Moderator: This is the first part of a three part exchange between David Marquand and Anthony Barnett. The second part will be published tomorrow.
David Marquand (Oxford):
Dear Anthony
I've just read your ‘dream' on "What Gordon Brown should have said". I loved it.
But I think you are conceding too much to the Europhobes, in a potentially dangerous way. You seem to start from the premise that we, the British, have to decide for ourselves, and for all time, how much authority and how many competences we should transfer to Union institutions. I strongly disagree.
The EU is the descendant of the EEC, which was itself the descendant of the ECSC. From the start, the whole idea - the utterly brilliant idea, which has peacefully transformed Europe from the Dingle peninsula to the Byelorussian border - was that the Member States would join together in a union that transcended national sovereignty and that would evolve, in inherently unpredictable ways, from economic integration to political union, of a quite original kind. That vision, Monnet's vision, was quite different from the vision of the founding fathers of the United States. The US has a written constitution, in principle valid for all time, setting out the powers conceded to the centre with the rest reserved for the states. The US, you might say, is a characteristically Enlightenment modernist project. The EU is post-modern; and this is its beauty.
If today, in 2007, only 50 years after the Rome Treaty, we were to define the powers we want to transfer to Union institutions in a written constitution, we would lock ourselves in a straitjacket when what we need is the maximum possible flexibility. The one certain thing we can say about the future is that it will be different from the past (and present) - and the most probable thing is that, if Europeans are to have any hope of keeping their end up in what will, by 2050, be a multipolar world with at least three and possibly five or even six super-powers, the Union will have to be far more tightly integrated than it is now, and the central institutions will have to have more competences and more power to exercise them. I do not want my grandchildren to have to live in a world ruled by the US, China, India, Brazil and perhaps Russia (plus Ukraine and Byelorussia, most probably), in which Europe remains at its present stage of integration. And for one Member State to adopt a constitution effectively preventing further transfers from the national to the supranational level, and therefore blocking the rest from moving forward as and when the world evolves from unipolarity to multipolarity, would be outrageous. If we are so suspicious of the Union that we want now to codify and define the powers we are prepared to transfer to it, we ought to leave. And the only future outside is that we become, in effect, the 51st state of the US - only without any capacity to participate in its decision making.
This is why I'm against a referendum, by the way. It implies that the citizens of one Member State have a right to veto what the others want to do. The only referendum I'd accept would be one carried out throughout the territory of the Union.
Ever
David
