Do we want more EU?

The EU topic has been slimmed down since new AS specs came in a few years ago. Opinion was divided among teachers on whether this was desirable. In the edexcel course for instance it is subsumed within discussion of the extent to which the UK Parliament is sovereign.

But comments today from the Commission President are sure to reopen serious debate. According to today’s Indy:

“The economic crisis has turned into a “fight for European integration”, the president of the European Commission warned today.

Jose Manuel Barroso insisted that the answer to the growing threat to the euro was a more, and not less, integrated European Union.”

Essentially the question is whether we want to move to something closer to the USA, where Washington DC exerts far greater power as a central authority than most people can imagine Brussels doing.

I have included some notes below that go far beyond the demands of the current AS level (since they were written with the old one in mind, though I have tried to update them) but should provide some help in supporting your arguments about what future direction the EU should take

What are the main arguments against further EU integration?

1 Further integration would inevitably entail further erosion of national sovereignty and that, according to opinion polls, would be unacceptable to the British people.

2 The enlargement of the EU has greatly increased the cultural, social and economic diversity of the EU. This makes further integration extremely problematic. The economic disparity between, for example, the UK and Slovakia makes the implementation of common economic policies near impossible. A much looser association is likely to work better.

3 There is a democratic deficit in the EU. Although the European Parliament is directly elected and the Council of Ministers comprises elected representatives from the member states, most people have little understanding of, and feel themselves to be remote from, the key institutions of the EU. They feel a much closer connection to local and national democratic bodies: power and influence should not be taken away from these bodies.

4 Economic integration has had very mixed results. In particular, the experience of Germany since the introduction of the single currency has not been a terribly happy one and many economists laid much of the blame for Germany’s economic problems in the aftermath of the Euro’s introduction at the doorstep of the European Central Bank.

5 Further integration risks antagonising the US, especially if moves are made towards a common defence policy. The US sees NATO as the essential framework within which western defence policy ought to be formulated and implemented and it will resist anything that threatens to undermine this tried and tested body.

6 The foreign policy interests and objectives of the EU member states are very different. How could the EU possibly have agreed on a common foreign policy on Iraq, for example?

7 If there is a trade-off between further enlargement and further integration (and there probably is), enlargement should be the priority. The potential benefits of bringing the Balkan states, Turkey, the Ukraine and Georgia, for example, into the EU far outweigh any possible benefits of further integration.

8 There is a risk that further integration, driven forward by politicians who are out of step with the people they are meant to represent, would result in a tremendous backlash against the EU. The worst-case scenario, recently raised by The Economist, would be the disintegration of the EU.

What are the main arguments against further EU integration?

1 Some policy areas - fishing, transport, trade, immigration and the environment being among the most obvious ones - demand supra-national decision-making. It makes little sense, for example, for each country in the EU to attempt to address the issue of climate change single-handedly. The more closely integrated we become, the more chance we have of success.

2 The EU provides an essential counter-weight to US power and influence. No European country would, on its own, be able to influence US policy. A world dominated by one superpower is arguably a very unstable one and a European superpower is therefore needed to restore a global power balance. In the acutely sensitive diplomacy over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, for example, the EU is playing a vital role in restraining some of the more hawkish Americans.

4 Similarly, only by acting collectively as a solid, cohesive whole can European countries hope to have any influence over China. This is likely to become one of the critical issues in international relations in the near future.

5 Closer economic integration has brought huge benefits, but significant barriers to trade still remain. Creating a more efficient single market would yield further benefits. Recent studies have shown, for example, that the EU countries (Britain among them) which freely opened their borders to workers from the newly joined eastern European countries, gained significant economic benefit through doing so.

6 The prospect of becoming part of a tightly integrated, cohesive union is what prospective states find so attractive: they do not want to become part of a very loose, fissiparous organisation.

7 The EU has preserved peace in Europe since the end of the Second World War. Margot Wallstrom, a former Swedish European Commissioner, marked VE Day in 2005 by accusing Eurosceptics of risking a return to the Holocaust by clinging to ‘nationalistic pride’. She argued that politicians who refused to sell the draft constitution to voters and who resisted the pooling of national sovereignty risked a return to Nazi horrors of the 1930s and 1940s. Many would agree with her
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8 Would any European country alone have had either the technological expertise or the financial resources to design and build the A380 ‘Super-jumbo’ or the Eurofighter Typhoon? Imagine what might be achieved if European countries were to work even more closely together in the future.