue.
Without this constitution, Europe is broken down politically.” When Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, claimed to be saddened by the French vote, you could almost hear his officials popping champagne corks behind him.

Success is all the sweeter because the European issue has bedevilled Britain for so long. The difficulty was that the two goals, avoiding entanglement in a political union and preventing a Franco-German partnership from dominating Europe, have so often conflicted. Britain at first stayed out of the European Economic Community, because it seemed an unacceptable infringement of national sovereignty. But as the economy suffered and British influence waned, a new strategy was adopted: join the club, but try to focus it on economics and block any more moves towards European federation. It was a tricky game to play. Many British Eurosceptics, including, latterly, Margaret Thatcher, feared that, in the name of preserving British influence, the country was being gradually drawn into a political union.

Suddenly all such clouds have lifted. Britain is still in the European club, but political union is dead. Better still, French fingerprints are all over the murder weapon. Having spent years being reviled as “bad Europeans”, the British are taking quiet satisfaction in all the odium now being heaped on France. President Jacques Chirac clearly saw this coming. In his final television address before the vote, he warned his countrymen that a non would be a triumph for those who had always wanted Europe to be little more than a “free-trade zone” and opposed a broader political union—words that clearly pointed to Britain.

The irony in all this is that Mr Chirac was forced into calling a referendum in large part because Tony Blair decided to call one in Britain. It would be nice to believe that subsequent events were all part of a fiendish British plot. In fact Mr Blair called for a referendum mainly because he was politically weakened after the Iraq war, and thus needed to defuse the European issue. For a long time, it looked as if he had made a huge miscalculation. Earlier this year, senior British officials convened for an anxious weekend conference to contemplate gloomily the consequences should Britain be the only country to reject the constitution—as seemed likely at the time.

But if luck and accident played a part in the British triumph, so did one long-term strategy.
Lady Thatcher and Mr Blair may have adopted different tones towards the EU, but they shared a central goal: enlargement of the club. The British argued, doubtless sincerely, that letting former members of the Soviet block into the EU was a moral imperative. But this also happened to serve British goals very well. The central Europeans have only just recovered their sovereignty and are instinctively wary of moves towards European federation. Bitter experience of socialism also makes them sympathetic to the economic liberalism traditionally championed by Britain. And the mere fact of expanding the EU to 25 countries in 2004 has made it far harder for any two countries to dominate. The days when Franco-German initiatives were nodded through by everybody else are over. To rub salt into the wound, English is increasingly the working language of the EU, a cause of real anguish to France.

Even as the British pursued the single, consistent goal of enlargement, the French suffered from a lack of strategic vision. As one senior French commentator puts it, “we always go into European summits determined to fight to the death for something. Unfortunately it is always a different thing.” At Nice in December 2000, Mr Chirac's goal was to keep the same number of EU votes as Germany, despite the much bigger German population. He succeeded; but only a few years later, France abandoned the point and conceded more voting power to Germany. Instead, Mr Chirac adopted new goals: an EU defence initiative, getting a Frenchman appointed to head the constitutional convention, protecting the status of the French language.

Such jumpy inconsistency reflected an underlying fear that the EU, France's baby, was growing out of its control. In 2001 Le Monde asked on its front page: “Who will dare say no to enlargement?” The answer was certainly not France. Moral scruples may have played a part. But France also realised that blocking enlargement would cause an unthinkable rupture with Germany, which badly wanted its eastern neighbours in the club. French leaders were trapped; some of their fears may have been transmitted to the people who this week voted no.

Oui, minister

A key part of the European game is that all sides must always justify their policies by reference to the noblest ideals. That is why the purest statement of Britain's European strategy is to be found not in any official document, but in an old television show, “Yes Minister”, which was a favourite of the then Mrs Thatcher's. In an episode from 1980, Sir Humphrey, the feline civil servant, explains to his bewildered minister: “Britain has had the same foreign-policy objective for at least the last 500 years: to create a disunited Europe.” Enlargement of the European club, he adds, is the key: “The more members it has, the more argument it can stir up, and the more futile and impotent it becomes.” Any resemblance between a 25-year-old comedy show and real life is, of course, entirely coincidental.

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