Bruges in Belgium is one of the most picturesque, delightful and interesting towns in the world. The home of lace-making, it is still untouched by the commercialism of American tourism.
In this remote little town last month, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher addressed an international audience and bugled a certain trumpet for Europe’s future. She called for cooperation in a common market but rejected coalescence into a political conglomerate.
She contemptuously deflated current efforts to “suppress nationhood and concentrate power” in a new European nation-state. She dashed the dreams of the utopians who have unrealistically been hoping that human nature could be repealed and that patriotism could dissolve into a millennium of European unity.
Two years ago, the European Community (EC) of 12 member states, including the United Kingdom, agreed to build a true common market in goods, services, capital and labor, beginning in 1992. Businessmen eagerly look forward to selling and trading in a vast EC market of 320 million customers.
But some people began to surface with goals that are not economic. They started planning for a political union, too, headquartered in Brussels.
Margaret Thatcher brought their foolish hopes out into the spotlight of debate and called them a “nightmare.” She said that a single economic market should not imply either incipient political union or transfers of sovereignty from national capitals to a Brussels-based bureaucracy.
She rejected the illusion that national differences can be glossed over or suppressed in the name of federalism. She said that the best way to build a successful EC is by “willing and active cooperation between independent sovereign states.”
For the past two years, the executive commission for the European Community has been developing a list of regulations, now numbering 260, which it contends are necessary to make the Common Market work. These include scrapping border regulations and customs inspections, standardizing taxes and products standards, building a “social Europe” with common unions and welfare policies, and finally installing a common European currency.
Most of all, this commission displays the endemic ailment of all bureaucracies: an overriding eagerness to increase its own size, power and prestige. Indulging in delusions of grandeur, head bureaucrat Jacques Delors predicted that, by the mid-1990s, “80 percent of European economic decisions will be made in Brussels.”
That was too much for Maggie Thatcher, who isn’t about to transfer her authority to a French socialist paper-pusher in Brussels. “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain,” she thundered, “only to see them reimposed at the European level.”
Eliminate border controls? Not on your life, according to Mrs. Thatcher. They are vital to catching terrorists and controlling the drug trade.
Cancel quarantine regulations for pets? No siree. Rabies would spread from the contaminated Continent to British pups. Anyone who understands politics must be sensitive to the power of dogs and dog-lovers.
Standardize excise and sales taxes and unify money under a Central European bank? You have to be kidding. Taxation is one of the most precious attributes of sovereignty.
Britain isn’t the only nation that looks upon a political union as adverse to its own interests. West Germany doesn’t want a central European bank. Denmark doesn’t want to dilute its high health and safety standards.
France doesn’t want tax equalization. Border controls are vital to Greece. Weak and protected industries everywhere fear they will be frozen out of business by competition from other countries.
Until Mrs. Thatcher’s Bruges speech, dissatisfaction with the march toward European unity had remained at the mumbling level. Mrs. Thatcher brought it all out into public debate and made it respectable. She put ideological flesh on the skeleton of national self-interest.
But after all, Mrs. Thatcher only said the obvious, like the little boy who said the emperor has no clothes. She was right to characterize Jacques Delors’ dreams of becoming a 20th century Charlemagne as “absurd,” “airy-fairy,” and “over the top” (presumably the British equivalent of our “off the wall”).
A centralized European government would not only prove divisive and unacceptable to natural passions for patriotism and national sovereignty, but it should run counter to the economic wave of the future. The aim should be to spread Thatcher-Reagan private enterprise to Europe, not allow Continental socialism to be reimposed on Britain.
