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EU Reform: Hidden Agenda
A stable framework would be the purpose of a genuine constitution. It would set out clearly those matters that are the responsibility of the E.U., and those that remain the responsibility of the member states. It is this that Europe badly needs.
And it can be secured if, and only if, the federalist dream is explicitly abandoned.
Nigel Lawson, Time Magazine 26/3 2008
Lord Lawson was Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer under Margaret Thatcher.
We can readily dismiss those who believe the E.U. is, or should be, about economics. The relevant economic context is not European but global, and the responsibility for pursuing economic policies that will enable business and industry to prosper in a globalized world economy is national. No, the purpose of the E.U., right from the start, even when it called itself the European Economic Community, has always been political.
Although the form is different, experts are divided only as to whether 95% of the content is the same, or merely 90%.
The treaty was originally presented as a necessity, enabling an enlarged E.U. to function following the accession of the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. In fact, since the Franco-Dutch rejection of the treaty, the E.U. has been functioning as well as it ever has done. But, of course, that was never the real purpose of the treaty.
There is another, quite different view of what the E.U. is about politically — and it is this alone that explains the present treaty.
In a recently published essay, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote: "In Europe the nation-state is in the process of being diminished. The European Union is supposed to replace it, but the reality is that Europe is in transition between a past that it has rejected and a future which it has not yet reached."
It is the furtherance of this transition that the reform treaty is all about. Hence the notorious "passerelle" clauses, which enable matters now within the competence of individual member states to become an E.U. competence, and matters that now require unanimity to be decided by majority voting, without the current requirement of formal treaty amendment or the approval of national parliaments.
The E.U. is not in some period of transition toward a full-blown United States of Europe, if only because the great majority of Europeans neither want it nor would feel any sense of allegiance to it.
Det makroekonomiska argumentet för EMU
Nils Lundgren
Mr Brown did offer a clue about what is fundamentally wrong with the European monetary union when he quite rightly stated that
"it is important to learn the lessons not just from the experience of the euro area but also from how the states and regions adjust successfully in the United States monetary union".
Nigel Lawson, Daily Telegraph 15/6 2003