Anthony Peters, SwissInvest Strategist
Prime Monster David Cameron yesterday gave a key speech on this country’s relationship with the rest of the EU and he could not have made it clearer that the relationship, strained at the best of times, is more stressed now than it has been for many a good year. Other Europeans – if there is such a creature as a “European” – find themselves permanently perplexed by the stubbornly ambivalent stance which this country seems to take to everything and anything to do with the ever closer union.
Broadly, the attitude seems to be that the British signed up to an economic union but not to a political one and that she is happy to play single market but that is all. I find this argument facile and shallow and in being so, it misses many of the complexities of both this country and of its relationship with its European neighbours and with the rest of the world. The “little Englander” critique is an insult to the most outward looking of countries in the European edifice.
As an island nation, this country has never needed to define itself by anything other than by its shoreline.
In fact, I would argue, it is the “little European” which might be construed to be the source of the problem between Britain and its partners within the union. This is an open and multicultural society. It “embraces” nothing other than the right of all people to be what they are, so long as they respect basic principles of fair play and live and let live. Democracy in this country, I wrote in a paper as an undergraduate, is protected by a healthy disrespect for authority. This, above all, is what Britain shares with the United States in a way which it does not share with the rest of Europe.
As an island nation, this country has never needed to define itself by anything other than by its shoreline. If a nation state is described as being a union of people of common culture, language and heritage which chooses to be governed by a single authority, then this becomes the cause of most of the armed and unarmed conflicts in European history as countries fight over where one set of communalises ends and the next one begins.
Great Britain can look on and smile while Alsatians are pushed between Germany and France, South Tyrolean’s are argued over by Austria and Italy and Hungary and Romania try to agree which bits of the border territories truly belongs to whom. Clearly, the easiest way to avoid further conflict is to declare that there are no more definitive borders between France and Germany, Italy and Austria and Romania and Hungary.
Scotland and England were not united under one crown until 1707 but for 300 years there has been no significant challenge to that fact. The Scottish Nationalists who govern Scotland from Holyrood at the moment might have been given their referendum on the union but their chances of actually winning it are more remote than some of the islands off its coast where the nineteenth century has yet to end.
My contention is that many of the issues which tax the European minds do not affect this country and are hence not part of its political culture or, to be more general, its collective state of mind. The “one size fits all” approach to policy, economic, fiscal and social, which is aimed at creating unity is anathema to British thinking. As I noted, democracy is not about obeying rules but about breaking them. Opposition to authority is not anarchy but order. The mayhem which is the House of Commons is a case in point.
Post-industrial realities
But there is more. Britain was the first European country to seriously de-industrialise and to focus on creating a viable post-industrial economy. She now feels that there is jealousy as others, primarily the old enemy, France, see their industrial base diminish and as they seek alternative areas of interest. Britain would probably prefer to live in a structure such as was created in its old colony, Hong Kong, where the “one country, two systems” approach was taken. This country would be happy in an EU which gave as much credence to the differences as it does to the similarities, in other words if it were able to be as “multi-cultural” as this country is – less “either, or” and more “not only, but also”.
The warnings about Britain leaving the EU which emanated from the White House yesterday were not helpful. I once recounted the story of a very dear Greek friend who, in my presence (I might have been 11 or 12 at the time) asked an American over a drunken dinner for his definition of democracy. The American replied loudly and definitively that it is a society where one can do as one likes. “No,” replied the Greek (Nick is now in his 80s), “democracy means to respect one’s neighbour’s opinions”.
Democracy is not about the rule of the majority, it is about the protection of the rights of the minority. This, I believe, is a concept which struggles to take root in many parts of Europe and hence the EU. In that, I declare, no matter how much this country needs the EU, the EU still needs Britain more than Britain needs the EU.
Please stop treating us like the unruly child that we are not. We are the eccentric professor who doesn’t pander to the faculty but who moves the boundaries of science.